TWTR — Verification for Free Speech?

Twitter has been a blessing to humanity, a real Public Square 2.0 where people can quickly come together and discuss, from anywhere in the world, the topics of the moment.

This week, Twitter banned Tommy Robinson from our modern Public Square — he is not the first.

Banning any person from speaking in our Public Squares, or manipulating the topics that are trending in our Public Conversation, can easily become a powerful mass propaganda tool — the type of weapon that western civilization has slowly learned, through pain, to avoid.

In public, even the unstable, unkempt, homeless man, talking to himself as much as anybody else, is allowed to shout his theories during shop hours where ever he may wander. We do not ban people from the Public Square IRL, and we do a great disservice to our new and improved Public Square of Twitter, Google and the World Wide Web itself, when we allow ANY voice to be censored.

Yet, we all understand that to keep our new Public Square functioning, certain behaviors must be made transparent — here Twitter Verification is a great solution, checking ID’s before issuing the marvelous blue verification check box.

So what we have is a Public Square with what some see as a problem, Hate Speech. A problem with a caveat that nobody, no matter how crazy, should be banned from the Public Square — so long as they are non violent.

In Twitter Verification, we find a potential solution, summed up as:

“Hate Speech is Free Speech, once it’s signed.”

In the real Public Square, you can say anything because society trusts that your reputation and physical presence anchor you, body and speech, to the society you seek to impact, thus forcing proper consideration before sharing beliefs which go against the generally accepted social norms, while still allowing those beliefs to exist and even to spread with great virality by design.

The lack of connection to social norms and the casual disregard for those accepted norms, is what many are reacting to when applauding the banning of “bots” and the muting of trolls.

The idea that “Hate Speech is Free Speech, once it’s signed.” seeks to bring reputational accountability back into our digital public square.

Only one person needs to stand up and put their real world name on the line for a movement to succeed — only one person in a movement needs to be [Twitter] Verified, to show their papers. Historically, consequences for even truthful and important speech can become massive as societies fall, so never requiring ID to follow a “censored” topic or person is a red line for this author.

One brave person can be the conduit for a million voices if an idea is powerful and powerfully banned, or a million voices can get Verified and say the one thing that these centralized services, which are bound to fall under (perhaps already under) the influences of the same handful of uber rich and well connected folks that seem to have all of the money and run everything else — folks who lie well, about huge topics, regularly.

Ideally, any person can get onto these platforms and say absolutely anything they want, and be treated fairly by the service’s algorithms such as trending and search, without regard to the content of what is being said, within the bounds of Law. So long as the speaker is willing to link their reputation to their speech, they will not be banned from our new Public Square.

I think this fixes the “Tommy Robinson” problem, ensuring that the same rules we use to keep bots and trolls from leveraging the lack of reputational accountability in our modern Public Square cannot be used to silence dissent.

Whatever it is that we may want to talk about in our Public Square that our “Trusted Censors” in these social media companies don’t think we should say or hear, precisely that speech is what ID Verification in exchange for Free Speech is for. Tommy can show his ID, linking his banned speech to a real human, and carry on saying whatever he wants to whoever will listen.

Let the idea and it’s speaker’s reputation stand on merit in our Public Square 2.0, as it has for centuries before.

Give the masses an ID Verification process — then #NeverCensor these accounts

@JRedded (unverified)