There was some good news this week about the future of public debate. The U.S. Supreme Court appeared ready to give the Biden administration the go-ahead to persuade social media platforms not to publish content promoting nonsense and conspiracy theories about the presidential election, despite a large right-wing presence. . Pandemic and other various bilges and breakables.
Missouri and Louisiana accused the government of suppressing speech by pressuring platforms to downgrade or delete posts. But the justices, including conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, did not appear to support that.
good. Hopefully, the court's final decision will show the plaintiffs where to land. That would be a victory for internet regulation. But no one should get too excited. The genie is already out of the bottle and there is little chance of it going back in. It is more likely that extreme free speech will continue to be tolerated, paving the way for more Donald Trumps.
The advent of the internet and social media platforms has brought that to an extreme. They created a tsunami of freedom of expression. Although we still hear complaints about the lack of free speech, these platforms have provided the public with more freedom of speech than ever before.
When other communications revolutions occurred, such as the printing press, radio, and television, they were still largely controlled by elites. But with the advent of the Internet, regulatory bodies such as Canada's CRTC stepped back. It was an open season for anyone to put out anything they wanted. No license required. No identity verification.
It's a far cry from the days when the public had no outlet other than “street interviews,” letters to the editor, and protest placards. We have moved from one extreme to the other.
The masses were finally weaponized – not with weapons, but with means of communication that gave them power over regime forces like never before. This change represented one of the major power shifts in history.
What a great democratic advance that so many people were given megaphones. But it came with a pretty big irony. Freedom of speech has become both an enabler and a destroyer of democracy.
The internet dumped megatons of untreated sewage into public squares, unchecked. With the removal of filters that have been in place for years, a ton of misinformation and disinformation has emerged. And propaganda, polarization, and child pornography. and intimidation, prejudice and conspiracies against leaders.
Would the rise of the far right and Trump have been possible if the internet had been given guardrails? Not a chance. Thanks to the internet, he gained his 88 million Twitter followers until his account was suspended in 2021. This gave us the freedom to bypass traditional media and create an alternate world, the Smear Sphere, where we could lie and escape as if we were breathing.
The Internet has shaken up the established newspaper business model, drastically reducing print and reporting volumes, creating a void for Trump and his ilk to fill. His rallying cry against fake news, well described in former Washington Post editor-in-chief Martin Barron's book A Clash of Powers, has had the effect of fragmenting the media landscape into left-right silos, leading to extreme This contributed to the polarization.
The way to reverse this trend is through strict regulation, but the free speech lobby in the United States is as fierce as the gun lobby. The internet's historic victory for free speech has been largely forgotten. Amnesiacs cry for censorship. Trump recently comically accused Joe Biden of being out to “kill free speech in America.”
A New York Times analysis this week detailed that Biden had intentions to regulate big tech companies, but largely abandoned them in the face of opposition from the free speech lobby.
In Canada, the Trudeau government's attempts at regulation have been met with fierce opposition, and in some cases understandably so, with bills such as Bill C-63 going too far in requiring life sentences for speech crimes and re-drafting. This is because it is necessary.
But the dangers of a deregulated infosphere are no greater than south of the border, where Mr. Trump and his allies could turn free speech into perverted speech and send the country off course. Small victories like the one we saw this week in the Supreme Court come too late and are not enough to curb the demons that have been unleashed.