The Myth of Debating Hate
Oppose censorship if you want, but don't pretend "debating Nazis" works
“Free speech” is the hot topic for modern social media. It has been for a while but never with so much emphasis and fury as since Elon Musk’s hostile acquisition of Twitter to force it to stop moderating content. Substack has similarly come out to announce that they will not moderate or restrict anything that anyone chooses to publish on their platform – a statement which isn’t entirely accurate given their established terms of service. The reality is more that they won’t restrict anything that isn’t bad for business, and the somewhat terrifying reality we find ourselves in here in the year of our lord 2024 is that white supremacy isn’t bad for business. Nudity is.
We’re headed for an era in the online landscape where a woman’s breasts are generally considered less offensive if you cover them up with swastikas. So how did we get here?
People proudly wear the badge of “pro free speech” in big technicolour lettering right on their forehead as though they think that there’s anyone who doesn’t describe themselves that way, and sneeringly refer to people they disagree with as “pro censorship,” pretending that they respect the argument, if not the position, while at the same time bestowing on them a label that they haven’t agreed to accept. It’s the same type of games that people either side of the abortion argument play when they frame the sides as pro/anti-life and pro/anti-choice before the first arguments are even exchanged.
So yes I, like almost everybody, believe in mostly free speech. Most people who say they are “free speech absolutists” are lying their ass off. Being a free speech absolutist is as nutty as being a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian and dreaming of owning a house connected to sixteen distinct plumbing systems in direct competition with each other so every morning you can discover which corporation is going to charge you the least to take a shit.
Everybody draws the line somewhere, and most people who use free speech as some sort of personality trait gerrymander their line of acceptable speech around people and politics they just have personal beef with. Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who nevertheless has variously set rules in Twitter’s terms of service outlawing support for Palestine or transgender people, while allowing both explicit Nazism and homophobia even though the latter break the same ostensible rules as the former. Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, heads of Substack, permit the genocide rhetoric but ban porn. I don’t think they’ve said why but it might be as simple as recognising that they don’t want to become OnlyFans.
This all raises the question: If everyone thinks they’re a free speech absolutist while at the same time drawing their own lines, then how do we reconcile this in our own mind? I think it’s as simple as: We defend speech on a case by case basis to the extent that we can come up with some cover argument to defend it.
You won’t find many people, for example, who defend doxing—the publishing of a private individual’s address or location against their will—even though it’s legal to do that. People just can’t find good reasons to fight for the right to dox. You can stand up all day in front of a giant flag blowing gently in the breeze with your hands on your hips, stoically reciting the purported Voltaire quote about fighting to the death for your enemy’s right to speak their wrong opinions, but nobody ever says they will fight to the death to allow Catturd2 to pin their photo and full address to the top of his Twitter profile.
So you might kinda think Nazism would fall under the banner of things few people will defend the right to espouse, but a lot of people do defend it, because they can come up with a reason to defend it: The ever popular “debate them instead” gambit.
That’s right, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can oppose fringe, radical, abhorrent, even evil ideologies while stridently defending them against censorship. It’s a characteristically American way of looking at the situation—the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an ideology is a good guy with an ideology.
The argument goes that somebody whose opinions or stances on any given issue don’t make sense or hold up to scrutiny, or there’s some error in their thinking, then they will simply lose out in the marketplace of ideas. The superior or most correct argument will always just rise to the top and bad arguments will die out. The purported mechanism is almost Darwinian. You barely have to do anything! The superior, non-toxic ideologies will simply out-compete their scummy genocidal opponents!
This was central to McKenzie’s argument about keeping censorious hands off the tiki torch crowd:
I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.
We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.
Confronting a Nazi with non-Nazi discourse is frequently described as being not dissimilar to blasting an industrial spotlight at a vampire. The hateful views will fizzle up and die and they’ll promptly join a donation drive for the local YMCA.
It’s a theory that sounds right. And it sounds right because everyone likes to think their current worldview is more or less correct and that they came to all their beliefs through logical reasoning, and everyone being equally logical, if you show the same reasoning to anyone else they will relatively quickly come to the same conclusions as you.
As with a lot of theories that sound right, a considerable factor in how right they sound is how much you want them to be right.
For all the people who relentlessly bloviate about debating Nazis, I really only have one question: When was the last time you saw some kind of fringe political extremist change his mind because he lost a fucking argument?
Most people agree that something should be done to stop Nazis from coming to power if they threaten to do so (the only people who disagree tend to be Nazis) but just don’t want that something to be any form of deplatforming or restriction of their absolute freedom. So we’re at an impasse where we throw up our hands and say, shit, why don’t we try explaining to them why they should not be Nazis?
To be clear: The concept of debating fringe radicals, shysters, trolls, propagandists, grifters, and genocidists out of their ideology is a placeholder dummy argument for people who want to be free speech absolutists but don’t otherwise know what to do about that material.
It’s a form of mental gymnastics, to use a cliché. One of several rhetorical devices in the toolkit of wishing the problem away. Any given rant waxing hysterical about censorship will insist that hate groups and fascists are simultaneously easy to stop, impossible to stop, maybe shouldn’t be stopped, are too powerful, too fringe, too broadly defined, and don’t exist.
Endless reams of argument have been laid out about why deplatforming and censorship don’t even work to begin with. The always very polite and respectable Freddie deBoer wrote two and a half thousand words about how, not only does censorship do nothing, but it’s basically impossible to fight fascism at all, or at least it’s pointless to do anything against it that’s anywhere short of 100% effective.
But that’s always presented as kind of just the end of it. The assumption that social media content moderation in any form is in all ways censorious, wrongheaded, and completely futile is just generally taken as given, as is the supposed axiom that debate just fixes all these problems. Like the art of the argument is a spell lifted from an ancient grimoire.
I’m not a cackling censor but I do think there are strong counterarguments against its uselessness and impotence – the first and most obvious being that if it is so futile then why is everyone so afraid of it? Per deBoer, censorship cannot be considered good if it doesn’t work. But the thing about that is, it also can’t be bad if it doesn’t work. It can be annoying I guess?
And what do we mean by “doesn’t work” in this context? Just that it’s anything less than 100% effective—it doesn’t eradicate the ideology, permanently, from every mind on the entire planet.
But this is an argument and a line of reasoning that says nothing and goes nowhere. As a thought experiment it’s as useful in guiding policy as Descartes’ brain in a vat problem—can you prove the material world is real and you’re not just a brain in a vat having an extremely lucid dream? The answer can be visualised as me making an exaggerated wanking motion with my right arm.
By the exact same token, nothing works. Debate sure as hell doesn’t.
The relevant question when discussing methods for dealing with extreme, toxic, and hateful ideologies is less “does it work” and more “what does it do?”
It is certainly not true that information control and content moderation do nothing. The extremely radical shift in the ecosystem of Twitter in just a single year after its management shift is proof enough of that. Just by tweaking algorithms to deplatform certain politics and making the system pay-to-play (ie. Give voices only to those who are willing to pay money to a vicious and proactive racist) Elon Musk has managed to alter the entire zeitgeist, and that will certainly (by purposeful design) have trickle down effects on the culture.
I’ve seen it argued that deplatforming Alex Jones made him more powerful, but that’s completely backward—everybody forgot who the hell he was for years after his deplatforming. The power he has now came about because he was subsequently replatformed and excessively boosted by one of the most powerful men on the planet.
Censorship, selective platforming, and information control when utilized by people like Elon Musk does immense damage. When it comes to advanced hateful ideologies like those of Alex Jones, deplatforming actually did something positive. You can see how it can be used for good or for evil.
But debate, when applied to Jones or to Nazis, does nothing. I mean actual nothing. Ideologies like Nazism and spiritually similar abominations aren’t malleable to debate. It’s like fighting Stage 4 Cancer just by eating right and getting enough sleep. The disease metastasized far beyond the reach of your appeals to reason.
Literally all it does when you ask the targets of hate to debate their oppressors is it subjects victims to the burden of incessantly, humiliatingly, and painfully arguing their own right to exist against people who aren’t listening and don’t care.
To understand why debate doesn’t do anything here, I rather love something that the author Margaret Atwood said on the topic recently—though it shouldn’t take a mind of the calibre of Atwood to work it out, its brilliance is in its simplicity:
What does “Nazi” mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is “Kill all Jews.” This is not an opinion. It’s a call for actions, such as blowing up a synagogue with people inside or murdering 6 million people who are Jews.
Debating is a method of shaping thought. Strong ideologues and hatemongers don’t operate on thought, they operate on action. What Nazis are is something that began with a thought, at some point, but now the thinking has finished. Now they’re acting. You can’t fight action with debate. You fight it only by acting upon it.
If someone is coming at your throat with a knife, it’s insane to characterise him as “disagreeing with you remaining alive.”
Now, disappointing as this may be, I‘m not going to end this essay with a prescription. I’m just calling things how they are. The way platforms organize their moderation is best discussed by professionals known as trust and safety experts. You know, the team of people Musk fired specifically because they were getting in the way of the Nazis.
But I very strongly suspect that the way forward for society, in an era of globalised media and social platforms, is going to involve both healthy, passionate, debate and content moderation. Smart moderation, careful moderation, call that the scary word “censorship” if you really want to. It does something, it’s a tool like anything. A dangerous tool, yes, but so is a gun. Use discipline with it.
And I believe that part of this process is going to involve deplatforming Nazis. Wherever we see them. Yes! I know we’ll never be rid of them! I know they’ll scurry to another corner every time! I don’t care! Fuckin’ whack-a-mole! Let’s go! Because if we can’t decide this right now, if we cannot bring ourselves as a society to say that genocides, holocausts, and systematic human extermination are wrong, if that’s still on the debate table then I’m sorry, guys, but what we need isn’t a debate, it’s a comet.
Same for 2nd amendment freaks. It does not give anyone the right to own a rocket launcher or a nuclear bomb. It is not an absolute right. We regulate “arms” all the time. We have the right to bear some of those arms but not all. Anyone not respecting common sense about such things is up to something else: probably rationalizing why nobody will have sex with them. When a man grumbles about “feminism” my immediate assumption is a few women haven’t given him what he wanted. I make this assumption because of men I’ve know. where this has been true. I don’t make things up to fit my world view. Grow up, ya morons.
Thanks, this is a thoughtful argument, and I appreciate you writing it in an effort to be persuasive. With that said, I still think a lot of this is wrong. To address a few points:
1. You ask "When was the last time you saw some kind of fringe political extremist change his mind because he lost a fucking argument?"
Sorry, but I think this is a bit of a loaded question.
First, because when was the last time you saw *anybody* that you didn't personally know change their mind because they lost an argument? When people actually change their minds, it's generally an invisible and gradual process. That's not specific to extremists either, it's just how most people work. For one thing, on a public forum like the Internet, there's a lot of ego and emotion, and people are generally unwilling to concede that their opponent made a good point. But also, almost nobody just "changes their mind" after one debate, not when the subject is a deeply-ingrained belief. Changing minds is more a process of erosion, of chipping away at the underlying ideas, of instilling doubt. Maybe an extremist will never completely "change their mind", but over time, we can instill enough doubts in them that they will keep silent and wrestle with their uncertainty instead of confidently arguing for bad ideas.
Additionally, I think you're misunderstanding the main benefit of public debate. No, it's often not successful at changing the mind of the person you're debating. But it's also for the benefit of the audience, some of whom will be on the fence, and could be persuaded away from extremism if they see bad ideas argued against effectively. Those people absolutely exist, and again, when they change their opinion, it's generally an invisible process.
2. You touched on one of the main philosophical reasons I generally support open debate - because I care about whether the ideas I hold are correct, and I believe that correct ideas are the ones with more and better evidence to support them. In this sense, if you consider the world to be a battleground between good ideas and bad ideas, then honest debate/persuasion is the *only tactic* that favors good ideas over bad ones. Every other tactic (censorship, mockery, memes, propaganda, actual physical violence, etc.) only favors the side that has the most power, which, depending on the whims of history, could be people with good ideas or people with bad ones. Actually being *right* is the only thing that people with bad ideas can't counter. If we refuse to use that advantage, we're just leaving things up to chance.
3. You say that self-professed "free speech absolutists" are generally hypocrites. I think you're probably right about this, which is why I don't actually call myself one. So where is the line I would draw? Well, it's more about tactics than content. I'm generally fine with moderating speech where the intent is to distract, silence or intimidate an opponent rather than countering their ideas. So yes, things like doxxing. Death threats. Shouting over a speaker at a debate so that they can't be heard. I would consider all of those non-valid uses of speech. You can decide for yourself if that's an arbitrary line or not. I don't think it is.
But subject-wise? Philosophically, I don't think I have a line. But of course, I bet Elon Musk would have thought the same thing at some point, that all ideas were fair game, that none should be moderated. Then he gained control of a huge social media platform and proved himself a hypocrite. To be completely honest, I can't guarantee that I also wouldn't be a hypocrite if given the same power. I doubt many people could.
4. You write "What Nazis are is something that began with a thought, at some point, but now the thinking has finished. Now they’re acting. You can’t fight action with debate. You fight it only by acting upon it."
Your first two sentences don't add up. Yes, it's true that "actions" can only be counteracted, not debated. But in what sense are Nazis on the Internet "acting"? Posting on the Internet is not acting. It's just speech. Speech can absolutely be debated.
5. I might as well bring up the subtext of this entire issue, since this was all triggered by the Atlantic article claiming "Substack has a Nazi problem". Does it though? The article itself admits that Nazi newsletters are a "tiny fraction" of the total. It cites "at least 16" newsletters with Nazi iconography, although it's not clear if this is out of the 17,000 newsletters that charge a subscription fee, or of the 1.7 newsletters in total. So all it's established is 1 in 1000 in the worst case, and more likely, 1 in 100,000. If the author could only establish 16 in total, is that even worth bringing up? It feels that just by mentioning their existence in the Atlantic, he's given them 100 times more attention than they would otherwise have had.
We all know that the term "Nazi" gets thrown around on the Internet when it doesn't really apply. The word "Nazi" gets spoken, and everyone starts picturing swastika-tattooed hatemongers who literally want a complete genocide of the Jewish people. You've done that here, and it's correct, that's who the Nazis are.
But let's be real. Nobody was going to write an article about Substack's "Nazi problem" if it was only about 16 insignificant newsletters. This is about people who are definitively *not* actual literal Nazis, but still espouse views the author finds distasteful. It's about people with racist opinions, but who aren't Nazis. It's about trans people in sports, a deeply complicated issue that deserves discussion. It's about people who think gay marriage should be banned (still almost 30% of Americans - you can't write them all off as "Nazis"). And this is the rhetorical trick of claiming it's all about "Nazis"; in order to argue against it, as I'm doing here, I have to split hairs in such a way that's makes it seem like I'm standing up for bigots. Don't fall for it.
This strikes me as the same type of over-zealous dot-connecting that's causing a bunch of poorly educated Zoomers to misunderstand Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance. The paradox may have some merit as it applies to actual Nazis because they literally want to violently wipe out the people they are intolerant of. It does not apply to every group that someone could consider "intolerant", and Popper understood this.
(Edit: I'm going to link this post, which makes some of my favorite arguments in favor of supporting a culture of free speech: https://www.historyboomer.com/p/free-speech-is-not-a-luxury
If that's TLDR for you, the 2 main ideas, as paraphrased from John Stuart Mill, are that 1. Sometimes our deeply held beliefs are wrong, so by encouraging open dialogue, we allow ourselves to be corrected about things we are wrong about, even if feel certain about them at the time, and 2. Even if we're right, having discussions with people who think differently forces us to think more critically about *why* we are right, which makes our arguments stronger and more persuasive in the future.)