Too many people think the First Amendment gives people the
right to lie. But you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. You can’t maliciously
slander someone to harm them. You can’t lie about the swampland in Florida you’re
selling.
The First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause only prevents
Congress from passing a law to abridge freedom of speech. But countless restrictions on speech have trickled down through the years. A newspaper, television
network, Google or Twitter has the right to distribute any information they
want. If Twitter decides its advertisers seek to reach only those who believe
lizard people from Orion eat babies, Twitter can legally disallow the posting
of any content that contradicts that. That’s not much different from MSNBC
refusing to cover the presidential coronavirus press conference that Fox
broadcasts live.
But in the end, it's hard to reconcile 18th century concepts
of a free press and free speech with robot trolls flashing propaganda worldwide
with no accountability. The Constitution fails to address today’s central
issues.
The 18th century idea was that if one penny press
voice ignores an issue important to the population, another will pop up to
speak that truth … just as it did in the Colonies. But if Google decides to
exclude antivaxxers or environmentalists from its search results, it’s a far
different business environment. Another Google can’t just pop up to serve that
constituency. Yes, there’s a dark web where odious ideas can flow, but Google exercises
its commercial might to seduce us into its world.
We have Gmail, our free online Google Drive, our Google
calendar and our Android phones to make life easy, all linked with Google
Chrome. Google has won. Its primary competitor for all these unified services,
Apple, has a fraction of Google’s clout. In browsers alone, Chrome/Android users
represent about 65 percent of the market, with Safari/MacOS far behind at about
20 percent.(Stats here) When it comes to desktop usage, the comparison
is a joke: Chrome is around 70 percent, and Safari is less than 10 percent.
It gets worse for diverse voices. The top social media
platform is Facebook, with 2.6 billion users. Tied for second place is YouTube,
owned by Google. And WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. (Stats here)
How would Adam Smith’s gentleman farmer or diligent cooper
fight back against this duopoly? Both YouTube and WhatsApp arrived on the
market to compete with the giants. The giants quickly ingested them.
The 18th century Constitution cannot fight
misinformation. It fiercely protects misinformation or lying through omission.
Any information distribution system not run by the government can block any
content they choose. Just as the Times spins its reports for its coastal bourgeoisie
readership and Fox spins its reports for its MAGA audience, Google or Twitter
get to pick their audience.
Where does this leave us?
Trusting capitalists to do the right thing? Sorry, didn’t mean
to make you choke …
Trusting government to foster a diversity of voices, when
the government duopoly has worked so hard to silence third parties?
If the owners and operators of our information systems can’t
be trusted, and the government has a dismal record of trustworthiness on the
most important issues, like wars and health, where do we turn for help?
In his popular book “Sapiens,” Israeli history professor Yuval Noah Harari makes a case that
societies and nations are not bound together by blood or geography, but by
unifying myths. It is a unity of beliefs that binds societies, he writes.
Today, the most “unified”
nations are totalitarian, China and North Korea. Continue that train of thought
and despair.
