Don’t Apply Different Speech Rules to Libs of TikTok

T aylor Lorenz is at it again. The job of the “technology and online culture” reporter for the Washington Post seems to consist entirely of targeted harassment of individuals and, occasionally, organizations. Now, in an article co-bylined with Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison (“Twitter account Libs of TikTok blamed for harassment of children’s hospitals”), she seeks to weaponize hate mail to get the speech of the Libs of TikTok Twitter account suppressed. This is asymmetrical information warfare and should be treated as such.

Is free speech too dangerous? Should we allow reporting on the conduct of individuals or institutions? The rules should be the same no matter who is doing the reporting. The situation that Lorenz is writing about is a common enough one in journalism, whether it is practiced by prestige outlets or by rougher-edged citizen journalists on blogs or social media:

• Person A engages in conduct that is controversial and possibly an abuse of public position or the rights of others.
• Person B, engaging in journalism, exposes that conduct to a broad audience.
• Person C in the audience engages in abusive or harassing behavior towards Person A.
• Person D, a second journalist, directs anger against Person B, blaming them for Person C.

In several past public controversies, the woman who runs the Libs of TikTok account has acted as Person B in this scenario, while Lorenz has been both Person B and Person D, all the while changing her position on who should be silenced, based on where she stands in any particular controversy.

The Libs of TikTok account exists to expose sexually deviant ideas and conduct posted publicly on the Internet by people in a position to influence young children. The focus of the account is not on exposing private information; the bulk of the content is created by the users themselves and posted publicly on social media for the world to see. The core of Libs of TikTok is, literally, just re-posting things from TikTok, without editing or commentary, onto Twitter. The targets of Libs of TikTok’s journalism frequently tout their own positions as public-school teachers, employees of public hospitals, or other holders of positions of public trust, many of them taxpayer-funded and enjoying the coercive authority of the state — an authority that Libs of TikTok’s proprietor, who works in real estate in Brooklyn, does not enjoy. Often, her targets volunteer info in their videos about how they use their positions of trust, confidence, and public power to propagandize young children with their ideologies about sex and gender.

Lorenz wants the Libs of TikTok account to be shut down. To that end, in April, she published an article in the Washington Post revealing the identity of the citizen-journalist behind the account, going to the homes of her relatives and telling readers that “when registering the domain . . . [Libs of TikTok] used her full name and cellphone number linked to her real estate salesperson contact information.”

This has become standard practice for major media reporters who do stories on people on the right who can be framed as “extremists.” CNN famously even went to the home of a woman who created a meme the network disliked. We see the pattern repeatedly: The targets of Lorenz and others in her space in the mainstream media are hounded personally, their identities exposed, and sometimes their personal information revealed. This is considered standard and acceptable journalistic practice when the targets are on the right side of the political spectrum. It is of no moment that the target got death threats as a result:

Not only that: Any criticism of reporters for doing this kind of exposure is treated as dangerous harassment. Lorenz wept on MSNBC’s Meet the Press while discussing the hate mail and abuse she received after being criticized by Tucker Carlson of Fox News for her reportage on other people. She is now complaining about the mistreatment she’s received over her latest story. She does not discuss the impact of her work on her own targets. Lorenz’s theory at the time of her tearful Meet the Press interview was, basically, that Carlson was punching down at the powerless, given that the Washington Post is merely the community newspaper of an unimportant town, owned by a mere bookseller. Her previous employer was a local newspaper styled by its corporate owners as the New York Times. These are, of course, platforms that pale in comparison to an anonymous Twitter account operated by a real estate investor in Brooklyn.

Having failed to shut down Libs of TikTok by means of exposing the identity, location, and profession of its proprietor, Lorenz returns in her latest dispatch with an effort to pressure Twitter to eliminate the account’s access to an audience. Her theory is that exposing the conduct of others can lead to harassment or worse:

Specialists in online disinformation are especially critical of Twitter’s approach to Libs of TikTok. The platform on at least two occasions has blocked [its] ability to tweet — once, for 12 hours in April and then again for a week, in a sanction that ends Saturday. . . .

. . . Employees demanded that the company take stronger action, arguing that it was “only a matter of time” before the posts led to someone getting killed, according to the internal Slack exchange shared with The Post. But experts within the company argued that the account’s tweets did not meet the standard for prohibited threats and harassment. When employees pushed back, an executive asked employees to “refrain” from discussing if an account should be suspended, arguing the conversation could be leaked, according to a Slack conversation viewed by The Post. Debate raged again in August, after Twitter’s lack of a strong response to the events at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

Never mind that, in many cases, the offending Libs of TikTok content in question has been public content posted on the Web, even including promotional videos put out by the hospitals themselves.

The responsibility for death threats, or for actual violence, rests with the perpetrators. There are kinds of public disclosures that are more dangerous than merely exposing other people’s public ideas, and it is possible to treat those disclosures with rules or norms that are neutral and even-handed. Revealing the identity of pseudonymous speakers is pushing it; doxxing people with personal information goes over the line. It is fairer for Lorenz to go — as she did in her subsequent column, co-authored with Joseph Menn — after Kiwi Farms, a forum that has been used for organizing targeted harassment campaigns.

By contrast, we should not lightly suppress free speech in the name of preventing harassment or violence. If we banned all kinds of speech that can trigger violence, harassment, or abuse, we’d have to ban just about every expression of politics, religion, journalism, education, or philosophy. Moreover, whatever moral norms or practical rules we have should be applied even-handedly — and that is exactly what Taylor Lorenz and her ilk cannot abide. If it is fair to shine a spotlight on ordinary citizens with Twitter accounts, it is also fair for them to shine it back at people exercising government power or institutional authority. Many media organizations today employ full-time reporters to focus on “right-wing extremists.” If an account posted TikToks from neo-Nazi or white-supremacist police officers and soldiers, would it be treated with the same hostility by Twitter or the Washington Post? We all know the answer.

The real underlying argument of Lorenz and others like her, which is sometimes made explicit, is one that we also hear in arguments over “disinformation,” stolen-election theories, or other controversies: that people on the center-right or right are just more dangerous than people on the center-left and left. Under this theory, it is justifiable to pressure governments and big corporations to crack down on speech by one side in an asymmetrical fashion: to ban Libs of TikTok from Twitter, while leaving Taylor Lorenz and the Washington Post free to use the platform in essentially the same way. That is un-American, and it is dangerous. It is how we corrode social trust and build an ever-more-powerful backlash against the self-appointed gatekeepers of speech.

More fundamentally, however, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that what Lorenz objects to is not how Libs of TikTok delivers information to readers, but to the information itself. The account has attracted a following because it uses sunlight to balance the scales in the argument over sex and gender ideology in education and, more recently, in health care. Just as the account’s targets are free to use TikTok and other forms of social media to promote their ideas — and to brag on social media about how they use more coercive forms of government power to do so in the public school system — Libs of TikTok uses the visual medium of sharing their videos in order to make the opposite case about the indecency, insanity, and falsehood of what these people are doing. How, precisely, is that sort of reporting supposed to be done except by sharing the videos themselves? Lorenz claims that Libs of TikTok uses contestable or false framing for the videos, but again, if that is the standard, we should have a conversation about why Twitter hasn’t banned her or the Washington Post. The real agenda here is to make Libs of TikTok’s argument impossible to convey in public, or at least, to make its reporting operate under more constricted rules than those that apply to people making the opposite argument.

As with efforts to police what words can be used to describe woke ideas, the real stakes here are about whether dissent is even allowed to be put into words.