Must-Read: Noah Smith: Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Freedom of Speech in the Digital Age: “Speech that disseminates ideas is more valuable than speech whose purpose is to intimidate others…

…Twitter, as a technology, is unusually conducive to face-screeching…. The sheer volume of harassment on Twitter comes from the fact that there are roving mobs of harassers who spend all day going from target to target. One minute you’re talking to your friends and colleagues, the next minute there are a hundred pseudonymous accounts screeching at you. Two hours later they’re screeching at someone else, but now you know, if you say the wrong thing, the mob will be back in a heartbeat. If you’re a really unlucky high-profile person like Leslie Jones (who committed the unpardonable sin of being a black woman and being alive), you become a perennial target, and the mob never goes away until you quit Twitter….

I’m guessing the Twitter Nazis’ total population… to be only a couple thousand at most–to intimidate and silence enormous numbers of people who only wanted to say their ideas out loud (or, in Jones’ case, just wanted to be there, period). Twitter knows it has these problems…. But it’s possible… the non-screechers. That could lead to Twitter becoming a ghost-town…. Twitter, fun and useful as it is, might not be something that works out…. More broadly, internet technologies are forcing us to face a sharper conflict between freedom of idea-expression and freedom of targeted disapproval. The tradeoff faced by Twitter is just an acute version of the tradeoffs faced by Facebook, Google, and any other communication technology with a global network effect….

So what do I think about the banning of Milo, Ricky, and other prominent alt-righters? I’m not at all upset about it….

Banning and corporate censorship seem to be the only way (so far) to create an online world where people who mainly value freedom of idea-expression can coexist with people who mainly value the freedom to yell mean things at other people. That’s probably going to lead to a “two-tiered” internet… a “top layer” where everyone plays nice, and a “bottom layer” where genocide jokes and death threats are the order of the day…