No One Is Owed an Audience: Facebook, Free Speech, and Liberal Tolerance
What are the proper limits of liberal tolerance? Mark Zuckerberg, of all people, appears to have found himself pinned against this seemingly impossible question. Shortly after giving a speech at Georgetown University about freedom of expression, the Facebook CEO has found himself hounded with questions about his choice to include far-right Breitbart as a partner in a new standalone news app. After explaining that the app would judge content based on “objective standards,” Zuckerberg was pressed on the inclusion of Breitbart specifically and argued that in order for the app to be a trusted source it needed to cater to a diversity of views.
Benedict Evans—partner in Facebook investor Andreessen Horowitz—has offered a partial reformulation of freedom of speech that might help Zuckerberg out of his bind:
Evans’ points are notable precisely because, where previous criticisms of “no platforming” have rested largely on conflating it with speech regulation, he attempts to articulate a version of freedom of speech that would encompass both concerns.
Unfortunately, he does not succeed. The most I can make of his point is that censorship by government is just a special case of censorship by those with the power to deprive individuals of “reach and distribution,” a phrase I assume means something like audience size. The implicit argument is that any content policing they do should be viewed as a curtailment of free speech. One problem with this formulation is that only a negligible proportion of the population ever reaches audiences of any meaningful magnitude, so to formulate freedom of speech this way is to make it essentially impossible for the majority of humanity.
The traditional emphasis on the evils of censorship by the power of the state specifically is much more concrete and actionable, to say nothing of coherent. It is important to distinguish those evils from the evils of some instances of blackballing by, say, the big three networks in their heyday. This is not to say liberals should be indifferent to the latter, but the “right to be published” or worse, the “right to an audience” formulation is useless for the purposes of either understanding the problem or providing a specific plan of action. It cannot provide a principled response for Zuckerberg or anyone else to the question of why Breitbart, specifically, ought to be included rather than some other.
What we have here is a conflation between freedom of speech and liberal tolerance writ large. While the former offers very concrete answers to the questions asked of it, so long as it is kept within its proper domain, the latter is far more ambiguous. Principled liberals can disagree on where to draw the line between these two domains, but should never doubt that there is a line to be drawn.
Publication as potential audience
Consider a scenario where publishers blackball a Communist author. There’s another tier—indie publishers and small presses—available to the author. If there are enough Communists committed to the cause, they may even pool resources and launch their own publications and publishers—this is not a hypothetical, but a fact of history! The crucial point is that even if the shut-out author doesn’t personally have the resources to self-publish or create an alternative publishing house, the number of people to whom they could appeal to potentially publish their work is extremely broad and extends well beyond the currently existing publishing houses.
When state censors ban the publication of a certain author’s work, that author can appeal to state officials, but that’s it. The state has the final word on the matter. Any conceivable alternative arrangement is against the law. And of course, under Communism as actually practiced, the state dictated how many publishers there were, who they were, and what they could publish. There was no alternative possible, at least within the confines of the law, and a heavy penalty was exacted if you were caught publishing material outside of those confines.
The distinction between state censorship and private publishers’ discretion is, again, a crucial one. But I will stop beating this dead horse. What I really want to point out is that Evans’ framework, closely related to many in contemporary free speech discourse, tells us little about what sorts of actions by publishers constitute “censorship.”
We can all agree that blackballing is heavy-handed. But if “reach”—that is, actual audience size—matters, as well as “distribution”—that is, the number of people into whose hands the publication may end up, or who navigate to Vox.com or log on to Twitter—then what do we make of, say, running an article on page 12 rather than the front page? Is that a breach of free speech, given the sharp dropoff of readership? What about deciding that a publication will not cover certain topics? What about specialist publications? If a technology publication becomes among the most widely read publications overall, is it a breach of free speech for them to refuse to publish people writing about non-technology topics?
The exact role that “reach or distribution” are meant to play is murky at best. Audiences are always potential. Though publications may sell ad space on the basis of more-or-less reliable monthly audience estimates, those estimates are never a guarantee—not for the publication, and certainly not for an individual article within it. Audiences are made up of individual people with agency of their own who must be persuaded that something is worth their time. No one has a right to other people’s attention.
What we should care about is giving the broadest set of people the widest array of options for reaching audiences. This is not a matter of freedom of speech, but of developing capabilities in Sen and Nussbaum’s sense. And of course, this is precisely what we have done in a dramatic fashion since the first web page went online almost thirty years ago. Anything from videos to podcasts to newsletters to blog posts to the lowly social media post has the potential to go viral, blowing up suddenly to reach enormous audiences. Even an audience of a few hundred is a public in its own right. Platforms like Patreon, Kickstarter, or Paypal make it easy for a few hundred motivated fans to support an author financially, which drastically expands the potential alternatives available for those locked out of the big platforms. And of course, the Kindle store and competitors make self-publishing easier than ever.
Blackballing for liberalism
Evans’ formulation, if fleshed out to any extent, runs into all the paradoxes and self-sabotage you see political theorists engage in when they attempt to create a unified theory of pluralism. Superficially, Evans may be saying something like: major news outlets like CNN, and major platforms like Facebook, ought to make room for diverse perspectives; if certain voices cannot be given a voice on such concentrated sources of potential audiences, we cannot truly say we have achieved free speech.
But let us flip this around. Say Breitbart—a site which contains articles categorized “black on black violence,” and which is self-consciously catering to the far right—grew to be the most widely read publication in America. It would be a strange notion of “free speech” indeed which held that a publication dedicated to promoting a specific set of values should cease to overtly do so once it reaches a certain level of popularity. After all, by continuing to favor solely people espousing those values, Breitbart would be denying everyone to their left the “reach” and “distribution” they enjoyed. Yet the whole point of freedom of speech and liberal tolerance writ large is to allow distinct voices to step into the arena and try to persuade others to adopt their point of view. If succeeding in the arena of free speech is at odds with free speech, we may, again, wonder what purpose this clearly self-defeating ideal is supposed to serve.
If we relegate freedom of speech to its traditional domain—government censorship—and understand liberal toleration as a virtue to foster in liberal citizens rather than a law or policy, we can cut the pluralist gordian knot. The answer to concerns over the existence of concentrated audiences should not be to adopt a rule that would require anyone with a set of values to cease defending them without compromise the moment they become popular. Rather, we should strive to persuade audiences to be uncompromisingly liberal. Of course, to be uncompromisingly liberal is to be steadfast in one’s commitment to tolerance, not as an absolutely logical category but as a historically contingent accomplishment. Liberals seek to understand perspectives they disagree with for a variety of familiar reasons: because we know we may be wrong in big ways or small; or there may be some element of value from another framework which we can translate into our own; or we may have overlooked the way in which our existing liberal institutions oppress a minority group whose situation we have failed to understand.
It is quite consistent with an ethically thick liberalism to call for Google and Facebook to leave Breitbart—which is, at best, flirtatious with white nationalism—out of their news services. Both the criticism of Breitbart’s inclusion and the defenses of it are legitimate parts of the ongoing conversation among liberals about the specific boundaries of liberal toleration at one moment in time.
The practical shortfalls of Evans’ and similar formulations comes both from this attempt to shoehorn liberal tolerance into freedom of speech, and from problems associated with drawing too close an analogy between traditional mass media on the one hand and social media platforms on the other. The nature of a newspaper or broadcast news business is different in kind from Facebook or Twitter’s business. The former takes ownership of what they publish; the latter is more of a tool or space for other people to say what they want. The former is necessarily public, the latter runs the gamut from person to person private messaging to public figures releasing statements to millions of followers, and this distinction is reflected in American Law. While a newspaper is liable for an article or editorial’s content, a blog is not liable for its comments and Facebook is not liable for posts made by its users.
This indirect relationship with the content hosted on its servers does create closer analogies with state action on speech than in the case of publishers. Some of the content that Facebook, Twitter, and Google “censor” on a regular basis, such as fraud and pornography, bear quite close resemblance to the currently recognized exceptions to the First Amendment. The other major category, spam, can be seen as a direct threat to the value of these platforms for their users—and analogous to laws such as the CAN-SPAM Act or the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. Moreover, the winner-takes-all nature of platform competitions results in unprecedented concentrations of users, to the tune of about one billion active every month on Facebook. These are potential audiences as well as potential creators seeking audiences whose activity falls under a single company’s governance structure.
If this is all that Evans meant, and his analogy with mass media was just a poor choice of words, then I would agree that liberals ought to err on the side of supporting a more rather than less expansive tolerance on Facebook’s part. But Evans and Zuckerberg cannot have it both ways. The distinction between freedom of speech in particular and liberal tolerance in general rests in no small part on the capability of people to creatively develop alternative methods of reaching audiences. In other words, freedom of speech, rather than liberal tolerance, is more likely to be the applicable concept for private actors when they have a true monopoly; when it is prohibitively difficult for alternatives to develop. I do not think that is true of Facebook’s case, especially if we are considering public speech specifically rather than merely the social media market. But it seems to me that the logic of Evans argument, if restricted to this domain, would apply only if he believed Facebook to be a monopoly.
Freedom of speech is an important, but partial aspect of liberal tolerance overall. Good liberals ought to zealously defend the former, not shy away from debating the limitations of the latter, and do what we can to support as many alternative methods of reaching potential audiences as possible.
Featured image is an illustration of the printing press by Albert Sidney Bolles
