OSD 308: Instagram matters more than gun laws do
A mischievous genie appears and gives you one wish. But he watches a lot of YouTube content about radios, so he says you have to use your wish to improve the future of ham radio in America. He gives you only two options.
Option 1: The laws will stay as-is, but you’ll be guaranteed that everyone will be able to post freely about radios on social media forever.
Option 2: All laws about amateur radio at all levels of government will be repealed and replaced with whatever you want. But all advertising of radios and radio accessories will be banned on the major platforms. All radio content will be suppressed in the recommendation algorithm. Content teaching people how to build their own radios will be strictly forbidden. Autocomplete and autocorrect won’t work when people are searching for radio pages — they’ll have to type in the entire name of the page they’re looking for, with no typos, before it’ll show up in search results. Every single radio influencer will have their page taken down every so often, because AI systems will erroneously flag them for running afoul of vague rules. The appeals won’t work because the systems will be run by people who don’t know the difference between a radio and a stereo. And even as a regular user, your account will be banned if you post about radios too much.
Which option would you pick?
Replace radios in this scenario with guns, and Option 2 describes the status quo for gun content on social media (it does not, alas, describe the status quo for gun laws).
But that about that status quo on social media:
This is just an announcement. The real test is what happens in the next few months. But people’s excitement about it comes from something they feel instinctually yet don’t say out loud: this stuff matters a lot more than gun laws do. A lot of laws can be effectively nullified if people can communicate freely about them. Think about how the AR MagLock in California or “other” firearms in New Jersey undermined the bans in those states. Or how quickly news of “freedom week” spread in California, leading residents to buy 1 million magazines in just seven days. You can imagine more draconian social media rules that would have made those developments impossible. You can also imagine how freer social media rules would lead to more innovation, faster, all the time.
A few years ago we wrote about how gun laws do and don’t matter:
When people ask why gun rights are important, our shortest answer is usually “If someone’s trying to hurt you, you have the right to stop them.” That’s the right of self-defense, the right of self-defense implies a right to the tools of self-defense, and boom, there you have it, gun rights. But that’s an abstract concept. The Second Amendment is a particular legal instance of the concept. What does it accomplish?
The simplest answer is that it preemptively invalidates (well, in theory) laws that infringe on gun rights. And sure, yes, a handful laws have been struck down on Second Amendment grounds. But is that how you get robust gun rights? Hoping that courts will eventually strike down the laws that take those rights away?
That’s like trying to get an A+ average by getting straight Bs and then arguing with the teacher after each test. It’s a lot safer to just get the A+ in the first place. A state like, say, New Hampshire didn’t end up with robust gun rights by litigating their way out of restrictive gun laws. They got there by not wanting to pass the laws in the first place. Their culture is fertile ground for gun rights, and salted earth for restrictions. (More on that concept in “OSD 142: Love means never having to say certiorari”.)
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Culture is upstream of law — and cultures need seed crystals to grow on. Shared ideas to rally around and build up. So while the Second Amendment serves a purpose as law, it serves a much more powerful purpose as culture.
It’s a Schelling point that everybody knows. It’s so successful that even people who don’t like it still land on the same Schelling point. “Americans like guns.” Over time, statements like that take on a self-reinforcing quality.
Gun laws are a public signal about what is halal and what is haram, what is clean vs. unclean. But social media content policy is a much more powerful signal. Unlike law, it reaches into every person’s home every day. It affects not just what they do, but what they learn and who they associate with.
There’s no spot in society with as much immediate leverage on gun rights. We’ll see how these policy changes change the way that leverage gets used. We’re optimistic.
This week’s links
OSD’s own Chuck Rossi is going back to Meta to work on content policy systems
Lots of details in the post. Things will be in good hands with Chuck at the helm. Reach out if your own gun-related Instagram or Facebook page gets taken down.
Not what I expected to be doing, but I'm going back to Meta to help work on some of the issues the products are having, as described by Zuck in a recent video.
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I appreciate the top photo being a 7.62NATO can for the 308th post.
I used to hate the approach of fighting this culture war on social media. I remember Karl Kasarda of InRangeTV always being pissed that his videos were getting censored on Youtube even though he intentionally demonetized his whole channel.
Ian from FW made a whole platform separate from Youtube which is the more 1A-friendly way to deal with this, but idk anyone who uses Weapons of War TV.
But now I see that banks are starting to turn around on their de-banking policies because of Republican senators. And I gotta say, it's proving to be more effective than hoping people move to a 3rd party social media host. Especially when it's Rumble and they have a bad reputation due to all the conspiracy theory nonsense on their pages.