There is something deeply unfair about asking a person to speak courageously when someone else will decide what that courage costs. From a safe distance, speaking out can look like a straightforward moral duty. For the person who has to return to work, look after a family and live with the consequences, it may be a much harder calculation.
Nordic Monitor reports that Turkey’s restrictions on digital expression are deepening, with social media companies helping to silence critics of President Erdoğan. The supplied reporting does not establish the individual circumstances or the precise actions of each company. It does, however, give us reason to examine a responsibility that is easily pushed onto the wrong people.
When opportunities to speak are restricted, we tend to look towards those being silenced and ask whether they will persist. Perhaps we should spend more time examining those who control whether they can be heard.
A social media account can appear a rather insubstantial thing until it becomes a means of reaching people who would otherwise never hear from you. If that access is withdrawn, the consequences need not end with the missing words. Others may mistake your absence for withdrawal, agreement or indifference. A public conversation can become misleading without anyone inserting a single false sentence.
There is a complication here. Platforms cannot reasonably be expected to publish everything. Threats and harassment can drive people out of a conversation too, and moderation involves difficult judgements. Yet that difficulty cannot settle every argument in a company’s favour. Restricting a critic’s reach calls for reasons that can be examined and decisions that can be challenged. Otherwise, the person with the least power is left trying to prove that their disappearance matters.
For the rest of us, there is an ordinary discipline worth practising: do not read silence too confidently. Someone who stops speaking has not necessarily changed their mind. Nor do they owe us a demonstration of bravery.
Before asking why a person has fallen quiet, it is worth asking what happened to their ability to speak, and who is in a position to help restore it.