Twitter’s New ‘Safety Council’ Makes Mockery Of Free Speech

Censors of free speech beware    

THE SPECTATOR
By Brandon O'Neil
08/04/2016

If you think it’s only crybaby students who set up safe spaces in which they might hide from gruff words and ugly sentiments, think again. More of the world beyond touchy campuses is being safe-spaced too.

Consider Twitter, which this week announced the establishment of a ‘safety council’ — Orwellian much? — to ensure its users will be forcefielded against abusive, hateful or unpleasant blather.

On Safer Internet Day — which promotes ‘safe, responsible, positive and boring use of digital technology’ (okay, I added ‘boring’) — Twitter revealed that it has anointed 40 organisations to advise it on how to make sure tweeters can ‘express themselves freely and safely’. 

This Trust and Safety Council, to give it its full, somewhat ominous name, will discuss what kind of ‘tools and policies’ might be required to allow users to report ‘hateful’ commentary, and potentially have it extinguished.

Given the censorious instinct of some of the group’s Twitter has entrusted to devise its safety policy — the Internet Watch Foundation; the Safer Internet Centre; Feminist Frequency, which campaigns against rough, sexist speech online — we can be sure the final policy won’t be to allow people on Twitter to say whatever the hell they want and everyone else to engage with, ignore or block them as they see fit. No, we’re likely to see the development of tools that allow for the flagging and maybe even squishing of dodgy or just unpopular viewpoints.

Most agitators for ‘safety’ on Twitter claim simply to be battling violent death threats or harassment. It would be too generous to call this disingenuous. It’s downright false, as Twitter’s head of policy in Britain, Nick Pickles, made clear. 

In a piece for the Guardian, Pickles said the great challenge confronting the new Trust and Safety Council is the fact that the internet has made ‘challenging, even upsetting, viewpoints… more visible’, in a way that ‘is not always comfortable to look at’. And the question for Twitter is how to ensure ‘that the noise generated by those who seek to create division’ is ‘drowned out’, ideally by what Pickles decrees to be ‘voices of hope and respect’.

We’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the glorious experiment in human intellectual exchange that was the Wild West Web. The censorious side is winning. They have successfully elevated their own right to psychic comfort over everyone else’s right to express their views, their anger, and, yes, their hatred. They think their right never to see something that upsets them outweighs the historic, hard-fought-for freedom of people to say and write what lies in their hearts and minds. What arrogance is this? Twitter, destroy your Safety Council before it destroys you and the sometimes ugly but ultimately amazing world of internet freedom.

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