The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Should Freedom of Speech Extend to Social Media? (Part I)

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Should people be able to say whatever they hell they want on social media? Brazil doesn't think so, at least when it comes to public misinformation. While most social media platforms have bent the knee, Musk and Twitter (now X) have held out. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/should-freedom-of-speech-extend-to-social-media-part-i

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado, and today we're going to talk about social media and truth and government and Elon Musk and the right to lie and all that good stuff. The issue of the moment is happening in Brazil, where Elon Musk and Twitter, or X, if you prefer, are in a spat with the legal system, including the government and the Supreme Court in Brazil over a lot of social media postings. The very, very, very short version is that Brazil has laws on the books that prevent you from lying in the public sphere, unlike the United States, and they are trying to enforce those laws versus Twitter. Twitter refused at Musk's direction to play ball, and so the Brazilian courts have shut Twitter down. Now, Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, said, well, I'm just going to transmit it in via Starlink. So the Brazilian government started to go through the paces of shutting Starlink down. Musk, me as to say, Nimitz's bluff was called back down.

The court cases are continuing. Musk has called his friends at the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission here in the United States, to work that angle versus the Brazilian government. That is in play as well. There's a lot of back and forth. But let's start out with the really, really basic stuff. This isn't unique to Twitter.

There are any number of social media platforms operating in Brazil, and the issues in question, the Brazilian government is taking issue with are ones that are calling for the forcible overthrow the government outright lies and calling for violence in schools and every single other media institution that has been Brazil long ago complied with the government orders to take this stuff down. So really what Elon Musk is talking about when he's saying extreme rights to free speech, he's talking about the ability to say whatever you want, whenever you want, whenever you want, regardless of the consequences are.

Now, the existence of social media is new. And so the regulation of social media is new. And every time we, the United States, has ever gotten a new technology that deals with information transfer, we then have to build a legal structure to manage and regulate it. So if you go back to the 1800s, every political party in the United States had their own newspaper. And so if you think FMSNBC and Fox are bad now, it's nothing compared to what we used to put into print with everyone just making shit up about everybody else. eventually that got tampered down and you had to actually tell the truth to a degree. Well, then we got the telegraph and all of a sudden you didn't have to wait for the morning edition. People could just tap things out and send it across the country.

And then once again, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies. We got something called yellow journalism, which was part of the reason the United States got involved in the Spanish-American war in the first place. And to go from a wild, wild west of information, sharing, and fabrication to something that's a little bit more civilized, you need a degree of agreement among the various factions of society that this is okay to do. So in the United States during reconstruction and the roaring 20s, we didn't have that. But then with World War II in the dawn of the Cold War in the 1950s, we got a series of court cases out of the Supreme Court and a series of laws out of Congress that basically built this structure of libel laws and fraud laws that we know today. What we're struggling with in the United

States right now is we have those fraud laws and we have those liable laws that regulate television and newspaper and magazine and all of that. But they do not regulate social media. Social media instead comes under the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which says that if you are the provider of a platform, a technology platform, you are not legally liable for what anyone posts on it. And we don't have laws to regulate what the people post. So anyone can say whatever they want, and it can be on any platform for as long as you want. And if somebody wants to regulate it, they're doing it out of the goodness of their own heart or because the government said, hey, this is like going to kill people.

Of course, the quintessential topic of the day is Donald Trump insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And after four years, Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, not a single faction supporting him anywhere in the country, has yet to present a single shred of evidence that that was indeed the case. It's not that evidence has been produced in the courts have ruled that this is faulty or fraudulent. It's that nothing has actually been produced at all. And if you don't believe me, that's fine. Go to Chris Krebs. He was basically the guy in charge of maintaining election integrity under the Trump administration.

And he said that the 2020 elections were the cleanest ones ever in American history. So, of course, Trump fired him. Anyway, saying this in the United States is still legal. Repeating it is news is still legal because we haven't built that legal structure. and at this moment in our country's history, we're kind of arguing about a few things. So getting the consensus that's necessary to put a fresh regulation on speech probably isn't going to happen in the next year or two. Well, that moment has already come and gone in Brazil.

In Brazil, we had a military dictatorship back in the latter half of the last century. And when civilian rule was reestablished near the end of the last century, they got a new constitution, they got a new currency. They've had peaceful transfers of government. And they've come to the conclusion. that for their society outright lies and their political discourse are bad, and so they regulate them. Now, the danger, of course, when you decide to regulate free speech is that somebody has to be the arbiter of truth. Someone has to be able to go in on a case-by-case basis say that this is actually factually correct, and this is a flat-out lie.

Now, in the case of Brazil, because these most recent situations involve things like calling for sedition and coups and murder in schools, It hasn't been really hard for the Brazilians to get behind this. I mean, yes, there's always going to be some conflicts, but these aren't gray areas in the free speech debate. But you still need an arbiter of truth. And the judge that is involved in this has been involved since something called the Car Wash scandal years ago, where in essence, the government, this one, the previous one, the one before that, and the one before that, have all been trying to clean up public affairs. It might be too strong to call this a bipartisan or a multi-party effort, but it is something that enjoys a degree of success and support throughout society.

And so the judge in question that Musk has been personally maligning has made the ruling. It was appealed by Musk. And then the Supreme Court got involved and it was a unanimous decision on the part of the Supreme Court and the executive of the Brazilian government supports it as well. So it's difficult for me to see the Brazilians backing down on this. Now, Brazil, an important country in South America, really isn't what really matters here because a lot of other countries are struggling with this same topic for a lot of the same reasons. And the European Union is paying very close attention to what is going on in Brazil because they have already built a digital's directive that gives the European Commission, that's their equivalent of the executive branch, gives the commission the legal authority to build an arbiter of truth to determine. how to manage social media, how to punish it when they get out of line, how to handle content moderation. And they have yet to build that arbiter, but they're now watching Brazil to see what

works and what doesn't. And it's probably not going to be Musk and Twitter that are the deciding case, or going to be the first case for whatever this new authority is. That is likely to be a different platform, something called telegram that comes out of Russia. And that we're going to talk about tomorrow. Thank you.