 Aaron Powell Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus And I'm Trevor Burrus. Aaron Powell Joining us today is our colleague Will Duffield from the Cato Institute's First Amendment Project. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Will. Will Duffield Thanks for having me. Aaron Powell So the First Amendment and with it a lot of our notions of how we think about freedom of speech, how we think about freedom of expression developed in a time when most of our communication or all of our communication occurred either face-to-face or via print. So in what ways has the shift to digital communication and the digital world is a medium for communicating and expressing ourselves complicated the picture, complicated the way that we think about these issues? Will Duffield Well it's lowered the barriers to entry in the marketplace of ideas tremendously. Anyone who can afford a cell phone, who can afford an internet connection or even wander into a library can begin speaking to audiences of hundreds of thousands if not millions. With that we've seen many of the old gatekeepers fade away and in many cases have been replaced by enablers, companies, intermediaries or people whose business it is to get other speech out there to provide them with a platform. And that's been pretty revolutionary. Aaron Powell It seems that we have this extra problem though because if we're all on this third party, we call it gatekeepers. So the New York Times was a gatekeeper. I mean it still is but it used to be a more important gatekeeper in terms of whether you could get into its pages but now you can broadcast it yourself but then you're also using someone else's technology or like the internet, ISPs and things like that to get your voice out there which is very different than giving a speech on a platform. Will Duffield Well and the New York Times owned, not only was the one who was putting out the speech but it's the one who owns all the mechanisms for the distribution of that speech. Aaron Powell Exactly but now it's different. Will Duffield Yes and there is certainly growing concern that many of these enablers are either voluntarily or being bullied into becoming a new set of gatekeepers but at the same time this is a technologically aided development. It's not reliant upon the corporate structure of Google or Facebook and if you see significant changes in the current enabler gatekeeper market you're likely to see competitors arise that give people what they got from the internet a couple years ago. Aaron Powell So I'm going to ask a question. I don't know if this question quite makes sense but I'll roll with it. So you're distinguishing gatekeepers from enablers but in a sense the old gatekeepers whether that was the New York Times or Random House publishers or NBC were also enablers because their job was to facilitate people getting their speech out to an audience. It was just a smaller group of people that they were facilitating. So did the switch from the gatekeeper role to the enabler role was that purely a technological switch in the sense that the reason that say Random House acted as a gatekeeper was because it simply was not economically viable for it to publish the writings of everyone. So it had to be selective and then it had to choose how it was going to be selective or was it a cultural shift in the sense of kind of a change from elitism to populism that in the past we thought the only people worth listening to were the ones who could make it through a gatekeeping process whereas now we think that every person's opinion, every person's thought is the kind of thing that ought to be broadcast to everyone. Aaron Powell I think it's much more technological and frankly I'm not sure if we've made that cultural shift at all. If you look at something like Amazon Books, the Kindle, when they're publishing environment, they're publishing nearly anyone today and they're able to do that because they can publish books digitally in a way that even if they wanted to do that, had some kind of economic incentive to do that 20 years ago, it would have been incredibly costly for them to do so. And it's not as though throughout the past 50 years you haven't had people pumping out homemade zines but again their distribution routes were much more expensive if they wanted to really push it out there. So you see a lot of that being handed out on street corners whereas now a blog link can be shared around the world in a matter of minutes. Aaron Powell I think one of things you might be getting at Aaron is the anti-intellectualism or anti-elite kind of attitudes that the idea that some important person is been given permission by the New York Times to tell you things that are important is being seen with less esteem than it had been in terms of being against intellectualism on the right and being against elites on from whether it's Bernie or Trump. And so now it's just, no, my next-door neighbor on Facebook totally said that the Russians have infiltrated the White House and that's as valid as George will. Aaron Powell Right. I wonder, so if I can kind of modify what I was getting at then in light of that, like I wonder if there's almost a feedback loop here where it used to be that you only heard from people with a certain level of call it professionalism because they made it through the gatekeeper process. And so we as a society, that was also who we looked to for information and we kind of thought of them as somewhat authoritative. And then the technology changed. So the reason that we couldn't hear from everybody back then was because the technology simply didn't allow it, the economics didn't work out, the distribution wasn't fast enough and so on. Then the technology changed and it became possible for say Amazon to let anyone publish a book on their platform for free or anyone can tweet, anyone can post on Facebook, anyone can start a blog. So the technology shifted to enable all of that vast group of content creators to create content, distribute it. And then because they could do that, the culture then shifted as a result to thinking, well now, because we've all got a platform, all of what we have to say online is equal or equally authoritative or the notion of gatekeepers themselves is suspect and it shifts more to that populism thing. So they're playing off of each other. I think that that's certainly valid. There are, with the rise of social media in particular, distinct from the rest of the internet, you've gotten new metrics to judge not so much expertise but impact. And I think that works with this feedback loop very effectively. So it's no longer about experts, it's about influencers. Yes. I mean, if you go back to the late 90s, early 2000s, you saw a big blog ecosystem. That was quite viable. But someone's reputation in that ecosystem was somewhat word of mouth. There wasn't data on it or not publicly accessible data. Whereas today you look at someone on Twitter and you see that they have 30,000 followers. So they must matter in some sense or to a lot of people that means that they matter. Generally speaking, libertarians have an answer, so to speak, to these questions. To everything. Yes. No, to these questions of the First Amendment and how it applies to say Google. And so we've had some controversies or Twitter. We've had some controversies such as people trying to sue Donald Trump for blocking them on Twitter under First Amendment grounds and you came to my office and brought this up. And the first thing I said was, well, the First Amendment applies to government. Twitter is not the government. Move on. That ends the inquiry. And we have also discussed Google changing the rankings of Russia today in terms of how much it will appear in your search. And one, you could again say First Amendment applies to government. Google is not the government. Move on. But you increasingly think that that's not sufficient to address the concerns that need to be addressed, correct? Well, I think we ought to beyond, I suppose, wrote libertarianism have a certain liberal conception of speech, what a speech environment ought to look like, how accessible speaking should be to people. And that requires some slight shifts in the analysis. Now, whether you can come and bring a First Amendment claim against Google over de-ranking, no. I think that would be ludicrous. The Twitter case is a bit different because it hinges upon whether or not Donald Trump is speaking as a government official and therefore actually has less to do with Twitter itself within that First Amendment analysis. But are we going to have to have Congress? You made me think about things in conversations we've had, especially with something like Google where the standard libertarian response is, well, start another Google. And of course, the Google has to rank things because it would be just noise otherwise. If you search for something and you were as likely to get Bob's blog as Wikipedia, it would be a worthless thing. Had to show you all of them simultaneous. Exactly. And so you almost have this choice architecture situation of the nudge world where it has to be ranking and somehow, but given Google's popularity and its networking effects, and we could call it a monopoly. And of course, the left would love to say it's a monopoly. It should be a public utility and then we'll figure this out otherwise. But is there really a realistic alternative of another Google competing against Google in that? Or should we just there's a tremendous first mover advantage in that market because you are gathering information about the state of the world, what's out there and sorting through it and creating machine learning algorithms in order to do so more efficiently, which of course, require a great deal of data to train and again, tremendous first mover advantage. However, going back to the original First Amendment question and what may complicate it, I think the fact that these are international firms matters tremendously because they aren't just falling under US law. They're operating under a host of legal systems and increasingly we're seeing states around the world trying to force their interpretation of acceptable speech on the world as a whole or on the world as a whole through various social media firms. And at the same time, even domestically, we see say in the wake of this potential Russian meddling in our election, pressure coming both from Google customers and from the United States government at the same time and in a similar direction. So when sorting through, whether or not some response of Google's was bullied out of them, was rested from them by the US government or simply them trying to satisfy their customers can be really difficult. It seems like we might, I mean, to get somewhat abstract, we might complicate the traditional or see if we could complicate the traditional libertarian story of, well, it's a private company, they can do whatever they want. And if you don't like it, start something to compete with them by looking at it as you have a space. It happens to be a digital space, but it's a, I mean, it's arguably a more important space than a lot of the physical spaces that we're in as far as how we communicate, how we interact, how we earn a living, how we engage with the economy, all of these necessary things that we have to do. And you have a single entity that has extraordinary power within that space. And it has the power to effectively compel you, if you want to be in that space, to see certain things or not see certain things to act in certain ways or not act in certain ways. And I'm a bit overstating here for a fact, but... And if we say that, then we start looking in a cyberspace sense, do we start looking awfully close to Max Weber's definition of the state, which is the entity that possesses a monopoly on the use of legitimate force within a geographic area. If our geographic area is the internet, is cyberspace, and we say that Google possesses either a monopoly, or at least even if Google started doing really nefarious stuff and people were competing against it, it would still be a long time before anyone could supplant it, right? Is force here kicking them off or something? Force, or force is... So we tend to think of force, force can be... So we think of force as violence. Like I'm going to actually do physical harm to you, but we also tend to think of force as the ability to compel you to act or behave in certain ways. Like I'm going to use force to prevent you from taking this thing, right? I'm going to use force to... I'm going to pen you in. If I lock you up, that's using force, but it's not necessarily violence, right? And so if they can dictate to a very exacting degree the kind of stuff that you can do within this space, and that's not quite the same as force, but it certainly is compulsion, right? And so in this kind of thought experiment, does that start to push these things into being the kind of entities within this particular space where it makes sense to think of them more in a state way than as simply private firms in a thriving marketplace? And I don't know the answer to that question. I'm just kind of thinking out loud, but I could see thinking in that direction. Well, my thoughts are that the insurance ability, even though there are large networking effects for something like Google, and they have a first mover advantage, as Will pointed out, the ability to enter the market. So when we talk about anarchic governance and polycentric law or something, generally I would suspect that in that world, the thing you'd be living under, whether it's like a homeowners association or something like that, would look a lot like a state to the point that people would be like, isn't this basically a state? And you'd have to say, well, no, there are some important differences here that are crucial. And right of accident, all these things being of the case. So when it comes to a digital world, we can't fall to the kind of consistently wrong problem for monopoly concerns where, you know, prosecuting Microsoft because everyone says, well, nothing is ever going to replace Microsoft or MySpace or any of that stuff. Nokia. Yeah, Nokia. We can't do that just consistently wrong problem where it could happen very quickly when Google is doing something that people don't like and they say, hey, we're a new company and we don't do that thing that people don't like what Google does. Now, the problem is, and this might just be the kind of thing where you have to accept the foibles of humanity, because if you're trying to do this from a standpoint of good governance and you're talking about things like fake news, which we'll be getting into here, right now we get into it. And if you're saying, well, we need to have a good government so we need to make sure that people are properly informed and that does not include fake news. Well, the thing is, is that people kind of demand fake news. And so if Google, if imagine Google deciding to censor a bunch of views or change its rankings according to, you know, taking Alex Jones down to the bottom and taking all these, maybe with the decidedly right wing built down to the bottom. And so then right wing, Google pops up and it says, well, we don't do that. We will show you the real results about the real news that they're trying to suppress. And it's probably going to be mostly BS. Well, that happened, what was it? Gabb? Was that the right wing? Like when Reddit started kicking all the alt riders and the racists and anti-Semites off, they started their own version of Reddit? Yeah. So this then gets us into the question of where censorship concerns are most valid and where competitors can potentially enter the market. We've been discussing things happening on the content layer for the first bit of this conversation. And I see that as probably the least concerning element of the internet from a censorship standpoint because at the end of the day, if you're kicked off Twitter, you can go over to Gabb and you can create and count there. And yes, you'll probably hanging out with a bunch of other alt-right near-do-wells who are also kicked off Twitter, but it's an alternative. And you can make an alternative that fulfills any kind of social function you'd like. However, Gabb was, after a couple of months after its introduction, kicked off both the Google App Store and the Apple Play Store. At that point for many cell phone users, it becomes much more difficult to access this because you've moved one layer down, essentially. And as you move further and further down into the real infrastructure of the internet, it becomes harder and harder to come up with alternatives in order to route around that kind of censorship. So again, it's one thing if you're bounced off Twitter, okay, you can't speak on Twitter anymore, you may feel censored, but your ability to communicate with the world at large has not, I think, been tremendously undermined. If, however, a DDoS protection firm like Cloudflare stops protecting your website that you've created, or even if an ISP were to stop allowing your content to flow over their pipelines, that becomes much more concerning. We have a problem there with lack of competition as you go deeper into the technology. ISPs, you might not have that many available to you. At the same time, I was thinking about GeoCities or some of these old groups where if they wanted to kick you off because you had a Nazi GeoCity site, they could have, and maybe they did. But if you don't have a lot of ISPs to choose between, this could become a problem possibly. Yes. I mean, getting all the way down to domain registrars. So you can't, you can't. At some point, you need to move to another internet, which doesn't exist. Now, we aren't anywhere near that level. ICANN seems very resistant to any kind of push. They're the people who register domain names. And they're a non-state organization, correct? Yes. They get funding from a number of governments, but they seem, again, very independent and thankfully so. So fake news. I want to get back to fake news because this is something that is particularly... It's in the real news right now. Fake news is in the real news. Yes. It's particularly concerning to me. What do you hear, Will, when someone says fake news? I guess in the context, when a congressman says, well, that's just fake news, or when Donald Trump says that's fake news, or what do you hear? Well, I hear that they disagree with something someone else has said. Fake news has been around for a really long time. Arguably, heresy is the original fake news. And it comes down to a disagreement about what the facts of the world are. However, we are or have been introduced to the internet coming off the back of one of the more centralizing communication technologies we've had in a while, television. So in comparison to television, it's much easier for people to get different perspectives out there on the internet to disagree about what the world looks like. And as many of the old gatekeepers have expressed frustration with this state of things, you're hearing this fake news complaint rolled around. So it's not a problem? Well, it's certainly a problem. Epistemic uncertainty is a problem. So fake news, I think, it gets used in different ways by different groups. And I think that some of those ways are closer to what you're describing, Will, and some are further from it. So on the one side, when Donald Trump says fake news, the claim that he's making, yes, he's addressing, so there was a claim that was made in a news story or somewhere else that he doesn't like. And it's not that he's saying, I disagree with it. He's just saying it's fake. Like the content and the, it doesn't matter because it's just fake. It's not real. It's made up on the spot or whatever else. And when Trump's followers say fake news, when they think that the Washington Post made up the stories about Roy Moore molesting children, they, that it's just made up. It's like not factual. I think that when most of the rest of us talk about fake news or when Congress is say talking about the fake news during the election, that like the Russian propaganda, what they mean is news that was, even the people making it knew it wasn't true, right? It was basically fiction from the get go and was not intended to inform. And so the claim is more, it's less about, I disagree with it, it's less about it flies against my ideological foundations and more simply that this is intentionally pretend stuff intended to accomplish something other than informing people. Again, it doesn't feel like anything new. Doesn't anyone remember the main? Yes, or Gulf of Tonkin or something like that. Yeah. However, I do think that the internet being something very new and something which was originally conceived of by many as a store of all of humanity's information is therefore socially uniquely vulnerable to the spreading of fake news. A lot of people seem fairly likely to believe what they read online, but at the same time we have to remember that we're talking about politics here. And it seems as though fake news about politics spreads much more rapidly, is much more virulent than fake news about say restaurant sanitation conditions or the usefulness of a given product because like all political opinions, there's no personal cost for being wrong online about something. And in fact, in many cases, it feels pretty good to hold on to a nice sounding belief that might not be correct. Is this new to, is this new to politics? Because as you're describing this, this sounds like, so that the fake news that we talk about now is very much political because of the election and because of the scope or lack of scope of the Russian meddling. But what you're describing seems to fit quite well with say that the fake news that was prevalent before that which focused much more heavily on science and nutrition and health, right? Like that was what people, before we were griping about fake news from Russian bots, we would gripe about is like people are passing around these insane studies of, so autism, vaccines or there's a cancer cure, like this essential oil cures cancer and people would share these things and you felt good about it and there was little cost unless you actually tried to use essential oils to cure your cancer. But it seems like that's, and that didn't seem to upset us as much. Like it didn't, you know, we didn't have congressional inquiries into the spread of this stuff. We weren't hauling Facebook in front of Congress because, what's her name, Science Girl? Is that the, there's that? Yeah, the GMO, Science Girl, whatever. Because she had millions of followers and was spreading misinformation. Complete misinformation. So it does seem like this is, this only really mattered when it hit the political world. I mean, I think the reason for that is because people vote. At the end of the day, your belief about essential oils doesn't really affect anyone beyond you. You can try to share that incorrect belief, but you can't use it to push a policy on anyone else. So you can weaponize your ignorance. Yeah, when you're voting on the basis of cancer. I mean the vaccines might be a counter to that, but. Vaccines would be. But again, that only seemed to become troublesome when it entered into the realm of politics, when you saw people in their local school board meetings trying to push to have their unvaccinated children allowed in a school. That that was where that seemed to take. And then instances of outbreaks of diseases in spots. But so on the political fake news, there's a lot of calls to do something about it. And there's calls both for legislative or regulatory change and calls for technological change that the platforms, the social media sites should do something about it. Do you think, I mean before we get into some of the specifics of things that have been proposed to be done about it, do you think it's even the kind of problem that we can do something about? I mean is this like to combat fake news, first you have to know what it is and you have to be able to say this is fake or this isn't or this is the kind of fake that we should do something about and this isn't the kind of fake we should do something about. Well and it isn't even a we, it's a someone, you're then empowering someone to make these kinds of distinctions and presumably someone without the same sort of biases that hinder the rest of us, which seems like a tall order. 10 years of intensive fake news training and he's going to become the minister of fake news. Oh it's fine then. Okay, absolutely. But I think that the Aaron's question is interesting but you kind of defined it beforehand. I mean if it was like, it can't be something that Plotify says pants on fire. It's a intentionally knowingly misleading. Well right but that gets us to- Even the fact that it's intentionally misleading doesn't necessarily bring it to the level of being harmful. Interestingly last week Snopes debunked a Duffleblog story and Duffleblog is a sort of onion competitor for members of the military. They spread humorously false stories about life in the DoD. Now on one hand it's fake news but you don't expect anyone to actually believe and act on it and therefore the idea of debunking a deliberately humorously false story seems wrong. Well so that's one of the avenues of which this gets complicated because satire, like what's the difference between satire and fake news but then also my definition of fake news with depending on intent gets us almost into like a mens rea sort of problem where you can't- I mean Facebook can't- Facebook knows a lot about us and maybe it can figure this out because maybe it's incredibly more creepy than I already think it is but it probably can't divine the intent behind posting or creating. It can only look at the content that is posted or created and so that's our bright line that might be an impossible one to recognize. Yeah I think we also have to discuss the the non- because there have been some stuff proposed which we could talk about in a second but we have to discuss the non-government solutions problems that I always point out with the internet and it only just came up because especially though on the left they're freaking out about Donald Trump's election and they're coming trying to come up with an explanation of it that they can maybe stop and so fake news gives them an opportunity to say oh only because of Russian muddling you know to say no we really had the right you know we're right it's just someone got in the way with their lies and so we just had to fix that and then we'll get we'll win subsequent elections which of course is terrifying but I think that's what's behind this but more but on the internet in general if you think about your history of your life on the internet it's been a lot of having to tune your BS detector you know there were you could have used a clickbaity ad in 2004 that you would say you know you won't believe what happened here or something that said or different kind of spam emails this one weird trick or Nigerian scams or different types of ways of getting at you and so they're always updating their scamming and then the people are always having to update their ability to detect scams and there's a lag period there so you the Nigerian thing works and they have to change it it's phishing emails work but then you have to realize they have to change it and also just being able to detect BS and I you know what the the list the clickbait stuff and I think with fake news we're going to see a similar response that people are just going to get better at spotting it and not sharing it and not you know and not going and checking the story before they share it I suspect if there's someone to measure it I suspect it's already happening I think you're right about that particularly when it comes to the sorts of fake news that we're seeing now which are usually text based outrageous stories I don't know how many people believe bat boy when they saw him on the side of the grocery store check out aisle 20 years ago but certainly fewer people believe those stories today now to some extent we do have to think about where this is going to go because at the moment it is mostly text based but you're seeing technologies coming down the pipe to losslessly fake both audio and vision video um adobe's project voco is a good example of this that with about 20 minutes of someone speaking can then start to create new conversations that they haven't had um there's a video um we'll try to put it in the show notes of a it's it's obama and a couple of other politicians and they have they show you them on one side talking and delivering a speech and then on the other side they have used this vocal synthesis software plus like basically a lip remapping to make it look like they're delivering an entirely different speech and you can tell like so watching them side by side you can tell that the the fake one is a little bit fake because the mouth is movements are a little bit are just slightly off but if you didn't have them side by side it would fool an awful lot of people and that's just the beginning of it and teachers will be indistinguishable yeah yeah so that's an area in which we need to be thinking about technologies which can combat that going forward because we as human beings with human eyes aren't aren't so good at doing that um you may end up with a kind of race between different sorts of machine learning algorithms one trying to trick you or trick the other algorithm which then attempts to determine what's fake and what's not but the the sooner we can orient ourselves towards those sorts of threats the better we'll do especially when they're initially rolled out how much concern do you have because the facebook has announced it's a was going to do it itself or to some degree try and combat fake news and google as we mentioned with russia today uh does that does it concern you how facebook would do it compared to the government so that we have if we're trying to say we need ways of combating this including our our own personal behavior our own sources checking our own things using technologies that help combat it or things like snopes or whatever we're going to have to do this um or the government could do it which seems to me to be very very scary well i don't think i don't think just to clarify i don't think it'd be the government doing it it would be facebook coming up with its own way to do it or facebook doing it in a way that the government tells it to but it would still be facebook doing it you could have the government pass a law that said something about uh well this this brings us to the recently proposed honest ads act and facebook's response to it um Amy Klobuchar has proposed a bill that would regulate online advertising in a similar way to how video advertising on television is regulated um with a couple important key differences um one being that it would cover all manner of political advertisements or advertisements oriented towards a national legislative issue of importance um which goes beyond simple candidate advocacy um the bill also includes a provision to have the FCC compile biannual reports on non-paid political online advertising which isn't really defined and could include almost anything could that be like a youtube channel or someone just rants about yeah i guess no again no one really knows what it means and yet it's in the bill and when facebook is attempting to come up with a solution to something like this it doesn't include those sorts of extraneous overreaches um it's very problem specific in how it's created tailored and as well unlike traditional legislation they can test and tweak their solutions in an ongoing fashion um after this bill was announced facebook announced its own updated advertising policy which dodging the somewhat difficult to answer question of what counts as a national issue of legislative importance um will create a database of all ads run on facebook um tied to the pages that run them it'll require pages that run ads to be linked to real people and this is on one hand a measure which accomplishes at least the spirit of what congress is supposedly setting out to do but also provides general consumer benefit that you wouldn't have seen with the congressional bill um if you're interested in seeing something so simple as what kind of ads the sneaker company has been running for the past couple years whether they're showing you the same ads they show to other people facebook will now give that to you um so i for one am much more comfortable with platform driven solutions mainly coming down to the fact that they aren't wielding legal power over america as a whole and they know their platforms pretty well much better than congress people do but they i mean the the obvious danger here is to take this back to what trevor said that a lot of the motivation behind the the current crusade against fake news is democrats who lost an election looking for an easy explanation and one that doesn't point the finger at them right um that isn't you ran a terrible candidate um or people don't like your ideas people don't like your ideas that's you know here's a here's something there is a thought no that cannot be it it has to be fake news and so facebook could do this and facebook could solve the fake news problem as far as like we as users are concerned but the next time the democrats lose an election or the republicans lose an election um they're gonna say well you didn't you know it was because you didn't do enough you didn't solve the fake news problem we're going to solve it um and then of course the legislative things you know you make a legislative fix that still it's even even if even if congress passes something to ban fake news it is still likely that democrats or republicans will lose an election at some point in the future um and and so then we'll want to crack down even further right and so is to some extent is like the private sector saying wait we'll do something about it or yes we acknowledge the problem teeing up those kinds of fights in the future because what the private sector has said is a sexually lended credence to this narrative that the politicians are clinging to that the reason they lost is because of this thing and this thing is actually a problem when it might not really be a problem in the first place i think you're gonna have that no matter what you do because if the current platforms come down too hard either on fake news or on opponents of certain politicians or whoever those folks will find somewhere else to speak um and they already are to some extent um for a host of reasons i mean you've seen youtube demonetizing all kinds of content because advertisers have been frustrated initially because their content was appearing next to terrorist videos um but this is now extended to all manner of things uh gun reviewers for instance um an alternative platform has sprung up just to host videos about firearms um you're seeing it with patreon and a sort of crowdfunding website um which then kicked off certain members of the alt right uh they've created a competitor called haterion um subtle so at some point even if you get a congressional push to regulate something which is rebutted by a shift in private policy you'll end up with a competitor which won't make the same change and will therefore in the mind of congresspeople merit their legislative response anyway i think it's important to point out and this is some stuff i'm currently working on that there's a part of this problem is tied to the schismatic partisan nature of the country and in particular the inability of partisans to understand why other people disagree with them and to me that is actually the biggest the biggest threat to free speech overall because a while back you had i can't remember which congress congressperson i i i can't remember exactly but some very extremely left-wing member of congress proposed taking fox news's license away under the FCC discretionary rules and wanted to do it with nbc sorry trump yeah and and and this was pretty this was very a very marginal view to say that you know that fox news is harming america and they should be just classified as a political organization and i'm regulated by like the fec is a political organization and that's the kind of thing that really should be terrifying to people if you if you have citizens out there who who think that the biggest reason people are disagreeing with them is because there's something that's making that that's telling them lies and so the left has thought that forever about about you know things places like kato we could we could be called like a lie manufacturer by people on the left and so they we need to be shut down for the good of america and on the right thinks that fake news is the problem and that's what that's why they're you know we've had all these issues for years so they need to be shut down for the good of america and then you're just going to have possibly a very dangerous situation yeah if you have a model of garbage in garbage out people rather than human beings is kind of news receiving automatons then you'll always seek to alter their viewpoints by limiting their access to certain bits of information for the good of america because it's not just and even for their own good yeah and your point about voting was is perfect because it's not just shutting down science things because the person got essential oils is like if we're going to save america by insert policy x building the wall single-pilot health care whatever we need to make sure people understand how good it will be for them and the way we do that as we shut down the liars so i mean a big strike against that worldview comes out of this most recent election and the internet in that you saw the greatest shift towards increased political polarization amongst the elderly and they're also the least likely of any age cohort to be receiving the majority of their news online so the internet supposedly this tremendously polarizing force didn't seem to most polarize those who spent the most time on it but as far as censorship goes so if if we pulled if the government pulled a broadcast license in order to block certain types of political speech we would see that as censorship but do we see it as censorship if the government says hey google you better do something and as a result google radically decreases traffic and attention to russia today or hey facebook you want to do something about these these liars in the libertarian think tank world and they and so facebook turns off kato's access to its 300 000 plus fans and followers on facebook i would say so i think to make this example stark you have to look outside the united states because we don't think of our government as generally doesn't push companies to directly violate the first amendment if it did so explicitly that would be illegal however europe knows no such constraints and in the past year past year and a half really we've seen in european commission code of conduct forced with the the threat of regulation behind it on google facebook and twitter to adopt european style speech norms across their platforms globally through their terms of service so in many cases when using these platforms we fall under private standards but private standards promulgated by the european union um germany has passed the net's dg law which attempts to expand germany's understandings of hate speech worldwide it's an extraterritorial imposition by threatening social media companies with millions of pounds in fines if they don't take down certain offending content within 24 hours the very concerning element is that it leads us towards automated takedowns in which you have some algorithm determining what counts as hate speech in germany and applying it to things you post here um bill hex is never going to be listened to again in germany then yeah um amber rudd home secretary of the uk seems to keep shrinking her expected takedown window from 12 hours to two hours to hopefully automatic takedowns um and this covers things which are legal here but hate speech elsewhere something like holocaust denial but even the sharing of technical information um something that could be used to make a firearm or bomb for instance um so it has a pretty wide impact and as more and more countries come online and have populations such that they can't simply be turned down and pushed away by the googles and facebook's of the world we're going to see an ever stranger mesh of competing restrictions on speech um coming from turkey nigeria china's mostly walled off its internet but um this problem in general is only going to get worse and you're left with either imposing everyone's norms on everyone everywhere which leads you with very little acceptable speech or a more fragmented internet or i'll just pop in here and suggest people go back and listen to our episode on the blockchain from a month or so ago you end up with a technological shift where all of this communication is encrypted and decentralized and not accessible to states and not controlled by central entities that can enforce takedown notices um that i think i think that there's a technological fix here and i think that it's it would be relatively easy to switch this all over to a system where all of the issues that you're raising right now about censorship and public private stuff um and gatekeepers simply become technologically impossible i'm sympathetic to that view but i think we need to take the role of intermediaries very seriously here uh because there've been attempts to do that in the past um sealant an anti-aircraft platform that sits in international waters off the coast of both the uk and europe was for a time in the mid two thousands used as a data haven um it was thought that in a sort of cryptonomicon-esque fashion people could store their gambling server here and therefore it wouldn't be touchable by the authorities well that's all well and good but that traffic flows through a cable to sealant and then to france and all of the gambling traffic can be parsed out as soon as it hits a server in on french uh soil so as long as you still have intermediaries and particularly intermediaries that exist within physical space um you're going to have nexuses of of censorship nodes in which the government can interfere and impose its will upon cyberspace so i will we'll move on because we're i had a another question for you but i'll just say there um that i think i'm more optimistic than you are and i think that we already the the concerns that you just raised already have been mooted um and we can already do those things without having to worry about centralized locations or pipes or identifying traffic but um i we started this conversation with the way that the digital world changed things um that it that that kind of radical break from the prior way that we thought about speech and communication and interaction um and so now that we've been in this world for call it since the early 90s um that that's you've been in the world since the early you were a very early adopter we being the world has had access to these kind of global networks and i would say 2000 is the beginning of a moving online you know in insignificant amounts i mean i i remember the the wonderful straight to vhs instructional videos in the 90s about how to surf the web that you know had the person stick in the aolcd and then we blown backwards by the awesomeness of the information super highway but do you think that in another 20 years looking back that this shift will have been positive for freedom of speech for freedom of expression um or do you think that it will that will be will have moved backwards somehow that the that the the access it gives to sensors the ability to sensor the ability to control will outweigh the benefits i think on the whole it's it's still going to be very positive um i mean today for everything we're concerned about here we're able to communicate with people all over the world share ideas share papers um often in a hidden encryption encrypted fashion people can speak anonymously on the internet and shed their whatever persona they have in real life in order to speak honestly in a way that they might not be able to in other parts of their life and that these are net goods um i am concerned to some extent by the permanent digital nature of a lot of speech the fact that data right now is being swept up that we don't have the processing power to go through yet or it doesn't make sense to from an economic standpoint but that can one day be parsed and understood um in such a fashion that in many cases social pressure can perhaps be applied to people who thought they were speaking anonymously or or thought that what they were saying was encrypted 20 years from now it might not be however again on the whole it's it's allowed us to speak to far wider audiences um and for individuals who couldn't have spoken previously to do so and that's valuable thanks for listening this episode of free thoughts was produced by test terrible and evan banks to learn more visit us at www.libertarianism.org