Redefining Censorship
Over the past several months, there has been a lot of discussion around what appear to be growing demands for censorship across the American political spectrum. On the right, large-scale legislative efforts to prohibit certain forms of instruction that are commonly — but often incorrectly — associated with “Critical Race Theory” have coincided with efforts to remove specific books from K-12 curricula in school districts in Missouri, Texas, Alabama, and other states. The most recent example comes as a Tennessee school board removed Maus, a graphic novel focused on the experiences of Holocaust survivors, from the eighth grade curriculum due to concerns over offensive language and nudity.
Some progressive school districts have similarly sought to eliminate specific books — including classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — from their K-12 curricula for reasons of racial insensitivity, though the scale of these efforts generally has not matched what is taking place in more conservative states and school districts. Instead, progressive activists have largely focused their energies on corporate and academic spaces, both online and offline, working to eliminate content (and content creators) deemed socially harmful. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with continuing vaccine hesitancy among certain demographics, attempts to “de-platform” purportedly harmful speakers have taken on a renewed emphasis among progressives as a means to slow the spread of scientific misinformation.
While censoriousness has a long history in the United States — often originating from the right — what is relatively new about these recent activities is the adoption of alternative definitions of “free expression” and “censorship” by many progressives. It has become increasingly common for left-wing thinkers to champion an essentially libertarian conception of free expression, which excludes from protection or consideration vast territories of corporately owned space, including the digital spaces where most political expression occurs in modern life.
The most prominent recent example of this tendency comes amid wide-spread calls to remove podcaster Joe Rogan from the music streaming platform Spotify, which has an exclusive deal — purportedly worth $100 million — to host his content. While Rogan has been controversial for quite some time, the current backlash was prompted when musician Neil Young announced that he would be leaving Spotify, due to Rogan’s spreading misinformation around COVID-19. (Others have called on Spotify to sever its ties to Rogan due to his past use of racial slurs.)
Young’s former collaborators, David Crosby and Stephen Stills, followed his lead, insisting that they would be removing their music from Spotify unless the platform took “real action” against Rogan’s podcast.
After releasing this statement, David Crosby followed up with a tweet arguing that removing his music was not akin to a call for censorship.
What is censorship?
Artists and users are, of course, free to boycott Spotify. But if their reason for leaving the platform is that Spotify is not taking “real action” to suppress other content creators, this is a desire for censorship. This fairly basic definitional question is one that many progressives seem to be willfully misunderstanding.
In her recent piece for the New York Times explaining why she is removing her podcast from Spotify, author Roxane Gay went further than Crosby, writing:
I would never support censorship. And because I am a writer, I know that language matters. There’s a difference between censorship and curation. When we are not free to express ourselves, when we can be thrown in jail or even lose our lives for speaking freely, that is censorship. When we say, as a society, that bigotry and misinformation are unacceptable, and that people who espouse those ideas don’t deserve access to significant platforms, that’s curation. We are expressing our taste and moral discernment, and saying what we find acceptable and what we do not.
Too many people believe that the right to free speech means the right to say whatever they want, wherever, whenever, on whatever platform they choose, without consequence.
This, again, is a wildly inaccurate understanding of censorship and free expression. Censorship does not require the threat of death or jail, merely the suppression of one’s speech. As the American Civil Liberties Union explains in its summary of censorship:
Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive,” happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.
In contrast, when private individuals or groups organize boycotts against stores that sell magazines of which they disapprove, their actions are protected by the First Amendment, although they can become dangerous in the extreme. Private pressure groups, not the government, promulgated and enforced the infamous Hollywood blacklists during the McCarthy period. But these private censorship campaigns are best countered by groups and individuals speaking out and organizing in defense of the threatened expression.
What is free speech?
The concept of “free speech” is rooted in the notion that people should be able to express ideas without fear of censorship, whether through legal or social suppression. As a matter of basic definition, free speech does entail freedom from retaliation and censorship, not merely legal sanction, and does mean freedom from being “de-platformed.” Free expression extends beyond government censorship, and has long been understood — not least by progressives — to apply to various situations involving private actors.
As more and more progressives insist that this version of censorship is not actually about censorship but “consequences,” the libertarian conception of free expression is becoming ascendant on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, with less of a neutral bulwark against speech suppression from either side. For reasons that have been covered well elsewhere, it’s unwise for progressives in particular to continue transferring power to corporations to erode free speech norms and censor content they view as offensive or harmful.
But the most frustrating part of the debate is the condescending — and frankly Orwellian — insistence that censorship isn’t really about what it is plainly about. If progressive thinkers and activists want to shift their stance in a direction more supportive of censorship, they should be honest about their position, rather than engaging in misdirection. As philosopher Oliver Traldi once put it:
In general, we should be skeptical of people who try to argue by attempting to shift our sense of what some debate or event is “about.” “Aboutness” itself isn’t about much of anything. When someone starts haranguing about what some debate is or isn’t about, interpret it as a sign of what they do or don’t want to talk about. If someone says, “Politics is about power,” it means that they want to talk about power. If someone says, “So-called free speech debates aren’t about free speech,” it means that they don’t want to talk about free speech.
For better or worse, platforms like Spotify, Twitter, and YouTube are where the majority of American discourse happens these days. A consistent left-wing position demands at least some consideration of these platforms as public enclaves, where rules and norms around free expression and censorship are implicated. Demanding “consequences” for misinformed, obscene, offensive, or politically unpopular speech really isn’t as far from the Hollywood blacklists as many progressives want to believe. It’s worth wrestling with that fact rather than trying to define it away.
