Censorship is a dangerous game.
No one with liberal or left sympathies wants to give hate and bigotry a platform. But dealing in terms so malleable and easily contorted means that attempts to simply banish unpleasant things from our discourse by decree often means letting people with vastly different ideas of what those words mean decide what should and shouldn’t be allowed to say.
A recent case illustrates this conundrum. Google’s decision to demonetize libertarian website Zero Hedge, and put the right-wing Federalist on notice over offensive content in their respective comments sections received a lot of attention last week. The Right was unsurprisingly furious, seeing in the move yet more confirmation of their vastly overblown theory of an anti-conservative bias among social media companies. Yet the move also saw well-reasoned pushback from the Left. After all, the Federalist may publish some appalling dreck, but do we really want unaccountable tech giants threatening media outlets over content they deem unacceptable, particularly when it’s in their comments sections of all things?
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