Re: XKCD #1357: Free Speech | Randall Munroe and the Misread of Free Expression
XKCD is written by an intelligent man, but one of its comics stands out for its lack of foresight and awareness.
Several years ago, Randall Munroe published this XKCD comic:
This comic has been widely praised on the Internet by people whose ideologies happen to fall in alignment with those of monstrously powerful tech companies, but relatively few attempts seem to have been made to explain why it is so foolish. This will be mine. Munroe’s conception of free speech is flawed and pernicious for the following reasons:
The United States is not the only nation that exists in this world.
The idea of having a “right to free speech” does not begin and end with the First Amendment.
Munroe appears unaware of what the First Amendment says.
Munroe demonstrates a colossal lack of foresight.
Along the way I will attempt to foresee and counter any arguments that may be offered contrary to my position.
Let us begin.
1. Beyond Burgerland: The United States is not the world.
This comic makes exclusive reference to a political construct from the United States (i.e., the First Amendment), which, as much as we Americans don’t enjoy admitting it, is not the only nation that exists.
The counterargument is likely to be immediate: “Munroe is not claiming that the message of this comic applies anywhere except for the United States. He is obviously addressing only those people in his audience that live there in particular.”
My response, in turn, is that this simply betrays a sort of myopia regarding the whole establishment of the Internet. To introduce your argument with the arrogant presumption that you are qualified to distribute a “public service announcement” to the global audience of your webcomic, only then to halfheartedly (and indirectly) clarify that you are merely addressing the inhabitants of one particular country, does not demonstrate a commitment to intellectual honesty on the matter. It would be as if someone were to publish an article with the title I Have Proven that Murder is Objectively Wrong and the justification ended up being that Morocco’s national statutes say that you’re not supposed to kill people. (Fact check: Correct!)
This ultimately proves to be the most minor gripe I have with the comic, because, in all technicality, Munroe at least implicitly indicates that he’s only addressing a small fraction of the people with access to his work. But still, that just means the scope of his argument is too small for the subject matter at hand. Speech-related decisions in a country as influential as the United States are sure to influence, or at least inform, those made in other countries. The world watches when the United States legislates, especially since we love to declare ourselves the greatest country that humanity has ever created. (Fact check: Uh-oh!) World politics, especially from the perspective of the United States, are not insular. People across the world have opinions on what we do, the laws we pass, and the principles we (ostensibly) stand for; to cut them out of the conversation will not help us move forward in the discourse, no matter which side of the free speech debate you fall on.
Freedom of speech is a big, thorny, and complicated issue which each country treats differently. If Munroe has decided for some reason to focus on one tiny speck of the whole, grand garbage pile, it is logical to ask why he would narrow the discussion to a scope such as this. I believe the answer is that Munroe is, knowingly or not (but probably knowingly), collapsing the concept of free speech into a smaller box than that to which it belongs. Or, more directly, Munroe is talking about legality where most of us want to discuss morality.
2. The Authoritarian’s Lament: Rights are not a purely legal concept.
Suppose I inform you that I live in a dystopian, third-world country where the overly militarized police are permitted to destroy your property and leave you with no opportunity for recompense. If you tell me that you think this state of affairs is appalling, I sneer at you and tell you that you’re being ludicrous. After all, the law in my country says that this is okay. You might object and ask, “yes, but don’t you think it’s wrong, even if it’s legal?”
Munroe would not raise this objection, because Munroe demonstrates through this comic an unwillingness to distinguish between matters of moral and legal acceptability.
When people are upset that they have, or someone else has, been censored on the Internet, they are not ordinarily claiming that such censorship is against the law. Many people are aware by now that the United States has degraded into an oligarchic hellhole to one degree or another, and therefore hold no illusions that many protections on offer by Washington are aimed in their direction. People who feel they have been unfairly silenced on social media are upset because they feel they have been made the victim of an immoral and improper use of the social media company’s authority, not the literal breaking of a free speech-related law. This is not to say that some people don’t misunderstand the First Amendment (like Munroe does; more on that in a bit) and find themselves under the misconception that private entities are legally forbidden from censorship. But most of the time, when I see discussions of this sort online, the silenced party is expressing a concern at the morality of the silencing, while his or her detractors respond with banal assurances that nothing untoward has happened, legally speaking. In other words, these groups of people are discussing different things.
Ironically enough, Americans who respond to “censorship is wrong” with “but it’s not against the law” demonstrate a profound indifference to the whole point of their own country’s founding document. You may recall this bit from the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights
The Declaration references “rights” in an absolute, moral sense of the term. These rights come not from the government, but from God. (Or, as you wish, from whatever source of ultimate cosmic authority that gives the idea of human rights its legitimacy; take your pick.) This is the conception of the “right to free speech” that detractors of corporate censorship typically invoke. They may be incorrect about the existence of this right, or whether corporate censorship indeed violates it, but the vital thing to understand is that you cannot dismiss such a claim by referencing governmental statutes. “The First Amendment doesn’t prohibit X” is an incoherent response to the claim that X is a violation of one’s rights, so long as the claim is referencing rights in this foundational, cosmic, moral sense.
Free speech is not the same thing as the First Amendment. Even within the United States. They are two distinct concepts, related yet dramatically different in scope. For, say, a German to invoke the right to free speech (as in the American First Amendment) as a defense against censorship is laughable. For her to invoke the right to free speech in and of itself is laudable. The founders of the country codified the right to free speech into the First Amendment because they valued it.
Why, then, have so many people taken to the position that appealing to this right in and of itself is foolish? Or, worse, why have people such as Munroe taken to conflating these two incredibly different concepts? Is it merely to allow them to play a game of definition-hopping, countering moral claims with appeals to legality? Again, just imagine how foolish I would sound if I countered “murder is ethically wrong” with “but it’s legal in my country!” Nobody cares if it’s legal in my country. Nobody cares if corporate censorship is legally sound. What we’re trying to discuss is the moral component at hand, and for someone to interject with a legal defense is unhelpful and only serves to obfuscate the conversation. I have witnessed firsthand the profound damage that this comic has done to the discourse surrounding free speech on the Internet, as people whose opinions place them in no danger of censorship (at least, not yet; more on that later) gleefully link to it as a way to stonewall any concerns that perhaps a small handful of privately owned megacorporations with more political power than God should not be able to ostracize someone out of participation in modern society.
Perhaps the only other response as inane and counterproductive is the classic line of “you’re just mad because you’re not allowed to be bigoted anymore,” which also fails to actually address the issue in question while simultaneously opting for a well-placed ad hominem attack.
So why is it that people are concerned, morally speaking, about censorship at the hands of private corporations?
As is not likely to be surprising to you, most of the traffic on the Internet is directed to a small handful of companies. Additionally, the Internet itself, on a structural level, is owned by a small handful of companies. And the servers that host websites are likewise. It isn’t just websites, either; if you want to disseminate a smartphone app, you essentially have two choices.
The monopolization of the Internet by a small collection of private companies (i.e., organizations with massive political power yet which are not beholden to public accountability) does not pose just a vague, hypothetical danger to the individual. The consequences are real and painful. Due to the network effect, the consequence of being booted off of one of the few mainstream social media platforms is essentially a permanent and complete disconnection from mainstream culture. (At least as far as making active contributions are concerned.) And it is not merely a matter of participation in culture; modern democracies are influenced by social media. For good or for ill, regardless of the frivolities of memes and celebrity-worship and TikTok dances and cat GIFs, participation in online platforms facilitates the machine of modern politics in a way that traditional media, such as the distribution of printed pamphlets, can no longer hope to match.
And while it may be argued that access to these means of participation in society and politics is not exactly a right (moral or otherwise) to which one is inherently entitled, it should be inarguable that such an extreme recourse as cutting this participation off should be handled with care and doled out with immense caution. To deny this is to misunderstand, perhaps willfully so, that the world we live in is conducted largely online, and therefore that to become restricted from online platforms is a hefty punishment indeed. I believe that this fate, the banishment from the modern public squares of social media, is not treated with the gravity it deserves. At least, not by the American Left, in whose favor social media companies have tended to lean in recent years, ostensibly if not in actuality.
For a nicely illustrative case, recall the saga of Parler. A typical response to concerns of censorship on social media is the invitation to “make your own platform” and to run it differently if you find the content moderation practices of the present giants to be distasteful. People did, and thus was born Parler, a distinctly right-wing social media alternative that was summarily axed from the two primary sources of mobile apps, and which also drew the ire of Amazon and found itself without web hosting on the backend. Parler was later restored to both app stores, but only after agreeing to alter its content moderation policies to more closely match the demands of the tech giants.
The story of Parler stretches the credibility of the “just go make your own platform” argument to its limits. When, as stated, virtually the entire online public sphere falls within the domain of several big and private corporations, making your own app did not prove to be enough. The eventual solution that a hypothetical platform like Parler would need to employ, in the absence of any tech companies with which to play ball, would be to create their own backend Internet infrastructure, create their own web hosting servers, create their own application distribution platforms, and then create their own platform. Parler eventually found itself an ally in the web-hosting arena, but the fact that it would have been dead in the water if not for the presence of yet another private corporation which happened to play nice should serve as warning enough that, if we’re being realistic, “go make your own” is not a serviceable argument.
At this point, the reader may object that there is nothing untoward about a cabal of private corporations making their decisions in tandem, given that there is no legal obligation for them not to. One may argue that the story of Parler was a case study in how a genuinely harmful platform was brought to justice by the gloriously self-regulating captains of industry, lending credence to the idea that concerns about “free speech” online are mere smokescreens for those who, among other things, spread incitements to violent actions.
This would, however, prove but another misread of the concerns that most people tend to have regarding social media censorship. I bring up the story of Parler not to mourn its dubious legacy, as it is a platform I have never been on and have never had an interest in being on. (Given its extreme Right slant, it is very likely that I would find common ground with its users on free speech but very little else.) I bring it up as an example to illustrate my problem with the very notion that a handful of corporations have this power at all, not with the specific application of that power against this particular app. It ultimately would not matter to me if Big Tech censorship were directed against conservatives or liberals, fascists or communists, theists or atheists; I would have compunctions with the state of affairs regardless. “Parler was deserving of its bans because it hosted vile content” may very well be true, and I do not intend to defend its users, but it is also irrelevant to the broader point.
If a police officer observed a wanted serial killer shopping for groceries on a Sunday morning, we should be aghast if he were to pull out his gun and execute the killer on the spot. We should be aghast not because we have any particular soft spot for killers, but because in a democratic society, it should not be permissible for a police officer to singlehandedly appoint himself the deliverer of justice. The cop’s job would be to arrest the killer, not to kill him (assuming, as we are, that the killer was not at the time posing a threat against someone else’s life). Our problem in this scenario would not be that the cop killed a bad person, but that the cop felt empowered to kill anyone in such a way, regardless of the victim’s moral status.
Likewise it is, in my mind, with censorship at the hands of tech companies. It matters little to me whom they censor; I am far more concerned with their ability to censor at all.
A brief digression is required here to point out that I am not insisting that content moderation per se is tantamount to problematic censorship, nor am I positing that content moderation is an easy task with a simple and conveniently workable solution. This section of the essay has been intended merely to voice my misgivings with the concept and to explain why other people feel likewise. Consider this my way of taking the opposite approach of the one Munroe takes in his comic; while he treats content moderation and censorship as inherently mundane, ethically blameless, and unworthy of scrutiny, I am of the opinion that it is inherently risky, ethically dubious, and worthy of intense scrutiny. Munroe has a noticeably blasé attitude toward the principle of free speech. As I pointed out above, he appears to reject, or at the very least to ignore, the idea that human rights exist and deserve consideration whether or not one’s home government recognizes them. It is very easy to imagine an alternate-universe Munroe from China or Russia arguing that no free speech is violated there because such protective concepts are not enshrined in law in the first place. It is obviously the case that free speech rights exist morally everywhere and in every nation whether or not they are recognized as such by the ones wielding the hammer; if not, Americans would not routinely turn their noses at dictatorships and lament the deprivation their subjects endure. How can one square the idea that China’s government is repressive for not recognizing the principles of free speech, but that social media companies do not merit even a sidewise glance because free speech stops and ends at the legislature? From the moral standpoint, either free speech rights exist or they do not. If they do not, repressive governments are blameless for restricting the speech of everyday people. If they do, private tech companies are not automatically off the hook, even if they are found to be ultimately blameless. The existence of free speech rights is the hook. You do not have to be a free-speech absolutist to understand that tech companies deserve scrutiny for their behavior. You may even agree with their content moderation 100%, and still the existence of these rights would behoove you to at least admit that these concerns have merit.
Once again, though, the reader may object that this is all irrelevant to the message behind the comic. Munroe is not ignoring this context, but is rather addressing a separate point, and we cannot hold it against him that he hasn’t preempted a counterargument which is aimed at a point he hasn’t even made.
This would work fairly enough to paint Munroe’s comic as merely impotent rather than malicious, and he as a man who went through the effort to contribute to the discourse without bothering to address the very foundation of the topic he discusses rather than a man who finds himself pleased at the political expediency of the present state of affairs and is trying quite conspicuously to preserve it in the hope that it will remain forever in his favor. That is to say, whether Munroe wants to address it or not, the fact of the matter is that no discussion on the ethics of censorship, even one made from the position that no censorship is even occurring, is complete (or indeed even comprehensible) without an acknowledgement of why the discussion is happening in the first place. This discourse is only happening in our culture because people have objected on ethical (and, to be fair, political) grounds. “Censorship is wrong because X,” people say, and Munroe, rather than discuss why he disagrees with X, opts instead to disagree with Y. Very few people are under the misconception that private companies are not at liberty, from a legal perspective, to do with their platforms what they will. That is not the issue in question, but Munroe declares the entire debate resolved. Big Tech censorship is not wrong because it’s not actually happening, because legally speaking, Big Tech can moderate their platforms the way they want to. Case closed. Whether moderation that falls perfectly within the bounds of the law could possibly be ethically questionable does not enter into the equation for Munroe, and as such there is no acknowledgement that the case is, in fact, wide open, let alone a counterargument. The debate as Munroe presents it is incomplete. This isn’t even to say that Munroe is wrong, or even particularly misguided. There is just nothing to draw from because he does not bother to make the effort, and people who agree with his perspective seem to similarly disregard the ethical part of the question.
Imagine how absurd this pattern of argument would be if applied to some other hot-button political issues. Imagine a debate on abortion that sidestepped the question of whether fetuses counted as people, and, if so, how that weighed against the rights of the mother. Imagine a debate on gun control that made no mention of how one balances the Second Amendment with the shocking numbers of mass shootings in the United States. Imagine a debate about taxation that remained silent on from whence the government claims the right to tax, and to how much representation its constituents are entitled. (You may recognize this last one as a pretty big deal.)
These debates would be surreal and absurd, perhaps to the point of no longer qualifying as “debates” at all. One would look on in fascination and disgust at the people wasting their time trying to get to the bottom of an issue without seeming to realize that they are ignoring perhaps the most important parts of the issue. This is how Munroe’s, and many others’, free speech-related arguments appear to me. They are incomplete, utterly hollow, and thereby woefully inadequate to even hope to make any sort of progress in the discourse. Munroe’s arguments are foolish at best and, at worst, hugely damaging to the online discourse surrounding freedom of speech. One does not need to disagree with Munroe’s ultimate position to see this. One needs simply to recognize that he is packaging up an incomplete argument and presenting it to the world, from a position of great influence, as a slam-dunk, common-sense resolution to a matter which we were all terribly silly for taking seriously in the first place.
To summarize this point, Munroe’s contribution to the debate on free speech is to either implicitly deny that the human right to free speech is the precursor to the First Amendment, and therefore that arguments about free speech cannot simply end with the fact that the First Amendment has any particular limitation, or to conspicuously ignore this in favor of a more simplistic, easily digestible position. Any defense that the ethical concept of free speech as a human right is merely beyond the scope of his present argument raises the question of how he can so confidently discuss the matter without addressing all of the salient foundational points which underlie it.
3. Not So Simple: Munroe mischaracterizes the First Amendment.
Let us suppose, after all of that, that Munroe is correct in his assessment of the situation: the thorny issue of free speech and social media truly is as simple as the letter of the law, and there is nothing further to consider. “The government can’t arrest you for what you say,” as Munroe so diligently explains. Simple as that.
Simple as that, provided your understanding of what the First Amendment means is juvenile to the extreme. Any cursory knowledge of the amendment reveals that “the government can’t arrest you for what you say” is not an accurate summary of what the law says. Set aside for a moment those parts of the amendment that really are of questionable relevance to this debate, including the freedom of religion and the freedom of assembly. If we narrow our focus to the parts of the law that explicitly pertain to expression and speech, as we must assume Munroe has done in his comic, we are still left with a multitude of other, more complicated issues than “you can’t be arrested” to deal with.
For example, may online spaces be construed as “public forums”? (Munroe would likely say no.) Are online spaces subject to the same regulations and protections as physical media? (Munroe would likely say yes, at least as far as companies’ editorial practices being counted as free speech themselves is concerned.)
This is not splitting hairs. This is recognizing that even if legality is all that should enter into this equation, understanding the place of social media in a society governed by free speech laws written almost three centuries ago requires more critical thinking and fewer empty platitudes. If we want to give our blessing to social media companies’ editorial and moderation decisions, we cannot do so from the lens of the First Amendment as purely protecting individual citizens from being arrested. To understand and articulate Munroe’s own position requires a more thorough understanding than that.
To an objection that this is merely “nitpicking,” and that Munroe was simplifying the issue in service of condensing the First Amendment’s protections to a length better suited to a brief comic strip, we may still ask why he chose to portray it in this way specifically. Is it accurate to say that he has summarized the First Amendment in this way? Off the top of my head, with no more than three seconds of thought, I conceived of “the government can’t restrict what you say” as a nice summary that he could have used instead. Or “the government can’t tell you what or what not to say.” Or “the government cannot compel speech.” There are any number of ways to do this, and all of these examples recognize more broadly what the First Amendment actually says, as far as speech is concerned. “The government can’t arrest you for what you say” is not a summary of the First Amendment, but rather a very specific point within the context being ignored. This statement on what the First Amendment supposedly means reaches the point of utter misrepresentation, in the same way that it would be disingenuous to claim that the Second Amendment means “the government can’t stop vendors from selling magazines over a certain size.” Even if this is a true fact within the Amendment and among its many facets (and I don’t know enough about the Second to know if it is), it is obvious that it would be tantamount to lying to claim that this and this alone is what the Amendment means. Just so with the First. Given the wide array of protections and continually debated legal questions contained within, Munroe opts to summarize the whole thing as “you can’t be arrested for what you say.”
It is not conceivable to me why Munroe would have chosen this very particular formulation if his intention had been to give readers a short-and-sweet summary of the First Amendment that would fit within his comic, at least if we assume he wrote the comic in good faith as opposed to crafting it specifically to obfuscate the matter at hand. However, his refusal to address the ethical side of the debate and this very conspicuous misrepresentation of the First Amendment do not paint a terribly positive picture of his intentions by distributing this comic. We must make increasing room for the benefit of the doubt as Munroe crosses the line from a succinct message, inaccurate in the way that all overviews of complex topics are, to what appears to be a purposeful attempt at portraying a complex, multilayered debate as already resolved and unworthy of further discussion. This would, conveniently enough, put responses to his comic such as this on the defensive at the very outset, as any reader familiar with Munroe’s comic, and amenable to its message, would be influenced to see any response as rocking the boat of an already handily settled issue. To preempt criticism in this way is wildly dishonest, but, to be fair, this is speculation.
(To provide a bit more historical context, I came upon an article that detailed the Founding Fathers’ ideas behind corporations. If the historian being interviewed is correct, the idea of “corporate personhood” as we wrestle with it today did not exist as such back when the United States was founded. I do not know enough on the subject to belabor this point, but it seems relevant to note that First Amendment protections for corporations, which Munroe treats as so obvious as to be beyond the need for discussion, probably would not have existed, or at least would not have looked as they do now, back when the First Amendment was ratified. So to treat this too as an open-and-shut case is both inaccurate and presumptuous in the extreme.)
4. It Could Never Happen Here: It is myopic to forge weapons with the belief that they will never be turned against you.
In case this needed to be clarified, popular opinion tends to change with time, but institutions are much slower to adapt. If we normalize the idea that corporations may, without accountability to the American people, wipe out one’s prospects of participation in modern culture should someone express views or opinions that their shareholders deem harmful, that ability will persist and the pattern will repeat itself. You may argue that as of right now, the only people finding themselves in this situation are truly deserving of this fate, and that social media companies are exercising a marvelous restraint in who they choose to ban. This may be true. Will it remain true indefinitely?
When every election cycle is said to hold at stake the existence of American democracy as we know it, and when one’s political opponents are reduced to communists (if you lean Right) or Nazis (if you lean Left), it is very, very clear that large portions of the American populace believe that social upheaval of unprecedented enormity is liable to occur at any time. Respected institutions may fall to rubble, and society as we know it may change drastically. Nobody knows what will happen, but we’re all very sure that if our team loses, it is going to be disastrous in every conceivable way. When “Make America Great Again” became “Keep America Great” not because President Trump succeeded in draining the swamp but because he is obligated to portray his term as preferable to the one that followed, it became clear once more that nothing means anything to anyone and the messaging that comes from the Powers That Be can change at any time.
That said, proponents of heavy-handed corporate censorship, who justify their positions with the insistence that it only happens to bad people, fail to realize that they may one day fall on the wrong side of what messages the corporations wish to purge. Right now, for example, spreading misinformation about the global pandemic is liable to get you booted from a platform. (I find it difficult to muster much sympathy, to be perfectly honest.) But recall that we’re perpetually one bad election away from the very fabric of our society ripping apart and being mended back together by all manner of evil people (that is, the people you voted against) whose goal is to ruin our way of life. If that much is truly at stake, if society can change that quickly and that dramatically within the public sector, full of people who are actually elected, what possible assurance do you have against the unelected, privately owned corporations changing their tunes, or having their boards of directors upended by people with a different political slant? If we’re on the verge of society-rending catastrophe, should we not want to withhold immensely destructive power from these organizations of people who do not even maintain the artifice of being accountable to us? If they can silence anyone they choose for any reason they choose, if they can choose at any time to stop “hosting your bullshit,” as Munroe phrases it, is it not reasonable to fear what may become of us if the suits upstairs decide they have a different perspective on what “bullshit” means? Is it not conceivable that a privately owned corporation may one day decide that it wants to peddle misinformation, rather than stamp it out, and promote anti-vax speech while silencing accurate information?
People fear Trump and the possibility that he may restrict American democracy. The prospect of the next president doing this is a reasonable thing to fear at any point in history. May we assume it possible that he could, for example, use backdoor dealings to pump social media companies full of loyal cronies? Or use the legal processes (for which his detractors observe he has little respect) to somehow alter their incentives? Perhaps for a reason as petty as getting revenge against perceived slights toward conservatives, Trump may, we could choose to imagine, influence private companies through his rhetoric to take up the mass banning of liberal voices on social media. As long as those companies do it within their scope as private entities, with which Munroe has no issue, what could people on the Left say to express their displeasure?
These specific hypotheticals are not presented with the insistence that they are particularly likely, at least not in the short-term. But on a general level, I consider it almost guaranteed that the social narratives will change over time, even within the purview of each political side. For example, to be “colorblind” was once the goal of a nonracist society, yet is now itself considered racist. Such is the progression of society, whether or not one approves. One may find oneself at a failure or reluctance to adapt to the new orthodoxy within one’s own side of the political aisle in this way. If this continues for some time, as it must, because societies evolve, it is absolutely delusional to believe oneself to be placed at the “end of progress” somehow. If you place the tools of silencing people, of total online ostracism, into the hands of the social media giants, you are running the risk that you and they may one day fall out of lockstep with each other, with disastrous consequences for you. Clearly we need not hypothesize of some malicious takeover of the board of directors; perhaps the company and the people simply evolve in different directions while still being loosely allied politically. In either case, is it wise to have handed them the banhammer, knowing, as one must, that it may be aimed in any direction the company pleases?
All of this is to say that Munroe has placed himself atop a very tenuous perch, looking down on those who have been silenced, even if for legitimately good reason. His perch is subject to topple at any moment, based on decisions made not by elected officials or members of his community, but by completely unelected shareholders whose interests only coincidentally and temporarily happen to align with his own. Munroe would be utterly insane to believe that the alignment of social media companies will remain just and prosocial in perpetuity, and yet this is the only coherent way to explain why he, and others like him, are so intent not only to bequeath tech companies with such enormous power, but to go to bat for them and defend their ability to use it however they wish in the absurd hope that he will remain in their favor forever.
The things that people do and say on social media can be harmful, to individuals and to society at large. My intent is not to insist that moderation and banning people are wrong in and of themselves, or that tech companies ought not have any power to influence what gets posted on their platforms. I mean to express that such abilities should be given only with a keen eye open, suspicious that private companies operating under the profit motive might not always have society’s best interests at heart. I mean to express that freedom of speech is a complex topic that warrants complex and nuanced discussions, not bite-sized bits of misinformation, obfuscation, and the abuse of influence by the influential who wish for there to be no discussions at all. I wish to demonstrate that Randall Munroe’s take on freedom of speech is myopic and damaging to the discourse, and that he and those who agree with him often misunderstand the principles at play, to the detriment of society as a whole.
Munroe’s comic is too US-centric for a globalized world; it ignores the hugely important context behind the First Amendment; it grossly misrepresents what that amendment says; and it advocates a very dangerous balance of power and demonstrates that Munroe has not completely considered the long-term consequences of his arguments.