If we want a free and open society, we need to pass new laws that punish people who instigate and participate in social media cancel mobs

Feel whatever you like about Elon Musk’s views, he’s right.

But dare I say unless we involve a larger number of people in public discourse—especially those within the institutions—the knowledge shared on social media will be a faint simulacrum of what occurs in the real world.

We need not merely to protect free speech but to promote it by the sorts of people who are best qualified to provide important information about society’s problems.

But it is very dangerous to one’s career to provide authentic, thoughtful commentary that crosses party lines. As a result, of those who work in the institutions and who do participate online, we get a very distorted and curated view, since these people are almost all virtue signaling ideologues, i.e. virtually the only class of people who are safe to post their “views” online.

Without making it safer and more professionally rewarding to express views that go against the powerful narratives and counternarratives, all the protections for free speech will only produce on social media a mere shadow or outline of events and interpretations of events as they exist in the real world.

Without professional protections for those working in the institutions, free speech on social media platforms still produces a distorted, mere shadow of a view of the real world, and society will suffer greatly from that lack of detailed information.

More fundamental reforms are necessary at the society level to achieve a level of dynamism in public discourse that can adequately meet the demands for truth and the identification of emerging problems that our rapidly changing society in which we live requires.

Twitter is not enough, even if it is protected. We really need so much more freedom to express ourselves on controversial topics without fear of retribution or punishment.

Dare I say that harsher laws should be passed to punish those who participate in noxious, hysterical cancel mobs. This would be tantamount to saying that free speech should be supported, but speech aimed at cancelling or otherwise discouraging others to practice their speech must be punished by the law.

Without such provisions, our open society will only be a half-shell of a truly open society, with the deranged and mentally ill serving a surveillance role in poisoning and enfeebling public discussion, making the right to free speech very nearly a mere formality for most people, especially those whose voices we need to hear most.

Consider the following:

You cannot incite a mob to violence. You shouldn’t be able to incite a mob to deprive someone of their speech.

You cannot harass people in real life. There are laws against that. Why shouldn’t there be laws against forms of harassment that threaten to deprive people of their careers and livelihood?

It is in practice impossible to protect people downstream of cancel mobs given current institutional arrangements. It might be possible to strengthen those institutional arrangements, and I would be in favor of that. But such reforms would also require disruptive new laws.

I’m open to alternative suggestions. High-flying principles are clearly not adequate either way. They have failed, and the current situation is an indication of that. If the current situation is an acceptable tradeoff to people, OK. It’s not an acceptable tradeoff to me.

Something needs to be done to remedy the current situation. People are afraid to say what they believe in public. In the current arrangement, the right to free speech is for many people a dead letter--a right in theory but a right that cannot be practiced.

What good is a right that only exists in theory but not in the real lives of most people?