And the World Was Made Worse Through Dorsey's Actions

​And the World Was Made Worse Through Dorsey's Actions
by
Julio Gonzalez, M.D., J.D.
 
In a series of tweets, entrepreneur, muti-billionaire, Twitter CEO and self-prescribed purveyor of Truth, Jack Dorsey, explained his deranged decision to ban President Trump from his social media platform.  "I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here," he wrote. "I believe this was the right decision for Twitter.  We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety.  Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all."  
 
It seems based on his release of at least eleven tweets on the matter that Mr. Dorsey is reflecting on his company's actions.  But no matter how much he tries, his defense still comes up short.  
 
The issue of censorship for the purposes of society's protection has long been abandoned by all except the most tyrannical and self-aggrandizing of minds.  In fact, in offering his explanation Mr. Dorsey sounds like one stuck in ancient Greece with all its misrepresentations and incomplete understandings of truth. Compare Mr. Dorsey's comments regarding public safety with Plato's words on the same topic in The Republic:

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Shall our youth be en-couraged to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be incited to quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife among the gods? Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sen-ding him flying for helping her when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are incapable of understanding allegory.  If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay down the principles according to which books are to be written; to write them is the duty of others.  

The utter offensiveness and destruction of censorship and the banning of certain political opinions at the expense of others has been demonstrated time and again by the actions of older, discarded systems of government. By the nineteenth century, the censor’s harm had been so well established that social philosopher and writer John Stuart Mill had dismissed the need of having to even explain it. In On Liberty, he wrote:

No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the question, besides, has been so of and so triumphantly enforced by preceding writers, that it needs not be specially insisted on in this place.

Except to Jack Dorsey.  Even in the seventeenth century, Baruch Spinoza, another epic philosopher would have dismissed it: 

Since every man is by indefeasible natural right the master of his own thoughts, it follows that men thinking in diverse and contradictory fashions, cannot, without disastrous results, be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme [governmental] power. Not even the most experienced, to say nothing of the multitude, know how to keep silence. [A Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), 4.20]

Yes, Spinoza already recognized the futility in attempts to silence the people.  But the evils of censorship go well beyond futility, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin in The New England Courant "Without Freedom of Thought," he wrote, "there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech."  
 
Mills agreed when he expressed his view on the tragic consequences of silencing even the most seemingly isolated opinion:  
 

Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dis-sent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinionis right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

In his arrogance and self-exaltation, Jack Dorsey has bitten of the censorship apple with the calamitous results.  Since his misguided actions, Twitter's stock has dropped nearly 8% in value, at one time losing as much as 10%.  His actions have made Twitter the face of oppression and elitism in the eyes of many.  Millions have spoken by leaving Twitter, to which Dorsey has responded in true empyreal fashion by conspiring with Amazon and Apple to run alternative platforms out of existence.  
 
And the world was made worse through Dorsey's actions.  
 
The reality is that Dorsey will never stop violence by silencing the voices of others.  He merely elevates the discussion's vitriol and serves as an unwitting catalyst for the violence he is hoping to suppress.  If a deranged individual takes another's words and commits violence as a result of them, it is the violent actor who is to blame, not the opiner.  But in silencing those who wish to opine, the censor merely pushes them closer to resorting to methods beyond those achievable through the use of the pen.  
 
In expressing his opinion, President Trump and his followers are no more responsible for driving others into violence than Dorsey is at stopping them though his attempts at silencing them.  This lesson was learned by mankind centuries ago, and it is one that Dorsey and his leftist sympathizers fail to heed, once again, with dangerous consequences.   
 
Dr. Julio Gonzalez is an orthopaedic surgeon and lawyer living in Venice, Florida.  He served in the Florida House of Representatives.  He is the author of numerous books including The Federalist Pages, The Case for Free Market Healthcare, and Coronalessons.  He is available for appearances and book signings, and can be reached through www.thefederalistpages.com.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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