Free Speech and Moral Boundaries

Benjamin Franklin printed almost anything for a price, but even the famous champion of free speech refused some customers

Welcome to PeaceLinks, a curated monthly collection of web links about peace, cooperation, and common ground. Today’s post is a special edition addressing two petitions that have circulated since Thursday on Substack. I believe this newsletter can offer a perspective useful to the conversation, so it is worth some departure from our usual format. Please share the post if you consider it of value to the present debate.

Two letters appeared Thursday in the Notes feed and inboxes of many Substack readers. One of them, signed “Substackers Against Nazis,” asked Substack leadership what it planned to do about Nazis and white supremacists on the platform. The other, by

Elle Griffin

, urged no change in content policies (“Substack Shouldn’t Decide What We Read”). “Let the writers and readers moderate, not the social media platforms,” she advised. Between them, the letters attracted hundreds of Substack authors as co-signers, responding to an Atlantic Monthly article by

Jonathan M. Katz

called “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”¹

If Benjamin Franklin were here, he would find something to approve in both letters, and Substack leaders would be wise to avoid reading the letters as opposites representing political “sides.” Franklin would wonder, however, how any printer, publisher, or platform developer could write Content Guidelines without the moral concepts he called virtue and vice.

As a young printer in the British-ruled American colonies, Franklin did not believe in content moderation any more than the Substack founders, but he did consider it his responsibility to limit the spread of “Vice” and say no to “large Bodies” of “resent[ful]” men whose words posed a danger to individuals or civil society. If you have heard of Ben Franklin — his almanac, statesmanship, scientific investigations, or wit — then you know that his refusal to allow his press to become a tool of resentful men did not result in any lasting harm to his reputation, to his business, or to free speech.

WWBFD (What Would Benjamin Franklin Do)?

Despite being a famously hands-off American media entrepreneur, Benjamin Franklin had a content policy at least one degree more interventionist than Substack’s.

In 1731, when threatened with a boycott for something he had printed for hire, Franklin answered with nine points in defense of printers’ freedom.² Unlike shoemakers and carpenters, he said, a printer was bound to offend people in the regular course of his work. To stay in business, he would inevitably provide a platform for opinions he did not support.

As Franklin put it, professional printers were “scarce able to do anything in their way of getting a Living which shall not probably give Offense to some, and perhaps to many.” He justified his content neutrality with optimism that history has perhaps proven unwarranted, adding,

[W]hen Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter. Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute.

Wrestling with similar questions of content moderation to those faced by Substack and any media business, Franklin in his printing office developed nine “hands-off,” “business-first” principles, based on the supposition that Truth and Error, abstract principles, had a foreordained outcome. If Truth is going to win anyhow, why should a printer turn any paying customer away?

Despite this evident optimism, Franklin had one more principle that qualified all the rest. It followed from his lifelong study of private virtue, which he was not willing to sacrifice in the name of business. “Notwithstanding” a man’s ability to choose any work he is paid for, Franklin wrote,

yet Printers do continually discourage the Printing of great Numbers of bad things, and stifle them in the Birth. I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance Vice or promote Immorality; tho’ by complying in such Cases with the corrupt Taste of the Majority, I might have got much Money.

Such choices mostly take place out of the public eye, Franklin points out, which means that the printer gets no credit for virtue in his business accounts. According to Hands-Off Franklin’s Principle #10, the printer / media owner’s virtuous choice to “discourage . . . bad things” has a higher claim than his neutrality or his revenue.

One Degree of Difference

Substack’s Content Guidelines (last updated August 7, 2023) sound very much in the spirit of Franklin’s first nine principles, with even a modest version of Principle #10. “In General,” the owners profess,

We want Substack to be a safe place for discussion and expression. At the same time, we believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities. In all cases, Substack does not allow credible threats of physical harm.

The guidelines also offer language discouraging “hate” and the circulation of “private information,” a tactic that hate groups have used on other platforms to cause harm.

But there is a fine and noteworthy distinction between the Substack standard — “does not allow credible threats of physical harm” and the 1731 standard of Benjamin Franklin. The Philadelphian refused “constantly” to print anything that “might” so much as “countenance” or approve of vice.

Twice in his Principle #10, Franklin used the word “might” to set that higher standard:

I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance Vice or promote Immorality. (emphasis added)

And in the next sentence:

I have also always refus’d to print such things as might do real Injury to any Person. (emphasis added)

Franklin did not wait for “credible threats of physical harm.” The quaint-sounding eighteenth-century word “vice” allowed him to reject anything he considered immoral, not just “real Injury to any Person” or other itemized wrongs. He cultivated a moral sensibility and relied on it to refuse any customer the amplification of his printing platform.

Of course, the Future Founding Father did not infringe on the free speech of people he rejected as customers. He simply turned down their money and said no to circulating words he thought should be left unprinted. He set moral boundaries for his business, and the free speakers took their words elsewhere, neither infringed nor amplified by the print technology of the day.

Safety First

Matching Franklin’s ethical standard would in no way detract from Substack’s policy of encouraging “robust discourse.”

In fact, the current Substack guideline opposes “safety” to “controversy” in a manner Franklin would surely reject. To return to this important point, Substack policy states,

We want Substack to be a safe place for discussion and expression. At the same time, we believe that critique and discussion of controversial issues are part of robust discourse, so we work to find a reasonable balance between these two priorities.

Here, friends, is the problem distilled to a single phrase: It sounds good at first, but there is no such thing in a civil society as a “reasonable balance” between safety and “robust discourse.” Those two things are not opposites, and they do not belong on two sides of a balancing scale.

As any teacher or therapist will tell you, and probably you know it yourself when you whack your head (not too hard) with the palm of your hand, a “safe place for discussion” is a precondition for “robust discourse” about “controversial issues.”

Full stop.

Franklin’s Principle #10 established safety for discourse as a precondition of his business. He was willing to earn “the Resentment of large Bodies of Men, for refusing” their jobs “absolutely.” After that, he considered himself free to practice content neutrality on lesser matters of public disagreement.

Dear Substack: You have created a wonderful thing. Don’t let anyone tell you that “safety” can be compromised so that someone’s “free” expression can have the scope it wants. None of us are free when any of us are unsafe.

Did I say full stop?

Beyond Franklin

So far, I have only considered Substack’s guidelines in light of the standard set by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. At that time, he risked a boycott because he printed an advertisement for a ship that did not want clergymen as passengers. From public anger on this issue, Franklin decided it was time to declare his nine principles of content neutrality and one qualifying principle of ethical intervention.

The challenges we face today are far more grave than the exclusion of clergymen from a ship.

Elle Griffin

expressed gratitude for the wisdom of Substack letting readers and writers curate and moderate their own communities. She is right: Substack is superior to other platforms for letting us shut out authors we consider opprobrious. If someone wants to insult clergymen and women and we find that rude, we can boot those hooligans from our invitation-only Substack garden.

But that is not enough.

We know something Benjamin Franklin did not. We know from twentieth-century history that it’s possible for the beneficiaries of a democracy to give up/lose their privileges to the mind-numbing slogans of fascism. And we know how hard it is to dislodge fascism once it gains the upper hand.

This means it is in the practical (not ideal, aspirational, rhetorical) interest of every media platform that depends on free speech and open discourse to actively promote democratic freedoms and actively discourage fascism or other threats to the Constitution and the due process of law. What Franklin called “Vice” and “Immorality” we have to translate into the words and actions of our own day. We learned in the last century that threats to democracy and the rule of law are threats to the safety of persons and the free exchange of ideas.

A platform that recognizes its debt to open discourse and democracy will do everything to protect the fragile environment that allows controversy to be safely aired. It will not “countenance” fascism, nor “promote” anything that “might do injury” to a person or to the democratic republic that preserves both our safety and our freedom to speak.

Dear Substack: Will you stifle in the birth any writing that would use your platform to harm democracy or promote fascism?

A Timely Idea

It may be hard for us to believe that the same author who wrote Franklin’s nine hands-off principles also wrote, “I have heretofore fallen under the Resentment of large Bodies of Men, for refusing absolutely to print any of their Party or Personal Reflections. In this Manner I have made my self many Enemies, and the constant Fatigue of denying is almost insupportable.” (From “Apology for Printers,” 1731, Principle #10)

Franklin knew that in order to have a flourishing business in a time of “controversial issues” (there is never any other time), the printer / platformer had to be the gatekeeper of what should never find an audience, at a cost measured, in the short term, in more than coins. In the long term, the influence of Franklin’s integrity and intellect towers over the voices he refused to amplify.

Dear Substack: I know this magnifies the job of developing a platform. Will you discern where in the team you can lodge this responsibility, and treat it with utmost sincerity and care? Your technical and creative contributions have attracted a crowd. Now it’s time to ask what your ethical contribution to this era will be.

I close with two questions for Substack leadership and anyone who’d like to comment:

1. Do you think it appropriate for content guidelines today to meet the moral standard of Benjamin Franklin in 1731?

2. Do you think it appropriate for content guidelines today to surpass the moral standard of Benjamin Franklin in 1731, in light of our greater knowledge of what makes free speech and democracy vulnerable?

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For more on this subject:

Hateful Speech vs Hate Speech

Here is today’s update from the journalist who organized the Substackers Against Nazis letter, which has grown its list of supporters since Thursday:

More than 200 publications join Substackers Against Nazis

PeaceLinks is usually a digest of posts I admire and want to remember. I do most of my own writing at Quiet Reading with Tara Penry, linked here:

1. Katz added more here and here.

2. I quote at length throughout this essay from a single 1731 essay by Franklin, “Apology for Printers.” A transcription is available in the National Archives. A pdf from the National Humanities Center contains another copy with a related “Statement of Editorial Policy” from 1740: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/ideas/text5/franklinprinting.pdf.