A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.
Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.
There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:
• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.
• Respond to the speech with more speech.
Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.
It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.
So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.
It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.
The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.
The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.
What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.
Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.
I also heard the slogan "the answer to bad speech is more speech" frequently inside EFF in the first half of my time working there and almost never in the second half.
It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.
I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".
I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:
It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking
I can't really imagine a college student in 2026 having that poster (regardless of that student's political views).
I think the problem with the free speech ideals is a combination of engagement farms (i.e. a room full of smart phones where people “like” or view particular content so it artificially becomes more popular on social media) and bots (which, with modern AI, are pretty hard to distinguish from people who know how to write) which make modern online content a lot less organic.
In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.
Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.
Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.
[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.
First off, just want to say thanks so much for posting your top comment - I'm only tangentially familiar with the changes to the EFF over the years so I appreciate the insight.
> I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one (small data point to think about - the reddit r/jailbait controversy was in 2011, and that was when, AFAICT, Reddit first implemented policies beyond "anything except outright illegal speech". I also remember that, regardless of ones opinion on the topic, Reddit didn't really have a choice in the matter - they would have been sued or legislated out of existence if they didn't ban r/jailbait and similar subreddit. I also have trouble believing either the "old" ACLU or EFF would have defended the r/jailbaiters, but you were there at the time so maybe you could offer insight).
But I'd argue that this isn't just some opinion change. One of the unstated beliefs of many who believed in the power of free speech is basically that when people are free to speak out, the "best" ideas, or at least the factually true ideas, win out. I don't know how you could be alive on this planet for the past 15 years and still believe that.
To take a relatively non-political example, look at Ann Reardon, a YouTuber who originally got big with a baking channel but switched to "food debunking videos" because there was so much food bullshit online, and worst, "food porn" makers were hawking cheap, bright videos of recipes online that were inherently impossible while real amazing bakers (who showed recipes that actually, truthfully worked) were having to leave YouTube because their views plummeted in the face of "So Yummy" and the like.
Similarly, take the rise of MAHA, which has now mainstreamed pseudoscience and rejected evidence-based policies. Fine, one could argue there is a lot of opinion baked into that statement, but in a lot of cases some MAHA pronouncements make no sense because they're not even self-consistent. Like the new nutrition guidelines literally say "When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such
as olive oil." Except olive oil, despite being a great choice for many people because it is high in oleic acid, is actually a very poor source of essential fatty acids. There are lots of other BS items I could bring up with respect to MAHA, that's just one that is so undeniably clear that the authors didn't know what they were talking about.
To emphasize, I think the rise on the left of "you're a bad person if you say the wrong things as we define them" is not just a horrible, but ultimately extremely counterproductive, approach. I myself have very little idea what the optimal solution is, but I think technology, with its algorithmic feeds and difficulty that it presents differentiating bots from humans, has fundamentally changed a lot of the "axioms" people assumed with free speech absolutism, and to deny that feels like sticking one's head in the sand.
Because of the asymmetry of energy required to refute bullshit, letting people spew bullshit and cleaning up afterwards is very expensive. And because some people are very bad at updating information in their heads (worse than the average, which is already poor), people will be told a refutation, agree, and later will forget, and repeat the refuted bullshit. And I truly believe they forget, not just pretend to agree with the refutation.
So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.
But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.
People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".
Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.
Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.
Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.
A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.
Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.
>>>Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.<<<
This is a common meme which has gone viral on social media, but it’s actually not true. Read this:
“Men outnumber women on dating apps about 3:1. When adjusting for this imbalance, the median match rate for men and women on Tinder evens out, meaning the average woman isn’t matching with a bunch of chads.”
“The viral graph showing most couples in the US meeting online is based on a pitifully small sample size. The true percentage of people meeting online is likely in the range of 25–30%.”
Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.
There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:
• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.
• Respond to the speech with more speech.
Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.
It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.
So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.
It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.
The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.
The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.
What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.
Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.
[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.