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for our continuing series of book forums. this particular one i have been eager to look forward to it for many months because i knew about this book for some time now. i know about the podcast that came first with it. this is free-speech:history from socrates to social media which is available for a couple of weeks and is getting a very strong and appreciative audience in the united states and in europe also so we thought it was great. we've known jacob for quite a while and great to have a book and who better to have a conversation, climate

like-minded people with some differences than john rauch. you may know both of these people from your work and by the way, i am john samples from cato and i thought jacob would tell us about the book and that we talk about the issues and turn to q and a in a little while. jacob mchangama is founder and executive director, host of the podcast clear and present danger, a history of free speech emphasizing how we recommend that to you. very interesting podcast series that is available still. his writings on free-speech have appeared in the economist, washington post, foreign policy and other outlooks around the world. he lives in copenhagen, denmark. john rauch is a senior fellow of government studies and author of tweet books. it made me feel bad, the eighth

book, how do you see that? many articles on public policy, culture, and government, his articles have been highly influential as you may know. his many publications include the 2021 book the constitution of knowledge:the defense of truth as well as the 2,015 e-book which i think more and more is coming into its own, political realism. big-money and backroom deals can strengthen american democracy. he writes for the atlantic it is a recipient of the 2005 national magazine award, equivalent of the pulitzer prize. so i am eager to get started here. jacob, tell us something about the book, what led you to write it, the podcast and other themes that you found and what is a striking effort of research.

you really conquered a very demanding, very broad set of issues and it is hard to work with because -- 2000 years. >> thanks to cato for hosting me. it is almost exactly two years since i was in washington speaking at a cato event and you were having a dinner at a time when seen in hindsight might not -- >> awful's paradise for them. what led me to write this book. i was born, secular liberal denmark and in my youth, 3 speech was taken for granted.

in the 90s in early 2000s i didn't think about it. it was part of daily life and then became the epicenter of the battle of values over the relationship of free speech and religion when someone who became a good friend of mine, the editor of the newspaper published a number of cartoons depicting the prophet mohammed which led to a global crisis and around-the-clock security because of threats from extremists. many in europe and around the world, what is this principle that we hail as an enlightenment value and foundation of democracy? other people said it is not so

important, punching down a vulnerable minority, this is not what free-speech is about. that sort of surprised and shocked me a little bit and i saw generally people on the right were free-speech absolutists when it came to the cartoons and a number of government to adopted some restrictions on religious free-speech not formally but everyone knew targeted at extremist muslims that limited free-speech. i was sort of saying this goes against the principles we held up. a lot of people on the right said free-speech is important but to safeguard our values, particular extremists, that led me to investigate the history of free speech but a society

based on free speech, it is worth all the fuss. i found that it was. you can have a more detached attitude rather than the culture war. so the book really sat, the origins of 3 speech, when there were two concepts, the quality of speech, in the assembly, with male citizens had a direct voice debating and passing laws and more consequence, the second concept, something like

uninhibited speech which allowed a culture of tolerance of free-speech so if you were play-doh you could set up an academy and teach philosophy that was not particularly fun, democracies that allowed foreigners like aristotle to set up shop until the tolerance war, socrates, in the marketplace. in athens you are free to criticize the athenian constitution and phrase the spartan constitution but in sparta you can only praise the spartan constitution. that is the litmus test of free-speech.

are you able to criticize the political system under which you live. the athenian system by our standards was not radically egal i terrien but by the time it was egalitarian. i contrast that with the roman republic, where there was a top-down approach, you have senators like cato and cicero who believed in free-speech but mostly for the senatorial elites, not the plebs, the roman citizens did not have a right to address the way athenian citizens did. these concepts have been in tension throughout the history of free speech especially when it is expanded through technology, the printing press, radio, telegraph and social media or political

developments. it could be a democracy of giving the vote to women, and religious and racial minorities. there's always been a push back, x essential dread that the unwashed mob was unfit to be given access to information that had to be filtered by the elite because otherwise everything would go to hell. that was a very important thesis in the book. another one is related to that, many today see free-speech on power relations, in fact may be the most powerful engine of human equality human beings have stumbled upon and every oppressed group or minority has relied on free-speech, the

practice and principal to stake a claim for equality and tolerance. i spent a bit of time on how southern state in the 1830s adopted the most draconian censorship laws in american history to counter abolitionist literature, take virginia in 1776, the first state to adopt the flag before the declaration of independence. press freedom was the bulwark of liberty but in 1876 virginia passes a law that says something like it is a crime to deny that right masters have a right to property their black slaves and to inculcate resistance to slavery among a whole laundry list of ways to counter abolitionist ideas and

that you have frederick douglass who was born a slave but argued for universal idea of free-speech which would basically destroy slavery and argued free-speech does not depend on the size of your wallet and the right of free speech is a precious one especially to the oppressed and i would say that is another theme that runs through the book. staying at a hotel here at lafayette square or close to it you will see a placard showing how in 1917 a number of women's rights advocates were burning an effigy of resident woodrow wilson and were arrested and fined. i remember thinking about that when i was on the upper west side with my family and took my son to a museum and went outside.

tens of thousands were protesting, most of them women wearing these hats and shouting obscenities at the president and the nypd was there to safeguard, criticize the president in terms that were probably more aggressive and i thought that was a sign how free-speech had furthered the rights of groups that were previously persecuted, john had written about how that was also the case for the gay rights movement. when you see a huge increase in acceptance and tolerance of gay marriage, that was not achieved through censorship and putting people in jail, it was won by people using their first amendment rights to appeal to common humanity.

last thing i might want to highlight is ultimately i believe free-speech in any given nation depends more on a culture of free-speech than laws. the first amendment was ratified in 1790 one. it hasn't changed, the wording, but in 1798 you could go to jail for criticizing president adams and that would be supported by people like hamilton and washington. the federalists, with jefferson and madison on the other side of that conflict, then laws prohibiting abolitionists but if you go to world war i the supreme court is fine with sending people to prison for opposing american involvement in world war i. you have a red scares and so on and you had to get into the 50s

before free-speech is consistently protected and reaches threshold by the end of the 60s, the high threshold for limiting specific viewpoints and that reflects a change in cultural attitudes and norms among americans and you see that in works like on liberty, which is as concerned about stifling norms in victorian england as he is about censorship of the magistrate and warns the tendency to impose values is a danger to free-speech and the same thing so i worry for this country because in my view both sides

if there are two sides, eating away at the culture of free-speech in this hyper polarized partisan nature of american politics which has effects that might affect how the first amendment in 10 or 20 or 30 -- that was an effective summary. >> host: a comment? >> first comment, thank you. most of our viewers are online, nice to be in the room with actual human beings. i feel very good about that. the only thing i don't feel good about is in the introduction you didn't mention my first and seminal work on the subject now 29 years old, was published by who? >> there goes my performance

review, the cato institute. >> it is worse than that. the second edition john and i correspondent -- i was a publisher of it. how could i forget? >> don't forget the audiobook. >> spectacular. i/o a big debt to cato. i couldn't get a commercial publisher for the book and here we are 30 years later. are classic which is what we call books that are ignored for 25 years. >> getting so much money from chicago. the second edition so far. >> i thought i would say 3 things quickly, the first is about the book, the second is what we learned from the book and the third is the environment we are in. first thing about the book is get it and read it. it is not only readable and comprehensive but it is the only thing like it.

until this book came along there was nothing that took you from the beginning of the idea of free-speech up to social media. the ancient greeks, medieval times where there were outbursts of interesting thinking only to be suppressed. the enlightenment, the long history of seditious libel which reappears again and again. it is a fantastic book. i can't say enough about it. it will be a touchstone for years to come and it is a lot of fun. second thing. what i learned from the book or re-learned from it is the idea that the government should not only allow but actively protect speech and thought which is seditious, vulgar, offensive, wrongheaded, bigoted or just plain wrong, the idea that

government should protect that is the most crazy counterintuitive wacky social idea of all time bar none. if you pop that proposition to someone they will say what is the matter with you and it is only redeeming feature is that it is also the single most successful social ideas of all time bar none. it gives us the peace, the freedom and the knowledge that builds a society but because it is so deeply counterintuitive it took 2500 years to build and the current form in the united states is very young. extremely young. the environment in which the founders wrote the first amendment, more restrictive than today. what i remind people of and hope they take away is protecting this radical proposition requires getting up

every morning and explaining it from scratch. a whole new generation and our kids will have to to do that and their kids and grandkids every day and we need to be careful about that because as this book shows you we are doing incredibly well. compared to my grandfather's greatest novel of the 20th century, ulysses was banned by the government. couldn't happen today. at the present we have a couple challenges. it bent the paradigm. jacob and me and john and all of us, quite unconventional. we are used to thinking of free-speech has something we protect against intrusion by sensors, primarily the government. free-speech in terms of legal

protection more than anywhere in the world. would that be safe? i think it may be about to get stronger with the current supreme court. there comes a challenge that doesn't fit that box. one is disinformation. the other is cancel culture, the systematic use of social coercion to chill and silence. this is not about censorship, it is about a steve bannon very aptly and accurately put it, flooding the zone with so much lies and half-truths, conspiracy theories, exaggerations that no one knows which end is up and it turned out platforms like social media are tailor-made for this because their business model is to maximize eyeballs for revenue and way you ask mise -- maximize eyeballs's manufacture outrage and so forth. what we didn't know when the

internet got going was we thought it would be an open forum and marketplace of ideas and the best ideas would rise to the top, we didn't realize how easy it would be to manipulate this environment to make it systemically toxic. it is well-known that false stuff travels faster and further than true stuff which is more spent of to make and less fun to click on. that is not a problem you can tackle with traditional free-speech. it does the opposite. it harnesses free-speech, weapon eyes as it and turns it into a weapon of systemic destruction and mass confusion and chaos. we can talk about this, we have a disagreement on that because he is a purist and wants platforms like facebook which he sees as platforms to essentially adopt the morality of not the law of the first

amendment and that is impractical and betrays a lot of the rest of their mission which has to do with being a community of business and a publisher. there has to be content moderation and it is a hard problem than saying free-speech online. the second area, and social coercion. that has always been around. tocqueville came to the us in 1845 and warned the biggest threat to liberty was not from the government but social coercion, the tearing of the majority he called it. madison worried about the same thing. john stuart mill worried about it but it can be tear any of the minority. even relatively small groups of people that are ready to back you online, demolish your reputation, go to the search engine so you are called a racist mother first thing any employer sees, even small

minorities of people can make life living hell for dissenters and cause a widespread chilling effect and at the moment 2 thirds of americans say they are chilled, reluctant to say their true beliefs about politics for fear of social and professional consequences. 2 thirds, 60% of students on campus. that's approximately four times the level, the best we can measure, hard to compare. four times the level of 1953, the height of the mccarthy era. the reason is in the mccarthy era were a couple things you couldn't do and could be pretty safe. you don't know when you're safe with canceling and that is on purpose. they want to make us our own policeman. we are always afraid we will step on a new landmine. this is a widespread chilling problem and a disinformation problem, severe stressors on our ability to sort truth from falsehood and they are not in

the traditional bounds of 3 speech. this book is a ladder up to the next conversation. >> interestingly, the information issue which is sometimes called disinformation and sometimes misinformation and sometimes fake news and in general shows up as falls speech across a wide range of historical background. what i want to pose is i was listening to a seminar at a major university. talking about youtube and there was some sort of partisan difference related to speech or facts or whatever and whether inside or outside perspective

but at the end, most people were scholars. at the end of the seminar he posed the question which was nervous about posing or uncertain which was is the category of misinformation a way for us to put down a popular uprising? and if that is true, should we consider that, that it might be that? is true, that moment, and 2, is it possible? no one really engaged in either one of them but i think john talks about the differences. it is a problem because there are differences.

some suppression of speech is needed for business, right? it just happens. to be discussed and thought through. i had the feeling i might be engaged in putting down and apprising. >> you want to ask plane what that other role is? >> indirectly? the facebook oversight board? i will quickly say -- kindly and quickly. what i want to say is i don't have any evidence anything happened or anyone has said or anyone can see what facebook is doing the content moderation. ..l 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 that's to think about. and also beyond that which this caller was trying to force on us i think it may not be possible, even if we say you know, we've got to stop this stuff, it may not be possible. but it's an interesting perspective. what you think about all this? >> so i think acknowledging the free speech comes is essential to democracies, the idea that free speech is an unmitigated,, good and all circumstances i think is not persuasive idea. i think that social media has amplified, i don't think it is generated sort of polarization,

so it has amplified disinformation and hate speech. however, and i think for instance, january 6th, for instance, the attack on the capitol that probably could not have happened without social media. if the lies conspiracy theories had not been regurgitated on social media i don't think it would've happened. but on the other hand, i am more skeptical then john about this share of disinformation so a number of studies show that sheriff misinformation which is how do you find it and that's bob in and of itself, is not as messy as a narrative after the 2016 presidential election where it was fake news decided everything and people were manipulated into voting for trump. and also 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 resort sympathetic to trump, you are much more likely to consume and share this information then someone who is an independent or a democrat pics i think those are important nuances, but, but you know, even, so even if it's not as effective as we initially thought, you know, and absolute numbers if you convince two or 3000 people that the election was stolen and that would've helped motivate them to attack the peaceful transfer of democracy, that's a real problem for a state. like the u.s. so how do we handle it? and this is where i think the

european approach is that you are worse than the disease. the european approach is to say to facebook and others you have to remove illegal content or sometimes even like harmful content which is then not really defined, within say 24 hours or you will risk fines of up to 50 million euros. the effect of it is that it basically means done a number of studies which shows that been tn russia, turkey, venezuela come all the states basically copy paste that approach. they do it in bad faith obviously but we also see that the collateral damage to all kinds of other speech is enormous. so i think more in terms of technological development. so i remember i'm old enough to remember the blogosphere when it was blogs and not centralized platforms that were sort of the frontier of the internet digital age. at the time no one really cared about content moderation on the blog even if a blog at satan

million followers because it didn't really affect the entire ecosystem of information on the internet because no one, no single block could act as a chokepoint or as a massive disseminator of false information the way that centralized platform with billions of people can. so i think decentralization is one potential remedy and i think that chimes with the lessons of history of free speech. so for instance, the dutch republic became sort of the freeze free speech zone in europe and one of the key reasons for that was they didn't have a constitution, they didn't have laws protecting free speech but had a very weak political center and so the provinces of the dutch republic had a lot of autonomy and so if one province tried to censor someone they could skip state lines and set up shop elsewhere, and that cultivated sort of a culture of tolerance that was comparatively much more extensive than elsewhere on the continent.

another thing i think that might go some way is to provide users more control over content. and sort of allowing a could be ngos to fill filters that we could then use it so for instance, take the issue of anti-semitism. so some people believe that these campaigns to boycott israel amount to anti-semitism whereas others think this is legitimate debate. the facebook has to make a decision, should we, should this constitute anti-semitism or not, and then that has downstream effects are going on the platform. but if the adl which tends to promote and expand the definition of hate speech could then develop a filter you could use then you can shield yourself from what you perceive to be anti-semitism but it wouldn't affect everyone else. the same could be said with women. a lot of female journalists and authors fine a flooded with

misogyny that might not reach a threshold of illegal speech, but which nonetheless is, creates them cinema -- disincentive to engage in social media. so you could have a filter that filtered away some of the misogynistic terms, but again wouldn't affect everyone because there might be women is a 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 monica monarch sole sort of centralized approach where government and post standards on the tech companies or where the tech companies themselves sort of try to navigate through the lens of pr or stakeholder management. what do we do, have to do to avoid being summoned to capitol hill every second week and enter for this or that outbreak of what i call in the book elite panic about speech that this or that group doesn't like. ultimately i think you can adopt

as david hume old we did sort of a pessimistic case for free speech. david hume had been very optimistic about free-speech and then joe wilkes in the '70s or 76 in the uk sort of used free-speech as a blowtorch to attack everyone and sort of radicalized his supporters, and david hume sort of came to think of free speech that comes you know, radical speech is sort of an abuse of free speech but it's more dangerous to allow the government to clamp down so it's sort of, and unavoidable cost of free speech that your people with extreme views. so that's how i look at it but i would certainly not say that facebook and twitter we should just be different to what goes on there but i think there are other solutions then sort centralized content moderation that we should try to look at before we go down that road.

>> i'll add a response to john, the point you make, and then expand that made into a question for jacob based on what you just said. john, i think the question about populism versus elitism that this university professor asked would've been more appropriate 15 years ago then now because what we have learned in the last few years is that what we are not seeing online, for example, is the voice of the broad public. what we're discovering is that easily manipulable all of the systems and platforms are by small numbers of dedicated actors, be they the internet research agency in st. petersburg, anti-vaxxers 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 are cancers who are typically small numbers of

ideological left-wing radicals who are able to project themselves as much bigger forces. the reason we have constitution of knowledge and data wrote a book about it is in an unstructured market place of ideas it turns out instead of get sort of everyone equal big conversation to get manipulation by small dedicated groups, using tools of information warfare and that's why we go to so much trouble to develop all of the rules and norms and institutions like science in mainstream journalism, academia, law, a lot of government that said all the systems or require us to be on better behavior to expose argues to people who don't agree with us to make it very difficult for one faction to take over at the expense of others, all the things the u.s. constitution does, the constitution of dollars does in the epistemic world. it is day to think without those rules the people, they don't, the opposite is true. so expanding it to question for

jacob. if it's the case that there do need to be rolled out there and there should be government rules, i agree with you on that, i think the eu approaches to rigid and top-down and fining people, for heaven's sake, i don't think that'll work and a don't think it is desirable to 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 huge amounts of hyper partisan fake news in u.s. media, and others, and they were solved the same way which is it took a little while building up institutions and norms like publishers and peer reviews, , ethical norms in journalism, journalism schools that began to cabin these things. seems to me that's what facebook is doing. they're saying let's eat we can come up with some framework some rules and guidelines and make them transparent. we will tell people what they are. they will be voluntary in the sense you don't need to be on facebook, but if you are here this is what we expect.

seems to me like what worked in the past and the best available route. do you disagree with that? >> yeah, i don't think that a sufficient degree of transparency personal facebook it will be extremely difficult to find out what's going on. i also think, so one of the suggestions that my organization has made is that the terms that facebook and youtube and others should be, you know, they should be inspired by, the only thing that approaches something of the universe level because there's always this danger of free speech and debate of what i call the tyranny of american parochialism. everything is viewed through a u.s. lens, but these are global platforms and what's at stake in the u.s. is not the same and russia or iran where social media is basically the only way that you can circumvent official propaganda and censorship. so what we argue is that the terms at least on issues such as

hate speech and disinformation should then be inspired by international human rights norms because that's sort of the limit they should try to reach. but when we analyzed the content moderation of facebook we find that, on hate speech, for instance, of deleted comments that we look at it was 1.1% of the deleted comments that actually violated danish law. also found that what's been kept up, it , it was less than 0.f comments that had been designated as hate speech that actually violated danish laws. and i think those type of research, that that of research and looking at it in that way is an important antidote to sort of 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 that our research is exhaustive but i think it suggests that he might that this is actually not the case. and then should facebook tinker? i think that's unavoidable that they will be tinkering with different models. if we were part of it we would be experiment 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 platform as facebook, which give a huge incentive to governments and other powerful actors to say we want you to reflect our norms and our values because that will give us a huge say on how, i what is being allowed on speeded their sorely case for decentralization, and this question is not meant to be i gotcha or pin you down. it's curiosity driven. in the world we live in where

facebook as a large market share, would you rather that the facebook oversight board exist or not exist? >> i think it's a good idea that the oversight board exist, and they do, i think all your decisions you actually put to international human rights norms. the problem with that is of course doesn't work at scale? skill? i don't know how many decisions you've made so far but that amounts to sort of a nanosecond of content moderation decisions in real life across the platform, and candles content moderation decisions, can they reflect the jurisprudence, if you like, of the oversight board? >> this is why i want to go back to john, , his reply to me. first of all, it's not there was ever really, i'm not going to be defending completely a structured system. the first amendment in the public forum is structured, right?

jacob mentioned viewing a dissent in 2016, a vigorous kind of resistance to trump. the police were there to protect the protesters. so you have that structure. and you also had not perhaps as 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 come with a case of facebook, youtube is perhaps even more important because of the video element, you have a platform that is global with one, about 2 billion people on it every day doing things, 2 billion post would ever come right? the numbers are just immense. then you have things on it that are false speech. so who is the judge what speech is to come down?

is it facebook? are they to judge it because it contributes to maximizing shareholder value? that's one answer. the facebook answer in part has been to send disputed posts to these groups that decide that, right? the various kinds of panels that look at the speech and decide whether it's disinformation. when mark zuckerberg became concerned about disinformation, misinformation and so on, he said think you don't want on the platform include, we don't want obvious hoaxes and we don't want conspiracy theories. well, and so i think there was an assumption, it's 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, incitement is very hard to prove. but essentially you're turning over the question of truth the 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. you've got 2 billion people, 100,000 disinformation posts is a very small number. and if you have a panel or an oversight board that has to go through these things to determine the truth of them, they are not going to get very many. so it's very, , the scale, the e 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 now. we'll see. actually the algorithms,

algorithms at those levels make mistakes all the time. it's inevitable. so you have to decide what kind of mistakes you want to make and what to call start. so i don't think this is quite as, i don't think there is actually has been answered. there's been struggling with it. and finally the point i would make is abyss. you had, this is not a point about the current administration. it could be any administration. you have a president, an administration that is going to be running for reelection that has political concerns, et cetera, et cetera. and those are no pics sometimes they want, in recent cases, they want facebook or others to take down posts or taken 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 of them. this kind of job owning process, you know, what is truth in the context, and is 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 companies of agreement that a think a report that could easily get missed and often missed in the conversation. one, jacob said something which is important and true. i spent it all differently, but as important a 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 are number two. they buy with a.m. radio and

especially cable news, especially on the right, before and where the biggest spread of disinformation and misinformation is the oldest, and that's politicians. they can use all kinds of channels and resolve that in stop the steal. that was et cetera but i'm sure by social media but when you have 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 goal of disinformation it doesn't succeed primarily in changing people's minds but that's not what is trying to do. it's primarily interested in polarizing and confusing, and it's very good at that. secondary, secondary of

agreement when we do get the social media, i think it's an area of agreement, i think it is important to establish rules and boundaries and norms of conduct at a a recognized this will as be hard to enforce what 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 in the realm of -- it will introduce friction before the retreat like something so that there asked as facebook others don't you want to read this before you reach we did? make us think carter, change with algorithms work in terms of what's promoted and what's not and a fast velocity goes under lots of ideas about that. i think we're looking at systems that were designed for in which it just about getting eyeballs at any price. we discovered the price is high and assistance are now for ways to integrate more guidelines and guardrails into user experience. we don't know what that would look like but but i think we

general directions, and that's where the bulk of the improvement will come from. >> i'm going to direct us away from american colloquialism because i must say, i must have one of the things i've learned facebook is it's very hard for me as a person working here at cato working in d.c. is to then get beyond. one thing i learned by the way, and i will love your response to this, is that if i wanted to advance free-speech arguments, the worst thing i could do with my colleagues who 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 a parochialism, but also people can go to the content of free speech rather than the american experience. i think the respond much more favorably, right? so what's your general sense about outside of europe and the

united states, how is the free-speech story going? >> well, i actually agree with john that compared to 50 or 100 years ago we were living in a golden age of free speech, not only in terms of legal protections, even if outside the u.s. you might come the legal per day may not be a strong as under the first amendment, there are international human rights norms, protections, their human rights courts that try to uphold and enforce these norms, and even authoritarian states have to pay lip service to the idea of free speech because it becomes such a great norm. however, i would argue that the golden age is probably in decline. i i wrote a piece in foreign affairs we could go about the free-speech recession. so if you look at the numbers suggest that free speech has been in decline for more than a

decade, and went authoritarian states are on the rise it's not a surprise because you learn that going all away back to the athenian democracy the first thing that authoritarians will do when they tried to crush democracy or representative government is to go after free-speech. that's just, that's 101 of trying to push up authoritarian regimes. what worries me more is that liberal democracies have started to get free-speech perhaps as much as a threat than as a foundational value and there's a whole wave of repressive laws in democracy. one of them for instance, in the european union where the european commission wants to define hate speech as an eu crime, which would allow the commission to define hate speech across all 27 member states and said the minimum rules. i mean that to me as just a big flashing warning sign of how

leading democracies are thinking about free-speech. and, unfortunately, i don't see a lot of sort of civil society organizations in europe that are pushing back against this. i argue in the book that this is based on what i call the weimar policy which is a term i sort of borrowed from a brilliant professor told eric hynes are but i but i use it slightly differ from him. the idea is basically one that help we all share that of never again, that we will never want to experience the rise of sort of totalitarianism and industrial scale genocide in europe hopefully anywhere again. but the european idea is that you need basically militant democracy, this idea advance by carl newman steichen this german immigrant emigrate professionally to columbia and both his influential articles about doc democracy had to get tough and couldn't worry about free-speech

and had to sort of clampdown. but i try to show in a book that the binary republic even though it was very liberal compared to the empire under bismarck and the german confederation before that, it was actually quite hostile to extreme speech and it allowed laws and regulations for speech that we would never accept today. let me give you an example. so we german state could administratively man a newspaper for up to eight weeks if it spread false news or attack public officials or undermined the government. and so use of goebbels who art started the newspaper the enclave soda basically to troll particularly a jewish high-ranking police officer, claimed sort of proudly that it was the most frequently banned newspaper in germany. and the reason he started the

enclave was adolf hitler was banned from speaking and a number of german states. the most depraved anti-semite in history was probably you'll n schleicher who was the editor of the stroma and do as i think justly executed as part of the nuremberg trials because during the war he explicitly incited to genocide and a don't think anyone would argue that that is covered by free-speech. but during the weimar republic he was less explicit genocide but he did spread these dishes blood libels about jews and he was convicted on a number of times for offense against religion, including 1929 seconds to two months in prison, cheered by hundreds of supporters when leaving the courtroom and less than a year later the nazis increase the share of the vote including in nuremberg the hometown of striker where he was born. the radio did not allow communist or nazis on there d most alarming i think is the

nazis basically use the provisions in law and the constitution of the weimar republic have supposed to protect democracy, the use that to abolish democracy. that again is a flashing warning cited even for all of the good intentions if you adopt a set of laws that are restrictive of free speech, 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 rise of these, especially, i mean how far can you go in democracies if you want to counter especially of the digital age come how much censorship would it take to really suppress at the democratic voices, you know, where you could migrate from facebook to telegram. >> that to some extent is why they're turning to disinformation. its access to attention which you can swap. so on the international front

i'm not sure, think you would agree with this jacob but tell me, a development seems to me to be global very much happening in europe come very much in the u.s. 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 u.s. and in the eu again and again the justification for various kinds of chilling censorship, investigations, punishments. it is where protecting minority groups from being traumatized, being injured, being made second-class citizens, being told that don't belong on the planet. and as someone who was born in a very different world in 1960 d worked for years for same-sex marriage, we couldn't have done that without free-speech. as you said earlier i'm betting on this again and again. frederick douglass said, john lisette, mandela said it.

they all said without free-speech, as john lewis said, the subbasement would've been a bird without wings. i think that message is being lost. i think we're losing the battle internationally. what is your take? >> yeah, no. especially in democracies unfortunately i think that in a lot of states where they face censorship and repression they intuitively get that free-speech restrictions will harm the powerless more than anyone else. but i think this idea is really unfortunately prominent and i don't know the best way to counter it. hopefully a historical approach and the words of what was before is part of the solution. but i would also, look at here. free-speech restrictions in hungary and poland are actively being used against the lgbt plus committee. that should tell you something, and so, so look at the history

in the uk. when they first adopted this law to try to protect minorities from hatred, incitement to hatred, the very first person who was convicted was a black britain who it said something about white people, whereas a powerful white politicians were not prosecuted and so it created more controversy. but you also see sort of a goat for hate speech laws. more and more categories are being protected and what you see is those groups will then use it as a weapon against each other. it could be lgbtq+ community trying to use hate speech laws against religious conservatives and vice versa. and that i think really is dangerous because that sort of a race to the gutter. >> we are seeing the trans community use very censorious tactics in britain and the esco which also breaks my heart.

>> before i go to q&a let me ask you a follow-up on one of your points. so there's the international covenant on civil and political rights that the united states signed about 30 years after it was introduced in 1992. the icc pr, the international human rights law maine document contains to make interesting parts the relate to freedom of speech and this relates to the global element of free speech and now, , article 19 is very mh like the first amendment. it reads somewhat like the first amendment, on one hand. article 20 section two 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 required, you know, fostering war, aggressive warfare. now, clear there was a lot of

debate about this in the '50s is and '60s, but clearly you can see that article 20 came out of trying to not repeat the national socialistic experience in germany and so on. and yet there it is in international law, both a a sg statement of freedom of speech and our requirement for banding, which by the way facebook has, and others have a strong community standards about hate speech. so looking back, from your research, do you think that what 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 bloc. they tried to get a a similar provision in the universal declaration of human rights. eleanor roosevelt fought vigorously against it and western states succeeded initially but then lost the

battle with the international covenant on civil and political rights. and basically and was based on a 1936 stalin soviet union had an article 1-2-3 of its constitution it had an obligation to bring hate speech which a taste something about the concept. because stalin was not above using hate speech himself. and so that has been a dangerous instrument, but i would say that in the past ten years or so this provision has been interpreted very narrowly by a number of someone like david k who was a u.s. law professor but was the special repertory at the u.n. freedom of expression, and opinion and even human rights committee that sort of try to narrow it. i think the reason that densa is because in the u.n. system it so obvious that a number of states

are trying to gain the system and try to expand the interpretation of article 20 delegation to prohibit hate speech to basically allow them to prohibit dissent which is exactly what eleanor roosevelt warned about in in the '50s. but i'm sort of more hopeful now that the loophole has been somewhat close to a think the obama administration made a crucial role of that in 2011 with a fought against the campaign by islamic state to adopt a blast minivan at the international level. they actually a process from that resulted in a more limited interpretation of that. but it's interesting from you some of who is figures opposed to that provision that often brought on international human rights to say 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 bloc. >> so we had a microphone here, if you want to come down, and so everyone here and online can hear your question. please do so. when you come down before you offer that question, you have a choice of whether of revealing who you are or not. we preserve anonymity here so that speech is not shield. however, this is david boaz if you want -- david boaz, the -- >> i should put my mask back on. i want to go back to something jacob said early on, which was the culture free-speech is more important than the first amendment. 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 or on public

intellectuals generally have said about something going on in canada or britain or continental europe, that wouldn't happen here because we have a first amendment. now, maybe there's a question, what is a relationship between the first amendment and a culture of free speech? and its amount you could give canada a first amendment right now, would that change their culture? >> yeah, no, i think you're absolutely right. it's not a zero-sum game. i think there's a relationship between my point is that if the culture of free speech, the culture of tolerance that underpins legal protections 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 particularly at this point of time in america, without a

strong protection of the first amendment i think you would see speech restrictions being weaponized in various states, blue and red states, that would use them speech restriction in order to pound away at those they deem ideologically unsound. i think the bills against so-called critical race theory that we see and the number of republican states that are limited to education, i think they will probably be adopted at a much broader level, and you can actually see them when you ask immigrants and republicans about their degree of tolerance for different kinds of speech, he's huge partisan gaps. democrats very supportive of protests against racial justice in 2020. republicans much, much less so. republicans very supportive of first amendment extending even to misinformation. democrats much less so. so i think the first amendment

is really important. i just fear that the level of protection would erode if the underlying culture of free speech is eroding. >> , right, jacob, to remember that something, very loose paraphrase, , but given the choe between strong feet, strong free-speech laws plus week free-speech culture versus weak free-speech laws and strong free-speech culture he would take the stronger culture? as being the more important thing. >> i think so. >> i think it's in chapter three, not sure. >> i'm sometimes asked how do i feel about bounce on holocaust deniers in germany? what i tell people is that really 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 this environment support the values of free speech? and if they do then if you lost like that probably won't do a

great deal of harm. they probably won't be of use all that much and it's really the culture of free speech that is is the first thing we have to defend in that situation. maybe jacob wouldn't agree. >> yeah, no, and, unfortunately, you know, germany has of course a culture free-speech but what i find a book is that the german culture free-speech is a very much an elitist one and it has been so the throughout, wono down that rabbit hole either but the germans really, really concerned about the unwashed mob getting access to dangerous ideas. understandably given their history but but i worry thas they interpret it wrongly and leave ammunition for nefarious forces with the approach to speech. >> so i will make a remark about meal here which is the sum of your early remarks. i think he would probably use it to defend free-speech and

trans-global, and global situation. the problem with mill of course he says and our liberty this only applies to civilized countries barbarians can't do it. i think it's important when we can rescue the harm principle for our purposes but it is important to note that mill was off base there. that was really, because otherwise think about it you're somewhere else other than your and the united states and you're reading john stuart mill. you come across that. are you an advocate of free speech after that? [inaudible] >> you have no reason to remember that we ask a. >> i do. >> in new york when you are -- [inaudible] organization in denmark. you've come along the way, congratulations. you also mentioned i i would y our mutual friend rose, but when

nobody said was he's also a a senior fellow at cato institute. i looked it up and he's still there. my question, well, where was i? yeah, but flemming rose and i, oh, you're from denmark. why did you have to do that nasty thing about the cartoons? and every story seemed to start with rose -- publishing those nasty cartoons that made the arabs very upset. what they forget to tell, and i've gone through your videos, actually the danish muslims through the first punch in that. there was an innocent danish, like we all published educational children's books about things in the world, and it was about to educate them about what muslims were, since they were coming in to denmark

and the didn't know where it was. flemming rose was a party where you were hurt, somebody say that -- forgot his name, had withdrawn himself from making drawings that we do it all kinds of books for children. because they had given him death threats. so flemming said oh, my god do we really have a self-censorship problem in denmark? let's find out. and the story was that he went out to the danish cartoon organization, i think 22 cartoonists in denmark, and half of them said no, we dare not do it. some of them said okay. no, this is just anti-muslim propaganda. we don't want to participate. the ones that did to the cartoons did it to try to prove that we do not have self-censorship in denmark, and the rest is history. but i really like to tell people

that flemming was not the one who threw the first pudge. >> no, i don't think cartoonists throw punches at all. what is often also forgot his flemming actually wrote a very eloquent piece accompanying the cartoons picky argued that free-speech intolerance were enlightenment values that they apply to all and that no single group or individual could claim sort of special protection that if i can sort of the bigotry of low expectations to say that special rule should apply to danish muslims. they were to be part of the danish society equality intolerant would have to apply an equal terms and get you someone like the german famous author guenter grass who is comparing flemings piece and the cartoons, which i thought was despicable in many ways. of course the cartoon is also part and parcel of why those contact against charter to because those very few magazines

ackley showed solidarity -- republish the cartoons. >> the question leads me to come i have to reveal this. a colleague at facebook a work on the obama, worked at the united nations that you talked about, about religious 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 human beings and arguing for free-speech, the one group you can always count on, the diplomat you can always have at your side were the danes. i have to say i don't know i'll keep testing this, someday i will find an intolerant gain, illiberal dane, but that seems to me to be true. keep your eye out if you come across a danish person, probably they share your views. probably cato. >> we were the first country in the world that formally abolished any and all censorship

in 1770. didn't go so well, the guy who did it basically usurped the power of the king was executed, beheaded and had his hands cut off in public. >> okay. >> struck a blow for free-speech. >> i do want to get to some online questions here. there is many of them, many people are concerned about section 230 and about, section 230 is essentially why facebook is right to do all of this. they are outside laws of libel and so on. but there's a a couple of cass that i think the two competent to get into given, if your tips and comments about it with your interesting. but this whole question of culture, one person points out, these are anonymous questioners, that, you know, disinformation and so on and the problems online come if they didn't have

people who wanted it, who consumed it, it wouldn't exist. and second then 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 is based in the idea that ultimately we can exchange of views and suppressing views create distortions, right? and ultimately we can exchange of 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 is important. >> i'd be interested to hear john on this. and then i'll can come back. >> two things, one was education and the other was demand. >> you can answer the demand question. >> yeah, there's very large and

important element of demand poll in the world of conspiracy theories and disinformation in. people wanted. it fills a gap in the life that often gives them a sense to insider knowledge of purpose and mission in life and a villain to slight and all that. the reason we have a constitution of nosy because they're 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, maybe good for an individual or fun for an individual to consume and spread conspiracy theories about say jews, but it doesn't take much about to despoil the epistemic environment and that's what we have rules and structures throughout society, not just in the epistemic realm. the second point was -- the big one. >> what extent does education -- >> education seem to have some benefit. that doesn't sound like a

controversial phrase, let me put it that way. but what i have in mind is that i think a lot of the problems about social media have to do not just with the design of social media per se, but the environment in which they find themselves, which was a population which it have been exposed to these tools was epistemically naïve about the lack of professor francis as well, if a lot of people are going to be doing it it must be popular. it seems to be helpful in countries that are doing it to do education on media literacy, especially middle school and on into high school and critical thinking education seems to a better preparing ourselves for the pitfalls that we encounter in this environment. so yeah, i'm a fan of those kinds of measures. they are coming to the united states. of course i don't think should be dictated by government wanted to think we can better prepare ourselves for encountering the

environment that we are now in and we could hardly prepare ourselves for it, i don't know, jacob come what you think? >> one of the things that i regret not including in the book is what i see as 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 same religion or nationalism does. >> or qanon for that matter. >> or does an particular circumstances. so like the founding generation, would free-speech and the opposition to british, to the stamp act and other british attempts to limit a dissent would bind them together. they were advancing free-speech as a bulwark of liberty against british slavery. but when the revolutionary war had been one, free-speech it suddenly became a principal amplified their political and philosophical differences, and then suddenly you have sort of

quasi-war between the greatest generation of americans and you have sort of alexander hamilton arguing that this sedition act should be vigorously enforce against anyone that is slandering for using illicit propaganda against any government officials come should be prosecuted, and foreigners who were responsible for the incendiary prices should just all of them should be thrown out of the u.s., where sort of madison writes a very eloquent defense of the first amendment, jefferson is also 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 fed's. he sort of says, you know, we shouldn't prosecute each other with laws. but then in 1803 testing has been dragged to the mud by the federalist president and he writes in his private letter suggesting it might be a great

youtube prostitute some of these federal papers in state court and some of them are. that shows even if jefferson is liable to what in the book i call milnes cars, basically the unprincipled and selected defense of free speech, then that is 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 intolerant and rebuilt the sort of fragile patch on top of it which is tolerant and free-speech, but that constantly has to be updated and we have to build a firewall about it and where that firewall sort of sales, our or default mode will override it and we back to intolerant. and i think in those circumstances sort of nationalism our religion will provide a sense of meaning come social creation and in the circumstances free-speech with the suddenly be seen as a threat to that sense of social creation

that binds us together and that is particularly dangers in times of uncertainty, of political polarization somewhere less the times that we live in right now. >> i would be remiss if i didn't speak up on behalf of my gut anonymous professor friend. i don't think, i think he probably agrees pretty closely with what john thinks about these matters. but he thought there was a normative argument, that normatively good to suppress essentially a political movement and that you needed that argument, and john did she want in his book. but beyond that he raised the question of is it even possible to commit this kind of suppression and essentially prevent a political movement from continuing to its ends? and i would say that's an interesting question because remember, it may be that you can suppress speech at scale, but there's, the problem with that is that you also inevitably

suppress a lot of speech that is protected. all right? this is a facebook problem, not going around and seeing something is a whole, that's bad, right? there's 2 billion people writing. you can't do that, 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 come i don't think anyone seriously believes you can suppress speech in the current environment. the question now the reason i wrote the constitution of knowledge i think the jacob is doing his work in this book is to get with the guidelines and gardens are going to go so that we can incentivize ourselves for prosocial ways. he manages been doing there forever and that is not about suppression or it is not about rewiring some particular political outcome. it is figure out how to be our better self. >> i think there are some interesting places to look for

inspiration. so taiwan i think is a very interesting place. he basically had this sunflower movement which were these sort of hackers basically who squatted parliament and one of them is now the minister of i think technology, audrey tang and they basically 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 the neighborhood should there be, i don't know, a bypass, 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 reporting that.

>> that's an interesting one. another company field called cognitive immunology which is look at can you kind of create firewalls in communities to slow the viral spread of misinformation. there's lots of interesting thing but i will? of the acid early. i said no one really thinks you can suppress speech or political movements in this environment. soma does and i think it is china. we have got to china yet but talk about the challenge to this paradigm. >> that was, you can suppress speech. it's just that you get lots of false positives come to. >> and i think, you know, china is probably i would say the soviet union during the stalin was probably the most censorious state, least in the 20th century, but china is probably, current china on under xi jinping is probably winning that can't is because technology is binges being used in such a way.

but the worrying thing is that china is creating these digital client states. it's exporting its technology, and also and apra cripple and lynn end quote, the capitalist placentas the rope with which we will hang them come at a think that is a little bit true with some western companies who sister going into china and building the great firewall can sort of google working secretly to try and build a search engine that incorporate the dictates of the chinese communist party. so i think china is really, their ambition is that they will be able to control speech in almost every detail. and i think the traditional censorship is really, really astounding but they have more devious ways from flooding online community with propaganda to just having around-the-clock detailed surveillance, which is

a much more probably 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? 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 really i think a huge worry. >> so i hope for the people online who had many good questions that i've tried to go through and get some things and speak to things here, so please don't take offense if i didn't get quite to your question as always there were more questions and kate is a private institution so we can censor as we wish. >> that's happened here before. >> but i think we got to the issues that were raised in many cases, and it does show the importance of the social media

and the book is "free speech." the author is jacob mchangama and he's been here kidded today. i hope he comes again many times. our friend john rauch has also commented today. you should look 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. and lunch is upstairs. [applause] and you can buy books outside, too. >> american history tv saturdays on c-span2 exploring the people and events that tell the american story. at 12:30 p.m. eastern on the presidency house speaker nancy pelosi along with the missouri congressional delegation unveil a bronze statue of harry truman to the u.s. capitol rotunda are at 1:30 p.m. eastern to mark the 50th anniversary of the return

of american pows from vietnam in 1973, author alvin townley talks about their harrowing experience and the work of the national league of pow/mia families to bring them home. exploring the american story. watch american history tv saturdays on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. ..

>> there's a lot of places to get political information and only on cspan straight from the press.