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Civil and Uncivil Discourse

The new world of digital media has amplified an old concern: What speech, if any, should be limited? And who should decide?

There’s a trade-off between allowing people to speak in an unfettered way and risking that at some point unfettered speech might veer into the realm of inciting or threatening violence. The rise of the internet and social media have amplified concerns about incendiary speech, but the concern is not new. Political philosophers have debated this trade-off for centuries, with those like John Stuart Mill arguing in favor of erring on the side of an unfettered exchange of ideas.

One famous illustration of this trade-off took place in 1977, when a neo-Nazi group calling itself the National Socialist Party of America made plans to march through the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie. Social media has made the difficult issues presented by events such as this one much more complex. Skokie was about the regulation of public spaces; today, private social media services have become, as former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has written, the “modern public square.” Who should be drawing the lines in the world of social media? Private companies? The government? Both? Does the First Amendment get “canceled” because of social media’s reach? Our society will continue to wrestle with these questions in the coming years.

The spread of disinformation is another challenge that is not new but has been amplified in a digital environment. To some degree, disinformation is covered by existing laws. Defamation laws, for instance, are basically about disinformation. If you write or say something about somebody that is false, that person can sue you, and there’s an adjudication process for deciding whether the speech qualifies as libel or slander.

But when it comes to dealing with misinformation more broadly, the caution I give, and I go back to Mill, is that deciding what is true and what is not requires us to believe that government actors or social media companies are going to make the correct calls in what speech they allow and what speech they suppress. There’s a certain amount of hubris in that kind of thinking. We can look throughout history and find ideas that everybody was certain were true, or certain were false, and it turned out that was not the case. Just think about how knowledge about COVID-19 has evolved in the past year. (Remember when we were told to sanitize our mail?) What’s more, concerns about misinformation can be used as a pretext for suppressing unpopular viewpoints. We should call out claims that are factually false, but suppressing speech doesn’t make the misinformation go away. In fact, it may serve to amplify it.

Currently social media companies are engaging in self-regulation of political speech on their platforms, and many observers believe they are ill-equipped for this role. The question becomes, what’s the alternative? If the government steps in, is the cure going to be worse than the disease? I like to raise this thought experiment: pick the politician you least like and ask yourself whether that politician should oversee the writing of rules governing political speech.

In spite of the obvious challenges digital media poses, I would argue there’s more space for ideas today than there was 20 to 30 years ago, when media gatekeepers essentially controlled the distribution of ideas. Now you don’t need to publish your ideas on the op-ed page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to reach a wide audience. The algorithms that guide what we see in digital spaces are powerful precisely because there is so much more information available. As for the power of the companies that rely on them, the US economy is very dynamic. Just because a company is dominant today doesn’t guarantee that it will be in a few years. History shows us, in fact, that market power is temporary.