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HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
I got that quote from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, and his post on the dangers of setting up libertarian free speech zones.
The main structural problem with media is the incentive systems it creates. If you generally act like a brash, loud-mouthed irritant then your star will rise, because people will form a strong opinion of you.
As David Brooks advised in his book ‘Bobos in Paradise’ two decades ago, the most successful opinion pieces are those which are well-crafted but just essentially wrong on some central point because it means that people will debate your argument. People will strongly overreact to your argument, causing the opposing political tribe to strongly support it.
With social media, of course, those terrible incentives are magnified. As I argued before, ideas markets without gatekeepers or institutional restraint present huge advantages to people with personality disorders.
So one reason that people get mobbed or “cancelled” or no-platformed, or all these other boring 2010s phrases, is that there are huge rewards and incentives for people to ruin someone else’s life or livelihood over some utterly trivial issue; conversely there are very few risks or downsides.
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