It’s hard to imagine the complete demise of the United States. Just as it once was hard to imagine anyone getting elected President while under four indictments.
Throughout his life, Trump’s key to success has always been his incredibly skillful ability to identify and exploit weaknesses. The First Amendment has one such weakness: Flagrant lies are protected speech.
Example: One mile = 5,280 feet, right? That’s a fact. But for every one fact, there are an infinite number of ways to lie about it. How about 1 mile = 5,390 feet? Pick any number among the infinitude of possibilities, and it’s yet another lie about that basic fact.
Some lies can be absurd interpretations of the truth. Tucker Carlsen might stupidly query, “Well, I wonder how many of those 5,280 feet shouldn’t count because they have toe fungus.” Or Liberty University might teach its students that it’s really 10,560 feet because Jesus taught us to go the extra mile.
So it’s easy to fill political discourse with a plethora of lies, while the truth languishes in solitude.
Here’s where Section 230 comes in. They are just 26 words: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” They are part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and signed into law on February 8, 1996.
Section 230 gives Facebook and all other social media the right to freely share anything, including flagrant lies, on its platform. Facebook’s “algorithm” is designed to maximize ad revenue. So it rewards posts that get the most reshares, comments, and reactions (Like, Love, Angry, etc.), and such posts tend to be outrageous lies that the audience WANTS to believe. The “reward” of any post is more visibility to other users who haven’t yet reacted, reshared or commented. Such an algorithm keeps people’s eyeballs on Facebook, so they see more ads, thereby increasing Facebook’s ad revenue.
Fox News has 1.2 million daily viewers. That’s a large number, but it is dwarfed by Facebook, which has 243.5 million Facebook users in the United States alone (and billions worldwide). So Facebook can spread lies with over 200 times the efficiency of Fox News.
If you’re on Facebook, you may not see those lies, because the algorithm keeps people in silos to maximize whatever keeps them engaged. In your silo, you might see truth about Trump’s utter corruption. The lies that you don’t see in your truth-loving silo nonetheless constantly bounce around within Facebook’s MAGA silos. People there just get angrier and angrier that, in their erroneous view, Trump was robbed of his 2020 Presidential election. Some of them get so angry, they resort to violence. January 6th was just the beginning.
No truth can penetrate such a silo because its members don’t WANT to believe the truth, so the truth dies out. They believe the 2020 election was stolen because they WANT to believe it was stolen, and nothing in their MAGA silo tells them otherwise. Trump discovered this flaw, and he exploits it skillfully.
Section 230 gives Facebook carte blanche to spread whatever lies will make Mark Zuckerberg the most money.
From my work in the ACLU (former President of the Houston chapter among other activities), I have learned that the best way to fight bad speech is not to repress it, but to oppose it with even more good speech. I’m not proposing that Section 230 be repealed, because that will never happen, considering how much the GOP depends on its lies. I’m suggesting that we Democrats need to penetrate the MAGA silos with targeted ads carefully crafted to persuade that audience, knowing that they fully believe that the 2020 election was stolen. I can’t guess how such a targeted ad should be worded, but it’s the only solution I can think of.
Unless we fight the plethora of lies that has more and more of the country fooled, we can look forward to America’s utter demise under totalitarian rule. Unfortunately, that’s not hard to imagine anymore.