On August 19, 2020, I was advertising a “Blow Out Sale” for The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom—a trailblazing anthology I coedited with Roger Bissell and Ed Younkins. I was corresponding with a few of the contributors to the anthology with regard to steep discount sales of the book. I was literally in the middle of a chat on FB Messenger with one of our contributors, Nathan Goodman, to discuss the discounts. Suddenly, I got a note saying that I couldn’t send the message. After uttering a few expletives, I tried again. This time, all of Nathan’s half of the dialogue was gone. Poof! The display: “This message has been temporarily removed because the sender’s account requires verification.” Huh?
So I clicked into Nathan’s profile, and got one of those “Sorry” messages that the content could not be displayed. Now the expletives were becoming a bit more Brooklyn edgy.
Onto email. Conscientious friend that he is, Nathan apologized profusely for not continuing our dialogue on FB Messenger and said he was having some account difficulties. Funny. I got the same message from another of our contributors, Jason Lee Byas, who informed me that he too was having difficulty with his account.
I joked to myself: “This is obviously a conspiracy against the dialectical libertarian project!”
The joke apparently was on me. In fact, on all of us.
It took a while to sort out, but here’s the gist of it all. On the very day that my announcement went up, Facebook apparently enacted a new policy, which stated in part:
“Today we are taking action against Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organizations and QAnon. We already remove content calling for or advocating violence and we ban organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission. However, we have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior. So today we are expanding our Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy to address organizations and movements that have demonstrated significant risks to public safety but do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organization and banned from having any presence on our platform. While we will allow people to post content that supports these movements and groups, so long as they do not otherwise violate our content policies, we will restrict their ability to organize on our platform. … As a result of some of the actions we’ve already taken, we’ve removed over 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon from Facebook, blocked over 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram, and additionally imposed restrictions on over 1,950 Groups and 440 Pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram.”
Well, I have to say, unbeknownst to me, my good friends Nathan and Jason are among those who are now being characterized as “Dangerous Individuals.” And Jason himself has actually been in my apartment! If only I’d known!
The irony of all this is that Facebook has no clue just how “dangerous” dialectical thinking actually is. These two fine young scholars are as dialectical as they come; they are among the vanguard of a growing brigade of freedom-loving thinkers who are unwilling to accept the status quo and who understand that a dialectical method is the apotheosis of radical theorizing. Dialectics demands that we grasp social problems by understanding their interrelationships within the larger context of the system in which they are manifested—and which they perpetuate. It requires that we address these social problems across time, understanding the past, present, and many possible future directions that they might take. And in the end, it aims not merely to go to the root of such problems, which is the essence of what it means to be radical, but to uproot their preconditions and effects and to transform fundamentally the social system in which they are embedded.
If this be treason, make the most of it.
As Kelly Wright (another banned FB friend) and Nathan explain in their essay, “When Facebook Bans Peaceful Anarchists But Not the Violent State” (published on the site of the Center for a Stateless Society), they and two of their colleagues had their “Facebook accounts indefinitely disabled” with no explanation. But it is pretty clear that this blacklisting was a direct result of their having been administrators of an FB page that articulated a ‘leftist’ case for gun rights. In a valiant dialectical spirit, their group—“Leftists for Self-Defense and Firearm Freedom”—whether you agree with its political perspective or not, sought to challenge the false dichotomies in contemporary politics: “On one side, we see center left commentators who profess concerns about marginalized people but support gun control. On the other side, we see right-wing commentators who claim to support gun rights, but favor forms of state violence that undermine gun rights and rights to self-defense, such as the war on drugs. For instance, every no-knock raid is a home invasion that risks turning a gun owner defending their home into either a murder victim or an accused murderer.”
Again, whether or not you agree with the positions taken by the individuals in the group in question, their whole reason for being was to challenge conventional thinking on both the left and the right. And for this, they have now been branded as “dangerous individuals.”
This is unacceptable. In fact, it is downright infuriating and disgusting. We hear more and more about the dangers of “cancel culture”, and yet, right on Facebook, we are now witnessing what it means when a media giant starts to bracket out and cancel any “dangerous” perspective that challenges people to think outside the conventional political box within which too many are intellectually imprisoned.
I can speak directly to the integrity and brilliance of my two young colleagues and friends whose work is a highlight of The Dialectics of Liberty. As our contributor biography page states: “Jason Lee Byas is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). His research focuses on rights theory, alternatives to punishment, and justice beyond the state. In addition to his academic work, he has been a Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society since 2011. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Georgia State University and a B.A. in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Oklahoma.” And Nathan Goodman is also a “Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. He earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Utah. He has worked as a research fellow for the Center for a Stateless Society, a program intern for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, and a summer fellow at the Fully Informed Jury Association. His research interests include defense and peace economics, Austrian economics, public choice economics, and self-governance.”
Jason contributed an essay to the anthology that focuses important attention on the nature of social change and Nathan penned an essay dealing with the invaluable contribution of Don Lavoie to the project of a “dialectical liberalism.”
Think about the effects of all this. These are not merely brilliant doctoral students. They are our future. They deserve to be heard. In the interests of “public safety,” actions such as those taken by Facebook are now being applied through some bloodless algorithm that will have the effect of deadening rigorous debate and marginalizing those voices we need to hear from most: those that challenge our most precious assumptions and that compel us to think in nontraditional ways.
I have benefitted immensely from my presence here on Facebook; I’ve met people through this social media platform whose friendships I have come to cherish deeply. I have also had an opportunity to use the functions of Facebook to moderate a study group that brought together over 100 members in a structured chapter-by-chapter four-month long discussion of The Dialectics of Liberty, in which seventeen of the nineteen contributors to the volume engaged with readers in a lively and thought-provoking discussion of the contents of their essays. It is not my plan to, as the old adage goes—“cut off my nose to spite my face”—and to leave Facebook in an act of revolt. I plan to stay on this platform until or unless they throw me off. But as long as I am here, I plan to speak up when I see such injustices.
Fix. This. Now.
Postscript (23 August 2020): Check out my friend Irfan Khawaja’s “Fatwa: Death to Facebook” post on his Policy of Truth blog. 🙂
