Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Free Speech, not Corporate Control

Political ads are coming back to Twitter. nnMore than three years ago, amid a wave of dis- and mis-information that coincided with a presidential election, the social media platform’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey announced a ban on political ads, arguing that their “reach … has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle.”

The ban was met with applause by liberals and Democrats and criticism from conservatives, nearly all of whom focused on the partisan question of who would benefit. Left mostly unaddressed were two key issues: the role that privately owned social media plays in our public square and the control that private companies have over speech.

Since then, former President Trump has been kicked off Twitter and later reinstated, and Twitter has been purchased by Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist who has re-opened the platform to the kind of misinformation and hate speech Dorsey sought to cancel. The result has been an exodus of at least some liberals from the platform.

Then, in early January, Twitter “relaxed” its ban on political ads, saying “cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics.” It also said that “the change will align the platform’s advertising policy with those of ‘TV and other media outlets.’”

Why does any of this matter? Twitter — and social media more broadly — is a central part of our new public square, a for-profit cog in the larger structure of our public discourse. Twitter offers access, infrastructure, and in exchange use the data it collects on us to make money by selling that data to advertisers. They also serve as moderators, arbitrators of what speech is acceptable and what is not — and they do this with our tacit approval.

This should worry all of us, and not just because ugly speech is being unleashed in an unregulated social media environment. We should be concerned with the creeping privatization of the public sphere, a process that has deep roots (suburban malls and gated communities, for instance, transfer control to private companies).

Twitter and other social media sites are independent businesses. Their decisions are not made with the public in mind, but with a set of consumers, users, advertisers. This makes them imperfect vessels for public debate. They are neither true public squares, nor functioning publishers. They exist somewhere in between.

This is fine for many — at least when this system cracks down on opponents and leaves us alone, when an anti-trans actress gets booted from her job, or a hard-right troll find himself de-platformed. But what about when a liberal TV host is canceled for opposing a war, or country music radio bans the Chicks from the airwaves because the band’s criticism of a sitting president?

This is not just a question of markets, but of access. We have accepted the lie that the market economy is somehow free, that it is open and accessible to all. This is nonsense. Our ability to speak is constrained by money — by who has it who doesn’t, and whose speech might generate it. In this system, money is speech and money is power and those with money have the power to speak and influence policy.

It is why who controls Twitter and Facebook and the other, smaller social media platforms matter. It is why the rules that these corporations impose matter, why concern about free speech must go beyond the First Amendment — which only prohibits interference by government — and implicate the way corporate entities impose their priorities and rules.

Social media has become a central element in the way we communicate and interact, both socially and politically. It is not going away, nor is it likely that these massive corporate platforms will suddenly function with a broad public in mind. It is long past the time we admit that the status quo is failing us.

We can start by breaking up big tech, by ending the mass consolidation in the sector. We should declare companies like Twitter and Facebook to be common carriers — like public utilities or the internet firms that control the hardware — recognizing the role they have come to play in the provision and distribution of information. And we should create and fund alternative structures and platforms to compete with what are now the legacy platforms.

Too much power over our discourse has been left in too few hands for too long.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2023

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