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- [00:01]
A
Humanity produces more new knowledge every morning, literally, than in its first 200,000 years, and free speech is part of that. But you need two other elements. You also need the discipline of fact. You can't just make stuff up. You can't bullshit your way through. And you need viewpoint diversity. You need enough different ideas in the room so that you get generative conflict. You can spot mistakes.
- [00:31]
B
And now, the fight with Jasia Monk. Welcome to this live recording of the Good Fight Club. Coming to you directly from the Global free speech summit 2025 at Vanderbilt University, we have with us, please give him a big round of applause, Jacob mchangama, who is the executive director of the Future of Free Speech and the organizer of this conference. We have Rene Dioresta, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown and author, most recently of Invisible Rulers. And we have Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings and a contributing writer at the Atlantic and Persuasion. That is correct. Thank you, Jonathan. So, look, this summit is about free speech, and we've had really interesting contributions, really great speeches and conversations about free speech over the last 24 hours. There's, I think, a question about free speech which is hard to escape at the moment, which is that virtually everybody who claims to care about free speech seems to be a bit of a hypocrite. That when you look at some of the loudest defenders of free speech on the right of American politics, whether that's somebody like Elon Musk or somebody like Donald Trump, suddenly they are demanding the firing of people who offend them. They talk about the importance of what they call consequence culture. They say, of course, people should be free to say whatever they want, but then there should be always terrible consequences for when they express themselves in unpopular ways. And, of course, the left is just as hypocritical. The left has spent or these parts of the left have spent years arguing for consequence culture and talking about why actually free speech is a reactionary conservative value. Now suddenly, when Jimmy Kimmel is fired, they are holding, rousing defenses of free speech. So the slightly provocative question I'm going to ask each of you is, should we give up on free speech if everybody who talks about free speech is actually a hypocrite? And if not, then why should we care about this value?
- [02:57]
C
We are all hypocrites about free speech. It's human nature. Free speech is a deeply difficult concept and in some ways counterintuitive to human nature. I think the good thing about is that we've made progress, like the circle of accepted speech, at least in mature democracies, has grown a lot. I don't think we will ever escape hypocrisy. It's what in my book on the history of free speech, I call Milton's curse, after John Milton, the famous English poet who wrote the Aripagitica in 1644, very famous defense of free speech. But when you read it more carefully, it becomes clear that Milton is not in favor of free speech for Catholics. He's not in favor of blasphemy. In fact, he's mostly in favor of free speech for mainline Protestant sects. So it's definitely not a new concept, but it's something to be on guard against. And I think this is where in the United States the value of the First Amendment becomes really, really clear because it provides a very strong, robust protection against government overreach. Now, it's a necessary but not a sufficient protection for free speech, because unfortunately, as we see cultural institutions, law firms, media outlets, voluntarily cave to the pressure of the Trump administration, even though they could rely on the strongest free speech protection in the world, which I think is an affront to dissidents in Iran and Russia who cannot rely on that protection. But I think it's a big difference, particularly compared to the European model, where a lot of the things that the Trump administration is threatening to do, but which would violate the First Amendment are perfectly feasible at actually being carried out in Europe right now. But ultimately, we obviously need that civil libertarian impulse to win the day. That is extremely difficult at a time of intensive polarization, because that just overrides the civil libertarian impulse.
- [05:22]
B
And I want to make sure we get back to the state of free speech in the United States and Europe later in this conversation. Jonathan, if we're all hypocrites, why insist on the value?
- [05:33]
A
We're all hypocrites some of the time on some issues, and that's okay with me. It's just human nature to be more reluctant to defend the speech or people we loathe than the speech and people we love. That's quite natural. It's, however, why we develop institutions and rely on them to give us guardrails. And those are what are being crashed through right now.
- [06:02]
D
I think when I saw the prompt, one of the things that occurred to me was the extent to which hypocrisy is maybe not necessarily the best frame, in part because I think a lot of people don't actually know the specifics. They don't understand the nuance. They don't really know the details. And One of the things that I think a lot about in the context of work that I do, the sort of intersection of speech and the Internet or content moderation or the areas that I work in, is actually just the lack of understanding of the fear facts of the matter and the extent to which that allows polemicists to spin things in particular ways and the extent to which that spin, when coming to you from a very trusted voice in a media ecosystem, particularly a niche media ecosystem, that is really quite. You're not necessarily going to see the alternate perspectives. The way that social media curates and presents information to you means that if you trust Jim Jordan, you're going to see that, you know, this particular drum that he's been beating for three years, and you are going to think that the Biden censorship regime is real. Right. And that it manifested in very particular ways. And you are not going to see the facts presented that, you know, came out of particular court cases and other things that undermine those claims. And it takes a extensive amount of work to try to break through with, actually, here are the facts, here is the information, here is the, here's what actually happened. Now maybe form an opinion on it. And so I think that it's not even so much, in my opinion, a hypocrisy issue as a, you're not actually seeing, many, many people are not actually seeing the facts of the matter. And that, I think, creates an additional layer of complexity on top of that.
- [07:36]
B
And I think this is one thing that I really want to get into today, which is how should we think about some of those attempts to moderate social media? And is that a threat to free speech, or is that, in fact, an important way of facilitating free speech? And perhaps that's going to be one of the areas in which we have some disagreements on this panel. But you know, just to stick with this idea of hypocrisy for a moment, you know, there's one defense that I could make of the importance of free speech despite the hypocrisy, which is that in lots of other areas, we also recognize the importance of a value, even if everybody flips on it. It's always the case that when Democrats are in the White House, they suddenly discover the importance of having extensive presidential powers. And then the moment they get into the opposition, they say, we need really strict limits on it. And of course, Republicans talk about the importance of having very strict limits on presidential power when they're in the opposition. And then once they're in the White House, they don't think about those For a moment, there's all kinds of areas where we see this kind of partisan switching when it comes, for example, about whether you should be able to suspend the majority, the requirement to have 60 senators vote through a certain kind of appointment for judicial to the judiciary. That again, flicks back and forth depending on political parties. But none of us would say, therefore, the idea of limited government or the idea of checks and balances is unimportant. We recognize that precisely the temptation that people have to use all the power they have when they're in government is one of the reasons why we need that value over more importantly. But I do think that it also poses a kind of deeper cultural challenge, which is, you know, if we are increasing in a moment where our politics is so polarized that there's fewer and fewer principled defenders of free speech. And I think there's a lot of them here in the audience, there's a lot of them that have spoken up at this conference. If, as a matter of practice, you know, the majority of people who make these free speech arguments are just making them in these instrumental ways to serve their own cause, then how helpful is that free speech talk in our politics, even if we continue to be committed to the First Amendment and to the underlying importance of those values?
- [09:45]
A
Can I break the order and challenge the premise? I think I heard you something say that requires pushback, which is that there is some sense an equivalent between Biden era free speech hypocrisy and Trump era free speech hypocrisy. Whatever the Biden administration did by way of jawboning Twitter and other social media is ant size microscopic compared with what the Trump administration is doing. Seizing people off the street because they wrote op ed pieces weaponizing the fcc, threatening to pull the licenses if Disney does not take Kimmel off the air. I could go on. This is a different kind of thing. This is not just turnabout hypocrisy.
- [10:37]
C
Yeah, I agree that the Trump administration has definitely taken assaults on the First Amendment to a next level. On his very first day in office, he signed this executive order on restoring free speech, which has not been honored. I would say that in the Biden years, the vibes coming out of the Biden administration also on sort of the cultural aspects of free speech, I thought were very much in tune, sort of with the 2020 vibe of where people could get canceled for speech. And when I heard Democrats talking about regulating the. It seemed like they had. They were very envious of developments, for instance, in Europe, and that they saw the First Amendment as an impediment. Now, to a certain extent, they respected it. They didn't sort of do an. And whatever they did, they did behind the scenes. Not obvious in the ways that the Trump administration has done. I think, though, it's important. Like, not that long ago, Attorney General Pam Bondi went out and said, hey, hate speech is no longer free speech, which is not in line with First Amendment practice. And something that people on the left in the US have long said, the First Amendment should not protect hate speech.
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B
But you saw Tim Wooll said something along those lines on msnbc.
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C
Yeah. And what I thought was interesting, there was actually quite a bit of pushback from conservatives, even market conservatives, who said, hey, whoa, we don't want to go down this road. So it's not like the entire conservative movement was on board with suddenly introducing hate speech restrictions, and she had to sort of walk it back. She didn't do it very elegantly. But that seemed to me like there was parts of even hardcore MAGA conservatives who said, this is a red line that we don't want to cross. And I think that's important.
- [12:47]
B
I love it when we have an actual disagreement on the good fight club, as I always emphasize, and I sense that there's this genuine disagreement here. So, Rene, if the argument is that, yes, what the Trump administration is doing on free speech now is terrible, and I agree with you, Jonathan, that it is worse than what the Biden administration did. But if people then say, look, under Biden, the government did exert considerable pressure, as we now know, from admissions from executives at Google and other social media platforms, to take off certain content about COVID from the Internet. For example, we know that for a while, the entire account of New York Post was blocked on Twitter because of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, which turned out, according to New York Times and other outlets, to be truthful, there was certainly a very broad cultural defense of the idea that, yes, people should be canceled for various things they say and we should have this kind of consequence culture. Those, you know, leading progressives who are on record as saying that, in fact, the idea of free speech is a conservative ideal and it's not one that progressives should embrace. You know, is that part of the prehistory of what explains this moment? And should we be really concerned about some of the things that happened during the Biden administration, or do you agree with Jonathan on this, as I suspect.
- [14:07]
D
I'm glad you brought that up. Who was president when the New York Times, when the New York Post's Account was locked.
- [14:14]
B
Sure. That was still under Donald Trump during the 2020 campaign. Okay, so let's start a lot of the instructions.
- [14:22]
D
This is one of the amnesia moments that I think it's actually important to call out. The President of the United States in 2020 was Donald Trump. Many of the content moderation policies that people object to today and that, ironically, Ted Cruz wrote an entire report about two days ago calling the Biden censorship regime. He alleged that the Biden censorship regime began in 2018. Who was. Who ran the government in 2018? Can anybody answer that question? We all know, right? And yet here we are, we're relitigating. How long was the New York Post's account blocked on Twitter for that, by the way, which I said at the time, on that day to Bari Weiss in a public exchange, because we were friendly, which I said was a very bad call. How long was that account blocked? Approximately 48 hours. Right. What happened when it was blocked on Twitter? When that URL was banned on Twitter? It was shareable on Facebook. It was shared 500,000 times on Facebook. So two of the most notorious stories that the right harps on, and I say this as an independent, that the right harps on as the pinnacles of egregious content moderation tyranny, One happened during the Trump administration. It was blocked for 24, 48 hours. And it was a bad call, but it was not what people have turned it into. Now, let's talk about COVID Okay. The COVID Lab leak theory, which is the other example that everybody points to, was blocked by one platform for three months, not at the behest of Biden. It was at the behest of the World Health Organization. And Meta lays this out in its policies that from February 2021 to May of 2021, it blocked it for three months at the behest of the World Health Organization. And when they decided, and by the way, I said that, too, was a bad call, I thought that that was a bad call because I didn't think that it was in line with any of the other COVID policies that ostensibly were trying to protect people's health or protect community health, whatever you think about them. That was the dominant motivation behind the content moderation policies that the platforms put in place. In the letter that Google sent to Jim Jordan this week, for those who don't know, Jim Jordan received a letter under subpoena. Right. So this is a letter from a company under subpoena that has been investigated for the last two years. I know this because I was investigated for the last two years under subpoena. He secures this letter from Google that says Biden administration requested us to moderate. We stuck with our policies. We did not change them. We refused the pressure. One of the things that Jim Jordan says is, but I secured a commitment from them that they're not going to fact check. So the irony of that letter was several layers deep. The other thing that Jim Jordan had was two years of interview transcripts from about 20 interviews that he conducted with YouTube executives that he dropped in a 12,000 page document dump about a week before Christmas in December of 2024. If you go through those, every single executive is saying, we did not feel pressure, we did not feel coerced. What John is saying is 100% correct. Every administration. And I went and I sat in oral arguments at the Supreme Court hearing for Murthy v. Missouri. Right. And Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Kagan are sitting up there on the dais saying, you know, look, I mean, when we worked in the White House, we applied pressure to media too. There's a difference between pressure and coercion. And what you are seeing here is something that is very, very different. And I think that people really need to understand that the facts of the case and what happened in the so called Biden censorship regime are absolutely not on par in any way with what has happened since.
- [17:50]
B
Jacob, what do you think? So Rene's argument is that a lot of the quote unquote censorship regime actually started while Trump was in office. Clearly, therefore wasn't directed by the federal government, that some of the most famous instances of censorship were short lived or were partial only on some social media platforms? Do you think therefore, that more moderate political parties, whether that's the Democrats in the United States or some of the governments and government entities in Europe, don't have a problematic relationship to free speech? That the threat only comes from the populist right? Or do you think that there is a genuine problem with the attitude towards free speech in the political mainstream? No.
- [18:30]
C
Even if it was short lived, it's still an egregious example. And so that's one example. And those are the sort of the most prominent examples that are being, being brought to light. But what are then the others that have not been brought to light? So I wouldn't downplay it. Again, I think it's quite clear that the current administration is on a multi pronged attack on free speech that is not related solely to social media. I would say that what the Trump administration is doing quite cleverly is that it is going after elite institutions. So traditional media, universities, law firms, so all of those that were seen as being sort of complicit in the cultural repression of free speech, that sort of went along with the 2020 vibe. So that is something that resonates with people who felt that their voice was limited, not necessarily by the government, but by elite institutions. And that's why I think when Jane Funder launches a First Amendment initiative to defend it and you have a lot of Hollywood stars signing onto it, that I think feeds into sort of the. The culture war narratives where people will say, oh, yes, now you're interested, because Hollywood stars and prominent journalists are on the receiving end. But you didn't care when it was like the ordinary social media user. And that is the problem of the polarization, because you want both elite institutions and the ordinary user to be able to exercise free speech. But when you have that sort of dichotomy, where it's sort of the masses versus the elite narrative surrounding it, you pit two consistencies against each other, and that just feeds the underlying culture war.
- [20:41]
A
Jacob, could I see if I can locate whether or not you're disagreeing with. With Rene and me? I think so. I've been in the free speech business since kindly inquisitors in 1993.
- [21:00]
B
Excellent book. That's still worth reading for anybody who
- [21:03]
A
has available At Fault failed to do
- [21:04]
B
so in the last 25 years.
- [21:06]
A
And that book was about non governmental repression of speech and thought at universities, but also elsewhere. I think that you and I, and probably all of us agree that free speech is not just about law and government, it's also about culture. And you need to have cultural institutions that follow principles of free speech, especially universities for whom pursuit of inquiry and knowledge is fundamental. So I think we all agree that the culture matters, but I'm going to guess that we may also agree, but I'll try you on this, that government repression of speech is more concerning than cultural repression of speech. I would argue it's an order of magnitude more concerning because government can yank your license, investigate you, try you, put you in jail. That's where I bridle at an equivalence between what students are doing on campus by way of canceling other students who are right wings versus what the FCC just did or what ICE did. I'm going to insist that these are different kinds of things and that one is much more serious than the other.
- [22:26]
C
I just said that I thought that the Trump administration is worse on free speech than the Biden administration. But when you're talking about culture. I mean, go back to John Stuart Mill. He talks about the tyranny of the majority. So I would say it depends on the context of a specific country, whether the cultural intolerance is worse than government.
- [22:51]
A
We do disagree. I think the problem with Europe, which you've rightly identified with what's going on in Britain, is that it is government mandated. They are arresting people. And I'm always going to worry about that much more.
- [23:05]
C
Yeah, no, if the government put you in jail, that is definitely worse than being. Than being thrown off Facebook for a comment. I would agree with you on that. But again, I think that you've been a very prominent voice on Cancel Culture. And I think there's a danger if you say, well, we shouldn't worry about that anymore because the Trump administration is doing that. So now we have to sort of downplay what went before it. I think we need to sort of be able to hold both things in our head and just not say, even if you say that's a hierarchy, this is worse. Like, going after Jimmy is worse, but not.
- [23:46]
A
You do have to walk and chew gum. But Cancel Culture is cancer. What the Trump administration is doing is a heart attack.
- [23:55]
B
I want to go to the normative question. So I think this is a really interesting attempt to try and understand what did and didn't happen over the last five years. But I think there is also a question about what the ultimate settlement should be be on things like social media. Now, obviously, there are many contents on social media that are bad in all kinds of ways. Whether they're just straightforwardly hateful, whether they're spreading information that is just false lies about particular people that in principle might be libelous but are probably difficult to prosecute for all kinds of reasons. How should we think about the moderation of social media? How much power should social media companies have to censor political viewpoints they dislike on their platforms? For example, do we say, these are private companies so they can do whatever they want, or do we think that actually some of the liberties and privileges they have, for example, by not being legally responsible for their contents, should be subject to some form of viewpoint neutrality that is maintained on those platforms? And what should the government be allowed to do? To what extent should the government be allowed to be able to go to Twitter and Facebook and those other social media platforms and say, hey, we're really worried about misinformation about COVID or the election or whatever else, and therefore we now want you to play ball in this or that way. At what point do we think that that is a form of government interference in free speech? Let's take it out of the debate about what happened during the Biden and what didn't happen during Biden. What actually is the principled position free from a set of people who I think are not hypocrites about free speech, who very much care about this value for how we should regulate this space.
- [25:37]
D
So I've looked at the regulatory conversation for a little over a decade now and watched many, many, many arguments come up about CDA230, and many of them came from the right arguing that CDA230 should be contingent upon, must carry, that must carry, must not be able to take down certain types of content. These laws have been largely found to be unconstitutional because the fact is this is a platform with editorial curatorial rights. And under the First Amendment law in the United States, the platform has the right to decide as a private company, as a private entity, it is their right to decide what they will or will not carry. And that is simply the like. That is actually the law.
- [26:15]
B
But can I ask you a question about that? Because my understanding of this is that, you know, the New York Times and the Boston Globe and the Washington Post have a right to publish whatever they want, but they also have forms of liability and responsibility for what they publish. So what normally comes hand in hand with having some form of editorial oversight over your product is the fact that you're then responsible for what it is you publish. Now, section 230, and you know much more about this than I do, I may be getting details wrong, but in my understanding, section 230 says you are now free from those obligations if somebody on your platform says something libelous. You, as a provider of this platform, are not legally responsible for this. And so I do think, from my understanding of First Amendment jurisprudence, it would be perfectly acceptable for the federal government to say, if you want to keep Section 230 protection against being liable for the contents that you publish on your platform, then you have to be a platform rather than a publisher. And the moment in which you start censoring some things, but not other things, you are more similar to the Boston Globe and the New York Times and the Washington Post. And like those publications, you should then be liable for what people say on your platform. You get into the business of being a publisher, we treat you like a publisher. And it's not obvious to me that that goes against either the letter or the spirit of a First Amendment, because it would be a way to make sure that those platforms which have tremendous public reach where a lot of our political conversation now happens, and politically tendentious in the ways they were. If you look at Twitter, first to the favor of progressives and now to the favor of the MAGA crowd.
- [27:56]
D
So I think that the. So what you're saying is a couple things. First, platforms are intermediaries, which means they are carrying the speech of other people. They're not writing it themselves. There's some very interesting court cases that are starting to emerge about generative AI and the speech that comes out of AI and is. Because that is much more clearly the speech of the company that has produced the AI. And that is where some interesting First Amendment jurisprudence is being formed right now. Whether those things are going to have First Amendment protection or whether they're going to be treated as products under product liability terms, there's a lot of interesting things happening there. But under social media, they are curating among they are curating and amplifying content created by users. One thing that is very difficult is the question of how do you ascertain whether they have censored or done anything to take a non neutral stance towards a particular viewpoint. This is one of the things where I was a big supporter of the Platform Accountability and Transparency act, which was a piece of legislation that did have fairly bipartisan support, which argued that there should be disclosure mandates made to platforms where they should be required to put out certain types of transparency information, and that there should be data access, perhaps provisions whereby researchers and others could request certain types of data so that you could actually do investigations to see is there certain types of curation or certain types of moderation or recommendation decisions that are privileging one point of view over another. So something where I remember making this appeal to people like Senator Blackburn saying if you, rather than going on the vibes of conservative censorship, if you would like to actually know, you should create a regulatory requirement for platform transparency. Ironically, this is what what the Digital Services act is. Many of the things, ironically, that people want the US Government to regulate into existence with. Regulating the speech of centralized social media platforms is what the DSA does. And ironically you have Jim Jordan taking forays over to Europe to scream about the DSA as a censorship law. So nobody actually is content with any of the things that come out of the regulatory regime because per the talk that I gave here yesterday about refworking, everybody sees an opportunity to try to advantage or create an advantage for their side. That's where I see the greatest hypocrisy, is the sort of flipping back and forth between the right and the left on what a centralized platform should do. My personal hope is that you actually have a proliferation of social platforms such that concentration is solved to some extent by market forces that essentially dissolve the power of the concentrated platform by creating an environment where there are many, many more speech platforms. I think that is, which is why I support interoperability laws and things that allow users to take their data and move to other places. I recognize that that, too, is something that people don't find popular because they consider that to be like an interference in a market. But this is where we are.
- [30:40]
B
So the Digital Services act as the major attempt by the European Union to impose regulation on this space. I'm sure you have certain things you like and certain things you don't like. I'm sure you would certainly. But on the whole, do you think it's a good thing? Yes or no?
- [30:55]
D
I never want to be in the position of defending European regulation. I will say I think it is unfairly maligned in American media because of a lack of nuance. I think that the transparency provisions that it grants are highly, highly useful. I think that it also gives users a right to appeal when they are taken down, which is something that they do not have under US Law. It gives them a right to demand an explanation for why they're taken down. Right. There are a lot of things, a lot of user protections built into the DSA that are fantastic. The parts that a lot of people don't like about it are that it uses some vague terminology around things like systemic risk. And it has requirements that say that speech that is illegal in the European Union. Governments can demand takedowns. There's a thing called a notice and takedown requirement where the government issues a notice, the platform then does the take, takedown. These things, again, per my interest in transparency, I think should be made transparent. I actually support FIRE and others have legislation saying that should be done here in the United States, too. And I agree with that. But I think that the combination of transparency and access is critically important.
- [31:57]
B
Jacob, I'm guessing you disagree.
- [31:59]
C
Yeah, no, I think overall, the DSA is actually a. Especially if you look at the current context of Europe, you say, oh, it's a notice that. The typical defense of the DSA is, well, it doesn't regulate any content. It doesn't provide any specific categories of content that it should remove. It's just, you know, what is illegal offline should be illegal online. But what's the underlying reality of Europe, including the European Commission, is that it is regulating more and more speech. So what you have with the notice and takedown system of illegal content is you provide this provision that when you get notified you have to remove illegal content and then you consistently expand the categories of illegal content. That is to be a bit polemical, a censorship machine. Take for instance right now the European Union, both the European Commission and the European Parliament are pushing through a proposal to create a harmonized hate speech law. Make hate speech an EU crime. The idea is to, to say hate speech should not be limited to any specific protected category. Any viable identity should be protected. It should be understood, stood through an intersectional lens. You can imagine how that might be interpreted. And then of course the DSA would mean that anything that was interpreted as being illegal should be moved down. Or take an example from Denmark. Denmark has this recent law about desecrating sacred texts that is now punishable. The Turkish ambassador just went out and thanked Denmark for its, for its, for its very wise law. So that's illegal content that could be demanded removed under the Digital Services Act. When you look at the speeches of European Commissioner, they talk about free speech, but it's always. But the consistent narrative is that disinformation, foreign information manipulation, a very Orwellian term, is undermining democracy. So it's a constant move towards framing free speech as dangerous, the need for some kind of top down control. And you cannot view the DSA in isolation from those dynamics. So I think that the net effect of the DSA is that it limits free speech much more than it supports it.
- [34:28]
A
Are you saying it sounds like that the real problem or the big problem in Europe is not the Digital Services act, it's the hate speech codes.
- [34:36]
C
No, if you create a notice and takedown system where you say, hey, we want to ensure that there's no illegal content online and then we're just going to ramp up the underlying categories of illegal speech. Then you're going to create, you're basically outsourced online censorship to private companies in ways that create huge incentives to over removal. We've done reports at the future of free speech where we've looked at deleted comments on Facebook and YouTube in Sweden, Germany and France. What we found was that between 88% and I think 97% of the comments that were deleted were perfectly lawful. Half of those lawfully deleted comments were not even particularly controversial. So I think there's this tendency, especially among policymakers to look at particular content and then say, oh, the social media is drowning in illegal content. It's drowning in misinformation but the data actually does not support that. A good example was, prior to the European parliamentary elections, Vera Yurova, a European Commission saying that this is like an atomic bomb disinformation and AI generated content. What happened there was no significant impact on the parliamentary elections. It had been the same narrative in 2019 where the European Commission was also out saying, oh, the European elections risk being drowned in disinformation. The autopsy afterwards was there was no problem. So. So when you have that narrative, when you have a political reality where European politicians are moving to ban more and more speech, the DSA must be seen in that context. It becomes a tool to limit more and more speech. I just can't see how it can function in any other way.
- [36:34]
B
Jonathan, take us back to the broader principles here. You've written about the dangers of a kindly inquisitors. You have talked about what it takes to have a constitution of knowledge, to have a set of social institutions and norms that actually allow us to pursue truth in meaningful ways. What does that mean in the age of social media, how do we balance, on the one hand, the fact that social media can be a fire hose of falsehoods, it's one of the forces that clearly is deeply polarizing our society. And on the other hand, I think precisely for the reasons that are beautifully expressed in your work, we should be very worried about governments having influence and say over what can be said in social media, because sometimes we may have enlightened governments that are on the right of a good and the true, but very often, as in the United States at the moment, we won't. So how are you thinking on the whole about the principles that should guide us as we're trying to figure out these difficult questions of social media regulation?
- [37:32]
A
So the, the core idea of the constitution of knowledge is that free speech is necessary but not sufficient. If you want to live in a world that is knowledgeable, peaceful and free, you also need a pretty elaborate structure of institutions, rules and norms that structure how we talk to each other in the search for truth. And that allow us to set up a global network of researchers, journalists, lawyers and government officials and others who are looking for each other's mistakes. And that this is a species transforming technology. This is why humanity produces more new knowledge every morning, literally, than in its first 200,000 years. And free speech is part of that. But you need two other elements. You also need the discipline of facts. You can't just make stuff up, you can't bullshit your way through, and you need viewpoint diversity. You need enough different ideas in the room so that you get generative conflict. You can spot mistakes. Okay, so everyone says social media, social media per se, is not necessarily part of the Constitution of Knowledge. It's an entertainment product. It's an advertising vehicle. It is not Facebook's job to advance the goals of research. Nonetheless, I would like to hope that digital platforms try to be good citizens of the Constitution of knowledge and that they would understand if they're creating an environment where people look up important information like is the measles vaccine safe? That the answer they get back is more likely to be true than false. I think that's good for society and I also think it's good for the platforms. So I don't think they're required to do that. I think as a moral matter, I wish they would. Four years ago, when I wrote the Constitution of Knowledge, I thought content moderation was necessary. You can't do without it. These are communities. They have to set community standards. Since then, I have come to think that the public is just not going to accept anything that appears heavy handed. Now I think that we should be looking at the kinds of things Renee Direst is talking about. Middleware, which gives individuals more control over their algorithms, transparency, which lets us see and evaluate what's going on. Government should be able to talk to these platforms. It talks to the New York Times all the time. But this should be formalized and logged. It shouldn't be people, the White House calling up someone and yelling at them. So now I'm focused on subsidiary elements not as heavy handed as content moderation. Did I answer the question?
- [40:39]
B
You did, I think. Better than I expected anybody could. Thank you so much for listening to this live episode of the Good Fight Club from the Global Free Speech Summit. In the rest of this conversation, we talk about the offer the Trump administration recently made to nine American universities, giving them preferred access to federal funding. If they sign up to about 10 demands from the administration. What is the good, the bad and the worrying in that compact? And what are universities going to do? What would it look like for universities to stand up in a principled way for free speech in this situation? We also at the very end, ask ourselves whether, as Jonathan Rauch believes, we are halfway towards Hungary. Is it true that people are starting to be afraid to speak their mind about politics to criticize Donald Trump in public? Or are we not yet at that stage? Is that too alarmist a reading of the situation? To listen to this part of this lively debate, please become a paying subscriber. Please support the work we do, please go to yashamonk.substack.com that is yashamunk.substack.com thanks for listening. And until next week,
- [42:21]
D
Sam.