I respect this position. I think that taking a strong position on the defence of freedom of speech is absolutely valid and necessary.
But concerning abhorrent speech, I must disagree with “It doesn’t matter.” (I know I’m being slightly unfair about your wording there, Josh.) So I wanted to reply here in order to point out that agreeing with Josh’s conclusions on the arrest of Pavel Durov and the more general fight for public and private freedom of expression, is also entirely consistent with other positions on this specific question about whether “all speech must be protected”.
The reason why I am not a free speech absolutist is essentially an application of the “paradox of tolerance”. If you’re not familiar with this argument (or if you are but didn’t know the source), here is the original statement of it by Karl Popper:
(Popper is, I think, rather too confident about the effectiveness of law in practice. Note that, on “utterance of intolerant philosophies”, he only says that he does not mean to imply we should always suppress such utterance, which is really a non-statement. I mean to refer to his general point, which prior to recent culture wars had become relatively uncontroversial as political philosophy goes; not on how it is stated.)
The fact is, there are rather a lot of people who would like to entirely shut down my and other trans’ people’s access to free speech, for example, simply because we’re trans. A lot of them will publically deny wanting to do that, but that’s a surface denial for reasons of political positioning.
Consider a platform policy that theoretically gives both trans people and transphobes “equal” unfettered access to free speech. The transphobes will end up making that platform unusable for trans people. Every single time. The same applies, eventually, to any marginalized group and the people who hate them and/or want to retain a position of power over them: racists, ableists, misogynists, etc.
The reason for this, is that it takes significant effort and time to make useful and original speech, or any other kind of expression — whereas degrading others’ speech with your own bullshit is easy and requires literally zero creative thought.
You can’t automate self-expression. (The kind of weak AI we will have for the foreseeable future fundamentally cannot come close to changing that.) You can automate hate speech. And people do, on a vast scale. If they’re not literally running bots, they’re doing it by acting like automata themselves (one of the points of the Matrix series and especially Matrix Resurrections, if you want to see that simile explored cinematically).
In other words, the practical effect of “unfettered free speech” policies on a platform is to degrade marginalized people’s access to that platform. I’m privileged enough in other ways to be able to work around it, sometimes at considerable cost in all senses, but I can never just ignore it. That’s a source of minority stress that impacts people like me every time we speak. Communications privacy within minority and marginalized communities is one of the ways for us to fight back.
Like many (all?) paradoxes, both mathematical and political, the apparent contradiction in the “paradox of tolerance” can be at least partly resolved by reframing it. In the context of free speech, we can reframe it by asking: what actually inhibits people from speaking?
Looked at from that perspective, it should be obvious that it is not only platform moderation policies or laws that can inhibit people from speaking. It is the entire political and societal context, which is very much dependent on what other people will be allowed and incited to say about the potential speaker.
That is a plausible abstract argument, but sometimes you need to see a concrete and very personal example to really get it.
Recently I recorded a video at the Z|ECC summit. It was and is a sincere and heartfelt attempt to express why I personally care about privacy. Chris Tomeo and Richard Renno edited the interview down to a shorter clip; I approved the clip and it retains arguably the most important parts of my position.
I’m using this example here both because of the content of my speech and the response to it. Warning for transphobic hate in the latter, below.
The original tweet is here, but you might not want to go to Twitter (and Musk broke embedding of videos from tweets, either by intent or by firing everyone who knew how that worked), so I’ll also link my copy of the video. Transcript for accessibility:
And here are a sample of the Twitter replies:
[Do not harass any of these accounts.]
For reference:
It’s a nice dress, one of my favourites actually. It has pockets.
None of the replies even attempted to address the argument about privacy. (I don’t think they spotted the more controversial one about it sometimes being okay and good to help people to break the law, lol!) I’m pretty sure none of these repliers would be capable of refuting it. I’m not saying there are no potential counterarguments, but the repliers didn’t even try. They were focussed on my appearance; most were making playground insults. Most people grow out of insulting others in this way (if they ever do so) by the age of 8 or so. But there was a degree of malice I never saw in playground bullies.
Not all of the replies were abusive, but it barely matters when the constructive ones are drowned out.
To his immense credit, @joshs met with me and apologized for mishandling how the video was posted (it shouldn’t have been posted on Twitter with open replies), then asked me what I wanted to do. Did I want to delete it or leave it up?
This is in my opinion exactly how, as a company, you should respond to someone who works for you being attacked online.
I chose to leave it up partly because — fuck the haters — and partly because, ironically, the overall response only reinforces some of the points I’m trying to make. (The post was changed after the fact to only allow accounts followed by the @zcash account to reply, but that doesn’t affect existing replies.)
Anyway, that is Twitter now, from trans people’s perspective. This is what intentionally destroying Twitter’s moderation infrastructure (among other destructive acts), leaving only a hollowed-out husk for appearances’ sake, looks like.
Consider: what is this policy doing to degrade the quality of my free speech? Whose speech is being prioritized by this platform?
To temper the memory of that unpleasantness with one of those “beautiful, radiant things” Emma was talking about, let me perform a Swihart-esque pivot to a musical interlude.
There’s a YouTuber I’ve been watching recently who is a classical musician well versed in music theory. Her thing on YouTube is that she had very little exposure to pop music when growing up, and so has never heard many culturally significant pieces of popular music that her audience is almost certain to have heard at some point. So she does videos where she is listening to a well-known piece for the first time, and then later she will do another video going into great detail about it from the perspectives of musical theory, the use of instruments and voice, metaphors, mood, meaning, and so on.
One of the fantastic things about this is that it often brings out aspects of a piece you’ve heard a thousand times but have never really heard. Here’s her first listen to The Sound of Silence, by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. (YouTube doesn’t do a great job on this video on some devices; maybe reduce the playback resolution unless you’ve got a good Internet connection to avoid buffering.)
[Alt text for video preview: A woman in a white filigree lace top with black above-the-shoulder-length hair wearing headphones and sitting with a piano and a drum behind her. There is a full-size harp to her right, which is taller than her while she is seated, and other instruments (guitar, large cymbal, small harp, and flute) on the back wall. She has her eyes closed listening to the music with her head tilted back, and her hands lifted up expressively with outstretched fingers. There is large superimposed text saying “Simon & Garfunkel” in red and “The Sound of Silence” in white, with a sound waveform below it.]
This happened to be the first time I’ve really considered what the poetry of those lyrics is trying to say. The song is all about suppressed speech and inhibited expression. It’s a lament for the tragedy of self-censorship and of not feeling able to express what you believe out of fear of repression, or ridicule, or social ostracism.
In short, it’s about the sound of silencing.
By the way, I know this video is long but the more of it you watch, the more you will see of why I chose to include it here.
I want to change tack again to talk a bit about political context.
In the UK recently, there have been a series of riots instigated by fascists, on the pretext of a violent incident in which children were murdered in a Southport school having supposedly been committed by a Muslim (it was not). The pretext does not even matter; the fascists would have used anything. They exploited it to incite a huge increase in racist and Islamophobic violence, including setting fire to (in one case) and attempting to set fire to (in another) multiple hotels in which immigrants were housed.
A few days after that on August 7th, there was a huge turn-out on the streets, of at least tens of thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands, and not just the usual activist types like me and my friends), expressing their rejection of fascism and racism.
It was a genuinely affecting and effective political protest, and it did restore some of my faith in humanity that had taken quite a battering from the extent of casual ableism displayed by so many people in the pandemic.
That’s the context in which the tweet from the Crown Prosecution Service (responsible for deciding on public prosecutions) that @joshs linked was posted.
Do I think this means the tweet can be taken at apparent face value as opposing specifically fascist speech? No. I think @joshs’ take on it is basically right, and that the government (speaking through the CPS) are exploiting the current political context in the UK to say something that could otherwise be considered downright dystopian (also, not wanting to appear oblivious to a strength of anti-racist public sentiment that the government and media had been caught flat-footed by).
Their real interest lies not in suppressing the speech of fascists, but in suppressing the speech of climate protestors, protestors against the genocide in Palestine, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, animal rights activists, people who would like not to freeze to death in winter, GRT people whose entire way of life is threatened, and “uppity” trans and disabled people who just want adequate healthcare and fair access to society – because those are the kind of people and causes that their political outlook considers it most important to silence.
This is not a theoretical concern about the future; it has been amply demonstrated by those already being the groups to which the most heavy-handed suppression of speech is applied in the UK, and will continue to be applied regardless of the recent change of governing party. And by the way, the UK government and in particular the Home Office (responsible for border control and police) is complicit in fostering and adopting policies that structurally support this same rise of racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.
In Brazil, they had a military dictatorship for 21 years. That experience influenced the constitutional laws that are being used against Twitter/X. And Twitter has displayed absolute contempt for the Brazilian legal system and legal decisions, trying to act as though local law did not apply to it. I haven’t studied those laws and (as you may have gathered 
) I have a strong bias against Twitter that is likely to be affecting my viewpoint, but we should certainly be skeptical about the attempt by Twitter/X to portray its legal noncompliance in Brazil as an uncomplicated defence of free speech.
All that said, I come to precisely the same conclusions as @joshs about encryption and communication privacy in general, and the arrest of Pavel Durov in particular.
In particular, it is vital for us to fight against the blocking of communication or privacy technologies, which is always a blunt instrument. (Yes, much as I think present-day Twitter is a toxic mess, I have to reluctantly admit on principle that this does include Twitter.) And we should never allow backdoors in these technologies, or anything remotely in a grey area adjacent to being a backdoor, because that makes them fundamentally untrustworthy and unfit for purpose.
The importance of context includes, for example, that even exactly the same words can be hateful in one context, and an expression of resistance to that hate in another. I can and occasionally do refer to myself among friends and other activists using words that should be considered slurs more generally. And that is fine because the same words mean different things in those different contexts. That to me is one of the issues that highlights the critical importance of private communication: privacy can help to avoid harmful context collapse and misinterpretation of speech for which the context is an essential part of its meaning (which is all speech and all expression). It’s part of what I was talking about in my video above.
Our communication and privacy tech has to be able to handle a wide range of scopes of expression, from 1:1 chats, to the private chat of a family or of activists before/during/after a protest, to a medical practice’s communication with its patients, to a Discord-like server of friends with shared politics or oppressions, to the global public sphere — often as part of the same platform.
I’m a cryptographer and I’ll repeat what basically all cryptographers are saying about this (with only slightly less mincing of words): Telegram is crap at this, and is not in any useful sense an encrypted messenger. In fact its UI could almost have been designed to mislead users into thinking they’re getting encryption in situations where they’re not: it will silently fail unless both parties in a 1:1 chat activate a hard-to-discover menu option while they’re both online. For private messaging, just use Signal.
(I’m sure there are a contingent of spooks who are privately annoyed at the French authorities for going after Telegram, because every user who thinks Telegram is a usable private messenger is a user they can collect more high-value plaintext from — plaintext from chats that the user might have thought were private.)
In terms of the material support we need to give to Telegram devs and the opposition to this attack against encryption and privacy tech in general, though, that doesn’t matter. It’s obvious what the authoritarians’ game plan is. Like a wolf preying on a flock of sheep, they are picking off the weakest projects first — the ones that they know won’t get unequivocal support.
Whether this choice of target was clever strategy or lucky accident from the authoritarians’ point of view, as security engineers we just can’t resist dunking on Telegram’s cringeworthy usage of obsolete crypto, or its awful silently failing security UX design. You’ll notice that I didn’t in fact resist that dunking (seriously, switch to Signal).
But if that were all we said, then we’d be playing into the authoritarian game plan. The legal precedents that they obtain won’t depend on security or otherwise of the actual crypto. If they’re able to establish the precedent that developers are responsible for uses of the systems they build, or even something short of that but close enough in practice, then they’ll eventually be able to use that against the developers of Signal and Zcash and every other privacy-enhancing technology. And I’d rather stay out of jail (especially since that would probably be a men’s jail the way things are going in the UK, which is frankly terrifying).
So if you would fight for the freedom of me and Str4d and Kris and Sean and everyone else working on Zcash if it came to it, then fight for Pavel Durov’s freedom. Fight for the freedom of the Tornado Cash devs: Roman Storm, Roman Semenov, and Alexey Pertsev (who has already been sentenced to almost five and a half years). Don’t let any mistakes that some of these developers may have made stop you from seeing the wood for the trees. I make mistakes too, and they will likely be used against me.
Please note: I’ve seen people trying to imply that the charges against Durov are about Telegram’s lack of content moderation. That is not true, or at least not the main point. First, as @joshs pointed out, some of the charges against him are directly about “the unlicensed provision [or importation] of cryptology services aimed at ensuring confidentiality”. Second, he is essentially being held liable for illegal activity by others that used Telegram — not participating in any of those activities himself, but just providing a communication network on which they happened. Prosecuting a developer for that is a huge overreach with chilling consequences on the development of communication tech in general.
I don’t claim that tech is value-neutral, btw. I endorse the views expressed in Phil Rogaway’s “The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work?” about the responsibilities of scientists to consider societal consequences of their work (or of their inaction!). I care deeply about those consequences, including attempting to mitigate adverse ones through careful design. But I claim that that’s all it can be: attempting. We must have privacy. We must, in order to live our lives.
I’ll tell yous something I hadn’t really planned to say when I started writing this reply. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I stopped working on mix-net research. In way of partial explanation, let’s just say that there was a lot that I didn’t understand about the world and myself in 2001.
It was a huge mistake. I should have redoubled my efforts toward making private and untraceable communications – technology that denies governments the traffic analysis information they would later admit that they use to “kill people with metadata” – available to everyone. Mix-net research carried on of course; one person is one person. But I will not make that mistake again, even if it costs me.