Twitter’s anti-woke rival: social media cesspit gets bigger, not better

Katie Hopkins, with inset Twitter and Parler logos. Pictures: Supplied

There are some horrors which it is hard for any civilised society to ignore, and in ours one of them is Katie Hopkins.

Having initially gained prominence as a contestant on The Apprentice, in which she stood out by virtue of being able to form complete sentences in almost all circumstances, she has since developed a professional niche as a hatemonger.

Employed for various stints by newspapers and broadcasters, most of which eventually thought better of it, she has since 2017 largely had to publish her hate on Twitter pro bono. But this month it, too, kicked her off. She is now to be found on a newish site called Parler, which bills itself as a “Free Speech Social Network”. Although we shall come to Parler in a minute.

Twitter is as entitled to decide it doesn’t want her tweets as a newspaper would be to decide it doesn’t want her column.

As in, perfectly. But one thing her trajectory proves is the sheer impossibility, in a free online world, of shutting anybody up.

Always a new cesspit

For all the talk of “cancel culture” (which we shall also come to) nobody today can really be silenced at all. However many times you are no-platformed, there is always another platform. There is always a new cesspit into which to sink.

You just might struggle to get paid for it.

Younger digital natives, for all their woke intolerance, often understand this rather better than confused oldies like me. We pundits, particularly, have a terrible inclination to regard our free speech as being under existential threat the moment somebody so much as calls us a windbag on the internet.

Earlier this year, for example, the reliably wrong provocateur Toby Young founded “the Free Speech Union” out of a professed fear that free online discourse was becoming impossible due to censorious mobs and the cowardly organisations that care more about their own reputations. Within a day, he’d grown hopelessly tangled in his own contradictions, after being asked whether the far-right activist who calls himself Tommy Robinson would be welcome in his club. Only if he was prepared to “sign a statement of values not to be racist, sexist or prejudiced against Muslims,” said Young. Even the club with “Free Speech” in its name has

caveats.

Words and consequences

Rather than free speech per se, Young was agitating for something along the lines of “the freedom to speak without facing an onslaught of other people calling you scum”. I’m glib, I know, but such onslaughts are a genuine problem. They may not put you in a gulag but they do have real consequences. Many organisations, such as the Booker Prize which last week defenestrated Baroness Nicholson over her historical opposition to equal marriage, are apt to panic in the face of them. We are all, in the wrong circumstances, capable of being made to feel like a marble colonialist at a Black Lives Matter demo.

Of course, one might suggest that a good way to avoid being called such a thing would be to avoid behaving like one. Alas, things are not always that simple, and that is a gruesome failure of social media. The fact that JK Rowling, for example, is now regarded as a pariah by some for her peerlessly compassionate examination of the impact of trans activism on female vulnerability shows that humility and politeness is no defence against a person who wants a fight and an out-of-context screengrab. Still, you have to try. This is what debate is, and what a role in public life entails.

Fallen pundits’ new Parler

To change minds, you have to be in an arena with people who think things that you do not. The alternative is not politics or even punditry. It is also where we come back to Parler.

Hopkins is thriving on Parler along with Donald Trump Jr and Rudy Giuliani, and a handful of fallen pundits banned from elsewhere. There are also some Tory MPs, such as Steve Baker and Ben Bradley. There are those, I know, who would say that this represents the same failure as above: because a woke militia has rendered so much discourse beyond the pale that ordinary decent people are forced to flee to sites with more backbone. But I’d say that any ordinary decent person on Parler can’t have read much of it yet.

A precursor, Gab, has been trying the same thing since 2017 but swiftly became an unusable mess of pornbots and open racism and has been accused of incubating at least one mass shooting. The same could well happen with Parler. The problem is not that the site is a cesspit of assorted hatreds, although of course it is – and with angry bells on. Rather, the problem is that it’s the opposite of what it claims to be.

This is not the marketplace of ideas. Instead, it is a safe space for people who have shown they cannot function in the marketplace of ideas. All of us, if we’re honest, believe some things that some other people would find offensive. If you argue to convince, then upsetting others is always going to be an impediment; a problem to be solved or circumnavigated. Sometimes it will be unavoidable but the moment you start lusting for it, you are doing something else. You’re not even debating. You’re just trying to beat people up.

The people on Parler represent nobody’s failure but their own. Otherwise they simply couldn’t stand to be there. They have not tried to bridge divides, and they have not agonised about their inability to do so. They were always in the cesspit. It just took the rest of us a while to notice.

The Times