The liberal meltdown over Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and his move to make it a privately-held company is enough to make Spock's pointy ears go smooth and turn his green blood red. The illogic of the thought that permitting open and uncensored dialogue is a danger to freedom and democracy would probably go over with Spock the way one of Dr. Leonard McCoy's emotional rants did on "Star Trek."
The left doesn't want to engage those who disagree with their beliefs and policies. They want to silence them. Why don't they want to put the time and effort into debating? Are their positions indefensible? Is it easier to just silence the opposition instead of attempting to correct what's said?
It's mind-boggling. "How dare anyone want there to be free speech? Don't they realize how harmful it is? Musk is doing us all a grave disservice!"
It's obvious some of these folks have either forgotten, or have never learned, when true free speech ruled cyberspace. The world didn't end and democracy didn't collapse because people were able to state their positions as they saw fit. And it wasn't that long ago, either, when people weren't constrained by arbitrary rules or terms of service when they wanted to express themselves.
Before cellular data networks, before mobile devices and apps, before streaming services, before HTTP and the World Wide Web, there was an Internet. It was much simpler than the online experience we know today, but in many cases, it was much better even with very limited content.
There were three major components of the Internet in its infancy. One was electronic mail. People were able to send messages to one another without the need to put pen to paper. E-mail has stuck around and is now the preferred contact method of many.
Another component was a method of transferring large computer files from one user to another. The system and the process shared a name, File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for short. Using special software, individuals could share data that didn't fit on the portable storage media in use at that time. FTP is still used, although the methods have evolved and services like Dropbox or Google Drive are now prominent.
But the final piece of the puzzle was something that raised few eyebrows back then, but would give the censorship crowd fits if it was prevalent and popular today.
Usenet was, and remains, a decentralized system of various discussion groups. Imagine the old America Online message boards, or the bulletin board systems provided by local Internet service providers. Multiply that by a factor of 100, and you have Usenet. It originated at Duke University and access was primarily limited to scholastic and other institutional settings before the Internet went mainstream.
The various topic-specific categories were known as newsgroups. And if there was a certain topic of interest, there was probably a Usenet group dedicated to it. Were you a college basketball fan? There was a newsgroup to discuss it: rec.sport.basketball.college. Were you a fan of a particular music group; say, Rush or Chicago or Kiss? Interested in camping? Fishing? Cats or dogs? Did you want to discuss politics? A devotee, or a detractor, of Rush Limbaugh? A few keystrokes in a search box, and you could find a place to talk about nearly any subject.
When AOL opened its closed system up to the Internet at large in the mid-1990s, a number of new users discovered Usenet. Dialup ISPs provided Usenet access as part of their service package, along with an e-mail address and possibly some file storage so customers could host their own small Web sites or file servers. When the Web became the primary attraction for online users, a whole new audience discovered the wonders of Usenet as well. If you had access to a Usenet server, you could discuss whatever struck your fancy with like-minded folks.
What made Usenet stand apart from today's online discussion offerings, be they topic-specific forums, or social media sites like Twitter or Facebook, was the total lack of content control. Outside of a few specially-noted moderated groups, you could say whatever you liked without fear of censorship. Once something was posted, it couldn't be deleted unless the original poster initiated a "cancel" request, which wasn't always successful. If you didn't like what a particular individual posted, you could place the subject or the person in a killfile and never see their posts, or posts in that particular subject thread, ever again. The action even got its own name; "plonking," after the imaginary "plonk" sound a piece of garbage would make when dropped into a trash can.
As a decentralized system with no owner, there were no rules. If you didn't like something, you removed yourself from it instead of removing it from the realm of discussion. No one fretted that Usenet discussions could lead to the end of the free world. It was a simpler and better time for public discourse.
One would think that in a censorious period like we're now experiencing, Usenet would be flourishing as the place for free discussion. But circumstances have taken a toll.
Usenet is, at its core, a text-based service. Network News Transfer Protocol, or NNTP, was designed to distribute text messages. As technology involved, knowledgeable experts figured out how to convert non-text files into text, and then how to reassemble them. This allowed Usenet to become a place where users could post and download pictures, videos, music files, and even complete installers for software. It boosted Usenet's popularity and brought about the rise of paid Usenet providers, selling access to the system above and beyond what ISPs offered.
It's been said that the boom in both consumer home video systems and Internet access was fueled by pornography. People bought VCRs so they could watch porn movies at home, and then got Internet service at home for the same reason. So naturally, pornography started being distributed in newsgroups set up for sharing files. So it's not surprising that child porn became readily available on Usenet.
Since Usenet isn't a centralized service like Facebook or Twitter, and user anonymity is readily available, someone had to pay the price for the accessibility of child porn. Former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and his successor, the now-disgraced Andrew Cuomo, began a very public push against Internet providers who made Usenet newsgroups available. Spitzer managed to get convictions against two local upstate New York ISPs, and this spooked major providers into either severely curtailing Usenet access, or eliminating it altogether. Verizon, Comcast, Time-Warner, AT&T, and other big national ISPs got scared and discontinued Usenet. Even AOL, which introduced Usenet to the masses, dropped access before it finally shuttered its online service.
Usenet is still around today, although in a vastly scaled-back form. There are some free NNTP services that allow access to text-based newsgroups, as well as several pay services that provide all the groups, including the "binary" groups where files can be encoded and downloaded. Google Groups also offers access to text groups. But it has waned in popularity to the point where new Internet users may not even know what Usenet is or how to access it.
Why hasn't a fully free and open discussion system flourished in this era of account suspensions, heavy-handed moderation, and biased "fact-checkers?" One of my favorite newsgroups has been supplanted by a forum where moderators have to approve accounts and rule with an iron fist. Posts are frequently deleted, threads locked, and users banned, and personal biases frequently come into play in those decisions. I'm amazed that a number of people actually prefer that setup instead of doing their own work to filter spammers, topics, and posters they don't want to see.
I miss Usenet and have frequently lamented its current status and wished for its return. Perhaps Musk can convert Twitter into a similar outlet, although the 280-character limit for tweets is extremely limiting. But the fears about how Musk will manage the platform are unfounded. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, or Antifa activists didn't take over the world when Usenet was king. And society isn't going to collapse if Donald Trump is allowed to get back on Twitter and take shots at Liz Cheney or Mitch McConnell or Joe Biden. (For the record, Trump has indicated that even if his Twitter account is restored, he doesn't plan to return and he'll keep using the Truth Social service he founded.)
Relax, liberals. The end of the world isn't imminent just because someday soon, people may be able to practice free speech and tweet what's actually on their minds without fear of running afoul of some arbitrary rule. We survived Usenet. We'll survive a more unrestricted Twitter. That's a conclusion that Spock would find entirely logical.
