Helen Lewis is pessimistic about the culture wars.
If today’s tech giants can be said to have an ideology, it is the promotion of unfettered free speech. Social media companies trumpet how pro-democracy protesters use their networks to oppose repressive governments. Celebrities are warned of the “Streisand effect” of trying to suppress unflattering information about them, and creating more publicity in the process. Twitter’s former general counsel once described the company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”.
But amid this orgy of self-congratulation, there is one rarely mentioned fact: one person’s free speech can come at the cost of another’s. This is the kernel at the heart of so many harassment cases: the stalker will insist, with an air of honest bafflement, that they are simply exercising their right to free speech. Unfortunately, they are doing it by shouting through the letterbox of their victim, who is now too afraid to leave their house.
Free speech, free shouting, free access to everyone’s letterbox, free access to everyone. Freedom freedom freedom.
There is no neutral position here. In trolling cases, for example, by protecting the abuser, you are discouraging the abused from entering public debates. The effect of this is profoundly conservative, because the cost of speaking out becomes higher for women (who receive a disproportionate amount of the most serious abuse, according to research by the Pew Institute and others) and other visible minorities.
No no no it’s the other way around. Minorities and women are holding everyone in the prison of Political Correctness and it’s all these shouting ranting spitting screeching Superior Young White Men who are subject to more abuse.
This aspect of the free speech debate is often ignored. Consider the backlash to Twitter linking up with a voluntary organisation, Women, Action and The Media, which will investigate and track sexist abuse on the social network. Wam’s power is extremely limited: it in effect has a hotline to Twitter, to escalate complaints that it has verified; it will also compile statistics on how well the service is handling them. The power to suspend and ban users still rests with Twitter.
This wasn’t enough to stop the influential US blogger Andrew Sullivan choking on his morning latte. “Is it simply that Wam believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?” he thundered. “I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.”
It has not, of course. Twitter has empowered feminists to monitor whether its own harassment policies are enforced – and to see whether the “uninhibited online speech” of one group is preventing the uninhibited online speech of another.
But Sullivan is used to a setup in which people like him get to do all the talking (yes, even though he’s gay) and people like us get shouted down, so an attempt to shake that out a little until it’s more even looks to him like leftist feminists having a censorship field day. So on we go, each day a little more hostile than the last.