Opinion | Free Speech Is Killing Us – The New York Times

In 1993 and 1994, talk-radio hosts in Rwanda calling for bloodshed helped create the atmosphere that led to genocide. The Clinton administration could have jammed the radio signals and taken those broadcasts off the air, but Pentagon lawyers decided against it, citing free speech. Its true that the propagandists speech would have been curtailed. Its also possible that a genocide would have been averted.

I am not calling for repealing the First Amendment, or even for banning speech I find offensive on private platforms. What Im arguing against is paralysis. We can protect unpopular speech from government interference while also admitting that unchecked speech can expose us to real risks. And we can take steps to mitigate those risks.

The Constitution prevents the government from using sticks, but it says nothing about carrots.

Congress could fund, for example, a national campaign to promote news literacy, or it could invest heavily in library programming. It could build a robust public media in the mold of the BBC. It could rethink Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act the rule that essentially allows Facebook and YouTube to get away with (glorification of) murder. If Congress wanted to get really ambitious, it could fund a rival to compete with Facebook or Google, the way the Postal Service competes with FedEx and U.P.S.

Or the private sector could pitch in on its own. Tomorrow, by fiat, Mark Zuckerberg could make Facebook slightly less profitable and enormously less immoral: He could hire thousands more content moderators and pay them fairly. Or he could replace Sheryl Sandberg with Susan Benesch, a human rights lawyer and an expert on how speech can lead to violence. Social media companies have shown how quickly they can act when under pressure. After every high-profile eruption of violence Charlottesville, Christchurch and the like tech companies have scrambled to ban inflammatory accounts, take down graphic videos, even rewrite their terms of service. Some of the most egregious actors, such as Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, have been permanently barred from all major platforms.

We need to protect the rights of speakers, John A. Powell, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, but what about protecting everyone else? Mr. Powell was the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and he represented the Ku Klux Klan in federal court. Racists should have rights, he explained. I also know, being black and having black relatives, what it means to have a cross burned on your lawn. It makes no sense for the law to be concerned about one and ignore the other.

Mr. Powell, in other words, is a free-speech advocate but not a free-speech absolutist. Shortly before his tenure as legal director, he said, when women complained about sexual harassment in the workplace, the A.C.L.U.s response would be, Sorry, nothing we can do. Harassment is speech. That looks ridiculous to us now, as it should. He thinks that some aspects of our current First Amendment jurisprudence blanket protections of hate speech, for example will also seem ridiculous in retrospect. Its simpler to think only about the First Amendment and to ignore, say, the 14th Amendment, which guarantees full citizenship and equal protection to all Americans, including those who are harmed by hate speech, he said. Its simpler, but its also wrong.

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Opinion | Free Speech Is Killing Us - The New York Times