Freedom of Speech

Yesterday was the 1 year anniversary of Facebook kicking all of the leftist pages and their admins off their platform; coincidentally, a Taliban spokesperson made some nice points about corporate censorship yesterday as well. The Taliban are not good people — they are right-wing extremists — but Zabihullah Mujahid was absolutely correct that Facebook censors free speech.

I certainly find it easy to laugh at US conservatives as they complain that big corporations are silencing them because they are the ones who created this world where capital can do whatever it wants. According to the doctrine of neoliberalism, it’s only censorship when the government does it. It’s all part of the basic assumption of neoliberalism — that capitalists are the legitimate rulers, and that they deserve power while everyone else should just have rights. Capitalists cleverly outsource all their violence to the state, and then pretend that economic power never involves force (or even power).

Rights are useless if you can’t meaningfully practice them. If you have the right to bear arms, but can’t afford a gun, that right is meaningless. If you have the right to vote, but they close down every polling place that you could reasonably get to on election day, that right is meaningless. (Voting is also meaningless when all the candidates were pre-approved by capitalists.) If you have the right to free speech, but essentially no one will hear what you say, that right is meaningless.

Moreover, capitalists in the United States are the ruling class in a very real sense; they control the government. We can’t let their clever layers of obfuscation succeed in concealing the fact that they are the ones in control. Every single media outlet and social media site of any significance is controlled by them as well. There’s no material difference between “the government” interfering with free speech and a major corporation interfering with it. Both things represent the will of the capitalist class.

If conservatives claim that they are capitalists, how is it that they are so angry about corporate censorship? Supremacists (a word that describes most if not all conservatives) love capitalism precisely because it provides cover for their various bigotries (the very complex hierarchy of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and so on). Then, when corporations instead choose to work toward pure neoliberalism (where money is the only hierarchy), it really pisses conservatives off. They want to use capitalism as cover, and keep the complex hierarchy that props them up materially and psychologically. They thought capitalism served their specific needs, and now they feel betrayed.

A response to Zabihullah Mujahid from Facebook said:

The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under U.S. law and they are banned from our services under our Dangerous Organization policies. This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them.

That’s nice, but the capitalist class are just as much a terrorist organization as the Taliban, but I suppose they aren’t terrorists “under US law” since the primary purpose of US law (from the very beginning) was to protect the opulent minority. My reading of Facebook’s published guidelines for the Dangerous Organization policies looks like it should cover almost every firearm manufacturer in the US — and certainly the smaller manufacturers, who are quite often openly advocating for violence against the government and the left (i.e., their fellow citizens).

Let’s see how that shakes out, though. Would a capitalist corporation that promotes violence against the government and is actively arming violent non-state actors be allowed on Facebook? Turns out that yes, it would. Facebook’s policy on dangerous organizations is very similar to a lot of aspects of law in the sense that selective enforcement allows the enforcing organization to use the policy/law as a tool to crush criticism and meaningful organizing against capitalism. Meanwhile, pro-capital voices are allowed to continue no matter what they say.

Some conservatives (e.g., QAnon) have gone off the rails enough that their speech is specifically harmful to capitalists — that is why they were removed. In contrast, a certain amount of antigovernment sentiment is helpful to capitalists because it keeps the government weak which allows them to have greater power over our lives. Yet, no matter how much power they gain, they continue to blame the government (which they control) for everything that goes wrong even while they use it to their advantage.