But free speech as currently practiced on X and other social media platforms does not meet all of these requirements. Sensational stories spread further and faster than sober ones. Polarizing personalities attract more followers than reasonable ones. The mechanisms available for debate – posting replies and corrections – are weaker than the mechanisms for public relations.
In the real world, most people are cautious about who they associate with. But in the virtual world, they throw caution to the wind. They listen to people they wouldn’t be seen with at the bar, either because they follow them out of curiosity or, more likely, because the Twitter algorithm is pushing them in their direction.
The traditional value of a social network is thus reversed: instead of “cleaning” content and refining information, the system packages truth with lies and reputable sources with sleazy ones. Worse still, the user is no longer able to distinguish between real people and artificial voices. A study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University of 200 million tweets about the coronavirus sent in the first months of 2020 found that 45 percent of them were probably not written by humans but by robots and aimed at sowing discord in America.
Twitter therefore weakens democracy rather than strengthens it. The recent riots in the UK were sparked when a user tweeted the falsehood that the man who killed three girls in Southport was a Muslim refugee who had come to the UK on a small boat. (Such rumors could have spread without X, of course, but the fact that the platform reaches so many people and places unverified rumors in their feed alongside reputable news sources ensured that they were even more deadly.) Foreign powers, particularly Russia, deliberately use misinformation, sometimes spread by malicious actors and sometimes by bots, to increase social tensions, spread rumors, and encourage cynicism.
When it comes to power, the old liberal ideal is turned on its head. Free speech should hold powerful governments accountable to the people. That’s why America’s founding fathers gave the press special prominence in the First Amendment. But today, power lies with the platforms, not the government. The platforms operate in most parts of the world (though China is now behind a “great firewall”) on principles understood only by a small elite in Silicon Valley. X has 368 million monthly active users and Facebook has more than 3 billion. Musk may see himself as a modern-day George Washington, but in reality he is much closer to King George III.
The biggest problem with social media is that they are not public places designed to encourage open discussion and democratic deliberation. They are commercial enterprises designed to attract attention and encourage engagement. Their most important metric is not the triumph of truth over lies, but the number of clicks, likes and retweets their posts receive. And that number has nothing to do with the search for truth and democratic deliberation; in fact, it is the opposite: polarizing and sensational material gives us the dopamine rush we crave and encourages us to keep scrolling and retweeting.
There is an important debate to be had about how we balance freedom and responsibility. To make progress in this debate, we need to move away from absolutes (freedom versus tyranny) and instead consider two subtleties. First, there are many different kinds of expression, from political expression (which most people believe should be protected) to commercial expression to intimidation.
America’s commitment to the First Amendment has not stopped it from imposing restrictions on nonpolitical speech based on truth or accuracy. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, controls what people can say when selling financial products. The Food and Drug Administration sets out what can and cannot be said about certain products. The Federal Trade Commission restricts “unfair and misleading” speech related to commerce.
The second subtlety is that there are many different types of regulation, from the comprehensive to the light-hearted. I would be tempted to apply the UK broadcasting model to news platforms. To obtain a licence to operate, UK broadcasters must prove they are “fit and trustworthy persons” and commit to reporting with “due impartiality” and “due accuracy”. But for those who find that too draconian, there are more modest measures – for example, requiring X users with large numbers of followers to meet higher standards than regular users, or blocking known troublemakers.
In any sane society, people are forbidden from shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. Yet a disturbing amount of what is happening on social media smacks of just that. The old assumption that these platforms can do what they want under the banner of free speech no longer holds water when they wield so much power and their commercial incentives so obviously conflict with the pursuit of truth.
