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FILE PHOTO: General view shows the United States Supreme Court, in Washington, U.S., February 8, 2024.
Can the government dictate what’s on Facebook?
The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday from groups representing major social media platforms which argue that new laws in Florida and Texas that restrict their ability to deplatform users are unconstitutional. It’s a big test for how free speech is interpreted when it comes to private technology companies that have immense reach as platforms for information and debate.
Supporters of the states’ laws originally framed them as measures meant to stop the platforms from unfairly singling out conservatives for censorship – for example when X (then Twitter) booted President Donald Trump for his tweets during January 6.
What do the states’ laws say?
The Florida law prevents social media platforms from banning any candidates for public office, while the Texas one bans removing any content because of a user’s viewpoint. As the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals put it, Florida “prohibits all censorship of some speakers,” while Texas “prohibits some censorship of all speakers.”
Social media platforms say the First Amendment protects them either way, and that they aren't required to transmit everyone’s messages, like a telephone company which is viewed as a public utility. Supporters of the laws say the platforms are essentially a town square now, and the government has an interest in keeping discourse totally open – in other words, more like a phone company than a newspaper.
What does the court think?
The justices seemed broadly skeptical of the Florida and Texas laws during oral arguments. As Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out, the First Amendment doesn’t empower the state to force private companies to platform every viewpoint.
The justices look likely to send the case back down to a lower court for further litigation, which would keep the status quo for now, but if they choose to rule, we could be waiting until June.US President Joe Biden and an American flag
Should the US government be involved with content moderation?
In a decision that sets up a monumental legal battle over the limits of the US government’s power to influence online speech, Louisiana-based District Court Judge Terry Doughty on Tuesday ruled that the Biden administration cannot contact social media platforms for the purpose of moderating content that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment.
What’s the background? The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Missouri and Louisiana last year, which alleged that the Biden administration had coerced platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube into suppressing certain views about public health measures during the pandemic, the 2020 election results, and the economy. The government says it merely made suggestions to blacklist content that it believed would cause public health harm or undermine trust in US elections, and that it didn’t force anyone to do anything.
The philosophical question: Who gets to decide? On the one hand, anyone with eyes can see that social media enables lies and disinformation to proliferate at unprecedented speeds. Enlightenment-era notions of free speech designed for a world of hand-printed pamphlets seem potentially out of date today -- especially when algorithms that tailor content to partisan tastes have turned the “marketplace of ideas” into a warren of self-contained online kiosks.
But the question is whether the government should be allowed to police content that might otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. Supporters of government intervention say that yes, it’s important to quickly stop lies that could, say, harm public health, or undermine the credibility of elections.
Skeptics – at least the good faith ones – see it differently. In a world where facts may be black and white (no, the 2020 election was not “stolen,”), but viewpoints are grayer (experts still disagree about the efficacy of masking and lockdowns during the pandemic), it’s a fatal mistake, they say, for a democracy to allow the government to police online speech like this. After all, one administration’s “fake news” might soon be another’s "fair question."
The partisan dimension: Philosophical matters aside, the case has a partisan coloring. It was brought by GOP states, and the presiding Judge — a Trump appointee — noted in his opinion that the viewpoints targeted for suppression were mostly ones shared by “conservatives.” What's more, it comes amid a broader campaign by the GOP-controlled House to show that various government institutions have been “weaponized” against them.
Still, ordinary Americans’ views on social media regulation don’t follow party lines as much as you might think. A huge study by the Knight Foundation in 2022 found that a majority of Americans think social media companies contribute to societal divisions, and 90% say these platforms spread disinformation. In other words, people don't feel they can trust social media -- a big problem when traditional media are also suffering a long-running crisis of credibility.
But when it comes to solving these problems, things get muddier. Nearly four in five Americans say social media companies can’t be trusted to solve that problem themselves, but 55% say they prefer to keep government out of those decisions entirely.
While there is a hard-core wing of Democrats who fully support government regulation of online content, and a similar, if smaller, wing of Republicans who oppose any controls whatsoever, the Knight study found that roughly half of Americans’ views on these questions don’t correlate neatly with party affiliation — younger and more politically active internet users of all party affiliations, for example, tended to think social media companies should regulate themselves.
What comes next? The Biden administration will appeal the ruling, and Eurasia Group US expert Jon Lieber says it will likely go all the way to the Supreme Court. If so, the case could land in the docket right as the country enters the homestretch of the 2024 election campaigns. In the meantime, the ruling will limit the administration’s ability to police what it sees as disinformation in the run-up to the vote. Depending on who you are, you either think that’s a bad thing or a good thing.
Speaking of which, let us know what you think.Should the government be allowed to pressure social media companies to suppress content? If not, is there another way to deal with the problem of lies or disinformation online? Email us here, and please include your name and location if you’d like us to consider publishing your response in an upcoming edition of the Daily. Thanks!
Undated photo posted by Jack Teixeira\'s mother on Veterans Day Nov 11, 2021 on her Facebook page.
What We're Watching: Pentagon leaker suspect arrested, Gershkovich swap chatter, Uruguay’s free trade ambitions
And the suspected leaker is ...
On Thursday afternoon, the FBI arrested a suspect in the most damaging US intel leak in a decade, identifying him as Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira was reportedly the leader of an online gaming chat group, where he had been allegedly sharing classified files for three years. If convicted of violating the US Espionage Act, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars. Teixeira will appear in a Boston court on Friday.
We know that the chat group was made up of mostly male twentysomethings that loved guns, racist online memes, and, of course, video games. We don’t know what motivated the leaks, what other classified material the leaker had, or whether any of the docs were divulged to a foreign intelligence agency.
Arresting a suspect, though, is just the beginning of damage control for the Pentagon and the Biden administration. Although the content of the leaks surprised few within the broader intel community, many might not have realized the extent to which the US spies on its allies.
Uncle Sam obviously would’ve preferred to have intercepted the message this scandal sends to America’s enemies: US intel is not 100% secure.
Russia is maybe considering swap for Evan Gershkovich
A top Russian diplomat suggested Thursday that Moscow could explore a prisoner swap with the US in order to release American journalist Evan Gershkovich, whom Russian authorities jailed earlier this month on espionage charges.
But first, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, the trial against Gershkovich will have to play out in full. That could take as long as a year.
What might Russia want in exchange? Hard to say. Last year, the Kremlin swapped WNBA star Brittney Griner, convicted of a drug offense while traveling in Russia, for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout. At the time, the Kremlin also reportedly sought the release of a Russian assassin from a German prison, but that swap broke down when the Kremlin refused to also release Paul Whelan, an American currently serving an espionage sentence in Russia.
A year from now, the world, and the Ukraine war, might look very different. But expect the Kremlin to throw the book at Gershkovich to maximize their leverage ahead of any talks about his release.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Russia’s prison system, opposition leader Alexei Navalny — currently in solitary confinement — has suffered a fresh health crisis that his spokeswoman says is another attempt to poison him.
For context, see our recent interview with Daniel Roher, director of the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny.
Uruguay’s FTA dream
Uruguay's Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo will soon meet with Chinese officials to take steps toward establishing a Free Trade Agreement between the two countries. Uruguay has wanted an FTA for three decades, and the timing might finally be right as China seeks to increase its influence in South America.
Getting an FTA with China has been a priority for Uruguay’s President Luis Lacalle Pou's administration. The meeting will come on the heels of trade talks between Brazil and China, countries that saw their two-way trade hit a record $171.5 billion in 2022. Uruguay wants in on the action.
China has deepened its trade relationships in Latin America throughout the 21st century, beating out the US as the region's largest trading partner. Beijing benefits politically from these partnerships, gaining votes at the UN and support for Chinese appointees to multinational institutions, as well as the ability to implement technology standards into regional infrastructure.
But not all of Uruguay's neighbors are comfortable with China's swelling influence in the region, or with Uruguay flying solo. Uruguay is facing resistance from other Mercosur countries that favor negotiating regional trade deals as a bloc. Paraguay, which still recognizes Taipei in lieu of the government in Beijing, is leading the pushback – a conflict that could test one of the bloc’s few rules: a restriction on making preferential agreements with third countries.
Demonstrators drape the national flag of Israel on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.
What We’re Watching: Bibi’s defiance, US strikes in Syria, Lula’s China visit, Putin’s Hungary refuge, India vs. free speech
Bibi’s not backing down
Israelis waited with bated breath on Thursday evening as news broke that PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was preparing to brief the nation after another “day of disruption” saw protesters block roads and strike over the government’s proposed judicial reforms.
The trigger for the impromptu public address was a meeting between Bibi and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, also from the ruling Likud Party, who has voiced increasing concern that the looming judicial reform would threaten Israel’s national security, particularly as more and more army reservists are refusing to show up for training.
That never happened. While he talked about healing divisions, a defiant Netanyahu came out and said he will proceed to push through the reform, which, among other things, would give the government an automatic majority on appointing Supreme Court judges. This came just a day after the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed a bill blocking the attorney general from declaring Netanyahu unfit for office due to a conflict of interest over his ongoing legal woes and his bid to dilute the power of the judiciary. In response, the attorney general released a letter Friday saying Netanyahu's involvement in judicial reform is "illegal," suggesting a much-dreaded constitutional crisis may have begun.
Two things to look out for in the days ahead: First, what does Defense Minister Gallant do next? If he threatens to – or does – resign, it could set off subsequent defections and be a game changer. Second, how do the markets respond? Indeed, markets rallied Thursday before Bibi’s address in hopes that the government was set to backtrack on the reforms that are spooking investors, but the shekel value slumped after the speech.
US strikes Iranian-backed group in Syria
The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after a Tehran-aligned militia launched a drone attack against a US base near the province of Hasakah, killing at least one US contractor and injuring another contractor as well as five US troops.
While strikes on US bases in northeastern Syria are not necessarily uncommon, the scale of casualties seen Thursday is quite rare. Indeed, a high-ranking US official recently said that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, which takes orders directly from the supreme leader, has launched 78 attacks on US positions in Syria since Jan. 2021.
The US Department of Defense, meanwhile, said that the drone used in this attack was of Iranian origin, and that President Joe Biden had given the go ahead for a precision-guided retaliatory strike on an Iranian-backed group that reportedly killed 11 fighters.
Video footage suggests the strike was on Deir Ez-Zor, a province that borders Iraq and contains oil fields. The US still maintains around 900 troops in the country’s northeast after President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 troops in 2018. It is at least the fourth known attack on Iranian assets in northwestern Syria under the Biden administration.
Iran, for its part, has not commented on the strikes, but the likelihood of increased tensions with the US is only rising.
Lula takes his beef directly to Xi Jinping
“Tell me who you walk with,” the saying goes, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” Well, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is rolling deep to his upcoming summit with Xi Jinping, taking nearly 250 businesspeople along for the ride. More than a quarter of them are from Brazil’s powerful meat export industry alone.
That tells you everything about the trip’s main focus: trade, trade, and more trade. And why not? It was during Lula’s last stint as president that China displaced the US as Brazil’s largest commercial partner, fueling a historic economic boom as it gobbled up huge quantities of Brazilian meat, soybeans, and iron ore. Nowadays, facing a much tougher economic and political environment, Lula is keen to recapture some of that commercial magic.
But the geopolitical context also matters. Important as China is commercially, the US is Lula’s most important regional security and investment partner, and Washington was Lula’s first trip beyond Latin America as president. As the US-China rivalry deepens, Lula and his dealmaking entourage will need to tread carefully in a world that is splitting apart under their feet.
Hungary is a safe space for Putin
The Hungarian government said Thursday it wouldn’t jail Vladimir Putin if he came to Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for the Russian president for war crimes.
Budapest’s reasoning was a doozy: While they have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, they say they haven’t gotten around to incorporating it into Hungarian law yet, so no-can-do on arresting Putin.
It’s all purely hypothetical, as there’s no chance of Putin going to Hungary any time soon. But that’s the point. Hungary’s avowedly “illiberal” PM Viktor Orban has long made clear that he won’t just toe the EU party line on Russia. He’s reluctantly gone along with EU sanctions on Russia, but he’s also said the EU is needlessly expanding and prolonging the war by arming Ukraine – something his government won’t do.
Moscow, for its part, says arresting Putin abroad would be “an act of war.”
India's opposition leader sentenced to prison for defamation
The world’s largest democracy seems to be getting less comfortable with a key tenet of it: free speech.
Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, was sentenced on Thursday to two years in prison for “defaming” Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was also disqualified as a lawmaker by the lower house of parliament. In April 2019, Gandhi referred to the PM — along with two corrupt officials also named Modi and charged with embezzling millions of dollars — as “thieves.”
This is a big deal because Gandhi is Indian political royalty. After all, he's the son, grandson, and great-grandson of prime ministers (his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India's first PM), and was surely planning to run against Modi for the top job in 2024. What's more, he recently completed a five-month-long march in hopes of reviving the Congress party, which for decades dominated Indian politics but took a beating from the BJP in the last election.
Although his party is appealing the conviction, the stakes are very high for Gandhi due to a provision in India’s election law that disqualifies MPs sentenced to, coincidentally, at least two years in prison for any offense, including defamation. Gandhi turned to Twitter in defiance, tweeting up a storm on Thursday with messages like "Long live the revolution" and quoting Mahatma Gandhi with "truth is my God."
Meanwhile, opposition groups accuse the PM of using the courts to go after his political rivals. Indeed, Gandhi’s sentence comes on the heels of the recent arrest on corruption charges of Manish Sisodia, the head of the AAP, another opposition party that runs the capital, New Delhi. Democratic backsliding indeed.
Elon Musk wants a way out of Twitter
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. A Merry Christmas to you all. A happy Hanukkah, just kicked off. Happy holidays to everybody. I'm delighted to close out the year with a Quick Take, getting us kicked off this rather cold, blustery, very bright sunny day in New York. Hence the sweater, it feels like a layered kind of day. And with everyone talking about the meltdown that is occurring every day on Twitter, I might as well weigh in.
Most recently, Elon Musk, the owner, the CEO, not the founder of Twitter, asking everyone online should I step down as CEO saying, "I will abide by the results of this poll." The answer 57.5% saying yes, 42.5% say no. They want him to step down. Probably a lot of Tesla shareholders weighing in on that. Let's not pretend that this is in any way a real or useful poll. You can of course, vote all you want with your burner and your fake accounts. What happens if the 12 hours of the poll happen to be 12 hours when you are mostly sleeping, depending on what your time zone is around the world? Well, you are kind of out of luck. I mean, you snooze, you lose. That's what they say. Not to mention the bot problem, and all of the people on Twitter that aren't really Twitter, they aren't really people. Of course, they get to vote too. It's all performative. Of course, Rasmussen had Elon ahead by four, and they turned out to be a little bit wrong, but that happens frequently.
No. Look, clearly, he wants a way out, otherwise, he wouldn't be posting something like this. And it seems like a good idea. I mean, my God, this guy is the CEO of three different major corporations. I'm the founder of one that's considerably smaller, and I'm not CEO because I understand that if you actually want to focus on the things that you're good at, in my case understanding global affairs, you can't also run a company at the same time. Now, look, maybe Elon has extraordinary energy and focus, and Lord knows he's an incredible entrepreneur, but running three separate companies, one of which you didn't found and you don't understand the inside of, as opposed to the other two, where he really does understand the nuts and bolts and the substance of it incredibly well, is clearly a bridge way, way, way too far. He's just surrounded by too many people that won't tell him no or are incapable of telling him no or just blowing sunshine up his ass. And that means you're much more likely to make bad decisions and deciding to run Twitter as clearly one of them.
Tesla stock is down some 60% from the highs. I saw it bounced, I think it was 5% when the Twitter poll results came in, because as I said in the opening, those are people that really want him back focusing on a world-changing corporation, which is kind of a big deal. I do think, by the way, that there's a very, very serious free speech problem out there, including on Twitter. But I don't think that's an Elon problem. I think that's a business model problem. That's a social media problem. That is a problem that comes from privately owned platforms, where the people that participate are the product. The only way you make money is by maximizing the time that is being spent by the product on the platform. So you can sell that product and sell that data to advertisers and other corporations.
That is not a model that in any way would promote free speech. In fact, in many ways, it's antithetical to free speech. The A/B testing that needs to happen on those platforms is about how do you addict the product? How do you ensure that the product spends more time on those platforms? Also, how do you bolster those platforms, even if it's not with people? So you're not incented to verify your accounts, you're not incented to take bots out because that artificially inflates your numbers and improves the output, improves the business model. None of which is good for free speech.
Now, I do think that Twitter's gotten a little worse since Elon has taken over, in part because check marks no longer really mean anything. It used to be that a checkmark was a sign that whoever it was that was in charge of moderation in Twitter believed that you were a public figure of note, meaning a celebrity or an expert or a corporation or whatnot, but it had some level of importance. It was a quick pneumonic that you could use to say, oh, I should pay more attention to this. Now, today, having a check mark either means that, which is again far from an ideal way of determining who's important or not, but it at least is an explainer. It can also mean, no, you just paid $8 and you could be absolutely anybody to have your Twitter blue. The only way you figure that out is if you go and click a second time to see which it actually reflects. Of course, that is something that most people aren't going to do and even if you do do it, it's after you've already gotten that internal sense that, oh, I should pay more attention. So that makes this less efficient as a platform.
Also, a lot more ads are showing up and you don't know it's an ad until at the bottom when you see promoted by. So again, the first experience you have is, oh, this is content I want to see and then you find out it's not really content you want to see. So I think at the margins, it's gotten a little bit less product friendly over the last four or five weeks, but the free speech experience is largely the same from my perspective. I will say it was kind of cool that Taylor Lorenz was suspended for 12 hours since people got enormously excited about that. Not at least of which was Taylor Lorenz. But okay, that's, that's a cheap thrill for those of you that are on social media. It's not seriously exciting or meaningful.
Nor am I expecting government intervention to matter. I think it's entirely too difficult. It's possible that you'll see TikTok have significant regulations against it, though I doubt it'll be removed. But that has nothing to do with social media problems for free speech that just has to do with the fact that it's Chinese-owned. And a lot of people are concerned about the Chinese government having access to that data.
No, the big question for me is the future of decentralization. Right now we have a governance model where you have a small number of corporations and the individuals that own them that have access to all of this data, might personalized artificial intelligence in the near term, undermine that model when you have individual bots that work for you that can scour the entire internet and give you a news experience, a media experience, a social media experience that you curate as opposed to the sovereigns in the tech space curate that. That would be a radical transformation of the space that would deeply threaten those that own these social media and other tech platform monopolies.
The other broader, longer-term question would be whether the blockchain undermines data surveillance by taking privacy and giving it back to individuals. I think the former might be three years away. The latter is probably more like 10 or 20, but at least for the foreseeable future, this is a very serious problem.
So that's a little bit for me, my take on everything, Twitter, social media, and democracy. And I'll talk to y'all real soon.
Podcast: Kara Swisher on Big Tech's Big Problem
Listen: Renowned tech journalist Kara Swisher has no qualms about saying that social media companies bear responsibility for the January 6th pro-Trump riots at the Capitol and will likely be complicit in the civil unrest that may continue well into Biden's presidency. It's no surprise, she argues, that the online rage that platforms like Facebook and Twitter intentionally foment translated into real-life violence. But if Silicon Valley's current role in our national discourse is untenable, how can the US government rein it in? That, it turns out, is a bit more complicated. Swisher joins Ian Bremmer on our podcast.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.“Blood and glass" and the power of Big Tech
A little more than ten years after the start of the Arab Spring — a popular pro-democracy revolution helped along by Facebook and Twitter — the world's largest social media platforms this week banned the US president for inciting deadly violence in the United States.
If ever there were an illustration of the simultaneous promise, peril, and more importantly the power of social media to shape our lives and politics, this is it.
Not surprisingly, the Trump ban — and the decision by Apple, Amazon, and Google to expel other right-wing platforms where Trump supporters had plotted violence — has raised a host of thorny questions about how to define free speech, how to regulate tech companies, and what comes next at a delicate and dangerous moment in the "world's oldest democracy." Let's decode some of it.
This isn't, legally speaking, a "free speech" debate. The Bill of Rights in the US Constitution offers no inalienable right to post on Twitter or Facebook, much less to be published, say, by Simon and Shuster. What's more, free speech laws generally stop short of permitting incitement to violence, the primary reason for the tech companies' recent actions.
But it is about the staggering and seemingly arbitrary power of technology companies to shape what is, in practice, the main public square of the 21st century.
Agree or not with the tech companies' decisions here, we don't know much about how those decisions were reached, or by whom. Well beyond Trump's supporters, critics as wide-ranging as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian dissident Alexey Navalny, and the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union pointed out the dangers of arbitrary tech censorship, or the potential powerlessness of people with far less power and recourse to fight back than the US president.
Part of the reason that this is even an issue is that the tech companies have gotten so big in the first place. If Facebook had 200,000 users rather than 2 billion, it wouldn't matter much. So implicit in all of this is the question, again, of if/how to regulate tech companies, and whether to reduce their power to control speech and markets in ways that may inflict harm on society.
Three regulation models. Globally, there are basically three main approaches to tech regulation at the moment. In China, tech companies — some of the world's largest — are privately-run but expected to act as the loyal arms of an authoritarian state, advancing its interests at home and abroad (sometimes even with help from Silicon Valley). In the EU, where by contrast there are very few tech firms of global scale, governments set strict rules on privacy, speech, competition, and transparency which companies must adhere to in order to gain access to a lucrative market of 500 million relatively high-income people.
Lastly, the US — cradle of what are still the world's most influential tech giants — has taken a hands-off approach: tech companies have until now been left largely to regulate themselves, and enjoy certain protections against liability for material posted on their sites. That light touch is what helped them become giants in the first place.
Where does the US go now? In recent years both mainstream US political parties have warmed to the idea of stronger regulation of tech companies, though for different reasons. Republicans allege liberal bias in Silicon valley, while Democrats are primarily worried about policing hate speech and protecting privacy.
Last week's events have supercharged both sides' concerns: Republicans are crying foul over the "deplatforming" of their supporters, while top Democrats see those actions as too little, too late. "It took blood and glass in the halls of Congress" for tech firms to act, said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a leading voice on tech regulatory issues.
Of course, as a result of last week's Georgia Senate runoff, it is now Democrats who will assume (razor-thin) control over Congress along with the White House, putting them in a position to start advancing their vision of what better tech regulation should look like.
Activists question Malaysia's clampdown on spoof sites
KUALA LUMPUR - The shutting down of parody Twitter accountBermanaTV has raised concerns among human rights groups in Malaysia, which claim that the suspension of parodical and satirical sites fits thealarming pattern of increased censorship and restrictions on freedom of expression by the Malaysian government.