How Twitter Killed the First Amendment

[spanone]

You need not be a media historian to notice that we live in a golden age of press harassment, domestic propaganda and coercive efforts to control political debate. The Trump White House repeatedly seeks to discredit the press, threatens to strip broadcasters of their licenses and calls for the firing of journalists and football players for speaking their minds. A foreign government tries to hack our elections, and journalists and public speakers are regularly attacked by vicious, online troll armies whose aim is to silence opponents.

In this age of “new” censorship and blunt manipulation of political speech, where is the First Amendment? Americans like to think of it as the great protector of the press and of public debate. Yet it seems to have become a bit player, confined to a narrow and often irrelevant role. It is time to ask: Is the First Amendment obsolete? If so, what can be done?

These questions arise because the jurisprudence of the First Amendment was written for a different set of problems in a very different world. The First Amendment was ignored for much of American history, coming to life only in the 1920s thanks to the courage of judges like Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Courts and civil libertarians used the amendment to protect speakers from government prosecution and censorship as it was practiced in the 20th century, such as the arrest of pamphleteers and the seizure of anarchist newspapers by the Postal Service.

But in the 21st century, censorship works differently, as the writer and academic Zeynep Tufekci has illustrated. The complete suppression of dissenting speech isn’t feasible in our “cheap speech” era. Instead, the world’s most sophisticated censors, including Russia and China, have spent a decade pioneering tools and techniques that are better suited to the internet age. Unfortunately, those new censorship tools have become unwelcome imports in the United States, with catastrophic results for our democracy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/opinion/twitter-first-amendment.html

[Igel]

1. It's far from dead.

And the problem hasn't changed.

People have to realize that the simple fact of telling a story entails the not-telling of some information. That was true in 1920, 1970, 1990, and today when you read any news article or any video footage. You see 3 minutes of video, you don't see what happened in the two minutes before or the minute after--could they make a difference? Yup.

People have to realize that their internal biases and conceits predispose them to believe certain information and not believe other information, regardless of the actual facts. We see patterns that aren't there and willingly overlook information that's omitted that we should suspect exists when the story's good (for us). We tend to downplay information that's included when it hurts our narrative. Whatever that narrative is, whoever "we" are.

People have to realize that sources both matter and don't matter, but in ways that we're unaccustomed to. One of our own (whatever that means in context) posts a video or makes a claim, we're all over it. We trust unreliable allies. Might they be telling the truth? Sure. But we trust them and it's an offense to not trust them. We don't want to offend our own. The enemy (again, by context) says something and we don't trust them. Why? Because they're the enemy and the enemy can only ever lie. And if we trust them, we get harrassed by our peers who say they're untrustworthy.

We've always needed a better quality of voter and hearer of news and information. Now it's urgent, but now it's harder to make the case without sounding like an enemy partisan (for whichever side you're *not* talking to).

[Crabby Appleton]

2. Agreed nt