I was recently watching Glenn Greenwald (of System Update) and Matt Taibbi (of the Twitter Files) talking about :"why free speech has become a right wing issue". I’m a masochist is why. The conversation was occasioned by the Supreme Court's recent surprising indication in oral arguments to Murtha v Missouri that it could be favorable to letting the government freely communicate its displeasure about content on social media platforms with the Big Tech companies that run them. At first, it seemed to me that Greenwald and Taibbi were as usual eliding the fact that these platforms are not public entities, not even traditional businesses but something new entirely*, and that the relationship of the government to Big Tech is deeply contractual. In other words, Elon Musk doesn’t need the CDC to tell him to boot someone off of X for speech he doesn't like, and if it does he’s free to ignore it, but he might find it in his interest to do so if he wants to continue to receive public funding for his ventures. In my view there is no one to root for in this scenario. The hypothetical anti-vax poster’s speech that is offensive to the federal agency was never free, it was always donated nonchalantly to Twitter which could always do as it pleased with it (and often did.) (Note: I'm being hypothetical. Any similarity to the actual case before the SCOTUS would be coincidental.) It just mystifies me (not) how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, beneficiaries of the largesse of Big Tech billionaires, worry us with this stuff but have nothing to say† about for instance Tennessee making it an offense punishable by a $1-$5 million fine for a teacher employed by any school system to discuss race, sex or class in a classroom setting in any way that offends a white male student (read: at all).
Having now watched the whole conversation, and read the NY Times article they discuss and Taibbi’s response to it, I concede the value of the main point they want to express which has not nothing but less to do with the fact of government insinuation into Big Tech’s affairs (contra my first critique of it) than with the nature of what government officials are interfering about. I.e., Greenwald and Taibbi are not on about the government officials (or ex-officials sock-puppeting for the deep state) leaning on Twitter executives to remove disinformation about Russian interference in US elections or about COVID health precautions and statistics-- they’re trying to draw focus on the government declaring its officials experts on “disinformation” and arbiters of what to do with it. Unwanted speech is protected; “disinformation” being the purview of experts is certified not to be.
Their point about “liberals” (by which they mean not just neoliberal government officials and the deep state but also the anti-Trump left) is that labelling unwanted speech “disinformation” gives cover to allow censorship. Liberals are all for censorship if it hurts Trump. Trump is bad because he somehow slipped through the cracks to become president-- thanks to strategically welling popular support in just the right places-- and subverted the neoliberal agenda. As continuous with the neo-liberal establishment as his first term wound up being, there’s no guarantee his second term will continue to be (strong signs indicate that it won’t), and as much as I truly fear what a second Trump term portends and for that reason will do at least the bare minimum I can to avoid it (which could at this point even be just not moving to a swing state and voting against Biden), I think Greenwald and Taibbi are right to point out the troubling nature of government (and mainstream media; and citizens sympathetic to the status quo) practicing a new framework for censorship and thought control. I don’t want to give them credit beyond this, but I think this is significant credit that they deserve.
They mostly refer to the would be thought police as “liberals”-- at least Greenwald does. But he also repeats that by not opposing this sleight of hand that turns unwanted speech into “disinformation” the left cedes Free Speech advocacy to the right. He compares the state of things 20 years ago when Noam Chomsky led the charge to defend the right of Nazis to deny the holocaust against the FBI which was criticized for interfering, to today when the Twitter files are called a "nothingburger" and liberals clamor for their government to police their social media platforms into banning Trumpist disinformation. Greenwald sees the main conflict today as being not between right and left but rather as between the separate sides of those inside or on the side of the liberal Beltway establishment (the perpetrators of this harm to freedom of speech and thought) and those outside and opposed to it.
Having conceded their point, I have swung back a bit this way on the value of this discourse -- actually I’m trying to sort out the mess. One thing you’ll note about free speech. The people we’re most often compelled to have to protect are basically saying unwanted, odious speech-- i.e., right wing talking points (frequently expressed as perverted subversions of valid leftist arguments), racist, sexist, homophobic, classist porn, or corporate lies. Much disinformation is paid for by right wing think tanks expressly to mislead and obfuscate and undermine the spread of leftist ideas. So we rarely find either Greenwald or Taibbi vociferously attacking the government or right wing media for the way it treats speech from the actual left-- basically shunting it to dark unseen corners when it’s not dismissing, mischaracterizing, vilifying, missing the point or advocating for (and often succeeding at) banning it. Both former heros and allies are 100% of the time now critiquing the left (barely concealed behind the slur of “The Liberals”) for the authoritarianism that is actually actively being crusaded for by the most nefarious elements of the right--- many of whom fund the outlets for such critiques of the left as Greenwald and Taibbi provide. So Greenwald saying it’s not right v left but inside v outside when he is 100% of the time attacking the left is infuriating.
However!1 The New York Times article they were discussing was absolutely pushing a false narrative about Matt Taibbi and the Twitter files --i.e., that Taibbi found and reported no government collusion with Twitter execs to censor tweets among the Twitter files until March 2023 when he met the Trumpist crackpot conspiracy theorist (or propagandist) Mike Benz who has lately been pushing the Taylor Swift hysteria shortly before Taibbi's testimony before Congress about the Twitter files, with the insinuation that Benz must have planted the idea of government collusion. As I vividly remember, the government collusion angle was in Taibbi's Twitter file reporting early on, in December 2022, so the NYT is just wrong about that (and almost certainly knows it). Plus the same article, as Greenwald very capably demonstrates, repeatedly bemoans the caution with which government disinformation specialists now have to proceed since the Twitter files were exposed and the deleterious effect it has had on the government’s ability to stay ahead of disinformation on social media. It’s actually disgusting frankly.
Like I say, there are no good guys. Or rather the good guys are shut out of the conversation. But I would like to remind us that the already free don't need freedom. It's the rest of us who could use some liberation.
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* YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Substack, Rumble, Racket, Bluesky, etc are not public squares where speech must not be infringed. They are “marketplaces of ideas”-- and not in any good way. They are at best imperfect restricted spaces where speech is heavily regulated by market forces. (They’re actually queen bees whose users and visitors are slaves willfully creating their value for them without their having to do jack diddly.)
† Taibbi at least is happy to talk about how the right should fine tune its attack on woke education if it wants to be less buffoonish.
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