If Speech Is So Free, Why Is It So Expensive
Free speech: if you claim you don't have it, you probably do. If you claim you do, you probably don't.
Believing that speech is free is like believing people could be ghosts. Logically, they are the same statement. As I wrote around a year ago, speech cannot be free because if you are interested in making yourself heard beyond the confines of friends and family, you are going to be needing a platform, and platforms come with … rules.
But none of this matters anyway because you, dear reader, do not give a damn about whether speech is free. Nobody really does. It is the longest running scam and second longest running scam in human history: free speech and concerns about free speech.
Exhibit A
What They Tell You
Demosthenes ( Ancient Athenian Orator): In Ancient Athens, it is necessary to speak with parrhesia, without holding back anything and without concealing anything.
Euripides (Ancient Athenian dramatist): This is slavery; not to speak one's thought.
What Actually Happens
Exhibit B
‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…’
(Obvs, Slaves and Women need not apply, dammit).
Each time someone creates a new platform to ' protect' and 'encourage' free speech, they just end up regulating the content anyway. You can waste a fine evening by reading up on how many left-wing media platforms control free speech, but right-wing platforms like Parler and 4chan also regulate content. If you log onto Truth Social and repeatedly make fun of the platform( which is not even an actual person or race or nationality), you will find that your account gets banned.
Visit any social media platform and you'll find the same version of the same mission statement ( like with everything in this regard, Facebook ² did it best): " [O]ur goal is to protect free speech and connect all the people of the world..." ³
This is Grade A bullshit because first off, they do not care. And second, it's unnecessary. Have you met other people? Have you met yourself? People don't need assistance from Silicon Valley to express themselves. We are perfectly happy to voice out our opinions for no other reason than they are our opinions.
China operates the most rigorous system of censorship in all human history and it still can't stop people from self-expression and dissent. Case in point: five of the ten largest social media platforms of all time were created in China.⁴
Hence, the business of every social media platform isn't to encourage or protect free speech. That's easy. The business of every social platform is to discourage free speech by putting in place content moderation and regulations. That's the hard part. I'll come to why in a moment. But Content moderation is the service. You already know who the product is.
So, if people don't actually want free speech, what do we want?Well, we want free attention. We want millions of people we will never know and we will never meet to hang onto our every word and salivate over each image. We want retweets and likes and comments. The people who manage to achieve this are venerated and disdained in equal measure.
Most bloggers give up after five posts; I personally am acutely aware of the temptation to just stop writing into the void. Bloggers don't give up because someone is censoring their free speech. Bloggers give up because no one is paying they and their content any attention. But attention, like hell, is other people, and since not a single person on this planet has once woken up with a random stranger on his mind, attention is scarce.
There are also just things as a society we don't want to reward with attention: I'll leave that to the willing reader's imagination. Whatever you come up with, that, my friend, is the first barrier to free speech. Caffeine addiction and a fondness for overqualified legalese are all that is necessary to acquaint yourself with the others.⁵
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Social media platforms are not what you'll call long-term businesses. They burn rather brightly and fade away. To its credit, Facebook has arrested its own inevitable decline for as long as possible. But it too is now fading away. The day it truly does, it will have plenty of company: Myspace, Digg, 2go, Eskimi, and Friendster among others are a few of the many media platforms which went on to bite the dust.
Each of these platforms have their own well documented causes of failure. But there is one which recurs over and over: the wrong kinds of users monopolize the attention of the platform.
You see, social media cannot give you free speech. And that's not what you are there for anyway. What they can provide, and what we truly want, is attention. The attention of other users.
When the wrong kinds of users begin to hoard attention, everyone else leaves. Digg sunk into oblivion the day it changed its algorithm to heavily favour sponsored content of advertisers over the organic content of users. Myspace died when it grew into a cesspool of anonymous spam.
Even Google and Amazon, which are not social media businesses, often face this same problem. A lot of Google search results are advertising crap because SEOs have figured out how to place their own content as the first results on the homepage. Amazon has a long and losing battle with paid reviewers and fake reviews.
Content moderation is doubly hard because it is easy to overcorrect in either direction and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the core base. As Danah Boyd memorably wrote,
People were hanging out on Friendster before they hung out on MySpace. But hanging out on Friendster is like hanging out in a super clean police state where you can't chew gum, let alone goof around and you're told exactly how to speak to others. Hanging out on MySpace is more like hanging out in a graffiti park with fellow goofballs while your favourite band is playing.
The great physicist Archibald Wheeler often remarked that Time is nature's way of stopping everything from happening at once. Well, content moderation is a platform's way of stopping the same kinds of people from owning all of the attention at once.
If too little of it gets done, the site degenerates into a freeforall. If too much of it gets done, the user experience begins to resemble reading brochures.
Every user has his or her own favourite sweet spot of moderation and censorship ( Hint: despite what some maintain, it's never zero). But if your platform is alive and well and we are still trading the chance to get off the couch and achieve our dreams at the expense of one more refresh, it hasn't deviated too far from that sweet spot....yet.
Network Effects Shall Save Us All
If bad content moderation does not end a platform, something else will: the platform itself.
Tech writers and entrepreneurs are obsessed with the idea of network effects. It is the magic pixie dust of every platform. The business grows fast enough that you lock in both sides of the marketplace as they have no incentive to go anywhere else. Less memorably, once a platform is sizable enough, the coordination costs of relocating somewhere else become exorbitant. People generally don't like to pay exorbitant costs.
Network effects were so popular that a spate of business books were either written exclusively on the topic or used up substantial amounts of printer ink on the topic. Perhaps, the most popular of them all was Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman, a genuinely unlikable book by a genuinely likable author.⁶
I know what you are thinking. If someone built a multi billion dollar business and told you network effects was the secret, you should be listening to them and not reading this substack. Yup. Yup. Yup. Network effects are real. They are powerful too. Try selling 'an upside down triangle in abstract art style to symbolize the decay of human consciousness' without Christie's or Sotheby's and you'll figure that out pretty quickly.
But the case for network effects is substantially overrated. Social media platforms run on pure network effects and fall to the wayside pretty quickly. Remember all the ‘Uber for X’ companies. That didn’t work out so great either.
But since no bad argument is complete without bad mathematics, to lend the idea of network effects some rigour, Metcalfe's Law is dutifully trotted out.
Metcalfe was a smart guy who realized that the value of a network grows in proportion tothe connected number of nodes on the network. A network with three users, for example, will have three possible connected pairs. A network with four will have six. A network with five will have ten...
Funny enough, Metcalfe's law actually undersells the case for network effects because it examines only possible pairs rather than all possible subgroups of the network. A better defence would be Reed's law which corrects for that assumption.
According to Reed's law, the value of a network grows exponentially with the addition of each new user. A network of three users will have four possible subgroups but a network with four users will have more than twice that with nine possible subgroups.⁷
As you keep adding users to the network, the value to each user is supposed to increase rapidly.
Unfortunately, Reed's and Metcalfe's laws applied naively, lead to some very strange places. The first problem is nobody's social circle has that sort of range. Yup, there's no human being on the planet who is friends with millions of people.
The network effects sirens forget this part as they are obsessed with the God's eye view of the total value of the network. The total value of the network is a meaningless scorecard. What matters is value for the modal user. And value for the modal user does not scale up exponentially: it hits certain limits fast. Whether that limit is the famous Dunbar number of approximately 150 people is a matter up for contention. But that limit is always much less than the total number of users on a typical platform.
Oh, attracting additional users isn't costless either. Everyone would love to grow by word of mouth but there's a reason social media businesses spend heavily on customer acquisition and advertising.
For all the talk of TikTok’s virality, its parent company, Bytedance, spent and keeps spending massive sums on advertising to attract new users. In 2021, the costs of enticing new users tallied up to 19.2 billion dollars, a major reason why TikTok didn’t even make a profit.
At some point, the cost of adding a new user outweighs the benefit of having the user on that platform. If Facebook wishes to double the total number of its monthly active users, it will have to provide broadband, mobile phones, and a good deal more to at least one billion people.
Interestingly, Metcalfe made a brief allusion to this which was, of course, roundly ignored:
There may be diseconomies of network scale that eventually drive values down with increasing size.
But the elephant in the doorway is the third problem: not all users are created equally. Adding Taylor Swift to your social media platform is a huge positive. Adding the everyday guy is not. Indeed, some additional users are negative in value: trolls, fascists, ideologues, and people who have invested their lives into being wrong with perfect consistency.
The user doesn't even have to be annoying. The paradox of social media is if the platform succeeds really well, it will eventually cultivate a group of users who infuriate and alienate another group of actual or potential users merely by existing on the platform. The exodus of teens on Facebook owed a lot to their parents and grandparents joining the platform. The older users didn't have to do anything else. Their existence on the platform was sufficient to drive other demographics away.
And network effects only guarantee popularity. They do not guarantee profit. All it means is users enjoy using the platform. It does not translate to any willingness to pay for it.
Why LinkedIn Is The Greatest Social Media Platform .
In real life, ninety percent of what we say is said for utility. It is functional speech. You want dinner so you say so. You want someone to stop bugging you so you say so. You want the volume dialled up so you say so.
Social media operates in reverse: ninety percent of what we say was because someone might be listening. There's a lot of complaint about ads on social media. But really, almost all speech on social media is advertisment: you are selling a view, an emotion, an image, or yourself. Everyone is a performer on social media. The only distinction is in the audience.
This is why LinkedIn is the greatest social media platform of all time: it has the most boilerplate, most insufferable audience you can find. It is excruciatingly boring. When it is not, it is funny without meaning to be funny.
Users humblebrag and post all sorts of motivational cliches on LinkedIn because they are prrforming for possible and current employers and employees. LinkedIn is more profitable than Twitter, Reddit, and Snap combined because its audience doesn't even have to pretend to give a damn about free speech. The platform doesn’t need censorship or moderation. The users self-censor themselves. They have to.
LinkedIn is the only successful platform whose only job is done willingly and happily by its own users without question, argument, or complaint. There is no conflict because there is no interest.
Don't Bring A Thermometer To Hell
Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, free speech is once again the centre of free speech. Elon had previously promised to wrest control from the ‘dark, nebulous forces’ in charge of the bird app and guarantee free speech on the platform.
Well, that's strictly impossible. Not the wresting control bit: he seems to be doing that pretty well with disastrous implications for profitability. But the freedom of speech bit.
I don't know the directions Twitter will assume after this: it's a heady time for social media in general. But whatever happens, in whatever form, speech on Twitter will remain 'unfree', as it has, as it must, as it should.
¹ As an aside, the legal penalty for murder in Ancient Athens was often exile, a more lenient fate than forced suicide. Make of that what you will.
² In the spirit of this essay, Meta will be referred to by its former and vastly better name: Facebook.
³ I am choosing to ignore the biggest benefit of social media platforms: their transformative reduction of search costs.
⁴ The argument that China's population is the probable cause here is moot. India has a similar number of people and no native social media platform of that size. Interestingly, especially when you consider its robust digital economy, India has no super successful social media platform at all.
⁵ Your free speech is my grounds for legal liability. You can’t have both. Rights only make sense in the context of duties.
⁶ Two things: Bill Gates' foreword to the book is better written than all of his own books put together. Also, the principle applies in reverse: some of the best books were written by some very unlikable people, e.g V.S Naipaul, Isaac Newton, Lord Byron, H.P Lovecraft, J.K Rowling, Nassim Taleb.
⁷ The formula for calculating Reed’s Law is 2ᴺ − N − 1 where N stands for the number of participants in the network. Note that Reed's law is not only mostly useless in the real world, it is nathematically inaccurate. The possible number of subgroups of a network of three members is three ( unless you also count the entire network itself which isn’t a subgroup), but applying Reed’s law will result in 4.
The possible number of subgroups of a network of five nodes is 24. But applying Reed’s law will output 26. Similar inconsistencies exist as one goes on. To the best of my knowledge, this apparent issue has not appeared anywhere else. Oh, well.
> The argument that China's population is the probable cause here is moot. India has a similar number of people and no native social media platform of that size. Interestingly, especially when you consider its robust digital economy, India has no super successful social media platform at all.
Because China needs social media (as you said, you can't stop people from expressing themselves), and they need to control that social media. India can piggyback off the West's social media because, at the time of their introduction at least, they didn't need to censor social media posts.