Let’s Talk About the Tradeoffs of Free Speech in the Internet Age | Commentary

It’s too early to unravel the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging service Telegram, which he co-founded. French authorities have charged him with complicity in the distribution of child sexual abuse images, aiding organized crime and refusing lawful orders to provide information to law enforcement. Many questions remain about the extent of Durov’s role, beyond running what The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel called “the platform of choice for many activists, crypto scammers, drug dealers, terrorists, extremists, banned influencers and conspiracy theorists.”

But it is not too early to talk about the consequences for freedom of speech, because we have been struggling with the problems that services like Telegram bring for years. And we will continue to do so for many years to come.

When I started writing on the Internet more than 20 years ago, my fellow bloggers and I assumed it was a free and open space where anything could happen. “The Internet interprets censorship as harm and gets around it,” we said to each other, a little giddily. Well into the social media age, Twitter executives proudly proclaimed their company belonged to “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

But as the World Wide Web entered its third decade, the size and reach of the Internet empowered some very bad actors, from trolls to white nationalists to child pornographers to drug cartels. There was a clamor to crack down on all this dangerous chatter — which brings us to Pavel Durov.

According to the Associated Press, French authorities say his company “refuses to share information or documents with investigators when required to do so by law.” The possibility that loose moderation and encrypted messages could facilitate heinous crimes poses a real challenge to the free speech wing of the Freedom of Speech Party: platforms where speech is unfettered are also platforms that make it easier to say and do antisocial things. This has always been a problem with free speech, of course, but the internet has given the bad guys opportunities we could never have imagined.

And so there’s been a concerted push for institutions to censor, to hand over user data, to tinker with algorithms to steer conversations in a more prosocial direction. Defending the freedom to say dark things — privately or publicly — inevitably begs the question: “Why would you want to help people like that?” Services like Telegram, where conversations can veer from bad speech to bad action, make this particularly hard to answer.

But there is an answer, and it is that this is the wrong question. We should not be asking whether someone wants to help criminals (no!), but whether it is worth sacrificing our own freedoms to make it easier for the government to stop them. The Bill of Rights answered this with a resounding no, and that is still the right answer after more than 200 years.

If you allow people to say anything, you’ll see a lot of hateful filth, but you’ll also see the kind of robust debate that makes our democracy stronger. If you allow bloggers to speculate on anything they can think of, you’ll see them generate a lot of nonsense — and you’ll also provide a useful check on institutions that aren’t doing their jobs. If you maintain spaces where people can talk, away from the prying eyes of the authorities, you’ll make it harder for democratic governments to catch criminals, and harder for despotic governments to crack down on political activists.

It’s tempting to say that we’re only giving good governments those powers, for good purposes. That we’re not really sacrificing any important freedoms, just the kinds of freedoms that no one should have. That we’re simply sanding down the wild edges of the internet, while leaving enough room for all the right kinds of speech to flourish.

But while it may not be a huge leap from a Telegram crackdown to a full-fledged Chinese surveillance state, there is an unavoidable trade-off: When such powers are used, they can be abused, as even democratic governments have done when they decided that an emergency — communism, terrorism, the pandemic — required us to give up some of our freedoms in the name of hunting down bad people.

Inevitably, we regret those concessions. Coincidentally, shortly after Durov was arrested, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a letter to a U.S. House of Representatives investigating committee in which he ruefully admitted that the Biden White House had pressured Meta to censor disinformation during the pandemic, and that Meta had in some cases done so, though Zuckerberg took full responsibility for those decisions. No doubt those officials thought they were helping people, but ultimately, Meta-owned Facebook also squashed reasonable speculation about the origins of the virus, along with an absolutely true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the election.

Small cost, I’m sure many of my readers will say, especially if they voted for Joe Biden. But then imagine how Donald Trump could use such powers — and then imagine what even worse governments could do with sweeping powers over Telegram’s user base. That’s why we keep deciding to tie the hands of government officials: not because we’re afraid of what they’ll do to the criminals, but because we’re afraid of what might ultimately happen to us.

Megan McArdle is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group.