While it was evident before, the extent and fragility of this situation became much more painfully clear post-2016. The current makeup of the Supreme Court is a direct result.
Anyway, I do think Citizens United, Super PACs, and the notion that money=speech (at least for political campaigning) is a problem that needs some sort of solution, but I don’t know what that would be.
I don’t think you need to classify that as a restriction on free speech. Those political groups remain free to air their views to anyone who will listen. They just can’t buy undue and unlimited prominence. They would still be free to get their message across to the whole country via non-paid-for channels.
Spending limits would certainly lower the bar for entry to the political process and that seems like a good thing.
Sadly the US Supreme Court does not agree with you. They have ruled that “money talks”, so spending money on political campaigns is clearly protected by the 1st Amendment.
Non paid for channels doesn’t make any sense. How do you have a freedom of speech and freedom of the press if you can only utilize methodologies that cost no resources? It takes resources to print. It takes resources to broadcast. We already have enough barriers to the concept and exercise of freedom of expression. The creation of a de-facto partisan regulatory body to monitor who spends what to communicate is a horrible idea.
I’m not suggesting that they can’t spend any money, just that there is reasonable cap on it. Enough for them to purchase a reasonable amount of advertising certainly.
Firstly, there’s no reason why it would necessarily be partisan.
Secondly, it seems to work OK in many other countries.
You might be right. I just tend to be very cynical about human nature and the concentration of power.
Of course when money = power one should be equally cynical / suspicious of any concentration of money.
The effect of money being equated to speech is to move political society away from “one person one vote” and closer to “one dollar, one influenced vote”. That cannot be a good thing for true freedom and true democracy given the actual distribution of concentrations of dollars.
Pretty much what the majority of the Supreme Court of Canada said. They just needed more words to say it:
Again, I’m talking about regulation of journalistic practices, not the actual content of stories*.
So any conspiracy story is fine as long as you can state the basis for making that report.
Also note that there’s a time lag to all this; the repercussions for the news outlet takes time, so it’s not like you get to shut down a story. If you want to kill a story the more effective way is just to buy exclusive rights to it, and then do nothing with it, and I believe that is still A-OK in the USA.
* obviously in some cases the content itself matters but I think they are irrelevant to the point of discussion in this thread. For example, if it’s a criminal story involving a child you can’t publish the child’s name. I don’t think anyone would see that as interfering with free speech.
Except other countries are able to make the concept of non-partisan bodies work. I appreciate that seems to be utterly foreign (in both senses) to Americans. In Canada, it’s Elections Canada, where the officials are sworn to act in a non-partisan fashion, and the Chief Electoral Officer is chosen by the House of Commons.
The contribution and spending limits are not set by some unaccountable body. They are set by Parliament, with full, open debate.
Once the election starts, Elections Canada enforces those contribution and spending rules, by means of returns that each party and candidate must file. Again, full and open access.
In case of a dispute about whether a party or candidate has complied with the law, Elections Canada can imposes penalties. If the party or candidate disagrees, they can go to court to challenge it.
Canadian judges are not partisan positions in Canada and are not chosen by election. Their duty is to apply the law as impartially as possible, on the facts of the particular case.
But remember, in the case of Fox News the actual news content is not that crazy. Their news is slanted, of course, but so is everybody else’s to one degree or another.
It’s the commentary shows–Hannity, O’Reilly and Tucker C, etc. that are so egregiously offensive. But commentary is not news and I don’t believe Fox says any differently, do they? You really can’t regulate commentary until it’s into obvious slander territory or doing the old “Fire!” in a crowded theatre gag.
Analysis and opinion is fine but not a shield for soberly presenting knowingly false information.
As we saw with the defamation suit. Why are we cool with the courts deciding about malicious statements and knowingly lying when it’s a big corporation, but when it comes to something related to public safety, say, suddenly it’s impossible to decide without impinging on free speech?
Not to mention that the “real” news parts of fox news often reference things said in the opinion shows as if they’re established fact.
I think many of you overestimate the impact of cable news and overestimate the viewership of cable news. It’s in the single digit millions, of a country with over 300 MM people.
Free speech is a cornerstone of our Republic, and you’ve got to take the good with the bad. I’m a huge supporter of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The so-called cancel culture is one the more recent of movements that strives to limit free expression.
For a few years I’ve been of the opinion that the US, as currently structured, cannot survive the internet, and this debate has done nothing to allay this concern.
The structure of the internet, and how we interact with it, is tailor made to destroy a society like the US. We register to websites to which we find interesting and supportive, thereby ignoring differing points of view. Information bubbles are easily created merely by clicking the subscribe button on YouTube, or the follow button on TikTok. We join Facebook groups which are moderated so that Thoughtcrime is not allowed (Just go to a Mommy group sometime. I dare you.) And, eventually, algos pick up on this and start feeding us engaging content, which, many times is content which reinforces previously held notions by means of creating feelings of hostility and fear of others.
The above is problematic enough were it just 340,000,000 Americans venting their mental issues online, but when you add in foreign actors who prefer a declination of American power, tired of our moralizing re: Democracy, tired of the Pax Americana imposed upon the world since 1945, tired of the cultural imperialism, and with their own internal and personal needs, America finds itself in an epoch-defining moment, where foreign actors are using the above power of the internet to fuel anger-based delusions, with the goal being to, at least, weaken American power and, at most, to break this country from within.
And America is easily fractured, for America is nothing but a shared delusion in and of itself. The theory of Americanism is that we are not Americans because we were a tribe who lived here since time immemorial, but that we are Americans because we believe in the ideals of the Founding Fathers, or, as Superman so elegantly put it, Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and if you choose to believe in this system, you, too, are an American.
But… destroy this belief, make “America” into some ethnonationalist state, convince 25-35% of the people that the remaining 65-75% are not “real Americans”, create an alternate reality where objective facts don’t matter, only winning does… and you can shatter America.
As America is currently being shattered.
With the installation of Donald Trump as the leader of one of the two major political parties of the United States, the handling of the COVID crisis, his 2020 electoral and popular vote loss, and the subsequent propagation of the Big Lie, shattering the US has become the official position of the predominant organ of the American Right, the GOP, even as COVID was killing over a million Americans in the pandemic alone.
Look at the objective reality – by any measure, a President which lost 16 million jobs and 250,000 lives the year prior to election day, all while lying about the then-unchecked pandemic, should have suffered Hoover-esque drop of support (over 25%). But Trump gained over 9 million votes from 2016-2020 despite being the worst President since, well, Hoover.
As I said above, the Internet is the single greatest vector of mental disorder triggers the world has ever seen, its ability to create self-reinforcing intellectual and emotional bubbles via dopamine-fueled bits of anger unparalleled, and there are bad faith actors who, for over 20 years, have been using this to tear America asunder by creating alternate realities and belief systems specifically designed to turn American against American.
Infecting a nation bristling with 6,000 nuclear weapons with self-inflicted, reinforcing mental disorders where the afflicted literally create, and react to, their own reality may not have been the long-term game-winning play they originally thought. Subverting the party who already was displaying fascistic penalties… not too great either. But Americans aren’t the only ones lacking a historical perspective and those bad faith actors (Putin being the obvious example, but he is not the only one) that claim they have one are focused on their preferred historical narratives which may or may not be relevant to this situation.
Including myself.
And as I argued… and this thread has shown… the crisis is worse in America because our First Amendment freedoms and economic structure strictly limit the government’s response to this problem. We can’t just ban Facebook (to pick one), we can’t install “truth filters” on the individual users, we aren’t going to set up a Bureau of Fact Management (nor should we), and, of course, we sure as hell aren’t going to turn off the Internet.
I just fear that what usually happens… that the contradictions explode into warfare at the expense of millions of lives and global suffering… is going to happen again. China (to pull a name out of the hat) is not going to be interested in sitting back, watching a nuclear power go insane because the mental and legal restrictions caused by our belief in something called “the First Amendment” is in opposition to the obvious need to bring our citizens back to a shared reality, and China… or someone… will be compelled to intervene.
In conclusion, as Christendom could not survive the printing press, America cannot survive the internet. Either we radically change our government or we allow our society to get torn asunder. There are no other options.
Excellent post. You voiced my concern much better than I did. I’m afraid we’re going to “freedom” our way over a cliff, and I don’t know what we can do about it.
Very good post @JohnT and in many ways I agree. And I don’t think it is just a problem for the US.
Memes have been analogized to viruses, and now, in the Internet and smartphone era, we’re metaphorically engaging in unprotected coitus with thousands of people at the same time, making a perfect environment for the most deadly STDs to evolve and spread.
Will humanity survive this? Genuinely, I don’t know. Who would have thought that climate denial could survive year after year of record temperatures? Who would have thought that some of the most multicultural places in the world could engage in old tropes of the “enemy within”, or pretty much half of America could be convinced of a stolen election with absolutely sod all evidence?
The one pushback I would give to your post is the implicit premise.
Many Americans seem to believe that free speech is a simple binary, that America right now has, but any regulation on speech whatsoever means the end of free speech. The reality of course is that no country has unrestricted speech, including the US, and holding public officials and large broadcasters responsible for knowingly lying is no different than having defamation laws, for example.
Hyperbole at its best.
Good post but of course I’d disagree with some of your analysis and conclusions. I think the problems are deeper than the Internet or other forms of mass communication. The problems occur from the lack of a shared set of basic principles. Furthermore, we have amoral folks who actively work to undermine the actual concept of the utility of a shared set of basic principles. And the shared set of basic principles isn’t necessarily a shared sense of a subjective reality.
The lesson that needs to be learned has already been learned during the religious wars that occurred before the age of Enlightenment. We need to go back to the promotion of the ideal of actual tolerance instead of pandering to the professionally offended. That intellectual infantilization is destructive and it’s pervasive. We are finally seeing an intellectual schism on the left between the progressive wing and the liberal wing and that is welcome. Unfortunately, the intellectual rot and the emotional stuntedness are probably irreversible.
In terms of foreign intervention… I don’t see overt intervention as wise. Why give a fractured society a common enemy? The wise thing to do is exacerbate the division between factions. Divide and conquer is an ancient and reliable way to weaken an adversary. With state level productivity, AI generated content that adapts to find maximal engagement will do far more to exacerbate division than anything else. The emotional maturity to deal with that in our modern, easily triggered society is not present.
So follow up on this and to show how the UK continues to be a very graphic demonstration of why restrictions on free speech are very unreasonable, and essentially autocratic attacks on civil rights, this story came up on my feed today:
, Commander Findlay said: “We are going to be using a sharper focus to inform sharper interventions to make arrests in big crowds.
“We have included faster-time analysis capability of social media and we are going to be employing retrospective facial recognition, so I want to make it clear that we will be doing everything within our power this weekend to make sure there is that fast-time, really robust response to emerging incidents that cause really grave concern to communities.”
Given the context (and the home secretary’s words I quoted above, not to mention other politicians statements) its clear that “incidents that cause really grave concern to communities” absolutely means “protected free speech that is absolutely not a threat or other incitement to violence”