WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Robby Soave

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason and host of Rising on Hill TV. He joined Erin Osborne of WRFH for a wide-ranging conversation.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Aaron Osborne and with me today is Robbie Suave. Welcome. It's great to be with you. Thanks for wrapping me. Thank you for coming. I wanted to start off talking about your thoughts on the evolution of free speech in the media in the past 10 years. You know, it's very interesting. Free speech is fundamental bedrock principle of what, of the Enlightenment tradition, of the American experience, the First Amendment. It distinguishes us from so many of. other countries. And I've actually developed a greater appreciation for that in recent, even just recent weeks as we hear so many European leaders, for instance, you know, railing or taking efforts to limit free expression in their own countries. We're so lucky in America to,

to enjoy this value. The media should be the main defenders of freedom of expression because it's what makes their business model possible. Yet what we found in the last several years, in so many cases, the media, I think, has grown, it is difficult to talk about the media as a monolith because it's so diffuse and there's so many different places. But if we're talking about the mainstream progressive institutions in the media, I think it's become very dismissive or even suspicious of freedom of speech, have in some ways helped government actors to campaign against it. if we're getting more specific, talking about COVID, for instance, efforts to grapple with misinformation online. I think many media organizations now view freedom of speech as dangerous,

as unhealthy for society and are working to limit it, working hand in hand with government actors to limit it in ways that we really need to speak up about. Okay. And once again, this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Aaron Osborne and talking with Robbie Suave. about that, why do you think that the media is sort of responding so fully to what we saw was say COVID and government concerns about misinformation? I think it's the new, I think misinformation is the new hate speech. You know, there used to be, there were court cases to decide, you know, whether even really despicable people can be in the public square sharing hateful views, views that I find despicable. And, you know, we've litigated this at the Supreme Court level. And we found

that, yeah, you know, there are very small exceptions to what the First Amendment protects in terms of libel, in terms of threats of imminent violence, but that hateful speech is not something that is well-defined, is certainly not been defined by the Supreme Court as a category of speech that is off-limit. You know, what you and I think is hateful, we could disagree about that. We can't rely on some central authority to tell us that. Misinformation is the new way that skeptics of speech are getting at the concept and saying, well, but misinformation, it's because of the internet. It's because of the unique ability for ideas to spread that are beyond the control, I think, of traditional media gatekeepers. You used to have newspapers, a couple major

newspapers, a couple of major TV stations, a couple major radio stations could gatekeep, could decide what is the range of legitimate things we're discussing. And social media, the internet, makes that impossible. And they don't like that loss of control over what we're allowed to discuss. And so they're trying to come up with new ways to limit it. And I think this information is the one they've seized upon that if you're hearing ideas and you're going to be sharing ideas that are wrong in a way as pertaining to COVID, wrong in terms of the health of society, we have some right to limit that.

And that is a, I think that's a bad idea. I think that's incorrect. I think if that got to the, the Supreme Court, it would be slapped down immediately, but it's what they're working toward. And how do you think that we obviously, obviously the journalism world has grown dramatically with everything from substack to podcasters to even social media. And I was wondering, do you think that that has kind of exacerbated or sped up the problem? I think new modes of communication present new challenges, but in the long term, it's always

demonstrated that the new mode of communication is good for the flourishing of society, for the sharing of new ideas. And you can go back and back and back and find every time there's a new innovation in the communication space, some want the prestigious leaders of the previous communications mode will say this new thing is bad. In my lifetime, it was violent video games are going to be bad. Let me find out they're not actually causing more violence. TV was bad. It's rotting your brain. What TV can be? be used for educational purposes and information. New York Times hated radio when it came out.

The New York Times did all this fearmongering about how radio was going to make people insane or distract you. Some of the attention span arguments that get used against social media today are right out of the anti-radio playbook that newspapers engaged in. I once came across an op-ed, I believe it was in the New York Times, calling on, what was it, Alexander Graham Bell to be killed for having invented new modes of communication. communication, the telephone, the telegram, those kinds of things. They were against that. You know, people were against ancient Greek philosophers warned that the written word was going to be

bad for communication. So this is nothing new. This is tech panic. So when these arguments are deployed against the internet or social media, I'm very skeptical because they've been deployed against every new form of communication throughout all of human history, and they've usually been wrong. Thank you. And this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Aaron Osborne. speaking with Robbie Suave. Another question about that is how do we combat this tech panic, both as journalists and then as citizens? Well, I think we just have to be scientific about it and actually evaluate the evidence. There are downsides of how addicted we are, I think, to our phones and to social media, the competition in the attention economy. And I certainly think it's healthy

for people, for young people to not have their phones in schools or log off. long stretches of time, please. But on the other hand, people are getting new sources of information, dissident perspectives, contrarian perspectives. There's been this vast flourishing of alternative media platforms like you mentioned, like substack and etc. as made possible by social media. It gets around the traditional media gatekeepers. That has been a healthy thing for people who dissent, for people who disagree with a dominant progressive or mainstream orthodoxy are well served by social media. The defenders of the status quo hate that you can get around them.

That political figures sometimes don't even bother talking to the mainstream media. They can talk to the people directly on social media. The podcasts where people are talking for hours at a time about and you learn more about them, it's better in some ways than those quick five-minute got-you-interviews you do with mainstream press. But it requires the public to be, you can't trust everything. you just see this is a truism, but just because you saw it on social media or Facebook, whatever, doesn't make it correct. But I think having more perspectives, more possible sources of information is better than an older environment where dissenting from the major media

players was impossible. And I wanted to shift a little bit to the government. You mentioned that COVID had a dramatic influence on government perceptions of misinformation. Has there been another or a similar kind of push towards combating misinformation from the government side of things? Yes. What we found out was, I mean, it's really remarkable, dramatic. The level of communication between government bureaucrats and social media moderators at Facebook and what was then called Twitter and YouTube, et cetera. There was so much, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, the White House itself was in constant contact with moderators at social media companies trying to browbeat them into taking down more content.

I think those of us who didn't like the heavy-handed level of moderation or censorship at social media companies, I think initially lashed out at the companies themselves and said, you know, why is Facebook silencing me? Why is Twitter silencing me? What we didn't know then is that it really wasn't their choice. They were being screamed at by the White House itself. The White House accuses you of, you know, like killing people because you're not taking down more content. Eventually you're going to comply for fear that they're going to regulate your business out of existence. And that was the explicit threat.

So we, I think we're more cognizant of that now and it was a major problem. Do you think that you mentioned Twitter. Do you think that that's something that's kind of shifting the other direction with Musk now taking over X? Or do you think there's still kind of a very strong undercurrent? No, I think it's shifted dramatically. And it's not just X. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg himself, leader, you know, head of Facebook, Meta, he came out and said he regrets going along with what the government wanted and that they wouldn't do it again. You know, people can be cynical and say that we can't trust him or whatever's the case. But, you know, all of virtually all the tech CEOs want to be friendly with the Trump administration. They were all there at the inauguration. They, I think they know that it did not end up serving. their companies well, let alone the public discourse, to have shut down discussion on which health mitigation efforts should be mandatory, where COVID came from in the first place. That's the

biggest egg on your face moment, is that discussion of COVID perhaps coming from a lab in Wuhan was vigorously suppressed on social media at the suggestion of the government. We now, now the government itself thinks that's, I mean, there's still debate on the subject, of course, we don't know for sure, but the energy department, the FBI and the CIA have all concluded that it is more likely than not that COVID did come from a lab. That's the very thing that was suppressed on social media. So people who wanted to shut down conversation due to misinformation really, really got proven wrong on a lot of COVID-related subjects. And I think that is a, I think it's a lessons learned kind of situation. That could be naively hopeful on my part,

I think it might be. And once again, this is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. I'm Aaron Osborne and I'm talking with Robbie Suave. On that note, you mentioned conflicts abroad. And I kind of wanted to shift us a little bit into your thoughts on European censorship. I know you mentioned it at the beginning. How does it compare to what we may or may not be experiencing on different sides in the United States? It is so much worse than what we experience here.

it's really striking that every other, so many different traditions, Europe, China, Brazil, Russia, India are all very different in many ways, obviously, different parts of the world. And yet all of them use censorship to police dissent to a vastly greater degree than we do because we have the protection of the First Amendment, despite the things I was saying earlier about the government putting pressure on social media companies, were much better protected. Europe, you know, despite being the founders of the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment tradition which gave us free speech, which we borrowed from them, they want to police speech at a online internet speech at a level that is shocking to me.

And, you know, J.D. Vance had some contempt for them, recently giving speeches in Germany, giving a speak, speaking with Kier Starrmer, the Prime Minister of Britain, chiding him for what they're doing. The European Union in particular is taking a very hands-on approach to policing misinformation on social media. And the other thing is these are our companies. X is an American company. Facebook is an American company. And they are trying to say that these companies, because they're operating, you know, in European jurisdiction. Of course, you know, it's the Internet.

It's not physically on the continent. Should be subject to their rules for what people get to get to say. I don't think we should put up with this. I think this is very, very bad. We need to foster environments where, the tech companies are free to innovate and have speech and dissent in terms of our need to compete with China, which is innovating in an AI space. The advantage we have as Americans should be a more permissive regulatory structure around speech-related products like tech. And we should not stomach

the European Union getting in the way of that. It's really dangerous. And I know Europe has a history with hateful speech, obviously, empowering Nazis and all that. You have a, you heard this, you saw that from CBS interviewing the speech police in Germany saying, well, we're policing Nazi speech. The response to that is, you know, Nazi speech was vigorously, vigorously policed in the run up to the Nazi takeover. It is not true that there was some total free speech environment in Germany. The Nazis took advantage of that to rise. That is absolutely 100% false. Nazi speech was absolutely prohibited. Nazis were arrested for speech, it did not stop the rise of Nazism because suppressing dangerous ideas makes them more

interesting and seductive to people. People say, well, why am I not allowed to hear this? Does that mean it has some validity? And then, of course, when the Nazis did come to power, they used that exact same kind of censorship, the regime that was already in place to suppress criticism of them. That is how censorship backfires. And the history of Europe does not show us that we should be fearful of free speech, it shows us we should be fearful of censorship. For Europe, and I'm thinking now that you brought up that example, more specifically Germany, are they now focusing on things like political parties like the AFD, or are they just kind of more generally censoring?

They will come to your door. They will knock at your door, the German authorities. They will confiscate your laptop and your phone for telling jokes, for, you know, they'll say, And this is the other thing with people who want to suppress speech. They start by saying, well, we're just going to suppress absolute Nazi advocacy. It starts with that. And then you see the slippery slope in action. Where then there, yes, it's just, it's advocacy of the AFD, or it's dissenting or disagreeing with the government, or it's hateful.

I mean, in Britain, they've arrested people for sharing rap lyrics that contain racist speech. The censors never understand these distinctions. you know, old ladies get arrested in Germany for what is called Nazi advocacy. To be clear, Nazism is absolutely very bad, and people can suffer social consequences for adopting those behaviors, absolutely. But I don't see any evidence that the authorities, you give them an inch, they take a mile, or whatever the equivalent is in metric terms. It's very bad. You mentioned the need for technological innovation and for fewer restrictions on technology. I wanted to ask why you think that's so important for the United States.

Well, it goes back to what I was saying a minute ago. We are in competition with China for who will govern the next century, for who will be the superpower. I think COVID has made this even more stark, the need for the next century to be the superpower to be the United States. States and not China. And, you know, I say that as someone who is certainly skeptical of too much military interventionism. I want to not have World War III with China. We don't want a military confrontation. We want to beat China the same way we beat the Soviet Union, which is by having a more robust, a better economy, a more powerful economy. And the next century is going to be governed by tech, by AI, by space innovation, all those kinds of things.

things. So we need a permissive regulatory structure that is going to allow our companies that share American values to flourish to the maximum degree. And that is we're going to lead the century by being a First Amendment affirming because these are speech-adjacent platforms, and that's how we're going to win. We don't want to have to beat China by a lot war where millions of people could die. But we don't want to let them run the world, because we don't want to let them run the world, because they are a repressive authoritarian government that allows no dissent. And when they arguably possibly caused a global pandemic, tried to cover it up. We can't have that.

And we will, again, we'll beat them by having favorable regulation toward tech. It's an existential issue. I think it's why the Trump administration is prioritizing and is moving away from a little bit of the antitrust behavior that the Republican Party was beginning to flirt with. In the last, I would say, four to eight years. you've seen some Republicans get more on board with things like, you know, you used to your breakup big tech. I've never been for that. And I think more conservatives are seeing why that's maybe not a great idea.

That also the anger at big tech was a little bit misplaced and was actually anger at government pressure on tech companies. So we're going to not do that anymore, I hope. Allow these tech companies to flourish. That doesn't mean we won't ever hold them accountable or we won't have any regulations whatsoever or that will have them running the government. directing favorable contracts to, to tech people. I oppose that. But we have to have a Europe can't lead. We don't want China to lead. Brazil can't lead. Russia can't lead. It's going to be the U.S. and it's going to be through unparalleled economic growth. So talking about China specifically and AI and that sort of thing, we've seen in the United States a lot of criticism of TikTok and

bite dance and AI engines that come out of China. What is the place for engaging in competition and at the same time not censoring? Yeah, it's a difficult and important question. The banning of TikTok was a very, very interesting situation because this was something Trump initially supported, then Biden went ahead and actually did, at the same time that the consensus around the issue was changing in real time, with Republicans starting to say, wait a minute, do we actually want to ban this? And then Biden even himself saying, you know what, I'm not going to enforce this. And then Trump undid it. And TikTok was grateful to Republicans.

It was Trump's idea in the first place. Some of the arguments made up against TikTok were really not ever proven to my satisfaction. I fully believe the Chinese government, which, to emphasize, again, is repressive, could use its proximity to TikTok to influence the algorithm in ways that are harmful to our national security or taking our data, although you can purchase the data, the data is going to be out there. The data protection stuff is those concerns are universal across all social media companies. And then the pressure on TikTok to suppress stuff that comes from the Chinese, well, as I was just saying, our own government did that to our companies too. So for me, it's like, we'll put our own house in order before we concentrate on this.

I think the, and then there's, you know, the harms to children argument, which I already kind of addressed that, yes, I see that there can be harms. And I think we should all worry about being too much on social media. But the harms from TikTok are not, in that respect, we're not unique to TikTok. It's the same. Instagram has the same problem. And I'm always very, I've learned to be skeptical when, you know, political. political government figures cite national security concerns, but won't explain what those are, won't be transparent about it, just trust us that there's a national security justification for, in effect, violating your free speech rights. Now, you can argue TikTok doesn't have free speech

rights because it's not an American company. It's always important to remember the First Amendment is not an affirmative right for a certain group of people. The First Amendment is a restriction on the government for suppressing free speech, period. It doesn't say, the First Amendment doesn't say American citizens and American companies get free speech, but that doesn't apply to TikTok because it's not an American company. First Amendment doesn't say that. It says the government shall make no law. It goes to the government and says, you cannot do this. So, like, I'm a TikTok user. I want to listen to, let's say I am, and I want to consume the speech of TikTok. Can the government say to me, or I guess say to the Apple App Store, you're not allowed to show this content to people

who want to see it. Seems like a First Amendment violation to me. The Supreme Court went the other way, but Neil Gorsuch, who's my favorite Supreme Court justice, expressed a lot of reservations in his write-up of the case, saying, you know, I haven't had enough time really to make this decision, and I seem a little worried about it, but I'll trust the government for now on its national security justification. I think we've often regretted buying into national security justifications. I think we certainly, on a bipartisan basis, regret that with, for instance, the Patriot Act and a lot of war on terror-era stuff, still taking off our shoes in line at the airport, all that kind of thing. I think we might think the same thing about TikTok in five or ten years.

All right. I think we'll wrap it up there. Our guest has been Robbie Suave and I'm Aaron Osborne on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.