Just before Donald Trump’s exit from the White House, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube finally got rid of him. Accused of inciting the Capitol rioters, the social media giants had what they saw as legitimate cause to ban him from their platforms, and with him, thousands of accounts that agreed with his politics. Allowing Trump and his ilk a voice on social media was simply too dangerous.
But the actions reignited the debate about regulation of the internet, and social media in particular. Advocates of government intervention make the case that the supposedly impartial social media companies have a strong leftist bias, that those banned are overwhelmingly from the right and that the purportedly objective reasons for bans are in fact a smokescreen for a deliberate strategy to silence conservative and free-market voices. They demand action to force social media companies to allow everyone access to their platforms or be treated as publishers, like newspapers, who are liable for the content they publish.
A libertarian’s natural instinct is to say that a private company can do business with whomever it wants and decline to do business with whomever it wants too. We applied that principle to bakers who refused to bake gay-themed wedding cakes (in recent high-profile cases on both sides of the Atlantic) and would instinctively apply it to any private business or interpersonal relationship. So, it seems a straight case of hypocrisy when advocates of freedom of association cry foul over the banning of conservative and libertarian voices from social media. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are private companies and can do what they want.
The issue with the major online media companies, however, is their size and therefore their power in shaping public debate. If you are not on their platforms your reach is drastically curtailed. And the trouble with that is that if the big media companies can influence what people know about politics, they can effectively influence how people vote. Should they have that power?
Now, free speech is one of the most fundamental libertarian values. And indeed, I’m in favour of socialists being able to say what they want, to agitate for socialism all day if they so choose. But I am totally opposed to a system that allows socialist policies to be imposed on unwilling subjects (like myself). That’s why democracy is not all it’s cracked up to be. If there is no consequence to their demands for socialism, there is no harm in their ideology being spread wide and far – but under a democratic system with universal suffrage, there are consequences to the spread of poisonous ideas: they may prove to be popular. The political system that mandates a government to use coercive powers to control the population simply changes the power of ideas. Your wrongheaded beliefs become my problem. Politics is not the sphere of voluntary action, rather the very raison d‘etre of the political system is to enable government to change the market outcomes of interpersonal relations and transactions. Should the marketplace of political ideas – given the presence of government that can be directed by those ideas – be free? Or should it be regulated, to give free-market ideas the best chance of being heard?
As any libertarian worth his salt will attest, the only real guarantor of freedom is the total absence of government. But this is the real world, and given the existence of government, the ideal of no coercive power whatsoever is simply not attainable. So, the question becomes: what is the best way to minimise the spread of coercive power in society? Is it to allow ideas to be freely debated, with the consequence – as we have seen in every western democracy – that the state grows to control swathes of the economy and enter every sphere of our lives? Or what if instead we enforced a total ban on any ideas which could lead to such policies? It seems that the latter would be by far the most benign – but returning to the real world, where that is clearly not going to happen, maybe the very least we can aim for is that conservative and free market ideas get a fair hearing too? And if that means regulating media to ensure it, is that an acceptable sacrifice to enable the fight against leftism? Could the existence of government mean that the rules have changed? When an actor with coercive power is introduced into the game, maybe it leaves no room for libertarian purists: the aim for the libertarian player becomes that of minimising the sum total of coercive power in society. And, counterintuitively, could that aim be best served with regulation of the media?
There is power in big tech and social media and the current incumbents are clearly not being honest when they tell us they discharge this power in an unbiased fashion. But handing the power over to the government presents other dangers. We must choose between two evils, and it’s not at all clear which one is worst.