Free Speech

"Free speech" Elon Musk has made a formal offer to buy out Twitter. People on the far right are praising this move because they are sure that Musk will "restore free speech" and allow trump back on Twitter. They think he is one of them. But people on the left point out that Elon himself has said he is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He is more in the moderate middle, politically. So it might not go the way the way the right wingers think.

But let's look at "Free Speech" itself. Why do we think it's a good thing? Well, it was made the first amendment to the constitution and part of the Bill of Rights in order to allow the population to speak out against the king, or any political leader, without fear of going to jail. Tyrants have always historically squashed any speech against them as a means of taking and maintaining totalitarian control. So enabling free speech against the government is an important tool that helps keep tyrants and dictators at bay.

But there have always been consequences to speaking your mind in public, even if one of them doesn't involve going to jail. But still, it's good to not have that hanging over you when you want to complain about how things are run.

So that's the upside. But there is a downside too.

In full recognition of the irony this presents, I'd like to exercise my right to free speech in order to speak out against unlimited free speech ....

Seriously though... some things are just reckless, irresponsible, and dangerous to distribute on public forums. For example: teaching teenagers new ways to destroy themselves huffing refrigerant from home A/C units, teaching people how to make bombs or where to buy the materials to make them. Teaching people how to murder others without getting caught, teaching people how to make untraceable poisons. Any number of versions of yelling "fire" or "bomb" in a crowded theater, (driving damage through inciting panic) or teaching people how to hack into government agencies, or power utilities online. Or teaching people to steal other's identities and rob them or destroy their credit, or even teaching people how to drop a commercial plane out of the sky using a homemade EM weapon... do I need to go on?

It's not just about protecting someone's right to their opinion. It's about protecting public society from evil, dangerous people.

Remember. Facebook, Twitter, etc are international. So do you really want to give the ability to do any of the things I mentioned above to a Russian troll farm, or an Iranian terrorist cell intent on destroying America?

We need SOME rules that we can all live with. Common sense needs to prevail here.

If we are going to connect the whole world together on the same circuit, we have to make sure somebody can't stick a fork in a socket and blow it all up.

Also, it's not just about being truthful. it must also not pose a threat to people. Real, actual "Truth" is difficult to know anyway. Just because you quote something you saw in the news somewhere doesn't make it true. Lots of what passes for news is skewed, exaggerated, or even a fabric of outright lies to support an agenda. Also, just phrasing something dangerous as an "opinion", or even just phrasing it as a cleverly ill-intentioned question doesn't give the writer carte-blanche to say all sorts of dangerous damaging things.

We are not talking about protecting truth here because no one really knows the absolute truth. We all only know what we've been fed. We only THINK we know the truth. But the fact is that everything you think you know was actually designed, carefully curated, and bought and paid for by somebody. You weren't informed. You were marketed to. Carefully. Over time.

So what we are talking about here is avoiding unnecessary pain, harm, and irreversible damage to other people. Even the whole country.

I know there are places people can go to get information on building bombs, making poison, etc. etc. And they can probably google those things if they want to find them and that is very distressing to think about. But my point was not really about building bombs, per se. I was just using those things as examples of dangerous information.

My central point was more about dangerous people saying dangerous things that can hurt a lot of people.

I can tell you from experience at 5 different power electric utilities that every single day there are literally THOUSANDS of cyber attacks on every electric power company as hackers and terrorists try to shut down our national power grids. They mean us harm. They are relentless and the battle to protect our power grid never ends. There are many unsung heroes working in IT departments of utility companies across the nation trying to keep our country safe from invisible terrorists.

In the same vein, there is no question that there are multiple large troll farms in Russia and China with thousands of people heads-down working our social media pretending to be other Americans, and all trying to get us at each other's throats by sewing seeds of distrust, discontent, hatred, etc. They use fake news, lies, misleading news stories, conspiracy theories, anything they can insert into our minds to split this country up and make us hate our neighbors. And unfortunately, they are not our only enemies in the world. There are other bad actors trying to do this as well.

Social media is a different sort of animal. And it includes an instant distribution mechanism that allows a whole different kind of threat. Should we really allow everything from anyone? Let's test our sense of limits to what we think should be allowed.

For example: let's say there was someone who wanted a political leader dead. It could be a senator, congressman, a state governor, or the Attorney General, or even the President. Or perhaps the political adversary of one of those people.

Is it OK if that person states in social media that they wish they were dead?

Is it OK to state that they want them killed? By any means, but not directly threatening to do it themselves?

Is it OK to say that they intend to kill him? (Even if they don't actually do it in real life, but by volunteering on social media they erode the resistance against it and desensitize the idea to others enough to follow through)

Is it OK to plead online for someone else to step up and kill them, and give an impassioned argument to justify that? To make it sound like it's the right thing to do and they would be a hero to the country for doing it? Would it even matter if half the reasoning they used were lies or fake news, or misinformation?

What about if they actually take up a collection online to pull together enough money to pay for a professional hit man to go kill that person? Is that ok?

What if they can build a following of hundreds or thousands of angry people, and get donations enough to finance a full scale mercenary military hit operation to go in, overcome local protection, and get it done? Is THAT ok?

What about if they actually organize that hit themselves? If they ramp up the hate and fear and anger and use that to build a group of thousands of supporters, and organize them to go and storm the capital and try to kill their political targets in the process? Would THAT be OK for social media to allow?

The point is - WHERE do we draw the line? Where in that range does it cross the line from acceptable "Free Speech" to dangerously plotting evil crimes, to even fomenting an insurrection? Remember Jan 6th, 2021.

So we need some rules. Some controls that protect us from them. It's not just to prevent some American right wing nutjob or left wing wokeness warrior from spreading his uncomfortable personal views. It's to prevent a wave of ill-intentioned onslaught of evil from triggering a civil war.

So I don't mind some reasonable, safe, common sense guardrails to prevent that from happening. But the rules need to be applied equally to left and right.

Bottom line: let's just play nice with each other, shall we? Lets be kind. Because we might just be wrong about those "other" people.