The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved: Social Media is a Force for Good in the World

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

Is social media a force for good? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Open Web advocate Jeff Jarvis squares off against Wired Magazine and former New York Times columnist Noam Cohen to debate the motion be it resolved, social media is a force for good in the world.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Our mission every episode is to provide you with a civil and substantive debate on a big issue of the day, free of spin focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation.

By the end of each debate, our hope is that you'll be armed with enough information to make up your own mind about any given issue. On this episode, we debate the motion. Be it resolved. Social media is a force for good in the way. world. We're trying to blame the platforms for the behavior of the people using them. And what we don't like is that behavior. That's what we have to deal with. We are choosing to have this really miserable system because we are a fetishizing idea of not having any rules. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, social media has transformed the way we communicate the images we see, the articles we read,

the videos we watch. But lately, these technology titans are being criticized for having created platforms which supposedly spread lies and political propaganda, transforming modern society into an angry mob of antisocial, uninformed, disenfranchised citizens. For big text critics, social media is fueling hatred, misinformation, and threatening the very foundations of our democracy. For proponents of social media, for people who are willing to take a second look at it, they see it as expanding the scope of human freedom by connecting communities. communities, disrupting vested power structures, and empowering marginalized voices around the world. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenged the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved.

Social media is a force for good in the world. Arguing for the motion is Jeff Jarvis. He's a journalist, professor, an advocate, passionate advocate of the open web. Arguing against the motion is Noam Cohen, former New York Times. columnist and author, the terrific book, The Know It All's, The Rise of Silicon Valley as a political powerhouse and social wrecking ball. Jeff, Noam, welcome to the Monk Debate podcast. Great to have you on. Thanks. Thank you. So, Jeff, as per debating convention, we're going to start with you first. I'm going to put two minutes on the clock. Let's get your opening statement on why you think social media is indeed a force for good in the world.

I would start by saying that social media itself is a misnomer. The internet is not a medium. The internet is not part of media. It's the reverse. Media is now being subsumed into the internet along with every other sector of society. And it's not media in the sense that it's not content. It's not produced like a magazine or a newspaper. What it is instead is conversation.

And what the social media now allows us to have is a few billion voices who were now heard, who could not have been heard in the hegemony. of mainstream media. And I know because I was part of that problem in mainstream media, a room, a newsroom filled with old white men who look exactly like me, who were making decisions and who didn't have the life experience of so many others. Recently in the New York Times University of Pennsylvania professor Sarah Jackson wrote a wonderful op-ed about all the people who have been brought out by the Internet,

African-Americans, survivors of gendered violence, who have used hashtags as platforms to be able to, to assemble and act and create movements. Hashtags like, of course, Black Lives Matter, CNN be like, me too, yes, all women. I learned a great deal from the hashtag alone of living while black, experiences that I didn't have, possible only because the internet and now enables these voices to have a place. So I fear that if we see the rising tide of moral panic come in around the internet and cause regulation to occur, We could cut off these voices.

We could have the unintended consequence of trying to go back to a past. And I'll just say this. The Internet is yet young. After Gutenberg's press, it took a century and a half before anyone thought to invent a newspaper. In Gutenberg Times, starting with 1450 when he printed the first book, it's only 1475. We're 25 years away from the beginning of the commercial web. It's 25 years into this brand new thing that is changing society in life. And I say, let's have some faith in our fellow man and woman and user that we will figure this out.

We figured out printing. We had a 30 years war, but we got to the end of it. We figured out telegraphs. We figured out the telephone. We've even figured out television. We will figure out the internet. Don't shut off the value of the new voices we hear there. Thank you.

Jeff Jarvis. Great opening statement. Noam Cohen. Same for you. We're going to put two minutes on the clock. Your opening statement starts now. Sure. Yeah.

And I relate to a lot of what Jeff's saying. And I had a lot of that same idealism. And I don't want to be too pedantic. But I think the question is whether it's a social good or not. And that's simple, you know, force for good in society. And I think that's such a clear answer that it isn't. And that doesn't mean that communicating is bad and being connected as bad. It means the way it is being practiced now by a handful of companies who make these important decisions is really been bad for society.

It's really interesting. This, you know, recently there was just a memo that came out that was written by one of Mark Zuckerberg's top deputies, this guy, Andy Bosworth. And in it, he's sort of trying to rally the troops and defend Facebook. And the best he can come up with is say, it's no worse than like a company that, that uses sugar to get people to buy their product. And he sort of cites an example of like a company like an Oreo, a company like it makes Oreos that like cut back the sugar and then no one bought it and they end up buying some other product and they fire the CEO and they put the sugar back in and make quadruple stuffed

Oreos and everyone's happy. So even he isn't saying that Facebook is a force for good. He's saying, I believe in freedom. and I believe that we shouldn't regulate, that our company should run the way it is, but it is actually a lot like a company that gives people very sugar-heavy, salty food. He also says in the same memo

that Facebook got Donald Trump elected and that he himself very much is upset that Donald Trump was elected and he gave the Max Hillary Clinton. So in essence, even if that, if Jeff were to concede that one point, which Facebook itself claims, that Facebook got Donald Trump elected,

wouldn't that be an argument that Facebook, one example of social media in our society, is a force for bad, you know, not a force for good? So I think we have to just focus on the narrow question. Are these social network platforms a force for good? Obviously, I think connecting is good. I think communicating is good. I'm very glad about voices that are getting a chance to speak that couldn't before. But the question at hand, whether these companies are making society better or worse, is so clearly not true. It's so clear they're making things worse that I think the answer, you know, the question answers itself. Noam, thank you for that opening statement. So,

me just briefly encapsulate the two arguments that you put forward here. Jeff, you're saying that this is a young phenomenon. Social media is in its infancy. We don't know where this is going to go, but we've mastered other media in terms of its effect on our society, its contributions to who we are and what we're about. So why can't we do that with social media too? Noam, you're saying in a sense that social media is like a double double Oreo filled with all kinds of horrible stuff that is purposely put in there to entice us, to entract us, to make us consume it. It's a corporate product. Yes, it does all these other good things, but at the end of the day, sitting behind it is a profit-making company.

They've chosen to not engage. They've chosen not to make this decision about how to run their company well. They've chosen to say they don't care about the social impact. That's a choice they've made. I don't think that's a given for any company. yeah, there used to be companies that cared about social impact. They clearly say that we believe in freedom and we're not prepared to make these tough decisions about whether Donald Trump is like using lying in ads, whether Donald Trump is suppressing the black vote, all these kind of things that are very clear problems. They're just saying we're not going to gauge that that's too dangerous.

The main thing now that people are talking about are the political ads, that you don't want to take down political ads that people know are false. that they contain false information. What I believe is that in a democracy, it's really important that people can see for themselves what politicians are saying so that they can make their own judgments. And, you know, I don't think that a private company should be censoring politicians or news. Let's start focusing on that narrow point.

Then I have your rebuttal, Jeff, to what you've heard from Nome's opening statement and his interjection just now. So I'm glad Nome and I agree about free speech, and I think we earnestly do. but I think in a sense you're trying to have it both ways in saying that the companies are bad and they should be doing things like around Donald Trump, but then you also don't want them to control our lives and control our conversations. We've got to choose one or the other.

And I know I might sound like a libertarian. I'm not. I'm a Kamala Harris Democrat in mourning, to be clear here, but I do believe that the freedom of the net needs to go and we need to have some faith in our fellow human beings. Number one, I don't believe that Facebook caused Donald Trump. I believe we had fundamental systemic problems in the United States, and I'm sorry to Canada, I'm sorry to the world that we did it, but we did. It's because we have racism in this country. It's because we have fear of outsiders in this country. It was stoked by Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. And I would further say that my feed is not filled with Trumpists and Nazis. My feed is useful. It's filled with friends. It's filled with good people and intelligent things. And I think we have this

moral panic presumption that, oh my God, it's all assess pool. But it's not. We need the data. The data doesn't say, the data don't say that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica elected Donald Trump. And they don't say that the internet is assess pool. We just have a media narrative of the competition saying they don't like Facebook. So, Noam, come in on that issue because it's at the core of Jeff's opening statement here is that his contention is that we're in the middle of this, quote, moral panic. TV, there was a panic about it. There was a panic about comic books.

Comic books. You can go through. There is a history, a pattern in this behavior. Why do you think that doesn't apply in this instance? You know, there's a famous line of who of Joe and Lai saying, what do you think of the French Revolution, you know, too soon to tell. He's saying that the 30 years war with the Gutenberg

Bible, you know, okay, so we might be in the middle of the 30 years war. And, you know, that, what are the, I don't know, to knock off a quarter of the population of Europe, but they did prevail and the Enlightenment came. When you ask these questions of what's good or not good, you could easily argue someone giving someone heroin when they're addicted to heroin is a good thing at that moment. Is it a good overall public policy?

No, I don't think so. But again, people can argue that the best public policies have no rules about drugs. Let's just, again, unpack what Jeff said about Fox News being a real source for problems in America. If Facebook has an algorithm that encourages Fox News to be read by people who made it clear they want Fox News's lies to be what they read, is that an indictment of Facebook? Would that be something to be a social negative? If they did something by design that lets more Fox News be read by people who are primed to believe it,

wouldn't you, by your own definition of what is bad and good in America, agree that that is a bad thing? So here's the problem, Noam. Everything that you accuse Facebook of is true of my industry, media and journalism. We feed double Oreos to people. We try to give people what they want. We divide people. We make money based on trying to sow discord, watch CNN any given day. So, you know, I think that it's too easy to blame the newcomer into this field, Facebook,

for the problems that we have that are inherent in the media business model and in the way media operate. Yeah, I don't believe that. And I don't even think you believe it because you basically picked out Fox News as being separate and distinct from the rest of media. I certainly shouldn't speak from me when I approach journalism where I've worked. I do not believe they are printing lies, incitement. I don't think they're looking for clicks. I mean, I'm not saying that doesn't exist.

I hate to see again to win these kind of arguments I was thinking about how if I had your side how would I win it you'd have to argue things that either that that everything is bad that is how would you defend something we know causes these problems you just say everything is you're just one second check me you're basically are defending it by saying that you initially pulled out Fox News and said this is a source for why Donald Trump got elected it's stoking as very angry audience it's lying to them it's misleading them and if I were to say to you that Facebook is a promoter of Fox News through its algorithm which you can dispute or not But if that were true, wouldn't on your own terms mean that Facebook is a source of social discord and a problem?

I'm asking those. First, do you believe the fact? And if the fact were true and do you believe Fox News is the same as all their media, then that's a different statement. You said Fox News is uniquely a problem. And you're now saying all media are the same as Fox News is? I'm saying that the business model of all media is the same as the business model for Facebook. We value clicks and we value attention. And that leads inevitably to Katz and Kardashians and ultimately to Donald Trump, the clickbait candidate.

So we've got to recognize our problems in media there. And Facebook doesn't just promote Fox News to people who like Fox News. Facebook promotes the New York Times to people who like the New York Times. Facebook gives you what you want, which is true of all media and true of all marketing. And so, you know, I think we've got a larger systemic issue there. But here's, you want to know how I'll win the debate. I'll win the debate by saying that I think that what we have to do is grant our fellow man and woman agency. We have to grant that they have choices and they have ability.

to decide what they want to do. And when they make bad decisions, and Donald Trump is a bloody bad decision, in my view, all right, they've done that. And we've got to look at deeper systemic reasons. Why? I don't believe that the entire United States was sane one day,

and then along came Facebook and made us all insane and into idiots. I think that there was a problem with our educational system. There's a problem with our racism. There's lots of other problems. And yes, can bad actors come and manipulate that and exploit that? and exploit that, yes.

Are those weaknesses ones that should be dealt with better than Facebook does? Absolutely. I'm not defending Facebook here. What I'm defending is the people who use it. Again, another way you might defend it would be to talk about freedom. And the only thing I can think, I think of very compelling to get off Facebook for a moment, was to talk about Google. And the story to me that's very compelling is to think about Dylan Roof, where, you know,

in essence, he became radicalized by doing searches and YouTube about white nationalism. And the only analogy I can make, and obviously we believe. Remind Lippsers who's Dylan Roof was. Right. So he's a young man who went into a black church in, you know, in South Carolina and fired and killed many people. And I, you know, and it was a horrible story. And this person, you know, this guy, this guy, Dylan Roof was radicalized because he went

and did searches on Google and got more and more evidence of what he wanted to see. And the only knowledge I can make is imagine a world where, uh, a kid went to a library and said, you know, I've been hearing a lot about Adolf Hitler or whoever want to be. He's really interesting. I'd like to read more about him. Where are the books that are about like how the Nazis organized and what they believe? You know, I don't think a library shouldn't have mind confident. I mean, it should be there. But a human being who sees a young man who is clearly troubled would say to him, you know, wow, I see why you might be interested in Adolf Hitler, but let me, can I talk about why? And maybe there's some other ideas you want to encounter.

And I know you really are strong about wanting to read about this white nationalism stuff. But let me just have a conversation. That's what a human being, a fellow. a person would do. So I have great faith in people. And so that's how they would handle it. Now, if you want to handle it instead by just saying, well, you're interested in Nazism, you're interested in white nationalism, here's how you find it, here's the list. And, you know, if you pay more, we'll give you even more books. I mean, that's not the way we organize society. So how much do you want Facebook to, or Google or YouTube or Twitter to become the editor for all? This is the problem with a discussion about whether Facebook, for example,

or Twitter should fact check political ads or should deal with fake news. Yeah, Jeff, I think that's an interesting issue that's been in the news. Why do you think Twitter made one decision and Facebook made another? I think they were both wrong. I think that Twitter is cutting off the potential for new political candidates to use this new medium, new movements to use this new medium in a way to reach people. I think Facebook is wrong because it sets no standard and any politician can say anything. Facebook is a garden party, and at some point Mark Zuckerberg should say, you're welcome here and you're not, and he has to make judgment.

Where Noam was saying before, and I agree with this, is they are allergic to making judgment. And at some extent, we should want them to be, because I don't want Mark Zuckerberg to be the controller of the world. And so when you can play in the one breath, oh, my God, they have algorithms, and you play on the other breath, and they don't use them, that's a problem. But I think they've got to come to some decision where there's a judgment they make about what is allowed there. However, I'm sympathetic to Jack Dorsey at the head of Twitter. Twitter is going to stop accepting political ads on the platform. Jack Dorsey has just tweeted it out. And he says, while internet advertising is an incredibly powerful and very effective tool for commercial advertisers,

the power brings significant risk to politics where it can be used to influence votes that affect the lives of millions. Do you really want to be the person who cuts off Donald Trump from his most beloved medium? that's a tough position to be in. In a way, I wish he'd do it. But another way, this is democracy. This is the conversation of democracy. This is where we're stuck today. You're listening to the Monk Debate podcast.

Be it resolved, social media is a force for good in the world. Arguing for the motion is Jeff Jarvis. He's a journalist, professor, an advocate for the open web. Arguing against the motion is Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech columnist and author of The Know It All's, the rise of Silicon Valley as a political powerhouse and social wrecking ball. Let's rejoin the debate in progress. Be it resolved, social media is a force for good in the world.

I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. So, Noam, let's come back to you on this idea of neutrality. Why do you feel that these new media are not neutral in ways that you think advance, you know, the public good, the public interest? You, in fact, believe that this neutrality is in some ways at the core of your argument as to why they're causing harm. Yeah. First, I don't think they are neutral, right? Because I'm trying to make the claim that the algorithms actually, you know, encourage you down a bad path. And we could even separate out the, you know, even like I have young children and watching what YouTube leads them to. It's a well-known, you know, story that the algorithm has a certain arc and progress or two. It's not neutral. My mom was always fond of that quote saying, you know, the law. and its infinite majesty forbids the rich and poor like from sleeping under the bridges, right? This idea that a law can be neutral and it's like saying rich people can't sleep on the bridges

and poor people can't sleep on the bridges. Oh, rich people don't actually want to sleep under the bridges. That's interesting. If you have a neutral law, the neutral rule that says politicians can lie, that's not neutral because politicians by definition have power. Donald Trump is not a regular person. So it is creating a class of people who are allowed to lie to people and they already have power. So neutrality is itself a kind of a lucidious. thing. I think freedom is another phrase that they use more often than neutrality to sort of say, oh my God, what do you want Mark Zuckerberg do? If he does something you get mad, if he doesn't do something you get mad. What I'm really arguing for, and of course it comes back, like what am I,

first I was trying to win the argument that they are of force of social negativity. I think we can kind of concede that. When I ask how would we solve it, I do argue for something that involves smaller scale. You could argue that. I don't want to live in a world that is so libertarian and so extreme and its idea of freedom that people are just these little individual modules. No one should know care what you're doing. You shouldn't care what your is my neighbor reading a lot of white nationalism? What's not my business sounds good? No, we all have a stake in each other. So I'm arguing for a company that cares about society. And that would make it more likely to be social good than one that absolutely just says, we just follow our basic principles.

Anyone can use our platform for anything. And we're going to try to get them to be on as long as possible. I mean, those are not neutral values. Those are negative values. And we know that from living in a society with Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. But the problem there is whose society do you want them to build. And here we have people in the same continent talking about this, but if you go to the rest of the world, there's an American view that has been exported to the rest of the world. And I think that Facebook and Twitter and Google, in a sense, apart from their, and I grant libertarian view, try not to impose too much of a cultural view on that. And let's also say that we are three white men sitting here talking about this. And I think that, um, I think that,

If you are someone who was excluded from mainstream media and you now have the opportunity to speak, you don't want other people making your decisions for you because that's all you've ever experienced is that that mainstream media decided what was news and what was not and what was important and what was not and who was important and who was not. And that's what the Internet brings us. And again, are we doing this well? No. Are we doing it perfectly? God no.

Is Facebook messing up day by day? Absolutely. Is Twitter messing up a little bit less? Yeah. but we're learning. We're figuring this out. And I think that the basis of where we go, is social media, in essence, a good,

is saying in the end, is the public conversation a good? And it is. Now, there are idiots there. If you go out here, I'm talking to you from Times Square, the center of the universe. And if I go out and I'm fond of saying

that Twitter is not the New York Times, it's Times Square. So out there, I go out walking, I'm going to find idiots. I'm going to find Elmo's. I'm going to find a lot of strange things out there. I don't listen to, them all. I don't try to correct them all. And let it be. It's part of what society does. And we have

to recognize, I think, a bit of that kind of laissez-faire view of the public conversation and letting it go. And the question we should ask then is, how do we bring value to that? I think the problem with the net so far is it's built entirely around talking and not around listening. And so we've got to build new abilities to find the good stuff, find the expert people, bring out the good stuff. And we haven't built that yet. You're listening to the Monk Debate podcast, be it resolved. Social media is a force for good in the world. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com.

We'll rejoin the debate with Noam Cohen, arguing against the motion. Be it resolved, social media is a force for good in the world. The question is whether these platforms are creating some system or, uh, rules where people can really communicate and flourish or not. So it's obviously beyond ironic that we know these platforms push out minority voices, particularly Twitter, and don't and really institute real rules about how people behave. So they are not open areas. And again, that would be as if you took the attitude that Times Square could have white nationalists yelling at people all the time where you could yell at women and make them uncomfortable on the street. There are streets that are like

that. And the idea you wouldn't want to like correct that is a huge problem. It's not a media publisher. It's not the same as a newspaper. But there are basic rules of decency and conduct that they are not imposing it. What are you correct in that case? Yeah, okay. This guys, this guys is a great segue to what. So are there rules, Jeff, that you think could or should be imposed to create, to bring, in your view, the better content, the richer content, the more community fostering content to the surface.

Do you accept a rules-based order for social media? The problem with that, Roger, is rules by whom imposed on whom and to whose decision. What we really see happening here is I think we're trying to blame the platforms for the behavior of the people using them. And what we don't like is that behavior. That's what we have to deal with. We're in a process right now of setting norms. I remember when little tiny cameras came out and Google Glass came out. There was a kerfuffle at the time.

A New York Times person did a column on this. Oh, my God, people are going to go into the bathrooms and locker rooms with their Google glass on and take pictures. Well, that presumes that a normal person was suddenly made into a jerk when they put this device on. It presumes that the rest of the population there isn't going to shame them out of that bad behavior. It's going to presume that we're suddenly without any agency of our own, and that's not the

case. We are trying to negotiate norms now. Part of the problem here is, and I'm guilty of this too in the years. past. On Twitter, there are fights that start up and people get into those fights. Well, that's as bad as being on a third grade playground and, you know, yelling, fight, fight over there. What we have to do is we have to have a norm that says don't encourage that behavior. Don't feed the trolls. The behavior we're going after is not that of the platform. It is that of our fellow man and woman, our fellow citizen. That's what we got to refigure. And you do that through parenting

and education and other things that take time. I just thought back in my own book, there was kind of, I feel like a very key episode in the history of the internet was when Tim Berners-Lee, right, the person who created the World Wide Web, when he was designing it, he initially was trying to create a system where people would be much more writing, much more like Wikipedia, where the browser wouldn't be just taking information, but it would make it very easy for you to edit the web. And, you know, the browser that came after it that became much more marketable, Mosaic, was much more about the experience of watching rather than producing.

So I always look at Wikipedia for all its flaws as a group that's committed to trying to make rules and trying to have some basic decency and there are people who are kicked out for bad behavior. And it's more like a society. And society is not a free for all. And it isn't a libertarian paradise where I can do whatever I want. And, you know, that's not the kind of world I want to live in. I'm not all for having these big rules and having a big brother watching you. But I also think you can't be naive and think that these commercial huge, gigantic, you know,

money-making ventures are the right people to make rules because we know they abdicate any authority, any responsibility. They don't believe they have any social role. And we've always believed that companies should have a social role in our society. And they're just the wrong people to make rules. And we're in a bad situation because we entrusted this vital, important tool to a bunch of in-app, you know, what I call the know-it-all is people who have no social responsibility. They are more likely to just care about making money or doing engineering.

And that's a real problem. Well, we don't have the right people to make rules, I don't think. If we look at the regulation that's occurred in Europe, it's well-intentioned in many cases, but I think that it's backfired in every case. Responding to a court order in Europe, Google is giving users the right to be forgotten. Google has about 90% of the search business in Europe. They must now respond to requests to remove inadequate or irrelevant search information on individuals who request it under European privacy laws. It has been meant to try to tamp down the behavior and the power of the platforms and it's only given them more power. The right to be forgotten makes Google decide what we can and cannot remember. The hate speech law in Germany makes Facebook decide what is manifestly illegal hate speech. And what it's done is had an impact on satire in Germany, on freedom of expression there,

because the platforms are going to play safe and their lawyers are going to make them do that. And we have a really dangerous piece of legislation coming up in the UK called the Online Harm's Report, where the government is going to require the platforms to take down speech that is legal but harmful. Get a load of that. Thus, legal speech becomes de facto illegal because the government has made a third party, a company, take it down. This is the kind of moral panic that I refer to here is trying to say, we've got to fix this thing. We've got to tamp all this crap down. No, we've always had crap.

We just couldn't see it as much. We go out in Times Square, listen for a while. It doesn't bother us there. We get used to it there. We understand how to filter it there. That's part of what we have to do is recognize who's an idiot and who's not. No. Do you see examples where regulation does work?

I mean, you've worked yourself in the media industry. There are guidelines. I assume that the New York Times has to follow. Traditional television has Federal Communications Bureau. Does government have a role to play? No. Yeah, I do think government has a role to play. And I just fundamentally disagree with Jeff.

I guess I could be another debate. I think the right to be forgotten is a very good rule. I understand the tension of saying that, you know, which is this rule, right, that says you can, you can appeal and say, I don't want the first thing about me to be this misdeed I did 20 years ago or 10 years ago. And I don't, I want to have some control over my search results. And I think that that's a beautiful thing. And I think that's kind of the government should try to do. And it's kind of thing people want.

And it's why that's why the law came about. What Jeff is really advocating is a liberal. libertarian and extreme libertarian view, which says that all information should be out there. It should be no control of anything, no control over behavior, no control over, uh, free fall. What's that? It's the enlightenment. It's the first amendment. It's free speech.

No, free speech stops when it's an incitement, you know, and as you would agree, if you were going to go back to the question of Twitter and Donald Trump, you know, when he's doing things that are, that are incitement, that are directing hatred at people. And I totally understand the argument. He's a leader, you know, the free world, is president of the United States. You want to hear what it is to say. But how do you do that is violating what we consider restrictions on free speech?

Why should he be exempted because of the internet? I don't understand. Let's take that as a case study. Well, he says these things in the New York Times and the Washington Post feel they're, they're obligated to quote it as well. But they would not. But they do not.

They obviously use judgment. You wouldn't quote anything he says. If he targeted somebody and said, they write headlines with what he says. But I think they don't quote what he says sometimes. They don't quote everything he says unfiltered. And no person would virtually, but I'm saying it's only when he does things that are incitement or things that we've

that limit free speech. We don't believe in absolute free speech. Do you respect the citizenry? The problem with the right to be forgotten is that I would think Europe of all places would understand the danger of trying to erase and rewrite history. At some point, knowledge is out there. And the only place where you can erase knowledge is the movie men in black with a magic pin. The idea that we can control knowledge and tell people what they're not allowed to know

or what they should not know is the currency of an authoritarian regime. That's what happens in China. At some point, we have to give respect to our fellow bad and woman, even those people who voted Trump in, God help us, and say that we've got to deal with that in society and deal with that at a higher level than trying to play whack-a-mole with the things we don't like said, including that by the president of the United States. But you have to understand that technology creates a difference, which is in the sense that like in the old days you had to go to an actual courthouse to find this stuff out. You know, I'm not saying you should hide who's ever been arrested or property sales. There are sites that basically run mugshots of people and they are shakedown operations.

And it is not the way you would organize society to say that a mugshot of someone should be the first thing you find when they search them. I'm trying to argue we are something beyond individuals with libertarian extreme rights that we actually are a society that's cohesive and has some empathy and humanity and realize that that's not the way you would organize a society. run your mugshot the first thing someone sees you. It's like that's not how, again, you don't go to a library and ask to see about white nationalism and just go right over there, get to it. You actually have a human being interact and empathize and try to figure out how to correct that. And if you think that that's impossible in the modern age or something, it's very sad.

I think one thing that we can... Jeff, just before we go to closing service, I want you to respond to that point that noam's making because it's definitely part of the public debate around data collection. And do you think that there should be, is there any kind of limit on what these corporations should be collecting about us, both the nature of that data set, the size of that data set? Are there aspects of that that concern you as someone with a libertarian, you know, freedom-loving inclination? Let's be clear once again. I'm a Kamala Harris morning Democrat. I'm not a libertarian.

And so I do believe in controls in society, yes. but I also believe firmly in freedom. And so are there limits? Yes, and we'll set them, and they're already in the rules. I know when I worked in media, we knew a lot about people in our subscription businesses. But I also know I wrote a book called Public Parts five years ago, which nobody bought because it was optimistic and only dystopian books sell these days, in which I argue that there's a value to sharing.

And I shared my prostate cancer online. I told the whole world I had a malfunctioning penis. You cannot get more public than that. And I got great value back. Now, it was a choice that I made from a position of privilege, let's be clear. But I got advice and help, and I got to help other people, and I think that we're going to lose sight of that value of sharing. Should we worry about data? Of course.

Should we worry about things being spread around? Sure. But when I tell you something privately, I don't control it anymore. You do. And you're going to decide whether to share it or not. And that's our norm that we're trying to figure out now. And we will figure it out, just as we figure it out other technologies. Noam, will we figure this all out?

Are we just a couple decades into Gutenberg 2.0? And this is just a few bumps on the road before a smooth information highway opens up before. 25 years into the 30 years. Sure. No, I look, I try to be hopeful too. And I do think that, you know, I think one of the problems is that, you know, is that inequality in our society and the monopolistic, you know, platforms and social networks is that they are really canning out about. buying anything that could rival them. And we,

and we, the U.S. government has not played a role in breaking up these monopolies. So it's a real problem that maybe Instagram would have been this other kind of social network,

but Facebook bought them. And so we won't ever know whether there could have been, you know, and I've heard people who were skeptical of that and think that all things kind of devolved to the worst because that's what the capitalism says,

that you go as low as possible to make the most money. But I do believe that there, if we had a genuinely, you know, a regulated social network system and we had genuine competition, there would be a better,

system. I always think back, you know, people in general when they are face to face with each other are much more decent than when they are online. I think there's got to be a way to kind of bring that back. I think what's we have to recognize is that there was this idea that, you know, the friends on Facebook are the same as friends in real life and you can have so many more friends. Mark Zuckerberg used to talk about that. And it's not really the same. So am I hopeful if Elizabeth Warren were elected someone who had a real principled view about breaking up Silicon Valley and bringing them into line, that would be awesome. I do think there's a chance that we could have other models that are nonprofit and that are, you know, people own their own data. And there's such

potential for good there. Now the way it's structured has been a force for real horrible things, real social ills. Great. Let's go to closing statements. And Jeff, I'm going to ask you to go first because Nome's just kind of concluded there with some thoughts of his own. So we'll change our traditional order here, Jeff. You've listened to Nome over the last half hour. It's been a civil, substantive debate, just what we were looking for. What are your final points you want to make, a final rebuttal that you might want to underline? I'm going to put a minute and a bit on the clock for you now. Well, I can't help but cheat and suck up to a Canadian audience by making reference to Innes and McLuhan, where I think that what we're seeing happen is a return

to an orality in society and away from a text-based society. And the presumptions the text brings to us, that it's produced and that it's a product and that it's owned and that it's edited and controlled. And you've returned to an oral-based society in conversation that's pretty scary. At the bottom line, what's really happening right now is that society is re-learning how to have a conversation with itself. And we're screwing it up. We're doing it badly. We're trolling each other. We're letting bad guys come in and exploit. Companies are doing, yeah, sure, greedy things, but it's a longer process than that. And I think we have to value the voices that we hear around us. And we have to stop concentrating on the bad stuff, which is a minority, which is a few

jerks who are ruining everything for all of us, why we can't have nice things. And instead, we've got to start to look out for the nice flowers in the field, not just the dandelions. And we've got to understand that there are things of value that people are saying, if only we will stop and listen. Nice summation. Noam, we're going to give you the last word. We're going to put a minute and change on the clock for you. Your final comments, please.

I do believe that we all individually are going through a learning process, and we as a society are going through a learning process. But I do think the only way we're going to really correct is to confront the fact that we kind of let this thing spill out, the social network platforms grow without any kind of thought regulation, that's kind of belief that it wasn't that important. And that applies also to Amazon, all these digital companies, think that they're just sort of a small,

subset of society, they really have gaining such power and have such control. And they've chosen to behave in this very laissez-faire, you know, libertarian approach. I'm always fond of a Canadian ban rush who once said, you know, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. And I think that's the thing that's very important. We forget that we are choosing to have this really miserable system because we are a fetishizing idea of not having any rules. It's a recipe for disaster. And that's, you know, I think we can make a different choice. We can choose to actually have a decent internet with rules and have smaller companies and not just give in to the algorithmic, you know, monolithic world we have now.

Noam, thank you. Well, gentlemen, we've gone from Marshall McLuhan to rush in three minutes on this podcast. That's a mission accomplished for me. But seriously, thank you for a civil, substantive debate on a challenging issue. This is exactly the type of conversation that we need to be having about these types of complex issues that confront our society. So thank you both for helping us restore the art of public debate

on this podcast today. Thank you, Rudyard. Pleasure. Nice talking, Jack. Hey, thanks, guys. That wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Noam Cohen and Jeff Jarvis.

You certainly gave us a lot to think about on a controversial and important issue. The Monk Debates podcast is a place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion,

geopolitics to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find show notes on today's debate along with a full transcript. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time. I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are produced by Antica Productions and supported by the Monk Foundation. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. The executive producer of Antica is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.