There is a lot of buzz about Threads, Meta’s new Twitter competitor. More than 70 million users have joined Threads in the last few days, and Joyce Vance gushes, “Threads can play a vital role in our civil discourse by providing an alternative town square where accurate information can be responsibly shared. If the new platform commits to good moderation, the kind that Twitter used to aspire to providing pre-Elon, it can make it easier for those who want to be informed consumers of information [to] educate themselves.”
As a journalist rather than an attorney, I question that statement. Twitter, and now Threads, are not the kind of reliable news sources that genuine news publications aspire to be. Yes, the posts can quickly get the word out on developing news (and many reporters have relied on Twitter for story leads), but those posts are rarely from neutral sources. Content moderation, as we learned from the real investigative reporting on the Twitter Files, has suppressed true but inconvenient information from dissidents and whistleblowers, not just the falsities that could be debunked in true civil discourse. Censorship, as we have frequently pointed out, only propels interest in the censored material and promotes anger at the censors.
Threads is gathering momentum not only due to Elon Musk’s clumsy and self-destructive handling of Twitter but also to Meta’s competitive advantage from having two billion existing Facebook and Instagram users. People log into Threads using their Instagram accounts, and Meta can use its existing platforms to promote Threads. Yet those platforms exist to harvest and sell user data. Shoshana Zuboff, a privacy expert at Harvard, pointed out, “They’re not only the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed, but they’ve institutionalized a new form of profound inequality…. Threads is simply another property in a global surveillance empire.”
Substack Notes is not a serious competitor to Twitter or Threads, but at least it claims to allow writers to post without fear of censorship. With all due respect to Joyce Vance and to historian Heather Cox Richardson, who writes Letters from an American — and both of whom I rely upon for important perspectives that shed light on what is happening in America — it is full freedom of expression that is essential to liberty and to our democratic way of life.
Heather agreed with Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe in his opinion that the U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the government from interacting with social media platforms in an attempt “to suppress speech based on its content” is “blatantly unconstitutional”. He stated, “Censoring a broad swath of vital communications between government and social media platforms in the name of combating censorship makes a mockery of the first amendment.”
The First Amendment was adopted specifically to prevent the government from controlling what is said and written. Historian Colleen A. Sheehan, author of James Madison and the Spirit of Republican Self-Government, says that, for Madison, viewed as the architect of Constitution, “the circulation of newspapers throughout the country was a critical piece of how he imagined free government working in the U.S.” In 1791, the year his Bill of Rights was ratified, Madison wrote that public opinion “sets bounds to every government, and is the real sovereign in every free one.”
That First Amendment right to a free press was not popular with all government leaders. John Adams famously hated the press, writing in the margins of a copy of Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet’s treatise Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind that “There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798.”
Condorcet’s views were very different. His 1795 text “expanded upon the belief that a press free from censorship would circulate an open debate of ideas, with rationality and truth winning out.”
It is the fear that rationality will fail that underlies the support for content moderation on social media sites. The Supreme Court properly dismissed that concern this year and back during its landmark decision in New York Times Co. v. United States, that affirmed the First Amendment right of free press against prior restraint in the government’s attempts to prevent the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. Rather than being “blatantly unconstitutional”, this month’s decision affirmed constitutional rights.
That leaves the question of what to do about the outright lies that can spread in a free exchange of ideas. The traditional answer, that rationality will win out, can seem inadequate when one is faced with the possibility (likelihood?) that another Trump presidency would bring in a fascist government. It is little consolation that, in the past, democracy eventually ended Hitler’s Third Reich or Senator Joseph McCarthy’s maniacal pursuit of communists. The utopian view that, with proper moderation, all future oppression will end is, like all utopian ideals, an unattainable goal. The more people feel their views are being ignored, the greater their numbers will be, and they will come to see rebellion as the only choice.
Allowing free expression and responding to the claims with honest debate has made the United States the strong country it is, and if it is to remain strong, that tradition must continue, regardless of how messy it can be in the short term.
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