Pity Poor Mark Zuckerberg. Really

Many on the right are upset, as am I, by the rising tide of blacklisting and censorship. Most recently, just yesterday, Facebook has banned Paul Joseph Watson and Laura Loomer, among others. This blacklisting has gotten so obviously out of hand that even Donald Trump has weighed in with a protest.

But I think those who are blaming Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter, and Google, and Patreon, and so on, for these bans are missing the forest for the trees. I think perhaps these businesses deserve some sympathy. They are probably not guilty as often charged with seeking to impose their own opinions on the world-- but of moral cowardice. A far more common moral failing.

It seems most likely to me that people like Zuckerberg, who have spent their lives accumulating extreme wealth, are really, in the first place, far more interested in making money than in politics. This is, moreover, their fiduciary duty as employees and proprietors. On that basis, they would surely really much prefer to continue hosting wildly popular content contributors like Watson, or Yiannopolis. Each makes them a lot of money.

But what if other people are threatening to boycott for hosting them? That sounds like a money-losing proposition. Bad PR. Angry customers.

The natural knee-jerk of a businessman is to keep the customers satisfied. He or she hears a complaint, and they figure they need to respond.

People on the left are of course going to be enraged at and want to shut down precisely the voices that are most effective, to which they cannot adequately respond. And so the process quickly gets draconian.

What Facebook and Twitter and the rest are doing now is still short-sighted and foolish. But it is understandable. They are businessmen. Politics is not their game. They just want to steer clear of it, they are not interested in it, and so they are blind to the dangers they are walking into here. Poor fools.

All he wanted was peace in our time.

So long as they stayed neutral and just let anyone post, they could plausibly deny any responsibility for what is posted. They would have had to stand tough and be principled, though, and they were not, in fact, principled. They just wanted to make money. But the instant they started policing things, as they have emphatically now, they actually and foolishly accepted legal and political responsibility for anything that appears on their platform. By anyone. Including posted comments by every lunatic capable of breathing through his mouth. That is going to become political and legal suicide going forward. There can be no end to it. Everyone is going to be furious at everything, and expect them to do something about it. And as soon as they do anything, another group is going to be at least as furious at the censorship.

Worse, as more and more legitimate opinions, and content people want to see, gets thrown off their platforms, they are almost forcing some competition to emerge and take over their market niche. And be able to compete by featuring established big names like MacInnis, Milo, Watson, Loomer; bigger names and more interesting content than are available on YouTube or Twitter. Because by the logic of the outrage boycotts, it will be the most compelling content and the biggest names that are targeted for boycott. Witness what happened with Fox News in the television marketplace. Witness the newspapers dying. Witness even how much less interesting Rebel Media has become since they bent to pressure by dumping Faith Goldy, Lauren Southern, Gavin MacInnis—all their stars. For an easier ride at the next shareholder’s meeting, these social media companies are signing their own death warrant.

Government intervention in the market is generally a bad idea. This is the classic situation in which it is a good idea. Government intervention can sometimes help everyone. The classic example is drugs in sports. Probably few athletes want to risk their health by resorting to performance-enhancing injections. But if a few do, everyone else must, or be left out of the playoffs. Their career is ruined. So it helps everyone if they are banned, and a regimen of testing imposed.

This situation is not the same, but similar. As a business proposition, probably no business wants to start censoring. But they feel forced to by the current market pressure. If, on the other hand, government passed a law positively requiring them to host all comers without politics being a factor—the rule could be that nobody could be denied a platform for any speech that is legal—then Facebook or Twitter could proceed with their business, the making of money hand over fist, without needing to soil themselves with politics. Everybody wins.

Except, of course, the scoundrels who want to silence opinions they cannot refute. But they will lose in any case.

Remember that famous quote, commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but nevertheless eternally true: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I never said it. I just lived it.

What we are seeing currently, nasty as it has gotten, is stage three. The left is no longer able to ignore opinions they disagree with. They are no longer able to ridicule them. Now they are fighting them openly and aggressively. In doing so, as Gandhi realized, they visibly surrender the moral high ground in the eyes of the general public.

Very soon after this, they become pariahs. They become as respected as, say, European imperialism is now, as a result of Gandhi’s campaigns, or discrimination against blacks is now, as a result of Martin Luther King’s. This is the road down which the modern left is frogmarching. People are starting to pop red pills literally left and right.