James Madison was one of the United States’ first Presidents and is the Father of our Constitution. In that Constitution is a well-known system of “checks and balances” between the capabilities and powers of each branch of government to hold the others accountable. For example, the Executive Branch can overturn decisions made by the Judicial Branch and veto bills made by the Legislative Branch. The Legislative Branch can, in turn, impeach members of the Executive and Judicial Branches, etc. From the fourth grade, American students are taught about this system.
Madison was very particular about why he didn’t want power to go unchecked in any corner of the government. He believed that all people were greedy, selfish, and power-hungry, and that given the opportunity, they’d abuse their power without thinking twice. Thus, he created the well-known safeguards against ambitious and passionate governance, which he saw as a detriment to reasonable argument. And yet, despite the philosophy that people were flawed and selfish, the Constitution (or more accurately the Bill of Rights) still outlines the rights that each of those people must have the rights previously reserved for the likes of Kings. The right to speech, the right to own guns, the right to religion, etc. were bestowed to all Americans.
The reasoning is simple: people are imperfect, and they should be protected from other imperfect people imposing their inevitably imperfect ways on them. Whereas other more authoritarian systems say that people are blind and therefore they need guidance, the Constitution says that people are blind and therefore our leaders will be blind. The Constitution recognizes the ability for authority to be flawed, and gives people protection from its powers.
240 years later, and we seem to be at a point where we can look to the philosophies of Madison for help. The Internet has become the effective medium for almost all political discourse and current events-tracking. But this paradigm shift has meant that the location of discourse has changed too. Now, we are having our most important discussions about our society and values take place on privately-owned platforms and technologies.
This was all made possible by the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA), specifically Section 230, which details that online platforms cannot be held legally responsible by the content they host. That means that if someone writes an illegal Tweet or a Facebook comment (let’s say, one that gives out US Military Intelligence secrets), Twitter or Facebook could not be held responsible for it (though the person who posted the comment could be). Without the CDA, we wouldn’t be able to use services like Facebook and Twitter, because social media could not operate if everything written in a post was its legal responsibility to vet. The CDA is good, because it safeguards the platform in a way that encourages people to use the platform, to connect and have those crucial discussions.
But that’s not the entirety of the bargain for social media companies. Social media companies have the ability to remove undesirable users or posts from their platforms at their own discretion and without transparency. And when one considers the usage of these platforms (Facebook has 2.3 billion users, YouTube has 2 billion), there’s a lot of information being spread, some of which is disinformation or colloquially “fake news.”
These factors have caused leaders to examine the privileges given to social media companies for the practices they employ. For example, President Donald Trump drafted an Executive Order that would have given the FCC and FTC the ability to punish social media companies for biased removal and censorship practices. Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed creating a “Ministry of Truth” of sorts, where political campaigns and individuals who spread disinformation online could be punished for doing so. Lastly, former Vice President Joe Biden has proposed eliminating Section 230 in its entirety, all for the purpose of holding Facebook more accountable.
When faced with such discomfort with the status quo and a clear yearning to change things, we should look to our past for advice. We aren’t comfortable with the general public’s ability to handle information (we’re realizing that people are flawed), but we’re also not comfortable with Facebook or other private interest’s ability to facilitate a productive conversation (we’re realizing that that means Facebook is flawed, too). We should do what James Madison would advise: trust people. Recognize that people are misguided, but in the way that leads you to question people’s authority over others as misguided, not in a way that fosters desire to control the general public.
Give people the power to control their own conversations. Stop this authoritarianism invading political discussions to make platforms look more market friendly. There isn’t a fair way to apply something like hate speech rules, and it’s leading to a drop in faith in liberal institutions, this, in turn, is causing people to feel censored and go to political extremes. When people feel like others are unreachable, like debate and discussion will not spread their ideas, they will turn to authoritarianism to further their causes. We can restore faith in these institutions by restoring liberalism to them.
Giving people power is the best way out of this predicament. Other proposals, like Trump’s and Warren’s which would attempt to control political speech and narratives on social media, would certainly backfire. Biden’s would end all political speech on the Internet- an impetuous action in an era when Americans are spending a quarter to a third of our lives online. The status quo does need changing, and social media’s power over discussions is too great. Forcing them to stop removing legal but unbecoming speech from their platforms is a way to reduce their power. And it does it in a way that hands it directly back to the people.
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