#no-platforming

To begin, consider the position of those who oppose “no platform” tactics. Their view is typically that there is some value to the open expression of ideas and, thus, that the use of violence to suppress such expression is objectionable. The problem with this view is that, if taken at face value, we find that speech is violently suppressed all the time—and, specifically, in ways that almost no one, including free speech proponents, seems to find objectionable.

Here is an example. I have a lot of strong views about politics which I would like to communicate to others. I sometimes write these up on this blog, but the audience is extremely limited (though appreciated!), and so my ideas do not reach as many people as I would like. In other words, my platform is fairly limited. Because I would like to rectify this situation, I have developed a strong preference to attend the Super Bowl and read some of my best essays over the PA system during the halftime show. Similarly, I have decided that I would like to go to the CNN television studio and read my essays on air so that more people can hear my ideas. But, of course, I won’t act upon these preferences. Why? Because if I tried to do either of these things, I would be violently removed by police and imprisoned for trespassing.

If one takes seriously the view that a right to free speech requires is a right against the violent suppression of one’s expression of ideas, then my free speech rights have been clearly violated by both the NFL and CNN. If I try to share my views in certain spaces, they will draw upon the violence of the state to prevent me from doing so. And yet, this great injustice has drawn surprisingly no condemnation whatsoever from the many purported defenders of free speech rights!

Of course, the reason that this suppression of speech hasn’t drawn outrage is fairly obvious: most debates over free speech presuppose a background of property rights where those rights take priority over the right to free expression. The owners of football stadiums are taken to have a right to control those spaces and what goes on within them, even if that includes the use of coercive threats and forcible removal to silence unwanted speech. Similarly, CNN is granted the right to unilaterally determine which speech to permit within its studios and which to ban. Hence the lack of outcry over the fact that my plan to give a talk at these venues has been thwarted by the threat of violence.

This observation reveals that, when some instance of no-platforming takes place, much of the ensuing debate over “free speech” is a red herring. Those who condemn no-platforming by appealing to the importance of free expression or the unacceptability of violence to preclude speech fail to take seriously the fact that, in a world of private property rights, speech is constantly suppressed via violence and coercive threats. Thus, unless critics of no-platforming are willing to grant that the NFL acted wrongly in violently suppressing my attempt to deliver my manifesto, they cannot object to no-platforming on the grounds that it is a violent suppression of speech.

Rather, critics of no-platforming must seemingly argue that the practice is wrong because those who do the violent suppressing of speech are not entitled to do so. When the NFL suppresses my speech, it has the right to deploy such violence because it has the prior right to control certain physical spaces—i.e., certain platforms. By contrast, rowdy college students and protesters don’t have any sort of property rights claim over various college buildings, meaning that their employment of violence and coercive threats to suppress speech is not legitimate.

However, if objections to no-platforming must tacitly appeal to property rights, then they lose much of their persuasive force. First, they give up the moral high ground of appealing to free speech, which is revealed to be entirely subsidiary to property rights claims. They can no longer appeal to the importance of a free exchange of ideas, the horror of Orwellian dystopias, slippery slope arguments, or anything of that nature in asserting the wrongness of no-platforming. Further, insofar as optics are concerned, it is rather a bad look to vocally trumpet the importance of free speech just prior to conceding that, actually, the right to control patches of the Earth entirely trumps such free expression.

Second, objections grounded in private property rights are then threatened by the numerous critiques of private property posited by anarchists and socialists. While I will not rehearse these arguments here, I will note that the claim that private individuals had the right to coercively seize unowned patches of the Earth—and, thus, that the inheritors of those patches are similarly entitled to violently control them—is a controversial premise upon which to rest one’s critique of no-platforming. Indeed, many of the most outspoken proponents of no-platforming are, in fact, anarchists and socialists who reject exactly these premises. And, once one rejects the view that some university administrator has the right to unilaterally determine who gets to use certain physical spaces to express their views (and who gets violently removed), then community control of those spaces as expressed via no-platforming begins to seem quite reasonable.