The Myth of Debating Hate

“Free speech” is the hot topic for modern social media. It has been for a while but never with so much emphasis and fury as since Elon Musk’s hostile acquisition of Twitter to force it to stop moderating content. Substack has similarly come out to announce that they will not moderate or restrict anything that anyone chooses to publish on their platform – a statement which isn’t entirely accurate given their established terms of service. The reality is more that they won’t restrict anything that isn’t bad for business, and the somewhat terrifying reality we find ourselves in here in the year of our lord 2024 is that white supremacy isn’t bad for business. Nudity is.

We’re headed for an era in the online landscape where a woman’s breasts are generally considered less offensive if you cover them up with swastikas. So how did we get here?

People proudly wear the badge of “pro free speech” in big technicolour lettering right on their forehead as though they think that there’s anyone who doesn’t describe themselves that way, and sneeringly refer to people they disagree with as “pro censorship,” pretending that they respect the argument, if not the position, while at the same time bestowing on them a label that they haven’t agreed to accept. It’s the same type of games that people either side of the abortion argument play when they frame the sides as pro/anti-life and pro/anti-choice before the first arguments are even exchanged.

So yes I, like almost everybody, believe in mostly free speech. Most people who say they are “free speech absolutists” are lying their ass off. Being a free speech absolutist is as nutty as being a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian and dreaming of owning a house connected to sixteen distinct plumbing systems in direct competition with each other so every morning you can discover which corporation is going to charge you the least to take a shit.

Everybody draws the line somewhere, and most people who use free speech as some sort of personality trait gerrymander their line of acceptable speech around people and politics they just have personal beef with. Elon Musk is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who nevertheless has variously set rules in Twitter’s terms of service outlawing support for Palestine or transgender people, while allowing both explicit Nazism and homophobia even though the latter break the same ostensible rules as the former. Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie, heads of Substack, permit the genocide rhetoric but ban porn. I don’t think they’ve said why but it might be as simple as recognising that they don’t want to become OnlyFans.

This all raises the question: If everyone thinks they’re a free speech absolutist while at the same time drawing their own lines, then how do we reconcile this in our own mind? I think it’s as simple as: We defend speech on a case by case basis to the extent that we can come up with some cover argument to defend it.

You won’t find many people, for example, who defend doxing—the publishing of a private individual’s address or location against their will—even though it’s legal to do that. People just can’t find good reasons to fight for the right to dox. You can stand up all day in front of a giant flag blowing gently in the breeze with your hands on your hips, stoically reciting the purported Voltaire quote about fighting to the death for your enemy’s right to speak their wrong opinions, but nobody ever says they will fight to the death to allow Catturd2 to pin their photo and full address to the top of his Twitter profile.

So you might kinda think Nazism would fall under the banner of things few people will defend the right to espouse, but a lot of people do defend it, because they can come up with a reason to defend it: The ever popular “debate them instead” gambit.

That’s right, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can oppose fringe, radical, abhorrent, even evil ideologies while stridently defending them against censorship. It’s a characteristically American way of looking at the situation—the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an ideology is a good guy with an ideology.

The argument goes that somebody whose opinions or stances on any given issue don’t make sense or hold up to scrutiny, or there’s some error in their thinking, then they will simply lose out in the marketplace of ideas. The superior or most correct argument will always just rise to the top and bad arguments will die out. The purported mechanism is almost Darwinian. You barely have to do anything! The superior, non-toxic ideologies will simply out-compete their scummy genocidal opponents!

This was central to McKenzie’s argument about keeping censorious hands off the tiki torch crowd:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.

Confronting a Nazi with non-Nazi discourse is frequently described as being not dissimilar to blasting an industrial spotlight at a vampire. The hateful views will fizzle up and die and they’ll promptly join a donation drive for the local YMCA.

It’s a theory that sounds right. And it sounds right because everyone likes to think their current worldview is more or less correct and that they came to all their beliefs through logical reasoning, and everyone being equally logical, if you show the same reasoning to anyone else they will relatively quickly come to the same conclusions as you.

As with a lot of theories that sound right, a considerable factor in how right they sound is how much you want them to be right.

For all the people who relentlessly bloviate about debating Nazis, I really only have one question: When was the last time you saw some kind of fringe political extremist change his mind because he lost a fucking argument?

Most people agree that something should be done to stop Nazis from coming to power if they threaten to do so (the only people who disagree tend to be Nazis) but just don’t want that something to be any form of deplatforming or restriction of their absolute freedom. So we’re at an impasse where we throw up our hands and say, shit, why don’t we try explaining to them why they should not be Nazis?

To be clear: The concept of debating fringe radicals, shysters, trolls, propagandists, grifters, and genocidists out of their ideology is a placeholder dummy argument for people who want to be free speech absolutists but don’t otherwise know what to do about that material.

It’s a form of mental gymnastics, to use a cliché. One of several rhetorical devices in the toolkit of wishing the problem away. Any given rant waxing hysterical about censorship will insist that hate groups and fascists are simultaneously easy to stop, impossible to stop, maybe shouldn’t be stopped, are too powerful, too fringe, too broadly defined, and don’t exist.

Endless reams of argument have been laid out about why deplatforming and censorship don’t even work to begin with. The always very polite and respectable Freddie deBoer wrote two and a half thousand words about how, not only does censorship do nothing, but it’s basically impossible to fight fascism at all, or at least it’s pointless to do anything against it that’s anywhere short of 100% effective.

But that’s always presented as kind of just the end of it. The assumption that social media content moderation in any form is in all ways censorious, wrongheaded, and completely futile is just generally taken as given, as is the supposed axiom that debate just fixes all these problems. Like the art of the argument is a spell lifted from an ancient grimoire.

I’m not a cackling censor but I do think there are strong counterarguments against its uselessness and impotence – the first and most obvious being that if it is so futile then why is everyone so afraid of it? Per deBoer, censorship cannot be considered good if it doesn’t work. But the thing about that is, it also can’t be bad if it doesn’t work. It can be annoying I guess?

And what do we mean by “doesn’t work” in this context? Just that it’s anything less than 100% effective—it doesn’t eradicate the ideology, permanently, from every mind on the entire planet.

But this is an argument and a line of reasoning that says nothing and goes nowhere. As a thought experiment it’s as useful in guiding policy as Descartes’ brain in a vat problem—can you prove the material world is real and you’re not just a brain in a vat having an extremely lucid dream? The answer can be visualised as me making an exaggerated wanking motion with my right arm.

By the exact same token, nothing works. Debate sure as hell doesn’t.

The relevant question when discussing methods for dealing with extreme, toxic, and hateful ideologies is less “does it work” and more “what does it do?”

It is certainly not true that information control and content moderation do nothing. The extremely radical shift in the ecosystem of Twitter in just a single year after its management shift is proof enough of that. Just by tweaking algorithms to deplatform certain politics and making the system pay-to-play (ie. Give voices only to those who are willing to pay money to a vicious and proactive racist) Elon Musk has managed to alter the entire zeitgeist, and that will certainly (by purposeful design) have trickle down effects on the culture.

I’ve seen it argued that deplatforming Alex Jones made him more powerful, but that’s completely backward—everybody forgot who the hell he was for years after his deplatforming. The power he has now came about because he was subsequently replatformed and excessively boosted by one of the most powerful men on the planet.

Censorship, selective platforming, and information control when utilized by people like Elon Musk does immense damage. When it comes to advanced hateful ideologies like those of Alex Jones, deplatforming actually did something positive. You can see how it can be used for good or for evil.

But debate, when applied to Jones or to Nazis, does nothing. I mean actual nothing. Ideologies like Nazism and spiritually similar abominations aren’t malleable to debate. It’s like fighting Stage 4 Cancer just by eating right and getting enough sleep. The disease metastasized far beyond the reach of your appeals to reason.

Literally all it does when you ask the targets of hate to debate their oppressors is it subjects victims to the burden of incessantly, humiliatingly, and painfully arguing their own right to exist against people who aren’t listening and don’t care.

To understand why debate doesn’t do anything here, I rather love something that the author Margaret Atwood said on the topic recently—though it shouldn’t take a mind of the calibre of Atwood to work it out, its brilliance is in its simplicity:

What does “Nazi” mean, or signify? Many things, but among them is “Kill all Jews.” This is not an opinion. It’s a call for actions, such as blowing up a synagogue with people inside or murdering 6 million people who are Jews.

Debating is a method of shaping thought. Strong ideologues and hatemongers don’t operate on thought, they operate on action. What Nazis are is something that began with a thought, at some point, but now the thinking has finished. Now they’re acting. You can’t fight action with debate. You fight it only by acting upon it.

If someone is coming at your throat with a knife, it’s insane to characterise him as “disagreeing with you remaining alive.”

Now, disappointing as this may be, I‘m not going to end this essay with a prescription. I’m just calling things how they are. The way platforms organize their moderation is best discussed by professionals known as trust and safety experts. You know, the team of people Musk fired specifically because they were getting in the way of the Nazis.

But I very strongly suspect that the way forward for society, in an era of globalised media and social platforms, is going to involve both healthy, passionate, debate and content moderation. Smart moderation, careful moderation, call that the scary word “censorship” if you really want to. It does something, it’s a tool like anything. A dangerous tool, yes, but so is a gun. Use discipline with it.

And I believe that part of this process is going to involve deplatforming Nazis. Wherever we see them. Yes! I know we’ll never be rid of them! I know they’ll scurry to another corner every time! I don’t care! Fuckin’ whack-a-mole! Let’s go! Because if we can’t decide this right now, if we cannot bring ourselves as a society to say that genocides, holocausts, and systematic human extermination are wrong, if that’s still on the debate table then I’m sorry, guys, but what we need isn’t a debate, it’s a comet.