This article was written spontaneously, as a stream-of-consciousness piece prompted by my own feelings; it is shared only on Suixuan, and please do not reprint it.
Trump’s social media accounts being banned set off a discussion about freedom of speech. Aside from the arguments that have never reached consensus, today’s discussions of freedom of speech do in fact involve some new conditions that have only emerged in the past decade or so.
This is the rise of large social media websites. They have carved out an autonomous space in the network world, and in many cases have replaced what used to be understood as public space. Whether, and how, the traditional principle of freedom of speech should be carried out in cyberspace is a new question.
In a certain sense, history has known only two types of polity built upon the principle of freedom of speech. One is the ancient Greek city-state system, exemplified by Athens; the other is modern democracy, exemplified by the United States. And these two polities are in turn built upon two kinds of social media: the former is rooted in the oral tradition, and its typical public space is the “square,” that is, the Agora, something like a civic plaza, temple fair, and market all rolled into one; the latter is rooted in print, especially newspapers, which provided a new space for debate and communication, and made it possible to carry out universal suffrage even when all citizens could not gather together in one square.
According to McLuhan and Postman, the emergence of television substantially changed America’s democratic system. McLuhan was optimistic, because television reactivated the oral tradition and broke through the indifference of print culture; Postman was pessimistic, because television fashioned a new culture of “amusing ourselves to death,” making politics vulgar.
Whatever one thinks of the corresponding media, both of them agreed that the one who wins an election is in fact the one who best masters the relevant medium. In the Greek city-states, politicians were often glib and eloquent, skilled in rhetoric; in the age of newspapers, politicians needed clearly organized campaign platforms and logically rigorous policy arguments; and in the age of television, politicians needed to advertise themselves, to be as “eye-catching” as possible, and to be good at mobilizing the audience’s emotional responses. So when we reach the age of social networks, politicians naturally have to adapt to the new logic of social media as well.
What is this logic? Open Weibo, Moments, Douyin, Kuaishou… and we can feel the new trend of social networks. On the one hand, they are more vulgar than television advertising and more stimulus-driven; on the other hand, they are no longer as “entertainment-oriented” as television. This may be something Postman never anticipated—in a certain sense, entertainmentization may not be the worst thing. Just look at the entertainment world: in the fan circles of a little star or idol, there are all day long fights, flame wars, arguments, sabotage, and the like, battling one another to the death. If an idol is offended by someone, the whole pack mobilizes, pursuing the offender even to the ends of the earth, and unleashes cyberbullying and even real-world violence. Is this still “entertainmentization”? If everyone were content simply to enjoy themselves, it would not have come to this, would it?
Although television is entertainment-oriented, it also plays the role of a “hearth.” Researchers long ago pointed out that in its early dissemination, television occupied in American households the focal position once held by the “fireplace.” A family of three or four gathering around the TV and enjoying itself together—this was the everyday family life of the television age. In such a situation, what television presents is often compatible content. Although different programs have different biases, on the whole men, women, children, and the elderly can all gather around the same television set. Postman therefore criticized television—for the sake of accommodating the broadest possible audience, television programs always tend to lower the intellectual threshold, so that even presidential campaign debates are reduced to a level that ten-year-olds can understand (in sharp contrast to the long debates of Lincoln’s era, which were close to graduate-level study). But this condition also has its advantages, namely entertainmentization and compatibility, which keep television politics from becoming so torn apart and polarized. It ensures that people with different interests and different views can still sit together and tolerate one another.
The basic feature of social media, by contrast, is “customization” based on user attention and recommendation algorithms: each person can follow only what they like to watch, and the more they follow, the more concentrated they become on what they like. People are torn apart from the compatible space in which men, women, old, and young could all enjoy themselves together, and sucked into “information cocoons” tailored to each of them. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to accept things that do not match their own impressions, increasingly easy for them to reject what does not suit their taste, and even their capacity to understand others is lost. What is taken for granted within one circle may be utterly outrageous or absurd beyond the pale in another.
This is why, before the election, many people believed Biden had the race in the bag, while others were convinced Trump was certain to win, and very few thought the situation was deadlocked. We Chinese, who can step back and watch coolly from the sidelines, were already so split and polarized in our judgments about the American situation—let alone the Americans themselves, who were caught up in it. Because everyone’s field of vision is shaped by their own customization, many people may not be failing to research and investigate, but the scope of what they investigate is consciously or unconsciously customized; the result is often simply to keep reinforcing their existing tendencies.
Of course, social media is also bound up with the trend of mobile internet, namely the fragmented culture of “scrolling.” People need to rapidly and repeatedly scroll through bits of information in the fragmented time available to them, which leads information to become broken apart, labeled, and radicalized. Fewer and fewer people are willing to patiently follow complex chains of argument, and fewer and fewer people are able to accept plural, uncertain conclusions. Slapping on labels, pinning on hats, having a sharply defined persona, and taking clearly defined sides—these are the new demands of fragmented media.
Thus we see that, with Trump as its emblem, political life in the age of social networks, like fan-culture life, displays this whole series of new features: anti-intellectualization, fragmentation, cultishness, extremization… As for the entertainmentization that Postman loathed so deeply, it hardly even counts as the worst of them.
Following Heidegger’s line of thought, we might ask: who is this person who “customizes” their own content of attention?—Not the free “I,” but rather “traffic,” driven and carried along by algorithms. Each user presents themselves in social networks as “traffic,” now being drawn into a vortex of closed, inward-folding spirals, now being pushed toward raging, headlong waves.
But it is not very meaningful simply to stand on the side of old traditions and lament that “human hearts are no longer what they once were.” After all, we still have to adapt to the changes of the times. The key question is: under this new media environment, how is a polity founded on “freedom” (especially “freedom of speech”) possible?
Freedom of speech has never been a matter without constraints or boundaries. First of all, freedom is at once a right and a responsibility, and rights and responsibilities are reciprocal: a person always enjoys corresponding freedom of speech only within the limits of being “able to take responsibility for one’s own words.” If someone cannot in any sense take responsibility for what they say, then they have no right to demand that others bear any responsibility for safeguarding their speaking rights. At the same time, if others have not assumed any responsibility for safeguarding the right to speak, then they likewise have no right to hold my speech responsible. For example, if I am merely “just saying it” and tossing off a few offhand remarks, with no intention of being responsible for them, then I also cannot demand that others provide an effective platform for disseminating my offhand remarks, nor can I demand that others listen seriously to them. If your neighbor finds it noisy and closes the window because they do not want to hear you talk, you cannot say that closing the window is an infringement of your freedom of speech. But on the other hand, if I am merely saying something off the cuff at my own doorstep, and have not taken the initiative to mount some public platform, then others likewise have no right to storm into my home and demand that I take responsibility for these offhand remarks. For instance, if I boast to my wife at home that I will build her a castle, and a passing neighbor hears it and turns around to accuse me of fraud, that would be absurd. But if I say the very same thing as a contractor, solemnly promising at a tendering conference that I will build a castle, then when the deadline comes and I have not built it, others have the right to hold me accountable for that promise. The difference is not merely whether a contract was signed, but rather that the occasion for speaking is different.
In other words, freedom of speech is something that pays attention to “context.” The rise of the concept of freedom of speech originally arose from the opening of the “public sphere” and its boundary with the private domain. Only when a person discusses public issues in the public sphere can one speak of the rights and responsibilities of freedom of speech. Speaking about public issues in the private domain, or speaking about private issues in the public sphere, is all subject to restrictions.
For example, if I rush into the next-door neighbor’s house and hold forth at great length, I may of course be properly shown the door. But many “public places” are not in fact public spheres of free speech—for instance, libraries and movie theaters are public places, but if you run to the front of the screening room and talk up a storm, you will be immediately thrown out.
Many places, although public in character, are not wholly free either. For example, a university classroom is supposed to safeguard the freedom of speech of both teachers and students, but if you go on and on discussing politics in a math class, that is also inappropriate; if the math teacher kicks you off the platform, you cannot accuse him of “violating freedom of speech.”
But if that is the case, then most places in human public life have specific uses, and in places with different uses, speech is subject to different constraints and orientations. Public places specifically for discussing public issues are actually very rare—for example, squares and debating halls. Yet precisely because such places are relatively scarce, people’s right to make public speeches is not unlimited. If someone monopolizes a debating hall and talks incessantly for three days and three nights, they will most likely already have been shouted off the stage long ago.
In the Greek city-states, opportunities to speak in public were limited, and the range over which such speech could spread was also limited, so Greek city-state democracy could not support a community of more than several tens of thousands. The new media space opened by printed books and newspapers, however, created a public space in the textual world in addition to the space of reality, and this redefined the meaning and scope of freedom of speech. This is why political thinkers who loved freedom in the modern era emphasized “freedom of the press” so strongly, and why Marx also sharply criticized censorship of books and newspapers. In the public space opened by printed books and newspapers, in principle everyone had the chance to speak on public issues. Of course, this opportunity to speak was not entirely equal, but after all the issue shifted from whether one could speak to how strong one’s voice was. The speech of ordinary people might go unheard, books might sell poorly, while the speech of others was widely welcomed. But even weaker voices had the chance to spread their views among an unspecified public.
The square space accommodates fewer speakers and fewer listeners; the book-and-newspaper space accommodates more speakers and more listeners; and the new space opened up by television accommodates fewer speakers and an enormous number of listeners. Television extends the audience beyond “book people” to address the broadest “masses,” but the resources for speaking on television channels become more precious, and in a certain sense even scarcer than in the square, because in the Greek city-states the square was separate from places like the theater, stadium, and baths (of course, sometimes the citizens’ assembly would be held in the theater, but on the whole the boundaries among various activities were clearly defined). On television, however, there are no clear boundaries between different “uses.” Entertainment, education, leisure, commerce, and other activities all compete with public issues for the same airtime. In principle, the entire span of television time belongs to “entertainment”; serious and lengthy political debate is out of place on television, so politicians can only turn themselves into television stars in order to appear on screen. The result is what Postman described: election debates lasting for days and nights on end are no longer possible; politics becomes entertainmentized, fast-foodified, and labelized.
Social media space accommodates an enormous number of speakers and an enormous number of listeners. From this angle, it seems to have revived a decentralized public space. But as noted above, this space is fragmented, and it is not divided up according to “issues,” but according to individual likes and dislikes. Every listener has acquired the power, like a meeting moderator, to shout down whatever is inappropriate. But so-called inappropriate speech is not like discussing politics in a math class, where the topic does not fit; rather, it is enough that it is “not to one’s liking.” Anything one cannot understand or cannot stand can be shouted out of one’s field of vision.
Of course, in the traditional world, most people were not interested in politics either, but when faced with things they were not interested in or could not understand, people in the past often adopted an attitude of “reverence with distance.” In the age of social networks, however, people have developed a new habit: toward fields they are not familiar with, they are neither reverent nor distant, because from within the information environment they inhabit, they imagine themselves to understand these issues. This too is a characteristic of social media. Because of its sensory, label-based, stance-based, and fragmented nature, people are no longer willing to accept lengthy arguments and complicated evidence; instead, they take the “headline” itself as knowledge. “Clickbait” is the natural product of social media media.
In ancient times, books were not even given “titles”; sometimes a topic or the first few words would be used as an identifier. For example, the Analects uses the first two characters of each chapter as its title. These “titles” were merely conventions that later generations adopted for ease of citation, not summaries of the entire text’s views. In the age of print, the significance of the “title” began to stand out, but it was still often relatively general, such as On Freedom, On Nature, or Discourse on Method, and a person who filled a bookshelf with such books would not imagine that they had thereby already become thoroughly familiar with the truth of freedom or the mysteries of nature.
But in the age of social networks, the titles people encounter are like this: “Shocking! These foods must not be eaten together! Many people still don’t know!” “You’ll regret it if you don’t read this! Drink it three times a week and say goodbye to high blood pressure!” “The United States actually did this kind of thing—if you are Chinese, share it!” … These titles often deliberately hold something back, hiding the key conclusion in the body of the text in order to lure you into clicking. And once you click, your job is done, and their purpose has been achieved. The disseminator of information does not want you to engage in any exchange at all, and does not even expect you to read the content carefully and critically; they only need your “click” itself. Of course, by the way, they also hope you will click on the advertisement attached to the article. And you, the recipient of the information, do not expect to see rigorous argument or detailed materials; what you have to do is also just click. Clicking in, seeing the conclusion concealed by the title, you feel as if you have completed some difficult piece of textual research, and then, thoroughly satisfied, you appropriate that “knowledge” as your own.
This mode of dissemination resembles the traditional spread of “rumors.” Kapferer believes that rumor itself is a kind of “confirmation,” rather than a “challenge” awaiting confirmation. In other words, a person is often only willing to listen to rumors that suit their own wishes, and when they hear such a statement, they take their vague notions or conjectures to have been “confirmed.” The difference is that in traditional society, “rumor” is always a subsurface current beneath public space; rumors are usually transmitted secretly from one private person to another, and when public issues are being discussed, the masses and rumor are usually only present as background, without directly intervening. But in the age of social networks, the boundary between elites and the masses, experts and laypeople, has been broken down; publicness has become synonymous with massness, and information spreading in the form of rumors has swept through the entire public sphere. Thus when intellectuals saw Trump, as President of the United States, spreading obvious rumors on social networks, they were astonished and found it hard to accept. But in essence, this was not caused simply by Trump’s personal oddity; rather, it was an irresistible historical trend. Trump merely exposed, earlier or more sharply, the polluted condition of communication’s “public space.” The pollution and chaos of public space were not caused single-handedly by Trump; on the contrary, Trump’s rise to power was itself the result of this pollution.
In this environment, the social media giants began to impose speech controls, from flagging and deleting posts to banning accounts. One might even say this was an overseas export of Chinese internet culture? Or rather, different roads lead to the same destination: different political systems will ultimately face the same problems, because these new problems are not caused by political systems, but by the emerging social network media.
Many people, on seeing Westerners doing the same thing, grow even more “confident” and take that as proof that China’s censorship of speech is correct. But what is correct does not become incorrect because Americans do it, and what is incorrect does not become correct because Americans do it too. My position has always been consistent: I oppose any censorship of speech directed at viewpoints.
In terms of effect, China’s reality shows that speech censorship cannot improve the basic tendencies of social network media—polarization, labeling, camp formation, rumorization. When companies like Twitter also engage in speech censorship, that too does nothing to ease the tearing apart of American society. But even if speech censorship could truly achieve the desired effect (for example, maintaining stability), I still would not support it; this is a matter of principle, not of efficacy. For example, if you stole a loaf of bread, the key issue is not whether that loaf of bread was effective in satisfying hunger, but that theft, as an act, is in principle unacceptable.
What is called speech censorship is the use of power outside speech to adjudicate speech, and does not include using speech to attack speech. This point should be very clear, but in China many people apparently do not understand it. For instance, when I criticize some viewpoint, someone may jump out and say: you have to respect freedom of speech; his view may be extreme, but he should still be allowed to speak. But they have not noticed that my criticism itself is also speech; of course, his muddying of the waters is also speech. Freedom of speech does not mean that one may not issue any opposing speech against any speech; on the contrary, the ability to issue opposing speech against any speech is precisely what freedom of speech means. Conflict between speech and speech does not involve the issue of “freedom of speech.” Only when a person no longer responds with speech, but instead introduces particular power or force (for example, filing a report with some department, or picking up a hammer to smash someone, and so on), is freedom of speech being violated.
“Directed at viewpoints” is a qualifier. In fact, I also support a kind of anti-censorship in the absolute sense, only this kind of “absolute freedom of speech” is too advanced, and for the time being I will not discuss it. What I mean here by censorship “directed at viewpoints” is, relatively speaking, “directed at form.” For example, in a mathematics class, politics is not allowed to be discussed; this is not because specific political viewpoints are banned, but because the general form of discussing politics is banned. It cannot be that in mathematics class one may discuss Biden but not Trump. For example, in public places one cannot discuss 18X topics; this does not mean that public places permit discussion of heterosexual intercourse but not homosexual intercourse. Rather, all discussion of this form is prohibited. I believe that a censorship system that targets only form and not viewpoints can, at least for now, exist in limited form.
Of course some people will say that certain extreme viewpoints can never be tolerated, such as views intended to incite riots with false evidence—for example, Trump accusing the election of fraud and inciting the public to riot: shouldn’t all that be banned? The key point is, who exactly has the right to determine that a viewpoint is wrong? When determining whether a viewpoint is correct, is it presidential authority or corporate-boss authority? Is it the authority of the majority or the authority of the minority? Is it the authority of American scientists or Chinese scientists?
The spirit of “freedom of speech” is not “the freedom to say correct things,” but rather “everyone has the right to say what they themselves believe to be correct.” “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—this truly is a maxim of the Enlightenment, and a basic principle we should still respect today. Many people today who flaunt “anti-discrimination” and “diversity” have instead forgotten the Enlightenment’s basic principle of “respecting dissenting views,” and have completely distorted the ideal of diversity—they think that so-called diversity and inclusiveness means that every position must be simultaneously contained in the mouths of the same group of people, rather than accepting the situation in which different people insist on different positions.
If “inciting riot” can serve as the criterion for banning speech, then all the speech of Enlightenment thinkers on the eve of the French Revolution should also be banned, and all of Marx’s speech calling for the workers’ movement should likewise be banned.
A modern, civilized polity should allow speech that criticizes or even seeks to overthrow it to exist. There is nothing magical about this; it is simply the “common sense” of modern politics.
Of course, actual organization of riotous activity should certainly be sanctioned, but that sanction is because of the actual destructive act, not because of speech; and the institutions imposing the sanction are, of course, the judicial and law-enforcement bodies established by the regime, not media companies.
Then someone else says: media companies are certainly not judicial bodies, but they are private companies after all. Isn’t it freedom for a company boss to screen speech at will on his own turf?
If it really were within the private sphere, then of course the owner of the premises has the right to տնօրinate the premises he provides; he has the right to invite specific guests and refuse specific guests. But the question is, what social networks unfold is really only a private space?
The current legal system may not have given an explicit definition of emerging network media, but in our minds it should be very clear: obviously, we do not regard platforms like Twitter as private domains (Facebook may be controversial; part of it is an extension of the private sphere, and part of it is the public sphere, but the private sphere in this sense does not refer to Zuckerberg’s private sphere as the owner, but to each user’s private sphere as the owner of their own homepage. When people use Facebook accounts to speak publicly, we still regard that as a public act).
Because “public space” is not a concept from physics in the first place. It is not that once I build a platform and fence off a tract of land, that tract of land automatically becomes public space. If you fence off tens of thousands of mu in the middle of the Sahara Desert, that still does not amount to public space. Public space has always been the product of the mutual coupling of the natural environment, the technological environment, and social activity. Public space on the internet is to a great extent detached from the natural environment, and is therefore constituted by the technological environment and social activity together. Social media companies provide the technological environment, while participants ultimately construct the public space. The company is the provider of the corresponding technology, but not the master of the public space.
It is like this: I build a hall and make it part of my private residence, then everything that happens in that hall is up to me; but if I transfer this hall to use by an unspecified public, as a space for them to discuss public issues, then I am only the builder of the assembly hall, and will not automatically become an elder or speaker of the assembly hall. Perhaps by providing space to the public, the builder has gained the privilege of selling candied haws at the hall entrance, but this commercial privilege has nothing whatsoever to do with speech censorship.
How, then, does one count as handing over space to the public? The key lies in whether the website is open to unspecified users or only to specified users.
If the relationship of rights and responsibilities is unclear, we can return to the most elementary principle: equivalence of rights and responsibilities. The power you enjoy and the responsibility you bear are commensurate. For example, a builder has the responsibility to build a structure that is solid and reliable, so he has the right to screen building materials; but he has no responsibility to ensure that the client’s speech is solid and reliable, so he has no right to screen the client’s speech. The extent to which a platform has the right to screen speech should be the extent to which it has the responsibility to be accountable for the speech on the platform.
Only a platform that has no right to screen speech can be exempt from responsibility for users’ speech. If it has the right to screen speech, then it needs to take responsibility for the screened speech within the scope of the screening standard. For example, the reason a mathematics teacher has the right to carry out “speech censorship” in a math class and exclude content unrelated to math teaching is that the math teacher bears responsibility for the “math class” he teaches; the film industry has the right to conduct rating reviews of film and television works, so if children see 18+ content in a children’s film, the censor also has to bear responsibility for dereliction of duty.
Likewise, if one says that a platform should ban speech that incites riots, then if there is a piece of speech that actually promotes a riot, the platform should also share in the responsibility of the riot’s instigator.
This logic has already been played out by the domestic internet environment; platforms are compelled to adhere to an extreme stability-maintenance strategy, not letting a single fish slip through the net. But we have already seen that this kind of governance has not changed the major trends of social network media, while the cost has been that public space has been compressed to an extreme degree, to the point where “public intellectual” has unexpectedly become an odious insult. What is tragic is that even though public space has undergone massive suppression and distortion, it still has not escaped the polarization tendency of social network media.
So, do we still have hope? Hope of preserving the spirit of freedom of speech since the Enlightenment while also avoiding the polarization tendency brought about by social media? I don’t know. I am neither a politician nor a revolutionary. From the standpoint of a philosopher, what we must first do is understand the present situation and the trend; after understanding, people in different positions will naturally take different actions. A person who has fully understood the polarization tendency of social media is, by that very fact, less likely to become an extremist. Even if they continue using social media, they will reflect on themselves more cautiously and avoid being swept along by technology.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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