Do we have an inherent right to infrastructure like Twitter? I’m going to say not exactly. To say this is to attempt to engage in the ways that privatised and corporatised social media operate as infrastructure by claiming to offer access as a right — often under the guise of ‘democratisation’ — but in so doing, erode the concept of a right — precisely by the specific ways it detaches the concept from its material support. This is not say that relationship between the conceptual content of a right has ever been equally or fairly applied in relation to the different material supports experience by people in differing circumstances. Rather it is to draw attention to the particular ways infrastructure delaminates the idea of rights instituted in relation to public space, a social contract, a legislative regime, etc., and relaminates it in relation to the functionality and parameters of that infrastructural assemblage’s systemic imaginary. In the case of twitter this can be seen as an imaginary of freely-accessible scalability of content and formation of user-community-audiences.

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There have a been a number of arguments about free speech and censorship in the wake of Donald Trump’s ‘self-coup’ attempt (Jan 2021). These have turned on whether Twitter can block certain people involved, and on whether Amazon Web Services should have refused to host Parler, the right wing curated social media site.

See: R4 Today programme and PM, 11.1.2021: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r35k; https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000r36n

To park the question of whether one has a right to free speech which includes spreading falsehoods or inciting violence for one moment (Rebecca Solnit offers a good critique: https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/), there is an element of this discussion which must be thought of in relation to the seeming public space or platform created by infrastructures like Twitter or AWS.

That is, if we have an inherent right to use them. That is to say, since they have become so important in public communication and politics, do we have similar rights to other public spaces in them? Again, I’d say not exactly; or that it is not so clear.

The reason to say no, is that the assumption of that right, and the arguments based on the content of free speech, ignore the fact that the operation of such infrastructures is separate and distinct to that content.

That is to say, that to claim that this is an argument about the right to free speech and its content is to miss all the ways that infrastructures are built through narratives about how it might facilitate free speech, whilst at the same time having nothing to do with manifesting as well as being accountable to those rights, the conditions for them, and their content.

This detachment from yet promise of what is enabled, is the ‘cost’ of digital disruption. Actions were converted into information, whose context changed from institutional politics to facilitation of digital communications within a variety of interwoven regulatory and technical regimes.

There are a number of consequences in this case. Firstly, that free speech, as it is tied to being ‘cancelled’ from these platforms is a straw man — not just because of this content. There is no right to these platforms, just agreement with terms of service. As such, no leeway on these terms is necessary for those demanding and expecting that this infrastructure should serve them.

A second, is that other forms of publication, including existing institutions remain necessary — albeit not in an eternally stable form — for the rights for any free speech to be fully understood. The plurality and representational diversity of both institutions and infrastructures are key in this sense: to avoid one or other taking up all the oxygen, and to avoid the conditional hegemony of one (like Twitter) distorting the question of entitlement and necessity.

A third is that it remains imperative to be attentive to, highlight and critique not only how infrastructures shape the conditions of public space, but also how these conditions shape and relate to the content shared in them.

A forth is how such infrastructures are used as infrastructures — or cognitive structures (see N. Katherine Hayles, 2017) — within which content — specific speech acts, ideas, traces, etc.,, – act as meaning, narratives and truths through which are made, amplified, and connected up as a whole and given consistency by the infrastructural experiences of Twitter — importantly: encountered as part of multiple everyday lives of its user. That is, where these traces constitute a reality made not through these narratives, but created and understood among their infrastructural enaction (see also: https://temporaryartreview.com/making-alternative-futures-instituting-in-a-weird-world-part-one/). (It is important to trace infrastructural meaning  since they accrete, relate, transition, multiply and cohere differently to stable representations associated with institutional narratives, such as accelerationism. See: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-capitol-invaders-enjoyed-the-privilege-of-not-being-taken-seriously; https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-social-media-made-the-trump-insurrection-a-reality; https://www.juancole.com/2021/01/accelerationists-boogaloo-insurrection.html)

In this way, the expectation of entitlement of distribution and access to Twitter and its fragmentary, scalable, un-grounded content, version of free speech, and regulatory disruption directly shapes the kinds of politics of truth possible in it; but it also shows the necessity of infrastructure and infrastructural meaning making to any political programme that might counter the white supremacy and far right version that has been so amplified by a surface of entitlement.