Axios Horror: People Can Speak Their Minds on Facebook!

It never ceases to amaze me how many people who make their living in the First Amendment sphere fail to understand what free speech means. Or perhaps more accurately, who just simply reject it — while hailing themselves as its heroes.

Today’s case in point comes to us from Axios, where the decision by Mark Zuckerberg to allow people to speak their minds has caused a freak-out. They use the hoary media device of “some experts” to shriek about how opinions on social media will mean PEOPLE GONNA DIE, or something:

Under Meta’s newly relaxed moderation policies, women can be compared to household objects, ethnic groups can be called “filth,” users can call for the exclusion of gay people from certain professions and people can refer to a transgender or non-binary person as an “it.”

Why it matters: Meta’s move to do away with third-party fact checkers made headlines, but some experts are even more troubled by policy shifts they say could chill online speech and lead to more real-world violence.

“Some experts,” they claim. Two of these “experts” are officials from GLAAD, which has demanded all sorts of prior restraint on arguments regarding the transgender debate. The only other “expert” is from some outfit named “Meedan,” which Axios claims is “a nonprofit that helps news and civil society organizations better contribute to public knowledge online.” It sounds a bit like other censorship-leaning organizations like Newsguard, a kind of speech-police effort that Americans are now rejecting emphatically. 

These two arguments are absurd on their face, no matter what “experts” say. The censorious “moderation” policies are what chilled free speech, not their elimination. How could less moderation chill free speech?  These “experts” argue that having free conversations will push some people off of social media, presumably because they don’t want to actually debate their views but prefer to exclude the views of others. 

You mean like what actually happened under Facebook’s previous policy?

“If Meta is truly committed to the free-speech principles that it recently announced, it will act swiftly to reinstate Mr. Ertelt’s, LifeNews’s, and Mrs. Covington’s accounts,” reads the letter from their legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

In May, Ertelt found his Facebook account had been permanently disabled after he posted a video showing a doctor performing a C-section. During the procedure, the unborn child can be seen grabbing the doctor’s finger.

“An unborn baby can’t be just a clump of cells when he or she is grabbing the doctor’s hand,” read the video’s caption.

Facebook permanently disabled Ertelt’s account and informed him the post failed to follow its Community Standards on “child sexual exploitation,” his attorneys said.

I’ve seen this video, and calling it “child sexual exploitation” is absurd. The only part of the child seen is its hand, and only the mother’s stomach is exposed. Furthermore, it seems highly unlikely that Facebook’s moderators picked up on this organically either. Opponents of the pro-life cause likely manipulated Facebook’s previous “moderation” policies by overwhelming complaints about this video as sexual exploitation as a strategy to silence Life News and others opposed to abortion. That strategy worked on Twitter too, until Elon Musk bought the platform and eliminated the “safety” regime that censored and suspended users for having the temerity to speak freely. 

But what about the viiiioooleeeence? Free speech exists in order to allow honest debates rather than violence. Political differences are deeply felt and held, and the safest way to deal with that tension is to allow people to speak their minds, no matter how detestable those opinions might be. It may seem astounding to have to explain that to a news organization, given the foundational nature of that particular liberty, and it is. Gagging people and excluding them from the public square incentivizes other strategies to effect political change, all of which are a lot more dangerous than allowing bad opinions to be aired and debated. 

If Axios’ “experts” don’t recognize that, then they should look for better “experts.” Better yet, they should stop claiming that activists are “experts” in any sense, and take a few civics courses to learn about the liberties that they wish to cover. Either that, or label it as the advertising on behalf of those activists, which in this case it truly is.