We're Moving to Patreon.
Hey, everyone —
After this week, we will begin publishing The New Thing exclusively over on Patreon. Weekly detective fiction and a few other things will still be available for public viewing over on Patreon, so please don’t feel obliged to sign up. This Substack will remain but will not be updated. All future payments to The New Thing on Substack are paused indefinitely.
Why is this being done? This statement. Five days ago, Chris Best, co-founder and CEO of Substack, wrote that “Elon Musk has been a vocal supporter of free speech … he deserves a lot of credit for advancing freedom of speech on X, before it was popular.”
This is a misguided statement at best. When Best talks of Musk ‘advancing freedom of speech on Twitter,’ he is effectively talking about how, per Le Monde, “accounts reinstated [on Twitter by Musk] had been suspended for anti-semitic, racist, misogynistic or transphobic comments, or because they were calling for violence.”
Why does this matter? It matters for a few reasons. For one, there’s a decent argument to be made that deplatforming — kicking people off social media — works. From Vox in 2021 —
Radical extremists across the political spectrum use social media to spread their messaging, so deplatforming those extremists makes it harder for them to recruit. Deplatfoming also decreases their influence; a 2016 study of ISIS deplatforming found, for example, that ISIS “influencers” lost followers and clout as they were forced to bounce around from platform to platform.
[…]
A 2018 study tracking a deplatformed British extremist group found that not only did the group’s engagement decrease after it was deplatformed, but so did the amount of content it published online.
It also matters because this kind of popular sovereignty-like approach to speech is ultimately an avoidance of responsibility. We live in a society and our words matter. If I say something hurtful and you get hurt and we both turn towards a referee who shrugs and says, ‘Free speech,’ who does that ultimately benefit?
Or consider that “power-motivated social media users disproportionately spread misinformation.” If someone lies and lies and those trying to regulate it in some way are just met with that same shrug and that same invocation of ‘free speech,’ who does that ultimately benefit? (The solutions seem so simple, too: consider that “unfollowing hyperpartisan influencers can reduce partisan animosity by 24%.”)
At the end of the day, we have a responsibility to look after each other. We don’t have to advance lies and hurt in the name of free speech, as if we have no other choice and no other option.
Some people clearly find responsibility boring or even repulsive. I don’t know about you, but I find it much better than the alternative.
Evan