Private Vices in Public Places
“For all that is secret will be revealed, and everything that is hidden will be brought to light.” — Luke 8:17
The fight over whether big internet platforms such as Facebook (NASDAQ: META) and X may censor content posted by users is alleged to be an argument over First Amendment freedom of speech and the press. This is wrong.
All the difficulties hinge, like so many social problems exacerbated by government, on the loss of agency, on the government creating pockets of irresponsibility in which people are not held accountable for their behavior. So, they behave viciously.
At the root of the problem is Section 230 of the Communications Act, enacted in 1996, which protects internet providers—generally interpreted to include the platforms—from being held liable for content they carry but do not produce, such your latest tweets about Taylor Swift or Dr. Fauci, or even Ms. Swift and Dr. Fauci.
Section 230 exempts the platforms from being treated as “publishers,” making them mere carriers like the phone company or your internet provider. Without such protection, the platforms could be sued for publishing, say, libelous material, or false information that led to bodily harm. Social media, as we know it, would be impossible.
Consider though, why social media as we know it, is so awful, a purveyor of vice and rage, online bullying and sexual predation, and, yes, disinformation. Much of the explanation is surely that Section 230, in relieving the platforms from responsibility, shifted that responsibility to… no one.
SleeplessInSeattle or CluelessInCleveland are anonymous. If their online activity is criminal, that anonymity can be breached with a court’s permission. Against civil suits however Section 230 protects all sorts of nasty, anonymous speech.
This is not a hard problem to solve. Needed is a responsible agent. If the venue is not responsible, then the author must be. Amend Section 230 so that Facebook et. al. are protected as mere carriers for posts verifiably signed by the authors. But for anonymous posts, treat them as publishers responsible for that content. With their deep pockets at risk, the platforms would have powerful incentives to minimize anonymous posts.
In our newspaper days, the rule was to publish the name of the correspondent and the town he lived in. We did not supply street addresses, so as not to enable harassment. The point was not to dox the writer but to discourage the bad behavior that anonymity encourages.
It is anonymity that makes social media a cesspool of hate and lies. Little of even the worst content on social media would be actionable even without the protection of Section 230. For the posters, unlike the platforms, it would not be fear of a lawsuit that would restrain people from evil speech but shame. And shame is a wonderful thing. Shame makes decent society possible. Anonymity destroys it.
From every corner today, we hear complaints that our privacy is being taken away, our traditional rights thereto lost to a networked society. The opposite is closer to the truth. Whole new rights of privacy are asserted for activity never considered private before. Entirely novel are rights to privacy in public places.
Never in history have retail purchases, for instance, been anonymous. Customers shopped in public places: the clerk, the other customers waiting to be served, and no doubt your nosy neighbors all knew you had been shopping and often what you bought.
In small towns, it was notorious that everyone knew everything. People fled to big cities not only for opportunity but for anonymity. It was precisely because of anonymity that cities were known as centers for vice and crime. Police forces were invented for cities.
In no way does government encourage more vice and social dissolution than by suppressing information. The root of bureaucratic sin is the “form” stripping the particular insight, the human variables, the possibility of judgment from every case. Bureaucracy renders the citizen anonymous, even as he signs his name. In our anonymous, bureaucratized lives, judgment itself is suspect as “prejudice,” which we have made the greatest sin. Judgments are always particular. Legislators make general laws, judges rule on cases. Bureaucracy blinds judgment.
Loss of judgment can make any beneficent act a source of vice. Our welfare system destroys lives, families and neighborhoods because, unlike charity administered less formally by town or parish, benefits are doled out as entitlements based on readily formalized criteria. Not only the brain, but the heart, is excluded from the decision. The information needed to function was lost to a form.
Socialism is a program for shifting agency from some newly discovered and favored victim to some alleged victimizer. Because suppressing information is essential to this effort—lest the victim be exposed as agent of his own distress—the result often is to destroy agency entirely, creating a society of the irresponsible. The results are unattractive.