 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Cass Sunstein, author of Liars, Falsehoods, and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Friday, March 5th at noon, Janice Nomura will discuss her book, The Doctor's Blackwell. In the mid-19th century, it was an unheard of notion for a woman to study medicine, but sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell became path-breaking doctors. On Tuesday, March 9th at noon, we'll welcome Jane Zangline, author of The Girl Explorers, the story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers, and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women's scientists. In life and in politics, truth matters. These are the opening words of Chapter 9 of Liars, Cass Sunstein's new book. As custodians of the records of our nation's history, we at the National Archives know well that truth matters. Researchers come to us to establish facts to unearth the true stories of historical events and people. The records preserve what happened at a particular time, but we do not label them true or false. A letter to an office holder may contain falsehoods, but the document itself is a true record of the writer's intent. It's up to the researcher to evaluate the sources and analyze viewpoints to determine what did or didn't happen. In Liars, Cass Sunstein looks at contemporary life to examine the role of truth and falsehood and asks how can we deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech. Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University. From 2009 to 2012, he was administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and he joined the Department of Homeland Security last month as senior counselor on immigration policies for President Joe Biden. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, often described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Law and Humanities. Founder and Director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at the Harvard Law School, he's been involved in law reform activities in nations all over the world. He's the author of many articles and books, including Nudge, How Change Happens, and Too Much Information. Now let's hear from Cass Sunstein. Thank you for joining us today. Hi everybody. It's a great honor to be here to talk at the National Archives of Repository of FACTS and Historical Records and to speak about the importance of truth and what can be done to safeguard truth under difficult, sometimes contemporary conditions produces chills down the spine. So I'm going to give you two epigraphs with which to start. The first is from a terrific mystery writer named Michael Robottam, and in a novel called Good Girl, Bad Girl, he writes the following. Some lies are selfish. Some inflate or conflate or mitigate or simply omit. Some are told for good reason. People lie because they think it doesn't matter. They lie because telling the truth would mean giving up control or the truth is inconvenient or they don't want to disappoint or they desperately want it to be true. I've heard them all. I've told them all. My second passage is from a writer who's a bit more famous, William Shakespeare, and see if you can keep track of the puns in one of Shakespeare's, I think, greatest works. When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies, that she might think me some untutored youth unlearned in the world's false subtleties, thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, although she knows my days are past the best, simply I credit her false speaking tongue. On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she? Not, she is unjust. And wherefore say I? Not that I am old. O love's best habit is in seeming trust, and age in love loves not to have years told. Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flattered be. That's Shakespeare's disquisition on love. And lying. In a famous opinion, Supreme Court Justice Alderwendel Holmes wrote, the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. Right now, probably on this day, certainly in these months, a lot of people have been falsely shouting fire in crowded theaters, and they are causing panics. The day of January 6th of 2021 was an example. In some cases, lies lead to illnesses and deaths. We've certainly observed that. In others, their lies cut at the heart of self-government. Some lies come from unfriendly nations. Some of them are homegrown. They come from public officials, private citizens, and from politicians or those who support them. Notwithstanding these points, my first goal, and I confess that I did not intend this to be my first goal when I started on this book, my first goal is to deepen the foundations of what many people find to be a jarring idea. In general, falsehood should not be censored or regulated even if they are lies. Shakespeare had it basically right. Free societies protect falsehoods in politics and in love. Public officials should not act as the truth police. A key reason is we can't trust officials to separate truth from falsehood. Their own judgments are hardly unerring and their own biases get in the way. If officials get a license to punish what is false, they will end up punishing dissent. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote, in the greatest opinion in the history of the United States Supreme Court, in fact this is my candidate for the two sentences which are the greatest in the history of any court, my choice, quote, those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. The best response to falsehoods is usually to correct them rather than to punish them. Punishment can fuel falsehoods. It can create a kind of oxygen. This is a time honored idea, but in some ways it's on the defensive. We need to understand them better and appreciate them more. So first point, protect falsehoods in a free society. Second goal, however, is to qualify this first conclusion and to take it back a bit. William Blake, the great poet commenting on lectures by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Reynolds was a great defender of generalization and abstraction, and William Blake scrawled in the margin. To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of true merit. Blake added, I thank God I am not like Reynolds. I'm going to aim not to be like Reynolds and not to rely on generalizations, and so I'm going to contend that government should have the power to regulate particular lies and falsehoods, at least if they can be shown to be generally harmful by any objective measure. And in that show, false statements are not constitutionally protected if the government can show that they threaten to cause very serious harm that can't be avoided through a more specific speech protective route. That's a mouthful I realize and I'm going to try to particularize it. Under the US Constitution, government can do a great deal to control defamation. If you say knowing it's false that your neighbor is a drug addict or has been engaged in some kind of criminal activity, that is punishable. That's liable. False advertising can be regulated. So can perjury. I suggest that these are foundations for thinking about how to prevent serious threats to public health and safety, and about how to protect at least certain threats to the democratic process. I'm also going to suggest that private institutions, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others, should have considerable room to stop the spread of lies and falsehoods to their credit. All three of these have embarked to some extent on that enterprise and that's a good beginning. Okay, let's acknowledge notwithstanding this plea for more control, typically private control on damaging falsehoods, that if you want to ban each and every lie or to excise lies and errors from human life, you're probably not a lot of fun. People boast. They exaggerate their achievements. That's human. Some of us flatter. We tell people things they want to hear. That's okay. People protect themselves by lying to those who endanger them. Do the ends justify the means? Not never. Sometimes. Some of us joke. We tell tall tales. Journalists spread falsehoods even when they're trying really hard to tell the truth. No one should have to live in a nation that makes it a crime not to tell the truth or even to lie. That kind of nation would crush freedom. But some lies and some falsehoods are beyond the pale. Suppose a company that sells medicine markets a new product saying if you take this one every day, you'll never get cancer. If the product has nothing to prevent cancer, that company will get in trouble with the authorities even in the free societies. To see why we have to explore the foundations of a system of free expression and that's true in nations all over the world, we need to understand what that system is for, what it's designed to do. Right now, 2021, that issue has unprecedented urgency. One reason is the rise of modern technologies which allow falsehoods to be spread in an instant. If you want to lie about a human being and throw them in their lives into turmoil, you can do that. If you want to lie about safety and health, you can do that too with ease. Much news, it's just so, is fake, and that's a big problem. An irony is that charges of fake news are often themselves fake, making it really destabilizing to figure out what's true. Sometimes people cry fake news when they're subject to criticism, even when nothing fake has been said. That means the real fake news on occasion is the cry of fake news. No wonder that with respect to many questions, including questions involving health and climate change and what's happening in a government, people find themselves in a state of vertigo. Saint Augustine said a long, long time ago, when regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful. Pause over that, if you would, when regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things remain doubtful. Saint Augustine chose his words carefully. Hannah Arendt, centuries later, warned, the chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed. It is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world, not only for a time, but potentially forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms or discoveries or theories. Facts and events occur in the field of ever-changing affairs of people in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind's structure. This is a plea for the vulnerability of our beliefs about what actually happened. Okay, now I'm going to shift and to try to offer a framework to square my first proposition, which is let thousands of flowers bloom even if some of those flowers are fake news. And my second qualification, which is to say some of those flowers are poisonous and need not be allowed to bloom. Okay, there are lots of falsehoods out there and they're really different. A cry of fire might be a lie designed to cause a stampede. It might be an innocent mistake coming from someone who saw some smoke from audience members who were illegally lighting up cigarettes. A seller of a car might lie about a vehicle's gas mileage. On a date a guy might lie about his career achievements. That's happened. Someone might perjure himself saying he wasn't at the scene of an accident. Someone might make an innocent error in which he mistakenly identifies someone as a perpetrator of a crime. I suggest to make progress on these fundamental puzzles. We can do a lot if we identify four sets of issues and keep them separate, just four. Each of them plays a role in the proper analysis of freedom of speech and also should play a role when we think about the obligations of private institutions, including social media providers. So I'm going to put a spotlight on four questions. The first of the four is the speaker's state of mind. If someone is saying that's false, they might be lying, reckless, negligent, or reasonable, but just happen to be wrong. Someone might say, for example, that a neighbor has done something horrible knowing that that's false. That's a liar. Someone might say it not knowing that it's false, but it's a reckless statement. They should know. That's not as bad as a lie, but it's pretty bad. Someone might not have been really reckless, but if they'd really thought about it, they would have figured out it was false. That's not good. It's not as bad as recklessness. Someone might. It might be a journalist. It might be a politician. It might be you or I. We just happen to make a mistake. It really matters into which category the speech falls. Under the constitutional order of many nations, it does matter. The difference between lying and an innocent mistake is a big one. That's the first of my four factors in my framework. The second is the size of the harm. How much damage is done by the falsehood? There's a continuum here where maybe a hundred is a lot of people are going to die, and one is it's mildly annoying. But let's just say to get clarity on the continuum, sometimes there are grave harms, sometimes there are moderate harms, sometimes there are minor harms, and sometimes there are non-existent harms. If a lie threatens to kill a lot of people, it's very different from a lie that simply gives people a mistaken impression. Let's say that the Rolling Stones were better than the Beatles. That's a factual falsehood. I'm kidding a little bit, but even if it is a factual falsehood, as I believe, it's not one that's harmful. There are plenty of factual falsehoods out there that are not very harmful. The third question, in addition to the state of mind of the speaker and the size of the harm, is how likely is the harm? Here, too, we have a continuum. It's certain it's going to happen. Somebody's going to die. At the other end is it's highly improbable. It's likely that the comment is going to cause no bad thing at all, and in the middle we have it's not certain, but it's probable, and it's improbable, but it's not highly improbable. As we get to certainty or high probability of harm, the argument for restricting lies or falsehoods becomes more forceful. If someone says, John F. Kennedy was not, in fact, president of the United States, he was actually vice president, we could generate an account by which that would be likely to cause harm, but we'd have to work really hard at it. It's not likely to do anything bad. The fourth and final question is the timing of harm. Here, too, there's a continuum, but let's just simplify and say we could have harm that's going to happen imminently today, or we could have harm that's going to happen 20 years from now in the distant future, or we could have harm that's going to occur not imminently, but pretty soon the next couple of months, or we could have harm that's not going to pretty soon, but it's not in the distant future. Let's say it's going to be 2022. You get the basic point that as harm looks more imminent, the argument for doing something about its strengthens. If the harm is in the distant future, it's more likely that something can be done to forestall its occurrence, where that something might not be censorship, but might be just correction and more speech. Okay, I've given you four points. One is the state of mind of the speaker. The second is the size of the harm. The third is the likelihood of the harm. And the fourth is the timing of the harm. And this is pretty common sensical stuff, I hope. And I've given you basically four categories for each of the four. We could mix and match them in numerous ways, 256 to be precise. We could create a matrix with that number of boxes. But as an act of mercy, let's really not do that. And let's just say that for purposes of thinking about freedom of speech, when we get to the part of each of the four factors that looks especially troubling or dangerous, the argument for some kind of response is stronger. And when we get to the part of the continuum for each of them, where the concern weakens, the argument for regulating them softens. So to give the extreme cases, if you have an intentional lie that is certain to create extremely serious harm tomorrow, the argument for protecting that I suggest is very, very weak. If we have a merely innocent falsehood that's highly unlikely to create anything other than very modest harm, and that won't happen for a long, long time, the argument for doing anything about it is vanishingly small. White lies typically fall in that category. So do exaggerations and other kinds of falsehoods with which we live with sometimes our best friends and colleagues. It happens, we might not love it, but the apparatus of government or Twitter not to be invoked to regulate that. Okay. Once we have these four factors, we're well on the road, I suggest, to separating the cases where we say with enthusiasm, falsehoods are a byproduct of a free society and not to be controlled from the proposition, well, surely you can regulate perjury and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That surely is true. If you commit perjury, you're creating serious harm immediately, and perjury typically requires state of mind. You know you're lying. It's not an innocent falsehood. But there's another point which is, I think, very exciting, which is because of new technologies. When falsehoods create harm, we have unprecedented tools with which to think about how to handle them, not just the apparatus of the criminal law, let's say, or asking for damages before a jury, not just getting the government involved, but having private institutions use their technologies either involving in a way that involves architecture or in a way that involves education. And we're seeing this in real time get increasingly sophisticated. So an architectural intervention might be reducing the circulation of certain kinds of falsehoods, so fewer people see them. So it might be the algorithm says if there's some lie about COVID-19, it's not going to be taken down. It's still on the platform, but it's not going to be something a lot of people see because the algorithm isn't going to throw it in their faces. That's an architectural intervention. Or you could have an educational intervention, which gives people a warning, or which refers to people to an accurate rather than false statement of what the world is like, or that gives people a kind of signal that the general view of people who study this is something other than what the speaker say. So if the speaker says something false, let's say about COVID-19 or false about the effects of a vaccine, one possible approach would be not to circulate that a lot. Another would be to give people access to accurate information. These are softer tools and more flexible tools than censorship or running to a jury. And they might be used in lieu of the more aggressive approaches. We could imagine, I think, in the fullness of time, much more creativity on the part of social media providers in controlling the dissemination of damaging falsehoods. And we could also imagine some governments building on those practices to think about more speech protective ways of controlling falsehoods than censorship or punishment. For now, let me just focus on the largest issues. We have four factors, state of mind, magnitude of harm, likelihood of harm, and timing of harm. And of these, to simplify further, two are the most important, state of mind and magnitude of harm. If we have an intentional lie disseminated by someone who is producing very, very serious harm, the argument for letting freedom ring is weaker than if we have a negligent lie by someone who was careless but not intending to produce a falsehood and that isn't likely to produce massive harm, though it might be likely to produce some harm. The case for regulating that isn't zero, but the case for regulating that is much weaker. Okay, I hope the general principle, what I called the mouthful with which I began, is getting a little more specified. Here it is again. False statements are constitutionally protected unless the government can show that they threaten to cause serious harm that cannot be avoided through a more speech protective route. That's the basic idea. And when lies are involved, the government may impose regulation on the basis of a somewhat weaker demonstration of harm than is ordinarily required for unintentional falsehoods. So someone is knowingly saying that their next door neighbor is a crook or that some product is going to prevent heart disease. The argument for giving that person a lot of breathing space is weaker than if the person just thought it was so and it happens not to be. Okay, to bring this in contact for a moment with current constitutional law not terribly long ago, the Supreme Court offered its most vigorous statement in favor of the idea that falsehoods are protected by the free speech principle. In that case, the court was dealing with someone named Alvarez who said that he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He hadn't. He bragged about having won it. He did so in order to get political success in his community. There's a law, I think beautifully named, the Stolen Valor Act that says it's a crime to say you've got the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now notice in that case we have from my first factor, that a state of mind, we have clarity. The person was lying. It wasn't just reckless. In terms of magnitude of harm, we don't have catastrophe. No one's likely to die if they believe the truth. They believe that the falsehood is true. On the other hand, you will distort the democratic process and demean those heroic citizens who have actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor. So on the framework suggested, the argument for giving protection to this lie is not very strong. That is, it threatens to cause serious harm, and it's very hard to avoid that harm through a more speech protective room. So not at all clear the Supreme Court had it right. Is it really important to protect someone's intentional lie that he won the Congressional Medal of Honor? Maybe not. But in many cases, the argument for protecting false face statements of fact is a lot more powerful. A denial that climate change is real, let's say, by someone who just doesn't believe the science. That's part of the marketplace of ideas. A false report on a prominent politician. Suppose saying that person did or said something they never did or said. It happens to be a mistake by a journalist who's trying to do her job. Or an exaggerated statement about the risks posed by genetically modified organisms in which let's say someone who doesn't have scientific expertise or someone who does have scientific expertise just gets it wrong. It would be wild, wouldn't it, to say that in a society democratic or not, those falsehoods are subject to criminal punishment. The government's own judgments about what's true and what's false might not be trustworthy. Regulation of false statements might and probably will chill truthful statements. If you tell people if you say something that's false, you might end up in jail. People might just shut up. And that is history's lesson, not just logic. People also can learn from false statements. Our engagement with falsity can deepen our understanding, whether the question involves climate change, genetically modified organisms, COVID-19, or the effects of a new medicine. We can learn from falsity. And that's a good thing in a democracy in which people are citizens, not subjects. People also need to know what other people think, even if what other people think is not true. If some people in our country think something that is utterly false, it's good for all of us to know that. Bending false statements can simply drive them underground and increase their power and allure. It can make them like magnets. Counter-speech, meaning response to the falsehood, is typically the better and more effective response than prohibition. But, and this is my trying to be like William Blake, not a generalizer, these arguments don't support the broad conclusion that a system of free expression always has to give strong safeguards to falsehoods and lies. Consider perjury, fraud, and false commercial advertising. Some of those issues are old, but they're new ones. Deep fakes in which anyone basically, based on a photograph, can be presented online as saying or doing something they never said or did. That's something Facebook has shown some concern with, and Facebook is right to show concern with that. Dr. Videos generally can show any of us looking like we have some evil act underway, or that we've said something that is horrific, that maybe we, it's profoundly to be oaked, we don't have underway, and that we didn't say. That use of modern technology to create destruction of reputations and harm to institutions of which human beings are an essential part. That is something for which at least private remedies, as some of the social media platforms are considering, that's a really good idea. Because so much speech occurs online, it's really valuable to be considering creative tools for reducing the spread of falsehoods, including disclosure, labels, warnings, disclaimers, and the use of architectures. These points, I am hopeful, offer a distinctive perspective on ancient problems and problems we're going to face in June or July of this year, meaning new ones. In the United States, current constitutional law doesn't quite strike the right balance. Public officials, actors, musicians, movie stars, and athletes should be able to do more than they now can to respond to defamation, if only to get a retraction. In addition, there ought to be power to regulate deep fakes in Dr. Videos where they are destructive to private reputations and to institutional integrity, let's call it. It's also very important to have new thinking about the protection of public health and safety, certainly in the context of intentional falsehoods, and if falsehoods create sufficiently serious risks, magnitude of harm in that context as well. Let me underline one of the points which I confess to being excited about, which is that some of the most promising tools for responding to falsehoods do not involve censorship or labels, they involve more speech-protective approaches, like labels or warnings. Private institutions, including magazines, newspapers, TV networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., should be acting more aggressively than they are today to take steps to control the most damaging forms of lying and the most damaging untruths with reference to the little framework that I've offered involving magnitude of harm, likelihood of harm, timing of harm, and the state of mind of the actor. I'm conscious that these are specific conclusions spanning a wide range of problems. I would underline that as I embarked on this book, published by the way just today, it became increasingly clear, immersion in the materials, the wisdom of old arguments about the importance of offering a lot of breathing space even for falsehoods. That was driven home by history and analysis more than I expected. Still, if you have someone whose life is at risk because of what someone said that was knowingly false about them, or if lives are at risk because of knowing falsehoods or even reckless falsehoods about health and safety, we should ask what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said to his advisors when presented with a conundrum. Roosevelt asked, what are you going to do about that? These are some of the largest and most fundamental questions, not only in politics and law, but indeed in daily life itself. Hannah Arendt, a hero of this book, put it this way. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. The principle of freedom of speech should not be taken to forbid reasonable efforts to protect reality. Thank you. I am seeing a question in the chat, so with your indulgence I will address it. The question is, I have heard that some countries are already adding courses in critical thinking and how it relates to social media as part of their normal media, as part of their normal curriculum. Is this good and should we try that in the US? The answer to that question has to be yes. Doesn't that critical thinking is important for all of us to have? It doesn't matter where we live. The only thing I'd add is that it is a little inadequate critical thinking. I will give you my favorite empirical finding in this domain as a way of testing the inadequacy. Did you all hear that the Boston Red Sox actually just a few hours ago acquired five players from the New York Yankees, five of their best players, and the Yankees gave them up for basically very little. So it looks like the Red Sox are going to be world champions just because of this trade. Okay, what I just told you was false. Some of you probably could tell that it was false. It was a lie, sorry. But I did it not only because I'm a big Red Sox fan and I wish it were true, but mostly because I wanted to illustrate a point. And the point is, if there is a falsehood communicated, either one on one or to a large audience, and if even instantly after the person who conveyed the falsehood said that was a lie, then people will tend to remember it days and weeks later and will tend with some part of their mind to think it's true. So forgive me, Red Sox and Yankees fans, some of you are going to remember as true the proposition that the Red Sox acquired a set of great Yankees players, even though I told you immediately after that it was false. I tried to choose a pretty innocuous example, but if someone says something about a political figure or about a vaccine or about climate change or about a country that's false, even if they say right after that was false, or even if someone, a newspaper or an expert says that was false, right after, some part of our mind is going to remember it as true. It's called truth bias. And the and a fiendishness of truth bias is that it has a good evolutionary foundation. That is, if a fellow member of the human species tells us something, we tend to believe it if they tell us in undergatherer societies that a lion's coming run, we're not going to think, are they right? Can I trust them? We're going to run. And so the truth bias has some, you know, foundation and something that's good, but it gives an opportunity for liars and also for people who are just reckless to distort our judgments, which is a long way of saying that critical thinking is a great thing, but the human mind is a little more, or that's the right word, a little more complicated than to be completely immunized from credulousness with respect to falsehoods, including lies by virtue of having a lot of capacity for critical thinking, which is suggesting that critical thinking is very important to have architectural responses by social media providers of the sort that some are doing, and to have, let's call it real time critical thinking promoters, as in you see something that's false, demonstrably false, not the truth beliefs. It's just a clear falsehood. And there's a notation to learn more about this subject. Here you go. Or there's a notation in clear cases, this is not true. Another question, you all ready? What is the difference between speaking falsehoods, knowing they are falsehoods, and repeating a falsehood, believing it to be the honest truth? Will we see a revival of traditional slander at lival loss? That's a great question. Let me tell you, if I may, a little bit about the American constitutional law approach to this and distinguish it from the British. So under current American constitutional law, if I say, let's say about a public figure, let's say Taylor Swift, I like her, so I wouldn't say anything mean about her. But if I said about Taylor Swift, she stole all her songs from Paul McCartney. That's palpably false, so maybe it wouldn't be libelous, but let's say I said it and it was a knowing falsehood and it turned out to be libelous. Under current constitutional law, she could recover damages from me. But if I said that merely negligently, I kind of thought, well, some of her songs sound like Paul McCartney songs, so she probably stole them. And I was negligent, but I didn't know it was false. And I wasn't reckless either. It's just negligent. A public figure can recover for that. That's where we are now. And I use Taylor Swift because it avoids political waters. If someone says with respect to a Republican or Democratic candidate, something that turns out to be false, but they were merely negligent, they weren't lying, and they weren't reckless, meaning they weren't completely unwilling to pursue reasonable sources of information. They were merely negligent. Under current law, carte blanche, you can do it. You can be negligent and spread falsehoods. Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court thinks we have been protecting libel too much. He thinks that the original understanding of the First Amendment was not so speech protective as current constitutional law is. He hasn't gotten a lot of traction on that. He might in the fullness of time. But where we are right now is that for a public figure, Taylor Swift or a politician, people have a lot of room to spread falsehoods about them, so long as they don't know that they're lying. Okay, that goes right to your question. So if someone knows that it's false, if I say something, let's say about a senator knowing that it's false and it is defamatory under standard principles, that politician consume me and recover damages. If I repeat a falsehood believing it to be the truth, that person can't sue me. I've been let's just stipulate. I've been honest in terms of my own understanding of what's true, and I haven't been reckless either. Maybe I was negligent. Maybe I was just an innocent believer in a falsehood, but I can't be sued. My view is the law is not going to change quickly on this. So falsehoods about public figures are generally going to continue to be protected. But I confess I worry about this. So if you say something about Taylor Swift, and this is not only or not mostly because I think she's great, but if you say something about Taylor Swift, that's genuinely damaging to her, and you were negligent, and she says, I want you to retract it, or I want you to pay me a dollar. Do we need in a system of free expression to prohibit her from getting a dollar or to prohibit her from getting a falsehood retracted if it's really damaging? So let's suppose someone says something about a nominee of President Trump, and let's say it's an innocent falsehood, but it's really damaging to that nominee. It might say something about their character, or their marriage, or their willingness to obey the law. It's just false, and it puts them, let's say, in harm's way in multiple respects that they, to show their head in public is much harder, and it was false. To say that Trump nominee can't get a retraction if it's demonstrably false or can't get a dollar, is it clear that that's the right way to go? I'm not sure, especially because falsehoods, and this is Justice Thomas's great point, falsehoods about people who are involved in government, are not just damaging to those people. They can be harmful to the political process, especially if those people are running for office, where citizens should be in a position to make fair evaluations. And Justice Thomas in saying that, by the way, was speaking of old ideas that were around in the founding period, not ideas that he made up. So whether, I don't mean to say whether he's right or he's wrong there, but he is raising fair questions about the idea that negligent or innocent falsehoods should be completely protected. Surely, they should be protected more than knowing lies, but if someone wants a dollar or please, now you know it's false, please say so. Help me out here a little bit. It might be that the right balance isn't obviously where we are. Okay, great. So the final question, which is sad for me because I'm really enjoying this, is how can someone think critically without full transparency of information? Okay, so it's hard, but if you get some information, let's say on your favorite television program that is partial. It might be about COVID-19. It might be about the availability of vaccination. You can still have part of your mind that is thinking, I'm not sure that that's the full picture. You might think I basically trust this newspaper or the station, but I maybe have some reading to do, and that's a great way that people exercise their freedom and show their own capacity for agency. So thank you all for your indulgence, special thanks to the Archivist and to the National Archives. The National Archivist is a national treasure, and the National Archives is even more than that. I'm very grateful for this, and let's vow shall we to keep our critical faculties intact in the next five years and beyond, and let's vow maybe to tell many fewer falsehoods than we would otherwise have told in the next coming months. Thank you.