Against Tech Censorship

Take tech censorship for example, something the Right has virtually built a brand around opposing over the past five years, triggered by pre–Elon Musk Twitter’s interference in the 2020 election to tip the scales against Trump, and the censorship against conservative accounts and causes that followed. If you listened to a lot of conservative pundits, you would think only the Right cared about tech censorship, or that they were its only targets.

In the real world, Jacobin has been one of the loudest voices cautioning about the danger of tech censorship, and we’ve made those warnings regardless of whether it was a Democrat or a Republican in office or whether its targets were progressive or conservative.

In Trump’s first term, we warned that liberal hysteria over “fake news” was threatening press freedoms worldwide, pushed back on efforts to use claims of Russian misinformation to justify censorship on social media platforms, and pointed out that the US government was itself long a spreader of the digital misinformation it was now using to justify this clampdown. We repeatedly criticized Twitter’s election-year throttling of the right-wing New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 as a grave overreach that threatened press freedom. Four years later, when most MAGA-aligned conservatives shamelessly pulled a one-eighty and cheered the exact same overreach, only this time at the hands of their own side to tip the scales for their preferred presidential candidate, we criticized that too, and for the same reason.

As Biden prepared to take office in 2021, we urged the liberal left to oppose censorship by Big Tech firms, including Trump’s ban from Twitter that year, arguing that letting tech overlords decide what we can and can’t read was “deeply disturbing.” We pointed out that the targets of censors at platforms like YouTube weren’t remotely limited to the political Right. We also criticized Meta’s censorship of a variety of stories about dissent across the political spectrum later that year, and we warned that tech firms’ stifling of content that cut against liberal orthodoxy on the pandemic “muzzled scientific debate” — after all, we don’t want big corporations to become arbiters “of what constitutes acceptable science.”

While much of the liberal commentariat dismissed the disclosures in the “Twitter Files” the following year as a right-wing grift, we explained why they really were a big deal and urged readers to see it for the press freedom story that it was. But while most of the Right quickly moved on from this issue, satisfied that with Musk helming the company they would no longer be targets, we continued to scrutinize and raise the alarm about Twitter/X’s ongoing censorship under the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” — while trying to use the episode to convince liberals to finally take the matter seriously.

At the close of Biden’s term, we criticized his move to ban TikTok, which was driven by the desire to suppress the spread of pro-Palestine content that had exploded on the platform, as an “egregious assault on free speech” and an idea “born of elite mistrust of ordinary people.” As Trump now moves to use the ban to put the platform under his allies’ thumb in his own bid to control the narrative, we’ve criticized that, too. And while most of MAGA world has swallowed Trump’s campaign vow to end online censorship and simply moved on from the issue, we continued speaking out about the Trump-driven tech censorship now taking place.

Repression Beyond the Digital World

Of course, the range of free-speech violations of this era have gone well beyond the digital sphere, and Jacobin has been at forefront covering it.

We spent years covering the government campaign against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for revealing the secrets of the political elite and national security state to the rest of us, and the threat his prosecution posed to press freedoms more broadly. Of course, many on the Right adopted Assange as a cause, too, thanks to his perceived role in helping Trump win the 2016 election.

But you can find in Jacobin’s pages over the years spirited defenses of not just Assange, but many other courageous whistleblowers who have challenged power on the public’s behalf, only to be forsaken by the rest of the political spectrum: whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, or NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, or Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, or lesser known names like Daniel Hale, who leaked details about the US drone program to the press, and Charles Littlejohn, whose leaks led to a major exposé of the scandalous extent of tax-dodging by billionaires.

Under Obama, we covered the shocking state repression of protesters at Standing Rock. Under Trump, we covered the now little-remembered J20 prosecutions against inauguration protesters, along with the spate of anti-protest bills pushed by Republicans across the country. And under Biden, we warned that while the January 6 riot was antidemocratic and deeply worrisome on a political level, the heavy-handed government response to it threatened all of our rights to speak and protest. Case in point: the several overzealous attempts by state-level Republican officials to treat protesters as terrorists that followed.

We also criticized censorship and repression in other countries, whether Russia, India, France, Germany, or the UK, noting that even liberal democracies were becoming increasingly hostile to what in the United States are called First Amendment freedoms.

Free Speech Threats Aren’t Limited to the Government

But Jacobin’s criticism of free speech suppression has never been limited to simply when it’s the government doing it.

Back in 2017, as the liberal turn against free speech was in full swing, Christian Parenti warned in our pages about well-meaning student efforts to get “vile speakers” like Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray shut down or deplatformed on college campuses, outlining the long history of left-wing struggles to secure the right to speak free of censorship, and warning that such actions threatened to lead left-wing groups into a trap. We criticized the Right’s much worse version of these “deplatforming” campaigns, too, as when a right-wing media smear campaign and hail of death threats forced Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor to cancel a speech about Trump-era racism in 2017.

It was a reminder that, while cancel culture is bad when it has a progressive face, it has often been much more virulent and had a much longer history in its right-wing form, which dates back many, many decades, going all the way back to the start of the twentieth century. To that end, we defended the sentiments in the infamous Harper’s letter, even as we noted the flagrant hypocrisy of some of its signers.

While Democrats and Republicans are fixated only on when the government tramples free speech, this magazine has always argued that violating this principle is bad no matter who’s doing the trampling or for what reason. So we’ve criticized when corporations have undermined press freedoms for the sake of profit, and we’ve argued that fighting for free speech also means defending workers from authoritarian bosses — “that no one should be punished by his or her employer for political speech off the job.” In fact, we just made that same argument again last week.

We have criticized the tendency on the Left to conflate speech with violence, and we have criticized it when the Right does it too, which they started doing way before Charlie Kirk’s death. We defended the right to speech from litigious billionaires trying to abuse defamation law to silence their critics, and we defended it from religious zealots who respond with violence to art they find offensive.

Censoring for Israel

Jacobin has been especially dogged in covering one free speech topic in particular, arguably the defining free speech issue of this century: the long-standing repression of pro-Palestinian speech and activism.

We warned that Trump was planning a third Red Scare against critics of Israel if he won the election, and while many former free speech warriors on the Right are suddenly silent on or even actively support this repression campaign now that he’s in power, we have continued to stick to our principles.

We’ve criticized the new — and often obsessively pro-Israel — cancel culture embraced by Trump and the Right more broadly, whether aimed at college administrators, workers who posted something critical of Charlie Kirk, or children’s show hosts who criticized the mass murder of children. We noted how Trump pushed for a clampdown on criticism of Israel on campuses on “the very same day that he claimed to have resurrected free speech,” and reported on some of the lesser-known cases of professors facing retaliation for their criticisms of Israel.

We’ve raised the alarm about Trump’s crackdown on noncitizens as a way “to terrorize critics of Israel into silence,” part of a long history of authoritarian politicians using immigration law to stifle dissent. In particular, we’ve spotlighted the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian green card holder and new father targeted by the administration purely for his First Amendment activity as a protest leader, warning that his case — and his now impending deportation — is not about one individual, but “about the future of free speech.”

Trump and his allies are far from unique. We’ve criticized the Democratic officials, too, who have acted exactly like him in trying to crush pro-Palestinian activism. Over in Canada, one of our contributors was arrested and jailed for five days this year for the crime of criticizing a supporter of Israel’s war, following a right-wing cancellation campaign against him.

Jacobin did not wait for Trump to come to office to start this coverage. We warned that a new, Israel-focused McCarthyism from across the political spectrum was taking shape under Biden, and we warned it was happening less than a month into Israel’s ongoing razing of Gaza. We spent the tail end of Biden’s term rebuking college administrators and police for trampling students’ right to speak out against Israel’s war, and covering workers’ and antiwar activists’ efforts to push back against both this repression and US support for the war.

That’s because the right of pro-Palestinian activists to criticize, boycott, and otherwise protest against Israeli policies has been the longest-running free speech fight of our generation. It’s one Jacobin has been at the forefront of, whether cautioning in 2011 about a push to have Ottawa classify criticism of Israel as hate speech, criticizing universities’ efforts to punish students and professors over the same in 2014, or a variety of other attacks on pro-Palestinian speech a few years after that — attacks we warned were coming from liberal institutions, at a time when the rest of the media was focused only on Trump.

We were early and consistent critics of the abuse of the serious charge of “antisemitism” to delegitimize dissent over Israeli policy, a charge that is no longer being lobbed solely against left-wing critics of Israel, but against conservative ones, too. The threats to free speech that have come from the pro-Israel lobby have been many and varied over the years, whether repeated (and unconstitutional) attempts to outlaw and suppress boycotts of Israel, or the firing and outright murder of journalists for speaking out on the subject. As we explained back in 2021, following a spate of cancellations and firings of Israel critics, there has long been a “Palestine exception to free speech.”

That’s not just in the United States, by the way. It’s also the case in countries like Canada, Germany, and the UK, which has seen everything from its own campus repression to the criminalization of musical artists and entire activist groups.

The Way the Game Is Played

Like so much in American life these days, elite attacks on free speech succeed by dividing the great majority of us into teams. We then have an incentive to be outraged at the First Amendment violations carried out by the opposing side, but accept or even cheer on the same ones when they’re committed by “our” side — ensuring that no matter who’s doing the violating, there will always be some base of popular support for it.

The reality is, no matter which political party is trampling free speech at any given moment, there isn’t much difference. It all stems from the same elite fear and mistrust of working people and the desire to control what they say and how they think. And in the long run, whatever free speech clampdown against the opposing side you find yourself cheering on is eventually going to be turned against you.

The only shot ordinary Americans have to protect their own rights is to stand up for the right to speak, think, publish, and protest for everyone, regardless of who’s in power. Jacobin is far from the only voice out there that has done this and done it consistently. But you should be wary of the voices out there who seem to only muster this outrage when it’s their political opponents doing it. That’s your first clue that they’re not really on the side of fighting for anyone’s free speech — they’re on the side of whatever team of censorious elites they play for.