Based on this kind of cold calculus of whether giving up civil liberties is worth it if you argue it within a legal framework, I’m sure you can rationalize all the worst excesses of the well intentioned War on Terror. Weak article.
Your main point seems to be "jawboning is different in kind from government coercion" and you're convincing! But you keep coming around to add "and suppressing COVID speech was much more important, too!" (Not your literal quotes. Sorry.)
My problem is that your second point makes me doubt the sincerity of your first. Biden didn't really violate the First Amendment on COVID, but it might have been ok if he had?
Carr was wrong. Trump was wrong. Ted Cruz, amazingly, was right. Please don't throw that away by suggesting that government coercion could be hunky-dory if the issue is serious enough.
While I agree what Trump is doing is worse and qualitatively different, I’ve come to the view that what the Biden administration did violated the spirit of the first amendment. While I detest vaccine skeptics, the government shouldn’t pressure private companies to censor them.
Additionally, it generated real backlash from many previously non-partisan or even Democratic-leaning figures, as well as the tech industry itself. This is part of what drove people like Joe Rogan and even Elon Musk to the right. And now it makes Democrat’s criticisms of Trump on speech feel not as credible with these people. So even setting aside the legality and morality, pragmatically it was a disaster.
What I feel like we’re missing here is a comprehensive policy laying out the exact line between acceptable and unacceptable censorship in an age of personalized feeds.
This is an extremely hard problem but here are a few thoughts:
- the government should never be able to censor visiting individual social media accounts (just like they shouldn’t be able to censor TV shows/channels, which have a similar structure)
- the government should never be able to censor chronological feeds of accounts users made the decision to follow
- the government *could* maybe have some input into recommendation algorithms suggesting new content (e.g. for you pages, trending topics)
- if so, interventions into recommendation algorithms should be required to pass through some kind of bipartisan review board before going into effect and should be subject to judicial review (with a direct-saving-lives legal threshold) afterwards — which also means interventions need to be transparent and not behind the scenes
A policy like this preserves the freedom for individuals to access content they have made a clear choice to consume (akin to turning the TV on to a particular channel), but would allow the government to intervene in the frequency with which they’re shown content they haven’t specifically requested — within limits.
Exactly how such interventions could reasonably work (e.g. fully hiding posts vs. downweighting recommendation scores, possibly at different levels based on the degree of public interest — and also determining whether individual posts should be subject to any interventions, while providing recourse) is an extremely hard problem though.
The root of the injuries we've felt because of the First Amendment are much larger than proposing changes to the Communications Decency Act to coerce the removal of anti-vax agitprop — or the blackmailing of a TV producer to kill one of their shows by a criminal, emotionally unstable, narcissist megalomaniac.
These instances are results of the segregation of Americans during the past 35 years, into discrete "identity blocks", by broadcasters and publishers whose business strategies feature reporting ideologically biased content to capture and hold audiences. This abuse of the First Amendment has divided us into factions which can no longer communicate with one another, because their assumptions are based on different paradigms of "truth", represented by contradictory sets of facts.
Asking publishers and broadcasters to censor their content won't break the "identity blocks" which bind factions to themselves, while segregating them from others — it won't allow individuals to mingle within an environment of freely-spoken or freely-published accounts and opinions. If anything, this type of censorship encourages the opposite, causing people to hold even more tightly to their political IDs while shutting out foreign perspectives with even more anger.
This crisis won't be solved until all perspectives are available for and visible to all political identities.
The FCC had an effective way of encouraging this prior to 1987, with something called the Fairness Doctrine. Using the electromagnetic spectrum was the only way to broadcast anything at the time, so the idea was that since this spectrum was limited by physics, it could be monopolized by ideologues whose content would effectively censor the speech of those without access to the air. The Doctrine required broadcasters who editorialized to provide free access for "editorial replies" to "responsible persons of the opposing point of view", so that the very same audience which heard or saw, and was influenced by biased content could screen rebuttals which would balance their impressions. Because broadcasters were compelled to spend valuable air time on replies to each of their opinions, they were discouraged from business models featuring too much bias, in favor of more neutral presentations.
The Fairness Doctrine was made obsolete after cable TV made it possible to broadcast without using the air. We can do so much more than even that now, of course, because of the internet, so returning the Doctrine in its original form in 2025 would be absurd. Yet, an attempt should be made nonetheless, to write a new version of the Fairness Doctrine for the 21st century, which would accomplish the same outcome as the old Doctrine — the outcome of providing all individuals within all political factions exposure to all biases and interpretations, so that we can all at least communicate with one another again… because we'll all be operating with the same understanding of reality, again.
Based on this kind of cold calculus of whether giving up civil liberties is worth it if you argue it within a legal framework, I’m sure you can rationalize all the worst excesses of the well intentioned War on Terror. Weak article.
Your main point seems to be "jawboning is different in kind from government coercion" and you're convincing! But you keep coming around to add "and suppressing COVID speech was much more important, too!" (Not your literal quotes. Sorry.)
My problem is that your second point makes me doubt the sincerity of your first. Biden didn't really violate the First Amendment on COVID, but it might have been ok if he had?
Carr was wrong. Trump was wrong. Ted Cruz, amazingly, was right. Please don't throw that away by suggesting that government coercion could be hunky-dory if the issue is serious enough.
While I agree what Trump is doing is worse and qualitatively different, I’ve come to the view that what the Biden administration did violated the spirit of the first amendment. While I detest vaccine skeptics, the government shouldn’t pressure private companies to censor them.
Additionally, it generated real backlash from many previously non-partisan or even Democratic-leaning figures, as well as the tech industry itself. This is part of what drove people like Joe Rogan and even Elon Musk to the right. And now it makes Democrat’s criticisms of Trump on speech feel not as credible with these people. So even setting aside the legality and morality, pragmatically it was a disaster.
I’m shocked that you think it’s ok to censor conservatives but not ok to censor liberals.
I agree that you're not a hypocrite – you never believed in or supported free speech in the first place!
What I feel like we’re missing here is a comprehensive policy laying out the exact line between acceptable and unacceptable censorship in an age of personalized feeds.
This is an extremely hard problem but here are a few thoughts:
- the government should never be able to censor visiting individual social media accounts (just like they shouldn’t be able to censor TV shows/channels, which have a similar structure)
- the government should never be able to censor chronological feeds of accounts users made the decision to follow
- the government *could* maybe have some input into recommendation algorithms suggesting new content (e.g. for you pages, trending topics)
- if so, interventions into recommendation algorithms should be required to pass through some kind of bipartisan review board before going into effect and should be subject to judicial review (with a direct-saving-lives legal threshold) afterwards — which also means interventions need to be transparent and not behind the scenes
A policy like this preserves the freedom for individuals to access content they have made a clear choice to consume (akin to turning the TV on to a particular channel), but would allow the government to intervene in the frequency with which they’re shown content they haven’t specifically requested — within limits.
Exactly how such interventions could reasonably work (e.g. fully hiding posts vs. downweighting recommendation scores, possibly at different levels based on the degree of public interest — and also determining whether individual posts should be subject to any interventions, while providing recourse) is an extremely hard problem though.
The root of the injuries we've felt because of the First Amendment are much larger than proposing changes to the Communications Decency Act to coerce the removal of anti-vax agitprop — or the blackmailing of a TV producer to kill one of their shows by a criminal, emotionally unstable, narcissist megalomaniac.
These instances are results of the segregation of Americans during the past 35 years, into discrete "identity blocks", by broadcasters and publishers whose business strategies feature reporting ideologically biased content to capture and hold audiences. This abuse of the First Amendment has divided us into factions which can no longer communicate with one another, because their assumptions are based on different paradigms of "truth", represented by contradictory sets of facts.
Asking publishers and broadcasters to censor their content won't break the "identity blocks" which bind factions to themselves, while segregating them from others — it won't allow individuals to mingle within an environment of freely-spoken or freely-published accounts and opinions. If anything, this type of censorship encourages the opposite, causing people to hold even more tightly to their political IDs while shutting out foreign perspectives with even more anger.
This crisis won't be solved until all perspectives are available for and visible to all political identities.
The FCC had an effective way of encouraging this prior to 1987, with something called the Fairness Doctrine. Using the electromagnetic spectrum was the only way to broadcast anything at the time, so the idea was that since this spectrum was limited by physics, it could be monopolized by ideologues whose content would effectively censor the speech of those without access to the air. The Doctrine required broadcasters who editorialized to provide free access for "editorial replies" to "responsible persons of the opposing point of view", so that the very same audience which heard or saw, and was influenced by biased content could screen rebuttals which would balance their impressions. Because broadcasters were compelled to spend valuable air time on replies to each of their opinions, they were discouraged from business models featuring too much bias, in favor of more neutral presentations.
The Fairness Doctrine was made obsolete after cable TV made it possible to broadcast without using the air. We can do so much more than even that now, of course, because of the internet, so returning the Doctrine in its original form in 2025 would be absurd. Yet, an attempt should be made nonetheless, to write a new version of the Fairness Doctrine for the 21st century, which would accomplish the same outcome as the old Doctrine — the outcome of providing all individuals within all political factions exposure to all biases and interpretations, so that we can all at least communicate with one another again… because we'll all be operating with the same understanding of reality, again.