Klein on Caplan on Cancelling

My friend and GMU colleague Dan Klein, editor of Econ Journal Watch, takes issue with my recent post, “The Woke Who Did Not Cancel.” Here is his response. Enjoy!

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Here are some reasons I think Bryan’s post is badly off-base:

1. Bryan uses “the dog barking” as a metaphor for Facebook/Twitter/Google-YouTube engaging in ideologically-motivated wrongdoing. What he operationalizes as wrongdoing/no wrongdoing is whether someone has been kicked off the platform. He says, “Yet they’ve cancelled less than 1% of what you’d think they want to cancel.” He says they engage in only “a token quantity,” “a tiny sliver,” of ideologically-motivated wrongdoing. But Facebook et al screw with content providers in a large number of ways: slapping on labels and warnings and barriers, shadow banning, demonetizing, suspending, defamation, disabling features, miscommunicating, stonewalling, stalling, and so on. There are probably a dozen ways that a platform can screw with a content provider. In the details, probably scores of ways.

2. Bryan never raises the Peltzman effect. A large portion of the video makers I watch on YouTube have said something like: “I don’t want to say anything that will get me banned/demonetized/suspended” — that is, they indicate: “I’m not speaking frankly. I’m having to tone this down.” They all feel chilled. Ivor Cummins says on his YouTube: Go to my Odysee to see my good stuff! Just as we watch what we say in our academic papers, at least if we want to get published in “good” journals. (Even for classical liberal journals, we have to pull our punches, because the journal editors think they need to, or because who knows who the referee will be.) The Peltzman effect is not only providers trimming their sails, but would-be providers refraining from being a provider at all. Look at what has become of Wikipedia. Do non-leftists bother to try to correct its leftist bias? Why would they?

3. Bryan writes as though he has a good sense of the empirical magnitude of the wrongdoing, but he gives us no assurance that he does. Again, he hasn’t properly operationalized wrongdoing, but he doesn’t in any way convey his knowledge of the magnitude of that, namely people being thrown off the platform (“less than 1%”). If we consider all the ways that Facebook etc. disadvantage non-left voices, my own guess is that 1% would be underestimating it vastly. I rather figure that they disadvantage non-left voices as a matter of course.

4. Bryan says nothing about taking out the head of the snake, the General of the army, the lead spear. Or the harsher, more hearty criticism (Robert Malone, Ivor Cummins, Tony Heller, etc., anyone?), or the most biting criticism (Bryan mentions Twitter cancelling The Babylon Bee). Bryan says nothing about the significance of killing 0.01 percent of the non-left discourse that just happens to be the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example. Or YouTube’s removal of viral videos to shield Covid lies from being exposed. Narratives have moments of critical challenge and formation. Movements and opposition are about organizations and leaders. If you can cut emergent leaders and truth-tellers off at the knees, you disempower the entirety of the non-left. The sociology of sense-making, interpretation, formulation, and judgment is an emergent hierarchy. Philosophies are spirits, and spirits need prophets, voices, personalities, leaders. Intimidate or incapacitate the opposition’s would-be leaders, and you make the opposition much less powerful. Consider what Amazon did to the rising Parler. Amazon cut Parler off at the knees. And there’s Twitter and Trump. Bryan writes: “The ‘dog that didn’t bark,’ to repeat, is the vast majority of non-left voices and positions that hasn’t been cancelled.” Vast numbers alone do not an effective movement, organization, or leadership make.

5. Although Bryan allows profit-reducing conduct by Facebook etc., he allows it way too grudgingly, writing, "they’re willing to sacrifice a tiny share of their profits to get petty revenge.” I think it is naïve not to think that ideology and a delusional selfhood among the leftist world elites play an enormous role with these multi-millionaires. Someone who understands Adam Smith knows that, beyond the basics, moral condition, as opposed to material condition, is paramount. I make per year perhaps a hundredth or a thousandth of what the chiefs of Facebook et al do, and what would be the marginal utility of doubling my annual income? Not much at all. I see that. Is the situation not similar for them? It is true that many people have, as Smith explained, foolish notions about how wealth will improve their moral condition. But they also have foolish notions about how promoting leftism will improve their moral condition—a matter, for them, far beyond getting “petty revenge.” Indeed, they compete for place as warrior for ‘social justice;’ their ambition proves their worthiness to a phantom lord. I think that many of them are more possessed by that false notion than by the false wealth-oriented notion.

6. Bryan concludes with the following judgment, for which he gives no reason: “And when they select their ‘least-favorite people,’ they do so in the same haphazard manner as most of the human race… What drives their cancellations is neither profit nor philosophy, but hysteria and herding.” Was it hysteria and herding that disappeared the Hunter Biden laptop intelligence and canceled the NY Post? Remember, it is elections that determine who gets into office and who doesn’t. Deft moves at critical spots at critical moments—“a tiny sliver”—write the story. I think Mark Zuckerberg knows that.