Banning Racists From Social Media Is Just Helping Them By Reducing Transparency on Their Distasteful Views
Twitter is continuing to act on its promise to fight hate speech, however imperfectly. The site has banned Wisconsin Congressional candidate Paul Nehlen after he posted a racist image that placed the face of Cheddar Man (a dark-skinned British ancestor) over actress and soon-to-be-royal Meghan Markle, who's mixed race. The company said it didn't normally comment on individual accounts, but said the permanent suspension was due to "repeated violations" of its terms of service.
Nehlen, who's hoping to unseat Paul Ryan in the 2018 mid-term elections, has a long history of overtly expressing his racist views. Twitter suspended him for a week in January over anti-Semitic comments, and he has regularly promoted white supremacist ideology. In private, he used direct message groups to coordinate harassment campaigns. Breitbart supported Nehlen's ultimately unsuccessful run against Ryan in 2016, but distanced itself from him in December 2017.
As the title of the post implies, I am torn on this. On the one hand, there is an argument that removing a powerful communications tool from bad people makes it harder to spread their, um, badness. On the other hand, I am not sure that driving these folks underground is the right approach. Sure, Nehlen has likely rallied some people of a similar mind to his side, but the flip side is that he has advertised himself to LOT of people as having distasteful views. I know that from my point of view, my awareness that awful folks like this still exist on the peripheries of power has grown from social media, whereas without it I likely might have convinced myself this sort of stuff was a thing of the past.
It reminds me what I wrote a while back about putting the Confederate flag on license plates:
Which brings me back to license plates. If a state is going to create a license plate program where people can make statements with their license plates, then people should be able to make the statement they want to make. ... Let's assume for a moment that everyone who wants to display this symbol [the Confederate battle flag] on their car is a racist. Shouldn't we be thrilled if they want to do so? Here would be a program where racists would voluntarily self-identify to all as a racist (they would even pay extra to do so!) What would be a greater public service?
To take this to an extreme, think about the effort to de-platform certain college speakers. I like to imagine who the most extreme example of such a controversial college speaker would be, and I come up with that old standby, Adolf Hitler. So what if in 1938 Adolf Hitler came to the States for a college speaking tour in 1938. Couldn't that have been a good thing? Many of the mistakes made by the world in 1938-1945 was underestimating both Germany's appetite for expansion and its ruthlessness in its approach to the Jews. Wouldn't it have been better to listen to a bad guy and potentially get some clues to this future?
