Elon Musk, Donald Trump and the trouble with free speech

The Cursed Ratio strikes again. Twitter users have voted 52-48 in favour of Elon Musk allowing the return of Donald Trump to the website, causing the gnashing of a great many progressive teeth in the airless no-space of the internet. The kicker to this is that – psych! – the former president almost immediately announced that he had no interest in returning to the site in any case. A pyrrhic victory, then, for Little Elon in his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, but still.  

I’m no fan of Trump myself. I’d love to see him doing a sullen perp-walk in an orange jumpsuit, and I dearly hope one day to witness such a thing. But it strikes me that having him back on Twitter might not be the worst thing in the world should he deign to rejoin it. His absence didn’t prevent his utterances from reaching their public – there can’t be a single thing he didn’t post on his Truth Social account that didn’t immediately become available on Twitter and everywhere else – while his presence would help to kibosh conspiracy theories about the site’s 'liberal bias'. 

There’s reason to be sympathetic to the position – which seems to be Musk’s – that though, yes, Twitter is a private company so it can do what it damn well likes, we should recognise that it has become in some respects the world’s town square; and that a company in that position should hold a very strong presumption in favour of free speech.  

“

We've all had a good laugh watching Musk’s chaotic management of Twitter

We should maybe recognise too that the stronger the presumption in favour of free speech, the higher the likelihood that the site will fill with hooting human chimpanzees spewing racist or misogynist abuse or deranged conspiracy theories. That isn’t necessarily an argument against such a presumption. Free speech is a civic good, but it’s often a very ugly one. There isn’t a sanitised, downside-free version available. 

But anyone who can describe themselves as a 'free speech absolutist', as Musk has done, clearly hasn’t thought very hard about the matter at all. There are myriad ways in which we all benefit from restrictions on publication and utterance, and it’s hard to think how the world could operate in anything like a recognisable form without them. Absolute free speech, for instance, would mean the abolition of all libel, privacy, intellectual property and fraudulent advertising laws – to say nothing of prohibitions on direct incitement to violence, doxxing and revenge porn. 

We might (and, personally, I would) take a liberal line on 'hate speech' and even Holocaust denial on the pragmatic grounds that these issues are exceptionally tricky to police, that insult and obscenity are deeply contextual and capable of irony or historical change (words are 'reclaimed' and co-opted), that art frequently thrives on indeterminacy, and that enshrining any aspect of historical truth as unimpeachable sets a dangerous precedent.  

But a liberal line, even an extremely liberal one, isn’t the same as flatly saying the ideal situation is that anyone should be able to say anything they like at any time. That is even before we get to the question of the way in which the marketplace of ideas, just like the real marketplace, tends to form cartels and that all manner of power differentials apply. Some people in the town square have megaphones. This is a complicated area and one-line slogans just won’t get anywhere close to usefully resolving it.   

There's more than one type of speech, for a start. The philosopher J L Austin made the distinction, for instance, between constative and performative language. Constative speech makes assertions about the world of the sort that might be evaluated as true or false. That’s the type, we could say, that protections on free speech primarily exist to enable: it’s best to let the earth-is-round mob and the earth-is-flat mob duke it out. But, as ever, there are exceptions; a world with weak libel laws is a good one, but a world with no libel laws at all might not be.   

Then there’s performative speech (how I wish this useful term of art could be rescued from its clumsy social-media appropriation to mean something like 'ostentatious') – which seeks to change the world (or in some cases, such as 'I pronounce you man and wife') changes it in the very act of utterance. That’s a bit riskier. Here’s speech of the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre type, or the 'let him have it' type. 'Exterminate the brutes!' can’t be proclaimed true or false, or tested in debate; it can only be acted on or ignored. It’s his performative speech – the contention that Trump’s rhetoric was directly responsible for his supporters’ violent assault on the US Capitol – that got Trump banned from Twitter in the first place.   

Was some of his rhetoric dangerous? It looks that way to me. Did it step so directly into the territory of incitement to violence that it constituted a criminal offence? That one’s still under investigation. Would keeping him off Twitter neutralise that danger? It seems highly unlikely. Does keeping him off Twitter inflict reputational damage on the company and add fuel to his victim narrative? It certainly bears considering.  

We've all had a good laugh watching Musk’s chaotic management of Twitter as a company over the last couple of weeks: misunderstanding the whole point of those blue ticks, deciding to mark some accounts 'official' even if they didn’t have a blue tick, then changing his mind, haggling with Stephen King over the price, then accidentally losing many of his advertisers and three quarters of his staff, then trying to hire some of the staff back, and so on.  

The same rudderlessness was on show in the back-and-forth over the site’s content policies. Musk claimed no changes had been made to Twitter’s moderation rules, then he said he was appointing a new independent 'content moderation council' and nothing would change before it met, then he banned a bunch of accounts that annoyed him, then he reinstated a couple of them, and finally he appeared to throw the question of Trump’s possible reinstatement to a poll of Twitter users – 'vox populi, vox dei', as he put it. 

But the question of Musk’s business management of the site is a separate one from the question of what he wants it to look like if he can make it work. There might be reason to hope. The chaos, the U-turns, the swerving between 'content moderation council' and 'dictator says jump' when it comes to policy... these may be the sign – and I hope they are – of someone learning as he goes; of someone whose understanding of free speech started with a jejune one-line slogan but is getting more complicated as his plan of attack makes contact with the enemy. 

Musk recently flew the kite that a new policy should be 'freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach', suggesting that misinformation or hate-speech might be algorithmically downplayed and harder to monetise. There are obvious problems of principle with that approach too, and it's still a one-line slogan. But it’s a shade subtler than 'free speech absolutist', and that's a step in the right direction at least.