{"id":109743,"date":"2016-11-16T13:06:48","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T21:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=109743"},"modified":"2016-11-16T13:06:48","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T21:06:48","slug":"twitters-alt-right-purge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=109743","title":{"rendered":"Twitter’s Alt-Right Purge"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Frum writes<\/a>: Politics remains welcome at Twitter, as its most famous user, the president-elect, can attest. What Twitter is saying is that some and only some speech will be policed, by standards that can only be guessed at in advance.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s socially undesirable for a lot of reasons, but consider just this one: It\u2019s precisely the perception of arbitrary and one-sided speech policing that drives so many young men toward radical, illiberal politics. On campus especially, but also in the corporate world\u2014and now on social media\u2014they perceive that wild and wacky things can be said by some people, but not by others. By useful comparison: On the very same day that Twitter suspended the accounts of some alt-right users, DePaul University forbade a scheduled appearance by the broadcaster and writer Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is not an alt-rightist; in fact, the Anti-Defamation League reported last month that Shapiro is Twitter’s single most frequently targeted victim of anti-Semitic abuse by alt-rightists. But Shapiro is a scathing polemicist and provocateur\u2014an alumnus of the same Bannon-Breitbart empire that incubated Milo Yiannopoulos\u2014and DePaul expressed worry that his appearance on campus might provoke violence.<\/p>\n

The culture of offense-taking, platform-denying, and heckler-vetoing\u2014now spreading ever outward from the campuses\u2014lets loudmouths and thugs present themselves as heroes of free thought. They do not deserve this opportunity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a crazy fact of American life that as of today, a neo-Nazi has more right to build an arsenal of weapons and drill a militia than to speak on Twitter. Maybe we should try it the other way around.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not much American constituency for Richard Spencer\u2019s vision of a United States subdivided into segregated countries for each racial group, or for debates about whether Jews and Italians should count as \u201cwhite,\u201d or for fantasies about overturning democracy and returning to rule by kings and lords. But there is a real constituency for debates about immigration, about crime and policing, and other racially charged issues.<\/p>\n

Over the past two decades, Americans have constructed systems of intellectual silencing that stifle the range of debate among responsible and public-spirited people. They\u2019ve resigned hugely important topics to the domain of cranks and haters. If the only people who\u2019ll talk about the risks and costs of a more diverse society are fascists, then the fascists will gain an audience. So long as they refrain from incitement and harassment, the right way to deal with social media\u2019s neo-Nazis is not by taking away their platforms, but by taking away their audiences, by welcoming a more open and more intelligent discussion of what Americans yearn most to hear about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Frum writes: Politics remains welcome at Twitter, as its most famous user, the president-elect, can attest. What Twitter is saying is that some and only some speech will be policed, by standards that can only be guessed at in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720,29674,29656],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-censorship","category-twitter-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t