“It’s the First Amendment, stupid” - podcast episode cover

“It’s the First Amendment, stupid”

Oct 31, 202443 min
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Trump and a bunch of billionaires, like Elon Musk, are calling for the FCC to punish TV stations by revoking their licenses and using the spectrum for other stuff. In a normal world, this would be idle billionaire wishcasting. Punishing news organizations is one of those things we have a First Amendment to protect against. You know — the one that protects free speech by prohibiting the government from making speech regulations or punishing people for what they say?   But, it turns out, there is a long and complex history of the government regulating speech on broadcast platforms like radio and television — and that history dovetails into many of the problems we have regulating tech companies and social platforms today. Verge senior tech and policy editor Adi Robertson joins me to dive in. Links:  The Verge guide to the 2024 US presidential election | The Verge FCC chair rejects Trump’s call to revoke CBS license over Harris interview | The Verge Florida official who resigned after letter to TV stations blames DeSantis’ office | MSNBC “To keep it simple for the state of Florida: It’s the First Amendment, stupid” | The Verge How America turned against the First Amendment | The Verge Why Sen. Brian Schatz thinks child safety can trump the First Amendment | The Verge How the Kids Online Safety Act puts us all at risk | The Verge Here’s a bunch of bananas shit Trump said today about breaking up Google | The Verge Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet | The Verge Why you’re seeing those gross political ads during the World Series | The Verge Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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That's www.alxpartners.com slash V-O-X. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. For more information, the app asks me questions. Let's talk about that. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. We have only got so much time on Decoder each week.

Now, Trump has been making threats like this since 2017, in the way that Trump has always been making threats. But in recent weeks, Elon Musk, David Sachs and others have all picked up on it, talking about how we should take the wireless spectrum back from TV networks and use it for other things, because they no longer believe the TV networks are in the public interest. In a normal world, this would be billionaire wishcasting.

Wireless Spectrum is doled out by the Federal Communications Commission. There is a long and boring process for reallocating it, and companies like AT&T and Verizon have armies of lobbyists who spend a lot of time and money getting what they want out of that process, and they are very good at it. On top of that, punishing news organizations for their coverage by using the power of the government is one of those things that we have a first amendment to protect against.

You know, the first amendment, quite famously the first one. The one that protects free speech by prohibiting the government from making speech regulations or punishing people for what they say. You'd think Elon Musk, the so-called free speech absolutist, would remember that one.

But it turns out there's a long and complex history of the government regulating speech on broadcast platforms like radio and television, and that history dovetails into so many of the problems we have regulating tech companies and social platforms. There's only one person who can really help me explain all this. It's the Verges Senior Tech and Policy Editor, Adi Robertson, who comes on the show to help me explain the most bonkers things. And this one is really no exception.

It feels like a bunch of billionaires are just not doing the reading or paying attention to how anything works. So I wanted Adi to help me create a framework to understand what's going on. You're going to hear us get into a lot of prime decoder territory. We talk about the Fairness Doctrine, Section 230, Monopolis, and of course the landmark Supreme Court case known as Red Line, which if we ever make a bingo card, will absolutely be a square. This episode is a wild ride. Here we go.

Adi Robertson, welcome to decoder. Hi, let's just jump in with a couple of things that happened this month. The first is from October. CBS aired a 60 minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on its broadcast stations, and then it published some different versions of that interview online. This is probably a mistake. It wasn't the most transparent thing. But Trump responded by calling on the FCC to revoke CBS's broadcast license. What on earth is going on there?

So this is one of Donald Trump's favorite threats, which is every time a station airs something that he thinks is too flattering to Democrats or unflattering to him. He says that's some kind of election interference or a campaign contribution that's illegal. And that it means that the station is no longer operating under its rules and it should have its broadcast license revoked. Let me ask you a really dumb question. What on earth is a broadcast license in this context?

Broadcast stations, not cable TV, but just your old fashioned over-the-air stations. There's only so much spectrum that they can take up. And so in order to keep that spectrum straight, the FCC asks stations to apply for a license. And because of its rarity, they agree that this is supposed to be in the public interest. They're supposed to operate in a way that is ultimately beneficial. Once they have that license, then they can air.

These licenses don't go to the actual networks themselves. They don't go to NBC and ABC. They go to the local affiliate stations. And sometimes those stations are owned by the same parent company as the network, but they're not the same thing. Okay, so that basically sets up a situation where the local TV stations in New York or Miami or San Francisco or whatever. They have a license to the spectrum from the government.

And Trump is basically saying he'll take those licenses away because he doesn't like what CBS news did. I'm not entirely clear how wealth Trump has thought this through because he has also made calls that suggest that CNN has a license, which is just not accurate. CNN's a cable network, but in theory, if somebody was going to interpret that, yeah, you would say, all right, you're an affiliate of this network that I don't like of ABC or NBC.

All right, we will revoke your license because you're no longer operating in the public interest over this in this case, one broadcast that we didn't like. And he's done this with CBS most recently, but previously ABC. And then while he was president NBC. These big networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, they used to have a distribution monopoly, right? The way that most people got video content or television was with antennas.

They had the biggest reach. People remember when must see TV on NBC was actually like a cultural driver. That era has faded, right? People aren't watching the three big broadcast networks every night altogether as a family and a living room anymore. Why is there so much emphasis on punishing them in this way? I think that it's part of really an overall emphasis on just punishing the press for Trump.

Really Trump has argued against almost every possible kind of press outlet, but because TV stations are in this kind of unique position where they have a scarce resource. That means that there's a level of government oversight that's greater than just the first amendment. There's this added lever you can push on. Right. So they have a license to the spectrum. And that means the government can take the spectrum away and that's a mechanism to punish them. And you can't do that to meta, right?

You can like haul Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress, but it doesn't matter. And there are just obvious limitations that are on, say, broadcast TV that aren't on the internet. Like there's the seven dirty words you can't say on television. There's indecency restrictions. There's just I think a really a public understanding that TV doesn't work like the internet. And that's because of the spectrum, right? The public owns the spectrum. We lease it to these companies.

And we say you need to use it for our best interest. That's a very important idea, but I want to come back to it a minute. Let's talk about the second extremely weird thing that happened this month. The Florida Department of Health sent legal threats to Florida broadcast TV stations that were airing advertising from supporters of a measure that would ease abortion restrictions in that state. What happened there?

In that case, we are at least actually talking about TV stations, their TV stations in Florida that ran an advertisement that is a woman describing how an abortion that she got for really awful health related reasons would be illegal under the new Florida law. And so the department sent letters to these stations saying, well, you have committed a sanitary nuisance violation.

Because the claim is that you're spreading false information and that's going to make women not want to get health care as opposed to the incredibly restrictive abortion law, meaning that they would not get health care. It turns out just to add to this, it wasn't even the health department's idea that the letter assigned by their general counsel, John Wilson, but he then resigned and said, this just came straight from DeSantis and I was pressured to send this.

Wow. In that case, went to the courts and the courts looked at it and threw it away, basically, right? They literally said it's the first amendment stupid. I think it might be useful to just talk about the first amendment for one second here. The first amendment allows for way more speech than people realize or want to concede. The hate speech is legal in the United States lies or legal in the United States.

Even if you don't like them, the government can't make a rule against lies. That is generally I think the foundation on which a lot of things are built. Can you just lay that foundation for folks? The first amendment obviously is very, very simple. Congress shall make no law concerning freedom of the speech, freedom of press. This ends up getting restricted in really specific ways. There are some very, very specific cases where you can abridged freedom of speech under the first amendment.

There's very strict incitement of violence. There's true threats which are not just someone saying, look, someone should kill this guy. They're really direct communications. Beyond that, there's a lot of things people really wish were illegal because they are awful. But it's very, very difficult to make those things illegal without then opening a huge can of worms in which the government can prosecute people for things that are just really hard to defend yourself against.

Or these can end up being applied in ways that just the people who worry about this really specific instance of harm are not expecting. You say, all right, I want to ban lies. One case that is pretty well known is lying about getting a congressional metal of honor. And then this goes to the courts and the Supreme Court says, well, the problem is just everyone lies.

And if you ban lies, then not only are you assuming that the truth is always easy to tell, but you're also just criminalizing a vast amount of speech. The reason I wanted to lay that foundation is both parties in our country have wanted to regulate speech on the internet, which is something we're going to come back to. And they've consistently run into the first amendment in ways that seem frustrating to them.

They talk about regulating speech and set aside all the first amendment problems over and over again. You've written about this in the past. We'll link those pieces so people can read them. What I'm getting at is threatening licenses of broadcast TV stations or threatening broadcast stations is the way that you can regulate speech. There's a known mechanism for threatening broadcast TV stations.

And in the case of a sanitary nuisance, they invented a mechanism to regulate speech. There's a law we think you're breaking that has nothing to do with the first amendment. That seems like the puzzle everyone's trying to solve. And just to be blunt, that the Republican party in particular is more actively and aggressively trying to solve. How can we regulate speech? Here are some levers we can pull to punish people for saying things we don't like.

Is that basically the shape of it or the Democrats doing it too? If we're talking about speech in general, especially online speech, there's a lot of things that Democrats are doing that have some interesting speech implications. But I think that in terms of actual government officials trying to pull these levers that should not be pulled, it tends to be Republicans.

And to be clear, these levers shouldn't be pulled. Like even though there are speech regulations on television stations, you are not supposed to be able to say I disagree with a thing that they have aired. We should pull their license for it. And every FCC commissioner, every time somebody calls for this, even if they're a Republican, even if they're a GPI under Trump, they just say no, that's not how this works.

That's not how it's supposed to work. But there have been instances where the FCC has pulled the TV stations license. Yes, very, very rarely. There has been one case of it sticking and it took many years to do. Like we mentioned, the argument is stations have to operate in the public interest. And so in the 1950s and 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, there is this NBC affiliate called WLBT.

And it was virulently racist and pro segregation. And it would just cut out NBC programming that involved black people or that involved civil rights. It would just say, whoops, sorry, network service interrupted. There were petitions filed by civil rights advocates that just said this station is not serving its need. It is just not showing news.

These were denied kind of over and over for procedural reasons. And then eventually years later, they ended up getting revoked and someone else took over the station. It was very difficult. It involved extremely repeated, egregious behaviors. It was not just that they aired something that somebody didn't like.

And then there are other cases. I mentioned the seven dirty words. George Carlin set those on a TV station. And it basically got a warning and ended up going to the Supreme Court and formally created this sort of indecency regulations that I mentioned. But even that, while they got a note in their file, did not lead to the station losing its license.

I just want to highlight those two specifically for people. And the first instance that you're talking about, there's just a long legal and regulatory process. There's complaints from the public. There's evidence. There's lawsuits. There's litigation. There's just an endless process that takes a long time and results in the government doing something. You might not love it, but the government using its power is usually checked by a long process of that kind. And it led to an outcome.

And in the second case, there's Supreme Court litigation over a warning. The government just said don't let George Carlin swear on TV. And they gave you a warning. And then there's a Supreme Court case that says, okay, you can swear on TV, but you just have to do it after 10pm.

And that usually is how we react to the government making speech regulations. Even a warning triggers a whole bunch of litigation and worry about the First Amendment. And then you end up with, yeah, the public airwaves just do the swear words after the kids are in bed. So that's where we stand historically. In just a minute, we'll look at the present day. But first we need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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Learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com. That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe, make progress. Welcome back. I'm talking to the Verge Senior Tech and Policy Editor, Addy Robertson, about threats, politicians, like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have made against media outlets during this election cycle. Right before the break, Addy was telling us about the one instance where broadcast TV station has ever had its license permanently revoked.

It was a long process that took many years, and quite a lot of back and forth and appeals and so on. It doesn't feel like we're doing that amount of process or worrying right now. It feels like we're just jumping to, we should let politicians regulate speech. We are. And again, I don't know that this is necessarily hugely thought-through. A lot of it is straight from Donald Trump's brain to truth social, and then someone tries to frantically find a way to make it happen for him.

So do you think these are all just empty threats? They should be empty threats. But we have people who are very close to the Trump administration right before an election saying, no, we actually, this should be real. This should happen. Investor and friend of Elon Musk, David Sacks, was tweeting this weekend that major broadcast networks are operating on free licenses in exchange for requirements to serve the public interest.

And it's an obsolete model so they should just have to compete with every other possible use of spectrum. And they would presumably lose because running a media outlet is not necessarily best selling path to riches. And then Elon Musk, who has been stomping with Trump, who has been promised a role in the administration is all in on this idea. He's calling it a free lunch that stations should no longer get.

Under the current regulatory system, it should not happen and should not make any sense is something that could happen if you get a president in the White House, who just has very little respect for the regulatory state and is willing to gut it, which is the precise thing that Donald Trump has said he'll do in office.

Elon notably operates Starlink, which obviously has spectrum licenses to operate its internet service. What's funny and the reason I keep saying these guys haven't done any of the reading is that all of LTE and to some extent 5G operate on spectrum that was reallocated away from TV networks in the 2000s.

The entire 700 megahertz band of spectrum used to be for TV and then we took it and we reallocated it to the wireless carriers and they had to furiously auction for slices of that spectrum. And that's why we got 4G LTE and now they're reusing a lot of that spectrum for 5G. The process already exists. It has already been used for the exact kind of goals that these folks are talking about and they can't see it. It appears they just want to take this spectrum by force.

And their argument, Elon's argument is that the legacy broadcast networks are an extension of the Democratic Party so that they should be punished and then obviously he can go win an auction for their spectrum. That seems just wholly out of step not with just the idea of the regulatory state, but with any process at all. Like if you take away the FCC and you take away this process, who would even run this auction?

I think that is the big question that a lot of Trump and Project 2025, which is obviously not directly tied to Trump, but is a very strong indicator of what the Republican Party wants. They want revenge on specific enemies they don't like and I think there is not actually a plan to build anything back up from that. I think they don't necessarily even care that much about running the auction even though obviously Starlink probably could use spectrum and it's worth noting.

It really is about just killing media outlets. That's the goal here. Everything else is kind of yeah, we're trying to make this make sense for them. I don't know that they've thought that far ahead. The other fascinating aspect of all this is the big ideological flip towards regulating speech on broadcast platforms that has taken place.

Because not so long ago, it was the Republican Party who was furious about the idea that the government would impose any restrictions on broadcast platforms like TV or radio. And they fought really hard to get rid of any restrictions that did exist. If you're on the internet and you've ever talked about speech, you've heard of something called the Fairness Doctrine, which the FCC used to impose.

That doesn't exist anymore. It's gone, but people talk about it all the time. Adi, can you explain what the Fairness Doctrine is? The Fairness Doctrine grew out of radio, which was a public trust, the same way as television stations. And as the FCC and its predecessor were formed and they're organizing radio, they say, look, we need these stations to actually inform people.

We cannot have them just be yellow journalism like those damn newspapers. And so they went through this process of figuring out under what circumstances radio stations could editorialize. And the thing they ended up settling on and extended to television, which was also growing in 1949 was the Fairness Doctrine, which says, these stations have to cover issues of public importance and they have to cover all sides accurately.

And that includes giving time to people from all sides of those issues in things like advertisements. So one way that it was used was for anti-smoking activism. There were cigarette commercials and the people who were arguing, no, this gives you cancer, managed to get space on the air to rebut the commercials. And courts said, yeah, no, this is correct. This is pro cigarette time. You need to get anti-sigarette time.

It didn't mean you had to devote the same amount of minutes to every issue, but it did mean that if you brought up an issue and you discussed one side, you had to represent that the other side existed. And you had to give them air time.

So that's straightforwardly a speech regulation. The government is directly telling broadcast networks what to put on their stations. And it's not even quantitative. It's not fair amounts of time, which you can measure. It's qualitative. It's represent all the viewpoints on an issue fairly, which is just not the sort of speech the government should be regulating.

Inevitably, it goes to court. If you're a decoder listener, you've heard me talk about this case a number of times. It's called red line broadcasting the FCC. The court issues the decision in 1969. Addie, what is the decision in that case? The court rules unanimously that the first amendment and the fairness doctrine, they're not actually in conflict. And a lot of this is still based on these two fundamental issues of their scarcity. And this means that stations operate in the public interest.

So it says, look, even now in the late 1960s, it's not clear that we're in a world where there are no scarcity concerns. And there are still these public interests. And that means that we have an interest in encouraging also not just less speech. It's not purely censorship. It's more speech is part of their argument. And so they're saying that in this particular case, there's not an issue.

So because the public owns the airwaves and the government licenses the airwaves, it's allowed to say, this is how we want you to use the airwaves. These speech regulations are correct because actually they belong to us. Right. And they're just limited by the laws of physics. There are only so many stations there can ever be. So that's the way we hum along until we get to the 80s and Ronald Reagan, who is a famously deregulatory president. And he gets rid of the fairness doctrine.

Right. His FCC votes in 1987 to repeal the fairness doctrine. And Congress had actually been trying to codify it into law and not just an FCC rule, but then Reagan vetoes this the same year. And Congress can't override it. Since then, there have been some sort of attempts to restore it. There have been Republican attempts to say we can never do that again. But it's largely accepted. It's just not coming back.

So you have this government regulation of broadcast networks that said we own the spectrum. You have to use it in public interest. And we have said part of the public interest is a qualitative regulation that says you have to be fair. You have to present all sides of an issue. Reagan, most famous Republican president in modern history, gets rid of this regulation. And that does what?

So we've been talking about TV, but remember that this all started with radio and radio is probably where we've seen the biggest impact, which is that suddenly AM stations don't have to represent all sides of the issue fairly. Instead, you get just this massive rise of right wing radio. This is Rush Limbaugh. This is this hugely influential market that suddenly can just grow up because the fairness doctrine is gone.

And it feels like even though people talk about reinstituting the fairness doctrine all the time that conservative talk radio is such a huge part of that ecosystem that it's just that's fully off the table for Republicans now, right?

Even if you look at things that aren't AM radio, like obviously just AM radio as a force is not remotely what it was in the 80s. I think that if you try to apply it to any number of Republican orientations, there's just no way that they would want to go back to that world. So how do you square we're going to have the government go after stations in Florida that are running pro choice ads with we can never have a fairness doctrine again.

I think that you just don't this is kind of where I've just come down is that there is not a point in trying to make the logical argument for people whose argument is just we should be able to use the regulatory state as a weapon. So that's where we stand right now regulating broadcast isn't really politically viable in the same way used to be and when modern politicians talk about it, it's usually in a weaponized way.

That brings us to a pretty big question for the future. Why isn't there a red lion for the internet? We'll get into that after this break. AM Gen, a leading biotechnology company needed a global financial company to facilitate funding and acquisition to broaden AM Gen's therapeutic reach, expand its pipeline and accelerate bringing new and innovative medicines to patients in need globally.

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Welcome back. Right before the break we were talking about the red line case which had allowed the FCC to impose things like the fairness doctrine on broadcast speech in the past. But there's no red line for the internet. That means internet regulation is well kind of a mess. Why isn't the internet regulated like TV and radio? The really obvious answer is that you don't have scarcity in the same way. There's a limited number of frequencies that you can tune your dial to on radio.

There is a virtually unlimited number of websites that can ever exist and it is no harder to get to one of them in theory than it is to get to any other. So you just don't have the same monopoly concerns that motivated okay. There are only a few networks and those networks have affiliates. If you think that you're not getting a fairs shake from one site you can go to another. Let me make the comparison. I think a lot of people instinctively make in the broadcast era.

You had ABC and CBS and NBC who basically owned distribution of information. Then they had the public's airwaves to do it. And we said okay you got to use those airwaves in the public's interest. Here are some rules and that's fine. In the modern platform internet era you still have just a handful of companies that address most of the people.

Google met a TikTok. Can't you make the same argument about them that they command so much audience that we should be able to say use your platforms in the public interest? I think there's one potential response which is just that even these platforms aren't limited by the number of hours in a day. The way that a radio station is you can still look at an almost infinite number of Instagram profiles.

But the other argument is that we still are trying to figure out if these platforms are monopolies. That the just old sort of 1980s consumer harm standard of monopoly just has been a really awkward fit for modern web platforms. We're trying to see okay can a free service that you can theoretically click away from it anytime still be a monopoly. And we're getting cases that are bolstering that there's the recent Google search case.

But it's definitely something that we've had to litigate our way towards. Google lost that big search antitrust case in August. The company is obviously going to appeal and this case will be going on for quite some time. And that's just one of the first of a whole batch of big tech antitrust cases that have gotten to a ruling. There are plenty of others that are still winding their way through court.

For example, we're waiting on the ruling in another Google antitrust case, this one about the digital advertising market. The Department of Justice has filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Apple. And there are plenty of other cases and investigations happening in both United States and in Europe. But let's just say for the sake of the argument that all these big platforms lose these cases and face the steepest penalties the government can offer up.

They get broken up into tons of little companies instead of being giant monopolies. Would that be better for speech on the internet? Or is it actually more effective to have big companies that we regulate directly? One of the general ways that we decide whether we can limit the First Amendment is if there is just not another good way to deal with it. If there's just not a less restrictive way to deal with the problem.

And I feel like there are many less restrictive ways to deal with the problem of there being some huge speech monopolies on the internet. Then implementing regulations that say, all right, it's inevitable that Facebook and Tik Toker monopolies let's just decide how they can cover things. So I'm not necessarily sure that even if they are monopolies, the answer would be speech regulation to enshrine them rather than let's just break them up. That's the normal sensible way of looking at it.

But on the other hand, we have Donald Trump, who seems to think that the threat of antitrust enforcement is a way to bludgeon these companies into doing what he wants. Google has been very bad. They've been very irresponsible. And I have a feeling that Google is going to be close to shut down because I don't think Congress is going to take it. That was Trump in his own words to Fox News's Maria Barteromo in August. He has since repeated somewhere threats more recently.

So Adi, I listen to that. And I think, okay, there's a very intellectual argument here that we can make that says we can solve the problem of regulating speech with the market. We'll just have more companies and fewer monopolies and people in America will pick the things they like. They'll pick the content moderation systems and the internet that they care for. And those companies will win in the market and the ones with the Nazis will fail and that'll be fine.

And it seems like Donald Trump is looking at that and saying, do what I want or I'll kill you. And I can't quite square that. Is it just antitrust is now a weapon of speech regulation for him? I think that everything is a weapon. I think this is fundamentally the issue is that Trump sees the entire regulatory and judicial system as things that you should weaponize against your enemies and let skate against your friends. He just doesn't fundamentally believe that laws and regulations are systems.

He just believes that they're things that you use as necessary. Yeah, you don't like Google and Google's a monopoly so you attack Google. But, okay, well Facebook, Facebook's a monopoly probably. But Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly Trump's friends so you aren't going to do anything. The problem is that Trump wants to regulate companies that probably should be regulated. So Google does have it's a monopoly.

The problem is that then if you are a company that is friendly to Trump and you are a monopoly, Trump is not going to apply that same standard to you. So it's a system that is just so selective that even if it is a stop clock being right twice a day, it's fundamentally not being used as a system. It's not the rule of law. I would point out that this is the exact argument for the government should make speech regulations because there's no way to be right all the time.

When people talk about regulating speech on the internet, the thing that always comes up is Section 230, which I hope if you're a decoder listener you've heard us talk about many times before, adding it false to you to try to quickly explain what Section 230 is. Section 230 says that no interactive web services like an app or a website should be taken as the publisher or speaker for something that a third party user put on that site.

There are a bunch of edge cases to that. It applies to a bunch of other things. But fundamentally it's that if I post something on Facebook and that thing is illegal, you can't sue Facebook for what I post it. The goal of 230 was to get platforms to moderate. It was to shield them from liability for making decisions. It has played out very differently, right? People want to take 230 away because they think the platformers aren't moderating enough.

Somehow 230 makes people angry either when platforms moderate too much or when they don't moderate enough. The argument when they don't moderate enough is well, they don't have to care because of 230. When they moderate too much, it's well if 230 didn't exist, they would have to just allow anything. Just for the sake of the argument, do you think we would have a better internet if platforms were more responsible for the content their users were posting?

I think that there are certainly cases where people have made good arguments that there are sites just operating in bad faith that there are non-consensual pornography sites that are very clearly aware of what's happening.

But I think in terms of just really big sites, I think what you would get is a bunch of really terrible moderation decisions. I think you would probably get either something that's assess pool or you would get something that's just hyper sanitized in a way that blocks a lot of speech people like and find valuable.

It's interesting that it's playing out right now with the absolute lack of moderation that's happening on Elon Musk's X and the incredibly hyper-aggressive moderation that's happening on threads. No one's happy. It seems like in a world where there's competition, users would move back and forth or they would both arrive at the same sort of ideal, but instead they're headed in different directions and they're both kind of miserable.

At least you can still go to Blisker and master done. That's true. There's a little bit more competition than there was before. Competition gets you part of the way there, but not all the way. We've talked about this a lot undercoder. I even asked former president Barack Obama about red line and regulation directly when he was on the show last year. His take was that we need to find another legal hook for the internet era.

The idea that the public and the government own the airwaves. That was really just another way of saying this affects everybody. And so we should all have a say in how this operates and we believe in capitalism and we don't mind you making a bunch of money through the innovation and the products that you're creating and the content that you're putting out there.

We want to have some say in what our kids are watching or how things are being advertised. But the principle still applies, which is how do we create a deliberative process where the average citizen can hear a bunch of different viewpoints and then say, you know what? Here's here's what I agree with. Here's what I don't agree with. And hopefully through that process we get better outcomes.

So it feels like the stakes of the selection are a potential Harris administration searching for that other hook to pass some kind of regulations on tech platforms and deal with AI, which creates all kinds of new weird speech problems that we will have to talk about in another episode or a Trump administration, which allows an impoverty on us to go seize transmitters out of TV stations in Florida. It doesn't seem like there's actually a middle ground here.

I think either administration that we get after this election is going to pass speech-related rules in some form. The appetite for child safety regulation and limitations in section 230 are just they're too great in both parties. But I think that the thing we're going to get with the Harris administration is rules that we can argue about and disagree with. And the thing we're going to get in the Trump administration is whatever Trump thinks is going to punish the people he doesn't like.

Those are the stakes in this election. You've already voted. Thank you. And if you haven't, please take a second and make a plan to go participate in our democracy. It's important. I'd like to thank Addy Robertson for joining me on the show. If you have thoughts about this episode or what you'd like to hear more of, you can email us at decoderthaverse.com. We really do read all the emails.

You can also hit me up directly on threats on that reckless 12-8. But as I've ticked off, check it out. It's at decoder pod. It's a lot of fun. If you like decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe over your podcasts. If you like the show, hit us with that five star review.

Decoder is a production of the version part of the box meeting podcast network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Kelly Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The decoder music is very break master cylinder. We'll see you next time. Support for this show comes from Alex partners. You don't need us to tell you that AI is reshaping how business is done. But during critical moments of disruption, it can be hard to figure out how to leverage cutting edge technology.

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