Obama demands government censorship
Former President Barack Obama last week called for government censorship to silence “hateful” and “polarizing voices.”
Speaking at a forum on Tuesday, Obama appeared to demand the suppression of conservatives on social media. He repeatedly took aim at Right-wing figures, accusing them of sowing disinformation.
“Vladimir Putin and the KGB had a saying that was then adopted proudly by [Trump advisor] Steve Bannon, which was if you want propaganda to be effective [then] you don’t have to convince people that what you are saying is true. You just have to flood the zone with so much poop. They use a different word. But you have to flood the zone with so much untruth, constantly, that at some point people don’t believe anything,” Obama said.
The former president then took a shot at President Trump.
“So it doesn’t matter if a candidate running for office just is constantly, just hypothetically, saying untrue things, or if an elected president claims that he won when he lost and that the system was rigged, but then when he wins, then it isn’t rigged, because he won. It doesn’t matter if everybody believes it. It just matters if everybody starts kind of throwing up their hands and saying ‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.'”
Obama continued by demanding that journalists and social media platforms—bound by government regulation—silence such voices to prevent “diversity of facts.”
“[P]art of what we’re going to have to do is to start experimenting with new forms of journalism and how do we use social media in ways that reaffirm facts, separate facts from opinion,” he said. “We want diversity of opinion. We don’t want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things?”
“That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that’s consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence,” Obama said.
Obama is not the only prominent Democrat to struggle with the First Amendment’s constraints on censorship.
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Last year, US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson fretted that the First Amendment may hinder the federal government from censoring taxpayers.
“My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson told Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguiñaga, who was arguing that the Biden administration should be prohibited from pressuring social media companies to censor Americans.
“You seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So, can you help me?” Jackson continued. “Because I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances, from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”
Jackson mentioned COVID-19 as an example of a “threatening circumstance” that requires the government to step in and curb free speech, as it did.
John Kerry: First Amendment is a ‘major block’
John Kerry, Biden’s former climate czar, said the First Amendment is blocking efforts to stamp out “disinformation.”
“You know there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc.,” Kerry said at the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Development Impact Meetings (SDIM24). “But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”
“So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he added.
Hillary Clinton
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year said social media censorship is necessary for “control.” She made the remarks on CNN’s “Smerconish” while discussing Section 230, a law that protects social media platforms from liability for content on their sites. Without Section 230, a social media company would be considered a “publisher” and could be held responsible for anything users say on the platform, leaving it open to volleys of lawsuits.
“We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity,” Clinton said. “Because they were thought to be just pass-throughs, that they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted.”
The failed Democratic presidential candidate then warned about a loss of control if social media platforms fail to “moderate content,” a euphemism for censorship.
“But we now know that that was an overly simple view, that if the platforms, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, X, or Instagram or Tiktok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control,” she continued.
MSM: First Amendment is a ‘barrier’
Mainstream media have also been warning that free speech is a threat to democracy.
“[T]he First Amendment has become, for better or worse, a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle a problem that, in the case of a pandemic, threatens public health and, in the case of the integrity of elections, even democracy itself,” wrote reporter Steven Lee Myers for the New York Times last year.
The paper also lamented that “billions of people will vote in major elections around the world in 2024” without enough censorship from social media companies.
‘Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?’
Other media outlets have suggested abolishing the US Constitution entirely.
“The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” read a New York Times headline.
“Is It Time to Torch the Constitution?” read a similar headline from the New Yorker.
