Jordan Peterson’s Thinkspot and Public Utilities

“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms are much more like churches or clubs than they are like a public plaza, regardless of their size.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for Merion West that argued, among other things, that the social media platform that Jordan Peterson recently announced—Thinkspot—was probably not going to have the advertised consequence of creating a truly open forum for the discussion of all ideas. There were two parts to this argument. The central one was about the dynamics of online discourse and why it is inherently hostile to an ideal situation where different points of view are discussed on their intellectual merits. I also briefly stated that I believe it is misguided to frame conversations like this as being about free speech in itself, since I believe that the concept of free speech should be limited strictly to government interference rather than individuals’ ability to express themselves on various platforms. The article sparked multiple replies through different media, though the common thread was that they were directed towards this secondary aspect of the piece. In essence: my separation of free speech from access to various platforms was incorrect.

I treated the issue as fairly obvious, so I did not explain why I made the distinction. I have not changed my perspective on this, though, in fairness, it deserves a lengthier look than what I initially dedicated to it. To re-state the position: what I want to argue is that the concept of free speech should be understood as nothing more than freedom from state censorship. To put it another way, free speech is a negative political right, which is to say that it prevents the state from doing something to individuals. This is in opposition to a positive right which entitles someone to something. In the end, taking the side that free speech requires access to platforms is to say that free speech is a kind of positive right. This is where I believe the misunderstanding stems from, and a closer look at all these concepts shows that free speech is best understood as a negative right.

Given the prior framing, it is in order to discuss the concept of rights. They can be grouped into many different categories depending on what aspect of them we are considering. A useful one to start with is the distinction between legal rights and natural rights. The latter are rights that everyone has just by virtue of being human. Legal rights are simply those that citizens of a particular polity have according to the laws of said polity. There is no point in discussing whether legal rights are real or not, and even proponents of natural rights have a place for them. On the other hand, not everyone agrees about whether there are natural rights in the first place. In fact, saying that there is no such thing as rights really only makes sense when referring to natural rights. One might say that legal rights are senseless, not useful, or even immoral, but their existence depends solely on being written down on a piece of paper as part of the law. Jeremy Bentham, who called the “French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” “nonsense upon stilts” theorized extensively about legal rights. Of course, this does not guarantee the possibility of making them effective, but that is an entirely separate question.