The NPR Politics Podcast - Government Mostly Can't Talk To Social Giants — That's A Problem

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

The government's ability to fight disinformation online has suffered a legal setback that experts say will have a chilling effect on communications between federal agencies and social media companies.A ruling by a federal district judge in Louisiana could have far-reaching consequences for the government's ability to work with Facebook and other social media giants to address false and misleading claims about COVID, vaccines, voting, and other issues that could undermine public health and erode confidence in election results.This episode: national political correspondent Sarah McCammon, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, and disinformation correspondent Shannon Bond.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Elena from Ukraine and Paweł from Tor in Poland in the English language camp in Poland with our American teachers. That's awesome. This podcast was recorded at 12.32 p.m. Eastern Time on July 7th, 2023. Things might have changed by the time you hear it, but we'll still be speaking English and playing games. That's great. Okay, here's the show. It's so wonderful to hear from you guys. I hope you're doing okay.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And NPR's Shannon Bond is here. Hey there, Shannon. Hey, thanks for having me. The government's ability to fight disinformation online has suffered a legal setback. Experts say it will have a chilling effect on communications between federal agencies and social media companies.

Shannon, what's going on with this case? And as it stands, what exactly does this court ruling prevent the government from doing? Sure. So these are actually two cases that were brought by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana. And the core accusation here is that the government is illegally colluding with social media companies to suppress protected free speech. And so this case centers on the social media companies policies, you know, companies like Facebook and Twitter against misleading and false claims about the COVID pandemic and vaccines, as well as about election integrity, and just how involved the government was in shaping those policies and also in enforcing those policies. The claim is that the government really overreached,

as these AGs see it, when it came to encouraging companies to take down or otherwise address posts that they were worried would, you know, contribute to vaccine hesitancy, you know, during the height of COVID or, you know, contribute to undermining democracy in terms of questioning the outcome of the 2020 election and, you know, questioning voting and all these issues that have become, you know, these huge public issues. And so in this case, it's still ongoing, but it came before this federal judge in Louisiana, who is a Trump appointee, and he has issued a temporary injunction while the case is going on that says the government, you know, agencies like Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the CDC, as well as individual government officials can have basically no communication with social media companies about areas that they consider protected free speech.

And so it's a really, really sweeping ruling that has quite a lot of implications for how the government can talk to these companies about a whole variety of topics, as you can imagine. Shannon, I have a question about this. Protected speech means that anyone can get up in the town square and say that vaccines cause your hair to fall out and your face to turn purple. But the question is, are these social media companies utilities, public utilities that can be regulated by the government, something like the airwaves were when we used to watch old-fashioned broadcast TV? Or are they private publishers that can do what they want and can be completely exempt from any kinds of communications with the government? Right. That is exactly the question. That's actually kind of how we ended up with this lawsuit. So I think we've talked about before,

you know, we certainly talked on this show and on NPR about these sort of long running claims from Republicans that social media companies censor conservative voices. And they have tried to bring those claims to court before directly against the companies. But as you say, there are actually pretty strong First Amendment protections for social media companies, for Facebook and Twitter and Google. They can decide. They run these private platforms. It's not the public square. They are not the government. And so they have a lot of leeway to decide what kind of posts they allow and what they don't allow. And so those legal challenges to come directly to the companies have failed. And so what's interesting about this case is the issue here is not necessarily

that the companies themselves are setting these policies. The claim here is that the U.S. government has been too involved and is that in some ways the government has turned the companies into sort of an arm of the government in terms of suppressing speech. And that's where you get this claim that it actually is a violation of the First Amendment in terms of the government regulating speech. Yeah, I found myself hearing this and reading about this, Shannon, and having questions almost about, you know, what rights, and maybe this is the wrong question, but like, does the government or do government officials have rights to communicate with companies?

Because, I mean, the issue here wasn't that they were actually restricting speech on the part of the social media companies, if I understand it. It was that they were communicating with them in a way that the plaintiffs and the judge found objectionable. Am I getting that right? That's right. So sort of to step back, it's actually a little hard to really understand exactly how these relationships work. There's not a lot of transparency into it. But what we do know is that, you know, essentially with the rise of social media, with the rise of the internet, you know, it has become important for

government agencies to be in touch, you know, with these communication channels about, you know, things like child sex abuse material that may be spreading, you know, criminal activity, terrorism. And so that's sort of the origins of where you started to see, you know, over the past decade even, agencies like the FBI, you know, starting to have regular meetings with social media companies talking about these issues. That has certainly escalated in recent years, you know, with both with the 2020 election, actually in the wake of the 2016 election and, you know, the concerns about Russian interference on social media, of course, in 2020. And then, of course, during the pandemic, when you had, you know, these sort of what were seen as these urgent threats, you know, to the public discourse that might cause real world harm. And so you saw, you started to see, you know, the various public discourse that might cause real world harm. And so you saw, you started to

see, you know, the various agencies, various government officials, and even President Biden at one point, when there were a lot of concerns around anti-vaccine content spreading on social media, you know, saying he felt that the social media companies weren't doing enough and needed to be doing more. And so that has all kind of been wrapped up together in these claims saying that is too much, that amounts to the government exerting pressure on the companies to take down this kind of content in a which we can imagine the government interacting with these companies that, as far as we see, we can tell from the materials in this case, often do seem to fall short of this idea that they are directly ordering companies to take down posts. How is this different, Shannon, from the government calling up the New York Times and saying, if you publish this leaked document, lives will be lost overseas. In other words, a leaked document that exposes the names and phone numbers of U.S. spies in Russia and China. I mean, how is that any different than this?

Right. I mean, we know, you know, in journalism, this is absolutely a thing that, you know, insensitive beats where you may, you know, there are those kind of conversations that happen. And look, I mean, I think we shouldn't set aside the idea that there are actual real concerns here. You know, there is this question of just, you know, when is sort of using the bully pulpit of the White House or, you know, the surgeon general, when does that extend too far? When does that amount to undue pressure? And, you know, I think the most kind of egregious cases we've seen have actually been outside this country. You know, in places like Turkey and India, we have seen governments sort of use the levers of social media, you know,

whether it's the threat of regulation or really just sort of direct orders to the companies to take down posts in a way that, you know, muzzles the opposition, you know, to the idea of deplatforming critics, you know, and those are real threats. I mean, there is a question here about like, how close is too close? Do we really want government officials, you know, being very involved in, you know, kind of creating the policies or, you know, telling companies how to enforce policies? The question is, you know, does the evidence in this case amount to that? And I think there's a lot of debate about that. And many of the experts that I spoke to, legal experts who have looked at this, say this is a

really sweeping order based on the evidence in the case. You know, and there are concerns that it's going to have really a chilling effect more broadly on the ability of government agencies to communicate with these platforms when it comes to really key issues like public health or national security. And I should say there's a carve out in this injunction so that agencies are supposed to be able to talk to social media platforms about issues of know, issues of criminal activity, national security, you know, foreign election interference. But, you know, the reality is, like, I think if you are, you know, an official, you're facing this ruling, you're going to be really wary now about, like, what you're going to say. And we've already seen this happen. I mean, the Washington Post reported this week that the State Department has canceled its regular weekly meeting that it holds with Facebook officials about 2024 election preparedness and hacking threats. And so I think we're already seeing that chilling effect that many of the experts I spoke with are concerned about.

Shannon, I've got so many more questions about this. This is so fascinating. First, we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back. Hey, don't miss our latest bonus episode. It's a conversation about covering the trial of former President Trump and what that looks like behind the scenes. A friend of mine who worked at the Associated Press came into the courtroom and said, Carrie, step to it. Michael Cohen has flipped on Trump.

Wow. That's the kind of world we live in now. You know, so many legal stories are happening all at the same time. It's hard to keep track of everything. It's all in our latest bonus episode for NPR Politics Podcast plus listeners, whose support helps make this show possible. And we're back. Shannon and Mara, a question I have for both of you.

You know, we're thinking about this right now in the context of things like COVID and in, you know, with the Biden administration in charge. I can't help but wonder, and you sort of alluded, Shannon, to the bigger picture questions that this issue raises, the comparisons to other countries with authoritarian leaders. I can't help but wonder if in the future, a different administration were in charge, if some of these questions might look different. I mean, what are the implications going forward for this case? Well, how about if Ron DeSantis doesn't like what Disney does on its social media platforms? I mean, there's no doubt that this is a shoe is on the other foot kind of situation. Conservatives believe that media in general and social media in particular I mean, there's no doubt that this is a shoe is on the other foot kind of situation. Conservatives believe that media in general and social media in particular censor their views.

It's hard to see the evidence for that, especially now that Elon Musk owns Twitter. But there's no doubt that that is a strongly held view among conservatives, that any kind of government intervention communication is going to hurt their points of view. Yeah, I think that's right. And it does show you just how sort of politicized and polarized this question of, you know, what used to be a very dry area of like social media content moderation has become. And, you know, we actually have seen these concerns, you know, when the shoe has been on the other foot. But when Donald Trump was president during sort of the beginning of the early stages of the pandemic, during the George Floyd protests, this is the point where the social media companies were starting to actually institute a lot of new rules and doing things like labeling posts, right, saying things or making claims were misleading or putting warnings. And when Twitter did that for the first time to a post of Donald Trump, he threatened to take away important legal protections that the platforms had. And people were really outraged about that.

There was idea of, you know, sort of using regulation as a cudgel. This idea, it's also known as jawboning, right, where the government is sort of exerting using its platform to exert pressure on a company to carry out a certain policy. And so, you know, I think there are those concerns. And I just think it shows you it's really, really hard to have a conversation about any of these topics without it immediately devolving into this partisan battle. Because as Mara says, conservatives have long claimed that they are censored in the media and particularly on social media. And then on the other side, you have, you know, Democrats who say that the social media companies are not going far enough in terms of policing what's on their platform and making sure they are not contributing to real world harm. I mean, how equipped are courts to even evaluate these claims, Shannon? It seems like some of them come down to questions about algorithms and technology, right? Yeah.

And of course, you know, say in this case, you know, you look through the set of claims they're making and, you know, it seems like a lot of, you know, borderline to bad examples of, you know, that are targeting specifically conservative content. But of course, you course, those are the examples that are being chosen to boost the claims in this lawsuit. There's no sense that this gives us an overall picture of actually what kind of content is getting moderated on social media. And actually, we do know that it's not always the case that conservative content is being targeted. I mean, certainly from the January 6th committee report and from the testimony of folks who work inside these companies, we know that in many ways the

platforms have kind of bent over backwards, you know, especially when it came to Donald Trump to not enforcing rules that, you know, would have gotten other users banned or, you know, kicked off or certainly at least limited. You know, they gave him a lot of leeway. It took until after January 6th, right, for any of these platforms to kick Donald Trump off, despite him repeatedly breaking their rules. And there was also a Twitter study back in 2021 that found its algorithm boosted right-leaning content

more than left-leaning content. If you're just reading the briefs in this case, that's sort of not what's showing up here. And I think, again, it's showing that polarization of this issue of content moderation. What does all this mean as we head into the 2024 election cycle? I think there are concerns, certainly ahead of 2022 in the midterms. You know, one of the lessons we had from 2020 and what happened, you know, with Donald Trump's false claims that, you know, all kinds of false claims, everything from that, you know, mail-in ballots were somehow going to be more fraudulent to claiming, you know, that the election was stolen from him.

There was a lot of concern, you know, that there would be a repeat. And you saw the social media companies, you know, try to set pretty clear rules and work quite closely, you know, with both governmental and nongovernmental partners to try to understand what kind of narratives were being spread, how do we get out accurate information. And, you know, so it's a lot of the just sort of basic mechanics that we've come to expect from social media companies when it comes to elections, things like making sure that people can get accurate information about when and where to vote. That is something that they work, you know, with, you know, local secretary of state offices and local election officials. That is something that they work, you know, with, you know, local secretary of state offices and local election officials to do to make sure they have that information correct. And if they are barred now, if those officials are barred from communicating with

the social media companies, you kind of have to wonder what that's going to look like. You know, Mara, this case is about allegations of excessive government pressure on social media companies, right? But do you think this could have implications for the regulation of other types of political speech? Because it seems like political speech, or at least the politicization of certain types of speech, is really at the heart of this.

Well, this is a big victory for disinformation, I think. Couple that with AI and the general distrust of institutions. And I think it's one of the – it's yet another thing, another trend that undermines democracy in America. So, Shannon, what happens next here? How is the government responding, first of all? Well, the Biden administration has said it is going to appeal this ruling. And it's actually already filed a motion to stay this injunction, so to make sure this injunction wouldn't go into effect while that appeal happens. But as we said, you know, we already see government agencies

being very cautious and backing off some of these communications. And I think, you know, while it's all in this very, you know, undecided phase and we don't know what's going to happen, I imagine there's going to be a lot of caution. I also say, you know, there has been a larger – this is part of this larger backlash against the companies, against the tech companies for the kind of policies they have – that have become increasingly muscular, you know, around things like public health and vaccines and elections. There's been a lot of backlash to that. And we've started to see the companies, you know, even before this ruling, backing away from some of these policies. So, for example, YouTube recently said it wasn't going to take down videos anymore, you know, that claimed the 2020 election was stolen. You know, Facebook has said it is no longer enforcing its policy, you know, against misleading or false claims about COVID and vaccines, you know, in certain countries. And so, you know, I think there has already been a ton of public pressure on these policies.

And I think the companies, you know, maybe that kind of gives them cover to not be as aggressive. And we're actually also seeing them disinvest in the teams of people that they have to hire to look at what's being posted and decide whether it breaks the rules or not. So I think it's all pretty concerning heading into an election year. Shannon Bond, thank you so much for your reporting. Thanks for having me on to talk about this. And we're going to take a quick break.

When we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go. And we have a special guest, Miles Parks. Hey, Miles. Hi, Sarah. This is the part of the show, of course, where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop talking about and thinking about, politics or otherwise. What have you got for us, Miles? Well, mine is otherwise. And we just had the 4th of July this week. And I don't know if you guys watched Joey Chestnut

demolish the competition for like the 15th year in a row in a hot dog eating contest. He downed like 60 hot dogs on the 4th of July. And you're like, where are you going with this, Miles? This was like an extra impressive one, wasn't it? It was. Well, I mean, every time he does, it's impressive. He didn't set the world record.

He set the world record a couple of years ago. But every 4th of July when I watch this competition, I think back to one of the best journalism assignments I've ever had, which was to cover Joey Chestnut. When he set the ice cream eating competition record back in 2014. I was a local newspaper reporter in Florida and I went to the ice cream. I can't remember. It was like the world ice cream fair or something, some sort of ice cream competition in Florida. And, um, he, he, he, he ate 15 pints of ice cream in six minutes, which I watch a lot of sports. And I will say it was the most impressive thing. I've seen a no hitter live. This was more impressive in terms of human achievement. It was one of the craziest things I have ever seen. And I talked to him afterward. And I was so curious. I was like,

how does ice cream compare to hot dogs? He set chicken wing records. He set a bunch of eating competitions. He said ice cream was one of the hardest things he's ever eaten competitively because of the brain freeze. Like brain freeze sets on in like the first minute of eating this ice cream. And he said like he had to basically push through six straight minutes of brain freeze to eat these 15 pints, which is just absolutely mind boggling. And he didn't puke, which is like also extra impressive. Sometimes people do that. I once won a White Castle eating contest at high school youth group because my family as a religious observance would fast on Wednesdays, not eat for spiritual reasons. And I always hated that because I like eating.

And I got to youth group starving. And they had a hamburger eating contest. And it was like, yes. And I won. I beat this giant six like six foot two guy. Oh my God. This is how, do you remember how many hamburgers you ate? It wasn't a lot.

It was like maybe six because they're like those little White Castle ones, you know? Yeah, the little ones. Yeah, that's awesome. We should have an NPR eating contest at some point. I'm sure that's probably like against the rules. In order to win, I'd have to come in so hangry, you know?

Yeah, right. What do you have, Sarah? So mine is more political, but I just can't stop thinking about it. So this is mine. The former mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, and his wife, who've been together a very long time, a couple of decades, I think they have a couple of kids. They gave this very kind of sweet interview to the New York Times about their decision to do something that lots of us have done over the years, which is separate. And I just thought it was kind of heartwarming in a way because they're so mature and so civilized. They've decided after a very, what sounded like a very rational conversation, that this isn't right. And so they're going to sort of separate in place, date other people, move on with their lives. And, you know, I just think of how many times we've seen political couples go on stage together, usually the wife with a strained look on her face, you know, to try to smooth over something.

And this is just two people who've, like, made a decision. It sounds like a very mature decision. And, you know, it's an unconventional one, but I wish them all the best. It was very, very revealing. And, of course, they are public people. And it means that their separation is going to be viewed and more public than most people's. But I wonder if this will set the norm, a new standard for public officials separating and then divorcing. It might.

Yeah, or maybe just more honesty and openness about what's really going on, because it is tricky for public figures to have private lives. Mara, what about you? What can't you let go? My Can't Let It Go is about a backlash to the Barbie movie in Vietnam. Oh, yeah. In the Barbie movie, on which I am not an expert, there appears to be a map that has a dotted line showing what China believes it owns of the South China Sea. And Vietnam doesn't consider that map legitimate. Didn't Warner Brothers kind of say it wasn't like a serious map? Like they said it was sort of just like a scrawl. Didn't they kind of downplay that it was even?

Nothing about territorial arguments is not serious. True. Even in the Barbie movie. Even in a Barbie movie. And actually, an international tribunal at The Hague ruled in 2016 that China's map wasn't valid under international law. And what's so interesting to me about this is that big movie companies who want to show their movies in China, because there's a

huge market there, bend over backwards not to offend the Chinese government. This has happened before. You've seen American sports figures bite their tongue and refuse to criticize China for human rights, transgressions, and other things. But in this case, there was a backlash to that. Vietnam didn't like it, decided not to show the movie. And in the Philippines, they're also considering whether to ban Barbie for the same reason. So I put this under the heading of backlash to China. And Barbie at the center of global diplomacy. Yes. And Barbie is the center of global politics for the moment.

Are you guys going to see the Barbie movie? Oh, yeah. Of course. I'm not. No? Is it because of the backlash, Mara? This is like you're putting your flag down, too? Oh, no, that's not why I'm not going to see the Barbie movie. I'm not going to see the Barbie movie because my daughter is now 22 years old and I don't have to.

I don't have a daughter. I'm going to see it anyway. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Mithoni Muturi. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our producers are Elena Moore and Casey Morrell. Research and fact-checking by our intern, Lee Walden. Thanks to Krishna Dev Kalimer and Lexi Shapiddle.

I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Milesmon. I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.