If this were nothing but the complaints of social media pundits from only one end of political debates, we might safely ignore their hypocrisy. However, recently on Twitter, an alliance was revealed between social media giants like Twitter and Facebook and various governments around the world. The purpose was to enable the quick deletion or suppression of posts determined to be harmful or misleading by state officials. This even offended the ACLU, who commented: “The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights.”
It would be nice if there were a way to rid our newsfeeds and digital platforms of misinformation, hate, and name-calling, but do we really want politicians and bureaucrats to make those calls? As Ronald Reagan famously quipped, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” The idea of state agencies deciding what citizens deserve to know should terrify us all, no matter our political loyalties.
Any group that sets itself up as the guardians of people and arbiters of right and wrong information presumes to have the wisdom of Solomon and, somehow, to be immune from its own biases. Tragically, the greater confidence a person or group has in their own good intentions, the more likely they are to abuse that power.
This, of course, is one of the great lessons from both Lord Acton and The Lord of the Rings: the temptations of absolute power are too much for even the best of us. The tradition in the West for tolerating dissent and demanding free speech, even for our foes, didn’t come about because people decided that everyone was wonderful and that all ideas should be shared and shared alike, so long as a few bad apples were tossed aside. Instead, it came from the hard realization that, on account of our all-too-human frailties, none of us is fit to hold absolute power... even on Twitter.
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