Steve Randy Waldman
traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post.
it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/
curtosis
@interfluidity I think it’s still underappreciated the degree to which billionaires are rejecting the entirety of the social contract. The problem for them becomes, at some point, that that social contract includes the bits about the people not dragging them from their homes and guillotining them in the public square.
Which is, of course, why controlling the media is existential for them.
Historically, that bet has not paid off in the long run. Ask the Romanovs and Ceaușescus, for example.
Steve Randy Waldman
i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin
Steve Randy Waldman
plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/
Steve Randy Waldman
i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/
Steve Randy Waldman
to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/
Steve Randy Waldman
but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/
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