Marc Andreessen, the influential venture capitalist, is exhibiting a startling disconnect between his stated beliefs in free markets and free speech, and his recent authoritarian threats against those who disagree with him.
In recent statements, Andreessen has threatened criminal charges against advertisers choosing not to associate with certain platforms and accused an imaginary “government-university-company censorship apparatus” of violating free speech rights. These authoritarian demands completely contradict the free market and free speech principles Andreessen claims to champion in his “techno-optimist manifesto.”
As a board member of Meta with inside knowledge of content moderation practices, Andreessen should know better. His descent into promoting baseless conspiracy theories and attacking the very rights he purports to defend is deeply troubling.
Over the last few years, Andreessen’s views on innovation have taken him down a path that often seems detached from reality. It started with him claiming that Elon Musk is “pro free speech,” when it was blatantly obvious that he was not even remotely supportive of free speech.
Things got worse last year when Andreessen published his bizarre “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which had plenty of good, but non-controversial, ideas in it, and then a few that made no sense, including claiming that “trust & safety” was an “enemy of progress.” I wrote a long response to it as my final post of last year, noting that avoiding breaking shit that doesn’t need to be broken (the role of “trust & safety”) isn’t holding back progress, it’s making sure that innovation and progress proceeds in a way that more people are willing to adopt rather than freak out about.
Earlier this year, Andreessen made a big bet on Donald Trump for President, and now he’s won that bet. He claimed he only supported Trump because he believed Trump was better for what he calls his “Little Tech Agenda.” Historically, I would have expected him not to leap to the gloating stage so quickly, but I was wrong. He’s spent a few days basically showing that his supposed “Little Tech Agenda” gets tossed out the window when he gets near the hands of power, to the point that he is looking to weaponize the criminal justice system to punish his perceived critics.
Andreessen seems to ignore that his plan to punish people completely obliterates what he claimed he believed in his “tech optimist manifesto.” So let’s go through a bit of it. In the manifesto, he writes:
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.
I agree with that sentiment. But Andreessen’s recent actions contradict it. On ExTwitter, Andreessen wrote:
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That’s him tweeting:
The orchestrated advertiser boycott against X and popular podcasts must end immediately. Conspiracy in restraint of trade is a prosecutable crime.
He’s wrong. To an extraordinary degree. Conspiracy in restraint of trade applies to collusive behavior to harm competitors. In 1982, the Supreme Court made clear that boycotts are a form of expression, protected by the First Amendment. The only exceptions are if those boycotts were done for “illegal aims.” And “sorry, we don’t want to advertise on your site” is not an “illegal aim.”
It’s especially galling since choosing not to advertise is clearly part of both the free market and the free speech right not to associate. The only cases where boycotts may be illegal is if they are in pursuit of something illegal, such as for antitrust purposes, like when Toys R Us used its (then!) dominant position to block toy makers from selling to Costco. But advertisers deciding “we don’t want our ads showing up on Elon Musk’s Hellsite” are making a business decision.
You know, like what free markets enable? Willing buyer. Willing seller. Except here, some of the buyers aren’t willing. And Marc is claiming that’s criminal.
His misunderstanding of free speech continued.
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That’s him saying:
Everyone involved in the longstanding illegal joint government-university-company censorship apparatus should take care to preserve their files and communications. Sunlight is coming.
First of all, you don’t issue litigation holds by tweet. That’s not how any of that works. Second, there is no “joint government-university-company censorship apparatus.” That’s literally not a thing that exists. We’ve talked about this quite a bit here at Techdirt, and even the Supreme Court just recently pointed out (in a ruling written by Amy Coney Barrett) that there appears to be no evidence of such a thing existing (other than a bunch of made up nonsense by a bunch of grifters).
There were a bunch of university researchers studying the flow of disinformation, mostly around voter intimidation and the like. One government agency, CISA, did team up with some of those researchers to act as a clearing house for connecting election officials who might see potentially problematic voter information, such as false information about where, how, or when to vote. Through this effort sometimes that information would be flagged to companies to review against their own policies.
This was nothing controversial or problematic. Every company has their own policies on what they allow. Most companies don’t want to enable election interference, so they say “hey, maybe we shouldn’t allow information that tells people to vote on the wrong day, because maybe that violates our rules.”
As we’ve explained multiple times, even as these researchers flagged some content for the companies to review, the companies quite frequently did nothing in response and there were no threats or legal consequences as a result. Flagging is something anyone can do (still, to this day, if you find something that you think violates the rules on any social media platform, you can flag it, just like these researchers did).
Again, Stanford’s report on what happened stated that the social media companies kept up nearly every reported URL, and in the small number of cases when they took action, they mostly focused on adding more speech (which is a very “marketplace of ideas” concept) such as pointing out that mail-in ballots are, in fact, pretty damn safe and secure.
We find, overall, that platforms took action on 35% of URLs that we reported to them. 21% of URLs were labeled, 13% were removed, and 1% were soft blocked. No action was taken on 65%. TikTok had the highest action rate: actioning (in their case, their only action was removing) 64% of URLs that the EIP reported to their team.)
I need to repeat this because it seems to keep getting lost every time I write about this. Anyone can report things to social media companies. It’s the “report” button you see all over the place. These academic researchers did report stuff to the companies, and only 13% of that content was removed. And even that’s distorted, because TikTok removed 64% of URLs reported because TikTok doesn’t care. So, the reality is that the other companies (mainly Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) removed less than 10% of what was flagged by folks. Some of them they “labeled” which is just “more speech” in the marketplace of ideas. And the rest they left alone.
And even if you claim that the 13% of removed links is too much, the details suggest you’re wrong about that as well. The report showed that the largest % of content that was removed after researchers reported it was related to phishing scams. In other words, people posted election-related content that was made to trick people into giving up their personal info, and it was reported to the companies and they removed it to protect users.
This is not a censorship scandal. This isn’t a “joint government-university-company censorship apparatus.” This is “local election officials were scared about scams and election interference, and wanted to be able to report it to companies to review, and some academics who were studying disinformation helped.”
Sounds a lot less problematic that way, right?
And here’s the thing: Marc Andreessen knows all this.
Because Marc Andreessen, who claims he does everything in support of his “Little Tech Agenda,” is on the board of Meta, one of the biggest “Big Tech” companies there is. And, over the last few days, I’ve spoken to way too many current and former executives at Meta (many of whom are frustrated), who all made it clear to me that in Marc’s role on the board he has been directly briefed on what is happening regarding disinfo/trust & safety efforts and why it’s not nefarious.
I don’t know if Marc ignored those briefings.
I don’t know if he forgot those briefings.
I don’t know if he doesn’t care that he’s misrepresenting reality.
But I do know that Meta execs are not particularly thrilled that he’s now spreading a nonsense conspiracy theory suggesting that the very company he is on the board of is somehow engaged in First Amendment violating state action, a thing that every court that has looked at this issue fully has rejected completely.
Because this is not a thing:
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That’s Andreessen claiming that “every participant in the orchestrated government-university-nonprofit-company censorship machine of the last decade can be charged criminally under one or both of these federal laws.” The “federal laws” he’s talking about are 18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242: “Conspiracy against rights” and “Deprivation of rights.”
These are both laughable claims.
Your “rights” do not grant you the freedom to use someone else’s private property for your own purpose. Again, you would think that Mr. “we believe in free markets” and “willing buyer meets willing seller” and “I’m on the board of Meta” would at some point realize that part of the free market where willing buyer meets willing seller is that private property rights matter. If the private property owner doesn’t want you on their property, they can get you to leave.
Even if we’re just looking at this through the free speech lens, the right of free speech has to include the right of association, and that includes the right not to associate.
Marc must believe that too, because I’m pretty sure that if I showed up at one of Marc’s many mansions and started screaming on his lawn, he would have me forcibly removed. That would be his right as a private property owner. Is that “depriving me of my free speech rights”? Of course not, because Marc has no obligation to allow me to speak on his property.
The same is true of Meta, on whose board Marc sits. It has no obligation to enable anyone’s speech. Their property. Their rules. And yes, it’s true that the government can’t forcibly remove speech, but there’s no evidence that happened. Instead, you had some academics and non-profits who used their own free speech rights (which Marc seems to think don’t exist) to share their thoughts with the companies, sometimes highlighting content they thought broke the company’s rules, or sometimes advocating for different rules. Which is their free speech.
The only way speech “rights” can be deprived is via state action, which has to involve the government. And yes, Marc wants to keep arguing that the government is involved in this “government-university-nonprofit-company censorship machine” but as the Supreme Court noted just a few months ago, what is happening does not, in any way, appear to be state action to deprive people of their rights.
At worst, government actors were trying to persuade private actors to act differently, which is allowed. The problem only comes in when the government tries to force action through threats and coercion. Yet no one has turned up any evidence of that.
Unlike Marc, the Supreme Court appears to be adept at differentiating between cases involving potential government coercion. In the Murthy case, the majority opinion authored by Justice Barrett found no evidence of coercion against social media companies. And the plaintiffs in that case tried every angle they could and threw a ton of ideas against the wall. Conversely, in the Vullo case, heard on the same day, the Court unanimously agreed that a New York official’s demand for insurance companies to deny coverage to the NRA constituted coercion and violated the First Amendment.
In short, the Supreme Court knows when the government is depriving people of their free speech rights and didn’t see that (at all) in how social media companies do content moderation.
Again, I know that plenty of internet randos and highly motivated partisans have been misrepresenting this reality for a few years now. And it’s pointless to respond to them.
But, of all the people in the world, Marc Andreessen should know what’s actually going on. Multiple Meta execs told me that he’s been told about it. Yet he’s making a mockery of his own “manifesto” by supporting the literal criminalization of being a “non-willing buyer” in a marketplace where he has a stake. He undermines his own claims of supporting free speech by suggesting it’s criminal for private property owners to decide whose speech to associate with. He’s further contradicting his free speech stance by threatening criminal action against academics and non-profits who use their free speech to criticize companies where Marc Andreessen is either an equity holder (ExTwitter) or a board member (Meta).
And that’s not “techno optimism.” It’s certainly not a “little tech agenda.” If you can force companies to do the bidding of the biggest tech companies out there, while simultaneously creating criminal charges for merely saying “hey, does this violate your rules?” you’re creating a world in which startups will be loathe to do business, out of fear of what arbitrary nonsense the Marc Andreessen/Elon Musk/Donald Trumps of the world will impose on them.
At Techdirt, we frequently call out hypocrisy and inconsistencies from public figures. In many cases, these stem from ignorance or misunderstanding of the complex issues around technology and policy. What’s so troubling here is that Marc is not ignorant of what has happened. He has had these things explained to him. Yet he is misrepresenting them to a very large audience, riling them up to believe things that are simply not true. This goes beyond mere inconsistency — it’s a direct distortion of reality from someone who should, and likely does, know better.
The end result may be that he gets to punish his perceived enemies if the Trump administration is willing to take such marching orders, but it doesn’t change the fact that he is misrepresenting reality. In doing so, he’s not just violating his own stated principles, but undermining public understanding of critical issues around free speech and platform responsibility. For someone who claims to be a “techno-optimist,” that’s a deeply pessimistic and damaging approach.
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