Once Again: the Contradictions of Liberal Notions of "Free Speech"

Some time ago, I wrote something about the liberal notion of free speech called Whose Speech and for Whom.  At the moment it's one of my more popular posts [oddly enough, the rather strident entry about the attractiveness of the young Stalin is the most popular] and now and then, when I chase down the links that appear in my traffic, I discover cross-postings where it is either enjoyed or reviled.  Generally, my reason for writing it in the first place was because I was growing rather tired of the uncritical acceptance of liberal notions of freedom––and the entire liberal ideology of "free speech"––amongst the internet left.  Indeed, those internet leftists whose entire anti-capitalist praxis appeared limited primarily to internet forums and/or university class rooms were the same leftists who tended to yammer on about some platonic notion of free speech, complain about "censorship" whenever they were banned from anti-capitalist forums for problematic speechifying, and who seemed to think that Noam Chomsky's thoughts about censorship and free speech were the standard of anti-capitalist thinking even though these were nothing more than yet another rearticulation of J.S. Mill's "marketplace of ideas."  I'm not going to bother going over the arguments I made in the above linked piece; it speaks for itself.

What interests me now, though, is the contradiction intrinsic to the liberal notion of free speech that I've briefly touched upon at various points.  A contradiction that may or may not be traceable to Mill's On Liberty, evident in the story he tells about the corn dealer; a contradiction that should lead us to ask, as my previous piece demanded, whose speech and for whom.  And just recently a paradigmatic example of this contradiction manifested within one of the hallowed halls of internet free speechifying, Reddit, where "redditors" like to wax eloquent about their sacred right to free speech and imagine they are being greatly censored every time reactionary and retrograde speech is questioned.

Basically the story unfolds as follows: one infamous redditor who was responsible for racist and misogynist trolling––who went so far as to create a forum dedicated to "jailbait" where participants were encouraged to post sexualized pictures of girls under the age of eighteen without these girls' permission––whose right to "free speech" has been defended loudly by other Reddit participants (who, while arguing they disagree with his repugnant views, thought that it was a hallmark of freedom to allow such backwards posting), has just been outed in a Gawker article by Adrian Chen.  Chen names this reactionary scumbag (no surprise, he's a middle-aged white man retired from the US military), points out that the top Reddit administrators protected him and even gave him a measure of authority in the Reddit community, explains precisely the racist and misogynist behaviour of the man, and then states: "Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez [the Reddit name of this troll] is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit's role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women. I'm okay with that."

Reddit likes to fight theoretical censorship by engaging in literal censorship

Chen's above statement turned out to be prophetic.  Not only has the comment string on this article been filled with irate people complaining about the violation of this scumbag's right to free speech, and not only has Chen been receiving hate mail from angry redditors, but the top Reddit administrators have actually banned linking to the Gawker, and specifically this article, from within Reddit.  Indeed, as a participant in the "communism" subreddit, where the moderators do not abide by this uncritical free speech bullshit, I tried to post a link to Chen's article and discovered that my submission was blocked.  So instead I posted about this link and how it was blocked and attempted, along with other progressive redditors, to link to the article in the comment string.  The /r/communism mods discovered that it was difficult to keep comments that linked to this article up for long, that there was some bot that alerted their activities to the administration of Reddit, and that this "community" that is supposedly dedicated to free speech can become literally censorious if necessary.

So here's one of the ironies of the liberal notion of free speech manifesting within a terrain where it is held up as the highest good.  Hate and rape speech, we are told, should be protected as "free speech" and censoring it is evil; hating on hate and rape speech, however, doesn't count as "free speech" and should be censored.  Maybe the logic here, considering the way the minds of liberal ideologues work, is that speaking out against speech constitutes some sort of rhetorical censorship and is thus "evil" and so to suppress it does not count as censorship since one cannot censor censorship… this is precisely the absurd level of reasoning liberal contradictions can end up encouraging!

Whatever the case, this reaction to the outing of a reactionary who once enjoyed the protection of the Reddit rulers (Chen hilariously compares them to feudal lords) should tell us something about the entire liberal notion of freedom behind the liberal conception of free speech.  Whereas the privacy and autonomy of "Violentacrez" matters––and irate redditors are complaining that he has been outed and that his private life and job will be affected––the privacy and autonomy of, for example, all the girls this troll and his friends pornified on their despicable "jailbait" subreddit apparently doesn't matter.  A middle-aged privileged man has the freedom to rape-bait but the girls he targeted do not have the freedom to not be rape-baited.  Here, "freedom" ends up being in line with structural oppression.  Whose speech and for whom?  A misogynist's speech for misogynist ends… Interesting how people obsessed with the liberal notion of free speech end up spending more time defending reactionaries than the victims of these reactionaries, going so far as to use the very mechanism of censorship they claimed they were against in the first place.

But maybe this all does go back to Mill's story of the corn dealer where, according to Mill, we are allowed to publish pamphlets about how said corn dealer is starving the poor but are not allowed to do so in front of the corn dealer's home with an assembled mob.  Perhaps Chen crossed the line in outing this troll, thus refusing to abide by the polite rules of the marketplace of ideas.  Perhaps Reddit's censorship of Chen's article, and of people who support Chen's position, is simply their way to suppress the metaphorical unruly mob outside of the corn dealer's home… But really, I don't think they've thought it through, or are that theoretically sophisticated––more likely they are just doing the only thing they know how to do despite all of the "free speech" values they've maintained: censor when these values turn upon themselves.

So again I maintain what I wrote in my previous article on free speech: "There is no freedom and no speech that is outside of class struggle.  To demand the freedom of the oppressed and global majority is to demand the removal of the freedom of the oppressor to oppress; to demand the free expression of the oppressed classes is to also demand the suppression of reactionary anti-person 'free' expression."