It is hard, grumbles Kerry, to ‘build consensus.’ Good. Democracy is not meant to be easy.
There is no doubt that the Kremlin (and other opponents of the West) do spread disinformation (lies spread to discredit, damage, or disorient an opponent), even if doing so is much less effective than often claimed. However, understandable concerns about disinformation are currently being used to talk up the threat posed by online misinformation (false information that is passed on by someone who thinks it is true), at which point this discussion enters treacherous territory. Determining that something is misinformation means determining that it is untrue. But, as a rule, establishing the truth of some disputed statement is more likely to be discovered by consulting multiple sources (ideally those that have proved reliable in the past) than by turning to one officially approved oracle. The officially approved oracle is useful for finding out the orthodox view, but orthodoxy is not necessarily the same as truth.
As I noted in a recent article on the disinformation panic (and related issues) for NR, “crowdsourcing ideas to take advantage of the collective intelligence available online makes sense. Insisting that there can be only one answer frequently does not.”
As economist John Cochrane has observed:
Much of the “misinformation,” especially regarding COVID-19 policy, turned out to be right. It was precisely the kind of out-of-the-box thinking, reconsidering of the scientific evidence, speaking truth to power, that we want in a vibrant democracy and a functioning public health apparatus, though it challenged verities propounded by those in power and, in their minds, threatened social stability and democracy itself. Do we really think that more regulation of “misinformation” would have sped sensible COVID-19 policies?
This is not how John Kerry views matters. Speaking last week at a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy investing and sustainable development, he replied (as NR’s James Lynch reports) to an “audience question about climate “misinformation” with comments about social media and the First Amendment.
It’s worth taking a closer look.
Kerry:
The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t — the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.
Who, I wonder, “dislikes” and feels “anguish” over social media? Most people who view social-media content do so with a healthy degree of skepticism, but the dislike and the anguish is, for the most part, felt by those members of the ruling establishment who used to enjoy a quasi-monopoly over information, thanks (to use Kerry’s word) those “referees.”
It is hard, grumbles Kerry, to “build consensus.” Good. Democracy is not meant to be easy. Besides, a consensus that is built on the suppression of inconvenient information is not, in any real sense, a consensus. This means that it may prove fragile, destabilizing, and, lacking serious challenge, turn out to be profoundly misguided. The story of the “race” to net zero is, as it happens, proving to be a good example of just how this works.
Kerry’s lament about people choosing for themselves where they go for their news and information is implicitly a call for muzzled media. It also reflects a revealing contempt for those who are not John Kerry and his ilk. We are supposed to believe that they are too dumb or too gullible to be allowed to search out information for themselves.
Kerry:
But, look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
The essence of social media, of course, is that they are channels for many competing sources of information. Besides that, to condemn the First Amendment as a “major block” to “hammering out” a competing source of information is disturbingly authoritarian. Yes, Kerry may think that a source is “sick,” has an “agenda” (and he doesn’t?), and is putting out what he considers to be disinformation. But a legal system that would allow him and those who agree with him to “hammer it out of existence” is far sicker.
But that is the legal system that Kerry wants.
Net zero or free speech: Choose one.