The artist Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, is reportedly stepping into the social media world.
Ye revealed on Monday that he had reached an agreement to buy the social media platform Parler, which bills itself as the “premier global free speech platform.“
In a statement, he said, “In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial, we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves.”
Ye’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were locked after he made some anti-semitic posts on those platforms.
The posts were not defensible, and they were condemned as they should have been.
Still, Monday’s news is kind of funny as it is the predictable result of what seems to be an increasing push to censor or limit opinions shared on social media because they are perceived to be dangerous.
Those who are in favor of a heavy-handed response to posts that go against the accepted medical guidance, or seem to be pushing a pro-Russian stance, or push back on the notion that there are more than two genders think banning people from Twitter will be the end of it.
But in reality, what happens is the people with money will either buy or try to start their own platform with much less content moderation.
Former President Donald Trump has his Truth Social. Former Trump aide Stephen Miller started GETTR. And now it seems Ye will have his own platform. And then there’s Elon Musk, who may or may not be buying Twitter.
Getting users to migrate from Twitter which has been around for longer than all three of the aforementioned platforms, tends to be the hard part.
Why would users want to leave Twitter when a lot of the people they follow are not on the other platforms? And why would politicians or commentators with thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of followers want to drop Twitter and move to a platform where they have a much smaller following?
Regardless of how successful those platforms are, advocates for strict content moderation apparently fail to realize that it is not in a person’s spirit to just sit down and shut up forever if they get blocked on one platform.
It will not prevent the spread of the ideas they seek to limit. Instead, those who have the means or the will will find a way to continue spreading their ideas — and usually with even less moderation.
To a certain extent, it is limiting the reach of those posts due to smaller followings on other platforms. But it also risks creating echo chambers where people can interact with ideas with almost no pushback or countervailing information.
So Twitter and Instagram, and Facebook can keep censoring people all they want, but it will not have the effect they are hoping for.
Instead, wealthy celebrities will either buy the original platforms or alternatives or build their own, and the content the pro-censorship crowd hates will continue to thrive unchecked.
