booktv. every sunday on c-span2 watch nonfiction authors discuss their books. television for serious readers. and watch them all online anytime if at booktv.org. you can also find us on twitter, facebook and youtube @booktv. .. because i knew about this book for some time now. i knew about the podcast that came first with it.t. this is jacob mchangama, "free speech: a history from socrates to social media." which iss available now, been available for a couple of weeks and is getting aer very strong d

appreciative audience, i would say, in the united states and will find i think its audience in europe also with these issues. we thought it was great. we have no jacob for quite a while and great to have a book forum. and who better to have just a conversation among like-minded people with someeo differences than jon rauch' from brookings. so let me give you, what i'm going to do here is give a brief bio. you may know bothop of these people from their work, both of our people. and by the way i'm john samples, vice president here at cato, if you don't know me. and then i thought jacob would tell us something about the book and then wee would talk about te issues and then turn to q&a in a little while. okay? jacob mchangama is the founder and executive director of the danish think tank justitia and the host of t the podcast "clear and present danger" i history of

free speech, not surprisingly i highly recommend that to you. it's a very interesting podcast series and it is available still. his writing or free speech has appeared in the economist, the "washington post", foreign," fon policy and many other outlets around the world. he lives in copenhagen denmark. john rauch is a senior fellow in the government studies program and author of eight books. writing that really madeus me fl bad. a eight books? howdy do that? and the many articles on public policy, culture and government come his articles been highly influential as you may know. his many brookings publications include the 211 book the constitution of dollars a defense of truth as well as the 2015 e-book which i think more and more is coming into its own political realism, how hacks machines, big-money and backroom deals and strengthen american

democracy. he also writes often for the atlantic and is a recipient of the 2005 national magazine award, the industries equivalent of the pulitzer prize. so i'm eager to get started here. jacob could you tell us something about the book, about what led you to write it, also the podcast and some of the themes that you found and what is really i have to say just in a striking effort at research. i mean, you really conquered a very demanding, very broad set of issues and that's very hard just too work with, right, because it's 2000 years years. >> first of all thank you, john, thanks to cato for hosting me. one of the few sort of life events i been doing on this site really appreciate that opportunity.rs also because it'sn almost exacty two two years since i was in washington and that was also speaking at a cato conference on i think the ninth or tenth of

march. john i think we're having a dinner at a time where, seen in hindsight, but not have been the most response. it could've been super spreader event. was born in in cosi's secular liberal denmark and in my youth free speech was sort of taken for granted. it was the air that we we breathed and and sort of in the 90s and early 2000s, so i didn't really think about it and i think most people didn't because it was not under threat. it was just part of daily life and then denmark became sort of the epicenter of a global battle of values over the relationship between free speech and religion when someone who later became a good friend of mine fleming also the editor of a danish newspaper published a number of cartoons depicting the the prophet muhammad which which led to a global crisis and and fleming

and many others still live with around the security because of threats from from extremists, but that forced many days and i think many in europe. and maybe around the world to sort of really think what what is this principle that we hail and that, you know as a sort of an enlightenment value and the foundation of democracy. is it really that important and a lot of people said, you know, maybe it's not so important. you know, these cartoons are punching down on a vulnerable minority and this is not what free speech was supposed to to be about and that sort of surprised me shocked me a little bit and then what i've also saw was that generally people on the right was we're sort of free speech absolute is when it came to the cartoons and then we had a number of governments who then adopted a number of restrictions on religious free speech. basically target, not not formally but everyone knew it was targeted at sort of extreme as muslims and that limited free speech and i was sort of saying

this is goes against the very principles that we held up during the cartoon affair but a lot of people on the right side. yeah. well free speech is important, but in order to you know, safeguard our fundamental values. we have to limit the free speech of these particular extremists and that sort of led me. to really try to investigate the whole history of free speech. what's at stake? what does it mean? what does it mean when society is based on free speech? what does its absence? i mean is this principle really so, you know, is it really worth? you know all the fuss and and i found that it was but i think you know looking at present debates about free speech. you can have a more detached attitude rather than sort of the culture war tainting everything when you look at it through the prism of the past and so the book really starts. i i locate the origins of free speech in the athenian democracy

some 2500 years ago where the athenians had two concepts of free speech. one of them being isagaria. so equality of speech which is exercise in the assembly where all freeborn male citizens had a direct voice in debating and passing laws, but perhaps even more of even more consequence was the second concept called parise which means something like uninhibited speech which allowed a culture of runs and free speech, which so you know, if you were a plato you could set up an academy and you could you could basically, you know teach philosophy that that was not specific particularly fund of the democracy that allowed you to to philosophize you could have foreign life foreigners aristotle set up shop. and until the tolerance war a bit thin socrates could heckle people and roast them in the

agora the marketplace and in in athens and and the athenian. statesman damustan is i think came up with it. you know, he said, you know in athens you're free to criticize the athenian constitution and praise the spartan constitution, but in sparta sort of the bitter enemies of the athenians, you can only praise the spartan constitution and i think that really is still is the litmus test of free speech. are you able to criticize the the political system under which you you live? so so i you know the athenian system obviously by our standards was not radically egalitarian, but by its time it was very much an egalitarian free speech idea, and i i sort of contrast that with the roman republic where there was a much more elitist top-down approach to free speech so you would have senators like cato like cicero who believed in free speech, but mostly sort of for the senatorial elite not the plebs and the and the roman citizens

did not have a right to address assemblies the way that that athenian citizens did and i think these two concepts leaders and and egalitarian free speech have have been intention throughout the history of free speech, especially when when the public sphere has been expanded either through technology be it the printing press the radio the telegraph and today social media or through political development. so, you know, it could be a democracy giving the vote to to women to the poor and property list to religious racial minorities. the you have always been an elitist pushback against this idea and a dread an existential dread that the unwashed mob was unfit to be given access to to information that had to be filtered by the elites because otherwise everything would would go to hell and basically and so that's that. that's a very important sort of

thesis in in the book. another one is related to that. it's that i argue that that many today see free speech as entrenching unequal power relations. i argue that free speech. in fact may be the most powerful. of human equality that human beings have ever stumbled upon and that every single oppressed group or minority has relied on free speech the practice and and principle to further their cause and stake a claim for equality and in this country. i spent a bit of time on how southern states in the 1830s adopted the most draconian censorship laws in american history in order to to counter abolitionist literature and an so take virginia. of course in 1776, virginia became the first state to adopt a bill of rights even before the declaration of independence, which said that press freedom

was the ball work of liberty, but then in 1836 with virginia passes a law, which says something like you know that you it's a crime to deny that white masters have a right to property in their black slaves and it's also a crime to inculcate resistance to slavery and you know among the whole laundry list of ways to try and counter abolitionist ideas on the other hand you had abolitionist like frederick douglass who himself of course was born as a slave but who argued for a universalist idea of free speech which he said would and would basically destroy slavery and he argued that that free speech is not depend on the color of your skin or the size of your wallet and that the right of a free speech is a very precious one, especially especially to the oppressed and and i would say that that you know is is a another theme that that runs through the book, you know, i'm staying at a hotel here. at lafayette square very close to it and and you'll see a

placket there showing how in 1917 a number of women women's rights advocates were were burning and effigy of president woodrow wilson, and they were arrested and fined many of these women who were basically arguing for the right to vote and i remember thinking about that in in 2018 when i was living on the upper west side with my family and i took my son to a museum and when we went outside tens of thousands of people were protesting most of them women wearing these pink -- hats and and shouting up sanities at the president of the time and the nypd was there to save god their first amendment right to criticize the the president in terms that were probably more aggressive than those that went before them and i thought you know, i thought that was, you know, really a sign of how free speech had furthered the the rights of groups that had previously been persecuted. of course, john has written very el about how that was also the case for for the gay rights

movement for instance. so when you see the huge increases in acceptance and tolerance of interracial and gay marriage, i think that that was not achieved through censorship and and putting people biggest in jail. it was to a large degree one by people using the first amendment rights to to do activism to appeal to come in humanity and so on and the last thing i might want highlight is that ultimately, i believe that free speech. the health of free speech at any given nation depends more on a culture of free speech than law. so the first the first amendment was ratified in 1791. it hasn't changed the wording, but you know in 1798 you could go to jail for criticizing president john adams, and that would be supported by people like hamilton and washington the federalists whereas with with jefferson and madison on the other side of that conflict then you know you go to to as i

mentioned slate laws prohibiting abolitionist literature, but if you go to world war one, you know, the supreme court is completely fine with sending people to to prison for 10 or 20 years for a posing american involvement in in world war one you have the red scares and so on and and you really have to get into sort of the 50s before free speech is is consistently protected and and reaches the the threshold by the end of the 60s that with sort of brandenburg. is ohio that very very high threshold for for limiting specific specific viewpoints and i think that reflects a change in cultural attitudes in norms and among americans because the wording hasn't changed and you see that actually also in in famous works like on liberty by john stuart mill. he is at least as concerned about the stifling norms in victorian england as he is about

the the censorship of the magistrate and warns that you know when side is tendency to impose its values on descenders is is a danger to free speech. george orwell says some of the same things as so so and that's why i worry for for this country because in my view both sides if there are there probably more than two sides, but but you know eating away at the cultural of free speech in hyper polarized partisan nature of american politics which i which i fear will ultimately have downstream effects that might affect how the first amendment is constitutional protected whether in 10 or 20 or 30 years. so that was a an executive summary. very good john some comments of well, the first comment is is thank you john.

thank you cato. it's even though i think most of our viewers are online. it is nice to be in a room with actual human beings. so thank you all i feel very good about that john. the only thing i don't feel good about is it in your introduction? you didn't mention that my first and seminal work on this subject now 29 years old kindly inquisitors. the new attacks on free thought was published by whom there goes by performance review the cato institute cato institute. yeah, and it's even worse than that because the second edition john and i corresponded frequently after because i was the publisher of it for okay, that's right. how could i forget that and don't forget the audiobook narrated by penn gillette. yes, it's spectacular. anyway, i so i have a spectacular i owe a big debt to cato because at the time no one i couldn't get a commercial publisher for the book. and here we are 30 years later. it's a fair to say a classic which is what we call books that are ignored for 25 years before anyone responding is because he

was getting so much money from chicago that i was really really excel sold and the second edition. so quite well, so i thought i'd just say three drinks quickly. the first is about the book the second is about what we learned from the book and the third is about the environment wherein right now first thing about the book is is get it by it read it. it's not only readable and comprehensive. it's the only thing like it unbelievably until this book came along there was nothing to read that took you from the very beginning of the ideas of free speech right up to social media. it's all here the ancient greeks medieval times where there were occasional outbursts of very interesting thinking only to be suppressed the enlightenment the long history of seditious libel which reappears again and again, it's a fantastic book. i just can't say enough about it. it's a service it will be a touch. for years to come and it's also a lot of fun. second thing what i learned from the book or maybe relearn from

it. is that the idea of that the government? should not only allow. but actively protect speech and thought which is seditious vulgar offensive wrong-headed bigoted or just plain wrong the idea that government should actually protect that. is the most crazy counterintuitive wacky social idea of all time bar none? if you if you pop that proposition to someone on the street, they'll say what's the matter with you? and it's only redeeming feature is that it's also the single most successful social idea of all time bar none. it gives us the peace the freedom and the knowledge that build this society but because it is so deeply counter-intuitive it took. 2500 years to build in the form.

we know it and as jacob just said the current form in the united states is very young. just extremely young. it's the environment in which the founders. wrote the first amendment was much more restrictive than today's. so what i remind people of and what i hope they take away from this book is that defending and protecting this radical wacky proposition requires getting up every morning and explaining it from scratch. to a whole new generation and then our kids will have to do that and their kids and their grandkids every single day and we just need to be cheerful about that because as this book shows you we're doing incredibly. well. actually, i'm not sure jacob would agree with that. a compared to for example, my grandfather's time the greatest greatest novel the 20th century ulysses was banned by the government and confiscated on on the docks couldn't happen today. right up at the present. however, we have i think a couple challenges.

it really been the paradigm and challenge jacob and me and john and all of us. because they're quite unconventional we're used to thinking of free speech as something that we protect against intrusion by sensors, primarily the government. free speech in terms of legal protections is stronger in america right now than i'd say. it's ever been anywhere in the world. would that be safe? yeah, i think that's a very accurate and i think it may be about to get stronger with the current supreme court. the kinds of challenges we face however don't really fit that box. one is disinformation. and the other is what's often called cancel culture the systematic use of social coercion to chill in silence. disinformation is not about censorship. it's actually about a stephen bana and trump's former advisor very aptly and accurately put it flooding the zone with --.

putting out so much. many laws half-truths conspiracy theories exaggerations that no one knows which end is up. and it turns out that platforms like social media are tailor-made for this because their business model is to maximize eyeballs for revenues and the way you maximize eyeballs is attractive conspiracy theories outrage, which is addictive and so forth. so what we didn't know when the internet got going was we thought you know, it would all be a big open forum and marketplace of ideas and the best ideas would rise to the top. we did not realize how easy it would be to manipulate. this environment to make it epistemically toxic. it's now well known. that fall stuff travels much faster and much further online than true stuff, which is much more expensive to make and much less fun to click on. that is not a problem that you can tackle with traditional free. speech. in fact it it does the opposite

it harnesses free speech weaponizes it and turns it into a weapon of epistemic destruction or weapon of mass confusion and chaos. and i think jacob and i we can talk about this but jacob and i may have something of a disagreement on that because i think he's kind of a purist and wants platforms like facebook. but she sees as platforms. to essentially adopt the morality though. not the law of the first amendment and i think that's impractical unsustainable and actually betrays. a lot of the rest of their mission which has to do with being a community business and a publisher so i think they're going to have to be content moderation and it's a hard problem. but getting it right is a lot more complicated than just saying free speech online. the second area which jacob didelude to awfully important so-called so-called capsule culture the weaponization. of social coercion that's always been around tocqueville came to the us in 1835 and warned that the biggest threat to liberty in america was not from the

government. it was from social coercion to tyranny of the majority he called it. madison worried about the same thing. john stuart mill worried about it turns out however, it can be tyranny of the minority even relatively small groups of people that are ready to whack you online demolish your reputation go to the search engines so that you're called a racist the first thing any employer sees demand that you be fired even small minorities of people can make life living health or dissenters and cause a widespread shilling effect. and at the moment two-thirds of americans say that they are chilled that they are reluctant to say their true beliefs about politics for fear of social and professional consequences. two-thirds and it's about 60% of students on campus. that's approximately four times the level to the best. we can measure its hard to compare. it's about four times the level of 1953 the height of the mccarthy era and a reason for that is in the mccarthy era. there were a couple things you couldn't do and you could you

could be pretty safe. in the counseling area. you don't know when you're safe and when you're not and that's on purpose they want to make us our own policemen so that we're always afraid that we'll step on a new landmine. this is both the widespread shilling problem and the disinformation problem are severe stresses on the epistemic environment. that is our ability to sort truth from falsehood. and they're not things that are within the traditional bounds of free speech. so this book in a way is a ladder up to the kind of next kind of conversation. that is now beginning. so i think i would interestingly i wanted to go back and to the infant disinformation issue before you you can respond to it, which is also sometimes called disinformation. sometimes called misinformation. sometimes called fake news. and in general shows up as false speech across a wide range of

historical background. so what i want to pose is out yesterday, i was listening to a seminar at a major university at a scholar was talking about youtube and measuring youtube and sort of and what he saw there was that sort of partisan differences. related to speech or facts or whatever. but rather an insider outsider perspective and at the end of the this was a scholar most people were scholars, i think professors listening to it at the end of the seminar. he posed the question. which was somewhat seemed someone nervous about posing but or uncertain which was that. is the category of disinformation? a way for us to basically put down an uprising a populist uprising the last few years. and if that's true, shouldn't we consider that that might be that?

and if it's true, is that normatively good? and two more than normatively good. is it possible? right and no one really engaged him on either one of those. but i do think john talks about the differences of the usual and it is a problem because there are differences as a private platforms. and they and some sort of suppression of speech is needed for business, right? but is it normatively good? it just happens it needs to be discussed and thought through. because it does i've had the feeling that i might be engaged in putting down an uprising in my other you want to explain what that other role is. i'm work indirectly for facebook on its oversized board. now i have to say i will quickly say as a kind to inquisitor.

what's that? yeah, the kindly inquisitor not. what i want to say is there's absolutely i don't have any evidence. from anything that's happened or anyone has said that anyone canceives what facebook is doing and content moderation as a political effort to head off a political movement. there's just i just and i should also say that i have inside knowledge that there's very no evidence that facebook is pursuing a jihad against conservatives. is not there outside or inside. however when you think about the big picture there's that to think about and also beyond that which this scholar was trying to force on us i think is it may not be possible. even if we say, you know, we've got to stop this stuff. it may not be possible, but your perspective is an interesting one jacob. what do you think about all

this? yeah, so i think acknowledging that free speech comes with costs and harms is essential to its advocacies that have the idea that free speeches is is an unmetically good under all circumstances. i think is it's not a persuasive idea. i think that social media has amplified. i don't think it has generated sort of polarization. so it is amplified. a disinformation and and hate speech however, i you know, i'm and i think you know, for instance january 6th for instance the attack in the capital that probably could not have happened without social media right that you know, if the lies conspiracy theories hadn't been sort of endlessly regurgitated on social media. i don't think it would it would have happened but on the other hand, i'm more skeptical perhaps

than john about this share of disinformation. so a number of studies show that actually the sheriff of misinformation which is all you know, how do you define it? and that's a problem in and of itself is not you know as messes as the narrative after the 2016 presidential election where it was sort of fake news decided everything and and people were manipulated into to voting for trump and also that those who are most likely to be persuaded by conspiracy theories are those who are already deeply partisan ideologues. so if you already someone who hated hillary clinton and the democrats and and were sort of sympathetic to trump. you are much like more likely to consume and share this information than someone who is an independent or or a democrat. so i think those are important nuances, but but but you know even so even if it's not as

effective as as we initially thought, you know in absolute numbers, you know, if you convince two or three thousand people that the election was stolen and that would have helps motivate them to attack the peaceful transfer of democracy. that's a real problem for for for a state like the us and so how do we how do we handle it? and this is where i think the european approach is is a cure worse than the disease. so the european approach is to say to facebook and others you have to remove illegal content or sometimes even like harmful contents, which is then not really defined within say 24 hours or you will risk fines of up to 50 million euros, and and the effect of that is that it basically we've done a number of studies which shows that then russia turkey venezuela all these states basically copy paste that approach they do it in bad faith, obviously and but we also see that the collateral

damage to to all kinds of other speech is enormous. so i think you know, i think more in terms of technological development. so i remember i'm old enough to remember the blockus fear when it was blogs and not centralized platforms that were sort of the frontier of the internet digital age and at the time no one really cared about content moderation on a blog even if a blog had say a million followers because it didn't really affect the entire ecosystem of information on the internet because no no single block could act as a choke point or as a massive disseminator of false information the way that centralized platform with with billions of people can't so so i think decentralization is is one potential remedy and i think that chimes with lessons of the history of free speech. so for instance the dutch republic became some of the first free speech zone in europe and one of the key reasons for

that was they didn't have a constitution. they didn't have lost protecting free speech, but they had a very weak political center and so the provinces of the dutch republic had a lot of autonomy and so, you know, if one province tried to censor someone they could skip you know a state lines and set up shop elsewhere and and that cultivated sort of a culture of tolerance that was comparatively much much more extensive than elsewhere on on the continent. another thing. i think that that might go some way is to provide uses more control over content. and and sort of allowing it could be ngos to develop filters that we can then use. so for instance take the issue of anti-semitism. so some people believe that these campaigns to boycott israel because among to anti-semitism whereas others think this is legitimate debate. so facebook has to to make a decision, you know, should we should this constitute antisemitism or not and then

that, you know has downstream effects for everyone on the platform. but if the adl which tends to promote an expansive definition of hp could then develop a filter that you can use then you know that you can shield yourself from what you perceive to be antisemitism, but it wouldn't affect everyone else the same could be said with with women a lot of female journalists and and all those fine, you know a flooded with the misogyny that might not reach a threshold of illegal speech, but which nonetheless is creative disincentive to engage on social media so you could have a filter that filtered away some of the misogynistic term but again wouldn't affect everyone because there might be women who say, you know, i want to see what these bigots are saying. i want to use it to expose people. i think that is a more of a solid monic solution than the sort of centralized approach

where where governments impose standards on the tech companies or where the tech companies themselves sort of try to navigate through, you know, the lens of pr or stakeholder management. you know, what do you what do we do to have to do to avoid being summoned to capital hill every second week and answer for this or that, you know outbreak of what i call in the book elite panic about speech that this or that group doesn't like, but ultimately, you know, know, you can adopt as david hume ultimately did sort of a pessimistic case for free speech. he had david hume had been very optimistic about free speech and then gel wilkes in in the 70 in the 770s or 76s in in the uk sort of used free speech as a blowtorch to to attack everyone and sort of radicalizes his supporters and david hume sort of came to think of free speech that you know it, you know, the radical speech is sort of an abusive free speech, but it's

more it's more dangerous to allow the government to climb down so it's sort of and and in unavoidable cost of free speech that you have people with with extreme views, so that's how i look at it, but i wouldn't i would i would certainly not say that, you know, facebook and twitter. we should just be in different to what what goes on there, but i think there are there are other solutions then sort of centralized content moderation that we should that we should try to to look at before we go down that road. i'll add a response to john the point you made and then expand that maybe into a question for for jacob on based on what you just said. john i think the question about populism versus elitism that this university professor asked would have been more appropriate 15 years ago than now because what we have learned in the last few years, is that what we are not seeing on online for example, is the voice of the broad public what we're discovering is how easily

manipulable all of these systems and platforms are by small numbers of dedicated actors be they the internet research agency in saint petersburg anti-vaxers who are able to use a combination of bots and trolls and search engine optimization to make a very small number. of activists look like a consensus online whether they're counselors who are typically small numbers of ideological left-wing radicals who were able to project themselves as much bigger forces. the reason we have a constitution of knowledge and that i wrote a book about it. is in an unstructured marketplace of ideas, it turns out instead of getting sort of everyone equal big conversation you get manipulation by small dedicated groups. using tools of information warfare and that's why we go to so much trouble. to develop all the rules and norms and institutions like science and mainstream journalism academia law a lot of

government that set up all these systems that require us to be on better behavior to expose our views to people who don't don't agree with us to make it very difficult for one faction to take over the expense of others all the things the us constitution does the constitution of knowledge does in the epistemic world, so it is naive to think that without those rules the people rule they don't the opposite is true. so expanding that to a question for jacob. if it's the case that there do need to be rules out there and they shouldn't be government rules. i agree with you on that. i think the eu approach is too rigid and top down and you know finding people for heaven's sake. i don't think that'll work. and i don't think it's desirable. it seems to me like what facebook is doing is exactly the right approach. we've had earlier problems like this the invention of the printing press. the rise of the offset printing in the united states which led to a huge amounts of hyperpartisan fake news in us media.

and others and they were solved the same way which as it took a little while but building up institutions and norms like publishers and peer reviews ethical norms and journalism journalism schools. that began to cabin these things it seems to me. that's what facebook is doing. they're saying, okay. let's see if we can come up with some framework some rules. some guidelines will make them transparent. will tell people what they are they'll be voluntary in the sense that you don't need to be on facebook. but if you are here this is what we expect that seems to me like what's worked in the past and in the best available route. do you disagree with that? yeah. i don't think that there's a sufficient degree of transparency. first of all on facebook. i think it's extremely difficult to find out what what what's going on and i also think you know, so one of the suggestions that that my organization has made is that the terms that facebook and youtube and others should should be inspired. you know, they should be inspired by you know, the only

thing that approaches something at the universal level because we have to you know, there's always this danger but in free speech debates of what i call the tyranny of american parochialism, you know, everything is viewed through a us lens, but but these are global platforms and and and what's at stake in the us is not the same in russia or iran where social media is basically the only way that you can circumvent official propaganda and and and censorship. so what we argue, is that the terms at least an issues such as hate speech and disinformation should then be inspired by international human rights norms. that's what they that sort of the limit that they should try to to reach but when we analyze the content moderation of facebook we find that, you know on hate speech for instance of deleted commons that we looked at. it was 1.1% of the deleted commons that actually violated danish law. we also found that of what's what's being kept up.

it was less than 0.006% of of comments that had been, you know designated as hate speech that actually violated danish laws and i think that's in you know that those type of research that type of research and looking at it in that way is an important antidote to sort of the the message that a lot of european politicians are pushing that basically the platforms are flooded with illegal content, you know, our you know, i'm not going to say that our research is exhaustive, but i think it's suggests very much that that this is actually not the case and then you know should facebook tinker, i think that's unavoidable that they will be tinkering with with different models if we were part of it, we would be experimenting with all kinds of things. but that's also why i think a more decentralized model would be better because then you would have more experimentation by various platforms rather than

having as dominant a platform as facebook which gives a huge incentive to governments and other powerful access to say we want you to reflect our norms and our values because that will give us a huge say on how on what is being allowed on other certainly a case for decentralization. but and this this question now is not meant to be a gotcha or pin you down. it's it's curiosity driven in the world. we live in where facebook has a large market share, would you rather that the facebook oversight board exists or not? oh, i think it's i think it's a good idea that the the oversight board exist and and they do you know, they do, you know, i think in all your decisions you actually point to international human rights norms the problem with that is of course, does it work at scale because i don't know how many decisions you've made so far, but but you know that that amounts to the the sort of a nanosecond of content moderation decisions in real life across the platform and and

can those content moderation decisions. can they reflect the jurisprudence if you like the other side this is i want to go back to john's point is reply to me. first of all, it's not there was ever really i'm not going to be defending a completely unstructured system the first amendment in the public forum is structure right? jacob mentioned viewing a descent in 2016 a vigorous kind of resistance to trump the police were there to protect the protesters. so you have that structure, you know, and you also had not as perhaps not significant, but there was speech that is not protected by the first amendment. that's a constitutional structure, right? the real question is you have a with the case of facebook, but youtube is perhaps even more important because of the video

element. you have a platform that is global with one about two billion people on it every day doing things two billion posts or whatever, right? the numbers are just immense. then you have things on it that are are false. speech. so who is the judge what speech is to come down? is it facebook? are they to judge it because it contributed to maximizing shareholder value. that's one answer. the facebook answer in part has been to send disputed post to. these groups that decide that right the the various kinds of panels that look at the speech and decide whether it's business information or disinformation. you know when?

mark zuckerberg's became concerned about this information misinformation. so on. he said things you don't want on the platform include, you know, we don't want obvious hoaxes and we don't want conspiracy theories. well and so i think there was an assumption. it's very easy to tell what that is. and in the american political system, we basically just leave that to people even up to the incitement. i mean excitement's prove. but essentially you're turning over the question of truth. to small numbers of these determination of facts right now. i hasten to add on top of that my impression is that that actually is not the way it works because what john mentioned which is the problem of scale if you've got two billion people 100,000 disinformation pose is a very small number. right, and if you have a panel

that or an oversight board that has to go through these things and determine the truth of them. they're not going to get there very many. so it's very the scale the one thing about social media that is different is speed and scale and the scale turns out to be humans can't manage the system at least we'll see we have humans that can manage that system and actually the algorithms have our algorithms that those levels make mistakes all the time. it's inevitable. so you have to decide what kind of mistakes she want to make and what the call star? so i don't think you know, this is quite as i don't think there is actually has been an answer. there's been struggling with it. and finally the point i would make is this. you have you had this is not a point about the current administration. it could be any administration.

you have a president and administration that is going to be running for reelection that has political concerns, etc. etc. and those are known sometimes they want in recent cases. they want facebook or others to take down pose to take down. speech. is that and they're not going to call the police in and make zuckerberg take stuff down, but everyone knows facebook is on tv asking for regulations that will be considered by congress and the president is important to that process, right he could prevent regulations. he could advance them. this kind of jaw boning process should you know, what is truth in that context and his government involved in ways that perhaps our first amendment doctrine hasn't realized and can act on i'll just mention a couple things that have gone by areas of agreement that i think

are important that could easily get get missed in our often often missed in the conversation. one jacob said something which is important and true. i spin it a little differently but as important as social media and facebook, for example, are they are not the chief spreaders? based on my reading of the literature of misinformation and disinformation. it's not even clear that they're number two they buy with. am radio and especially cable news, especially on the right, but far and away the biggest spreader of disinformation and misinformation is the oldest and that's politicians. and they can use all kinds of channels and we saw that and stop the steel that was accelerated. i'm sure by social media, but when you've got a former president of the united states plus his political party plus conservative media plus dozens of lawsuits. all pushing a big lie. it's going to get through so i'm all for focusing on social media, but i think at the moment there's a tendency to blame

technology first. when the principles of disinformation and misinformation apply across every channel and there are many channels so kudos to jacob for pointing that out. i agree. i also agree by the way that the gold disinformation. it doesn't succeed primarily in changing people's minds, but that's not what it's trying to do. it's primarily interested in polarizing and confusing and it's very good at that secondary of second area of agreement when we do get to social media. i think it's an area of agreement. i think it is important to establish rules and boundaries and norms of conduct and i recognize this will always be hard to enforce but i also think that in the long run the larger bulk of the solutions to this crisis won't be in the realm of policy design. it's going to be in the realm of product design. it's going to be figuring out systems that do things like slow people down introduce friction before they retweet or like something so that they're asked is facebook now does or don't you want to read this before you retweet it? make us think a little harder

change the way the algorithms work in terms of what's promoted and what's not and how fast velocity goes and there are lots of ideas about that and i i think we're looking at systems that we're designed for a an age in which it was just all about getting eyeballs at any price. we've discovered the price is high and the systems are now looking for ways to integrate more guidelines and guardrails into the user experience. we don't know what that'll look like. but i think we have general directions and and that's where the bulk of the improvement will come from. i'm going to direct us away from american parochialism because i must say yes. i must say one of the things i've learned at facebook is very hard for me as a person working here at cato and working in dc has been to get beyond one thing i learned by the way, and i will see i love your response to this is that if i wanted to advance free speech arguments. the worst thing i could do with my colleagues that didn't come

from the united states was say the words first amendment. or the united states, right? because there's this response that it's it's a parochialism, but also people really do if you go to the content of free speech rather than the american experience. i think they respond much more favorably, right? so what is the what's your general sense about outside of europe and the united states? how is the free speech story going is it? well, you know, i actually agree with with john that we're you know compared to 50 or 100 years ago. we're living in a golden age of free speech not only you know in terms of legal protections, you know, even if outside the us you might the legal protection may not be as strong as under the first amendment there are internationally human rights and norms there are constitutional protections. there are human rights courts that that try to uphold and enforce these norms and you

know, even even authoritarian states have to pay lip service to the idea of a free speech it becomes such a great norm, however, i would argue that that the golden age is probably in decline, so i wrote a piece in foreign affairs a week ago about the free speech recession. so if you look at sort of numbers suggests that that free speech has been in decline for more than a decade and you know when authoritarian states are on the rise, it's not a surprise because you learn that. going all the way back to the athenian democracy the first things that our authoritarians will do when they try to crush democracy or representative government is to go off the free speech. that's just you know, that's that's the 101 of trying to established authoritarian regimes. what worries me more is that liberal democracies have started to view free speech perhaps as much as a threat then as a as a

foundational value and there's a you know, a whole wave of repressive laws in in democracies one of them for instance in the european union where the european commission wants to to define hate speech as an eu crime, which would allow the commission to define hate speech across all 27 members days and and said the minimum rules. i mean that to me is just a big flashing warning sign of how you know leading democracies are thinking about free speech and and unfortunately, i don't see a lot of sort of civil society organizations in europe that pushing back against this and i think you know, i i argue in the book that this is based on on what i call the bimar fallacy, which a term which i've sort of borrowed from a brilliant professor called eric heinzer, but i use it slightly different from him and and the idea is basically one that i hope we all share that of never again in

that we will never want to experience the rise of totalitarianism and and and industrial scale genocide in in europe or hopefully anywhere again, but the european idea is that you need basically militant democracy this idea advanced by carl louvinstein this german immigrate professor who went to colombia and wrote these influential articles about how democracies when confronted with fascism had to get tough and couldn't worry about free speech and and and and had to sort of clamp down, but i try to show in the book that in the bible republic even though it was very liberal compared to to you know, the empire under on smug and and the german confederation before that. it was actually quite hostile to extreme speech and it allowed laws and regulations of speech that we would never accept today. let me give you an example. so a german state could administerively ban in newspaper for up to eight weeks if it

spread false news or attacked, you know, public officials or undermined the government and so use of gibbles who had started the newspaper that enclave sort of basically to to troll particularly a jewish high-ranking police officer and claim sort of proudly that it was the most frequently banned newspaper in in germany. and the reason he started the enclave was that eight of hitler was banned from speaking in a number of german states the most depraved antisemite in history was probably euler schleicher. who was the the editor of the stroma who was i think justly executed as part of the nuremberg trial because during the war he explicitly inside it to genocide and i don't think anyone would argue that that is covered by free speech, but but during the weimar republic he was less explicitly genocidal, but he did spread these vicious blood liables about -- and he

was convicted on a number of times for offense against religions including in 1929 sentenced to two months in prison cheered by hundreds of supporters when leaving the courtroom and less than a year later the nazis increased the share of the boat including in nuremberg the hometown of striker where he was born and you know, the radio did not allow communist or nazis on there and most alarmingly i think is that the nazis basically used the provisions in law and the constitution of the weimar republic that was supposed to protect democracy they use that to abolish democracy and that i think is again at flashing warning sign that you know, even for all of the good in if you adopt instead of laws that are restrictive of free speech they might very well be used by enemies of democracy when when they get into power and they and they may not even be efficient at countering the the rise of these especially in demo. i mean, how far can you go in

democracies in if you want to counter especially in the digital age how much censorship would it take to anti-democratic voices, you know where you could you could migrate from facebook to telegram to yeah, of course, that's to some extent why they're turning to disinformation. yeah, but you scarce resource today is not access to publication. it's access to attention, which you can swap. so on the international front. i'm not i think you'd agree with this jacob, but tell me a development that seems to me to be global very much happening in the in europe very much in the us and the thing that breaks my heart most about this entire debate. is the widespread belief that free speech harms minorities. yes. we see again and again on college campuses in the us and in the eu again, and again the justification for various kinds of chilling censorship investigations punishments. is where protecting minority

groups from being traumatized being injured being made second-class citizens being told that they don't belong in the planet. and as someone who was born in a very different world in 1960 and worked for years for same-sex marriage. we couldn't have done that without free speeches. you said earlier i banged on this again. and again frederick douglass said it john lewis said it. mandela said it. they all said without free speech as john lewis said the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings, but i think that that message is being lost. i think we're losing that battle internationally. do you what's your dad? no, i i tend to yeah and maybe especially in democracies. unfortunately, i think that you know in a lot of of states where they face censorship and repression they intuitively get that that you know free speech restrictions will harm the the powerless more more than anyone else, but but i think this this

idea is is really unfortunately and and and and i don't know the best way to counter it. hopefully, you know a historical approach and awareness of what went before is part of is part of the solution, but i would also, you know, look at europe, you know free speech restrictions in hungary and poland are actively being used against the lgbt+ community. for instance that that should tell you something and and and and so so and so so and you know look at the history in the uk when they first adopted this this law to try to protect minorities from from hatred incitement to hatred the very first person who was convicted was was a black britain who had said something about white people. whereas a powerful white policians were not prosecuted and so it created more controversy, but you also see sort of a scope creep in hate speech laws. so more and more categories of being protected and what you

will see is that those those groups will then use it as a weapon. each other so it could be the lgbt+ community trying to use hp laws against religious conservatives and vice versa and that i think really is dangerous because that's sort of a race to to the to the gutter where different we're seeing the trans community now use some very sensorious tactics and britain in the us, which also breaks my heart. so before we go to q&a, let me ask you follow up on one of your points. so there's the international covenant of civil and political rights that the united states signed about 30 years after it was introduced to it.2. the iccpr the international human rights law main document contains two interesting parts that relate to freedom of speech and this relates to the global element of free speech now article 19 is very much like the first amendment it reads a

somewhat like the first amendment. on the one hand article 20 section 2 includes a part that requires the signatories. to essentially ban hate speech it mandates that they agreed to do so that is and also speech require, you know fostering war aggressive warfare now clearly there was a lot of debate about this in the 50s and 60s, but clearly you can see that section article 20 came out of the trying to not repeat the national socialist experience in germany and so on and yet there it is an interna >> yet, there it is, an international law, a strong statement of freedom of speech and a requirement for banning, which, by the way, facebook has and others have a strong community standards about hate speech. so, looking back and from your

research, do you think, which side of the international law is going to win out? >> that's a good question. the interesting thing about this, i won't go down the rabbit hole of that, but it was basically a provision that was advanced by the soviet block. they tried to get a similar provision in the declaration of civil rights, and western states succeeded initially, but then last the battle with the international covenant on civil and political rights. so, it's-- and you know, basically was based on a 1936 style in the soviet union in article 1, 2, 3, had a prohibition of hate speech because stalin was not above using hate speech himself. and so that has been a

dangerous instrument, but i would say in the past 10 years or so, this provision has been interpreted very narrowly by a number of, someone like david kay who is a u.s. law professor, but special at the u.n. freedom of expression and opinion and even the human rights committee, they have sort of tried to narrow it and i think the reason they've done so is because in the u.n. system it's so obvious that a number of states are trying to game the system and trying to expand the interpretation of article 20, to prohibit hate speech to basically allow them to prohibit dissent, which is exactly what eleanor roosevelt warned about in the 50's. but i'm sort of more hopeful now that the loophole has been somewhat closed. so i think that the obama administration played a crucial role in 2011 when they fought

against the campaign by islamic states for blasphemy ban at the international level and a process from that resulted in a more limited interpretation of that, and, but it's interesting for me as someone who is rigorously opposed to that provision that i often rely on international for instance when it comes to social media, this is the least bad option, and then sort of having to rely on a provision that was basically proposed by the soviet block. >> so we have microphones here. if you want to come down, and so everyone here and on-line can hear your question, please do so. when you come down, before you offer that question, you have a choice of whether revealing who you are or not. we preserve anonymity here so that this speech is not--

so david bose, the-- put my mask back on. i want to go back to something jacob said early on, which is the culture of free speech is more important than a first amendment and i sort of agree with that. on the other hand, it seems to me that i've seen numerous instances in the past few years, maybe the past few months where distinguished writers on free speech, public intellectuals, generally, have said something about going on in canada or britain or continental europe, that won't happen here because we have a first amendment. the question is what is the difference between the first amendment and a culture of free speech and somehow if you could give canada the first amendment right now, would that change their culture? >> no, yeah, i think you're right.

it's not a zero-sum game. the relationship between-- >> the culture of free speech and deteriorates, the law is likely to follow behind that. but, that doesn't mean that the first amendment is of no consequence, i think it's very much of consequence and i think that particularly, at this point in time, in america, you know, without a strong protection of the first amendment, i think you would see speech restrictions weaponized in various states, blue and red states that use them in order to pound away at those they deemed ideologically unfound. i think that the bills against so-called critical race theory that we've seen on a number of republican states that are limited to education, i think they will probably be, you know, adopted at a much broader

level and you can actually see that when you ask democrats and republicans about the degree of tolerance for different speech. you see huge partisan gaps. democrats very supportive of protest against racial justice, and republicans are very supportive of the first amendment extending even to misinformation, democrats much less so. so, i think the first amendment is really important. i just feared that the level of protection would erode if the underlying culture of free speech is eroding. >> am i right to remember, that something like this, for a lose paraphrase. the difference between strong free speech laws and weak free speech cultures, and he would take the stronger culture as being the more important thing?

>> i think so, i think it's in chapter. >> i'm sometimes asked how do i feel about holocaust on germany, i don't get my underwear in a knot about it because germany is a special case and what i worry more about is does the culture of the country, does its environment support the values of free speech? if they do, then a few laws like that probably won't do a great deal of harm. probably won't be abused that much and probably the culture and maybe jacob wouldn't agree? >> unfortunately, germany has, of course, a culture of free speech, but what i found in my book is that the german culture of free speech is very much an elitist one and has been so throughout, you know-- won't go down that rabbit hole either, but the germans are really, really concerned about the unwashed mob getting

accessed to dangerous ideas. understandably given their history, but i worry that perhaps they interpret it wrongly and leave ammunition for nefarious forces with their approach to speech. >> so, i'll make a remark about mill here, which goes to some of your earlier remarks. and i think you can probably use it to defend free speech and trans global, in a global situation. the problem of course, he says, that this only applies to civilized countries and the barbarians can't do it. it's important when we can rescue for our purposes, but it's important to note that mill was off base there. that really because otherwise, think about if you're somewhere else other than europe or the united states, and you're reading jon stewart mill and you come across that. are you an advocate of free

speech after that? >> [inaudible] remember that we actually-- >> i do. >> in new york, when they came there for the organizations, and all the way from-- you also mentioned our mutual friend and nobody said was that he's also -- [inaudible] my question, where was i, rose and i-- oh, you're from denmark. why do you have to do that thing about the cartoons and every story seems to start with publishing those nasty cartoons

that made the arabs very upset. what they forget to tell and through your videos, is actually the danish muslims threw the first punch in that there was an innocent danish, like educational children's books about things in the world, and it was about to educate them about what muslims were, since they were coming into denmark and didn't know what it was and rose was a-- heard somebody say-- was making drawings that we do in all kind of books for children, because they had given him death threats. so said, oh, my god, do we really have censorship problem in denmark? let's find out and the story was that he went out to the

danish cartoon organization in denmark and said, no, we cannot do it. and said, okay, now this propaganda, we don't want to participate. the ones that did do the cartoons did it to try to prove that we have do not have self-censorship in denmark and the rest is history, but i really like he was not the one who threw the first punch. >> no, i don't think that cartoonists throw punches at all and what is also often forgotten, fleming wrote an eloquent piece accompanying, free speech enlightenment apply to all, no single group or individual could claim special protection and it was a bigotry of lower expectations to say that special rules should apply

to danish muslim if they were to be part of danish society, equality and tolerance would have to apply on equal terms and yet you have someone like the german famous author who was comparing fleming's cartoons to -- and i thought was despicable in many ways and the cartoon is part and parcel why there was an attack, because it was one of few magazines that showed solidarity and published the cartoons. >> and the question leads me to, i have to reveal this. the colleague at facebook who worked on the obama work at the united nations that you talked about, about heresy and so on, and she and i were talking one day about things and she said, you know, when we were going into those u.n. meetings and arguing for free speech, the

one group you could always count on, the diplomates you could always have at your side were the danes and i have to say, i don't know -- i'll keep testing this and some day i'll find n intolerant dayne or if you come across a danish person, they would share your views. >> we were the first to abolish any and all censorship in 1770. didn't go so well, the guy who did it, who basically usurped the power of the king was executed, beheaded and had his hand cut off in public. >> okay. >> struck a blow for free speech. >> so i do want to get to some on-line questions here and there is many of them, many people are concerned about section 230 and about-- section 230 essentially why facebook has a right to do all

of this. they're outside laws of libel and so on. but there was a couple of cases that, i think that's somewhat too complicated to get into given our -- if you have some comments about it that would be interesting. the whole point of-- and the information on-line, and problems, if people didn't want it, didn't consume it, it wouldn't exist. and secondly, there's the traditional, over the last few years anyway, response to what about education? to what extent can education because actually the free speech doctrine and based on the idea that ultimately we can exchange views and suppressing views creates distortions, right? and ultimately we can exchange views and it will be better. it may not be perfect, but it will be better than it was

going to be otherwise. and so, education, the ability to critically think about these questions are important. so, i think i'll be interested to hear john on that and then i will come back. >> so there were two things there. one was education and the other was demand. >> demand, yeah. >> and that's a demand question, in a way. >> yeah, there's a very large and person element of demand poll in the world as conspiracy theories and disinformation. people wanted it so the gap in their lives often give them the sense of insider knowledge and purpose and mission in life and all of that. the reason we have a constitution is because there are so many ways to manipulate us. intelligence provides no protection at all. there are dozens of cognitive biases and social biases and it takes a lot of discipline to keep us away from those things. it's a collective action problem may be good for an

individual to consume and spread theories that's why we have rules and structures throughout society and not just through the realm. and the second point was a big one. >> what extent does education-- >> yeah, education seems to have some benefits. the countries-- that doesn't sound like a controversial phrase when put that way, but what i have in mind, i think a lot of the problems around social media have to do not just with the design of social media per se, but the environment in which they find themselves, which is a population which had never been exposed to these was systematically naive like your professor friend, if a lot of people are doing it, it must be popular. and is seems to be helpful in

countrieses that are doing it to do education on media literacy, especially middle school and on into high school, and critical thinking education, seems to help better preparing ourselves for the pitfalls that we encounter in this environment. and so, yeah, i'm a fan of those kinds of measures, they're coming to the united states and of course, i don't think they should be dictated by government. but i do think we can be-- we can better prepare ourselves for encountering the environment we're in and we could hardly prepare ourselves worse. >> one of the things i regret not including in the book is what i see is the real problem with free speech is that, free speech, you know, it doesn't provide a sense of meaning and purpose. it doesn't bind us together in the same way that a religion or a nationalism. >> or it does in particular

circumstances. so like the founding generation would, free speech and the opposition to british -- to the stamp acton other british attempts to limit dissent would bind them together. they were advancing free speech at the ball balance-- and they had philosophical differences and a quasi war between the greatest generation of americans and you had sort of alexander hamilton arguing that, you know, the sedition act should be enforced against anyone slandering or propaganda against any officials, foreigners who were responsible for the incendiary presence should be thrown out of the u.s.

where madison writes a defense of the first amendment and jefferson is opposed, but then what happens when jefferson wins the presidential election, you know, in his inaugural address he gives a great sort of unifying speech instead of owning the feds we shouldn't prosecute each other with laws and in 1803 his name is dragged through the mud and he wrote private letters it might be good to prosecute some of the federalist papers in state court and some of them actually are. and shows if even jefferson is liable for what is in the book for milton's curve, the unprincipled selective free speech, then that's something that all human beings are very vulnerable to. so we come with sort of our original software that we've evolved. its default mode is intolerance and we've built this sort of

fragile patch on it. and that had to be updated and we had to build a fire wall around it and the fire walls that failed, our default mode will override it and we'll be back to intolerant and i think, you know, in those circumstances of nationalism or religion, will provide a sense of meaning, social creation and in those circumstances, free speech will suddenly be scene as a threat to that sense of social creation and that's dangerous in times of uncertainty and times of political polarization, so more or less the times that we live in right now. >> i would be remote if i didn't speak up on behalf of my anonymous professor. i think he probably agrees pretty closely what john thinks about these matters, but he thought there was a normative argument, that normatively good

suppress essentially a political movement and that you needed that argument. john gives you one in his book and beyond that, he raised a question, is it even possible to commit this kind of suppression and to essentially prevent a political movement from obtaining its end? and i would say that's an interesting question because remember, it may be that you can suppress speech at scale, but the problem with that is you also inevitably suppress a lot of speech that's protected. all right, this is a facebook problem, not going around and seeing something and saying, oh, that's bad, right? there's two billion people writing. you can't do that. all right. you can't even -- well, there's appeals processes and those are hard, too, i would say. >> i think this is a strawman question, john because no one believes-- i don't think that anybody seriously believes you can suppress speech in a current

environment. the question now, the reason i wrote the constitution of knowledge and the reason that jacob is doing the book, where the guidelines and guardrails are going to go, so we can incentivize. that's not about pre wiring some particular political outcome, it's figuring out how to be our better self. >> you know, i think there are some interesting places to look for inspiration, so taiwan, i think, is a very interesting place so you basically had this sun flower movement which were these sort of hackers, basically, who squatted parliaments and one of them is now the minister of, i think, technology, and they basically are working on sort of updating institutions to the digital age, and sort of trying to build institutions and technology that will increase rather than decrease trust,

which will spur sort of cooperation at a local level, especially it's been quite useful if you want to decide in a neighborhood, you know, should there be, i don't know, a bike path or then this platform can sort of help people come together and decide on these issues finding sort of, basically, areas where people agree rather than sort of looking at disagreement or rewarding that. >> that's an interesting one. >> another-- new field called cognitive immunology, can you create fire walz in communities to slow the viral spread of misinformation? there's lots of interesting speaking, i'll correct something i said earlier, no one thinks that you can suppress speech for political movement in this environment. someone does and i think it's china. we haven't got to china yet, but talk about a challenge to this paradigm. >> that was just-- you can suppress speech, it's

just that you get lots of false positives, too. >> and i think, you know, china is probably, i would say the soviet union during stalin was probably the most sensorious state at least in the 20th century, but china is probably current china under xi jinping is winning that contest because politics is used in such a way. but the worry is that china is exporting its technology and lenin quotes says the capitalists will send us the rope which with we'll hang him and i think that's true of some western companies, cisco going into china and building the great firewall and google working secretly to try to build a search engine that

incorporate the dictates of the chinese communist party. so, i think that china is really-- their ambition is that they will be able to control speech in almost every detail and i think. the traditional traditional ce they have ways of flooding with on-line propaganda to having around the clock detailed surveillance which is a much more effective way to control what people say if you're being watched in real-time all the time. how do you-- would you be-- not be afraid to speak out and if it has social consequences if you lose the right to travel or if you lose the ability to get a promotion, if you say something wrong. so, that is is really, i think, a huge worry. >> so i hope for the people on-line, who have many good questions, that i have--

i tried to go through it and speak to things here. so please don't take the sentence that didn't get quite to your question. as always, there are more questions and cato is a private institution so we can censor as we wish. that's happened before in the auditorium. but i think we got to the issues that were raised in cases and it does show the importance of the social media and the free speech edge, i think, and the book is free speech, the author is jacob mchangama. and i home he comes back, and thank you very much both on-line and in the auditorium and great to see people again. i agree with john about that and lunch is upstairs. >>.

[applause] and you can buy books outside, too. >> at least six presidents recorded conversation while in office. hear many of those conversations on c-span's new podcast, presidential recordings. >> season one focuses on the presidency of lyndon johnson, you'll hear about the 1964 civil rights act. 1964 presidential campaign, the gulf of tonkan incident, the march offer selma and the war in vietnam. not everyone knew they were being recorded. >> certainly johnson's secretaries knew because they were tasked with transcribing many of those conversations. in fact, they were the ones who made sure that the conversations with taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and theirs. >> you'll also hear some blunt talk. >> jim. >> yes, sir. >> i want a report of the number of people assigned to kennedy when he, the day he

died, the number assigned to me now and if mine are not less, i want them less right quick. >> yes, sir. >> if i can't ever go to the bathroom, i won't go, i promise i won't go anywhere, i'll just stay behind these black gates. >> presidential recordings, find it on the c-span new mobile apps or wherever you gets your podcasts. >> c-span shop.org, c-span products, apparel, books, home decor and accessories. there's something for every c-span fan and every purchase helps support our nonprofit operations. shop now or anytime at c-span shop.org. >> maggie krell is a trail blazer taking on impactful cases as a criminal rights lawyer. his nab