A Note from the Publisher on the Suppression of Speech
Editorial note:
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As many of you are probably aware, Facebook recently made a decision to remove, block, throttle, and shadowban multiple accounts and pages related to anarchist thought, analysis, and ideology, as well as changing their algorithm to prevent certain ideas from showing up in individual’s feeds.
Facebook is obviously a capitalist social media company, so we might be tempted merely to dismiss such decisions as “capitalists being capitalists.” However, the decision that Facebook took was not made in a vacuum, but rather is a result both of the particular political situation in the United States as well as an increasing erosion “from below” of the principle of free expression of thought.
In the United States, both candidates for president have denounced anarchism and vowed to prosecute anarchists. Long time observers of the Democratic Party’s policies were not surprised that Joe Biden followed Trump’s lead here: it has always been a core principle of Democrats to counter the authoritarianism from the right by offering to do the same thing, just in a nicer way and with more identity representation, offering us the great honor of knowing that it could be a Black man or a white woman bombing wedding parties full of children in the Middle East as a sign of “progress.”
In such an environment, a corporation such as Facebook could be said merely to be following the political will of both possible presidents, and since in Democracies the result of the electoral process is seen to be the “will of the people,” they could be said to have done exactly what we wanted them to do.
Unfortunately, such a conclusion wouldn’t be very far from the truth. In the last few years, expression of speech has been attacked both from above and “from below,” especially on social media through the process known as “canceling.” Both the “left” and the “right” have engaged in this process, using the reporting mechanisms social media platforms offer to silence people with whom we disagree.
By engaging in such actions, we have repeatedly re-inforced the idea that silencing someone we see as “dangerous” (whether that be a racist advocating for a white ethno-state or a Black leftist woman who broke with social justice orthodoxy by suggesting class is also an important analysis) is a common good. Rather than arguing against ideas, we have concluded that silencing those who hold and express them is a righteous duty. Worse, by failing both to critique our own conceptions of what is “dangerous” and abandoning wholesale the idea that speech should be a protected category of human expression, we have created societies where silencing, deplatforming, and blacklisting is not only commonplace but our immediate recourse against anyone we consider wrong or “dangerous.”
Of course, we on the left have felt ourselves to be righteous and holy in our use of silencing as a tool. After all, we are trying to protect oppressed people from dangerous ideologies, so why not use the master’s tools? When the right or the government silences people we agree with we scream injustice, but when we ourselves do it we of course aren’t “like them.”
So now dominant capitalist media platforms are silencing anarchist thought—our thought—and more importantly silencing people who have those thoughts. Of course this is very bad thing, one that should terrify us all. Among those deplatformed and banned were It’s Going Down (the largest autonomous outlet of news and essays about resistance to capitalism and authoritarianism) and CrimethInc, a publishing collective whose work is directly responsible for my own introduction to anarchist thought. Along with those publishing platforms were many individual accounts, including those of leftist rap artists and antifascist organizers.
Likewise, Facebook has “shadowbanned” an unknown number of accounts. Shadowbanning is a difficult to trace process, by which certain accounts stop showing up in the newsfeeds of others through algorithmic “throttling.” Accounts posting images or text which were previously being seen by thousands will suddenly find what they post seen only by a small handful of people, leaving those people with the sense of being gaslit.
Unfortunately, we cannot blame Facebook alone for this process and leave it there, as they are acting in a political environment where both parties have stated clearly that anarchist thought is dangerous. They are also acting in a societal environment where we ourselves have repeatedly affirmed a belief that silencing what is considered “dangerous” is a social justice. Unfortunately, we have forgotten that “dangerous” is a moving target and that the capitalists who own the media will always have more power to define what is “dangerous” than we do.
What is to be done? Honestly I’ve no fucking clue. Gods&Radicals Press still has an account on Facebook and it’s too early to determine whether our posts have been shadowbanned. Posts from my own account appear not yet to be shadowbanned, though I did have to dispute my legitimate right to say the following words yesterday:
We’ve collectively known that relying on capitalist media for our own expression is a dangerous proposition, so hopefully these bans will encourage leftists to develop more of their own media platforms. Unfortunately, convincing people to stop using Facebook and instead use other platforms is even harder than convincing people that revolutionary change is necessary.
But what is even hardest, at least for me, is to realise how we have helped create the conditions for the deplatforming of anarchists. We’ve done so by engaging in cancel crusades, harassing with an attempt to silence and even harm both right-wing expression and expressions from leftists who deviate slightly from our notions of dogma, orthodoxy, and “right belief.” And we’ve done so by refusing to stand up for the speech of others, fearing that by doing so the mobs will turn on us as well.
We could have done better. We didn’t, and now many of us have been silenced by Facebook and have created a culture of silencing where people are more likely to agree with Facebook’s decision than with our position. Hopefully, whatever we find next, we learn from our own mistakes and create spaces where ideas are something people have, not something people should be punished for.
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Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is the director of publishing and a co-founder of Gods&Radicals Press. He’s a druid and an autonomous Marxist. Support him on Patreon or buy his books.