How to neuter the social media mob

If a system builds a “punish my enemies” button, people will mash it.

(JGI/Jamie Grill via Getty Images)

Fifteen years ago, a career counselor at my law school gave me some well-meaning advice: To maximize my chances of employment, I should stop writing about socialism on my personal website and in other publications. She told me this, not because she was bothered by it, but because she thought others would care, especially those who control legal employment opportunities.

For better or worse, I ultimately declined to follow the advice, but I found the exchange quite troubling. Free speech and deliberative democracy are tentpoles of the American proposition, and yet here I was, in a law school no less, being informed quite bluntly that run-of-the-mill political participation could generate such a huge labor market penalty that I really should abstain.

The counselor turned out to be wrong about the specifics, thanks in large part to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 run for president, which defanged socialism for many Americans. But she was right about the general concern.

Over the last decade or so, terminations for political participation or speech deemed beyond the pale by one group or another seem to happen all the time, especially on the internet. For a time, this was a tendency attributed to leftists and liberals, the purveyors of a “cancel culture.” But as we saw in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk killing, the right is just as eager to punish bad speech.

In any society, some people hold views that others regard as repugnant. In an internet-connected society, some of them also broadcast these views, often to the very people who find them disgusting. When that happens, the offended must decide how to respond.

Probably the most sensible way is to simply not engage — to touch grass, as they say. Life is too short to get stirred up by sounds, images, and words on the internet, and you really do not have to consume things that make you mad, let alone react to them.

At the opposite extreme, one could respond by directing private or state violence toward the person who gave offense. But private violence takes a lot of work, especially if the person is not already in your presence, and it carries a lot of physical and legal risk. State violence in the form of imprisonment or a fine is an option in some societies, but not as much in the United States because of our free-speech protections. Prevailing liberal cultural norms also seem to make most people opposed to these kinds of reactions.

Between these two poles exists a variety of options that are more than nothing but not so extreme as to become illiberal: Given that the internet allows for two-way communication, one could simply let the person know how much of an idiot they are. If you previously had a social relationship with them, you could dial that back or eliminate it altogether.

If none of these options scratch your itch, you are, strangely, allowed to get offensive people fired from their jobs or expelled from their schools. Because liberal societies tend to conceive of things like employment as a private, voluntary matter, this response often scans as freedom-respecting, no different than breaking off a social or romantic relationship with someone.

But this understanding of employment is categorically wrong. In a society like ours, losing access to employment also means losing access to income, which, taken to its final end, is a death sentence. Not to mention losing access to employer-sponsored health care and, in some cases, retirement and other benefits. Responding to offense-taking by getting people fired is extremely harsh, makes no systematic sense, and invites backlash from political opponents.

Employment should not be a reward for good behavior. It is merely how we organize production. It exists to facilitate the creation of goods and services. Imposing massive fines on disliked speech — by exploiting the fact that we distribute much of our national income through employment — is illiberal and worse, in many respects, than having government-established speech codes enforced with public fines.

For socialists, this should be an easy concept to grasp. One of the key critiques of capitalism is that employment relationships are not really voluntary. They are coerced by the fact that employers control the productive instruments of the society and workers need access to those instruments in order to generate the income required for their survival.

Although liberals don’t usually take that socialist line of reasoning to its full conclusion, they do generally recognize that the gatekeepers of things like employment, housing, education, and public accommodations wield so much practical power over others’ ability to live free and full lives that this power must be constrained by rules outlawing discrimination along certain axes like race, gender, religion, age, and disability status, to name a few.

Conservatives are historically the most reluctant to acknowledge these sorts of power dynamics, sometimes even defending them as beneficial to society because they provide a way for the better among us to enforce conformity with certain values, forms of self-presentation, and ways of living. But more recently, even conservatives have acknowledged the freedom-destroying implications of all this — at least when it was their values and ways of living that employers and educational institutions set their sights on during the post-2016 “wokeness” wave.

People who try to get others fired for bad speech seemingly do so out of pique without regard for philosophical or practical concerns. But the practical issues with this punishment mechanism deserve serious consideration. What exactly do we want to happen to people who are fired in this way?

Are they meant to get another job? If so, then apparently their bad speech does not actually make them too toxic to employ. But if they are not too toxic to employ, then why do they need to be fired in the first place? What is accomplished by reallocating a cashier who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s death or said something nasty about trans people from Walmart to Target?

Or are they meant to remain unemployed forever? In that case, are they supposed to get their income from the welfare state? That seems kind of bizarre, to forcibly eliminate their ability to contribute to the national income while reducing the incomes of others to support them. Of course, the alternative, where they remain unemployed forever and are locked out of social income, is even stranger. It implies that they should never receive income again, a steeper penalty than we impose on far more heinous crimes.

Or is the idea that people fired for bad speech should be temporarily unemployed, not because they are too toxic to employ, but just to impose a financial penalty on them? In that case, it would seem far more sensible to create government speech codes and fine those who break them. You could even denominate the fine in days of income so that the financial blow was similar to temporary unemployment. The speech-codes approach would also benefit from advance notice, transparency, and due process, all things mob-initiated terminations lack.

The last paragraph is more provocative than serious. As noted above, due to certain liberal norms, the idea of the government acting in that way is repugnant to most in America. But my point here is that this sort of gut-level aversion should also be triggered when thinking about the idea of disemploying people in an attempt to achieve the same ends.

Despite the insanity of it all, it is unlikely that individuals will stop trying to get people fired if it remains a legal option. If your system creates a “punish my enemies” button, some people are going to press it. You can tell them to stop, but the more fruitful and realistic path is to disable the button.

The existing laws prohibiting employers and other important institutions from discriminating against people should be updated to include discrimination against off-duty speech and political participation. As with other nondiscrimination laws, jobs where political expression is a bona fide occupational qualification — such as political organizations — would be exempt, but every other job would be covered by the new protections.

This sort of reform, coupled with adequate penalties and enforcement, would protect workers who fall victim to this kind of retaliatory termination. But more importantly, it would create a new equilibrium where employers can respond to mobs by saying that their hands are tied, and angry people eventually stop using this tactic because they realize it is futile.

In this sense, such a regulation would be a gift to employers who want to focus on running their businesses rather than delicately navigating various political cross-pressuring around the hot-button issues of the day.

Until such a reform occurs, we are likely stuck in the world envisioned by my career counselor, where random people occasionally suffer huge labor market penalties for internet comments, while the more cautious give up public political participation altogether.