By Rudolph Bush

The Dallas Morning News

In a move that interested few and mattered less, Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland announced to Twitter on July 2 that enough was enough. He was leaving the platform for a place where he felt he could express himself full bore without the liberal idiots with mob mentality that have taken over here.

The Bedford, Texas, Republican promised to check his account infrequently, a pledge that turned out to be too good to be true since his Twitter thumb has remained pretty active in the days that followed.

But like other conservatives with a libertarian streak, most prominently Sen. Ted Cruz, Stickland said he was decamping for something called parler.com, a place apparently less hostile to his political persuasions but hardly a stranger to mob-think.

I dont know much about Parler. A brief stroll suggested it wont be a regular stop. I do know a thing or two about Twitter, and Stickland is partly right. Whatever you dont like, Twitter serves it in stinking heaps.

Mob mentality? Check. Hate speech? Check. Racism? Check. Anonymous libel? Check. Preening moralism and virtue signaling? Check and check. Trolls, bots and fake accounts pitting people in constant battle? You have come to the right place.

The problem of thinking like Stickland and Cruz and even President Donald Trumps reelection campaign is that it casts the social media problem as a political one. Twitter is becoming too liberal or too intolerant of conservatives, or so goes the argument.

But this isnt a conservative or liberal problem. This is a human social problem now, and one we better figure out how to fix fast, because it is giving us a political culture that promotes the worst, scares away the best and tears just about everything it gets in its maw to pieces.

Stickland isnt an interesting politician. A stock character from tea party central casting, he has consistently and successfully worked at making a joke of his office and its duty to legislate. Except for his habit of crippling good bills, his fellow conservatives stopped taking him seriously years ago.

But his social media situation is instructive as to what Big Techs platforms are doing to our national conversation and to why we cant fix social media the way it appears we are going to try.

The way things are going, free speech is going to be diminished if we let the platforms get their way. And, in the short term at least, conservatives will probably get the brunt of it.

In the long run, though, we are in danger of turning over the decision of what speech is and is not acceptable to profit-driven companies that do all they can to keep us glued to our screens.

Lets look at how this is playing out and why we need to stop it.

Last week, Facebook undisputed king of all social media had to face the music of a civil rights audit it paid for that found the platform is not sufficiently attuned to the depth of concern on the issue of polarization and the way that the algorithms used by Facebook inadvertently fuel extreme and polarizing content.

Instead of enabling free speech, Facebook privileges certain voices over less powerful voices, the auditors wrote.

The answer, according to the audit, is to somehow neutralize or disempower extreme and polarizing content issuing from privileged voices.

If that sounds like a good solution, recognize that you can put a lot of ideas and voices into those categories, and what constitutes extreme and polarizing shifts with the winds.

The solution that Facebook appears to be driving at is to remove content that might concern some people even as its removal concerns others. In response to the audit, Facebook has already removed posts and pages associated with Trump political operative turned felon Roger Stone and the far-right Proud Boys group.

Thats low-hanging fruit. And even that has been controversial. It will only get harder to parse what does and does not constitute hate speech or polarizing speech. Revolutionary Thomas Paine and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison were polarizing, after all.

If we leave it to social media platforms to decide what is and isnt acceptable, we will only continue to be damaged as a democracy.

Even if it were possible for these companies to perfectly judge what should and shouldnt be posted (and it isnt), they have proved over time that this is not something they are going to do. As Shoshana Zuboff details exquisitely in her crucial book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, these companies have acted at every turn to create products that deceive and divide in the name of profit.

Conservatives are hurting their own cause in this case. Cruz has been outspoken on the matter. But his instinct is toward libertarianism and preventing platforms from policing speech in any way. When he joined Parler, he said, the platform gets what free speech is all about.

That is a self-defeating strategy. Preaching to the choir gets awfully dull, and Cruz has hardly given up Twitter where his audience is larger and he gets in the sparring he seems to cherish.

If things continue on the path they are going, conservatives will have much to worry about when it comes to social medias selection of what is and isnt acceptable speech.

But they would be wise to join those on the left who post-Russian electoral interference still have a strong appetite for reining in the way America regulates platforms. And they had better act fast, before the entire left recognizes the advantage that is about to come its way from social medias big self-correction.

For too long, these companies have enjoyed freedom from liability for what people post on their sites even as their products have damaged our democracy. The wise legislator is coming to understand how that carte blanche has narrowed and cheapened the internet, when it was supposed to broaden and democratize it.

There has to be a reconnection to responsibility for what goes up that is governed the way we have always governed speech through threat of libel.

Would it substantially change the way platforms function? Of course.

Would that be what the country needs?

Take a run through Twitter today and answer that question for yourself.

Rudolph Bush is deputy editorials editor for The Dallas Morning News.

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