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♪ >> good afternoon. welcome to the cato institute for another and are continuing series. this particular one i've been looking forward to it for many months because i knew about this book for some time now. i knew about the podcast that came first with it. jacob's free-speech history from socrates to social media which is available now is been available for a couple weeks is getting a very strong and appreciative audience i would say in the united states and the withnce in europe also these issues pretty thought it was great we have known jacob for quite a while we thought it be great to have a book form and who better to have just a conversation among like-minded people with someso differences

then jon rauscher. but i'm going to do here is give a brief bio you may know both of these people from their work and by the way i am jon samples the vice president here at cato if you don't know me. and that i thought jacob would tell something about the book and we would talk about the issue and turned to q&a and a little while, okay? jacob mchangama is a founder executive director of the danish think tank and a host the podcast clear and present danger a history of free speech. i highly recommend that to you. it's a very interesting podcastr series and is available still has writing on free speech has appeared in the economist, the "washington post", foreign policy and many other outlets around the world. he is in prague and denmark. jon rauch as the seniors found

the governor studies program the author of eight books breeding that made me feel bad, eight books? how do you do that. many articles on government's articles have been highly influential as you may know. since many booking publications could the 2021 book the constitution of knowledge with a sense of truth as well as a 2015 e-book which i think more and more coming into its own, political realism how machines big money and backroom deals can strengthen american democracy. he also writes for the atlantic and recipient of the 2005 national magazine award. the equivalent of the pulitzer prize. so i'm eager to get started here. jacob, could you tell something about the book? what ledpo you to write it?

in the podcast and the theme you have found and what is really i have to say a striking effort at research. you have really conquered a very demanding, very broad set of issues. it's very hard to work with, right? it is 2000 years. >> guest: first of all thank you jon than' you to cater for hosting me. one of the few live events i have been doing i really appreciate the i opportunity. also because it's almost exactly two years since i was in washington. that was also speaking at eight cato conference. i think we were having a dinnern at a time or in hindsight. [laughter] mate not been responsible for it could have been a super spreader event. yes so what led me too write this book? i was born and denmark and in my

youth, free speech sort of taken for granted. it was the air that we breathe. and sort of in the '90s and early 2000's i didn't really think about it. and i think most people didn't it was just part of daily life. and then came the epicenter of the global battle of values between the values between's free speech and religion when someone a good friend of mine the editor of a newspaper published cartoons of muhammad which led to global crisis and many others live with around-the-clock security because of threats from extremists. but that forced many in europe and maybe around the world just sort of think what is this principle that we hail as an enlightenment value and the

foundation of democracy, is it really that important? of people said maybe it's not so important. the punching down of vulnerable minority s this is not what free-speech was supposed to be about.aw surprisingly, shocked me a little bit. and there but i also saw was a generally people on the right reported free-speech absolutism when it came to the cartoon. timmy had a number of governments that adopted on religiousge free-speech not formally but everybody knew is targeted at the extremist muslims. and that limited free speech.es i was sort of saying this goes against the very principles we held up the cartoon affair but a lot of people on the right sidwell free-speech is important but in order to safeguard our fundamental values we have to limit thehe free-speech of these particular extremists. that really led me too try

investigate the whole history of free speech. what is at stake? what is it mean when societies based on on free speech? what is absent? is it really worth all of the fuss? [laughter] i found that it was. i think looking at present debate about free-speech you can have a more detached attitude rather than the cultural war tainting everything the book really, i locate the origins of free speech and democracy 2500 years ago live to concepts of free speech the equality of speech which is exercised in the assembly were all the freeborn mail citizens had a direct voice and debating and passing laws. perhaps even more consequence

was a second concept wishes something like uninhibited speech which allowed ah, culture of tolerance that was operatively fond of the democracy that work that thin roast them you can only pray for

constitution it is the chest of free speech are you able to criticize the political system under which you live? so the system by our standards was not radically but by time it was very much a free-speech idea. i sort of contrast with the roman republic where there is a much more elitist top-down approach. you would have senators like cato, cicero who believed in free-speech but mostly for the senatorial elite not -- citizens did not have the right to address assemblies. i think these two concepts the leaders and free-speech especially when the public sphere has been expanded in the

through technology b of the printing press the radio the telegraph today social media through politicalal development. it could be a democracy giving the vote to women to the poor and property religious racial minority that i've always been an elitist to push back against this idea and exithe essential threats the unwashed mob was unfit to be given access to information and had to be filtered by the elite. because otherwise everything would go to hello basically. [laughter] that is a very important sis in the book. another one is related to that is i argue many today see free-speech as infringing on co- power relations i argue free-speech in fact they beat the most powerful while of human equality that human beings have ever stumbled upon.

and every single oppressed group for minority has relied on free speech the practice in principle to further their cause and stake a claim for equality and tolerance 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 counter abolitionist and ideas. so take virginia course in 1776 virginia became the firstl state adopt a bill of rights even before the declaration of independence 1836 virginia passes a law that said something like it's a crime to deny asses have property of black slaves is also a crime to infiltrate resistance to slavery among the

whole laundry list of ways to try to counter abolitionist ideas. on the other hand you and abolitionist like frederick douglass who himself was born as a slave which he said would basically destroy slavery. he argued free-speech not depend on the color of your skin or the size of your wallet the right of free speech is a very precious one especially to the oppressed. i would say that is another thing that runs through the book i'm staying at a hotel here at lafayette square, very close to it. you will see a plaque showing how 1917 a number of women's rights advocates were burning an effigy of president woodrow wilson they were arrested and fined many of these women were fighting for the right to vote. a memory thinking about that in 2018 was living on the upper

west side with my family. i took my son to a museum and went outside tens of thousands of people were protesting, most of them women wearing these pink hats and shouting obscenities the president at the time that they were there to safeguard t their first speech rights the terms are prime or aggressive than those who went before them. i thought that was really a sign of how free-speeched had furthed the rights of groups there previously persecuted for jon has written very eloquently about how that was the case for the gay rights movement for instance. when you see a huge increase in acceptance and tolerance of gay marriage that was not achieved through censorship and putting people and bigots and jails it was through a degree one by people using the first amendment rights to due activism to appeal

to common humanity and sowa on. the last thing i might want to highlight is ultimately i believe that free speech, the helpor of free speech at any gin nation depend more on a culture of free speech them laws. the first amendment was ratified in 1771 hasn't change the wording but in 1798 you could go to jail forci criticizing president jon adams that will be supported by people like hamilton and washington the federalists with jefferson and madison on the other side of that conflict. then you go to laws prohibiting abolitionists. but if you go to world war i the supreme court is completely fine with sending people to prison for ten or 20 years proposing american involvement in world war i. he of the red scare and so on.

you really have to get into the 50s before free-speech is consistently protected and it reaches threshold by the end of the 60s that very, very high threshold for specific viewpoints. think that reflects a change in cultural attitude, and norms among americans because they wording has not changed. you see that in famous works he is at least as concerned about the norms in england as he is about the censorship of the magistrate and warns impose its values is a danger to free-speech. orwell says some of the same things. that is why i worry for this country.

because inn my view both sides there probably more than two sites. eating away at the culture of free speech in this hyper polarized partisan nature of american politics which i fear will ultimately have downstream effects that might affect how the person is constitutionally protected weathers and ten, 20, 30 years for those in executive summary. [laughter] >> very good. jon? some comments? >> first comment is thanknk you. jon thank you, cato. i think most of our viewers are online o it's great to be an actual room with actual human beings. jon the only thing i don't know that aboutal introduction my fit work on this was.

>> there goes my performance review cato institute. >> he has free. >> it's worse thanat that becaue of the second edition, jon and i corresponded frequently because i was the publisher of it for cato. how could i forget that question. >> don't forget the audiobook narrated by penn and joetta. anyway i owe a big debt to cato because at the time i could not get a commercial publisher for the book and here we are 30 years later. it's a classic which is what we call books that have been ignored for 25 years. >> reason you'rech corresponding he getting so much money from chicago that really sold in the second edition sold quite well. what i thought i'd say three things quick of the persons about the book the second is but what we learnhe from the book in the third is about environment we are in right now. first thing about the book is get it, buy it, read it.

it's not only readable and comprehensive, it's the only thing like it. unbelievably until this book came along there's nothing to read that figure from the very beginning of the ideas of free speech right up the social media. it's all here at easy ancient greeks, medieval times there were occasional outbursts of very interesting thinking only to be suppressed. the enlightenment, the long history of seditious libel which reappears againin and again. late is a fantastic book i just it.t send up about it will be a touchstone for years to come and it's also a lot of fun. second thing, what i learned from the book or may be re- learned from it is that the idea that the government should not only allow but actively protect speech and thought which is seditious, bolder, offensive,

wrongheaded, bigoted or just plain wrong. the idea government should actually protect that is theou most crazy counterintuitive, wacky social idea of all-time bar none. cut that proposition to someone on the street they would say what is the matter with you? it's only redeeming feature it's also only the single most successful idea bar none. because it is so deeply counterintuitive, it took 2500 years to build in the form we know it. and it's jacob just said the current form in the united states is veryst young. extremely young at the environment in which the p founders of the first defendant was much more restrictive. what i remind people of them 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 and their grandkids every single day. we need to be cheerful about that because at this book shows you, we are doing incredibly well actually i'm not sure jacob would agree with that. but compared to for example my grandfather's time thehe greatet novel of the 20th centuries, ulysses was banned by the government and confiscated on the docks. could not happen today. right up at the present however we have a couple of challenges. they really bend the paradigm and challenge jacob, and me, and tijon, and all of us because thy are quite unconventional. we are used to thinking of free speech as something that we

protect against intrusion bite sensors primarily the government. speech in terms of legal ser protections are stronger in america than i would say it's ever been anywhere in the world, would that be safe? >> i think that's very accurate. >> i think it might be about to get stronger with the current supreme court. because the challenges we face however don't fit that box, one is this information on the other is what is often called cancel culture. socialtematic use of coercion to challenge in silence. this is not about censorship is asked about steven bannon trumps former advisor accurately putttt flooding the ship. putting out so many lies, half-truths, conspiracy theories, exaggerations no one knows which end is up. turns out platforms like social media are tailor-made for this because their business model is to maximize eyeballs for revenues andnd the way to maxime eyeballs is attracted conspiracy

theories, outrage which is addictive and so forth. so what we didn't know when the internet got going we thought it would be a big open form. place of ideas the best studies of rice to the top we did not realize how easy it would be to manipulate this environment to make it epistemically toxic. it is now well known that false stuff travels much faster and much further online than true step which is much more expensive to make and much less find a click on. that is not a problem you can talk with traditional free speech. in fact it does the opposite it harnesses free speech, weaponize as it turns it to a weapon of mass confusion and chaos. and i think jacob and i can talk about this. but jacob and i may have somewhatnt of a disagreement on that. i think he's kind of a purist wants platforms like facebook which he sees as platforms to

essentially adopt the morality but not the law of the first amendment. i think that's impractical, unsustainable and betrays allow the rest of their mission with has to do with being a community of business and the publisher. things are going to have to be content moderation and it is a hardyi problem of getting it rit is a lot more complicated and sink re- speech online. the second area which jacob did allude to,ia awfully important o called cancel culture the weaponization of social coercion. that is always been around toefl came to the u.s. in 1835 won the biggest threat to liberty in not from the government is from social coercion the tyranny of the majority he called it. madison worried about the same thing. jon stewart worried about it. itup can be tyranny of the minority even relatively smallha groups of people that are ready to whack you are online, demolish her reputation, go to

the search while called a racist the first thing any employer sees demand to be fired, even small minorities of people can make life a living hell for dissenters and cause a widespread chilling effect. at the moment two thirds of americans say they are chilled, they are reluctant to say their true belief of politics for fear of social and professional consequences. two thirds that's about 60% of students on campus. that's approximate four times the level to the best we can measure it's hard to compare, it's about four times the level of 1953 the height of the mccarthy era for the reason is that in the mccarthy area there are a couple things you couldn't do you could be pretty safe. in the canceling era you do not know when you are safe and when you are not and that is on purpose for they want to make us our own policeman. wea are always afraid will step on a new landmine. this is both a widespreadst chilling prom and a disinformation problem are severe stresses on the epistemic

environment, it is our ability to sort through falsehoods. they are not things within the traditional balance of free speech. so this book and away is a ladder up to the next conversation that's now beginning. >> interestingly i want to go back to the disinformation issue before you can respond to it. mentors also called disinformation some 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 as yesterday i was listening to a seminar at a major university and a scholar was talking about youtube, measuring youtube. when he saw there was not partisan differences related to

speech or fax or whatever, but whether insight or outsider perspective. and at the end it was most people were scholars i think the professors listening to it. the end of the seminar he pose the question, which was somewhat nervous about posing or uncertain which was that is the category of this information a way for us to basically put down in the pricing? a populist uprising of the past for years? and if that is true, should we consider it -- make that it might be that? and if it is true is that normatively good? and two, more than normatively good is it possible? and know one really engaged him on either one of them. i do think jon talks about the

differences of the usual it is a problem because there are differences of the private platforms and some sort of suppression of speech is needed for business, right? but is it good if b it just happens to be discussed and fought through because it does i have had the feeling that i might be engaged in putting down it uprising and my other question at. >> doing tricks like that of the role is? >> i work indirectly for facebook on its oversight board. now i have to say i will quickly say. >> what is that? kindly inquisitor. what i want to say is i don't have any evidence from anything that has happened or anyone has said that anyone can see what face book is doing in content moderation as a political effort

to head off a political movement. and i should also say i have inside knowledge there is no evidence that facebook is pursuing a g hot against conservatives, it's just not there outside or a inside. however when you think about the big picture and also beyond that which this scholar was trying to force on it i think as it may not be possible even if we say we've got to stop this stuff, it may not be possible.ah but your perspective is an interesting one, jacob. what you think about all of this? >> i think acknowledging that free speech comes with costs and harm is essential. the idea that free speech is an un- mitigated good under all circumstances is not a persuasive idea.

i think that social media has amplified. it has a generated polarization. it has amplified this information and hate speech. january 6 i don't think it would have happened. on the other hand i'm more skeptical than the share of misinformation. a number of studies show the misinformation is how you define it and that's a problem in and of itself is not the narrativeid after the 2017 presidential election worse fake news decided

everything and people were manipulated to voting for trump. and also those who are most likely to be persuaded by conspiracy theories are those who are already deeply part of an ideologue. if you are already someone who hated hillary clinton and the democrats and work sympathetic to trump you are much more likely to consume and share this information than someone who is an independent or a democrat. those are important nuances. so even it's not as effective as we initially thought in absolute numbers you convince two or 3000 people the election was stolen but help motivate them to attack the peaceful transfer of democracy is a real problem or

stage like the u.s. how do we handle it? you have to remove illegal contra we've done a number of studies shows russia, turkey all of these states copy paste that approach. we also see the collateral damage to all kinds of other speech is enormous. i think more in terms of technological developments. i am old enough to remember the blogosphere when it was a blogs and that centralizee platforms that were the front tier of theb

internet digital age. and at the time nobody cared about moderation on a blog even if it had a million followers because it did not really affect the entire ecosystem of information on the internet because no single blog could aca as a chokepoint or a massive disseminators of false information the way a centralized platform with billions of people can so i think decentralization is one potential remedy per think that chimes with lessons of the history of free speech of the dutch republic in the first ways that did not have a constitution they did not have laws protecting free speech that a very weak political center the problem with the dutch republic had a lot of metonymy. one tried to censor someone they could skip state lines and set

up shop elsewhere and that cultivated a culture of tolerance that was comparatively much more expensive than elsewhere on the continent. another thing that might go some way is to provide users more control over content. i'm sort of allowing ngos we could then use. so take the issue of anti-semitism. some people believe these campaigns to boycott israel could amount toe anti-semitism. others say it's a legitimate debate so facebook has to make a decision. should this constitute anti-semitism orns not? and that has effects for everyone on the platform the ado which is an x defensive of hate speech could develop a filter you could use. you can shield your self from what you perceive to be anti-semitism it would not affect everyone else the same can be said with the women a lot

of female journalists others are flooded with misogyny that might not reachf a threshold of illegl speech buton nonetheless createa disincentive engage on social media. so you could have a filter that filtered away some of the misogynistic terms but would not affect everyone there might be women who say i want to see what the bigots are saying i want to use it tole expose people. i think that smell of aor philharmonic and centralized approach for government imposed standards on the tech companies or if tech companies themselves try to navigate through the lens of pr or stakeholder management, what do we have to do to avoid being summons to capitol hill every second week as an answer to this or that outbreak of what

i call in the book elite panic of speech that this or that group does not like. cabut ultimately, as david ultimately did a pessimistic case forad free speech and veryr optimistic about free speech and then in the 70 or 76 in the uk used a free speech as a blow torch to attack everyone instead of radical lies the supporters. came to think of free speech as a radical speech is sort of an abuse of speech but it's more dangerous to allow the government to clamp down it is unavoidable cost of p free speeh you have people with extreme use. that is how i look at it. i certainly would not say facebook and twitter we should be indifferent to what goes on

there. i think there are other solutions than centralized content moderation we should try to look at before we go down that road. >> i will add a response to jon the point you made, and spin that may be into a question for jacob based on what you just said. jon, think about the question about populism versus elitism this university professor asked would have been more appropriate 15 years ago than i now. because a what we have learned n the last few years is what we are not seeing online for example is the voice of the broad public. but weird discovering is cap easily manipulative how easily they are by small numbers of dedicated actors, the internet researchur agency and st. petersburg, anti-vaccinator's were able to use a combination of bots and trolls and search while

optimization is to make a small number of activists look like a consensusho online. whether they are counselors who are typically small numbers of ideological left wing radicals who project themselves much bigger forces. the reason we have a constitutional knowledge and i wrote a book about it is an unstructured marketplace of ideas it turns out instead of getting everyone equal, big conversation you get manipulation by small dedicated groups using tools of information warfare. that is why be go to so much trouble to devote all the rules and norms and institutions like science and mainstream journalism, academia, law, a lot of government set up the systems require spin better behavior to expose her views to people who don't agree with this, to make it very difficult for one faction to take over the expense of others. all the things u.s. constitution does does in the epistemic world it is naïve toeo think that without those rules they don't

the opposite is true. so expanding that to a question for jacob, if it's the case there do need to be rules out there and they should not be government rules i agree with you on that i think the eu approaches to rigid, top-down and finding people for heaven sakes i don't think that will work and i don't think that is desirable. it seems to me like what facebook is doing is exactly the right approach with earlier problems like this invention of the printing press the rise of offset printing in the united states which led to huge amounts of hyper- partisan fake news and u.s. media andhi others. b there solve the same way it took a little while building up institutions and norms like publishers and. reviews, ethical norms and journalism, journalism school and it seems to me that's what facebook is doing let's come up with some framework, some rules some guidelines to make

transparent pride will tell people what they are. they will be h voluntary in the sense you don't need to be on facebook but t if you are here this is what you expect.le that seemed to me like what has worked in the' past and the best available route. do you disagree with that? >> is extremely difficult to find out what is goingns on. one of the suggestions my organization has made is that the terms that facebook and youtube and others should be inspired by the only thing thatn approaches something at the universal level there's always this increase speech debate but are called the tierney everything is reviewed from three u.s. lens these are global platforms what is at stake at the u.s. is not the same and russia were iran her social media is the only way you can

circumvent official propaganda. but we argue is the terms lease issues such as hate speech and disinformation should be inspired by international human rights norms. that is the limits they should try to reach. but when we analyze the content moderation we find on hate speechhe of deleted comments wee looked at 1.1% of the deleted comments actually violated we also found what's being kept up was less than 0.006% of comments at a been designated as hate speech that actually violated. that type of research and looking at it in that way is an

important antidote the message that a lot of european politicians are pushing that basically the platforms are flooded with illegal content. i'm not going to say our research is exhaustive but it suggests very much this is the case. and should facebook tinker? i think that's unavoidable they'll be tinkering with different models. if we were part of it we would be experimenting with all kinds of things. but that's a more decentralized model would be better because you would have more experimentation by various platforms rather than having a dominating platform as facebook which is a huge incentive to governments and other powerful actors to say we want you to reflect our norms and our values that will give us a huge say

it'sld curiosity driven in the world we live in facebook has a large market share would you rather the facebook oversight board exists or not exist? >> i think it's a good idea of a problem with that didn't work scale i don't how many decisions you have made so far but that amounts to a nanosecond of content moderation in real life across the platform get those content moderation decisionso reflect the jurisprudence if you like of the oversight board? >> 's is where you want to go back to john's point, his reply to me. first of all it's not going to

be a completely unstructured system. the structures jacob mentioned of viewing a dissent and vigorous kind of resistance to trump they were there to protect the protesters you have that structure.s you also had perhaps not significant but there was speech not protected by the first amendment constitutional structure. the real questionn is, in the case of facebook youtube is perhaps even more important because of the video component, you have a platform that isit a global with about 2 billion people on it every day doing billions of post. the numbers are just y immense. then you have things on it that are false speech.eb

so who is to judge what speech is to come down? is it to facebook are they to judge a because it contributed to maximizing the shareholder value? that is one answer. the facebook answer in part has been to send disputed posts to these groups that decide that, right? the various kindsk of panels tht look at the speech side of his disinformation. so markke zuckerberg is concernd about this information he said things you don't want on the platform include we don't obvious hoaxes we do want conspiracy theories. well, i think there was an assumption it's very easy to tell what that is.

in the american political system we basically leave that to people event up to incitement. incitement is very hard to prove but essentially are turning over the question of truth to small numbers of determination of fact, right? i hasten to add on top of that my impression is that's not the way it works because of what jon mentioned which is the problem of scale. if you've got 2 billion people, 100,000 disinformation posts is a very small number, right? if you have a panel or an oversight board that has to go through these things and determine the truth of them they're not going to get to very smany. the one thing about social media that is different is speed and scale. the scale turns out to be humans

can't manage the system. we will see and actually the algorithms at those levels make mistakes all the time. it is m inevitable. you have to decide what kind of mistakes you want to make and what the costs are. so i don't think actually has been been an answer they've been struggling with it. finally the point i would make is this, this is not a point about the current administration it could be any administration, you have a present and an administration that is going to be running for reelection has political concerns et cetera et cetera and those are known. sometimes in recent cases they want facebook or others to take down post to take down speech.

and to call police and make a zuckerberg take things down but everyone knows facebook is on tv asking for regulation that will be considered by congress and the president is important to that process, right?ou he could prevent regulation he could advance them. this kind of jawboning process, what is truth in that context? it gets government involved in ways perhaps the first amendment doctrine is not realizing can't act on. >> i'll mention a couple things that have gone by areas of agreement that are important to think it easily get missed and are often missed in the conversation. one, check it's at something that's important and true i spent 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

literature of misinformation ant disinformation is not even clear they are number two. they buy with am radio and especially cable news especially on the rights. but far and away the biggest spreader disinformation and misinformation is the oldest and that is politicians. they can use all kinds of channels we sawt that in stop te seal that was accelerate i'm sure by social media regarding former president of the united states plus his political party plus conservative media, plus dozens of lawsuits all pushing a big lie is going to get through. at mall for focusing on social media but i think at the moment there's a tendency to blame technology firstst when the principles of gimp disinformation and misinformation occur applyi across channels there are many channelsay kudos to jacob for pointing that out i agree i also agree by the way the goal of disinformation doess not succeed primarily in changing people's mind sets out it's trying to it's primarily interested in

polarizing and confusing and it's very good at that. secondary of agreement we do get to social media i think it's an area of agreement think it's important to establish rules and boundaries norms of conduct or recognize us will be hard to enforce also think in the long run the larger bulk of the solutions tohe this crisis won't be in the realm of policy design is going to be in the realm of product is at his home to figure out systems that you things like slow people down, introduce fiction before the retreat or like something don't you want to read this before your w retweet it? make us think a little harder change in terms of what's promoted and how fast philosophy goes there's lots of ideas about that. i think we are looking at systems that were designed for an age in which it was all about getting eyeballs at any price we've discovered the prices high

these systems are now looking for ways to integrate more guidelines and guardrails into the user experience. we do not know what that willco look like fun think we have general directions. but as for the bulk of the improvement will come from.wa >> i'm going to directors away. i must say one of the things hei've learned at facebook is vy hard for me as a person working here at cato in d.c. is to get beyond. one thing i learned by the way and i would love your response to this, is that if i went to advance free-speech arguments, the worst thing i would do with my colleagues who didn't come from theth united states would y the words first amendment or the united states, right? because there is this response that people really do, if you go to the content of free speech whether it's the american

experience i think they respond much more favorably, right? what is your general sense about outside of europe and the united states? how is the free-speech story going? >> i actually agree with jon. compared to 50 or 100 years ago we are living in a golden age of free speech. : : l these norms and even the idea of free speech however i would

argue the golden age is probably in decline. -- what worries me more is that liberal democracies have started to view free speech perhaps as much as the press at the foundational value and there is a whole wave of repressive laws. one of them for example the european commission wants to define hate speech is a crime that would allow the commission to define hate speech across all member states and set the rules

that is she was a flashing warning sign of how leading democracies are thinking about free speech. and unfortunately i don't see a lot of civil society organizations in europe that are pushing back against this and i argue in the book that this is based on the term i've sort of f barcode from a brilliant professor where the idea is basically one that i hope we all share that we will never want to experience the rise of the industrial scale genociden in europe or hopefully anywhere again. but the european idea is that you need to basically militant democracy. this idea established by a professor that wrote articles

about how democracies when confronted with fascism headed to get tough and couldn't worry about free speech and how to sort of clampdown. but i try to show in the book that ito was very liberal compared to the entire under bismarck into the german consideration. before that it was actually quite hostile to a extreme speeh and allowed of the laws and regulations that let me give you an example, the german state could band the for up to eight weeks if it spread false news or attacked public officials for undermined the government. so they started the newspaper basically to control a jewish highway patrol officer and claimed a sort of probably that

it was the most frequently banned newspaper in germany. the reason he started that is he was banned in speaking in a number off german states. the most praised was the editor and who was i think justly executed because during the war he explicitly cited genocide and i don't think anyone would argue that is covered by free speech but he was less genocidal but did spread these issues and was convicted a o number of times including 1929 sentenced to two months in prison shared by hundreds of supporters leaving the courtroom and they include ngincreased his share of the voe including the hometown.

the radio didn't allow communists or nazis and most alarmingly i think is that they basically use the provision and laww and constitution that was supposed to protect democracy. they use that to abolish democracy and again that is a flashing warning sign that even for all the good intentions it stopped the laws that are restrictive of free speech and they might very well be used by enemies of democracy when they get into power and they may not even be efficient at countering the risees of these. how far can you go if you want to counter especially in the digital age how much censorship would it take to suppress antidemocratic voices in a way where you could migrate from facebook to a telegram -- >> that is to some extent why they are turning to the

disinformation. it's not access to publication. it's access to attention. on the international front i think you would agreet but tell me a development that seems to me to be global very much happening in europe very much in the u.s. and the thing that breaks my heart most of this entire debate is the widespread belief that free speech harms minorities. >> we see again on the college campuses and in the u.s. and the eu again and again the justification for various kinds of censorship investigations, punishments is protecting minority p groups from being traumatized, being injured, made a second class citizens, told they don't belong on the planet. and as someone who was born in a very different world and worked for same-sex marriage again and

againn frederick douglass said it, john lewis, mandela. they all said without free speech the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. i think that message is being lost. i thinkll we are losing that battle internationally. >> may be especially in democracies unfortunately i think in a lot of states where they face censorship and repression, they intuitively get the free speech restrictions more than anyone else but this idea iss really prominent and i don't know the best way to counter. hopefully a historical approach and awareness is part of the solution but also the restrictions in hungary and

poland. that should tell you something. so look at the history in the uk when they first adopted of the law to try to protect minorities from hatred in fact very first person convicted where they were not persecuted so he created more controversy but you also see more and more categories being protected and you see those groups were being used as a weapon against each other so it could be the lgbtq plus community against religious conservatives and vice a versa and that i think is dangerous because that is a race to the gutter.ry

>> we see now they use very serious tactics in britain and the u.s. which also breaks my heart. >> before q-and-a let me ask you to follow up on one of your points. does the international civil and political rise of the united states signed about 30 years after itt was introduced in 199, the international human rights law document contains interesting parts that relate to freedom of speech and to the global element of free speech. article 19 is like the first amendment. we don't somewhat like the first amendment on the one hand. article 20, section two includes a part that requires in signatories to essentially man hate speech. it mandates that they agree to doo so and also fostering

warfare. now clearly there was a lot of debate about this but you can see article 20 came out trying not to repeat the national socialist experience in germany so on and get to there it is in the international law a strong statement of freedom of speech and requirement for banning which by the way facebook has and others have strong community standards about hate speech so looking back from your own research what side of theio international law is going to win? >> that's a good question. the interesting thing it was basically a provision advanced by the soviets they tried to get a similar provision in ther

declaration of human rights. roosevelt fought against it and the western states succeeded initially but then lost the battle in the civil andgh political rights so it basically was based on soviet union in article one to three of the constitution it had an obligation which should tell you something about the concept because stalin wasn't about using hate speech himself. but, so that has been a dangerous incident but i would say in the past ten years or so, this provision has been interpreted very narrowly by a u.s. law professor in the freedom of expression and even the human rights committee

they've done so because in the u.s. system it is so obvious a number of states are trying to game the system and expand the interpretation of the obligation to prohibit hate speech to basically allow them to prohibit docent, which is exactly what eleanor roosevelt warned about. but i am sort of more hopeful now that of the loophole has been closed and i think the obama administration played a crucial role in thatag when they had the campaign against islamic states to adopt at the international level. a process from that sort of resulted in a more limited interpretation but it's interesting for me as someone who's vigorously opposed that i often rely on the international organization when it comes to social media this is the least

bad option instead of having to lie on a provision proposed by the party. >> we have a microphone here if you want to come down so everyone here and online can hear your question. when you come down before you offer your question, you have a choice of revealing who you are or not. we preserve anonymity here however this is david if you want to ask a particular -- >> maybe i should put my mask back on. i want to go back to something jacob said early on.

-- those incidences on free speech or public intellectuals generally have said about something going on in canada or britain or continental europe. that wouldn't happen here because we have first amendments. maybe there's a question what is the relationship between the first amendment and culture of free speech and if somehow you could give canada a first amendment right now, would that change their culture? >> i think you're absolutely ifright. it's a relationship. my client is if the culture of free speech and culture of tolerance underpins legal protection deteriorates, the law is likely to follow behind that but that doesn't mean that the amendment is a consequence. it's very much particularly at

this point in time in america without a strong protection of the first amendment i think that you would see speech restrictions being weaponize to in various states, blue and red states that would use them in order to pound away at those deemed ideologically unsound as well as i think so called critical race theory that we have seen a number of states limited to education. i think they would probably be adopted at a much broader leveling and you can see that when you ask democrats and republicans about the degree of tolerance for different kinds of speechch you see the partisan gaps. democrats are very supportive against protests and republicans were supportive of extending even to misinformation.

i just fear the level of protection would erode if the underlining culture of free speech is eroding. >> in my right to remember this loose paraphrase but even the choice between strong speech, strong free speech plus week free speech if you would take the stronger culture as being more important. >> i'm sometimes asked how did you feel about bands on holocaust denial i in germany ad what i tell people is i don't really get my underwear in a knot about it because germany is a special case and what i worry more about is there's a culture

of the environmental support of thee values of free speech and f they do then a law like that will not be abused all that much and it's reallyy the culture tht is the first thing we have to do send in that situation but may e jacob wouldn't agree. >> unfortunately germany has the culture of free speech but what i found in my book is the german culture is very much elitist and has been. i won't go down that rabbit hole either but the germans are really concerned about getting access to dangerous ideas and understandably given their history but i worry that perhaps they interpreted it wrongfully and leaveor ammunition for the various forces with their approach to free speech. >> i would make a remark about mill that goes to some of your

earlier remarks. the problem is he says this only applies to civilized countries. so it's important when we can rescue for purposes it is important t to note that he was off base there because otherwise, think about if you're somewhere else other than europe or the united states and reading rejohn stuart mills and you come across that. are you an advocate of free speech after that? >> [inaudible]

nobody said he is also a senior fellow who's still there. my question [inaudible] every story seemed to start publishing that because -- what they forget to tell actually they threw the first punch -- it

was about coming into denmark and the party they heard somebody say that [inaudible] he went to the organization and said no, we cannot do it. this is propaganda. we don't want to participate. [inaudible]

that we do not have self-censorship in denmark and the rest is history. but i like to tell people -- >> fleming actually wrote an eloquent piece and argued that free speech enlightenment applied to all and there is no single group or individual that could claim the special protection and it was a sort of bigotry of the expectations to say that special rules should apply because they were part of the society and it would have to apply under equal terms yet you have someone like the famous author comparing flemings piece and of course the cartoon is

part and parcel of why there was an attack. it was one of few magazines that showed solidarity and we published the cartoon. >> the question leads me to have to reveal this. a colleague that worked on the obama work at the united nations that you talked about with religious heresy and so on. we were talking one day and she said when we were going into those un meetings arguing for free speech, the one group t you could always count on, the diplomats you could always have at your side where the danish and that's to say i will keep testing this and someday it seems to be true so keep your eye out if you come across a danish person probably they share your views.

the first country in the world that formally abolished censorship in 1770. it didn't go so well. the guy who did it was executed, beheaded and had his hands cut off in public. >> i do want to get to some online questions. many people are concerned about section 230 essentially why facebook has the right to do all ofde this outside of the laws of libel and so on but there's a couple of cases that i think is complicated to get into but if youol have comments that would e interesting. this whole question of culture. one person points out these are anonymous t questioners but this

information and so on and the problems online if they didn't have people that wanted it would not exist. then the response to what about education because it's based on the idea that ultimately we can exchange views ultimately it will be better, it may not be perfect but better than it was going to be otherwise. so education and the ability to critically think about these questions is important. >> i would be interested to hear john on that note. two things. one was education and the other

was demand. >> there is a large important theory and information people wanted to fill o the gap in ther lives and it gives them the sense of inside knowledge and purpose in life and all that. the reason we have the constitutional knowledge is there's so many ways to manipulate. intelligence provides none at all. there s is dozens of biases andt takes a lot ofy discipline to keep us away from those things. it's a collective action problem that may be good for one for an individual to consume and spread conspiracy theories but it doesn't take much off that to te economic environment and that's why we have rules and structures throughout society. the second point was education

that seems to have some benefits. >> that doesn't sound like a controversial phrase when it's put that way but what i have in mind as i think a lot of the otproblems around social media have to do not just with of the design of social media per se, but the environment in which they find themselves which is a population that has never been exposed to these tools was naïve about them, like your professor friends that say if a lot of people are doing it it must be popular. it seemed to be helpful in countries that are doing it, to do education on the literacy especially middle school and on into high school and critical thinking education seemed to help in better preparing ourselves for the pitfalls that we encountered in this oenvironment. so i am a fan of those kind of measures that come into the united statesta though i don't think they should be dictated by

government but i do think we can better prepare ourselves for encountering the environment we are now in and we could hardly prepare ourselves for. >> one of the things i regret not including in the book, what i see is the real problem with free speech is that it doesn't provide a sense of meaning and purpose. it doesn't bind us together in the same way that religion or nationalism -- or particular circumstances. so free speech and the opposition to the stand back and other british attempts to limit the dissent would bind them together. they were advancing free speech andd british slavery. but when the revolutionary war had been one, free speech

suddenly became a principal that amplified the political and philosophical differences into suddenly you had a because i civil war between the greatest generation of americans. you had alexander hamilton arguing that it should be enforced against anyone slandering or using malicious propaganda against any official should be prosecuted and foreigners who were responsible for the incendiary press all of it should be torn out of the u.s. where madison fsort of rights a defense but then what happens when jefferson wins the presidential election. in his inaugural address he gives a great unifying speech tand says we shouldn't prosecue each other with walls but then his name had been dragged

through the mud and he writes in private letters suggesting itut might be a good idea to prosecute the federal letters in state court and some of them are so that shows even if jefferson is liable, basically the unprincipled defense of free speech is something that all human beings are very vulnerable to, so we come with hours worth of original software that we evolved but the mode is intolerance and we have this fragile patch on top of it which is tolerance and free speech but that constantly has to be sort of updated and we have to build a firewall around it and where the firewall fails, the default mode will override it and be back to intolerance and i think in those n circumstances sort of nationalism or religion will provide a sense of meaning

antisocial creation and in those circumstances suddenly be seen as a threat to the absence of social creation that binds us together and that is particularly dangerous in times of uncertainty, political polarization so more or less the times we live in right now. >> i would be remiss if i didn't speak up on my yet anonymouspr professor. i think that he probably agrees pretty closely with what john thinks about these matters. but he thought there was a normative, was it normatively good to suppress and that you need that argument. john giveses you one in his book but beyond that raises the question is it even possible to commit this kind of suppression and essentially prevent a political movement from attaining its end is and i would sayio 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 is protected. this is the facebook problem, not going around seeing something saying that's bad if no one believes youd can suppres speech in the current environment of the question now, the reason i wrote the constitution and knowledge is figuring out where the guidelines and guardrails are going to go so we can incentivize ourselves in prosociall ways. humanity's been doing that forever and that is not bad or about rewiring some political

outcome. it's figuring out how to be our better selves. >> i think there's an interesting place to look for inspiration so taiwan i think is interesting you basically have this movement between hackers basically one of them is now the minister of i think technology. they basically were working on t updating institutions to the digital age and sort of trying to build institutions and technology that would increase and a spur a sort of cooperation at a local level especially if you want to decide in a neighborhood should there be i don't know, a bike path or a platform that can sort of help people come together and decide on these issues rather than

looking at disagreement. >> the new field called cognitive immunology which is create firewalls and communities toto slow the viral spread of misinformation.. for the speech or political movement someone does and i think that it's china. talk about a challenge to this. >> you g can suppress speech its just you get k lots of false positives also. china is probably i would say the soviet union during stalin was probably the most notorious state at least in the 20th century but probably china is

winning that contest but the worrying thing is china is creating these digital states so it's exporting its technology and also they will send the rope which will hang him and that is a little bites true with some western companies who go in and build of the great firewall sort of google working secretly to try to build a search engine that incorporates the dictator of the chinese communist party's. so their ambition is that they will be able to control speech in almost every detail. and i think the traditional censorship is astounding but they have more devious ways from

flooding the committee with 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 would you not to be afraid to speak out and if it has social consequences and you lose the right to travel for the ability to get a promotion if you say something wrong. >> i hope for the people online -- i tried to go through it to speak to things here so please don't take offense if i didn't get to your question but as always, cato is a private institution -- that's happened before at the auditorium but i

think we've gotten to the issues that were raised in many cases and it does show the importance ofhe the media. the book is free speech, the authorop jacob has been here at cato today and i hope he comes back many times. our friend john has also commented today. you should go for his book the constitution of knowledge. and thank you very much both online and here in the auditorium. it's great to see people again. i agree with john about that. lunch is upstairs. [applause] and the book is outside.

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