"A statement may be both true and dangerous. The previous sentence is such a statement." - David Friedman
Freedom of speech is a topic that many internet communities have struggled with over the last two decades. Cryptocurrency and blockchain communities, a major part of their raison d'etre being censorship resistance, are especially poised to value free speech very highly, and yet, over the last few years, the extremely rapid growth of these communities and the very high financial and social stakes involved have repeatedly tested the application and the limits of the concept.
In this post, I aim to disentangle some of the contradictions, and make a case what the norm of "free speech" really stands for.
A common, and in my own view frustrating, argument that I often hear is that "freedom of speech" is exclusively a legal restriction on what governments can act against, and has nothing to say regarding the actions of private entities such as corporations, privately-owned platforms, internet forums and conferences.
One of the larger examples of "private censorship" in cryptocurrency communities was the decision of Theymos, the moderator of the /r/bitcoin subreddit, to start heavily moderating the subreddit, forbidding arguments in favor of increasing the Bitcoin blockchain's transaction capacity via a hard fork.
Here is a timeline of the censorship as catalogued by John Blocke: https://medium.com/johnblocke/a-brief-and-incomplete-history-of-censorship-in-r-bitcoin-c85a290fe43
Here is Theymos's post defending his policies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3h9cq4/its_time_for_a_break_about_the_recent_mess/, including the now infamous line "If 90% of /r/Bitcoin users find these policies to be intolerable, then I want these 90% of /r/Bitcoin users to leave".
A common strategy used by defenders of Theymos's censorship was to say that heavy-handed moderation is okay because /r/bitcoin is "a private forum" owned by Theymos, and so he has the right to do whatever he wants in it; those who dislike it should move to other forums:
And it's true that Theymos has not broken any laws by moderating his forum in this way. But to most people, it's clear that there is still some kind of free speech violation going on. So what gives? First of all, it's crucially important to recognize that freedom of speech is not just a law in some countries. It's also a social principle.
And the underlying goal of the social principle is the same as the underlying goal of the law: to foster an environment where the ideas that win are ideas that are good, rather than just ideas that happen to be favored by people in a position of power. And governmental power is not the only kind of power that we need to protect from; there is also a corporation's power to fire someone, an internet forum moderator's power to delete almost every post in a discussion thread, and many other kinds of power hard and soft.
So what is the underlying social principle here? Quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Slatestarcodex elaborates:
That said, sometimes there is a rationale for "safe spaces" where people who, for whatever reason, just don't want to deal with arguments of a particular type, can congregate and where those arguments actually do get silenced. Perhaps the most innocuous of all is spaces like ethresear.ch where posts get silenced just for being "off topic" to keep the discussion focused. But there's also a dark side to the concept of "safe spaces"; as Ken White writes:
Aha. So making your own safe space off in a corner is totally fine, but there is also this concept of a "public space", and trying to turn a public space into a safe space for one particular special interest is wrong. So what is a "public space"? It's definitely clear that a public space is not just "a space owned and/or run by a government"; the concept of privately owned public spaces is a well-established one.
This is true even informally: it's a common moral intuition, for example, that it's less bad for a private individual to commit violations such as discriminating against races and genders than it is for, say, a shopping mall to do the same. In the case or the /r/bitcoin subreddit, one can make the case, regardless of who technically owns the top moderator position in the subreddit, that the subreddit very much is a public space. A few arguments particularly stand out:
If, instead, Theymos had created a subreddit called /r/bitcoinsmallblockers, and explicitly said that it was a curated space for small block proponents and attempting to instigate controversial hard forks was not welcome, then it seems likely that very few people would have seen anything wrong about this.
They would have opposed his ideology, but few (at least in blockchain communities) would try to claim that it's improper for people with ideologies opposed to their own to have spaces for internal discussion. But back in reality, Theymos tried to "annex a public space and demand that people within the space confirm to his private norms", and so we have the Bitcoin community block size schism, a highly acrimonious fork and chain split, and now a cold peace between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
About a year ago at Deconomy I publicly shouted down Craig Wright, a scammer claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, finishing my explanation of why the things he says make no sense with the question "why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?"
Of course, Craig Wright's partisans replied back with.... accusations of censorship:
Did I try to "silence" Craig Wright? I would argue, no. One could argue that this is because "Deconomy is not a public space", but I think the much better argument is that a conference is fundamentally different from an internet forum.
An internet forum can actually try to be a fully neutral medium for discussion where anything goes; a conference, on the other hand, is by its very nature a highly curated list of presentations, allocating a limited number of speaking slots and actively channeling a large amount of attention to those lucky enough to get a chance to speak. A conference is an editorial act by the organizers, saying "here are some ideas and views that we think people really should be exposed to and hear".
Every conference "censors" almost every viewpoint because there's not enough space to give them all a chance to speak, and this is inherent to the format; so raising an objection to a conference's judgement in making its selections is absolutely a legitimate act.
This extends to other kinds of selective platforms. Online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube already engage in active selection through algorithms that influence what people are more likely to be recommended. Typically, they do this for selfish reasons, setting up their algorithms to maximize "engagement" with their platform, often with unintended byproducts like promoting flat earth conspiracy theories.
So given that these platforms are already engaging in (automated) selective presentation, it seems eminently reasonable to criticize them for not directing these same levers toward more pro-social objectives, or at the least pro-social objectives that all major reasonable political tribes agree on (eg. quality intellectual discourse).
Additionally, the "censorship" doesn't seriously block anyone's ability to learn Craig Wright's side of the story; you can just go visit their website, here you go: https://coingeek.com/. If someone is already operating a platform that makes editorial decisions, asking them to make such decisions with the same magnitude but with more pro-social criteria seems like a very reasonable thing to do.
A more recent example of this principle at work is the #DelistBSV ampaign, where some cryptocurrency exchanges, most famously Binance, removed support for trading BSV (the Bitcoin fork promoted by Craig Weight). Once again, many people, even reasonable people, accused this campaign of being an exercise in censorship, raising parallels to credit card companies blocking Wikileaks:
I personally have been a critic of the power wielded by centralized exchanges. Should I oppose #DelistBSV on free speech grounds? I would argue no, it's ok to support it, but this is definitely a much closer call.
Many #DelistBSV participants like Kraken are definitely not "anything-goes" platforms; they already make many editorial decisions about which currencies they accept and refuse. Kraken only accepts about a dozen currencies, so they are passively "censoring" almost everyone. Shapeshift supports more currencies but it does not support SPANK, or even KNC. So in these two cases, delisting BSV is more like reallocation of a scarce resource (attention/legitimacy) than it is censorship.
Binance is a bit different; it does accept a very large array of cryptocurrencies, adopting a philosophy much closer to anything-goes, and it does have a unique position as market leader with a lot of liquidity.
That said, one can argue two things in Binance's favor. First of all, censorship is retaliating against a truly malicious exercise of censorship on the part of core BSV community members when they threatened critics like Peter McCormack with legal letters (see Peter's response); in "anarchic" environments with large disagreements on what the norms are, "an eye for an eye" in-kind retaliation is one of the better social norms to have because it ensures that people only face punishments that they in some sense have through their own actions demonstrated they believe are legitimate.
Furthermore, the delistings won't make it that hard for people to buy or sell BSV; Coinex has said that they will not delist (and I would actually oppose second-tier "anything-goes" exchanges delisting). But the delistings do send a strong message of social condemnation of BSV, which is useful and needed. So there's a case to support all delistings so far, though on reflection, Binance refusing to delist "because freedom" would have also been not as unreasonable as it seems at first glance.
It's in general absolutely potentially reasonable to oppose the existence of a concentration of power, but support that concentration of power being used for purposes that you consider prosocial as long as that concentration exists; see Bryan Caplan's exposition on reconciling supporting open borders and also supporting anti-ebola restrictions for an example in a different field.
Opposing concentrations of power only requires that one believe those concentrations of power to be on balance harmful and abusive; it does not mean that one must oppose all things that those concentrations of power do.
If someone manages to make a completely permissionless cross-chain decentralized exchange that facilitates trade between any asset and any other asset, then being "listed" on the exchange would not send a social signal, because everyone is listed; and I would support such an exchange existing even if it supports trading BSV. The thing that I do support is BSV being removed from already exclusive positions that confer higher tiers of legitimacy than simple existence.
So to conclude: censorship in public spaces bad, even if the public spaces are non-governmental; censorship in genuinely private spaces (especially spaces that are not "defaults" for a broader community) can be okay; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying access to them, bad; ostracizing projects with the goal and effect of denying them scarce legitimacy can be okay.
Originally published as On Free Speech with the WTFPL license
Create your free account to unlock your custom reading experience.
Read this article:
Does Freedom of Speech Exist in Cryptocurrency Communities? - hackernoon.com
- Here's what the law says about protesting on Texas college campuses - The Texas Tribune - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- The awkward truth about sex and free speech | Nina Welsch - The Critic - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Get the Facts: How far does the First Amendment go? - WDSU New Orleans - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- NC school adopts free speech policy after firing professor who opposed critical theory - ADF Media - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Biden's Government Takeover of the Internet Threatens Freedom of Speech - RealClearPolicy - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Professor tackles subject of limiting freedom to express - Yahoo News Canada - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Louisiana Tech earns top rating for free speech - Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Freedom of speech 'under assault' at Palestine protests in US universities - The National - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Is TikTok Protected Speech Or Threat To Americans? Wyoming Legislators Split - Cowboy State Daily - April 25th, 2024 [April 25th, 2024]
- Free Speech Aids Racial Justice. Activists Must Defend It. | Opinion - Harvard Crimson - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Progressives Are Ditching Free Speech To Fight 'Disinformation' - Reason - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- There is a way out of cancel culture but it's not free speech - Times Higher Education - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Editor's take: Limiting hate speech not a First Amendment violation - The Pajaronian - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Israel's Proposed 'Terror Incitement' Law Is a Dangerous Threat to Freedom of Speech - Haaretz Editorial - Haaretz - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Colorado bill tasking attorney general to study online 'misinformation' sparks First Amendment debate - coloradopolitics.com - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- 10 Worst Censors: 2024 | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Harvard University's Lifetime Censorship Award: Impact on Freedom of Speech and Journalism - Medriva - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Reading is freedom of speech, says 'ABCs of Book Banning' director - KCRW's This...Is Interesting - Podcast en iVoox - iVoox - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Freedom of speech or lack of civility? Resident perturbed by others berating Killeen City Council and mayor - The Killeen Daily Herald - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- Harvard Students Should Know Freedom Of Speech Is Not Freedom From Consequences - The Federalist - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- FIRE launches six-figure free speech campaign with primetime ... - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- UGS responds to free speech concerns on campus - The Stanford Daily - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- UCI Year of Free Speech kicks off with virtual event - UCI News - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- Book review: A Constitution To Keep: Sedition And Free Speech In ... - Maktoob media - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- Protestors, supporters gather on HUB lawn for Riley Gaines' Free ... - The Daily Collegian - October 16th, 2023 [October 16th, 2023]
- Editorial: When is free speech not free on college campuses? - TribLIVE - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- How do you handle free speech issues in higher education, popular discourse? - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Free speech protections are under threat in Texas Legislature - The Dallas Morning News - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Should Irish universities introduce mandatory free speech classes? - The Irish Times - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Florida House approves bill that would change rules around campus ... - WUFT - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Free speech bill 'could protect extreme views' - Times Higher Education - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Ronald Collins and Ronnie Marmo: Comedy clubs are free speech ... - Independent Record - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- A notable foundation for freedom of speech - Newsday - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Troy, Alabama A&M receive poor 'red' rating from campus free ... - 1819 News - April 27th, 2023 [April 27th, 2023]
- Freedom of Speech Pros and Cons: What Both Sides Think - March 8th, 2023 [March 8th, 2023]
- What is the freedom of speech? - Alliance Defending Freedom - January 25th, 2023 [January 25th, 2023]
- freedom of speech | Wex | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute - January 25th, 2023 [January 25th, 2023]
- First Amendment: Freedom of Speech | LII / Legal Information Institute - January 25th, 2023 [January 25th, 2023]
- Freedom of speech online: What are the Florida and Texas laws the US top court could hear a challenge to - The Indian Express - January 25th, 2023 [January 25th, 2023]
- Elon Musk says new Twitter policy is freedom of speech & not freedom ... - January 4th, 2023 [January 4th, 2023]
- CNN Calls Freedom of Speech 'Nonsense' in Moronic Rant - December 12th, 2022 [December 12th, 2022]
- Ex-CNN journo and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa explains why ... - December 12th, 2022 [December 12th, 2022]
- Hate speech - Wikipedia - November 27th, 2022 [November 27th, 2022]
- Freedom of Speech and Expression | CSCE - November 25th, 2022 [November 25th, 2022]
- Why Is Freedom Of Speech Important? The Relevance Explained - November 25th, 2022 [November 25th, 2022]
- 'Freedom Of Speech, But Not Freedom Of Reach': Musk Reinstates Kathy Griffin And Jordan Peterson Amid New Policy But Not Trump Yet - Forbes - November 21st, 2022 [November 21st, 2022]
- Freedom of speech is in jeopardy - The Ridgefield Press - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- The Alex Jones trap: How 'owning the libs' can turn into a self-own for conservatives - Washington Examiner - October 15th, 2022 [October 15th, 2022]
- Just released: The 2022-2023 College Free Speech Rankings - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Russian Court's Ban of Newspaper Novaya Gazeta is a Punch in the Face of Freedom of Speech - Novinite.com - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Bangladeshi Editor Rifat Munim Supports Salman Rushdie's Freedom Of Speech: 'Why React To The Book Or The Cartoons In This Childish Way? Why Show... - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Crikey! The exclamation of Free Speech - RadioInfo Australia - Radioinfo - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Batley row 'shows how extremists are using blasphemy to attack free speech' - The Telegraph - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- Expansion of Title IX Tramples First Amendment - California Globe - September 7th, 2022 [September 7th, 2022]
- BRACK: S.C. Senate is poking free speech bear on abortion Statehouse Report - Statehouse Report - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Will AG Ken Paxton join the fight for freedom of speech? - Wilson County News - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- The UK Government Wants to Scrap the Human Rights Act. Here's What to Know. - Global Citizen - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Cancel culture empowers the powerful at everyone elses expense - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Repressive executive order from UNC Chapel Hill student government cuts off funding for pro-life individuals, causes - Foundation for Individual... - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Editorial: Alex Jones' lessons on the First and Sixth Amendments - CT Insider - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- NEW for 7/29: How abortion now works in S.C., and more Statehouse Report - Statehouse Report - July 29th, 2022 [July 29th, 2022]
- Why Does The State Panic Over Free Speech? - The Friday Times - July 27th, 2022 [July 27th, 2022]
- How to Fix the Bias Against Free Speech on Campus - The Atlantic - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Universities are in denial over the free-speech crisis - Spiked - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Who Really Benefits From the First Amendment? - Tablet Magazine - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Legal Eagle: Is free speech abused to flout others rights? - Free Press Journal - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Free speech 'stifled' as universities cancel record number of speakers - The Telegraph - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- The Online Safety Bill could lead to the biggest curtailment of free speech in modern history - The Telegraph - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- LAWSUIT: Professor sues University of Washington after admins punish him for 'inappropriate' opinion - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- VICTORY: Art institute reverses expulsion for student who retweeted sexual art - Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - July 17th, 2022 [July 17th, 2022]
- Twitter and Freedom of Speech | News, Sports, Jobs - The Mining Gazette - Daily Mining Gazette - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- Amber Heard, the ACLU, and the Future of Free Speech - Reason - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- In my view: Freedom of speech is important - Slough and Windsor Observer - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- New AGB Resource Prepares Higher Education Board Members to Balance Freedom of Speech with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - PR Web - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- 'What's the point inviting me on!' Piers Morgan and student erupt in free speech row - Express - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- Binance CEO says 'free speech is very hard to define' - Business Insider - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- The Deeper Significance of Justice Thomas's Second Amendment Opinion - The Epoch Times - June 26th, 2022 [June 26th, 2022]
- Twitter and freedom of speech - Washington Times - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Bill of Rights to strengthen freedom of speech and curb bogus human rights claims - GOV.UK - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]
- Twitter and the freedom of speech | Opinion | journal-spectator.com - Wharton Journal Spectator - June 22nd, 2022 [June 22nd, 2022]