4 The Times Magazineecently, while researching
a fashion piece, I came
across the history of the
Doc Marten boot. It’s
an iconic item, primarily
because it’s just a good
idea. It works for everyone:
children, teens, badass
nannas. But, over time,
what the boot “means”, and who uses it, has
changed. Over the years, it’s been adopted
by punks, 2 Tone fans, supermodels and
schoolchildren. Depending on who was
wearing it, and when, you might either adore
them (little toddler splashing in a puddle – so
cute), or fear them (a skinhead with swastika
tattoos, preparing to kick someone’s head in).
Without wanting to sound too much
like Rowan Atkinson’s vicar on Not the Nine
O’Clock News, desperate to segue from a
populist topic into a more sombre meditation
on Christianity (“And, in a way, Formula One
is a bit like Jesus, isn’t it?”), the classic Doc
Marten boot is a bit like “freedom of speech”,
isn’t it? Fundamentally a useful idea – humans
should be able to talk about their ideas and
experiences! – over the years, the boot of
“freedom of speech” has had some rum
feet wedged into it, and has been walked
to some odd places.
Currently, in western society, the place the
phrase “freedom of speech” gets used most is,
overwhelmingly, online and on social media.
And it is most commonly used by people who
want to say things that, bluntly, come at a
cost to others: antisemites, racists, misogynists,
homophobes and trolls. “Are you against
FREEDOM OF SPEECH?” is the repeated
cry, when others protest at something abusive,
divisive, dangerous, cruel or just plain untrue.
“It’s ironic, watching liberals trying to shut
down FREEDOM OF SPEECH!”
When controversial “George from George
& Mildred” lookalike Laurence Fox recently
launched his political party, Reclaim, its key
aspect was to “protect freedom of speech”.Similarly, Toby Young’s Free Speech Union
was created actively to defend – for a fee
ranging between £49.95 and £250 a year- those whose controversial comments see
them at risk of being “no-platformed”.
While both men claim not to be bigoted,
merely “against wokeness”, it’s fascinating to
see that, in Britain, the two most prominent
people talking about “freedom of speech”
are both straight white men with high media
profiles who, so far as I can see, have always
said exactly what they liked about race, gender
and sexuality. At times, it’s hard to remember
that, in many other places in the world,
“freedom of speech” would be a phrase used
by absolutely powerless men and women
battling against laws that forbid them to
talk about who they love, which religion
they believe in, or to express their risky
disagreements with repressive governments.
The Free Speech Union has not yet, as far as
I’m aware, offered to step in and help Uighur
Muslims in concentration camps in China, or
dissidents in Hong Kong. Some days, I idly
wonder what would happen if I stumped up
the £250 for Russian opposition leader Alexei
Navalny’s Free Speech Union membership.
Would Young speak out and risk novichok
poisoning? It would be interesting to find out.
Anyway. I’m not here to talk about
what those who invoke “freedom of speech”
actually say because it tends to take ages and
get really messy.
I’m more interested what “freedom of
speech” actually means, on a practical level,on social media – platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, which have
come to be thought of as humanity’s town
square and our biggest marketplace of ideas.
That’s where “everyone” hangs out, right?
That’s where you can get a vague feel for
how “the people” think about various issues.
Newspapers regularly quote “one Twitter user,
@Nigel47474747” whenever they want to give
a “feel” of quotidian reaction. Currently, most
of the “freedom of speech” we talk about is
“freedom of speech on the internet”.
My question is: what does “freedom”
mean in this context? And what of freedom
of speech’s intertwined issue, which we never
address or even name: the “freedom to listen”?
I feel that freedom of speech doesn’t mean
anything if you can’t see both who is speaking
and who is listening.
The ability to be anonymous on social
media – the millions upon millions of accounts
that don’t have a headshot, and which go by
the familiar nomenclature formulation of
“FirstnameMcLotsOfNumbers” – means that
if social media is “a marketplace of ideas”,
you can’t see who’s selling or buying.
Tweet about a hot-button topic – Black
Lives Manner, feminism, trans rights,
antisemitism, the Labour Party – and your
timeline noticeably and instantly changes:
instead of people with headshots and full
names, there will be a sudden influx of these
anonymous posters, who all seem to speak in
the same way and use the same phrases. We
know there are numerous bot-farms in Russia,
Ukraine and Iran – one Russian operation was
found to be running more than 100 million
fake accounts and, in 2018, Twitter released
more than 9 million tweets from a single
Russian “troll farm”. All the analysis that’s
been conducted on these trolls and bots has
found that the overwhelming majority of their
tweets are right wing and are done with “the
intent to disrupt global politics”, and “infiltrate
and further polarise already polarised internet
communities on social media”.R
CAITLIN MORAN
I’VE LOST COUNT OF THE
DEATH THREATS I’VE HAD
My plan to defeat the Twitter trolls starts here
Every day I wonder
why someone doesn’t
create an alternative
social media platform
ROBERT WILSON