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Censorship

5 min read

Part of Free speech and civil liberties.

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Every episode (4)

Who argued it

Robert Mahoney · Frank Buckley · Bill Ottman · Harvey Silverglate

First Amendment · Social Media · COVID-19 · Morality · Education · Section 230 · Privacy · Free Speech

Background

Censorship, as discussed across these episodes, is the suppression of political, social or religious ideas so they do not reach the public. Bob Zadek offers that definition and adds that censorship as such is not illegal: an individual may tell others not to read a book, and a business may take a side and try to suppress other views, at the risk of losing customers Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023). The law enters, he says, through the First Amendment, which governs the relationship between government and citizens and, extended to the states by the 14th Amendment, bars government censorship, with exceptions such as incitement to violence. The Constitution does not regulate behavior among individuals.

Private platforms and Section 230

Zadek frames social media as businesses operating with maximum editorial freedom: so long as they break no law, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like may set their own publishing standards and delete or de-platform users as a matter of contract or right Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019). Frank Buckley agrees and distinguishes private censorship, which he does not oppose—if Facebook deletes a neo-Nazi’s account, he has no problem—from the case that troubled him, a comedian who told jokes and lost the right to publish on YouTube. Zadek places that episode in a lineage of comedians arrested for telling jokes, naming Lenny Bruce and Shelley Berman.

Buckley describes Senator Josh Hawley’s bill, introduced the week of the broadcast, as the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, which he calls the Social Media Shakedown Bill. Under Section 230 of the ‘96 Act, he explains, platforms are not responsible for content and cannot be sued for libelous material posted on them; the bill would remove that protection unless a company proves to the FTC that it does not discriminate on the basis of political viewpoints—a requirement, Buckley says, to prove a negative. Zadek calls the legislation scary and counterproductive, and likens the impulse to solve the problem of pool in River City by buying trumpets and trombones.

Bill Ottman, founder of Minds.com, discusses the shift of mainstream platforms from open-source ideals to algorithmic manipulation, the legal implications of Section 230, and the movement toward decentralized, privacy-focused alternatives, in a conversation that also covers surveillance, shadow banning and the First Amendment Social Media Censorship (2019).

Government pressure and censorship through noise

In a later episode, Zadek asks how Twitter, a private company, can trigger so much discussion of the First Amendment when the First Amendment does not regulate Twitter Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023). Robert Mahoney, author of The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, argues that the COVID-19 pandemic was not only a health crisis but a crisis of personal freedom and censorship: governments, terrified and unable to cope, doubled down on censorship rather than engaging citizens in dialogue.

Mahoney distinguishes two forms. The old-fashioned form restricts the flow of news, as in the Soviet Union, China or modern Russia. The other, which he says was seen in the US and a few other liberal democracies, is “censorship through noise”: confusing people by throwing misinformation, lies and propaganda at them until they do not know what to believe. He cites social distancing and mask guidance as measures whose purpose Americans could not clearly grasp because the information landscape was so confusing. Zadek draws the connection to physicians, healthcare professionals and epidemiologists who disagreed with the government line on lockdowns and school closures, arguing that drowning out other views by volume is as effective as locking up those who hold them. Mahoney notes that the confusion reflected confusion in the White House itself, that there was a desire to cover up bad news and downplay the severity of the disease, and that Steve Bannon described flooding the zone with garbage to create confusion. He states that the US has over a million COVID deaths out of six million globally, though it does not represent a sixth of the world’s population.

Across episodes: what changed

The topic recurs in 2019 and 2023, and the treatment shifts with the target. In the 2019 episodes the censors are private platforms and the proposed remedy is legislation: Ottman describes algorithmic manipulation and surveillance on Facebook and Twitter, while Buckley attacks Hawley’s bill for making platforms prove a negative to the FTC. By 2023 the emphasis has moved to government influence over private platforms, with Mahoney describing censorship through noise and the collapse of public trust during the pandemic. Zadek’s framing question—how a private company triggers First Amendment discussion—is the bridge between the two treatments.

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