By Daniel Lyons and William Rau

You probably heard the hype about Truth Social. With former President Donald Trump at the helm, conservatives would finally get their revenge on censorious Silicon Valley tycoons. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) even left a safe seat in Congress to help out. The First Amendment would be front and center.

Now, Truth Social’s top executives are quitting. The company is in disarray, and the former president is not pleased. Some argue the company’s ties to Trump and his mantra that the 2020 election was stolen were too toxic for success. Others cite technical issues that complicated sign-up and registration for Truth Social.

The real story here is this: Anyone who purports to have a
private platform that enshrines unconditional free speech is a false prophet.
This story usually ends with the operators of said platform discovering that
content moderation is both hard and, to some degree, necessary.

Last year, former Trump aide Jason Miller launched Gettr, a self-proclaimed free speech platform that
sought to upend “big tech oligarchs [who] try to dominate and control what
people think.” However, Gettr quickly began moderating content and deleting
user accounts when the platform began to resemble seedier sites
like 4Chan (not exactly a paragon of conservative virtue). Gettr also failed to
get Trump to join.

Gab, a similar site “that champions free speech, individual liberty and the free flow of information online,” likewise has clear moderation and reporting features:

Gab is a free speech site that follows the law as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court and the First Amendment #1A. This means that some speech is illegal and won’t be tolerated on Gab. . . . Violators may be warned, suspended or banned from using Gab’s services, depending on the nature of the violation.

Parler, perhaps the most famous example, gained a notable following when its CEO proclaimed, “If you can say it on the street of New York, you can say it on Parler.” But within weeks of its launch, Parler instituted anti-spam rules and began blocking accounts that “harassed” other users. (As TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes, Parler’s CEO also boasted that “leftist troll” accounts had been deleted.) Almost two years later, Parler is struggling to remain relevant after implementing further content moderation measures.

In fairness, there is more to the Parler story. After the
January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Apple banned Parler from its App
Store, flipping the script on a tech antitrust crusade dominated by Democrats.
After antitrust hawks Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) expressed concern with Apple’s ability to effectively exterminate
another enterprise on a whim, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT)
joined in, accusing Apple of “procedural [un]fairness.” (Elsewhere in
Congress, the irony seems lost on some Democrats who praised Apple’s removal of
Parler but now seek to ban Apple from vetting and removing apps.) In
May 2021, Parler returned to Apple’s App Store after making a number of
moderation algorithm changes that Apple mandated as grounds for reentry. But
the app is hardly thriving.

Of course, freedom of contract is also a core conservative
value. Apple, a private actor, can choose the terms on which it contracts with
other companies. Parler, if it found Apple’s algorithm requirements unfair or
distasteful, could have walked away. Instead, it chose to compromise its ideological
commitment for the sake of broad distribution, just as it had earlier chosen
some content moderation to prevent the site from becoming a cesspool.

The lesson for Truth Social is that the Trump-populist
vision of free speech is incompatible with business success. Ironically, it’s
also increasingly inconsistent with the First Amendment itself—not to mention
traditional conservative ethics of free enterprise and regulatory humility.
Perhaps today’s Trumpian conservatives seek a doctrine of free speech that is
increasingly unfused from the Constitution’s original meaning (an understanding
one might call “progressive.”) For supporters of the modern right’s free speech
crusade, the fates of Gab, Gettr, Parler, and Truth Social are hardly grounds
for optimism.

Fiery tweets about Big Tech “overlords” will sustain populist anger for the time being. But in both the regulatory and business spaces, conservatives will need to do some serious soul-searching if their backlash against Big Tech is to carry any real meaning.

The post What Happened to Truth Social? Free Speech Online Sounded So Easy. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.