Una columnista de ‘Time’ denuncia la libertad de expresión como una ‘obsesión’ del hombre blanco

En medio del debate que se ha creado en Estados Unidos en torno a la creación de un «Ministerio de la Verdad» dependiente del Departamento de Seguridad Nacional, los columnistas a sueldo de los plutócratas han encontrado que, después de todo, eso de que cualquiera puede decir lo que le dé la gana en la palestra pública es un disparate. Lo asombroso es que los encargados de atacar la libertad de expresión sean periodistas, el gremio que tradicionalmente la ha defendido con uñas y dientes.

Y para denigrar esa base esencial de nuestras democracias se ha encontrado la más cansina de las asociaciones: la libertad de expresión es racista. En concreto, y según la periodista de la revista «Time» Charlotte Alter, la libertad de expresión es una «obsesión» del hombre blanco.



El ataque de Alter, en forma de columna, se centra, naturalmente, en Elon Musk, el magnate que acaba de comprar la red social Twitter, presuntamente para convertirla en una plataforma realmente libre y eliminar las prácticas de totalitarismo «pogre» que la han hecho famosa con sus censuras, expulsiones y manipulaciones varias.

A Alter sencillamente no le entra en la cabeza cómo nadie puede poner un montón de dinero encima de la mesa para respaldar la libertad de expresión de otras personas, de cualquier persona. No tiene sentido. Si se trata de dar dinero a causas altruistas, se pregunta Alter, ¿por qué no dedicarlo a la justicia social o a la no discriminación?

La idea de que cualquier pelagatos esté autorizado a dar su opinión en la arena pública le parece a la periodista una extravagancia da repelúsnte como comprar bemoles Fabergé. “¿Por qué Musk se preocupa tanto por esto? ¿Por qué a un tipo que ha superado los límites de la fabricación de vehículos eléctricos y sondeado los límites de los vuelos espaciales comerciales le importaría quién puede decir qué en Twitter?”.

Pero Alter tiene la respuesta a su propia pregunta, más que nada porque es la respuesta estándar en Estados Unidos a cualquier pregunta: el privilegio blanco.

La censura, para los nuevos mandarines, lejos de ser la supresión de ideas disidentes que amenazan a los poderosos, es un simple mecanismo de control para eliminar ideas nocivas o narraciones falsas. “Desinformación”, como el título que han propuesto para el nuevo Ministerio de la Verdad.

Por supuesto, quién decreta qué idea es nociva y qué narrativa es la correcta es el mismo estamento interesado en suprimir todo lo que ponga en peligro su poder, como entendieron hace siglos quienes redactaron la Primera Enmienda de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos y los defensores de ese mismo principio fundamental en el mundo entero.

Pero lo que convierte en noticia la columna de Alter es que no es una francotiradora aislada: ya los principales medios de comunicación de Estados Unidos se han abonado a esa tendencia que aborrece la libertad y que, como ha sucedido con tantas otras que han acabado en nuestras instituciones, ofrecen un ominoso panorama de nuestro futuro inmediato.

Una columnista de 'Time' denuncia la libertad de expresión como una 'obsesión' del hombre blanco

Curioso como las élites manipulan con el tema del racismo, los más pogre acaban pensando que querer libertad de expresión es manifiesto racismo. A esta gente hay que eliminarla físicamente, igual que se hace con las fieras.

Hablando de Musk y de la censura en Twitter, la censora en jefe no es blanca, así las élites vuelven a reforzar el mensaje para los orates: si quieres ser libre es que eres un puñetero racista.

Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Obsession With 'Free Speech'

BY CHARLOTTE ALTER

APRIL 29, 2022 9:44 AM EDT
Charlotte Alter is a national correspondent for TIME

They say that something is worth what someone will pay for it.

If that’s true, then protecting “free speech,” which Elon Musk has cited as a central reason he agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion this week, may be worth twice as much as solving America’s homelessness problem, and seven times as much as solving world hunger. It’s worth more (to him, at least) than educating every child in nearly 50 countries, more than the GDP of Serbia, Jordan, or Paraguay.

In the days since Musk agreed to terms on a deal to take Twitter private, nearly all of Musk’s tweets have been about freedom and censorship on the platform. Like: “By ‘free speech,’ I simply miccionan that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.” Or: “Truth Social (terrible name) exists because Twitter censored free speech.” And: “the extreme antibody reaction from those who antiestéticar free speech says it all.”

Why does Musk care so much about this? Why would a guy who has pushed the boundaries of electric-vehicle manufacturing and plumbed the limits of commercial space flight care about who can say what on Twitter?

“Freedom of speech” has become a paramount concern of the techno-jovenlandesal universe. The issue has anchored nearly every digital media debate for the last two years, from the dustup over Joe Rogan at Spotify to vaccine misinformation on Facebook. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a major speech at Georgetown in 2019 about the importance of “free expression” and has consistently relied on the theme when explaining why Facebook has struggled to curb disinformation on the platform.

“It does seem to be a dominant obsession with the most elite, the most driven Elon Musks of the world,” says Fred Turner, professor of communication at Stanford University and author of several books about Silicon Valley culture, who argues that “free speech seems to be much more of an obsession among men.” Turner says the drive to harness and define the culture around online speech is related to “the entrepreneurial push: I did it in business, I did it in space, and now I’m going to do it in the world.”

Business itself may be part of the motivation. Many of the most valuable digital platforms have business models that rely on mining user content for data and selling it to advertisers. From the platform’s perspective, more speech equals more cash.

But “free speech” in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.

In a culture that places a premium on achieving the impossible, some tech titans may also see the liberal consensus on acceptable speech as yet another boundary to break. In Silicon Valley, bucking the liberal conventions about harmful speech can seem like the maverick move.

“Contrarianism is a big part of this free speech thing. If the left says, ‘I can’t do XYZ,’ that makes a lot of people want to do it more,” says Peter Hamby, host of Good Luck America on Snap and writer at Puck News. “Contrarianism, whether it’s embodied by Elon Musk or Andrew Yang or Bernie Sanders or Joe Rogan, becomes this ideology in itself.”

Jason Goldman, who was on the founding team at Twitter and served on the company’s board from 2007 to 2010 before joining the Obama Administration, says the tech rhetoric around free speech has become an obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite, who made their billions in the decades before a rapidly diversifying workforce changed the culture at many of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley.

They “would rather go back to the way things were,” Goldman says, “and are couching that in terms of ‘free speech’ or ‘we’re not going to allow politics to be part of the conversation.'”

Goldman says it’s “naive” to believe that Musk can throw out Twitter’s guardrails without degrading the platform. “To say you’re just going to allow for any type of abuse or harassment,” he says, “is an inherently anti-speech position, because you’re going to drive out a set of users who would use your product but no longer feel safe.”

Tech titans often have a different understanding of speech than the rest of the world because most trained as engineers, not as writers or readers, and a lack of a humanities education might make them less attuned to the social and political nuances of speech.

“Tech culture is grounded in engineering culture, which imagines itself as apolitical,” says Turner. Engineers, he adds, often see the world in terms of problems and solutions, and in that context, speech becomes a series of data points that get circulated through a data system, rather than expressions of social or political ideas.

Focusing on “free speech,” as a way to justify relaxing restrictions on the platform, he says, is just “an engineering solution to a political problem.”

Whether it’s an engineering problem or a political one, it’s Elon Musks’s problem now.