The attack on the Capitol by Trump terrorists which led to five deaths was a shocking, horrifying crime. Trump and his supporters deserve the strongest condemnation for their role in fabricating a lie about the election results and then calling upon a mob to fight for a coup to overthrow the new government.
Some people have concluded that the Trump terrorism means we must reverse our commitment to free expression–that since Trump has regularly used social media and disinformation to help inspire his terrorist mob, we must move to stop him with censorship.
I strongly disagree. The lesson to learn from Trump and his terrorists is not that we must embrace censorship, but that we must endorse free expression now more than ever. The belief that we should silence and punish fake news is the dogma of Donald Trump, and we must never embrace his authoritarian values.
While most of the current deplatforming debate is about social media, it’s not hard to see similar arguments about free speech on college campuses. If Twitter should ban Trump and his supporters, why shouldn’t colleges do the same? Some
For five years, I have consistently and loudly denounced Donald Trump. Trump is a pathological liar, a white supremacist, a misogynist, a rapist, a bigot, a babbling moron, a morally decrepit scumbag, a con artist, a deranged megalomaniac, a conspiracy theorist, a crook, and a genuinely evil person who not merely the worst president in American history, but also the worst person ever to be president. I believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office because he is a dangerous, unstable person with enormous power who tried to stage a coup and steal an election.
And yet, I believe Trump and his sycophants should not be banned–not from social media, not from the internet, not from colleges, not from anywhere.
Trump’s ban from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other tech giants is the decision of a private company. But it is still censorship–censorship is a broad term that goes far beyond what must be protected by the First Amendment. When private universities violate academic freedom and fire professors for their political views, we call it censorship. Those universities are private corporations that should not be controlled by the government, but they still deserve condemnation.
When Zoom and YouTube (owned by Google) banned campus events featuring a Palestinian terrorist, it shocked and angered progressives who fear the power of tech companies to silence criticism of the status quo. The tech deplatforming of Trump and his supporters is a dangerous precedent that will be used to censor leftwing radicals for years to come whenever someone makes an over-the-top comment on Twitter or if some violent incident occurs.
Even before the Capitol attack, Trump was inspiring many of his opponents to abandon free speech. A New York Times feature that appeared on the day of the Capitol attack asked, “Have Trump’s Lies Wrecked Free Speech?” It quoted Robert Post, who noted that before the internet, “People were always crazy, but they couldn’t find each other, they couldn’t talk and disperse their craziness.” Does Post actually believe that people with crazy views could not disperse their craziness before the internet? Consider the crazy idea of racism. Was there no racism until the internet was invented, because this crazy idea couldn’t be dispersed? I can imagine some version of Post in the 1860s complaining that we need to censor the printing presses and the mail because the Civil War would never have happened without this technology. The internet did not create crazy people. The internet revealed the fact that crazy people were always here.
It is simply jaw-dropping to hear supposedly reasonable people argue that because the president is an authoritarian liar, we must give the government more power to censor free speech in order to stop lying. What part of “president” don’t you understand? I’m not sure which theory is more dangerously naive: The belief that Donald Trump would be unable to lie effectively if we just banned him from Twitter, or the belief that Donald Trump would never dare to censor his enemies if we undermined the First Amendment and allowed the government to repress freedom.
Censorship doesn’t stop Trump terrorism. The false feelings of victimization that motivated many of the Trump terrorists would only be enhanced by censorship. And the spread of misinformation and hate by Trump would continue largely unabated. Social media move information faster and easier, but it doesn’t fundamentally transform the transmission of ideas. Unless you’re prepared to ban right-wing media networks, websites, email, rallies, books, and everything else, you won’t stop the spread of Trump’s hateful messages.
Censorship works, but it doesn’t persuade. Censorship can help silence some of the people some of the time, but it doesn’t create a positive transformation. And it certainly doesn’t stop a man with 74 million voters behind him.
Censorship never stopped Trump; it helped him. Trump became president campaigning as the “politically incorrect” fighter against liberal censors. People hate the impact of Trump, they see his effective use of social media, and they imagine that censorship would have saved us all this, they think that if Twitter had banned Trump in 2015 he would have never become president. In reality, a Twitter ban would have probably generated more sympathy and support for Trump. He would have been forced to change his tactics and his toolkit, but fundamentally Trump won because his message appealed to a lot of people, not because we have too much free speech.
The call for censorship is a dangerous delusion. There are no censorship shortcuts in a democracy. You cannot solve the problem of the people believing in bad ideas by simply banishing those ideas or the platforms that permit them.
Censorship doesn’t persuade. We need to understand why so many Americans were suckered by Trump’s lies, and figure out ways to convince them to change their minds. It is a difficult project, but you cannot censor out of existence 74 million Trump voters. Powerful mass movements like the Trumpsters are not stopped by censors. You can’t even censor Trump away, since he is planning to create his own news network. One of the biggest problems we face are people living in information silos where they never encounter opposing views. Trying to banish bad ideas and deplatform bad people only increases this information segregation.
A system where censorship prevails is likely to be turned against progressive voices. Trump himself wanted to impose mass censorship by targeting “fake news” media and banning “critical race theory.” If Trump had won re-election, he likely would have greatly expanded his regime’s repression and appointed even more judges willing to ignore the First Amendment at his behest. What saved us from Trump were the institutions and principles that protect free expression, ideas so powerful that even Trump was forced to pay lip service to them and limit his ambitions to censor. The next right-wing authoritarian who follows in Trump’s footsteps might not be as incompetent as Trump.
Censoring Trump will not save us from Trumpism, and it presents serious dangers. What happens when the next violent attack is linked to some progressive movement? Are leftists prepared to ban Black Lives Matter advocates from social media and college campuses, or critics of Israel? Even if progressives can manage a little hypocrisy, will the Trump supporters who run most of America’s state legislatures be tolerant of universities that allow unpopular views now that a new standard for censorship has been established?
While censorship doesn’t change hearts and minds, it can have a powerful silencing effect. And we should fear, not advocate, the power of censorship. The lesson to learn from Donald Trump is not that we must ban bad ideas in order to stop authoritarians from rising to power. The lesson Trump provides is that we must enhance the protections of free expression to stop authoritarian-minded rulers from imposing repression.
Crossposted from AcademeBlog.