Former President Barack Obama gave a detailed vision in his speech earlier this month of what direction he wants social media to go. And last Monday, billionaire businessman Elon Musk took Twitter in the opposite direction.
Musk’s willingness to invest his own money in preserving the future of free speech in the United States couldn’t come at a better time.
On a superficial level, Obama’s speech hit all the sensible notes about social media in a modern democracy. He said nice things about the First Amendment, proclaiming himself to be “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist.” He said he didn’t “have a lot of confidence that any single individual or organization, private or public, should be charged or do a good job at determining who gets to hear what.” And he even correctly identified why social media has made the world more polarized, noting that our ability to “occupy entirely different media realities” allows us to “select facts and opinions that reinforce our preexisting worldviews and filter out those that don’t.”
That all sounds pretty fair and evenhanded. But when read more closely, the speech shows that Obama is unable to recognize his own prejudices.
All of the examples of misinformation Obama identified in his speech — including former President Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, vaccine skepticism, and 2016 Russian disinformation targeting black voters — all come from his political opponents. Not once in his entire speech did he entertain the possibility that disinformation comes from the Left too.
And of course it does, often with catastrophic effects. He did not mention even once the Steele dossier, filled with lies about Trump that had been secretly paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He failed to note the disinformation campaign by certain current and former U.S. intelligence officials that the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop were fakes created by Russia. Obama made no reference to the Left’s disinformation campaign about Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law in which the media took part by calling the law the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, nor to concerted Democratic disinformation campaigns about the effects of election reform laws in Georgia and Texas, among other states.
And naturally, Obama failed to mention his own “Lie of the Year” award, which he won from PolitiFact in 2013 for telling people that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it” under Obamacare.
The Left occupies its own media bubble, which is full of just as many lies as the Right’s — and the Left’s are often much more harmful because the media are far more willing to parrot its disinformation. Obama has no self-awareness in this regard. His inability to acknowledge any disinformation outside of his comfort zone becomes highly apparent when his audience is taken into account and his final message to them is considered.
Obama’s speech was delivered on the campus of Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. He asserted that “those of you in the tech community, soon to be in the tech community, not just corporate leaders, but employees at every level, have to be part of the solution.”
And what exactly is Obama’s solution? Is it a call for more free speech? Or more introspection from social media employees about their own biases and media bubbles? Absolutely not. Obama specifically said current social media censorship “doesn’t go far enough.” In his closing, he urged those listening not to fight for “absolute truth” or “fixed truth” but “for what, deep down, we know is more true, is right.” In other words, Obama wants them to embrace their own biases. He wants them to enter the industry with a goal of censoring social media more vigorously to conform to their own prejudices — that is, what they feel is “right.”
Obama is not dumb. He knows that the employees of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media companies all give more than 90% of their political donations to his own Democratic Party. The employees who make the censorship decisions at these powerful social media companies look nothing like the rest of America. They are staffed with hardcore far-leftists whose opinions are far out of step with those of the average person on everything from immigration to transgenderism to energy prices.
Fortunately, Musk will change all of that, at least for Twitter.
“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means,” Musk tweeted yesterday.
This is the attitude that will save democracy — an attitude that rejects censorship instead of embracing it. Hopefully, others in Silicon Valley will come to their senses and follow suit.
