The Hard Problem of Social Media: Why Free Speech Platforms Ultimately Fail

It's not censorship - it's free will

Recently Substack, the platform that hosts my newsletter, was in the news again for, unfortunately, the same reason it’s usually in the news: The Nazi problem. More specifically, it hosts, and consequently profits from, an alarmingly high number of outright (or should I say altright, womp womp) white supremacists, antisemites, neo-confederates, and other assorted chucklefucks.

This is not the first time that Substack has been in the spotlight for unapologetically hosting the kind of material that could otherwise only really be found on Stormfront or KiwiFarms. And by “unapologetically” I don’t necessarily mean “proudly” – the site owners and employees are somewhat notorious for following a strict and absolute do not mention this in any way whatsoever under any circumstances rule. Seriously, as active as they all are on the site’s social media network, Notes, you can bring up the Nazi thing and watch them dodge the question in bullet time.

It's probably a trick they learned from Elon Musk—or, more specifically, they’ve learned from him exactly how not to respond. Turns out when someone suggests you deplaform Nazis you shouldn’t respond by going on TV and telling those people “go fuck yourself” and then spam Pizzagate memes at them.

Because I’m not someone who can often shut up about a topic in the same way, that means it’s time for another episode of S Peter Davis Shits Where He Eats.

Wow, what can go wrong?

But there’s another side to this conversation. I don’t mean the Nazis or their sympathisers because fuck ‘em, but those who genuinely can’t see why this should be a big deal at all. We don’t have to interact with these people or share their beliefs. Sincerely—why can’t we just let them gibber and drool over themselves from a safe distance? For the most part they’re not getting up in our faces. Why make such a fuss?

Free speech, after all, should be the most important consideration here. As opponents of moderation and censorship stringently maintain: Protecting free speech means protecting unpopular speech. In short, the slippery slope. If they’re allowed to ban Nazis then what will they ban next? Will they ban video game reviews? Will they ban cake recipes? It’s either all at risk or none of it is, and if any of it is at risk, it’s all at equal risk.

So I don’t really want to rehash the exact same arguments about intolerance and speech censorship that have been thrown about again and again. My stance is going to be a little different—first, that the censorship slippery slope isn’t quite as slippery as people fear it is, and second, that people almost always overlook the fact that this is not the only slippery slope in this water park.

Ultimately, it comes down to what kind of platform you want to wind up with. “Free speech” isn’t an end point, it’s not a vision in and of itself.

The tech world has a number of holy grails—enough for a table setting, I suppose—and one of them is the politically homogenous internet community. One of the things I talk about in my special feature series The Bitter Files is that geeks of the tech world tend to be political kooks, to be soft handed about it. The industry leans right-wing libertarian, but on a more granular level it’s packed with esoteric ideologies from the philosopher king technocracy of Elon Musk to the anarcho-capitalism of John McAfee to weirder shit like the Dark Enlightenment neo-monarchism of Peter Thiel and whatever the hell Jack Dorsey is. Many of them, particularly those involved in social media platforms, are deeply invested in this idea of the ultimate Free Speech platform.

Users from all over the political spectrum, not necessarily existing in harmony (that may not even be desirable, let alone possible), but nevertheless enjoying your product together with no or minimal interference from the top. Finding this golden balance is desirable for one reason above all else: Any ideologically polarised community is necessarily missing out on a huge chunk of potential revenue from whichever group is excluded.

What we’re imagining isn’t even a centrist or an apolitical platform—it’s a political emulsion. Like a big goopy cheese sauce that never splits no matter how much acid you add to it. And admittedly I’m no social scientist but I’m not a pie in the sky idealist either, in fact I feel like I know humanity better than most of these silicon valley billionaires do, and my strong inclination is that this project isn’t possible.

I priomise these analogies will make sense

Of all the platforms that have attempted the free speech absolutist project in search of a political emulsion, every one of them has gone one of two ways eventually: They have ultimately embraced content moderation, or they have become homogeneously radical right-wing websites.

But what is so hard about free speech? This is what people scream every time this topic comes up. What is so hard about not having rules? Well, it turns out that the free speech part really is the simple part. There is nothing difficult about free speech. The trouble is that you can’t force people to like it. You need people to like your product to get them to use it, if they don’t then it will fail, and if you don’t like that then your problem isn’t with speech, it’s with capitalism.

Fringe speech is actually a lot like pornography in the way it proliferates. They’re both what I’m going to call liquid content. That’s not making a moral argument about pornography. But whether you’re against it or not in principle, not everybody wants to be around pornography all the time. If people don’t like porn or don’t feel like looking at it, they tend to move away from it. There is a window of time in which porn is interesting to look at, but that window tends to only last a few minutes before ending abruptly.

But there is also a lot of demand for pornography. It flows in like water wherever it is allowed to be. It’s liquid. It fills she shape of its container. People who don’t want to swim in it move away from it, but it’s not similarly repelled by anything else. There’s no anti-pornographic content that dissuades porn and drives it away organically. Once you let it in, it’s there, and only manually removing it can get rid of it or even reduce it.

In short: Websites that don’t put restrictions on pornography eventually, inevitably, become porn sites. This isn’t just my theory—if I asked you the first thing that pops into your mind when I mention OnlyFans, it’s probably not going to be its indie music scene or baking videos.

They’re kiddign themselves.

Substack also has a firm rule against pornography, but strangely, nobody who opines about letting Nazis stick around complains about this. Why not? It’s a form of expression being restricted in the exact same way.

People who use Substack just don’t want it to become OnlyFans, and I really think it’s as simple as that. Because we all know that’s what will happen. It’s one thing if your only use of Substack is that you subscribe to a newsletter and read it in your email, but for those of us who use the app and the Notes platform and the website… The algorithm would just be suggesting porn to us all day. There would be porn all over Notes, trying to filter it would make the whole experience feel like a CIA document you got from an FOI request.

Incidentally, this has become an early issue with BlueSky. Being that, as BlueSky’s developers will readily tell you, they’re developing a technology, not a community, there’s very little restriction on what you’re allowed to say and do over there. They don’t have ads, and so they don’t have brand safety. When I finally got my invite and moseyed over there, I was immediately struck by how horny it was. The folks over there can, and eagerly will, hornypost on main.

Why? Partly a combination of a lot of sex workers looking for an audience (to funnel them, yes, to their OnlyFans in much the same way as I use it to draw people to my Substack. I won’t deny being a different kind of whore) and a still very leftist zeitgeist with very leftist attitudes toward sex workers. There is a culture that creates a very real pressure to, if not actively engage with that material, then at the very least repost it or risk looking as though you have something against sex workers or their ability to pay bills.

There is also, however, a timid undercurrent of pushback. Because even if you have no moral objection to that material, it’s still not necessarily always your positive desire to engage with that, right? There’s even somewhat of a consent issue here.

But what do you do about free expression that has a right to exist and doesn’t break any rules on the platform on which it’s posted, if you don’t want to see it? You move on, you go somewhere else. Like it’s been snidely said on every platform or forum that’s ever existed on the internet: It’s not an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure. The people who do want to see a lot of that stuff will stay. The platform will fill up with the people who want to see a lot of that stuff.

Tumblr was a social media platform with a very laissez-faire attitude to porn until it decided that wasn’t the way it wanted to go. So it banned porn—apparently without realizing the extent of the demographic takeover. They didn’t realise they had become a porn site. A third of their users immediately left, the company lost the vast bulk of its value, and never recovered.

BlueSky, for what it’s worth, has a filter system that can be switched on or off and is very good at detecting this material. In fact, I dare say the developers don’t mind the radical horniness at all because it’s helping them develop and refine these filters. BlueSky is another one of these ideological emulsion projects, another clue on the map to the tech holy grail.

Porn is an easier filter than politics, though. And these fringe extremist ideologies, from full-on Nazis to really sleazy male supremacy stuff, conspiracy theories, neo-confederacy, all of this is liquid content in the same way that porn is. It flows in, it won’t leave voluntarily, so sooner or later the people who don’t want to see it will leave on their own terms.

It’s organic movement. It’s not censorship. It’s the way things just are, it’s like the tides. This is the challenge faced by the Free Speech Platform. It’s the Hard Problem of social media. Not the ADL or Bob Iger or Media Matters sabotage.

This is what people like Elon Musk and, seemingly, Chris Best fail to understand. Musk, for his part, has no patience for this or any other problem in his businesses or, apparently, his life. He tries to solve the Hard Problem of social media in the same way that he tries to solve everything: With sledgehammers, threats, and lawsuits. He’s growing visibly more unhinged as Twitter collapses around him because he can’t fully emulsify the Nazis with everyone who wants nothing to do with them. He’s a short tempered and impatient chef whose sauce keeps breaking. He can’t sell his product because he’s a boss, not a salesman, and the only solution he can think of to the problem is to treat users and clients like his employees—bully them.

“IT’S CALLED X NOW!!!!!!”

He’s currently engaged in this insane project to try to use the machinery of the law and the state to force people to use his product against their will. And right wing politicians who desperately want Musk to succeed (there is a major election coming up and they need control of the media) are trying to help him by frantically interpreting the law to figure out how Disney deciding not to buy Twitter ads is actually illegal somehow.

You can look at the current incarnations of previous attempts at the free speech ideological emulsion project to clearly observe the two ways that they can end up if they succeed at all. You can go mainstream and user (and advertiser) friendly, even test the boundaries of what most people are comfortable with without crossing them too far: Meta and Google’s various platforms, while maybe a little too sanitised for many tastes, keep tight to the rails to keep the money flowing.

Reddit is a good example of a platform that needed to learn this lesson the hard way. But to their credit they really tried. Their solution to the Hard Problem was keeping its communities segregated. You could make one user account and hang out on your Simpsons shitposting subreddit and your George RR Martin sub and your engine repair sub without ever needing to visit the Hitler/Palpatine slash fanfic sub if you didn’t want to.

But people on the evil subs started warring and invading other communities for fun because that’s the type of people they were. Advertisers pulled out, like they’re doing with Twitter. Reddit launched an algorithm to keep ads away from racist content, again like Twitter. They came up with a scheme to “quarantine” communities dedicated to fringe material so people couldn’t stumble on it by accident. But then that content became invisible and rapidly festered in toxicity in the dark away from sight. Everyone began to realise, effectively, the mainstream communities were subsidizing the hate communities. When advertisers realised they were funding the next synagogue shooter, they pulled out again.

Ultimately, Reddit had to purge a lot of those communities. Users rioted because the demographic conversion had progressed too far towards becoming a fringe-right website. But they needed to make that choice. They could go mainstream or embrace the fringe. They could not force both to stay.

You can see other platforms that survive having taken the other road—that deal with fringe and extremist ideology the way OnlyFans dealt with porn, by embracing it, taking it into themselves and becoming one with it. Gab, the white supremacist Twitter (in so far as Twitter isn’t yet the white supremacist Twitter) is the elementary example of this. They will never be able to reach the level of prominence that an Apple ad partnership would grant, but like the Architect told Neo when facing the extinction of humanity as their power source, “there are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.” Gab is funded by a combination of community donations, cryptocurrency, very probable organized crime, and the generous benefaction of white supremacist millionaires whose identities are curiously unknown.

Parler was another radical right Twitter that needed alternative funding to survive, but it didn’t make it. Its lifeboat was going to be an acquisition by Kanye West, but when the deal fell through it was scooped up by a company that had little interest in running a social media network but a lot of interest in owning a fuck ton of valuable user data just sitting on those hard drives.

What is notable about Gab is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a free speech essentialist platform. They don’t force you to be a Nazi there, they don’t ban you for failing to embrace your swastika rosary and say five hail Hitlers every morning. You can say whatever you want. But I put the question to you, the first amendment essentialist who fights for the Free Speech Platform holy grail: Are you going to go hang out there?

Why not?

That’s the thing you want. That’s what it looks like. Were you expecting Neil Gaiman to rock up and hang out with you there as well?

When it comes to the Hard Problem of social media, the problem that Substack faces is more similar to Reddit than Twitter or Gab. It’s an ecosystem of roughly connected but nevertheless segregated communities. You’ve got

Joe Hill

and

Slavoj Žižek

and

E. Jean Carroll

and

Michael Ian Black

and

Chuck Palahniuk

publishing on the same platform as Roger fucking Stone, surely that’s a clean political emulsion?

Sure, but even if I can live with the adjacency to swastikas and Pepes and Happy Merchants, which for the time being I can because I’m a fan of free speech myself, I have another problem: After I hit publish on this newsletter and send it out to all my readers, I am then going to have to go through the next exhausting phase of audience building and go advertise this on places like BlueSky and Twitter and, ughhhh, LinkedIn I guess. And an ever increasing number of people are going to see my link and think… this guy writes for that Nazi site.

That’s my problem. And if that problem gets too bad than I will have to leave and find somewhere that doesn’t have the problem. I’ll have no choice. And others will have no choice, because we can’t force people to come hang out with us on the Nazi site.

Substack will be left alone with… well, the unpopular speech that needs protecting, whatever that will look like, and the Hard Problem of funding it. Maybe they can get in touch with Gab and get the name and number of their guy.