Former secretary of state John Kerry recently spoke at a World Economic Forum panel and lamented the First Amendment for being a roadblock to countering online “misinformation” and “disinformation” about climate change.
Responding to an audience question about “climate misinformation,” Kerry described how social media make it difficult to form consensus and said the First Amendment makes it difficult to weed out “disinformation” online.
“But, look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said.
“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he added, while acknowledging that different people have other visions for change.
“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
No thanks.pic.twitter.com/SLGHOLVjCr
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) September 29, 2024
Kerry’s comments came 45 minutes into a World Economic Forum panel on economic development, held during its week of “sustainable development impact meetings,” a series of panels primarily focused on climate change and international markets. The remarks caused an avalanche of criticism online, with many accusing progressives of openly supporting censorship.
For more than three years, Kerry was the Biden administration’s inaugural climate envoy, until he left his post in March. He was the Obama administration’s secretary of state from 2014 to 2017, helping negotiate the ill-fated Iran nuclear deal. After a decades-long career representing Massachusetts in the senate, Kerry, a longtime Democratic Party politician, lost the 2004 presidential election to incumbent Republican George W. Bush.
Online censorship under the guise of “disinformation” continues to be a hot-button issue four years after Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post‘s reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive, leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The ability for government agencies to coordinate with social-media platforms was the subject of the Murthy v. Missouri Supreme Court case. The justices threw out the case in June for lack of standing, but the plaintiffs are trying to resume the litigation in lower courts.
Upon taking over Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk gave independent journalists access to internal documents and communications showing how government agencies pressured the platform into suppressing speech leading up to the 2020 election.
In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to the House Judiciary Committee admitting that Facebook made content-moderation choices under pressure from Biden-administration officials and apologizing for censoring the Biden laptop story. House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have produced multiple reports on its investigations into online censorship in the U.S. and abroad.