Speaking about Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter, David Kaye, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, had this to say:
If Musk wants to advance a platform that is open to free speech, to public debate, he actually needs humans to moderate it. Policy decisions need to decide the context that makes sense, so the platform doesn’t become awash in racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, harassment and all that.
In other words, if Musk wants a platform where people can say what they’re thinking, they must be prevented from saying certain kinds of things.
I suppose this kind of ‘meaning denial’ was inevitable, given how it’s become normal to use the word free to refer to goods and services that are actually subsidized. From there, it’s a small step to use free to refer to speech that is actually censored.
The end game, as Orwell noted, is to eventually remove the need to censor people who think the wrong things by making it impossible for people to think at all — something that begins with destroying the ability to use language to communicate concepts that are precisely delineated, and stable over time.
It’s ironic that parents and pundits and politicians are fighting so hard over what to exclude from the welfare school curriculum, when they should be more concerned with what to include. For example, kids who could read and understand the Great Books collection would actually be in a position to understand why modern ideologues (like Professor Kaye) are so eager to redefine common words, and in a position to call them out on it.
