Gradually, then suddenly,” Hemingway’s bankruptcy quote can just as easily be applied to politics. If you had told me six months ago that a motley crew of free speech advocates would deal a thumping blow to the censorship leviathan I would have been deeply sceptical.
I had thought the Twitter Files would be the blow, but it turns out that was just a softening-up affair. The Twitter Files certainly moved the needle in the culture at large, but the institutions mostly continued their stiff resistance to accountability and change.
That change is now coming to the U.S. government and will flow on to academia, NGOs, and anywhere else that had its gums firmly locked to the teat of the state. That of course assumes the new administration comes good on its promises. On free speech, I’m reasonably confident it will given a sizable part of the censorship was directed at the Trump camp at its new allies. My concern is more that they will go overboard – either by removing any guardrails at all or through overreach and becoming the new censors.
As I have noted many times, Musk’s X has repeatedly contradicted their free speech commitments, I’m expecting the same from the new administration. Trump’s currently viral 2022 speech outlining how he will dismantle the censorship regime is very promising and will be a baseline to hold him to. My nonprofit, liber-net, has its own set of proposals about how to dismantle the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
