Vandalizing the Marketplace of Ideas
Everyone who’s been paying attention and has mere than a passing affection for freedom of speech knows that Internet culture is getting out of hand. Especially at times, it seems, in the little corner of the net inhabited by Science Fiction fans. (Perennial case being YA Twitter, of which I’ve expounded on elsewhere.)
However, something else is happening that’s a little more concerning than the Mean-Girls pile-ons that happen on social media and the blogs out there. There seems to be an increasing effort to use the functionality of the social media sites themselves to try and hurt or diminish one’s ideological enemies. This is long been the case on Facebook, where there’s a cottage industry in maliciously using Facebook’s “Report Post” functionality to get posts taken down and users suspended for dubious reasons. The trend has spread to Wikipedia. A growing number of authors (who at this writing include Michael Z. Williamson, Sarah Hoyt, Tom Kratman & Brad Torgersen) have recently had their pages flagged for deletion due to non-notability.
While Wikipedia has some arcane rationales for notability, I’m with John Scalzi in saying there’s no question these authors are notable. (If they aren’t, about 90% of the mid-list SF authors on Wikipedia need to go.) More importantly, it’s clear just from who’s being targeted, all sharing a publisher and all having some link to l’affaire Puppies, that these deletion flags are both malicious and politically motivated. That’s troubling in a time when we have a bunch of tech companies all putting their thumbs on the scale in some way or other.
Free speech is a prerequisite of civil society. It doesn’t matter if it’s lost through legislation, an algorithm, corporate policy, or by someone gaming a system, once it’s lost, trust in all remaining discourse is diminished until all that’s left can be dismissed as banal or propaganda. In a sense, these Wikipedia edits are a mini version of Google trying to game the next election, or Facebook deciding that a post complaining about them deleting a post is “hate speech”.
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