All glory to the non-violent Hypno Toad

I'm against free speech and in favour of censorship. There, that should annoy a lot of people and provoke suitable outrage.

Regular readers will know that I don't mean this in any unqualified sense, of course. That'd be silly. I just don't believe in the unlimited right to say whatever you want in any circumstance and get away with it scott-free. Like, if you were to sell toothpaste containing plutonium and not put that on the ingredients, you should go to prison as a result. Or if you were to declare that you were planning to murder someone, you should face a criminal investigation. Or if you were to say, "I hate rice pudding !" at the Annual General Meeting of the Rice Pudding Fan Club, you deserve pretty much whatever angry reaction you get.

Of course, the details get messy. Sometimes, contrary to popular memes, the government does have a right to intervene, sometimes it only means accepting that you don't have an automatic right to be either speak to or be heard by anyone you like just because you want to. Can you imagine if you did ? You'd be able to walk into the local Department of Landscape Architecture and declare in a booming voice, "Righto, chaps ! Here's a nice fresh corpse. Put those gardening tools down, for today I shall demonstrate the best way to conduct an autopsy !".

If people had such insane freedom to, they'd lose all freedom from. It'd be crazy. We would, quite literally, not have anything we could honestly call civilization. We'd have no freedom at all. We'd have barbarism.

Without censorship - be that in the form of law of by personal choice to look away - we'd have no rule of law. The right to shut people up is absolutely vital to a cohesive society. So I believe in freedom of speech in the same way I believe in freedom of action : under law.

The essence of this is that different regulations apply in different venues. I can say whatever I like among friends, no matter how hateful. I can be racist. I can be homophobic. I can have a vitriolic hatred of ginger cats or a genocidal mania against hedgehogs - anything. If I have evidence for my arguments, I can even present them in scientific conferences. But I don't expect all venues to be consequence-free. I absolutely cannot expect to start phoning up random people and say, "we need to KILL all the homophobic ginger hedgehogs !" and not expect to be sectioned. I can't yell homophobic things on the street at passers-by without expecting them to shout back. I can't shout, "all women are sluts !" in a job interview for a teaching position in a school for teenage girls and expect to be hired. If I was free to be a monster but no-one else was free to fight back, life would be unbearable.

(Frankly, the idea that I should be able to go around saying whatever I want in all situations is so utterly outrageous that you'd be forgiven for thinking I'm making a straw man. Alas, it isn't. People really do believe this is what "free speech" means.)

Now law is not an absolute. Its standards vary. If I say, "I think Nigel Farage looks like a toad", I can expect little or no response; if I say he should be eaten by piranhas I can expect this to be treated as hyperbole; if I orchestrate a campaign of abuse against him I can expect harsher sanctions; if I conspire to actually try and murder him I should expect imprisonment. Laws and regulations are flexible to the circumstances, not tyrannical absolutes.

Obviously this is messy. It has to be, that's life. But a slippery slope of ever-greater censorship  ? Hardly. If anything the progress of Western civilization over the last few centuries shows a tendency towards ever-increasing freedom*, not less.

* More accurately, there are certainly conditions under which censorship does become a slippery slope. The mistake I want to point out is in thinking that any limitation of any speech automatically starts us going down that road.

It's a peculiarity that so many are able to readily accept this when it comes to other matters but view speech as something which Must Not Be Touched, that any interference at all will inevitably lead to a Ministry of Truth or some such. As though there were some better "golden age" of now-lost freedoms. As though the freedom to make racial slurs in Edwardian England was more than fair compensation for being denied the right to advocate for gay rights. It's total bollocks - an arse-backwards view of history that very specifically targets whatever particular opinion happens to be relevant while ignoring the wider context; all too often, it's used to justify the freedom to hate those who've done them no harm while denying such people the very freedom they disingenuously claim to cherish.

It's absurd. If we can regulate behaviour directly, we can damn well regulate speech as well. And we do - for the most part, successfully. For as deeply flawed as the world is, it could be oh so very much worse.

But still, this is messy.

Take Twitter's policy against violence. Who was Twitter made for ? Ordinary people having conversations. Consequently, they allow for hyperbole. Presumably if I were to tweet that I think certain politicians ought to be shot into the Sun from a great big cannon, they'd understand that that wasn't a direct appeal to Elon Musk to start working on said cannon. Even if I say, "build that cannon, Elon, or there WILL be consequences !", they'll know I don't mean it. But if I start saying something which sounds more like a genuine threat, they'll step in.

This policy is largely sensible. In the online world, where we don't know anyone nearly as well as in real life, extra safeguards need to be taken : if I directly threaten someone, it makes sense to presume a sincere intent unless if can be clearly demonstrated that I didn't mean it. And the target audience matters. A public post is, roughly, equivalent to yelling through a megaphone on a public street, and if you were to yell, "I'M GONNA TEAR YOU A NEW ONE, SONNY !" on the street, you'd certainly not question it if an officer were at the very least take you aside for a quiet word.

If, on the other hand, you yelled something similar in a boxing ring, or during a hockey match, all you'd get is - at most - a referee telling you to calm down. People make threats largely to prevent violence, to issue a warning - not as a prelude to actual violence. It takes a lot to transform anger into action.

The venue matters a great deal to how we interpret the meaning of the words. Indeed, social media itself seems to amplify the tendency towards even reaching the threat stage*. But the sincerity of the threat is not really the issue : if someone says something online that would be considered unacceptable in real life, then the emotional consequences at the other end are similar. To not act against such abuses would be blatantly unfair.

* Whether it goes beyond this is another matter entirely. Plausibly people need greater levels of hyperbole to make the same emotional impact in text as they could in person, due to the sheer amount of information lost. So it might just make them sound angrier but not actually be angrier.

Part of the difficulty is because there's no exact analogy for social media as a venue. A public post has no guarantee of being seen by everyone in the whole world, but this is technically possible. Its potential for reaching a large audience is vastly greater than yelling in the street. A direct private message is most similar to a private phone call, but still significantly easier to reshare. Yes, you can record phone calls and play them back to people, but this takes a great deal of effort - which is why you don't expect it to happen. With digital media, you don't have the right to expect the same degree of privacy simply due to the very nature of the technology, just as if you were to yell at someone on the bus, you shouldn't expect everyone else to cover their ears so you could have a private argument. It is inherently more public, and relies on you trusting the other guy not to spread it around. And posts to online communities are somewhat like conversations overheard in pubs or private clubs, but the differences are profound - the invitation and admissions process alone are wholly different. Social media, in the end, is a medium unto itself.

All this is important for what follows, but I'm in danger of digressing. The wider problem of surveillance - whether the messaging service has a right to examine your data - isn't really what I want to look at here, it's that specific problem of violent messages.

The heart of it is that there is a legitimate use for violence and for the glorification of violence. Think of Eowyn killing the Witch-King, or the terrorist attacks of suffragettes, or the slave uprising of Spartacus, or the American War of Independence, or the battle or Marathon, or the destruction of the Death Star. Fiction and reality alike glorify violence because sometimes it is glorious, or at least necessary. Without a violent response to violent injustice, often that injustice would only persist. Turning the other cheek is entirely laudable, but it doesn't always work. This is particularly problematic when the law permits injustice and peaceful attempts at reform have failed.

So our history and fiction are soaked in it. Many of our now-basic rights were only won - could only have been won - through violence.

Much of it, of course, was not in the least bit glorious but utterly horrific. The genocide of the Kkmer Rouge, the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of witches, the slave trade, and countless other episodes are sorry affairs indeed. The point is that violence in itself cannot be objectively said to be glorious or horrific. It depends on context.

Twitter's specific policy, however, is largely sensible. It is concerned with specific, credible threats against real individuals, not against vaguer ideals. It does not state much specifically about the glorification of violence, but presumably the same basic rules apply : Lord of the Rings gifs should be okay, posting pictures of statues of ancient Roman generals is fine, even hyperbole about hated public figures is probably okay too.

What, though, if you want to organise a violent revolution ? What if you feel you have no choice but to fight violence with violence ?

What bothered me about the recent infamous tweet about looting and shooting (the origin of the phrase being something I was utterly unaware of) was that surely that the President of the US is sometimes going to find advocating and even glorifying violence unavoidable. Would "shock and awe" have been banned under Twitter's rules ? If it came from the source, then I assume so. And it struck me as a bit odd if official policy couldn't be discussed on Twitter : that would reduce the ability to protest.

This is where Twitter breaks down, for the simple reason that it's not a news service. Twitter can take action against individuals for making threats against each other; it can't take action against government policy. My simple conclusion is that this makes it a really, really stupid place to announce government policy. Discussing existing policy ? Sure. Making it the official source for the announcement itself ? No, because sometimes its own rules would prohibit it from doing so.

Therefore the answer to the "President's" threats and would-be revolutionaries is the same : don't do it on Twitter.

Again, the venue matters. Just as digital media is clearly unsuitable for discussions that need total privacy, so too is it a mistake to use Twitter for official policy announcements. Its whole structure makes it no more sensible as a vehicle for official announcements than releasing messages in little tubes strapped to thousands of carrier pigeons or a bunch of very sleepy frogs. Yes, you could do that. You certainly have the right to do that. But it wouldn't be a good idea.

What, though, if the "President" just wants to tell us his private "thoughts" ? Again, a ridiculously small character limit makes this manifestly a poor choice. It's fine for posting pictures of lolcats or commenting on celebrity hairstyles, but when absolutely clarity is required - as it is when we need to know if a Dear Leader is being serious or not - it's as daft as using the Windings font. You can't reduce moral issues or official policies to the simplicity which is Twitter's main feature.

(That said, the "President" himself seems to think you can reduce complex moral issues to unintelligible gibberish, but that's another story.)

I've stayed well away from setting out the conditions under which I'd consider violence to be acceptable, only noting that such conditions do exist, because I doubt I could do it here anyway. For that I'd need books and conversation, not a blog. Quite likely my own initial views would shift on hearing what others had to say, no matter how carefully I thought about it beforehand. But Twitter ? Ridiculous. People do use it to generate threads of intelligent statements, and some of them are even very good, but... why ? Fer gods' sake, why ? Write a blog ! Write a Facebook post ! Just use a suitable frickin' format instead of something designed for meme-length quotes ! Link to something suitable on Twitter by all means, but don't do it directly on Twitter itself - that's ludicrous.

Accepting that official announcements should not be made via Twitter, there remains the tricky problem of whether existing policy should be discussed there. Clearly Twitter ought, if it's not going to impose double standards, to take a much harsher line against the "President", but what should it do when official US policy violates its terms of use ? Isn't it also a valuable tool for exposing injustice ?

I believe its official policy could be interpreted thusly : discussion or simple regurgitation of an official policy would not violate its terms of use. If you quote someone else saying they're going to enact violence, you are not necessarily yourself participating in it (fake news is different, and needs to be removed entirely). The violence is thereby exposed for people to make their own judgement on it. A politician would then be able to, say, declare war in some other media and link to it on Twitter, providing they don't include any promotion of violence within the text of the tweet itself. Members of the public would then be able to express support for the policy, but not be able to tweet violent slogans or suchlike. They could set out why they agreed with the policy, but not engage in the actual promotion of the policy. They could say, for example, that "this war will keep our country safe", but not, "let's kill a bunch of people".

As I said, it's messy. I don't claim that it's a definitive answer.

It's important to have safe spaces where people can discuss whatever the hell they like. But it's also important that not all spaces are safe : that the Rice Pudding Fan Club isn't inundated internally with messages about the latest advancements in lithium battery technology, but that outside of their circle they can expect criticism for their strange obsession with an unpleasant desert. So the President can, for better or worse, set violent policy - he just shouldn't do it directly on Twitter. And let's face it, this particular idiot should have been blocked there long ago if Twitter isn't to impose double standards.

Finally, given the difficulties of how we view private social media companies as analogies to traditional forums, it's not at all obvious whether we should expect them to be completely unrestricted or heavily monitored. We don't expect local pubs or community centres to host any old group who wants to use their facilities, so why should we expect privately-run social media companies to allow online organised gatherings ? There's no particular reason to expect this. Though it's a double-edged sword : sometimes we need a violent response to correct an injustice. Whether you want to start or stop a revolution, then, Twitter might not be the best place to go.