The Purge of Trumpism

Free speech is about more than legal standards

Jacob Mchangama
Arc Digital
Published in
8 min readJan 22, 2021

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Within days the most powerful man in the world had been permanently cut off from communicating directly to his more than 120 million fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter.

After years of providing oxygen to the political guerrilla tactics of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey finally decided that fanning the flames of violent insurrection through a firehose of incendiary falsehoods violated their terms of service (sort of).

From a purely legal point of view, Facebook and Twitter were on solid ground. The First Amendment might be the most protective free speech standard in the world, but this bulwark of liberty protects the social media platforms from government officials, not government officials from the platforms.

Since Facebook and Twitter are private entities, some liberals see no free speech issue at all with how they moderate user generated content distributed to billions of people across the world, many of whom rely heavily on social media for news and information.

In the specific context of Trump, the narrow legal purist understanding of free speech is seductive. Indeed, the muting of Trump feels almost cathartic after four years of incessant disinformation, petty grievances, and stab-in-the-back legends with Trump as the victim fighting heroically against the “Enemies of the People.”

However, the larger ecosystem needed for free speech to thrive does not begin or end with the law. At least as important is what might be called the culture and practice of free speech. This culture is embedded in the attitudes and tolerance (or lack thereof) of citizens and the institutions that create, facilitate, and distribute speech.

The history of free speech and some of the greatest champions of this fundamental freedom can help us think more clearly about the importance of defending this principle, even when no legally protected rights are threatened by the government.

The roots of free speech stretch back some 2,500 years to the direct democracy of ancient Athens. The Athenians had two overlapping but separate concepts of free speech: isēgoría, or equality of public, civic speech; and parrhēsía, which translates to “frank” or “uninhibited” speech.

Isēgoría was exercised in the Athenian Assembly where free male citizens debated and voted on laws. Parrhēsía allowed the citizens to be bold and honest in expressing their opinions in general.

In his classic work on the history of Greece, the 19th-century historian George Grote emphasized

the liberty of thought and action at Athens, not merely from excessive restraint of law, but also from practical intolerance between man and man, and tyranny of the majority over individual dissenters in taste and pursuit.

Grote was a close friend of the famous political philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty ranks high in the free speech canon. Mill echoes Grote and, by extension, the Athenian ideal of free and equal speech, as being dependent on more than laws:

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.

In his famous account of democracy in America, Alexis De Tocqueville also identified tensions between the unprecedented freedom of the press which characterized 19th-century America — at least as compared to Europe— and its effects on public opinion.

On the one hand, he found censorship of the press not only “dangerous,” but also “absurd” in democracies based on the sovereignty of the people. On the other, majority opinion included its own dangers since it “it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.” In fact, he knew of “no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.”

Only the “excessive dissemination” of newspapers, the number of which “surpasses belief,” prevented the power of public opinion from subverting American freedom and democracy. Due to the decentralized nature of the American press, “neither discipline nor unity of design can be communicated to so multifarious a host,” and therefore, “they cannot succeed in forming those great currents of opinion which overwhelm the most solid obstacles.”

The stifling norms of Victorian England and the media environment of Antebellum America might seem entirely irrelevant to our digital age. But the idea behind the World Wide Web was to further entrench and enlarge the egalitarian ideal that also animated the spread of early 19th-century newspapers in America.

The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, described his vision as “encompassing the decentralized, organic growth of ideas, technology, and society” — a space in which “anything being potentially connected with anything” was unfettered by “hierarchical classification systems. In effect, the globalization of the ancient Athenian ideal of parrhēsía.

This vision was shared by the early pioneers who enthusiastically embraced the web in a spirit of civil libertarian techno-optimism. In 1997 influential computer scientist Michael Hauben contrasted Usenet — an early online distributed discussion system — with traditional mass media:

Inherent in most mass media is central control of content. Many people are influenced by the decisions of a few. … However, Usenet is controlled by its audience. Usenet should be seen as a promising successor to other people’s presses, such as broadsides at the time of the American Revolution and the Penny Presses in England at the turn of the 19th century.

Alas, techno-optimism turned out to be techno-utopianism. Two decades into the 21st century the horizontal and decentralized web pioneered by Berners-Lee has been replaced by a much more vertical and centralized web in our current era of “platformization.”

In 2019, 43 percent of the world’s internet traffic ran through the same six tech giants and their subsidiaries: Google (including YouTube), Netflix, Facebook (including Instagram and WhatsApp), Microsoft (including Skype and LinkedIn), Apple, and Amazon, in decreasing order.

In the third quarter of 2020 alone, Facebook deleted more than 22 million pieces of content for violating its policy against hate speech. Ninety-five percent of the purged content was flagged by AI rather than humans, supercharging the ability of platforms to police their content according to wherever they decide to draw the line, but with little transparency or due process.

The digital dragnet not only purges white supremacists, but also embattled dissidents, radical feminists, and vocal minorities.

The dangers of a centralized system of news and information — even if privately owned — is not peculiar to the digital age. George Orwell, perhaps the 20th century’s most eloquent defender of free speech, warned against a situation not entirely dissimilar in the U.K. during and immediately after World War II. The proposed preface to Animal Farm was a short essay on “The Freedom of the Press” (unpublished until 1971).

Orwell had few complaints about the government’s wartime censorship which he found surprisingly mild. But he took little comfort from the official tolerance.

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

This state of affairs was facilitated by the fact that “the British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics.” Orwell particularly lamented that among liberals “the notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing [among] intellectuals who confuse the issue by not distinguishing between democratic opposition and open rebellion.”

Orwell took issue with the idea that

if one loves democracy…one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines.

Shortly after the war, Orwell maintained that “the degree of freedom of the press existing in this country is often over-rated. Technically there is great freedom, but the fact that most of the press is owned by a few people operates in much the same way as State censorship.”

Both Mill and Orwell were wary of systems of informal “social censorship” that thwarted dissent and controversial ideas. Still, neither Mill nor Orwell denied that there are limits to free speech. But they both set a high bar. Orwell warned against the idea that “one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods” and famously argued that “if liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Mill found it strange “that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being “pushed to an extreme”; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”

Both men may well have agreed that Twitter and Facebook made the right call by temporarily suspending Trump’s accounts during the storm on Congress, given the president’s refusal to condemn his supporters’ violent insurrection, which he himself had inspired. But the permanent suspension and the wider purge of (non-violent) MAGA-diehards would surely have troubled them even if repulsed by the raw illiberal and unprincipled tribalism of that movement.

Mill and Orwell would have been acutely aware that political sensibilities and expediency can change quickly and that those who define the red lines one day might find themselves on the wrong side of those lines the next day. Had Trump won the election and the GOP held on to the Senate, Facebook and Twitter may well have adopted an entirely different policy to appease the conservative backlash, infuriating those liberals who enthusiastically support the purge of Trumpism.

Disagreements about where to draw the line on social media would be less consequential if the largest social media platforms were less dominant and the distribution of information and opinion more decentralized, as Tocqueville saw clearly two centuries ago.

While we wait for old and new pioneers to re-decentralize the internet, a broad civic commitment to the ideals of free speech and tolerance is the best hope for ensuring the vitality of Parrhēsía on social media.

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Jacob Mchangama
Jacob Mchangama

Written by Jacob Mchangama

Host and producer of the http://www.freespeechhistory.com. Bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, WSJ, Washington Post etc.

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