Major US social media companies including Meta's Instagram and Facebook, and X, are blocking the accounts of Saudi dissidents at the request of the Saudi government.
There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”
We are currently witnessing the demolition of a fence that was never built by the hands of the people who are now tearing it down, nor by the hands of those who are being silenced by its absence. The fence in question is the digital public square, or rather, the illusion of it. The reformers - those Silicon Valley architects who believe they have invented the town hall - have decided that the walls of this hall are too restrictive. They wish to open the doors to the winds of global commerce and the whispers of foreign courts. They claim this is progress. They claim that by allowing the Saudi government to request the silencing of its dissidents on American platforms, they are merely respecting the sovereignty of nations. But this is not respect for sovereignty; it is the surrender of the local to the global, and the surrender of the individual to the state, mediated by a corporation that claims to be neither.
The paradox is this: The very institutions that were built to liberate speech are now acting as the most efficient censors in history, not because they are tyrants, but because they are bureaucrats. A tyrant silences you because he hates your voice. A bureaucrat silences you because he cannot find the file that proves you have the right to speak. The modern tech giant is not a guardian of liberty; it is a landlord who has forgotten that he is supposed to protect his tenants from the king. He has decided, in his infinite wisdom, that the king’s request for eviction is more important than the tenant’s lease.
Consider the ordinary man, the dissident in Riyadh or the critic in London. He does not care about the abstract concept of “platform neutrality.” He cares that his voice is heard. He built his account with the expectation that the platform was a public square, a place where ideas could clash without fear of immediate, invisible erasure. The platform promised him a microphone. Now, it hands him a gag, wrapped in the polite language of “community standards” and “geopolitical compliance.” The reformer who argues that these companies are merely following the law misses the point entirely. The law is the fence. The company is the gatekeeper. If the gatekeeper opens the gate for the jailer, the fence has failed its purpose.
The clever people in Silicon Valley have been educated out of common sense. They believe that because they have built the road, they own the destination. They have confused the infrastructure with the society. A railway company does not decide which passengers are allowed to travel based on the preferences of the government in the country they are leaving; it simply transports them. But the digital platform has decided that it is not a railway, but a publisher, a judge, and a censor, all rolled into one. And in doing so, it has become more dangerous than the old censors, because it is invisible. The old censor burned your book. The new censor deletes your existence.
This is the danger of the fence being removed without understanding why it was built. The fence was built to keep the mob out, yes, but also to keep the king out. It was built to create a space where the ordinary person could speak without looking over his shoulder. By removing this barrier, by allowing foreign governments to dictate the terms of speech on American soil, these companies are not promoting freedom. They are promoting a new kind of feudalism, where the lord of the manor (the tech CEO) bows to the king (the authoritarian state) and leaves the serf (the user) with nothing but the wind.
The ordinary person knows this. He does not need a degree in international relations to understand that when his voice is silenced at the request of a foreign power, his liberty is diminished. The intellectual, however, is busy debating the nuances of jurisdiction and the complexities of global data flows. He is so busy analyzing the mechanism of the lock that he has forgotten to ask who is holding the key.
The resolution is simple, though it will not satisfy the clever. The platform must choose. It cannot be both a neutral conduit and a compliant censor. If it wishes to be a public square, it must defend the square from all comers, including the powerful. If it wishes to be a tool of state repression, it should admit it and stop pretending to be a champion of free speech. The fence must be rebuilt, not to keep people out, but to keep the power of the state at bay. Until then, we are not in a public square. We are in a lobby, and the doorman is taking orders from the wrong master.