One way of looking at freedom of speech is atomic: treating each individual act of free speech as an equal component of the overall freedom of our discourse. That’s kind of the default position on Twitter, and in the section of American culture that it grew out of. It’s an assumption that is all but baked into the 140-character platform¹. But it’s also the basis of a lot of arguments advocating an unmoderated online culture as a whole, or pushing back against individual acts of moderation all over the web.

The problem, as Twitter so ably illustrates, is that treating free speech as a collection of free speeches can actually diminish the collective freedom of speech. There are conversations I can’t have on Twitter, because I’m afraid of the atomic acts of free speech that I will get in response. Some of them will be genuine tests of the value of my speech, but others may be rape threats, doxxing, a flood of vicious and pernicious abuse. And yet more will inhabit the shady borderland between the two: arguably legitimate things disproportionately aimed at particular targets².

But because absolutes are easy, atomic acts of free speech are easy to defend, and are defended widely on the internet. Actual adults who can deal with nuance elsewhere can be surprisingly simplistic on the topic.

(musical interlude)

Jefferson:
We fought for these ideals; we shouldn’t settle for less
These are wise words, enterprising men quote ‘em…

Hamilton:
That was a real nice declaration
Welcome to the present, we’re running a real nation.

I’m being a little unfair here. Many of the people who defend free speech on an atomic level do so because of the risks of controlling it for any kind of “greater good”. And they’re right: most of the greater goods that have been used to control atomic free speech have been neither great nor good. But the answer is not to give up, any more than the answer to bad government is no government. The answer is to do better.

Because the model we’re using is broken. The awareness of its brokenness haunts our entire discourse³. Indeed, many of the people who abuse the model draw their passion from a fear of being silenced, of not being heard.

(musical interlude)

Jefferson:
if New York’s in debt—
Why should Virginia bear it? Uh! Our debts are paid, I’m afraid
Don’t tax the South cuz we got it made in the shade…

Hamilton:
Hey neighbor,
Your debts are paid cuz you don’t pay for labor
“We plant seeds in the South. We create.”
Yeah, keep ranting
We know who’s really doing the planting.

Jefferson’s portrayal of the South as a financially stable “land of the free” is, as Hamilton points out, based on keeping certain costs off the books. He can do this because in Jefferson’s Virginia the people paying those costs aren’t as important as the people reaping the benefits⁴.

In the same way, the “wealth” of atomic freedom of speech has costs that don’t appear on the absolutist balance sheet. No individual has the strength of heart and mind, the time and resources, to deal with the full range of possible responses to their speech. The fact that this full range is more likely to be deployed against certain speakers⁵ is the equivalent of Jefferson’s financial accounting⁶: important costs are being kept off the books.

Add those costs in, and it’s clear that our speech, taken as a whole, is actually desperately poor, deeply unfree, silenced, squashed.

I can’t solve the internet as a whole. I can’t solve our entire discourse. I’m a moderator on a few sites and a participant in a few conversations. But here, for what it’s worth, is my approach in those places.

• Free speech is a complex molecule. You can’t just pile up atoms of individual free speech and hope they’ll crystallize into it.
• It is an objective that we cannot reach, but must continuously strive toward anyway. It’s a form of adulting. It’s hard. We screw up, individually and collectively, and must then try to clean up the mess and to learn to do better in the future. But no worthwhile thing is easy.
• This striving takes the form of tuning the balance between competing discourses. Every decision we make protects some voices and silences others. If I as a moderator constrain the shouters, they are constrained, but the people who leave the room when the shouting starts may stay. If I let the shouters shout, those other people leave.
• Inaction is also a choice. Choosing not to moderate is also silencing voices. It’s simply letting the mob choose which voices get silenced instead of doing it yourself.
• If you make choices, you need to hold yourself appropriately accountable for their consequences. This doesn’t mean the trolls don’t own their words, of course—they’re accountable for their own trolling. But you’re accountable for letting them stay in any conversation you control.
• Now while we’re at the adults’ table, let’s just admit that choosing the voices you protect and prioritize means choosing the conversation that will take place in your space. And that choice, like the choice of voices, excludes as well as protects. No community can hold all conversations.

And here we get to a problem I cannot solve with a blog post, a few bullet points, and a couple of stray Hamilton quotes. What we really need for free speech is a varied ecosystem of different moderators, different regimes, different conversations. How do those spaces relate to one another when Twitter, Reddit, and the chans flatten the subcultural walls between them? Have we the tools or the will to foster the kind of genuine respect for disagreement, trust in disagreement, that that would require?

Probably not. But as adults, we still have to try to do our fallible best in a complex world.

1. This is not your standard “damn Twitter and its damn character limits killing depth of communication” rant⁶. The brevity that strips nuance and allows decontextualized comments to wander through our discourse like visitors from the Oort Cloud also brings a kind of clarity, and rewards a particular sort of wit. At its best, it’s a vast collective parlor game.
2. Hic sunt otariinae
3. This includes people all over the political landscape, from TERFs to economically precarious Christian- and (historically) Republican-identifying Americans. People in otherwise violent disagreement are united in a fear of being silenced⁸.
4. We’re still working on a true balancing of those books. Ironically, one of the places we’re doing the sums is Twitter itself.
5. And it’s so often the same speakers: the poor and powerless of every kind.
6. I am not equating the consequences of even the most horrible avalanche of online abuse with slavery here, by the way. But there’s a core problem that the two share: they each work because some people are more valued than others.
7. This lawn here? The land it grows on predates me and will outlast me. I just mow it while I live here. Come sit with me on it and let’s have a conversation.
8. And this conversation is not a referendum on the realism of anyone’s fear. People genuinely feel it, and act differently because of it. It’s a real factor in the conversation, a real rock in these rapids.