The sacred right to peddle lies
A federal judge in Louisiana on Tuesday restricted the Biden administration from communicating with social media platforms about broad swaths of content online, a ruling that could curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.
The order, which could have significant First Amendment implications, is a major development in a fierce legal fight over the boundaries and limits of speech online.
It was a victory for Republicans who have often accused social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube of disproportionately taking down right-leaning content, sometimes in collaboration with government.
That’s because right-leaning content also leans heavily toward lies.
In the ruling, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana said that parts of the government, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, could not talk to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
Lies must be free!
Right-leaning content may be lie-leaning, but so is left-leaning. *cough* Genderism *cough*
The claim that social media platforms disproportionately restrict rightist content and do so on ideological grounds is, at the very least, plausible. I’ve seen gender critical YouTube channels get taken down for misinformation and hate speech, so …
I thought the same thing: “let’s get the lies off the internet” is a double-edged sword. If I hadn’t taken the politically incorrect position on sex, gender, and gender identity I don’t think I’d see the problem as clearly.
It’s the old problem. We give government agencies the role of directing social media to shut down misinformation. And they will indeed do that.
But, while they’re put some effort into shutting down misinformation, what they’ll be far keener to do is shut down stuff that is actually true but politically inconvenient.
And to do that, all they need do is label it “misinformation”. This is just way too much temptation to put in the hands of anyone.
And they will misuse it. We already know that. The obvious example is the Hunter Biden laptop story. The FBI knew that this laptop and its contents were genuine. But they told Twitter and Facebook that it was Russian misinformation. Why did they do that? In the (later) words of one of them “Because I wanted Biden to win”.
So, with being fed false accounts of this by government agencies, Twitter and Facebook heavily censored mentions of the story, even locking out the Twitter account of the New York Post for 6 weeks leading up to the election.
So it’s hardly surprising that the Republicans are now asking the courts to stop government agencies behaving like this.
I’d rather have to put up with dealing with misinformation than have governments shutting down the truth.
This really is one of those make-or-break questions that elucidates your own core political instincts and even your unexamined beliefs. Do you fundamentally trust the government to tell you what is true and what is false? Do you fundamentally trust the government to restrain the speech of anyone they insist is telling untruths, or to approve the speech of anyone they insist is honest-injun?
Do you really?
Yes, lies must be free, because lies are inescapable. Giving the government the power to adjudicate the truth means that, sooner or much sooner, all the government will ever do is tell you lies and you’ll be left scrounging around for the truth at the risk of your freedom (or perhaps your very life). Twitter is a cesspit of scum and villainy, but you will not make it any better by turning into a twenty-first century Pravda.
I am only passingly familiar with this issue, so I wonder if I may be under a misapprehension. Ahem.
It is not the government that is shutting down posts and accounts, it is the company itself – facebook, twitter, youtube being named as examples. The government uses those for communication too, crafting warnings that link to government made information pages on issues such as covid, but it is the private company that chose to curtail the lies in the first place. This ruling seems to limit the actions of the government which seem not to be authoritarian in nature at all.
I suggest reading the judge’s ruling. It is incoherent. See the discussion of it on the Meidas Touch Youtube channel.
Washington Post: “One day after a Louisiana federal judge set limits on the Biden administration’s communications with tech firms, the State Department canceled its regular meeting Wednesday with Facebook officials to discuss 2024 election preparations and hacking threats, according to a person at the company.” (link)
“The person at Facebook said they presumed similar meetings the State Department had scheduled with other tech companies also were canceled, but that could not be confirmed immediately.”
Given the dominance of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, in today’s information ecosystem, is anyone else rather dubious about the State Department having regular meetings with Facebook et al about upcoming elections?
I find curious the naiveté of certain commenters and their obvious eagerness to suppose that any government at all is a bad thing. No, we should not ‘fundamentally trust’ or uncritically accept anything a government says (and certainly not one headed by, for example, a man such as Trump, though I should not be surprised at all if one person on this thread turned out to be a fervent supporter of Trump). No-one sensible is supposing that we should accept such a thing. I had expected better of Der Durchwanderer than the near hysterical suggestion that we are in danger of allowing the US government to be given the power to adjudicate truth and to turn Twitter into Pravda.. Instead of this horrid vision, Der Durchwanderer presents us with the equally horrid vision of a cesspit of scum and villainy, because it is morally better to let lies fester away and not to hold their purveyors to account or to prevent the lies from being spread, even if it means, say, thousands more people dying in a pandemic.
I find particularly risible, I am afraid, Coel’s concern, after Trump’s reign of lies and chaos and his attempt, through lies and violence, to steal the last election (about which I have seen Coel express no concerns), with Hunter Biden’s laptop. I should also say that I think the State Department has every right to discuss the subject of hacking threats with companies like Facebook, though I should certainly welcome a world where such matters did not need to be discussed. There is a dangerous infantility involved in peddling a global mistrust of anything and everything.
Whatever the faults of democratic governments (and they are many), I should prefer there to be an institutionally and legally founded focus of power which people are allowed to vote on than the sort of diffused chaos that is coming to be our lot, and which nobody can vote on.
@Tim:
What an utter failure of logic (though perhaps typical of Tim). The example of Trump is a reason to be more wary of giving governments power to censor information that they don’t like, not less wary.
The big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) are too powerful. They should be regulated for political neutrality and for transparency of their moderation policies (and, perhaps they should be declared to be monopolies and broken up, following the examples of Bell Corp and Standard Oil).
What should not happen is near-monopoly big tech holding non-public meetings with state actors and imposing politically motivated censorship without any transparency or accountability.
If you don’t see the problem, imagine Trump were the incumbent president, and the State Dept personnel meeting Facebook were Trump appointees, and Facebook had just been bought by the Koch brothers, who had instituted new moderation policies that they didn’t tell anyone about … and none of this was publically known.
See why this could be a problem?
Tim:
I did not say these were the only two options; I said that the one was not a cure for the other, but rather a poison. And I did not say, or even imply, that “…any government at all is a bad thing”.
What I said was that this question, the question of whether the government should have the power to adjudicate what is true, is one of the very few that actually elucidates where a person stands politically.
And I may certainly be naive, but I am not sure I understand what business the government of any country in the world has “…urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech” unless it is trying to establish the power to both determine what is true and to enforce that determination upon the organs of dissemination.
And that is a power your Founding Fathers rightly saw as gravely inimical to liberty, so much so that it was the first matter they deliberated in your Constitution once they’d settled the technical framework of the government’s functioning. Your First Amendment protections range more widely than most other liberal democracies’, and though I find much objectionable about American governance in practice, I believe its speech regime is broadly theoretically correct. I would caution anyone against allowing your government to chip away at this right, because it is virtually impossible to get it back once you have surrendered it.
A case in point: you have already allowed the US government, and several of its constituent states, to turn classrooms into theatres where children are groomed into acting out graduate-level gender theory nonsense and indoctrinated into the gender cult from kindergarten (and even from daycare); where teachers collude with activists to hide name changes and alternate clothing from parents; where a child’s super-special gender identity can be used against a non-compliant parent in a divorce settlement; where children undergo Mengelian experiments on their hormones and physiologies; and where all of this is not just allowed and overseen but actively championed by rainbow-flag-waving government officials.
Anyone who says anything against any of this — or who even points out that it is happening — is exposing themselves to the accusation of “misinformation”, and thereby liable to having their speech restricted, and possibly exposing them to more drastic consequences. Other liberal democracies with speech regimes just slightly more restrictive than your own are already much further along this path — in the UK women are arrested for tweeting the wrong thing, and in Germany lawyers are taking it on their own initiative to hunt down “misgendering” and privately suing alleged offenders for thousands of Euros on behalf of the emotional suffering of their clients. A German court has also imposed official sanctions and penalties to at least one blogging network for the thought crime of “misgendering”.
This is not theoretical, it is not breathless hyperbole — it is happening, right now, in democracies every bit as liberal as your own. And if America does not uphold the sacred right to peddle lies, things like the above will happen to you lot, on top of the madness that already takes place over there.
And, for the record, the thought of a Trumpian figure with an honest-to-God Ministry of Truth at his fingertips (even one that only “suggests” and “encourages” the shaping of information, on the implicit understanding that a failure to comply will lead to monopoly-breakup and possibly worse) is fucking terrifying to me.
That is where I stand, and cannot do otherwise.
‘The big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc) are too powerful. They should be regulated for political neutrality and for transparency of their moderation policies (and, perhaps they should be declared to be monopolies and broken up, following the examples of Bell Corp and Standard Oil).’
Yes, of course, they should. And then we come to the questions of who regulates them, how the requisite laws and institutions might be fashioned, and how acceptable this might be generally, particularly with the MAGA crowd fuming about Hunter Biden’s laptop on the right, and those on the extreme left fuming about the things that the extreme left fumes about.
There is of course the question of what constitutes ‘political neutrality’, particularly when the MAGA lot and anti-vaxers claim that lying about the result of the last presidential election and the horrors of vaccination, as well as about a host of other things, constitutes protected speech under the constitution.
Perhaps Coel should reflect on the old story about belling the cat. The matter is a very difficult one, and has become massively more difficult in an age of social media. And I do encourage him to read the judge’s ruling.
And thank, you, Durchwanderer, for your considered response. Yes, I find appalling the cases you cite in connexion with ‘misgendering’, etc., but I really do not think that these cases entail that we should uphold ‘a sacred right to peddle lies’, particularly when those lies are dangerously influential ones and liable to lead towards the installation of a Putinesque regime which actively seeks to create an environment where nobody knows the difference between truth and lies. I have no time for the cynicism of that student of Julius Evola & Goebbels, Steve Bannon, and his ilk.
I am, by the way, British, not American, and have lived in Japan for fifty years.
The Washington DC Board of Professional Responsibility has recommended that Rudy Giuliani should lose his licence to practice law in the District of Columbia:
‘…Mr. Giuliani’s rash overstatement that the election was stolen had no evidence to support it…. His utter disregard for the facts denigrates the legal profession:
‘False statements intended to foment a loss of confidence in our elections…damage the proper functioning of a free society. When those false statements are made by an attorney, it also erodes the public’s confidence in the integrity of attorneys admitted to our bar and damages the profession’s role as a crucial source of reliable information…. It tarnishes the reputation of the entire legal profession and its mandate to act as a trusted and essential part of the machinery of justice….’
No doubt there will be screams and squeaks from the spreaders of lies and mistrust, as well as from Giuliani himself (‘WITCH-HUNT!’), but I am very glad that Giuliani & others are being held to account and that American institutions are working well.
Tim,
Sorry for assuming you were a Yank (and thanks to Ophelia for fixing the blockquote fail). But I am afraid that you and I simply disagree about the consequences of foregoing an effective right to lie; to me it is obvious that any government that holds for itself the power to influence the dissemination of information is already quite a ways along the ratchet to Putinism or much worse. There is quite simply every incentive for a government to declare any information they do not like “misinformation”, including the very details of how they influence the organs of dissemination, and that makes it much much MUCH easier for the next Trump (or the next Trump-slaying Democrat) to go full Putin.
Because there are no bright lines between lies and falsehoods and misapprehensions and misunderstandings; even the recent history of the pandemic is replete with examples of true things which were at first excoriated as misinformation (sometimes even correctly, given the unclear circumstances and the certainty with which some of these things were initially attributed) as well as false things which governments and health ministries insisted were true (sometimes at the behest of the Peoples’ Republic of China).
I am hardly alone in recalling the initial reporting about the utter inefficacy of masks in the opening stages of the pandemic, which was supported by statements from the CDC and the WHO to prevent mask hoarding, panic buying, and theft from hospitals — noble goals, certainly, but striven toward with manipulations of facts and false certainties which later proved very damaging to these institutions’ credibility. I recall the certainty of the public messaging around how effective the vaccines would be, how things would “go back to normal” as soon as everyone was vaccinated, and how officials and media personalities alike insisted that the mRNA vaccines were sterilising until the evidence was overwhelming that they weren’t. And I recall how the “Lab Leak Hypothesis” was branded misinformation (oh yeah and also racist) until the moment the fucking Pentagon came out and said “we don’t know but we’re kinda sorta sure it came from that coronavirus lab in Wuhan”. And I remember, at every point of this process, how anyone who didn’t toe the party line of the day was accused of peddling lies and misinformation.
Now you may say that all of that is bollocks, that it didn’t happen, or at least not like I’m presenting it so succinctly here. Or you may say, alright, fair enough, the government has lied and itself misled the public with noble intentions, but what bearing should that have on the government’s ability to pressure private media companies about what kinds of speech they promote?
To both of which I say: it is not the government’s job, any government’s job, to determine what is true; it is your and my job, as interlocutors, to critically examine the information we take in and adjust our beliefs accordingly. Any government arrogating itself that power will, even with the best of intentions and in the faithful discharge of its other responsibilities, find itself classing true things as false or false things as true and punishing its citizenry for failing to uphold those spurious classifications. And any government which has given itself said power will retain that power even when those good intentions evolve.
It is simply not possible to know, in advance, which facts about an evolving and dangerous situation are true and which ones turn out to be false. Would that it were so, but it simply is not. It is a comforting delusion to think, for example, “If the government could just get these private media companies to shut down all the lies about vaccines, most everyone would have gotten one and many fewer people would have died.” But this is an untestable hypothesis that, in actuality, has very little likelihood of being true — or, at least, has very little likelihood of not having monstrous consequences in the medium and long terms.
There is always a pandemic, or a catastrophe, or a mass casualty incident, or a war, or a famine, or an asteroid, or whatever. There is always the steady grinding of pestilence and poverty and pedestrian violence. There is always the every day emergency of being a human being. These are things we’ve had to live with for at least twelve thousand years, and most of them far longer — and we actually aren’t doing too badly, all things considered. We came out of the coronavirus pandemic pretty well, for example, through a combination of luck and some of the more sensible hygiene measures we implemented…and of course with more than a little help from the vaccines. Though these were not nearly as helpful in halting infection as initially hoped, they were certainly effective at limiting mortality (and I do not regret having gotten three before my first go-round with the real thing).
And there is always the desire, lurking in all of us, to cast all the blame for our constant misfortune upon some identifiable other; if only they hadn’t done this, or if only they had done that, all of the bad things wouldn’t have happened. And there will always be people ready to prey upon this desire, to offer a simple solution to all of our problems — or succour in the certainty of our resentments. It is inevitable that, when the very fact of the matter itself is in play, some of these hucksters will promise to enforce what you *know* to be true as a matter of executive authority — and because there is never not a crisis underway, there is always an excuse to exercise authority over the truth in order to avert or mitigate that crisis.
What is new, what is practically unprecedented in the history of the world, is a form of government which does not assert the right to cut out your tongue for saying things it insists are not true. It was by no means inevitable that we should have developed such a form of government, and it is by no means inevitable that we should be able to keep it.
Thank you, Durchwanderer. I shall only say that although I think governments should not always or necessarily be trusted, and should always be kept under careful scrutiny, I do not share what seems to be your blanket mistrust of government. I note that you draw attention only to governments’ roles, and not to the roles of large corporations, social media, think-tanks, organisations that claim to be presenting news and do not, dark money and irresponsible billionaires in spreading lies, and cynical intellectuals such as Žižek – which, in a situation where large corporations are more powerful than ever before, overshadowing that of governments (a situation that has been described in a number of serious books), has created an environment where lies may flourish. Power, in what remains of our present supposedly democratic nations, has become extraordinarily diffused and unaccountable.
I note that you do not mention the power of lies in fomenting the January 6th insurrection or Brexit, which have had huge consequences. I recommend the following book on how Erdogan seized power in Turkey and what it has meant for Turkey: ‘How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship’ by Ece Temelkran. She doesn’t confine herself to Turkey, and what she says about other nations, in particular the USA under Trump and Brexit Britain, is hugely important.
And since, Durchwanderer, you appear to be very exercised about claims about the ‘inefficacy’ of masks, these were claims, whether they came from the WHO or not, that one certainly didn’t hear much about in Japan, where the government recommended masks from the outset, and the Japanese people mostly complied and would have done anyway without being requested to (there is anyway a custom in Japan of wearing masks where airborne diseases are concerned, dating to back to the 1918 flu epidemic – they know they are effective); similarly, apart from a pitifully small group of libertarian nationalists I encountered outside Shibuya station in Tokyo who were shouting into loudspeakers about computer chips being inserted into you with COVID vaccines, there was nothing like the anti-vax uproar you had in the US, such that Judge Doughty, a Trump appointee, felt justified in complaining in his ruling about Clarke Humphrey, ‘who at the time was the Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team’ because he ’emailed Twitter and requested the removal of anti-COVID-19 tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’ Do you honestly believe that Mr Humphrey was unjustified in requesting (not ordering) what he did? And if so, why? I think it was the responsible thing to do.
You might compare the percentage of deaths per head of the population from COVID in Japan with those in the USA & the UK. Japan, by the way, had no lockdowns for constitutional reasons, but Japanese people behaved (mostly) sensibly, and despite the fact that, because of its mountainous terrain, the Japanese population is concentrated mainly in a very few, mostly urban areas, the percentage of deaths was far less than in most Western countries.
Tim,
I am already prone to verbosity (indeed when I am done with this reply I may well have cracked the majority of the word count of this comment thread, despite having contributed much less than half the total comments); if I had addressed every point you seem to wish from me, I’d have written a book-length treatise already. But I take your point, gladly, that I am very skeptical whenever an official of a government convened under my assent turns around and claims the right not only to police what I say but to police what I am allowed to hear — to police in the most literal sense, ultimately backed up by the babs and bobs in funny hats and handcuffs.
I do not dismiss concerns of corporate overreach, media conglomeration, and social media manipulation — particularly by algorithmic tweaking from within and only-technically-non-state-actors out of Eastern Europe from without. Again, the fact that I have not provided a point-by-point outline of how to comprehensively solve these problems does not mean I believe they cannot or should not be addressed; rather, the tool of having a government decide what you are allowed to say and what you are allowed to consume is not a solution to any of these problems, and only makes them worse.
Yes (or rather no — in this case the Latinate positive-negatives or certain German modals would really help), I do not think it appropriate that a government official ask Twitter to take down a tweet from a conspiracist nutcase, even if I do not agree with the nutcase (though in this case I do not know, and do not care to find out, the details of the tweet in question or anything at all about Jack Kennedy’s progeny). People have the right to be wrong in public, even dangerously or delusionally or maliciously so, except in a very limited and narrow set of circumstances such as perjury or fraud. This right, once forfeited, will be very difficult to reestablish, and such reestablishment will not likely happen before a long a cruel period of despotism that you seem to want to avoid.
Because there is no bright line between conspiracy nuts denying the reality of COVID and gender-critical feminists denying the reality of trans genocide, or atheists denying the existence of God, or left-wingers denying the justness of America’s imperial misadventures, or gay-rights activists denying the “traditional definition of marriage”, and on and on and on. Sure, this time it was a request to take down a probably-batshit tweet that might have convinced some number of people to behave more recklessly than they otherwise would have, and thus might have contributed to more people dying in a pandemic than may have happened without the tweet.
Next time, it will be another “request” with stakes at least as high, with lives or human flourishing in the balance, but what happens when this “request” is to take down speech you agree with? After all, every time one of those evil feminists writes about men in women’s prisons, she is putting hundreds if not thousands of vulnerable transwomen prisoners at risk of being sent to a men’s prison and being raped or murdered, and not to mention all the poor trans teenagers who will kill themselves at the very sight of such a tweet; how can anyone in good conscience allow such blood libel to stay in digital print for all the world to see? Only a monster would be so callous. Or what about a tweet about opening the borders and letting asylum seekers through no-questions-asked? That is a call for marauding gangsters and rapists and murderers; we cannot have such wanton disregard for public safety polluting our digital discourse. Tweet not sufficiently anti-racist? It’s promoting genocide — out it goes. Tweet not sufficiently supportive of the “traditional family”? It’s in favour of holocausting unborn children — under the jail.
And on, and on, and on.
If you start playing that game, you had better be sure that your side can win the argument of who gets to push the button, every time. And that isn’t a game I think we should be playing. You clearly disagree, and I wish you the best of luck in setting up and playing that game, but I have very little confidence it will work out for you the way you envision it will.
Your points about Japan and masks and vaccines could make for an interesting tangential discussion but amount to Gish-galloping in this one. Nevertheless, I will indulge, briefly (if I am capable).
There are any number of reasons why Japanese mortality was different from that of Western countries, possibly involving a more regular familiarity with effective masking protocols (and more ready access to snug high-grade masks) because of a higher incidence of localised pandemics, possibly due to genetic factors with this particular pandemic, or possibly due to dumb luck. In the US and Germany, at least, federal states with the harshest mask mandates and lockdown measures tended to have the highest death rates — again, for a number of obscure, not-very-straightforward reasons that do not necessarily speak to the inefficacy of masks themselves.
That is all neither here nor there for the purposes of this discussion. But let’s see if I cannot provide an illustrative example about masks and COVID.
TEST SPEECH SAMPLE:
The latest scientific consensus is that FFP2+-grade masks of the appropriate shape, when properly worn and stored for reuse, provide statistically significant protection against COVID-19 infection which correlates inversely to the amount of time the mask is worn — a snug mask which is either brand new or has been hanging in a well-ventilated area for a number of days, worn over a clean-shaven face with a full seal around the mouth and nose and handled with thorough handwashing before placement and after removal, is great for popping into the shop or for a short stint in the tube; it is less so (though far from useless) for a classroom session (especially when that classroom is itself well-ventilated); and it is essentially useless on a long-haul flight. And a mask improperly worn, or improperly handled after it is worn, is no protection at all.
END TEST SPEECH SAMPLE
The above paragraph is perfectly true, and has a number of implications about sensible masking protocols and recommendations. It would be considered misinformation across much of the West, both at the start of the pandemic for insisting masks work at all, or in the middle of the pandemic for pointing out that masks aren’t perfect. Information warriors would have clamoured for such a statement’s removal as anti-scientific dangerous propaganda, and a government official may have even “requested” that it be removed on grounds of public safety. Even though it is true, both in the sense that it is what most credible epidemiologists believe and that it is highly likely to closely resemble the fact of the matter.
Because, of course, misinformation isn’t about what is actually true. To an information warrior, truth is not a defence against the charge of misinformation or disinformation; true things as well as false can be weaponised, can mislead or be misinterpreted or misunderstood. In order to effectively manage misinformation, in order to successfully prosecute the information war, we should only say things which cause the most number of people to behave in the most reasonable way, regardless of whether those things we say are true or not.
You may be comfortable inching toward a world where you are punished for saying a true but inconvenient thing in public — you may well even think my paragraph bracketed with “TEST SPEECH SAMPLE” should be rendered unutterable, at least if it were shared on Twitter by a famous son of a dead president.
But I do not wish to inch toward such a world; I believe, very strongly, that the freedom of speech is no more and no less than the ability to say in public what one believes to be true. I further believe that it is a foundational freedom of the West, essentially a miracle which we obtained through thousands of years of grinding slavery and hundreds of years of blood-soaked warfare, and that we discard it at our great peril.
I am very sorry to say this, Durchwanderer, but I am honestly not interested in, forgive me, your hair-splitting, your banalities, and, to return the compliment, Gish galloping. I do not find what you say responsible. Perhaps you might try out your arguments on those many Samoan parents whose children died of measles because of American anti-vaxxers and a gullible prime minister. Try watching this:
Youtube: RFK Jr., anti-vaxxers, and a measles outbreak: Mehdi’s deep dive
And I am afraid I am neither going to read nor respond to anything else of yours.
That is fair enough, Tim. I reiterate my wishes for your luck in building a regime where people are only ever allowed to publicly utter what you personally judge as “reasonable”, and that it never has any unintended negative consequences for you.