There is no way for an entire industry to police ‘misinformation’ without favoritism, caprice, and, ultimately, profound embarrassment.
There is no way for an entire industry to police ‘misinformation’ without favoritism, caprice, and, ultimately, profound embarrassment.
L ast week, in the space of just a few seconds, the White House press secretary cut the knees out from beneath everyone who has spent the last five years arguing that the shortcomings of Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media enterprises will be best addressed by the free market. “We are in regular touch with social-media platforms,” Psaki said, before confirming that the executive branch was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Unbidden, she then volunteered the coup de grâce: “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there.”
A longstanding response to critics of Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms has been, “if you don’t like them, go build your own.” Of late, this injunction has been hijacked by its targets and turned into a cynical and sardonic scoff, but, despite this appropriation, it has remained the best among the available options. However imperfect and infuriating markets can be, they still represent our best chance to extract ourselves from this mess, not least because the likely result of regulation will not be to weaken the Twitters and Facebooks of the world but to ossify their positions and thereby ensure that they will stick around forever. Despite the overheated rhetoric that one hears from their detractors, none of our major social-media companies are in fact “monopolies,” “utilities,” “common carriers,” or “public fora.” They are standard private companies that operate within a competitive private market and that are subject to the same private pressures as any other outfit. It can be easy to forget, but, in the space of just 20 years, we have gone seamlessly from Friendster to MySpace to Facebook. There is no good reason to assume that this is the endpoint of that evolution, or to believe that the benefits of government oversight will outweigh the flaws.
Unless, that is, Jen Psaki were to get her way — in which case the existing model would need to be considerably rethought. Clearly, a company whose editorial decisions are being routinely manipulated and informed by the federal government can no longer be considered a purely “private” actor, just as an industry whose players admit and reject customers on the basis of a single criterion on a single list cannot be regarded as meaningfully “competitive.” At present, we have an open market within which Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are free to annoy their customers with their moderation policies, and in which those annoyed customers are free to “build their own” Parlers or Rumbles or Substacks in response. Under the system Psaki covets, we would have something closer to a cartel.
Worse, we would have the makings of a national social-credit system, akin to the one on display in Communist China. Naturally, such a scheme would be utterly repugnant to the American order per se. But, in addition to the deleterious effects it would have on free expression and legal equality, it would also be unworkable, for there is simply no way for an entire industry to police “misinformation” without favoritism, caprice, and, ultimately, profound embarrassment. All too often, yesterday’s “misinformation” turns out to be tomorrow’s “well, actually. . . .” Once upon a time, the notion that masks helped protect against COVID-19 was “misinformation,” as were the claims that SARS-CoV-2 spread easily on surfaces and that the pandemic may have originated in a laboratory in China. The opponents of “misinformation” may be sincere in their zeal, but there is nothing special or omniscient about them, and, as such, there is simply no good reason to give them the power to mark American citizens with a digital scarlet letter for having the temerity to disagree with the conventional wisdom of the day.
Nor is there any limiting principle that could keep such a program within tight bounds. The latest freak-out over “misinformation” has been prompted by a desire to increase the COVID-19-vaccination rate and to save lives. Certainly, this is a virtuous aim, but the idea that only this will be deemed sufficiently important to warrant intervention is a bad joke. Almost everyone can identify a debate that they’d like to superintend, and, once the precedent has been set, almost everyone will feel justified in doing so. Reflect for a moment upon how many of the problems in America are described reflexively as a “crisis.” Now imagine the federal government working closely with Silicon Valley to control the contents of the debates over those “crises,” and to decide who may take part in them. It does not take a soothsayer to divine that, under such a system, “dangerous misinformation” would swiftly come to mean anything that even mildly annoyed the incumbent government. Is that really what Jen Psaki wants?
If it is, she ought to think long and hard about why. Last week, Glenn Greenwald was criticized for submitting that the appropriate word for a system in which the government acts in close cooperation with a handful of tightly regulated businesses is “fascism.” But, while that word is indeed fraught, Greenwald was essentially right: Per its classical definition, that’s exactly what fascism is. One suspects that this might have been more obvious to Greenwald’s critics had a press secretary for, say, Donald Trump taken to the White House podium to explain that the federal government was working closely with the big social-media companies to root out what it considered “misinformation” and to propose that those who fell afoul of its definitions should be barred permanently from all available platforms.
Were Psaki the employee of a different president, a barrage of questions would immediately have been thrown the White House’s way: What statute accords the executive branch the power to liaise with social-media companies in order to root out lies? Which executive agency is engaged in this behavior, and by what regulatory mechanism? Are these conversations recorded or disseminated in any way, and can those records be acquired by the public? At what point does the federal government’s deputization of private companies represent a de facto circumvention of the First Amendment? Does Psaki want the White House to be involved in constructing uniform-ban lists? Does she hope that the major players will collude with one another — and, if so, how does she think such collusion will intersect with federal law?
The answers to these questions will tell us a lot about where we’re headed — and why. Now might be a good time for our press corps to circle back.