Disinformation is Solvable

recent years, free speech can also suppress speech. The same freedom that promotes creativity and collaboration can become a tool to spread lies and propaganda. Misinformation usually refers to facts that turn out to be wrong, and disinformation refers to wrong facts that are being deliberately peddled for a political end. So it's the more kind of sinister version. Disinformation now

threatens American democracy directly. Malicious foreign actors, including the Russian government, are taking active measures to so confusion and cynicism, and it's unclear where the responsibility falls for separating facts from falsehoods. If you don't want the government to have any power over online speech, then you have to recognize that you have made mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey at Twitter and whoever runs YouTube the czars of speech. So you just

got to reckon with that. I mean, the First Amendment is the closest thing to religion and the households I've lived in, and the idea that it's broken or needs to be modified or limited in some way is I mean, honestly, I can only go back to these religious terms. It feels herre icle to me, Yes, I know you and lots of people in my Twitter timeline. I deeply think it's crucial to every democracy to protect free speech. I think what Americans need to reconsider is how we are

protecting free speech. Emily Basilon is a staff writer with The New York Times magazine. In her recent story The Problem of Free Speech in an Age of Disinformation, she explores the way free speech is being abused. I wanted to talk to her about that problem and what we might do about it. Disinformation is a solvable problem. We have this ideal of free speech, which is that there's a marketplace of ideas out there, that more speech is always better because the good ideas will win out in

the end. It's a kind of fundamentally optimistic idea. It comes originally from the political philosopher John Stuart Mill and his book on Liberty in the nineteenth century, and then it kind of comes into Supreme court land in the twentieth century. But it often just turns out not to be true. There are various eras in history where propaganda

and false ideas have actually won the day. In politics, you can think about the Nazis, you can think about times of Soviet Union, communism, other nineteen thirties examples of fascism, and more recent governments in places like Brazil and India where disinformation has really won out. And so I think that we are flirting with that possibility in a scary

way in the United States right now. The fact is the marketplace of ideas was always a pretty shaky concept, and so free speech is really important to our democracy, but we need, I think, to reconceptualize how we think about it and how we protect it in a way that really protects the speech that supports the democracy instead

of threatening it. Just so we Yet our terms clear say a little about how disinformation with a D differs from misinformation with an M. Yeah, I mean these are sort of recent terms that are only I think the definitions are becoming clear kind of as we speak. But misinformation usually refers to facts that turn out to be wrong, and disinformation refers to wrong facts that are being deliberately peddled for a political end. So it's the more kind

of sinister version. Yeah, disinformation, intentional deception, often fueled by malicious actors of different kinds, is sort of crowding out the good information. I mean, there's a term in economics called Gresham's law, where you know, the bad money, the money that's fake gold kind of is circulating everywhere and

the real money disappears from the marketplace. In a way, that's something like that happening with information right where there's just all of this swirling nonsense depending on where you get your information from, and you can't tell what's the good information or if there's any good information in that context. Ray. So one way to think about this is that it used to be hard to speak. We had gatekeepers, We had these traditional media companies that had a real hold

and sort of control over speech. Now it's really easy to speak, but it's very hard to be heard. And some of what we see in disinformation campaigns is a deliberate effort to drown out true speech or to smear the reputations of people, especially online, so that they'll effectively be silenced. They all leave the space, they won't keep trying to talk. And so it's the use of speech to suppress speech, and that is very challenging for our

American First Amendment to deal with. I mean, you had I thought a really good example in your piece, which was a meme. My eye hadn't come across that the Democrats were threatening to secede from the country if they lost the election. Just tell that story in brief, because it was such a tidy example of sort of you know, in the famous like Mark Twain, like a lie that got halfway around the world before the truth got its boots on him. It's just a piece of nonsense that's

spread like wildfire. Right. Yeah. So over the summer, a group of academics and former administration officials, former campaign staffers, posters, they got together take game out the twenty twenty election, and they played out various scenarios in which one or

the other candidate won. It was close, there was litigation, there wasn't They're basically testing the system of American democracy and Rosa Brooks, who was one of the co organizers of this project, wrote an essay in The Washington Post in which he mentioned that in one of the several hypothetical scenarios, Biden won the popular vote, Belosi Electoral College, and fictional team Biden talked about trying to ask California and the Pacific Northwest threatened to secede as a way

of pressuring Republicans to add more seeds to the Senate. There's just a sentence about this in Rosa Brooks's essay. Out of that sentence comes an article by Michael Anton, a former Chump official and a conservative publication, arguing that a coup is coming. And from that article comes an appearance by another Chump official on Tucker Carlson Show talking about this fictional threat of a democratic coup, a very

popular right wing podcaster named Dan Bongino. He shows up making videos about this that are getting millions and millions of views on social media. President Trump tweets in praise of a publication called Revolver News, a right wing website which is also spreading this false story. And what you see here all the parts of the right wing media ecosystem coming together to really give a big platform to this made up idea that the Democrats are planning a coup.

It's like a malignant game of telephone exactly. It's a propaganda feedback loop. Yeah, I mean you use that to illustrate your argument that the First Amendment isn't serving democracy in America. The First Amendment is being used to advance propaganda disinformation, and it is not. It's not doing what it's supposed to do, which is get information to voters

and help them make decisions. It's such a striking thing to say, and so obviously true in many respects, but I mean, I'll say I still have a hard time accepting criticism of the First Amendment. I mean, I'm a journalist, you're a journalist. You know I grew up in an Afilu family. I mean, the First Amendment is the closest thing to religion and the households I've lived in, and the idea that it's broken or needs to be modified or limited in some way is I mean, honestly, I

can only go back to these religious terms. It feels heretical to me. Yes, I know you and lots of people in my Twitter timeline, so I guess I'll say two things. I do not mean to be making an argument against free speech. Like I deeply think it's crucial to every democracy to protect free speech. I think what Americans need to reconsider is how we are protecting free speech.

Our First Amendment has come to put corporate interests, in particular corporate spending on elections on par with the shouting of protesters. That is not the way other democracies think about free speech in Europe and Canada and elsewhere. And that sort of libertarian corporatization of free speech and of the First Amendment. I think that's what we failed to

grapple with. But it actually is the kind of underlying framework for both why the social media sphere circulates disinformation the way that it does, and also why we have a broken traditional media system in which we have underinvested in trusted public broadcasting. And again that is a big contrast between us and some of our pure countries in Europe. Right, I mean, someone like we believe the First Amendment isn't just important for democratic purpose, it's a human right. That is,

it's you know, it's something that belongs to people. I don't believe it's a human right that belongs to non humans, i e. Corporations who maybe persons under a kind of legal fiction but aren't don't have human rights per se. But doesn't this all just go back to this series of Supreme Court decisions? I mean, is the problem with the First Amendment or is it simply with the way a conservative Supreme Court has used the First Amendment to

protect commercial interests at the expensive democratic interest. I mean, it's the latter. The problem is not the text of the First Amendment right which protects our freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and the freedom of the press. It's a line of Supreme Court cases that start in the seventies and take off in the eighties and basically culminate in Citizens United, which gave corporation so much more

ability to contribute to political campaigns. There are some other cases that come into play here too, involving labor unions. And it's really as Justice Elena Kagan put a kind of weaponizing of the First Amendment. And then I think the other strand of this that's important and that I learned a lot about when I was writing my piece is the deregulation of traditional media by the Reagan administration.

In the eighties. So when you go back to the beginning of radio and TV, starting in nineteen twelve, you have Congress passing laws that are include the idea of a public interest, a public interest obligation by the people who are getting our broadband space. Right, Like we the American people, own the broadband. We are giving you a place on the radio dial or on the TV dial, and in return we expect some attention to the public interest.

That idea lasts until the late eighties, and then it really goes away during the Reagan administration, and I think that's part of what leads to the rise of Fox News and talk radio like Rush Limbaugh. I'm not making an argument about conservative media because it's conservative, but I am talking about the way in which Fox and commentators like Limbaugh really spread disinformation more than the mainstream or

the liberal media. I mean, there's a lot of evidence to back up that thesis, right, But you're arguing that Western European democracies that don't have the First Amendment per se maybe doing free speech better because their version of free speech doesn't prevent them from having reasonable regulation around campaigns.

They have national broadcasters like the BBC that are generally reliable, trusted sources of information, and those are all good things, but they also those go in hand in hand with limitations that we would be in the United States more reluctant to accept, certainly those of us who are journalists. There's less protection for truth findings through journalism. It's easier to sue people for libel. And of course there are

tougher restrictions on what people would call hate speech. That is, there are things, you know, political things, ideas that express animals that you know, can't be said in certain in certain places. That's you know, that's it's just a more limited conception of what free speech allows. I think that's true, especially about hate speech. And I think if you are really opposed to banning hate speech, then Europe looks like a problem because they do punish people for widely disseminated

hate speech. In Europe, they have a trifferent tradition. Their tradition comes out of the fact that the Nazis rose to power because they were elected, and so in Europe there is this deep sense that anti democratic ideas can be terribly threatening and they're just kind of done with them and willing to regulate them and ban them in a way that we are not. It's a kind of more pessimistic view of the marketplace of ideas than we have.

I guess the question and you know here we are unsolvable, and I want to, you know, focus on now when are we solving the problem the conversation we can on exactly that. You know, what is the solution in broad strokes, Well, I think if you are thinking in a kind of blue sky way, you could start with investment in traditional media in the United States on par with European countries, for example, like the BBC in the United Kingdom or

RD in Germany. And I think especially important is creating outlets or more opportunity for competition that conservative audiences will trust. So you know, we have lots of fact checking of Fox from outlets like CNN and the New York Times where I work, but those are just not trusted outlets in a conservative part of a country or conservative audience, and so you would want to create more competition, particularly

in that space. The second thing that we're going to watch the Europeans do is figure out how to make the big social media platform MS more responsible, how to essentially inject a public interest sense of obligation into what they do. I think they're just going to do it much faster than we are. One advantage in regulation I think the Europeans have over the United States is that these big social media companies they're American companies, they're not

European companies. And so in United States Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, they show up in Congress and they say, hey, if you don't protect us, you're going to empower the Chinese TikTok is going to take over the world. The Europeans aren't particularly moved by that argument. They don't feel the same need to protect American corporations, and I think that is why they're going to lead the way in figuring out how to have just a healthier social media environment.

Although these companies have big lobbying operations in Brussels, they're working the European legislators the same as they're working the ones here. Absolutely, I mean, I yes, I'm glad you said that they just don't have the kind of home team antis, but they are absolutely spending lots of money doing exactly that. And there are a range of things to talk about here. I mean, I don't I am

not in favor of direct government regulation of speech online. Like, I don't think we should create a federal Department of Content moderation. But what we could do, or what the Europeans may well do, is start requiring, first of all, much more transparency from these companies. Well, let's dig into the social media part of it first, because you know, here we have a conundrum. We've given these companies permission

to not be responsible for what they've published. This is the so called Section two thirty that says as long as their platforms and not publishers, they're not legally culpable and what publishers are. And they've generally taken that to mean, well, you know, it's not up to us whether something is true, it's not. We don't decide what's good information and what's bad information. All we have to do is take things down if they vile a copyright or I guess increasingly

if they are proven false. They may limit the spread of them. At the moment, independent researchers can't even tell you how prevalent disinformation and hate speech is on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and these are places that are not governed by the First Amendment. They already police lots of speech, right, they're not the public square. They sort of function that way, but legally they have much more freedom to monitor speech

than the government does. They're not the government, they're companies. But we don't even really know what they're doing when they say that they're fact checking or putting fact checking labels on posts, or reducing the spread of disinformation. We have to trust their internal reports about the effects that

has we don't even know. So that's like one place to start solving this problem is just literally to find out what's going on inside those companies, and then we can talk about other parts of this involving like the way that their algorithm functions. Yeah, so a crucial suggestion is if we're going to do something about disinformation, the

places that are the main avenues for disinformation. I eat Twitter and Facebook more than any others, but the social media platforms YouTube, Jacob, we got to include sorry, your YouTube absolutely fem in there because they always we always leave them out. They have to get good at dealing with disincinformation. They have to get good at spotting it and keeping it from spreading. And you know, the question is,

then do they are they going to do? Are they incentive has to do that on their own will regulation make them do that? Or are there rules like if they adopt standard, setting up some sort of independent governing body that will enforce the rules they set in a

consistent manner. Right. That's another thing that Europeans are talking about is whether they should have some kind of government agency that they don't even necessarily talking about setting the rules, but saying to these platforms, Okay, what are your rules, and then how can you show us that you're actually in forcing them in a fair and comprehensive way. Like

that's a role you could imagine the government playing. Yeah, what can we do about the other side of this, the political side, the unlimited money, the undisclosed sources of funding on political ads online. Absent a new Supreme Court that revisits citizens United, how can we regulate politics in

a way that de weaponizes the First Amendment? Well, I mean, there is nothing in the Supreme Court jurisprints that would prevent Congress from requiring disclosure of funding sources for online ads, just as they do for radio and television imprint that is still available. Another possibility would be to ban or regulate what's called microtargeting, which are these very narrow casted ads online in which you can pick exactly who you

want to reach. You can send a more extremist kind of message to one part of the electorate and then more moderate ones to other parts. And if you're slicing and dicing the electrode into very thin slices and sending out lots of messages, the chances that people are going to fact check all the messages you're sending are much lower. Like people aren't even going to see the messages necessarily, they may never surface in a way that they come

to the attention of the press. And so we've seen a lot of domestic groups do this in this cycle. This is what the Russians did in twenty sixteen. Microtargeted ads are one thing. If you're buying shoes, maybe they're a totally different thing. And we shouldn't allow campaigns and issue advocacy groups to use them. That's one possibility. Isn't another important part of it just the widespread consciousness that

we are prone to disinformation. I mean that there we know more and more about how it works, we have some ideas where it's coming from, and isn't that you know? And that's that's like wearing masks during the pandemic, you just have to take some basic precautions totally. I agree. I guess what I worry about is that the people who are aware of what you just said are not

the people who are falling for it. You know, sometimes when I'm out reporting and I'm talking to people who aren't journalists and don't really know very much about politics, I just sense a level of exhaustion and confusion about which sources of information to trust. And I think if you're in that sphere and you're just really not sure who's telling the truth, it's very hard to figure out what to do because like your whole sense of trustworthy

information has been destabilized and kind of scrambled. I mean an extreme example of this is Russia under putin, where people just don't trust anything and I'm not sure what. Well, it's not a good thing to say unsolvable. I think that one thing we can do about that is a longer term effort to really teach people about how social

media and media work, and that's important. In the more short term, we also need to make sure that when we talk about disinformation, we don't do it in a way that makes it seem so overwhelming that we just like exhaust all the people who are not super plugged in and make them feel like politics is just useless and not something that they can ever figure out. I

worry about that. Yeah, it's interesting. On coronavirus, the social media companies at the outset took a pretty strong position that they were going to take down disinformation because it was so dangerous for obvious reasons, and they were pretty good about that. On the one hand, it doesn't seem to have had that much of an impact in that there's still tremendous disinformation spreading and being believed by a

significant portion of the population. On the other hand, it's a pretty good model for how they can get bad information out of their systems when they want to. Yeah, it's interesting because before coronavirus, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube would almost always say like, we can't promote authoritative sources, that's

not our role. And then the World Health Organization came to them in March and said we have an infodemic on our hands, meaning like a pandemic of disinformation, and the platform said okay, and they started trying to promote information From the World Health Organization and the CDC. There has still been a lot of misinformation about coronavirus online.

Trump has contributed to a lot of it. You know, when Trump started talking about how you can inject disinfectant, his words stayed up online, but also the social media companies then left up other claims about bleach is disinfectant. So there's some way in which Trump himself, at least in the United States, is like a major causal factor, and or at least we won't know how much it's

about him until we've moved into some post Donald Trump world. Emily, we usually wrap up by asking what listeners can do to help with the problem. I think this is one where a lot of people have a lot of opinions, But what do you think are the most important things that ordinary people can do to fight the spread of disinformation. The first thing is you can learn more about these issues,

especially on social media. The Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center does really interesting analysis of Twitter takedowns and other social media developments, Facebook takedowns, and they also have a link to the Election Integrity Partnership, another organization that's trying to tackle electoral disinformation. There's a really interesting global activist

group called a VAZ that does. It's a VAAZ. They do reports on misinformation and disinformation, and the Berkman Client Center for Internet and Society at Harvard is another great resource. And then I think another part of this is don't share stories that come across your social media feed until you're sure they are true. And I think this is something that happens to all of us, like liberals as

well as conservatives. Friends of mine since I've been working on this story have confessed to me various stories that they looked true and then they turned out to be totally wrong. So just be careful when you see things coming across your feed, are they coming from a reliable source, what kind of evidence do they look like they really

have behind them? Because what the companies are doing is trying to make money, and they are algorithms right now are driving and amplifying a lot of content because it's hot and that it provokes emotions like outrage. And so part of this is being a consumer of social media or media who is trying to push these companies toward a less profit driven and more public interest kind of model. And how do people let social media companies know that they want that? I mean literally, it's like what you

click on, what you respond to. The algorithms are promoting the content that keeps people engaged, because the more data about us and he's have, the more they have to sell back to advertisers. If we're going to disrupt that whole loop, it's going to be because we forced it to happen. So if we have a different kind of diet ourselves like that affects the algorithm in a healthy way. So be careful what you share, lean on social media

companies to be more responsible and better actors themselves. And then how about the political part. I mean, if Congress were to do one thing and listeners were to write their members of Congress asking for that one thing, what would it be, Well, I have to choose one thing. Okay, you can have as many. Well, certainly we should start by requiring disclosure for online ads, just as they do

for radio and television and print. I mean, that just makes sense, And there's by part as an interest in that. I think beyond that, there are real questions that go deeper about the Supreme Court line of cases that ends and Citizens United, and basically how to get corporation out of the dominant or near dominant place they have in our political ecosystem, and that's about major political change. It really is. It's unfortunately not a kind of medium sized solution.

Emily Basilon is a staff writer for The New York Times magazine and the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School. Don't forget to check out our show notes for links to the suggestions our guest mate for ways that you can get involved in solving these problems too. Next week, Solvable will discuss the international rise of populism and how to solve it. I hope you'll join us. Solvable is brought to you by

Pushkin Industries. Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frank. Catherine Girardo is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia lo Bell. I'm Jacob Weisberg.