Did someone send out a memo? Or has the shock of encountering the wild variety of views visible on Elon Musk’s X just been too much for grandees used to moving in circles where the acceptable boundaries of disagreement are narrowly drawn? When John Kerry recently spoke of “dislike of and anguish over social media,” he was presumably referring to how he and like-minded others (among them, it turned out, another failed presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton) reacted as they watched the wrong sort of ideas openly discussed on major online platforms.
For his part, Kerry was talking about climate “misinformation,” a word that, in the hands of those who manipulate its meaning, can encompass not only a misstatement of fact but also, all too frequently, nothing more than the expression of a heterodox point of view. Such fine distinctions, we suspect, are of little interest to Kerry. Instead, he bemoaned the way that people no longer turn to “the referees we used to have” to determine what’s true, but — the horror — “self-select where they go for their news, for their information.”
The idea that news or information should be curated by referees (who checks the refs for their bias?) is as patronizing as it is incompatible with free speech and, indeed, #science. Science is supposed to be the search for truth, not the acceptance of orthodoxy. Sadly, it is no surprise that Kerry described the First Amendment as a “major block” to “hammering” a source of information of which he disapproved “out of existence.”
At around the same time, Clinton was talking about protecting “the children,” a ploy that she has a way of using when it’s freedom enjoyed by adults that she truly has in her sights. She explained:
We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs. That they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted.
But we now know that that was an overly simple view. That if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook, or Twitter, X, or Instagram, or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control. . . .
We need to remove the immunity from liability and we need to have guardrails. We need regulation.
Quite who “we” are was never made clear, but the reference to “control” is revealing enough as it is. “Moderate” in this context means censor. Clinton complains about child pornography (understandably so), but that is already illegal, and social-media companies do what they can to eliminate it. That’s not her target. Section 230 is the legislative device that has opened the public square to voices that would not normally have made it there. Scrapping or gutting section 230 would, by opening the doors to endless lawfare, do away with X and silence those annoying expressions of dissent from conventional thinking. And that, quite clearly, is what Clinton wants.
In the meantime, Clinton has given an enthusiastic welcome to the EU’s Digital Services Act, which, backed by the possibility of heavy fines, effectively brings U.S. social-media companies substantial enough to have a large following in the EU within the control of Brussels. The result, unless social-media companies implement separate systems governing what their customers in the EU may see, means that Americans posting on American social media in America will find that their speech is governed by the standards set in the EU, territories in which free expression is subject to far more restriction than in the U.S.
There are those on the Right, including, at least in the past Donald Trump, who also want to amend section 230, in their case because it permits online media companies to make their own “moderation” decisions. That those decisions typically (X apart) reflect progressive bias is a major source of concern to many conservatives. But it does not change the fact that social-media space is private property, a concept that conservatives are supposed to respect. Moreover, monkeying around with the section’s wording could set off a process under which the viewpoint diversity facilitated by social media is eaten away, with results that few conservatives are likely to appreciate.
The Democrats’ attack on online free speech is likely to revolve around section 230 and “misinformation.” Tim Walz (before he was running for the vice presidency) said there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” During his debate with Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance, Walz defended Democrats’ desire for tech companies and the government to work together to suppress misinformation by claiming, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” The Court does not, of course, use that “test” to make the government the arbiter of truth, and the analogy comes from a 1919 decision that the Court tossed aside over a half century ago. Taken together, Walz’s comments demonstrate that it is not only the party’s former leaders who want more Americans to keep more of their thoughts to themselves.