Freedom of Speech and the Disinformation Machine
At the present moment, a civil libertarian such as myself is in a painful position.. Shoshana Zuboff and Masha Gessen , among others, have pointed out that with the apotheosis of the Internet, truthful speech has lost its preferred position as a mode of communication. It does not emerge from competition in the market-place of ideas, as John Stuart Mill and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes posited. The market-place of ideas is now a battlefield, with no-man’s land in between. And as C. Day Lewis put it in a poem that summed up the pre-World War II situation, “Only a Ghost/Can live between two fires.”
The immediate fact is this: In a recent survey, “only 16 percent of self-identified Republicans believe that Biden won the election fairly, while 71 percent believe that it was stolen from Donald Trump: a Big Lie that is pounded into them nightly on Fox Television. And if the seemingly newsworthy lies of Fox pall, they can move on, as many millions do, to the Right-wing Net and its world of even bigger lies and conspiratorial fantasies; in which on such sites as Qanon and others, their opponents are identified as Satanists, pedophiles, and agents of a murderous “Deep State;” and are identified as legitimate targets for killing and rape.
The assault is endless. As New York Times reporters wrote about the origins and spread of the original lie that Antifa and Black Lives Matter were really behind January 6th, “What happened over the next 12 hours illustrated the speed and the scale of a right-wing disinformation machine primed to seize on a lie that served its political interests and quickly spread it as truth to a receptive audience.” What to do in the face of that?
This is the apotheosis of hatred; nothing is beyond its scope. How then to deal with the monopolistic social media, which claim that as common carriers rather than licensees they are not responsible for what is posted on them: or else we put them in the position of adjudicating appeals for censorship. Anyone who would accept an appointment to that position is not qualified to hold it. As Marx wrote, “who will guard the Guardians?”
The Dominion Corporation has shown a partial way out of this, with its lawsuits against Fox News hosts for spreading the libel that their voting machines were used in a conspiracy to steal the election; the Smartmatic company has followed with its own actions. I hope everyone the two corporations have sued is bankrupted, but that’s not a long-run answer.
Who is Hillary Clinton going to sue for posting the accusation that she’s the head of a pedophile ring and should be raped or decapitated? And there are not “two sides” to it. Indeed, to dial back to what seems by comparison a world of normalcy, namely Fox Television, reveals a picture is almost as bleak. It has the two most popular opinion makers in the nation, after all. Whoever is reading this, what do you make of that?
And It’s not as though its viewers are being presented with what has been called by some an “alternate version of reality” to that of CNN and MSNBC, between which they may choose. No, they are being presented with a denial of reality; of the entire realm of moral and intellectual discourse to which we have become accustomed with so much travail. We could be back in 19th Century Hungary for the ritual murder trial of a Jew. No difference.
In any event, the deeper, and more frightening problem is this. It was recently reported in The Guardian that “The domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was poised to declare the far-right Alternative for Germany Party a “suspected case” of antidemocratic extremist activity. The party’s anti-immigrant and anti-Islam talk has emboldened far-right extremists, and some of its officials have ties to extremist groups.” And the question has been raised–as well it might be–“Should a government agency put a democratically elected political party under surveillance if the party is feared to be a threat to the democratic order?”
The Germans, to be sure, have a deeper understanding of the issues involved than do we Americans. But in one respect that’s a misleading comparison. The neo-Nazi mass in Germany is represented by a third party. Here it is mobilized by officials of one of the two major parties in a two-party system. What is now the mainstream of the Republican Party is worse than the Alternative For Germany. It is headed by, and swears fealty to, the most popular leader in the U.S., who has totalitarian ambitions and will let nothing stand in his way: a would-be Fuhrer.
Its most prominent spokespersons have happily internalized the partial truth that all interpretations are ideological, that facts have to be interpreted, and that therefore no reporting on mass media is completely innocent. This semi-understanding has been converted into a weapon aimed at the destruction of truth and facts, and their supersession by the quest for total power. The traditional GOP is supine, seems to exist to do nothing but harry the Biden, and puts up with or even accepts the movement to limit the suffrage, and reject democracy. Its intellectual stance consists of hand-wringing. The mega-donors who own it (e.g., fossil fuel) have no interest in or liking for democracy per se; they’d happily do without it. They want only to preserve the tax gift that Trump’s GOP gave them, And on the ground, it is the white nationalists, the American neo-Nazis who are making the running. The so-called Republicans are functioning as blocking backs. A perfect storm.
In France and Germany, by comparison, there is still some debate about immigration, for instance, though even there the situation gets steadily worse. In the U.S., debate and discourse is limited to Democrats and one small and powerless segment of the G.O.P. Donald Trump and Steve Miller and Donald Trump, Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Green and Josh Hawley and other leaders of the mob are not interested in pursuing the question of whether immigrants are rapists and killers, whether they sponge off welfare, whether they are Islamic terrorists. Those are useful things to say in the quest for power, so they will go on saying or believing them. They desire only a coup d’état, nothing less.
For all of them now, the only burning question is Lenin’s Who/Whom? They are Leninists of the Right, though utterly without Lenin’s philosophical and critical underpinnings, For his “a pistol in the hands of a policeman is an instrument of oppression, a pistol in the hands of a proletarian is an instrument of liberation,” they substitute “a pistol in the hands of a policeman means you better shut your mouth.”
They do not propose, as would Mill, that they have rights because they are a minority, let alone a minority of one, but because they are truly, if only you’d listen, a virtuous majority and not an iniquitous minority; and have been denied what is therefore the rightful place in the autocratic sun. And you therefore lose your rights, such as freedom of lying speech, to the, once they become the possessors of ownership and control.
A. J. Liebling famously remarked: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Updating him, we have to ask, What use are gun rights to to the person who has none? Are we going to find out?
Follow-Up
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Wednesday that it planned to lift its ban on political advertising across its network, resuming a form of digital promotion that has been criticized for spreading misinformation and falsehoods and inflaming voters.
