Like a long-dormant volcano that can no longer contain the geologic pressure building beneath it, New Jersey Star-Ledger guest columnist Linda Stamato, a “planning and public policy” academic at Rutgers University, erupted in a torrent of anti-free speech advocacy that amounts to an effective end to social media. Loaded with the favored, conveniently vague slogans and terms of would-be government censors, Stamato lays out a platform for shackling social media, thereby stifling public expression and debate, effectively muzzling the voices of the common “man-in-the-street.” Following is an annotated analysis of Stamato’s broadside against the First Amendment, published under the innocently titled heading Social media needs rules.
The piece begins with this subheading:
Social media platforms have imploded with misinformation and hate. Linda Stamato makes a case for some sort of regulation and a restoration of trust in digital content for these platforms to truly function as public squares.
Stamato establishes her fascist bonafides right off the bat. Social media platforms are not public squares. They are private for-profit companies. She claims that their wildly popular platforms have “imploded.” By what standard? She gives a hint with insertion of the terms “misinformation and hate,” favorite buzzwords of politicians who want to stifle opinions of constituents they disagree with or don’t approve of. When she calls for “some sort of regulation and a restoration of trust in digital content for these platforms to truly function as public squares,” she’s saying that these companies must operate according to government edict, not their own market-oriented judgment. Government bureaucrats sensitive to political pressure, not company moderators sensitive to consumer tastes, will call the shots.
Stamato then opens her article with a quote:
“The rise of social media has “unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.” ― Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, May, 2022. [sic]
How will government control of what we can say foster trust, when the government becomes the tool of those who want to silence us? Doesn’t the democratic process depend on free-wheeling intellectual freedom of expression? Not according to some, apparently. Apparently, our belief in the institutions will be enhanced when we empower these institutions to dictate what we can and cannot say on their newly created “public squares.” Note that “institutions” is left unidentified. But given that Stamato is advocating government control, we can rationally infer she has government institutions in mind.
The platforms do provide spaces for people to achieve much that can be positive, but, with their destructive influence growing, social media platforms continue to fall far short as digital public squares.
Here Stamato is laying the groundwork for utility-scale government control. Electric, water, and gas utility monopolies are bad enough. But social media lies at the intersection of economic and intellectual freedoms. By regulating social media like traditional public utilities, the government is not just restricting economic freedom. It is directly attacking intellectual freedom. To repeat, social media platforms are not public squares. They are private marketplaces of communication and ideas.
Then the question arises; Destructive? To Whom?
If consumers view a platform as “destructive,” whatever that means, they can leave the platform and go to another, all of which are subject to market competition. Where will they go when the government becomes destructive?
What Stamato really means is “destructive” in the government’s eyes. Social media is certainly “destructive” in the sense that they water down the influence of political, academic, and media elites. The elites’ waning influence in the face of “we the peoples'” newly-expanded, social media empowered ability of influence is competition at work. The statist elites in politics, academia, and traditional mainstream media don’t like being held accountable. They long for the intellectual dominance they enjoyed before social media came along, and unleashed the people at large. Now that the “average Joe '' has been given their own platforms to publish as they please, thanks to the Facebooks and the Googles and the Twitters, the elites are angling for a way to reign them in.
Reforms and regulations are sorely needed. And they may get a prod from the U.S. Supreme Court as it appears poised to reconsider the rules governing online speech, not least those limiting social media’s liability.
Stamato is referring to a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The rule that limits social media liability is Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. That rule basically holds that the individual subscriber is the publisher, not the company. Since only the publisher is liable for his content, the platform operator—e.g. Facebook—is thus shielded from most lawsuits. It is the law that enabled social media to flourish, to the benefit of billions of people. This is the source of the regular person’s newfound power of widely disseminated expression. Making the platform company liable would force them to greatly stifle that popular power, for fear of lawsuits stemming from speech they did not post. Ultimately, it is the common citizen, not the big online social media companies, that the statists are after.
Bringing attention to the need is none other than Elon Musk as his acquisition of major player, Twitter, implodes, with content moderators either fired or abandoning ship and suspended accounts, as extremists and promoters of misinformation and conspiracy theories test Twitter’s boundaries.
Here Stamato pulls the old bait-and-switch. There is a fundamental, critical difference between government and private action—between political power and economic power. Political power is the power of force and coercion. Economic power is only market power that derives from voluntary consumer choices to buy the product.
Equivocating the two dismisses this crucial difference. Musk’s Twitter, or any private media company, can and should be free to moderate content on their platforms as they see fit. In fact, it is their First Amendment right to do so. Freedom of speech includes the right not to promote speech one doesn’t agree with. The issue here—the issue that Stamato seeks to hide—is government “moderation” of private speech, which is definitely forbidden by the First Amendment. The government has no role in regulating speech. It may only step in if the “speech” is directly and objectively linked to rights-violating criminal activity, in which case it is not the speech but the action that is at issue.
Blurring the distinction between economic and political power—philosopher Harry Binswanger more accurately refers to it as The Dollar and the Gun—serves the statists well. But the equivocation is dishonest and fraudulent—an example of the very misinformation that Stamato claims to want to fight.
Stamato goes on to list a litany of unsavory content from the likes of popular media sites Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google. She throws the obscure Gab, “the extremist, far-right social media platform,” into the mix, apparently to highlight her political leanings (what about extremist, far-Left social media platforms?).
Conclusions, in short, are these: Social media platforms amplify political polarization, foment populism — especially right-wing populism — and are associated with the spread of misinformation and acts connected to violence.
“Polarization” is defined as “a state in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes.” “Extremes” is not defined. Yes, some violent fringe groups can be labeled “extreme.” But the clash between Capitalism and Socialism are also extremes. The middle of the “continuum” as it relates to politics is a mixture of two extremes, Capitalism and Socialism, known as the mixed economy. The purpose of demonizing political polarization is not to expose fringe nutcases but to shut down identification and debate on legitimate, fundamental, principled, consistent adherents of opposing opinions, beliefs, or interests. The underlying debate of our age, individualism vs. collectivism, can be called political polarization. Most issues today are a mix of these two extremes. Since the first leads to Capitalism and a free society, and the second leads to socialism and a totalitarian state, identifying the extremes at the root of these issues is crucial. Resolving controversial political issues requires identification of the extremes involved. But that would be “political polarization,” and thus forbidden, by Stamato’s standard.
The impact of social media use on the mental health of its users, particularly adolescents and young adults, is striking. Researchers were able to establish a significant link, for example, between the presence of Facebook and the deterioration in mental health among college students.
As more people come to believe the world is full of fake news, moreover, trust, an essential element in successful democracies, wanes. And as other critical elements of our national well-being unravel, faith in the nation’s institutions; support for its pluralistic values threatened by anti-immigrant vitriol and conspiracies; revisions of history to privilege some citizens and damage others; and an erosion of belief in the benefit of diversity to the nation’s social and economic good — America itself is under siege, by enemies within.
So the government is to exert control over what it deems acceptable for mental health, the news we consume, our values, history, and the appropriate relative social mixes of races, genders, et al. These are crucial issues that should be open to expression and debate, unfettered by government controls. Yet that public debate is exactly what Stamato’s regulatory barrage is targeting. The enemies within America are not the people posting on social media, not even the nasty ones, not even the criminals who use social media as a vehicle for their nefarious activities. Individual liberty defines America. The enemies within are the people who want to stifle that liberty. What’s left of America then? This is a prescription for a totalitarian state. But, of course, I shouldn’t say that. That is too polarizing.
The struggle of print newspapers to attract and retain readers as their presence shrinks and the increasing fragmentation of news in our digital era make matters worse.
This points directly to one underlying motive for stifling the internet—The big social media companies are strong competition for traditional mainstream media. Could it be the print media sees regulation as a means of hampering their competition? Intellectual elites in politics, academia, and traditional mainstream media have lost much influence, and are trying to resurrect the intellectual dominance they enjoyed before social media “fragmented”—i.e, opened up to competition, or democratized—the media landscape. True, some print newspapers struggle to survive, or outright fail, in the new competitive market. So what? True, some lunatics and nutcases get a voice on social media that they couldn’t muster before. But so do truth-seekers able to use their newly powerful countervoices. As former ACLU head Nadine Strossen urges, we should counter bad ideas and hate with our own free speech, not censorship.
Given the scope and quality of the research on social media platforms that we have now — the distortions of truth that anonymous voices post, forward, tweet and re-tweet to maximize the damage —and acknowledging the fact that the platforms are largely unconstrained by commitments to protect the public interest, we can’t fail to act.
Now we’re getting to the meat of Sramato’s design: What does it mean ”to protect the public interest?” What does it mean that social media should be “constrained” to protect the public interest? The public is only a conglomeration of individuals, each of whom has their own interests. The public interest can only be objectively defined by consideration of the interests of all individual members of the public. But in Stamato’s context, public interest means the interests of the state as determined by whatever political faction happens to have weaseled their way into control of the apparatus empowered to define the “public” interest. When someone says they want to regulate speech “in the public interest,” she means that some people’s interests are to be imposed at the expense of the interests of others. This means one thing—government censorship. When Stamato identifies social media platforms as “unconstrained by commitments to protect the public interest,” she means not obedient to the dictates of the state. Private businesses are committed to satisfying consumers. Stamato wants to replace the consumer with the state.
So what do we do? Regulating state by state, nation by nation, when the challenges facing us are national and global, might seem to make little sense, but regulation within smaller units can have broad impact, much as, say, California’s emission requirements for cars, that, being higher than any state or federal standard, prompted automakers to produce vehicles to meet the higher standard. [My emphasis.]
Here, Stamato seems to be resurrecting the old Marxian Communist dream of a global dictatorship. The “world interest,” not just the “national interest,” would be the standard. Imposed by whom? Some world authority? This means we are not merely to consider the interests of the U.S. government, where at least generally strong public support for First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech remains to constrain the government’s censorious impulses. We must also commit to protecting the “national interests” of governments from the likes of Communist Cuba and North Korea, the Ayatollahs of theocratic Iran, and the fascist dictators of China and Venezuela. Stamato seems intent on imposing her authoritarian intellectual controls by any means necessary.
A proposal, in Regulatory Review, to combine government regulation with pressure on companies to self-regulate is a sound and savvy approach that includes both incentives and liabilities:
Vest enforcement power over the “terms of service” of each social media company in the FCC, the FTC and the SEC, and force adherence by the government through litigation that involves fines against not only the companies but also against their CEOs, other executives and members of their boards of directors.
And there you have it. The emphasis is Stamato’s, not mine. This underscores the fact that the totalitarian speech controls to be imposed on the average American social media participant should not be misunderstood, or underestimated. Stamato and her ilk mean it.They will control directly through existing government agencies, who will be granted vast new powers. And what they can’t get away with controlling directly and openly, the politicians will control through proxy censorship by extortion—that is, by threats of regulatory control and/or criminal prosecution against not only the companies but against executives and board directors personally.* Try to speak your mind on Facebook or Twitter while the management is living under this reign of terror.
Please don’t remind me that a lot of nasty stuff is posted on social media. Most, while disgusting and offensive, are harmless. It can be ignored, or combatted with counter-speech.
True, some may be criminal. But the government already has the prosecutorial tools of criminal law, such as subpoena power and obstruction of justice laws, to deal with that. And yes, some ugly speech can be materially harmful to some people’s reputations. But we already have laws against slander, libel, and extortion to deal with that. But outside of these narrow, objectively provable crimes, which are handled by the judicial system, the government has no legitimate role whatsoever in regulating the internet—especially on the broad, undefined, undefinable scope advocated by Stamato.
And please don’t remind me that these platforms can serve as vehicles for criminal activity. That’s true. But so can restaurants; so do the roads; so does the post office; so does the phone system—all of which can be vehicles or “platforms” used for plotting and carrying out crimes. Are the restaurant industry, the taxpayers who own the roads and the government that administers them, the U.S. Post office, or the phone companies to be held liable because their venues were used to carry out criminal activity? Of course not, and neither should the social media companies. The criminals are responsible, no one else. The government, not those institutions, is responsible for protecting individual rights and prosecuting criminals. Social media companies should not be held hostage to the government’s attempt to escape its responsibility of protecting individual rights.
But that’s exactly Stammato’s design.
Of course, the media companies can restrain this stuff themselves through their own community standards. It’s their property, after all. They can ban racial epithets and profanity, for example. If they flag potential criminal activity, they can, and should, notify the authorities. As to alleged misinformation and the like, free people can and should do their own fact checking. Delegating that responsibility to the government is classic letting the fox guard the henhouse. A fully free marketplace of ideas, debate, and communication is the best, and only legitimate, path to truth-seeking.
Even if the government officials use their powers of censorship with restraint and are well-intentioned—which is highly unlikely—just giving the government these powers means future administrations with dictatorial designs would have a ready tool to consolidate power. This is not just hypothetical. Heidi Tworek, writing for The Atlantic, documents what happened when Weimar Germany’s 1920s control of media fell into the hands of the Hitler regime. In A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media, Tworek warns:
Radio only became central to Nazi aims after Hitler was elected chancellor in January 1933, but [Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph] Goebbels quickly exercised power over the medium, because the state already controlled its infrastructure and content. State control over radio had been intended to defend democracy. It unintentionally laid the groundwork for the Nazi propaganda machine.
My emphasis. Some version of what happened in Germany is where Stamato wants to lead America. Please don’t tell me that Linda Stamato doesn’t mean that. Monstrous mistakes of this size aren’t made innocently. “Misinformation,” “hate speech,” “conspiracies,” “fake news,” “public interest,” “polarization,” “extremism,” “protection” of democracy or marginalized groups, and other conveniently vague and malleable terms and slogans are the leitmotifs of power-hungry, anti-individual rights demagogues, and Stamato employs the whole enchilada of statist rationalizations. Stamato’s angry, hissing op-ed is a catchall designed for tyrants of every stripe, every motivation, and every pet scheme to avoid accountability to the American public. In pushing his own anti-free speech scheme, former New Jersey representative Tom Malinowski explicitly captured the spirit of Stamato’s broadside against liberty. In defending his own pet scheme, the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act, Malinowski made his intent brutally clear. Referring to what he believes is the need to stop “Political extremism, white supremacy [and] domestic terrorism” that social media allegedly promotes, Malinowski raged:
This has absolutely got to change. And if they don’t do it voluntarily, we’re going to have to regulate them to death.
My emphasis.
“Regulate them to death.” Keep that in mind—that, from a then-sitting United States Congressman!
The rest of Stamato’s tirade covers nuts and bolts of the legal initiatives she advocates. Whatever opinions one may have about any particular detail, Stamato’s intention is crystal clear—to neuter the First Amendment, crush intellectual freedom in America, and fine or jail social media company executives if they don’t control their customers’ speech according to the whims of government officials. This is not hyperbolic. These are Stamato’s, and Malinowski’s own words.
Freedom of speech is the protector of all of our liberty rights. If that goes, all of our rights are endangered, because we the people lose our individual capacity to intellectually fight for and protect them.
Stamato hammers away unabashedly in her conclusion, leaving no doubt, as if we still had any, of her tyrannical ends:
Society will benefit, moreover, from digital public space when we manage, with the cooperation of social media, to harness the technology to serve the constructive ends of institutions, agencies, organizations, governments and individuals. We may come to see, then, what society and the platforms also require: user trust in digital content.
My emphasis.
So, our “free speech” is to be “harnessed”—there’s a slave term if there ever was one—to advance the interests of elites in institutions, agencies, organizations, governments, and of politically connected individuals. Forget about expressing and advancing your own interests, fellow American citizens. You have been officially excommunicated from the public interest. No need for our “destructive influences.” “Cooperation” is an interesting term to describe a social media industry forced, by law and backroom extortion, to do as the government says.
Stamato and her ilk ignore the fact that anyone can simply tune out the peddlers of genuine hateful, offensive, or disrespectful rhetoric. Others can counter it with rebuttals. By censoring speech, the government is banishing ideas it doesn’t approve of, denying choice and opportunity to common people. After all, these big powerful social media sites are just a click away—or away from getting out of. The fact that this ugly piece of totalitarian nonsense was published is not a good sign for the preservation of free speech. The First Amendment is not enough. It must have broad cultural support, including from the institutions most directly dependent on it. In that regard it is particularly disturbing that it was published in a major newspaper, the NJ Star-Ledger. Perhaps the Star-Ledger is thinking it can harm its competition. But this is dangerously delusional and short-sighted. Once the censors have destroyed social media, and thus the free speech of the ordinary citizen, they’ll surely come after the major newspapers next.
Stamato’s broadside against internet freedom of speech is extensive. The damage to internet freedom that the broad powers Stamato would grant to the government could be catastrophic. Chris Stokel-Walker, writing for the Washington Post, warned of the dangers:
Britain’s example should be a warning to everyone in the United States about the dangers of bad tech regulation. Given the central role that the big tech platforms play in our lives, its deeply problematic that regulation could head down a reactionary path without a proper consideration of what we really want to achieve.
Or, I would add, prevent. If the likes of the Star-Ledger will not defend free speech—and it’s not the only one—it’s even more imperative that we as individual citizens step up. If you are tempted to cite the nasty and disrespectful content to say “that should be legally restricted, but otherwise I’m all for free speech,” you are with the enemy, not free speech. Middle-of-the-road mushiness won’t do. All speech must be defended, or none is. Stamato, Trump, Biden, Malinowski, and all of their statist ilk should be told in no uncertain terms, Keep You Filthy Totalitarian Mitts Off of Our Social Media.
* [They already do it covertly. Stamato would legalize it.]
Related Reading:
Social Media and the Future of Civil Society -- Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard
Many of the bureaucrats and commentators behind these laws and initiatives against social-media companies share essentially the same tactic. They blame social-media companies for not doing what governments are supposed to do—protect individual rights—and then rationalize that this supposed failure is grounds for doing what governments are not supposed to do—violate individual rights.
Censorship-By-Proxy is Real, and it's Here
The End of the Free Internet Is Near: The idea that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone has been turned on its head. -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH for Reason
HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen
Review of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media by Michael Dahlen for The Objective Standard
A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media By Heidi Tworek for The Atlantic
Trump Joins Biden in War on the Average Person’s Newfound Power to be Heard
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