Ian Bremmer:
Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer. Today we are diving into an issue that's becoming increasingly divisive in American politics, free speech. But it shouldn't be, right? We like to think of the First Amendment as sacrosanct. You can speak your mind, protest peacefully, publish your opinions, and the government can't stop you. In practice, of course, it's messier and has become more polarized than ever. Both the left and right claim to be defenders of free speech, but they have very different ideas about what that means. Republicans have long accused Democrats of silencing conservative voices. Now, as the Trump Administration targets campus protesters and cracks down on institutions it sees as hostile, Democrats say they're the ones whose speech is being threatened.
What does free speech mean in 2025? Why do so many Americans feel like theirs is under attack? And what does the future of open discourse look like in a deeply divided country? To help make sense of it all, I'm joined by two people who spend most of their time thinking about these questions. Jeremy Peters, a journalist at The New York Times, who covers free speech and the politics of higher education. Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional scholar and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Let's get to it.
Jeremy Peters, Ilya Shapiro, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.
Ilya Shapiro:
Good to be with you.
Jeremy Peters:
Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
I want to start with an easy one, Ilya, to you. Tell us what free speech is and what it is not.
Ilya Shapiro:
It's the ability to express yourself, your opinion, your artistry, your views on any number of subjects without being persecuted or prosecuted by official state actors. That's the very basics.
Ian Bremmer:
What isn't free speech? For people that think that free speech covers anything.
Ilya Shapiro:
It is not physical acts, be they criminal or otherwise, that are motivated by ideas. If I beat somebody up, if I vandalize a building, if I block a road, physical actions of various kinds, even if I'm motivated by completely expressive, artistic, what have you, ideas. That there's no First Amendment or free speech defense to any rules against that.
Ian Bremmer:
Jeremy, given that, why do you think freedom of speech has become a partisan issue? Because that definition certainly doesn't sound objectionable to just about anyone that would be watching this show right now.
Jeremy Peters:
Well, I guess it depends on what your political persuasion is and whether or not you feel you're being persecuted for that speech. The old saying about speech, "Free speech for me, but not for thee," I think still very much applies today. Often, this has been the case throughout American history, people complain about free speech only when it is taken away from them. They tend to be really excited about it as our First Amendment to the Constitution when it enables them to say something that people don't want to hear or might otherwise be controversial.
Ian Bremmer:
Give me, if you can, an example or maybe two examples of that happening right now, one from the left, one from the right.
Jeremy Peters:
Certainly, you see the Trump Administration going after elite universities. What they have said is, "Because you take federal money, we are going to subject you to a list of demands." You have to discipline your students according to your code and not let them do things that would be not be considered free speech, like setting up a tent in a quad. That is not something generally considered to be an exercise of your First Amendment rights.
As far as on the left, I would say you look to what kind of climate I think is responsible for the very contentious debate we're having right now, the climate on college campuses where you had progressive student activists, and in some cases students egged on by progressive faculty members, trying to shout down certain speakers who are conservative or pro-Trump. That is not something that is a protected First Amendment activity. You can't prevent somebody else from speaking.
Ian Bremmer:
Ilya, do you think that talking about free speech and claiming oppression from free speech is something that both parties right now have some fundamental truth about? Or is it something that only one party, like the party that everyone happens to be affiliated with, can be right on?
Ilya Shapiro:
It really just depends on the circumstances. In the university context, one thing is going on. In other contexts, other things are going on. Even within the university context, if there's an attempt at regulation or restriction of speech within the classroom, that's a very different thing than arguing that the university is not acting to enforce its own rules. Or it's violating indeed civil rights by, as Florida has done with its legislature, having DEI offices and things like that. There is illiberalism or campaigns against free speech from all sorts of directions. And non-ideological directions, for that matter. But we're at a fraught time because it's so polarized and so tribal right now that indeed, this dynamic of free speech for me, but not for thee is prevalent.
Ian Bremmer:
What would you say is the clearest in your mind, Ilya, example of overstep of fundamental freedom of speech rights in the university context right now? Either side.
Ilya Shapiro:
I'd say universities not protecting their student speech rights in various ways. FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression, does a survey every year. They're, by the way, very ecumenical, very fair-minded, protect everyone from all over the place. One of my favorite organizations. They give a failing grade to most universities in the country. I think Harvard's at the very bottom, with the only school with a negative score. But they see all sorts of things. Not necessarily speech codes, although some of those are still around. But uneven enforcement, certain clubs are allowed to do something that other clubs aren't because they're disfavored by administrators. Sometimes schools have very good free speech, free expression policies that are observed in the breech. Something schools have a hard time, as we've seen since October 7th, in differentiating between speech and things that are non-speech, as we just discussed. And also, in terms of time, place, and manner regulations, as lawyers put them.
For example, core political speech is very important, but I can't go to your residential neighborhood in the middle of the night and with a megaphone, tell you exactly what I think about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. A lot of issues with schools forgetting their basic responsibilities, their core missions to promote free speech, not to mention due process, academic freedom, some of these fellow travelers with free speech, if you will.
Ian Bremmer:
Jeremy, is freedom of speech broken on American campuses, or at least some American campuses today? And if so, how?
Jeremy Peters:
It certainly did seem to break on a lot of campuses over the course of the last decade-and-a-half or so. It was getting better. But before we talk about how it was getting better, I think you are right that it definitely seemed to not exist, at least for certain points of view. This didn't just extend to college campus demonstrations or speakers who were controversial who got shouted down or dis-invited. This also extended to the classroom, where students who say in surveys and still do, as far as I know, that they have censored themselves. That they've been afraid to say certain things that they believe in for fear of enduring the wrath of their fellow classmates.
It definitely has been something that colleges, a lot of them, have acknowledged they need to work on. That's why you see more universities and colleges starting programs that are intended to introduce students to opposing points of view and teach them how to disagree agreeably. That's some of the improvement you were starting to see, improvement that I don't think the Trump Administration has really given universities credit for in its list of demands about basically how to do everything from discipline its own students to what teachers should be allowed to say in the classroom.
Ian Bremmer:
Now, Jeremy, you heard Ilya say that Harvard is at the bottom of this list, at least according to one nonpartisan organization. To what extent is this challenge that the universities have had much more significant in a small number of elite left-leaning universities? As opposed to the vast majority of universities across the country. Are we talking about something that truly is broad-based or not really?
Jeremy Peters:
That's a great question and I don't think we really know the answer to it. It's something that I'm interested in as a subject of my own reporting for the Times. I think it is definitely concentrated at large, elite, state schools and Ivy League schools. They tend to get the most media attention so that often leaves us not knowing what is happening at Mississippi State University or at a rural community college in the far reaches of Northern California. What the administration has done here is make policy based on those select few schools that have had some of the most provocative and outrageous demonstrations. They're not basing their policy on what's going on at the average college campus. They're basing their policies on what's going on on Harvard's campus.
Ian Bremmer:
Ilya, let's talk about what's the Trump administration is doing at Columbia, at Harvard, at other universities. Explain Trump's position and what you think he's trying to get done and whether you think he's going about it the right way.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, we've seen the subversion of core university missions in the last 10, 15 years, as Jeremy was alluding to, not just in terms of free speech or cancel culture, but due process. This goes back to the Obama era Dear Colleague letter relating to sexual harassment and there've been major settlements alleging violations of due process and sort of some complaints. Equality under the law, again, different ways of applying rules depending on the viewpoint of the speaker, civil rights violations after October 7th relating to antisemitism. But not just those, just in terms of equal opportunity to access educational programs.
What the Trump administration did is, focusing on the lowest hanging fruit or the highest profile universities, has set out a list of demands saying, "You violated your obligations under the contracts that you signed to get your federal funds as well as broader federal laws like Title VI and other civil rights laws. Therefore, here is how we want to remedy this."
Columbia negotiated a settlement, it seems to have at least. There's some dispute with its now former president about whether they're actually pursuing anything. Harvard and some others have decided to fight in court. I agree with the administration's overall strategic goals and its kind of large scale diagnosis of the problem. I think that strategically or tactically, they might've been better off pursuing some of the investigations that they announced over dozens of institutions laying the groundwork, getting the backup, all of the data, and exactly connecting the violations to the statutory authorities under which the education department or the Justice Department Civil Rights Division would be acting. Then laying it before the school saying, "Hey, we found these violations. You're going to be in serious trouble unless we see very direct changes and not just kind of the handshake agreements that we've seen in the Biden administration that closed some investigations in the waning days and weeks of President Biden's term, but real significant change." Because I think schools have gotten away with too much for too long, but that's not what happened. We kind of have this high stakes poker game playing these demands, counter-demands, lawsuits. I don't know where it's all going to end, but the schools certainly don't have clean hands here.
Ian Bremmer:
I am going to come back to you for a second, Ilya. If you were advising the presidents of one of these universities facing President Trump's wrath, would you be recommending that they work to cut a deal the Columbia route, or that they hit back with a lawsuit, refuse, the Harvard route and why?
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, there's legal advice and then there's PR or political advice. There's different pressures on Alan Garber, for example, the president of Harvard. So legally speaking, it looks like the administration was open to negotiation. That's what happened with Columbia. That seems like what was happening with Harvard after an April 3rd letter. This April 11th letter that provoked the lawsuit, we're now learning might not have been fully authorized so it's a bit of a mess there. But it's always better to resolve things through negotiation than to go through litigation, not just because you could lose, but because it turns down the heat and it can be better for all parties.
I don't know, the president of Harvard was put in a tough place, but as is coming out about Harvard as well as Princeton, I think, which is my alma mater, and its president, Chris Eisgruber, has been also vociferously defending his practices. But we're seeing some reporting by my colleague Chris Rufo, for example, of a racist discriminatory regime that Eisgruber has put in for hiring at Princeton. So it's a big mess, and I do hope that something can be accomplished before we just use the brute force of judicial rulings.
Ian Bremmer:
Heck, Trump probably wouldn't be president this time around if he chose to just negotiate as opposed to litigate when he was facing conflicts. But that's a different show.
So let me now turn to Jeremy and say please, to start respond to that. Where do you agree and disagree?
Jeremy Peters:
I think that one thing that we haven't talked about is the way that the Trump administration is most likely in violation of the First Amendment by the way that it treated some of these students who are non-citizens. It's exactly true what Ilya said. The universities do not have clean hands here. But instead of taking an approach and executing a very reasonable demand that universities allow greater free speech rights on campus and make their campus cultures less ideologically homogenous, rather than execute that cleanly and smoothly, what the administration has done is use this blunt force to deport or try to deport people who really didn't do anything terribly wrong. These are not the students we were talking about earlier who smashed windows or assaulted security guards.
Ian Bremmer:
These are students exercising freedom of speech, right? That's what we're saying.
Jeremy Peters:
Right, yeah, and the Supreme Court probably will have to decide whether or not, because they're not citizens, what type of free speech rights they're afforded. But it has issued rulings that go back and forth on this. You talk to legal experts and you just don't know what the Supreme Court ultimately is going to say about the First Amendment rights of these folks.
But the two highest profile cases, we're talking about a guy at Columbia, who was the spokesperson for an organization that believed and said some pretty outrageous things, but he's not on record having said any of them himself. And a woman at Tufts University who just wrote an op-ed about divesting. It's pretty hard to see where the Trump administration can make a legal case that these people are national security threats.
Ian Bremmer:
Ilya, it would seem that a lot of American citizens would be outraged if these people were somehow facing penalty as American citizens. They're not citizens, they're just green card holders. Does that mean that freedom of speech doesn't apply to them? Is that your view?
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, that's a different issue. Even though superficially it seems like an education-related issue because they're students, it's more about immigration policy and national security and a different kind of fight. Indeed, even the education stuff that we had been talking about, not all of it relates to speech. There's one thing about trying to control course catalogs or what's taught or said inside classrooms, to the extent that that's what the administration is doing. I don't think they are, but to the extent that it is, they're on shakier ground than if they're trying to police civil rights.
But getting onto this immigration issue, I kind of have a lived experience with some of these rules because I'm a naturalized citizen myself. At several steps along the way, having student visas, worker visas, green card, you have to certify that, for example, not just that you're not committing a crime, but that you're not a Nazi, you're not a communist, you don't sympathize with an authoritarian party, you don't support terrorism. You don't support the violent overthrow of the US government. In certain circumstances, you can be denied a visa and the standard for being denied a visa is the same as for having a visa revoked for pure speech in terms of giving a speech, saying, "I'm for the violent overthrow of the US government." I don't think that's what's happening in these cases. At least for Khalil as the leader of a group or in the leadership organization, spokesman for, representative, all of these things get you in trouble for being involved with a group that did take over buildings and do all sorts of things. Now, you don't have to commit a crime or even be charged with a crime to be deported. There are all these other immigration rules under the Immigration and Nationality Act. I prefer that the administration go after violators of the immigration rules like the ones that I described, rather than relying on the broader catchall that says that the secretary of state can simply designate someone as harmful to American foreign policy because that really opens the door to a lot of-
Ian Bremmer:
To abuse, yeah.
Ilya Shapiro:
... problems. That's right. Again, the administration has not released, nor do they have to, all the information they have on at this point hundreds of people whose visas they've revoked. I hope they're going after lower-hanging fruit, the leaders of these organizations that are violating rules not just engaging in hate speech or what have you. I don't know what's going on with a tough person in particular or others. But certainly if you're involved in various kinds of organizations that do various kinds of things, as a foreigner you can't be charged, you can't be criminally prosecuted, fined, or anything else, but the immigration rules are pretty strict. And it makes sense in the broader sense of a country regulating who can come into the country, what kind of ideas they want to spread, do we want to subvert our democratic institutions. And we can have a debate about what those standards should be, but it's nothing in particular should prevent us from enforcing the immigration laws that are on the books.
Ian Bremmer:
So I guess the question is, Jeremy, does this have a chilling effect on freedom of speech for a far larger group of people across the United States or who might be interested in visiting the United States because they feel that they could arbitrarily be considered a national security threat and there's no judicial recourse?
Jeremy Peters:
I think you're already seeing the chilling effect. At Columbia University for instance, the dean of the journalism school told students, don't post on Facebook, don't do anything that will draw attention to yourself. And it's kind of hard to argue with that advice given what students are being deported for or are being put in the queue to be deported for. It's like we were just saying, these are not students who committed crimes. And I think the reason the Trump administration hasn't shown us anyone it's deporting who behaved in really egregious ways or was shouting hateful things or is videotaped blocking students from entering the quad or their dorm rooms is because those actions, I would guess, were primarily undertaken by American citizens and the school's responsibility is to discipline them in most cases, not the federal government.
Ilya Shapiro:
That's not necessarily the case. Right after October 7th, there was all sort of mayhem at MIT, for example, I recall, and that school has a heavily foreign population. And the administrators there said that they didn't discipline people for, they admitted that rules were violated and people were blocked access and things like this, and they didn't discipline people because so many are foreigners and then their student visas would be jeopardized. Then Senator Marco Rubio wrote to the state department, this is the Biden era State Department, and got confirmation that indeed people can have their student visas revoked and have to leave the country for engaging in those kinds of altercations.
So this is not a new authority that Trump is necessarily invoking, and I think it's right to look at people who are engaged in disruptions and doing all sorts of other things. Now, I wouldn't go after people whose only fault is writing an op-ed. Just in terms of setting priorities, you go after the murderers before the jaywalkers that sort of thing. But I think it's totally okay to find people who are agitating against America's interests, harming their fellow students in various ways.
Ian Bremmer:
Writing a political op-ed that supports a position that a lot of students that are citizens would support. Is that jaywalking for a non-citizen? That's what I'm hearing, so I want to make sure that's what you view it.
Ilya Shapiro:
If that is the only charge that would be the lowest level priority I would think. I mean, just an op-ed could violate the immigration rules. Again, you have to certify you're not a communist, you don't support the violent overthrow of the government, you don't provide support for terrorism. If you write an op-ed expressing those things, you are violating the immigration rules. But if you're not engaged in some sort of criminal conspiracy to continue on with that kind of behavior, to organize bomb plots or what have you, I think that just an op-ed is lower priority than people that organize to block roads and take over buildings and assault people and block access and things like that.
Ian Bremmer:
Jeremy, I'll give you a chance to respond then.
Jeremy Peters:
Well, that's exactly right. I mean, if there were students who are here on visas, non-citizens, who are blocking traffic, breaking windows, occupying administration buildings, those are violations of the law. Trespassing. So certainly those people could face deportation for what they've done. The administration has had a hard time showing us that those are the people that they are going after, and instead they've found people who have done things that are rather tame and may even be protected by the First Amendment like writing an op-ed. So as the administration has done with many other policies that would have a lot of public support, resetting our relationship with China, rethinking our relationship with NATO, they have executed it in a way that has been so heavy-handed and so alienating that it really undermines, I think, their popular support. And you can see that in the polls.
Ian Bremmer:
I see a fair amount of agreement, even if not in the exact terminology that both of you would use in the way you're generally framing what you think needs to happen and where your concerns of overreach are. That's certainly a useful place for us to all start. So, hey, Ilya, since you've already brought up your lived experience, let me ask you about another one, which is, I've seen a lot of commentary about a specific focus in needs to curtail speech that equates to anti-Semitism. I'm wondering, do you think that there has been a singling out of anti-Semitic speech and do you think it's appropriate to do so?
I don't think there's been targeting of antisemitic speech. Just like racist speech or other kinds of offensive or hate speech, that's protected, that's free speech. The problem is when you start acting on that or there's a high bar for incitement of violence, if you conclude your speech by saying and therefore any Jew you find today punch them in the face, or any black person you find today, chase them down, or something like that, that starts rising to the level of harassment or incitement of violence.
I think there's a proper focus on antisemitism because it's reared its ugly head since October 7th. And what we've seen as Bill Ackman, the billionaire Harvard donor activist, wrote in a piece that in the free press that ironically came out the same day that Claudine Gay resigned last year. Anti-Semitism is the canary in the coal mine, it always pops up when there are much larger or more pathologies underneath. And in the educational context that ranges from ideological indoctrination to echo chambers, cancel culture, all of these things. I just published a book in January called The Lawless, The Miseducation of America's Elites. I really think that there's this illiberalism that has taken over higher education and that started before even Donald Trump's first term.
I am not sure it's coincidence in terms of Ackman's piece coming out since he was one of the people that was leading the charge and trying to get Gay to resign. But I otherwise take the point. So, Jeremy, do you accept that characterization and how do you think the American government needs to police this? How do you think universities need to respond in ways perhaps either have not been acting appropriately?
Jeremy Peters:
Right. Well, Claudine Gay's response and the response of other university presidents at those congressional hearings about what constituted antisemitic conduct that would rise to the level of punishment at these universities, their responses were totally inadequate. And that's why you saw such an uproar. Not by the way, just from Republican congressmen on that panel but from really professors, other students. It was pretty widespread the kind of shock that it would be okay in the eyes of a university for students to advocate for genocide in some cases, which is exactly the trap that Claudine Gay got caught up in that ultimately-
Ian Bremmer:
Caught up in, yeah.
Jeremy Peters:
... led to her ouster. So I think that the anti-Semitic issue is tricky because you have the current president of Harvard, John Garber, saying that he believes certain forms of anti-Israel commentary can indeed be antisemitic. And that is something that a lot of people have debated, whether or not these speech codes that try to police antisemitic actions and words go too far in violating the First Amendment. Colleges now seem to be much more focused on preventing antisemitism than they were just a year ago when it seemed that many of them didn't take it seriously at all.
Ian Bremmer:
Ilya, do you think that it's defined appropriately on campuses that anti-Israel speech by itself is not antisemitic? Because I mean, certainly as someone who spent a lot of time on college campuses, I see a hell of a lot of the former that does not equate to the latter.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, I think it's possible to be anti-Zionist without being antisemitic, but it's very rare in my experience, and you see that with opposition that's nominally to Israel's policies, but it's being directed to Hillel's or it's being directed at synagogues or what have you. So it's a hard call to make, but you have to be detail-oriented in these things and go case by case university by university.
Ian Bremmer:
I say it primarily because then a post-October 7th, the solid majority of Israelis on the ground had huge problems with Netanyahu, the Prime Minister, and with his policies, but I wouldn't call them antisemitic.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, okay. Now individually Israeli policies certainly, but anti-Zionism meaning against the right of Israel to exist that, is exceedingly rarely divorced from antisemitism.
Ian Bremmer:
So when I said anti-Israel, I personally was putting in the context of being anti-Russia or anti-China, of which you'd probably describe the vast majority of Congress. So I mean, in that regard, maybe we're just defining anti-Israel with a broad brush in ways that we shouldn't be, is that fair?
Ilya Shapiro:
I don't think so. I mean, when the protesters chant, "I don't want no two-state. I want it all," or however they do it, or, "From the river to the sea," that is a direct threat to Israel. That's not just saying we want to replace Netanyahu's Coalition government with a different one. I mean, for that matter, the anti-Netanyahu coalition leader, Naftali Bennett was shouted down at Princeton very recently.
Ian Bremmer:
I remember.
Ilya Shapiro:
I don't think we want to get too cute here.
Ian Bremmer:
No, I was going to say, I don't think we're going to resolve this issue on this show, which is fair enough. But let's get to an easier one, social media. We've talked a lot about what freedom of speech means for people, what about for non-people? Lots of non-verified accounts, even verified accounts on social media that are not people that are bots. How do we need to rethink freedom of speech and freedom of speech protections in this country when you start talking about the social media domain. Jeremy, I'll start with you.
Jeremy Peters:
I don't think you need to rethink free speech law or the First Amendment narrowing it at all. I think what needs to happen is Congress needs to do its job and it's Congress's responsibility ultimately to pass laws that hold these social media companies to account. I mean, these are private organizations that can decide what happens on their platforms and what type of speech is and isn't allowed. So Congress, since the existence of social media, has failed to come up with a way to regulate them, and I don't see any reason why we should expect the near future at least to be any different there.
Ian Bremmer:
Ilya, primarily a regulation problem?
Ilya Shapiro:
I'm wary of regulation because I'm wary of putting power into government officials hands to say, "This is okay speech. This is not okay speech." Or, "This is an okay speaker and that's not an okay speaker." So it's not about whether bots have rights, it's about do we want to have free platforms or regulated in a whole host of ways that will have real impositions on real people, as we saw by the collusion between the tech companies and the government over COVID, and although that litigation was ultimately stopped at the Supreme Court over a standing issue, I think they kind of lumped it into their COVID jurisprudence and they didn't want to expand further. But especially with Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook and others talking about pressure from the Biden administration to suppress certain stories or speakers or what have you, I am wary of having a board of misinformation or disinformation or Congress regulating in some way.
And we've seen kind of a counter example with Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. I'm not so sure about renaming it X, but regardless, it seems to me the most balanced platform out there. And as we're all in our echo chambers listening to or watching only certain kinds of news sources, X seems, of anyone, seems to have the most balanced as between liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and that's largely a function of Musk's removal of the prior restrictions and regulations.
Ian Bremmer:
I tend to agree with you that there's a lot less of a filter bubble, a lot less of a people just talking to themselves on Twitter X than you see on Bluesky or Threads for example, and also because it's much more global, frankly, but also a massive profusion of disinformation, of fake news and of course also engaging so much more with accounts that aren't people. And so I worry personally that where we are heading with freedom of speech in the social domain is one where increasingly we don't really know who a citizen is. When we really don't know what it means to have civic engagement, and it feels, social media free speech feels to me even more broken than freedom of speech on universities today. Is that a fair thing for me to say, or would you push back? Ilya, you can start.
Ilya Shapiro:
Well, we have laws that apply equally in the social media platform or artificial intelligence space against fraud, against election day misinformation. Telling someone, "Oh, Republicans vote Tuesday, Democrats vote Wednesday," that sort of thing, there are rules against that. Beyond those kinds of traditional laws, I don't know how you would define and restrict and who would get to define and restrict so-called fake news, propaganda of various kinds, whether commercial, political, artistic or otherwise has been part of the human condition since time immemorial. So I'd be wary of trying to even define and then empower people to enforce those new definitions.
Ian Bremmer:
One I would suggest would be maybe algorithmic promotion cannot be for accounts that are not verifiably human. That might be one way to start it, but that's just an idea. Jeremy, would you like to give us a concluding thought on something positive that could be done that would help reduce what feels like an increasingly fragmented and fraught environment?
Jeremy Peters:
Unfortunately, I think if you were to ask Americans who they trust less than Congress to set laws and parameters around what is and isn't speech online, it would be the Silicon Valley tech companies. Because basically what you could end up with is a law or a regulation that says the New York Times is fake news, or that PBS is fake news, or that the Manhattan Institute is fake news. Once you let individuals start giving greater definition to these very loose forms that are thrown around so much that they're virtually meaningless now, it's really problematic.
Ian Bremmer:
Jeremy Peters, Ilya Shapiro, really appreciate you joining me today.
Ilya Shapiro:
Thank you.
Jeremy Peters:
Thank you.
Ian Bremmer:
That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you do. Why not make it official? Why don't you rate and review GZERO World five stars, only five stars, otherwise, don't do it, on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell your friends.
