Freedom of Speech? Are You Kidding Me?

When I began my corporate communication career in the mid-eighties, CEO’s were flocking to video to sell their visions and products.  As novices under studio lights, they moved like Gumby and kept glancing off-camera for someone to rescue them.  (Inevitably, after their spouses and kids told them how awful they looked, they’d take it out on guys like me.)  Today, CEO’s, middle managers – heck, even interns – log into Zoom and handle themselves like Ryan Seacrest.

Back in the day (Did I really just say that?), if you wanted to get something off your chest about politics or anything else, your choices were to complain to your local barber or bartender, take it out on the dog, or spend your lunch hour banging out a “letter to the editor” on a Wang computer and hope that it might appear several days later in the local newspaper.  Today, you can sit in your Fruit of the Looms, drink a skunky microbrew, and unload on the President of the United States on social media, with the free world watching.

So, I can’t tell you how unfathomably crazy it sounds to me when people complain that Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg of Twitter and Face Book are impinging on their freedom of speech.  Are you kidding me?

The same people who argue vociferously that a baker employing three people has the right to refuse a cake for a gay wedding are now complaining that Dorsey and Zuckerberg – who employ 50,000 people between them and don’t charge a dime for their service – have no right to pick and choose who they offer service to.  Even, mind you, if they believe the blockage will help ensure that their platforms are not used to incite a riot or a revolt against their country!

Why do you have to love or hate these guys, or believe or disbelieve in what they stand for, to understand that they don’t owe you and me a dadgum thing, including the right to free speech.  Fuming at Dorsey and Zuckerberg about your inability to be represented publicly is like shaking your fist in the air at Louis Pasteur because you let the milk expire in your refrigerator.  (Make no sense?  Exactly.)

The social media icons aren’t guilty of robbing you, me, or anybody else of the ability to speak our minds.  In fact, they made their fortunes selling advertising to sponsors who love it when we blow off steam over their logos.  They have actually given us more freedom than we literally know what to do with. 

Nobody has benefitted more from their service offerings than the former president, who Tweeted 34,000 times in four years at zero cost to himself or the taxpayers.  Ironically, he did it because he thought he was being robbed of his freedom of speech in the regulated media.

In fact, what’s happening today in the social media space occurred in television years ago.  Fox News was born because Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes figured out that they could make hundreds of millions of dollars by catering to an untapped market of conservatives who were exercised by their lack of representation on CNN.  Fox News was, in effect, the Parler of 1996.  Networks like ABC squeezed profitability out their existing public affairs programming by turning shows like The View into the equivalent of lady WWF wrestling, to the delight of laundry soap advertisers.

Our model of news delivery and consumption is changing from one in which we trust single sources to give us both sides, to one in which we have to compare multiple “advocacy” sources to fashion our own personalized versions of the truth.  Social media was billed as news in our laps, but it’s really turned out to be a pain in our asses, both because it is exhausting to keep up with and because it is ruining our country. 

P.T. Barnum famously said that there is a sucker born every minute.  We are the suckers.  We beat the daylights out of each other on social media while big tech companies and their sponsors rake in billions of dollars by tracking our preferences and stuffing us with any brand of slop we enjoy or enjoy to hate. 

The only reason you know how much you hate CNN or Fox News or Twitter is that you spend hours looking at them.  You know it’s true!  I know it is because I have been the worst at it, especially in recent months.

A couple of days ago I went to bed mad as Hades at a guy I have not physically seen in forty years.  He and I took full advantage of the freedom and access we are afforded by Facebook to rip each other apart about politics, when we could have been talking about my family and his grandkids.   Is Mark Zuckerberg to blame for that?  Of course not.  He gets paid either way, and not by us.

I believe it is possible that America has gotten so jacked up on sweet freedom that we have become shackled by a sour addiction to a little device that used to be called a phone… that was wired to a wall… and that was perfect for checking on grandma or wooing a date from a girl in Algebra class. 

Let’s not blame Facebook or Twitter for our loss of freedom.  Let’s just turn them off once in a while.  Go outside.  Take in some air.  Pretend that we are “one nation, under God.”  Quit being suckers.