Freedom of speech falls victim to the Twittermob

The unofficial thought police on Twitter shut down discourse and people they don’t like

Nobel prize-winning sci­entist Tim Hunt, above, recently lost an honorary position after tweeters went ballistic over a sexist joke he made.

Of all the institutions thrown up by the digital revolution, none has failed to live up to its promise as much as Twitter.

This instantaneous publishing platform, a printing press in the palm of your hand, was meant to liberate our right to speak from all the fetters of old.

Pre-printing press, you needed the say-so of a pointy-hatted man of God before you could publish anything (if you knew how to write, which hardly anyone did). Monks with pots of ink were pretty much the only source of publishing. Even after the printing press was invented, you still required official­dom’s permission (in the early days) or an editor’s permission (in later times) before you could publish your thoughts.

But with the emergence of Twitter in 2006, all those old guardians of discourse became obsolete. Now, wherever you were, whatever was on your mind, you could express yourself to the world. Angry with a politician? Pissed off with the press? In love with a celeb? Tweet it. Reveal it. You don’t need anyone’s permission. Write it down, press publish, and it’s there, visible to all.

In 1644, in the relatively early days of the printing press, John Milton took a fiery stand against government restrictions on publishing, demanding: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

If you had told Milton that, 350 years later, people wouldn’t even need huge printing machines to utter but could do it with a gadget in their hands, he’d be gobsmacked — and delighted.

Twitter boasts of its revolutionary boosting of humankind’s “right to utter”. Tony Wang, former general manager of Twitter UK, says Twitter is “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”. Well, that was the dream. The reality? Somewhat different.

Far from liberating human utterance from the finger-waggers, Twitter has morphed into a sphere in which a whole new army of word-policers try to shut down thoughts and folks they don’t like.

There are two ways in which the right to utter is being rattled on Twitter: first, through the application of old laws to this new digital zone; and, second, through the emergence of Twittermobs, led by the right-on Twitterati, who behave like Twitter’s own self-correcting blob, hunting down and punishing the expression of anything “inappropriate”.

Joe Hockey’s libel victory against Fairfax Media confirms that Twitter is far from immune from the speech controls of old. Hockey was awarded $200,000 on the grounds that a tweet Fairfax sent to promote an article about him was libellous. The tweet referred to him as a “Treasurer for sale”. The case shows that one of Twitter’s great strengths — its brevity — is also its weakness.

Forced to cram complex thoughts into 140 characters, tweeters can end up sounding nutty. What’s more, to get noticed in this noisy forum, you have to stand out. The clickbait temptation: say something startling to get hits. Fairfax has learned that Twitterspeak can be a minefield. The rest of us are reminded that Twitter is not a law-free zone, even if some of us might prefer it were.

In Britain, too, old laws have dulled Twitter’s anarchic promise. In 2012, prominent tweeters — including columnist George Mon­biot and Sally Bercow, wife of John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons — took part in nudge-nudge tweeting about a Tory lord being a pedo. He wasn’t a pedo. So he took them to court and won.

Brits even have been imprisoned for tweeting. A student was jailed for 56 days for writing racist tweets, a scandalous assault on the freedom to utter (which must include the liberty to utter bilge).

In 2010, a tweeter was convicted of being “grossly offensive” after making a joke about blowing up Robin Hood Airport in Not­tingham. He was fined £385 and lost his job. Give me the freedom to joke, above all liberties.

Last year, a British tweeter was arrested after making a joke about the Christmas-shopping disaster in Glasgow, when six people were killed by an out-of-control garbage truck. He was eventually let off. But the fact he was visited by the cops suggests officialdom has no intention of letting Twitter be “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”.

Alongside these official clampdowns, there’s something even worse: unofficial Twitch-hunts of the un-PC, led by the Twitterati.

Some leftish tweeters were sniffy about Hockey suing of Fairfax. Yet he only did formally what they do informally: punish tweeters who say outrageous things.

Barely a day passes without the emergence of a Twittermob. In Britain, Nobel prize-winning sci­entist Tim Hunt recently lost his honorary position at Univer­sity Col­lege London after tweeters went ballistic over a sexist joke he made.

Last year, Brendan Eich lost his job as chief executive of Mozilla after tweeters exposed and went apoplectic over his opposition to gay marriage. (Being anti-gay marriage is Twitter suicide. As an Irish columnist said in the run-up to Ireland’s referendum on gay marriage, tweeters who were anti risked being “pelted with hashtags … until they either submitted to the mob or were driven offline”.)

In Australia last year, a Twittermob got Sydney Opera to dump Georgian singer Tamar Iveri over nasty comments she made about gay people. Because apparently artists must have the right moral views before they can perform in public. You know, like in the Soviet Union.

The Twittermob phenomenon reveals what kind of people dominate the Twitterati. To be a super-frequent tweeter, you must be time-rich and hands-free. That excludes bus drivers, coalminers, nurses … normal people too busy to tweet every three minutes. The most active bits of Twitter are the domain of the cultural and media elites, celebs, think-tankers, people with oodles of time. And these people tend to be cut from PC cloth, intolerant of anyone who has the temerity to have a different moral perspective to theirs. They’ve become the Twitter­police, hounding out moral reprobates far more effectively than the likes of Hockey do.

This is Twitter’s curse: the misfortune to have been invented in an era of new PC intolerance. Technologically, Twitter pro­mises a liberty of expression earlier generations only dreamt of. But culturally it has arrived at a time of caginess about offensive or non-con­formist speech. Instead of liberating us from thought-fet­ters of old, it has created new ones, becoming a forum for enforcing the new conformism on everything from gay marriage to feminism.

If we really want tools such as Twitter to lend themselves to the historic liberal project of giving people the liberty to utter “above all liberties”, then we must restate the case for full freedom of speech. Not only for the right-on but also for the “wrong” — for everybody.