A friend recently posted something about his concern that various social media platforms were blocking posts by Trump and others. While many us have an immediate reaction that it is about time, I got to thinking about the matter and thought it worth pointing out some of the complexities of regulating speech.
Regulation of public speech operates between two extremes: on one hand, “free speech” implies that anyone can say anything, leaving the marketplace of discourse to edit the conversation; on the other hand, practical considerations counsel limiting certain kinds of speech, such as defamatory statements about individuals, or dangerous speech such as calling out “fire” in a crowded space. Generally we are more likely to favor limiting speech when it has a clearly defined harmful effect. Defamation causes direct harm to an individual. Calling out “fire” can result in a panic and physical harm. In both cases, the cause and effect relationship is clear.
The two examples above illustrate two of the most common types of speech that can spark regulation. Defamation involves statements that intentionally promote falsehoods. Crying “fire” directly promotes harmful action. The terms of service of social media usually include limitations on posts that fall into these categories.
Trying to police social media based on such terms of service inevitably is very tricky because of the blurred lines defining truth and hortative statements.
Henry II is reported to have said “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” The statement lies between an innocent “I don’t like Becket” and a guilty “… kill Becket”. More recently, Michael Cohen said that Trump operates like a gangster, in code, and “doesn’t give you orders ...” Obviously, if anyone set out to precisely edit Trump’s posts on Twitter, they would be faced with the problem of determining where to draw the line — which posts are benign and which exhort people to riot?
Measuring the truth of statements presents the same problem. Even simple statements can be at once true and false. If someone says “my wife is home right now” that would seem to be objectively measurable. Yet what if he is in the midst of a divorce and his wife rushed in to grab a suitcase and is on her way out? At best, the same statement would then be misleading because it generates false inferences. A carefully limited statement, such as “my wife is physically located at this moment at the following address ...” would be more accurate, and would also give rise to other implications. On the political level, saying “Biden is a Socialist” could be genuinely characterized as either true or false. Initially, of course, you would have to decide what “Socialist” actually means, and to make the statement more precise you would need to include reference to the definition you adopt. Whatever definition you use, it is true that some programs Biden supports could be called socialistic (and others not) — but does supporting a limited number of programs make you a Socialist?
There are various solutions to the issues raised above. The traditional approach, one that the framers of the Constitution seem to have favored, arose in a time before mass media, and was essentially the democratic approach — get all ideas out on the table and public comment will straighten them out. The process was never perfect, but the slower movement of information in the 17th and 18th centuries had a dampening effect. (It is interesting to note that the biggest changes in government during the Age of Revolution came a few centuries after the invention of modern printing by Gutenberg — when ideas barely circulated at all, the status quo remained.) With accelerated spread of information in our digital age, falsehoods can multiply and spread faster than the weight of public discourse can tamp them out.
While a totally free market of ideas poses dangers, regulation poses its own problems. In the past, the FCC Fairness Doctrine tried to encourage balance by requiring media to present both sides of political issues. Some have pointed to the demise of that doctrine as a cause of many of our current problems. Of course, the doctrine did not apply to all media, many non-traditional outlets now purport to provide news, and the underlying doctrine had a simplified view of politics as a two part discussion between Republicans and Democrats.
Right now some independent fact checkers such as Politifact and Snopes help the curious to quickly determine if a particular snippet of news (or more often meme) is accurate. Drawbacks to these services are that not everyone uses them and they only check a limited number of statements. A bigger drawback is that it appears people with a conservative bent are much less likely to trust fact-checkers. This is reflected in the fact that false memes tend to propagate more quickly and broadly among conservatives than among liberals. So fact-checking doesn’t help all that much.
Another approach is self-regulation by social media. Facebook, Twitter, and others have started to do this more and more. While commendable, self-regulation is imperfect. Because of the blurred lines separating fact from fiction, control of posts becomes an exercise of judgment, which is necessarily subjective and imperfect. Although it is also a subjective decision, banning specific posters, as Facebook and Twitter recently did with Trump, at least avoids the problem of having to evaluate every single post by a repeat offender. Of course, self-regulation by social media only attacks part of the overall problem. Among corporate news outlets, many try to be factual, while others do not. Even among legitimate news outlets, there is always a judgment call as to what news to report on at all.
At this point there may seem to be no answer at all — it is hard to define fact in the first place; government regulation doesn’t work’ private self-regulation is faulty; an epidemic of disinformation can spread too quickly for the general public to build immunity.
There is an even bigger obstacle as well: facts don’t change our minds. It does no good to argue with the proverbial uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Despite all this, I think there is a solution, but it is a long term one. I noted above that the accelerated spread of information that Gutenberg enabled did lead to revolutionary changes in society, including literal revolutions, and the growth of democratic governments. But the changes spawned by the printing press were not limited to bits of information. They included access to a broad range of ideas, and led people to broaden their inquiries into all aspects of life, from science and economics to religion and philosophy. The western world, one might say, began to get a basic education. To be precise, it began to get what we might call a liberal education.
As the ongoing debate about testing illustrates, education consists of passing on numerous isolated facts, and also teaching methods of dealing with facts. As our education progresses, we learn to filter the factual input using tools we acquire. We develop our own epistemologies. In grade school we might be taught that water is hydrogen and oxygen — an isolated fact. In high school, we may perform experiments that tend to confirm that fact. Those who decide to go into chemistry eventually learn to perform much more decisive experiments, but also, more importantly, to sift through information published in journals and evaluate its significance when it explores the subtleties of the chemical bonds of water.
The human brain operates in curious ways, however. It seems the “liberal” arts inform our skills in the hard sciences. Our intelligence seems to rise when we listen to Mozart. Even gym class helps us think. But what I am talking about here is not trying to “make people smarter” in the sense of getting better test scores. Rather, I am promoting the teaching of tools that help students — and citizens — on all levels to process the information that comes to them day to day.
Years ago, I did some teaching, and at times taught basic “freshman English” composition classes, both at a prestigious university and at a local college in a somewhat backward state. Looking back, I wish I could have used the experience I now have to enrich those classes, but even back then it was clear that the biggest problem in teaching writing or composition is teaching people to deal effectively with facts and ideas. The big challenge to getting students to write a decent research paper was not the use of language, or proper footnoting, but getting them to differentiate between primary and secondary sources — basically, not how to write the paper but how to do the “research”.
All this may seem obvious, but it is clear that one class of freshman English — or any other isolated class — is unlikely to transfer many students. While it may not take 10,000 hours to become an expert, it does take continued practice over a period of years to develop the skills needed to work meaningfully with the daily bombardment of facts offered by daily media. Those are skills that can best be fostered through an educational system that is itself well nourished and affords teachers at all levels the time and resources they need.
I am of course revealing my own biases when I assume that a better rounded education will lead to more liberal citizens. Certainly I have a good number of friends who are of a conservative bent, and with whom I am able to carry on a rational discussion concerning politics. But for the most part those friends are not delusional about the underlying facts we discuss, and tend instead to differ more in matters of opinion as opposed to fact. On a simplistic level, may of us on Kos have remarked on the fact that the Republican base often seem to vote against their own best interests, and that the states with the poorest education records are also the most Republican.
Even at the upper end of the educational spectrum, there seems to be a differentiation of political views that somewhat parallels people’s learning process. Doctors, obviously highly educated, are required to absorb an enormous body of factual knowledge in med school. Many of their classes involve frequent exams ensuring their mastery of all those facts. In contrast students in law school read long cases and are required to discuss their implications. Many classes involve a single, long, essay exam. In practice, lawyers — especially litigators — must defend their factual statements with detailed evidence. Not surprisingly, lawyers tend to be more liberal than doctors. Even lawyers in large corporate firms tend to have personal views that slant left to the left.
Well, my wife is a retired teacher, and I guess the bottom line is that she and her fellow teachers are really the key to an effective democracy. There is no good way of policing the flow of information. The best we can do is to improve education on all levels so our citizens become more proficient in handling the daily onslaught of information.
This is a long way around getting to what may seem to be an obvious conclusion, but my real point is in response to my friend who was uncomfortable with the censorship being imposed by Twitter. On that point, I must agree to a limited extent with my conservative friend (differing in the level of concern as applied to Trump). Ultimately censorship is not the solution, and education is.