There are FOUR lights, Elon

How quickly free speech absolutism starts to resemble totalitarianism

Programming Note: This is the second installment of The Klonickles. I’m still figuring out how it’s all going to work, but for now it looks like it will be a weekly newsletter focused on online speech and law & technology plus a crazy Kate post-script (see below) for paid subscribers. Thanks for reading and thanks double for pay subscribing. The more you do, the more I have the freedom to research and write.

First, hold this in your head as you read

There’s a classic meme from Star Trek The Next Generation where Captain Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is being tortured by opposing forces who are shining four bright lights into his face. The Lead Bad Guy (Gul Madred) keeps telling Picard to say there are FIVE lights and each time he asks, Picard refuses, iconically screaming after much duress:

If you want to be all well-read about it, the Four Lights scene is supposedly an homage to George Orwell’s 1984 and the moment in which the protagonist, Winston, is asked how many fingers his captor is holding up:

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Five! Five! Five!'

'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'

'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!

These references, of course, are not about truth so much as they are actually about power. And they are not so much about fiction as they are about allegory, which is why despite being from roughly 50 to 70 years ago, they are, as we will see, so relevant to current events.

Second, some background

In mid-December Elon Musk banned a number of high-profile journalists from Twitter and got a lot of high-profile backlash as a result. To understand how Musk justified this, let me run you through a quick timeline of events:

• A well-known Twitter account called @ElonJet used to tweet the publicly available location of Elon Musk’s private jet. This has been generally controversial because of the potential safety risks and privacy violations. (At one point Elon tried to buy off the kid who ran the account but apparently Musk thought the kid’s demand of $50,000 was too high so he paid $44B to buy the entire platform, ban the account and destroy the digital public sphere, but I digress.)

• At first when he took over, Musk tweeted that his commitment to free speech was so absolute that he would leave the @ElonJet account up!

  

  Elon Musk@elonmusk

  My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

  12:30 AM · Nov 7, 2022

  ---

  30.1K Reposts · 397K Likes

• But then apparently some gonzo followed Musk and his kid, X@#69!!!, from an airport and Musk had had enough and banned @ElonJet for doxxing, stating: “Real-time posting of someone else’s location violates doxxing policy, but delayed posting of locations are ok”

• Shortly after the @ElonJet Twitter account was banned, so were any accounts that linked to it or ANY third-party link to such information. This apparently included a number of journalists who had tweeted on the events taking and linked to the primary source accounts, or even — in the case of CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan — a link to a link of a third-party location tracker. (HT Oliver Darcy who chronicled this whole stupid saga beautifully).

• Twitter Private Information and Media Policy now states this:

  

  With this key new interpretation:

  

All of this was a terrible set of actions for freedom of expression — banning journalists? Did Elon miss the day in Free Speech Absolutism Class when it taught about the Press Clause?— but the reason it is particularly interesting is because of what happened after the accounts were suspended and what was demanded to bring them back.

“You do, however, have a choice . . .”

In order to get back on Twitter, those whose accounts that were banned were told they had to delete the Tweet that had violated Twitter’s rules which automatically forfeited any right to appeal.

In other words, in order to get back on Twitter you had to state that you violated the rules.

But what if there aren’t five lights?

In Donie O’Sullivan’s case, the Tweet that had caused his account to be suspended was, as he told me, an “image screenshot of the Mastodon Twitter account to show what it posted [in order] to be suspended,” and “an archive dot org link to the mastodon account.”

So, in order for there to be a violation of the Twitter Private Information and Media Policy that included “links to 3rd-party URL(s)” O’Sullivan’s 3rd-party link to a 3rd-party link would have to count.

I’m not a lawyer, but This interpretation of this rule is illogical on its face, nonsensical in practice, and would quickly suck the whole internet into a censored vortex.

For example, can I post a link to a Google Search of “ElonJet Mastodon Account”? Presumably no. How about a link to a Bing Search of “Google Search of ElonJet Mastodon Account?” Also, likely no.

The option of deleting a one-time post in order to resume your banned account isn’t new on Twitter (it is different if there have been multiple violations). But of course these aren’t just random users, these are journalists. And they’re tasked with truthfully reporting on the nature of the speech platform and the enforcement of rules and free expression, so falsely admitting guilt is sub-optimal. Not just for these individuals as professionals, but for freedom of expression, information gathering, and truth, generally.

And to loop this all back to the beginning, it should remind you of the essential relationship between truth and power. If you’re not a Star Trek or Orwell fan, you might be better convinced by Michel Foucault:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.¹

Which is all to say: Gul Medrad, Elon Musk — they’re not so different. And to the extent you believe in reality, perhaps the latter is considerably more scary.

1. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 By Michel Foucault, Ed. Colin Gordon (1980) at 131. Full text available here: https://monoskop.org/images/5/5d/Foucault_Michel_Power_Knowledge_Selected_Interviews_and_Other_Writings_1972-1977.pdf