Progressive intellectuals say they are still very worried about misinformation and its capacity to undermine democracy. This has been on the Left’s collective mind at least since Donald Trump came into power, but news of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has brought these anxieties back to the surface.
The apparent urgency even lured Barack Obama back in the public eye. He went to Stanford to warn about the threat of disinformation, particularly on social media, to the American republic:
No one tells us that the window is blurred, subject to unseen distortions and subtle manipulations. All we see is a constant feed of content where useful factual information and happy diversions, and cat videos, flow alongside lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, white supremacist, racist tracts, misogynist screeds. And over time, we lose our capacity to distinguish between fact, opinion, and wholesale fiction. Or maybe we just stop caring.
Among other solutions, Obama suggested having private corporations check speech:
A regulatory structure, a smart one, needs to be in place, designed in consultation with tech companies, and experts and communities that are affected, including communities of color and others that sometimes are not well-represented here in Silicon Valley, that will allow these companies to operate effectively while also slowing the spread of harmful content. In some cases, industry standards may replace or substitute for regulation, but regulation has to be part of the answer.
As with so many Obama elocutions, it is full of just enough “to be sures” and “on the other hands” to make it seem neutral, and his policy assertions are so vague, even anodyne, that objecting to them is beside the point. The point, as ever with the 44th president, is the target — the directing of one’s indignation upon one thing rather than another. Are his priorities straight? Should the rest of us be as concerned as Obama, and the legions of liberal intellectuals whose anxieties he channels, about too much speech?
It is at the very least peculiar to assert that our democracy requires greater content moderation, since for virtually all its history, we’ve had nothing of the sort. Indeed, the very notion was inconceivable until the 20th century saw the rise of the broadcast networks. Before that, newspapers were the main source of information, and they promoted a wild and woolly discourse.
Moreover, today’s information silos are nothing compared to those of the 19th century, when geography and economics severely curtailed people’s access to information. Insofar as news was available, it often had an explicitly partisan bent — hence the reason why some newspapers have the word “Democrat” or “Republican” in their names.
Even today, truth hardly reigns supreme in our political discourse. It’s full of half-truths, non sequiturs, spin, even outright lies. There is an entire industry within politics dedicated to propagating this — they’re called the communications teams, and they work for our elected lawmakers. To a remarkable extent, we remain, as historians Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin put it in their study of 19th-century politics, a “rude republic.”
And yet, here we are. We have gone from being the agricultural backwater of the West to the greatest nation in the entire world.
It’s almost as if Thomas Jefferson was on to something in his first inaugural address when he said, “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” Jefferson was being a bit of a visionary when he uttered those words on March 4, 1801. The statement had hardly been demonstrated — in fact, the roiling politics of the 1790s seemed to threaten the very foundations of the republic itself. But 221 years later, we should be more confident in the capacity of the people to distinguish right from wrong.
Still, Obama’s vision, and that of the economically upscale liberals for whom he speaks, is not pulled from thin air. It has its antecedents in the early republic, too, espoused initially in the late 1790s by the Federalist Party, America’s first elitist coalition. Concerned about the rabble-rousing Jeffersonian press, the Federalists enacted the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to defame the Congress or the president — in other words, to spread disinformation that might have diminished their reputations. The law carried heavy penalties, and some even went to jail for it.
In fairness, nobody of political significance on today’s Left is calling for jail time for misinformation, nor are they demanding the government censor speech. But they certainly have absorbed the aristocratic flair of the Federalists, many of whom believed that natural aristocrats, the “better sorts,” should have an outsize say in public affairs. If anything, today’s progressives are even more high-toned. At least the Federalist Party housed ultimate authority about what should happen to purveyors of disinformation in Congress, which was responsible to the people. Obama, and many on the Left calling for content moderation, would have a wholly self-appointed cadre of experts working at or with the tech companies to distinguish true from false — a weird conglomeration of aristocracy and oligarchy. The people could, in theory, vote the Federalists out of office (which they did, in 1800), but you cannot vote the shareholders out of Google and Facebook.
This helps explain the outrage on the Left over Elon Musk purchasing Twitter. He’s clearly a Jeffersonian on the virtue of speech. Likely worse from the perspective of the Left, he is a true gadfly. He does not share the cultural conceits of the “better sorts,” and he has so much money and fame that he cannot be corralled by them.
Therein lies the fundamental flaw of the high-toned vision of mostly-but-not-quite-entirely-free speech. By any reasonable metric, Musk must be counted among the natural aristocrats, if such a class indeed exists. A self-made man, an immigrant, who by the age of 50 amassed one of the largest fortunes the world has ever seen. If the elites should be facilitating democracy, why not him? The answer is that his views are inconsistent with our would-be content moderators — which demonstrates that they are not neutral. They have social, cultural, and economic prejudices that tinge their view of what is and what is not a valid opinion. They thus lack the capacity to dispassionately judge what should and what should not count as legitimate speech in a democracy.
One can see this most clearly by juxtaposing the 2004 and 2020 elections. In 2004, Dan Rather of CBS propagated a fake document as evidence that George W. Bush received special treatment during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. It was up to conservative bloggers to point out the fraud. Yet Rather remains in the mainstream political discourse — appearing regularly on CNN’s Reliable Sources. CBS is still considered by respectable types to be a respectable news organization. Sixteen years later, the New York Post published details about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop — details that were embarrassing to Joe Biden. The response from respectable outlets was the same: This was almost certainly Russian disinformation, should not have been published, and shame on the Post for doing so. The Post was even de-platformed from Twitter. Yet its reporting was basically truthful.
Two different stories, one fake and one true. The fake one was promoted, and the true one was demoted. The difference is that the political biases of the “gatekeepers” inclined them in one direction over the other. Our self-proclaimed neutral judges lacked the capacity to be fair when fairness was most needed because they, like everybody else in the country, were invested in the outcome of the election.
Ultimately, one need not embrace Jefferson’s utopianism about free speech to accept the basic idea. Indeed, Jefferson himself was very bitter about “disinformation” spread among New England merchants undermining his embargo on trade with Great Britain after 1807. The choice is between competing alternatives, neither of which is perfect. The problem with the elitist view is that, if the better sorts are wrong, the truth is severely disadvantaged, and politics will likely reflect their class biases.
This does not require us to admit all speech into the public square — just as communities are allowed to regulate pornography and strip clubs, so, too, should social media take reasonable, broadly acceptable steps to deemphasize truly inhumane views. And on a shallow reading of Obama’s speech, one could see that is all he is on about. But the devil is in the details, and we as a nation should choose whose vision of free speech is closer to ideal, Obama’s or Jefferson’s.
I’m with Jefferson.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
