We all support free speech – or say we do, anyway. A poll last year found that 93 percent of Americans consider the First Amendment vital. But what do we think about misinformation and intentional disinformation – which now runs rampant, especially on social media, with potentially deadly consequences? What happens when our right to free speech runs smack up against lies that can put people and whole nations at risk, and that can alter history?
We’re facing some critical decisions on that point, and we don’t have any help from either our government or the giant private companies that largely control digital communication.
We’ve seen what disinformation can do. Donald Trump’s outright lie that he actually won the 2020 election eventually was accepted by two-thirds of Republican voters last year. That arguably gave him the credibility that he surely didn’t deserve after the 30,000-plus false statements he made during his first term – that figure from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker – credibility that he used to regain the White House.
A crisis looms in part because of advances in the technology used to manufacture propaganda and disinformation. Artificial intelligence has brought us easy-to-use media manipulation tools. And the digital revolution has made more true than ever something Mark Twain wrote more than a century ago: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
At last year’s World Economic Forum, a survey found that the leaders from around the world consider misinformation and disinformation from AI as the top global risk we face in the short term — that is, ahead of climate change and war.
Thoughtful people have been working on this for a while. Four years ago, the Biden administration followed the recommendations of a blue-ribbon panel and set up a disinformation board that would research some options and make recommendations for a disinformation policy. But Trump declared that a government attempt to censor conservative views, and with the echo of that notion on Fox News and other MAGA propaganda sites, the effort was quickly squelched. So disinformation about the disinformation board forced its dissolution.
And now, with America’s leading disinformation source back in the White House, we face an even tougher road. One of President Trump’s first actions on the day he was inaugurated was to sign an executive order that he said was aimed at, in his words, “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” Trump ordered the Department of Justice to investigate the Biden administration for what he described, again, as efforts to censor Americans’ free speech. Trying to protect the truth might be considered criminal in Donald Trump’s America.
Even the conservative-dominated Supreme Court concluded a couple of years ago that there was, in fact, no effort by the Biden administration to censor social media users. They were ruling on whether federal security and health officials were wrong to contact major social media platforms to point out mis- and disinformation that was clearly dangerous – like posts about child sexual abuse and national security, stuff that called for violence. That’s not censorship, the court ruled; it’s protecting the public. And for a few years, you know, the big digital platforms made some effort to warn users about harmful and obviously false material, and even to pull it down – like posts that called LGBTQ people “mentally ill” and that presented false videos of natural disasters.
But with the return of Trump, the social media platforms are giving up on moderation, so as to not offend the liar-in-chief. No more fact checking, no warnings of dangerous or blatantly false material on web sites. It’s a digital free-for-all out there, at the insistence of our government.
Meanwhile, Trump’s allies have in fact tried to curb private speech – that of disinformation researchers, say, or protesters on college campuses. His new executive order is poised to elevate speech he likes while chilling any criticism of it. And it could be used by his administration to engage in its own form of censorship – rewriting history to suit its own agenda. It’s a direct assault on reality, as Trump emboldens bad actors and disinformation profiteers. What he clearly wants is, as the saying goes, free speech for me but not for thee.
No, this isn’t about freedom. Disinformation that leads to abuse and harassment and violence brings less speech, and a collective silencing.
This is undeniably a difficult issue, with competing values – freedom versus truth; accountability versus liberty. Those issues, fraught as they are in the digital age, are not going to be resolved by staging an executive order amid false claims of censorship. They require a more thoughtful approach than anything Donald Trump has ever said about freedom of speech.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.