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.”
The gate in question is not made of wood or iron, but of code and corporate policy. It is the barrier that stands between the Saudi dissident and the American server farm. The reformers, those who champion the untrammeled flow of information, wish to tear down this gate. They argue that the gate is an instrument of tyranny, a digital accomplice to the silencing of voices. They are right that the gate silences. But they are wrong, or at least incomplete, in their diagnosis of why the gate exists. To tear it down without understanding its foundation is to invite a flood that the reformers, in their clean, theoretical world, have not imagined.
The fence was built by the architects of the modern internet, who believed they were building a town square. But a town square requires a mayor, and a mayor requires a budget, and a budget requires a source of revenue. The source of revenue is not the truth; it is the advertiser. The advertiser does not pay for the chaotic, dangerous, or politically inconvenient. The advertiser pays for the safe, the predictable, and the profitable. Therefore, the fence was not built primarily to serve the Saudi government, though it serves them well. It was built to serve the American shareholder. The Saudi King is merely the customer who pays the highest price for the silence.
Consider the paradox. The American tech companies claim to be the champions of free speech, the last bastions of liberty in a world of tyrants. Yet, when a tyrant asks them to silence a critic, they comply with a speed and efficiency that would shame a secret police force. Why? Because the fence was never designed to protect the dissident. It was designed to protect the platform. The dissident is a liability. The Saudi government is a market. The fence exists to keep the liability out and the market in.
The reformer who demands the removal of this fence believes he is fighting for the soul of the internet. He is, in fact, fighting for the soul of the corporation. He wants the corporation to be a public utility, a neutral conduit. But corporations are not neutral. They are engines of profit. To expect a profit engine to act as a neutral conduit is like expecting a wolf to act as a vegetarian because it has been fed lettuce. The wolf may eat the lettuce, but it will still hunt the sheep if the sheep are more profitable.
The Saudi government did not invent this fence. They merely pointed to the sheep they wanted removed. The tech companies, eager to please their most powerful customers and avoid the regulatory headaches of operating in sovereign nations, pulled the lever. The fence was already there; it was just waiting for a reason to be used. The reason was not moral; it was mercantile.
Now, the reformer says, “Let us remove the fence. Let us make the platforms immune to foreign pressure.” This is a noble sentiment, but it is a fence of a different kind. It is a fence of regulation. It is a fence built by the state to protect the citizen from the corporation. But who builds this new fence? The same politicians who may have other interests. The same bureaucrats who may have other pressures. The reformer tears down the corporate fence, only to find that he has replaced it with a state fence, which is often higher, thicker, and more difficult to climb.
The ordinary person, the dissident in Riyadh, does not care about the theoretical purity of the platform. He cares about his voice. He knows that the fence is there because the people who built it value their comfort more than his safety. He knows that the reformer, sitting in his comfortable study in London or New York, is tearing down the fence not because he understands the mechanics of the platform, but because he feels a moral indignation that is cheap and easy.
The true lesson is not that the fence should be removed. The true lesson is that the fence was never a guardian of liberty. It was a gatekeeper of profit. To remove it without replacing it with a structure that values human dignity over shareholder value is to leave the road open to worse things. The reformer must understand that the problem is not the fence, but the foundation upon which it stands. The foundation is the belief that information is a commodity. Until that belief is challenged, the fence will remain, and the dissident will remain silent, not because of the Saudi King, but because of the American CEO.
The democracy of the dead would have us remember that institutions are built for reasons. The reason for this fence is money. The reason for the reform is morality. But morality without an understanding of money is a ghost. It haunts the house, but it cannot pay the rent. The reformer must learn to speak the language of the builder, or he will find himself locked out of the house he sought to save.