When to Suppress Speech
The idea of forcibly silencing those who disagree with you has a long history. It used to be that you’d be persecuted for expressing disagreement with the Church (heresy). Today, that’s still true, though it’s a different church that’s in power now, the Church of Identity Politics.* They tried it also in the Soviet Union, and they’re still doing it in China.
*Aside: John McWhorter argues that woke ideology is a religion: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/why-third-wave-anti-racism-dead-end/578764/.
This idea is so tempting to ideologues that it may be the norm in almost every human society in history – i.e., that people get punished for questioning certain beliefs. Is this a good idea?
Reasonable people tend to answer “no” almost immediately. And indeed, most suppression of ideas is obviously bad. But the argument for suppressing some ideas is surprisingly strong, and doing so seems beneficial in some realistic circumstances.
1. Does it work?
1.1. Suppression shouldn’t work!
One tempting argument for free speech proponents is that suppression of ideas won’t work. People will see through it. E.g., if you’re in communist China, you know that the media is controlled by the government, so you’ll just assume that it’s all lies, and you won’t believe it.
Indeed, suppression shouldn’t work on a perfectly rational public. If you’re trying to convince me of P, and I also know that you’re forcibly preventing me from hearing the arguments against P, I should infer that the reason you’re doing this is that you know that if I were to hear the not-P arguments, I would lower my credence in P. But knowing this, I should just lower my credence in P right now. I don’t need to know what exactly the arguments against P are; it’s enough that I know that if I heard them, I would lower my credence in P.
You might think: “Ah, but perhaps suppression is still rational because, even though it’s going to make you lower your credence in P, you still won’t lower it as much as you would if you actually heard the arguments against P.” But no, because once I figure out that that’s why the P-believers are suppressing the not-P arguments, I should lower my credence even more. I should lower my credence to whatever (by my estimate) is the level that the P-advocates were afraid I was going to lower it to.
1.2. Suppression can work
But of course, in reality, suppression of ideas can work. People don’t all go through the above reasoning, and some people will just believe something because the government or the mainstream media or the academic elite said it. And they just won’t make the inference that the existence of forces suppressing dissent constitutes evidence against the dominant narrative.
My guess is that in the Soviet Union, people of course knew that the government was often lying, but they probably did not adequately gauge the full extent of the lying. They probably set their credences to a kind of “middle ground” between what the government was saying and their own prior probabilities.
1.3. Caveat
I’d like to add the caveat, though, that it’s important to the working of this strategy that one has near total control over information sources. E.g., the state has total control over the media in communist countries.
If you only have partial control, then what happens is you suppress the idea you disagree with in the places (the media outlets, web sites, etc.) that you control, and then other information sources put out the contrary information, along with commentary on how you’re suppressing that information. This feeds distrust of your sources and causes some people to turn away from those sources and just rely on the alternative, opposition sources.
Now, this doesn’t mean that your suppression plan doesn’t work at all. But it will be polarizing: it will push the opinions of the people who listen to your sources in your desired direction, while pushing other people further away.
That, by my read, is what is happening in America right now, with the mainstream media versus the right-wing media.
2. Does it promote truth?
2.1. Suppression interferes with pursuit of truth
Speech suppression usually interferes with promoting truth. By far the main reason for this is that you are wrong. That is, when people want to suppress disagreement, the opinion that they’re trying to protect from criticism is almost always false. (Which is why it needed to be protected from criticism in the first place.)
But even if your basic view is right, as we learn from John Stuart Mill, you can still learn from critics. By engaging with criticism, you can learn to refine your position, to better understand it and the reasons supporting it. And even if the critic is wrong in their main point, it is very unlikely that they’ll be wrong in everything they have to say on the subject.
2.2. Suppression can promote truth
I think all that is basically right about most cases. And if we were all fully rational, it might be true about all cases. But we aren’t, and there really are some conditions in which suppressing speech can promote the pursuit of truth.
This is because, first of all, some people are very bad inquirers. They will place great trust in utterly unreliable sources, while unreasonably distrusting much more reliable sources. E.g., they might think that scientists should be ignored, while con artists and anonymous internet trolls should be believed. Many people are more influenced by rhetorical appeals, wishful thinking, and various biases than they are by evidence and rational arguments (see my previous two blog posts). So in fact, if all ideas get an equal hearing, one cannot simply trust that the best ideas will win out.
Second, some content-providers are bad faith providers. It’s not that they have mistaken views because they’ve accepted some unsound arguments. They do not have the views they are advancing; they’re just cynically manipulating people for their own, non-epistemic goals.
Take the example of advertisers for commercial products. If we didn’t have truth-in-advertising laws, advertisers would probably just fill their ads with the most blatant, self-serving lies. Smart people would mostly disregard the ads, but plenty of suckers would still believe them. Mill’s arguments don’t apply to this kind of case – no one is going to learn important truths from “engaging with” self-serving liars.
That’s how I think about QAnon. It’s in a different realm of speech -- the political realm rather than commercial speech -- but it’s still bad faith content. Whoever is writing the QAnon content is not arguing for his political beliefs; he’s just lying. Nothing would be lost to the pursuit of truth if that content did not exist.
That's also how I think about the election fraud debate. I assume that most of the fraud theorists are sincere in their convictions, as are the QAnon followers. However, their convictions are based on the statements of individuals such as Mr. Trump and his lawyers (Giuliani, Sydney Powell) who are not advancing genuine beliefs; they are just cynically lying.
"What about leftists who lie? Why aren't you talking about them?!" Yes, leftists can also cynically lie, and that also inhibits the pursuit of truth. I have no interest in talking about which tribe is worse, though.
2.3. Why Not More Speech?
The standard civil libertarian view: "The remedy for bad speech is more speech!" In other words, why not just put out competing information that rebuts the false messages? Publish stories that fact check politicians' statements; add links to "more information about the election" below the false posts about the election, &c.
The problem: This assumes that the audience is rational and interested in listening. Often, they are not. Once people hear certain kinds of false content, it may be impossible to get them to entertain the possibility that it is a lie, no matter what evidence you present or how good your reasons are. But they would not have come up with those false ideas on their own. That is how it is with QAnon, religious cults, and what we might call "political cults". Witness the last few years in America.
3. What about rights?
By libertarian principle, people have the right to do whatever doesn’t violate other people’s rights. Speech typically doesn’t violate people’s rights. It can do so, but it would be extremely rare at best for political speech to violate someone’s rights.
That’s a good reason why the government shouldn’t suppress political speech. However, that doesn’t preclude private agents suppressing political speech in non-violent ways – e.g., a news organization refusing to run certain kinds of stories, or Facebook kicking off certain users whom they find to be sources of fake news. They’re exercising their property rights. But there’s still a good question as to whether this kind of suppression is a good idea, and the above arguments speak to that.
4. Whom can we trust to suppress speech properly?
Of course, all libertarians can think of the next big problem with censorship. Whom can we trust to hold the power of deciding which ideas get expressed and which do not?
Let’s not be completely gullible fools. Obviously, if we give this power to the state, they’ll just use it to suppress criticisms of themselves, or reports on their own misconduct. They’ll just take the arguments I gave above (sec. 2), and falsely claim that the arguments apply to whatever speech they want to suppress. E.g., they’ll say that libertarian commentators are bad faith content-providers, and that the libertarian audiences are suckers who are being taken in by lies. So we can't trust the state with this power.
What about academics? Surely we can trust them, right? Sadly, no. I’ve seen enough of academia to know that they’re about as bad as the government. Once the door to speech suppression is opened in principle -- once we accept that it’s right to silence certain harmful ideas -- academic ideologues will seize the excuse to suppress criticism of their ideology. If we say, “It’s okay to suppress speech by bad-faith content-providers who are just trying to manipulate suckers,” academic ideologues will just say that conservatives are bad-faith content-providers, etc.
What about social media? Surely we can trust Zuckerberg? Again, no; see the above points about academics.
This is to say that speech suppression is unlikely to be beneficial in reality, whether it is done by the government or private agents. However, I of course wouldn’t expect this to convince anyone not to do it. We observers can lament speech suppression by political ideologues, but we can’t expect any of those ideologues to be persuaded, since they of course regard themselves as perfectly trustworthy.
Even those ideologues, though, should heed the point in 1.3 above. Unless you control the whole information sphere, other people will put out competing content, and suppressing the ideas you don’t like will just push the people on other side into these competing information bubbles, making your society ever more polarized.
My guess is that suppressing simple liars like QAnon is worth it, but suppressing people who are merely partisans from an opposing ideology isn't. Ideologues are bad at making that distinction, but that's still probably the right distinction to make.