Conservatives are going to have to build a better Internet

It’s ironic that, as conservatives rage against the overlords of their preferred online realms, they are also, in another context, fighting to shield business owners’ right to free association in the marketplace. Jewish bakers should not have to bake cakes for Skokie’s swastika set, &c. We should permit similar liberty to Mark Zuckerberg, or Twitter’s elusive “Jack.” After all, social-media sites, like the neighborhood deli, aren’t charities. They have certain principles and interests, and they set up rules to forward those principles and interests. Perhaps the rules are dumb, but they’re still the rules, and if you want to play the game, you have to follow them — and if you don’t obey, you’re out. Conservatives seem to have forgotten this. If Twitter does not want Milo Yiannopoulos on Twitter anymore, it does not have to allow him to tweet. Maybe Twitter’s mind can be changed for mercenary financial reasons, but there’s no recourse for Twitter users otherwise.

Owners of social-media sites can rule with an iron fist, and, because of this, conservatives are wasting their time trying to make them change the rules. There are no neutral spaces, and there never will be. Whether the forum is public or private, certain people are going to be in charge, and they’re going to impose certain parameters. The goal should not be to create neutral spaces; it should be to create non-neutral spaces more attractive than existing non-neutral spaces.

That is the success story of conservative media. National Review in the world of print, Fox News in the world of television, and the Drudge Report online carved out spaces that were not in the least neutral, but which handled their “prejudices” in a way that was more attractive than the alternatives.