Who gets to decide whats allowable speech? – Long Beach Press Telegram

In July, White House press secretary Jen Psaki complained that Facebook wasnt doing enough to shut down discussions of inaccurate vaccine information. The company needs to move more quickly to remove harmful violative posts, she declared.

The official spokesperson for the Biden administration stated that 12 people were responsible for nearly two-thirds of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.

If youre wondering how many government employees spend their time reading and logging social media posts, heres the answer: none of them. The finding came from a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Who are those guys?

The Center for Countering Digital Hate, headquartered in London, describes itself as a not-for-profit NGO [non-governmental organization] that seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation, which includes denial of scientific consensus.

In an introduction to the CCDHs report titled The Disinformation Dozen, CEO Imran Ahmed wrote, Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies.

The report states, Despite repeatedly violating Facebook, Instagram and Twitters terms of service agreements, nine of the Disinformation Dozen remain on all three platforms, while just three have been comprehensively removed from just one platform.

This complaint was echoed by the White House press secretary, who publicly harangued Facebook in particular.

People in London are not obligated to understand the First Amendment, but people speaking on behalf of the U.S. government should recognize the problem with seeking to shut down the speech of Americans discussing matters of public interest, even if those speakers are misinformed.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate may be misinformed itself. Digital spaces have been colonised and their unique dynamics exploited by fringe movements that instrumentalise hate and misinformation, the groups report asserts, using the British spellings. These movements are opportunistic, agile and confident in exerting influence and persuading people.

Persuading people is protected activity under the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is especially vital in relation to issues of immense consequence and public interest, such as COVID-19 and the policies put in place to mitigate public harm. People have very different views of whats necessary and appropriate, and thats just the CDC director every five days.

Is it the Israeli data, in particular, that changed your mind? Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News asked CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky at a White House briefing on Wednesday. The topic was the Biden administrations new plan to recommend COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all adults. Just five days earlier, Wingrove pointed out, she had made a point of saying, repeatedly, that booster shots werent needed for the time.

Heres what Walensky said that prompted the question: Reports from our international colleagues, including Israel, suggest increased risk of severe disease amongst those vaccinated early. Given this body of evidence, we are concerned that the current strong protection against severe infection, hospitalization, and death could decrease in the months ahead.

Five days earlier, that statement would likely have been flagged as misinformation. In fact, Twitter suspended journalist and author Alex Berenson for a week after he wrote posts about the data from Israel.

There are only a few large social media platforms, and if they can be pressured by the government into shutting down speech that officials dont like, for whatever reason, Americans will be deprived of information exactly as if the government was censoring speech directly.

History suggests that this wont last. There was a time when a handful of news editors and producers could shut down coverage of a salacious story about a U.S. president, simply by refusing to allow reports in their pages or on their air. That collegial brotherhood was broken up in the late 1990s when Matt Drudge, who was not a member of the club, published the details of a report that a television network had declined to broadcast.

The story of what President Bill Clinton did with White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public online in The Drudge Report and, as we know, was painstakingly verified as truthful. The mechanism that had controlled the flow of information was shattered.

The three-network era was ended by new technology and new players, and the Facebook-Twitter-YouTube axis will one day be a relic of the past, too. It may happen sooner rather than later, as the tech companies find new ways to irritate absolutely everyone and Congress closes in with proposed anti-trust legislation.

On Wednesday, Facebook Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert put out a statement denying the claim that 12 people were responsible for most of the online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. She criticized the CCDH report for analyzing only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content, a sample that is in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts on the topic of vaccines, but she said the company has now removed the groups, pages and accounts linked to the 12 individuals, as well as limiting others.

So the CCDH got what it wanted. In the words of its report, the CCDHs solutions seek to increase the economic, political and social costs of supporting or profiting from anything it declares to be hate and misinformation.

However, Americans dont have to allow a group in London to define the boundaries of allowable speech. Somewhere in the National Archives theres a document that says that.

Write Susan Shelley: Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.

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Who gets to decide whats allowable speech? - Long Beach Press Telegram