We noted on Saturday, April 9th, that Ellen Pao, a tech investor and advocate, the resigned-before-she-could-be-fired CEO of Reddit, and a cofounder and CEO of the diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include, and someone who uses her freedom of speech and of the press to maintain her own website, used her freedom of speech and of the press — in that case, The Washington Post’s freedom of the press — to attack other people’s freedom of speech and of the press. That irony seemed to escape her.
Now comes Robert B Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com, using his freedom of speech, and The Guardian’s freedom of the press, to tell us that if you support freedom of speech and of the press, you’re no better than Vladimir Putin!
The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies.
Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was.
At least the US responded to Trump’s lies. Trump had 88 million Twitter followers before Twitter took him off its platform – just two days after the attack on the Capitol, which he provoked, in part, with his tweets. (Trump’s social media accounts were also suspended on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch and TikTok.)
These moves were necessary to protect American democracy. But Elon Musk – the richest man in the world, with 80 million Twitter followers – wasn’t pleased. Musk tweeted that US tech companies shouldn’t be acting “as the de facto arbiter of free speech”.
They were? Did not our legal system prevail following the January 6th Capitol kerfuffle, a ‘coup d’etat’ so serious that none of the protesters were even armed?
Musk continues to tell his 80 million followers all sorts of things. I disagree with many of his positions, but ever since I posted a tweet two years ago criticizing him for how he treated his Tesla workers he has blocked me – so I can’t view or post criticisms of his tweets to his followers.
Seems like an odd move for someone who describes himself as a “free speech absolutist”. Musk advocates free speech but in reality it’s just about power.
Freedom of speech means more than just the freedom to speak; it also means that someone has the freedom not to speak, or not to speak to certain people. Perhaps Mr Musk ought to have a thicker skin, something Mr Musk has said himself about other people, and President Trump was himself sued by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, more than once, for blocking some people from his Twitter account, but Mr Musk was exercising his First Amendment rights.
Power compelled Musk to buy $2.64bn of Twitter stock, making him the largest individual shareholder. Last week, Twitter announced that Musk would be joining Twitter’s board of directors, prompting Musk to promise “significant improvements” in the platform.
Sunday evening, though, it was announced that Musk would not be joining Twitter’s board. No reason was given but it’s probably part of a bargaining kabuki dance.
Musk wouldn’t have plopped down $2.64bn for nothing. If he is not on Twitter’s board, he’s not bound by a “standstill” agreement in which he pledged to buy no more than 14.9% of Twitter’s stock. Musk now faces no limit on how much of Twitter’s stock he can buy. He’ll buy as much as he needs to gain total control.
Who knows, maybe he will or maybe he won’t, but Dr Reich’s statement was a declarative one, that Mr Musk ‘will buy’ — ‘will’ taken from Dr Reich’s contraction — as much Twitter stock as he needs for total control.
What “improvements” does Musk have in mind for Twitter? Will he use his clout over Twitter to prevent users with tens of millions of followers from blocking people who criticize them? I doubt it.
Will Musk use his clout to let Trump back on? I fear he will.
Fear! Dr Reich fears that Mr Trump will be able to again speak to people who want to listen to him. And in that, Dr Reich is telling us that he wants to restrict Mr Trump’s freedom of speech and of the press, and that he wants to prevent people who might want to listen to what our 45th President has to say. 74,216,154 Americans voted for Mr Trump in November of 2020, but Dr Reich believes that they should not be allowed to listen to what he has to say on the most easily accessed method of doing so.
Mr Trump led a populist movement in the electorate, and if there’s one thing that Patricians don’t like, it’s the plebeians having a say in government or society or life.
Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an “uncontrolled” internet. That vision is dangerous rubbish. There’s no such animal, and there never will be.
That, of course, does not mean that there shouldn’t be.
Under 47 USC §230 of the Communications Decency Act, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, my site hosting service is not liable for anything I publish, and I am not liable for anything a commenter here says, though I would protect myself by removing anything that I saw as legally liable by a commenter as soon as I saw it.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote:
CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.
The legal protections provided by CDA 230 are unique to U.S. law; European nations, Canada, Japan, and the vast majority of other countries do not have similar statutes on the books. While these countries have high levels of Internet access, most prominent online services are based in the United States. This is in part because CDA 230 makes the U.S. a safe haven for websites that want to provide a platform for controversial or political speech and a legal environment favorable to free expression.
EFF works to ensure strong legal protections for Internet intermediaries and endeavors to fight threats that would weaken such protections for intermediaries and users. We realize that a combination of technology policy and law protecting intermediaries ultimately helps uphold freedom of speech online.
Who knows what Mr Trump might say, were he allowed back on Twitter? He might even tweet something libelous, for which he could be sued, or he might ask for votes — something not at all illegal — or he might just post photos of Barron Trump at the beach in Florida. But what Twitter and the other social media have done is to exercise prior restraint, not knowing in advance what Mr Trump might say.
Musk talks about freedom of speech but his real power is freedom of reach – reaching 80 million Twitter followers without accountability to anyone (including critics like me) – and enough money to buy himself a seat on Twitter’s board.
Musk has never believed that power comes with responsibility. He’s been unperturbed when his tweets cause real suffering. During his long and storied history with Twitter he has threatened journalists and tweeted reckless things.
In March 2020 he tweeted that children were “essentially immune” to Covid. He has pushed cryptocurrencies that he’s invested in. When a college student started a Twitter account to track Musk’s private plane, Musk tried and failed to buy him off, before blocking him.
If Mr Musk uses Twitter to do something illegal, he can be prosecuted for it; if he uses it libelously, he can be sued for it. But what Dr Reich is advocating is prior restraint.
(H)ow does the SEC go after Musk’s ability to tweet now that he owns Twitter?
Shades of Minority Report, a 2002 movie in which a specialized police force apprehends criminals before they commit their crimes based on foreknowledge provided by psychics. In asking how the SEC can “go after Musk’s ability to tweet,” he is asking how the SEC can restrict Mr Musk’s freedom of speech and of the press in advance of anything he might tweet that could be legally actionable.
In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain – projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone.
In reality, that world would be dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.
That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.
Some of us might thing that restrictions on speech would constitute a “brave new nightmare.”
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which Dr Reich referenced in his concluding sentence, society is wholly engineered through artificial wombs and childhood indoctrination programs into predetermined castes based on intelligence and labor; it is a society in which everything is controlled and dissent trampled upon.
Is this what Dr Reich wants, a world of sameness and regulation? He was certainly active in using his freedom of speech and of the press to criticize the government when Donald Trump was President, and now he “fear(s)” that Mr Trump might be able to speak to those who have supported him again. His solution to all of that? To restrict the freedoms he has exercised when exercised by people he just doesn’t like.