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this is jacob mchangama, free speech from socrates to social media which is available now and available for a couple of weeks and is getting a very strong and appreciative audience i would say in the united states and you will find i think it's an audience in europe as well so we thought it was great, we've known jacob for a while and who better to have just a conversation amongst like-minded people with some differences than john rauch so let me give you, what 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'm john samples, vice president here at cato and i thought jacob

would tell us about the book and you talked about the issues and turn to you and a in a little while . jacob mchangama is the founder and executive director of the danish think tank justitia and most of the podcast clear and present danger: a history of free speech. i highly recommend that, it's a very interesting podcast series and is available. his writing on feet free speech has appeared in the economist, foreign-policy and many other outlets around the world . he was in copenhagen denmark. john rauch is a senior fellow in government studies and author of eightbooks . writing that really made me feel bad.eight books, how do you doit ? many other articles on policy and government, his articles gshave been highly influential as you may know. his many brookings publications include the 2021 book the constitution of knowledge, a defense of truth as well as the 2015 e-book

which i think more and more is coming into its own political realism. big-money and backroom deals, constraints in american democracy and he also writes for the atlantic and is a recipient of the 2005 national magazine award, the industry's equivalent of the pulitzer prize. so let's get started here, jacob could you tell us something about the book, what led you to write it, and also the podcast and some of the themes that you found and what is really i have to say just been a striking effort at research. you've really conquered a very demanding very broad set of issues and it's very hard to work with. it's 2000 years. >> first of all thank you john, thank you for hosting me. one of the views and i really

appreciate that opportunity also because it's almost exactly two years since i was in washington and that was also speaking at a cato conversation and you i think we were having a dinner at a time where seen in hindsight it might have been the most responsive paradise. >> it could have been a super spreader event .. yes, so what led me to write this book? i was born in a secular liberal denmark and in my youth, free speech was sort of taken for granted. it was the air that we breathe and sort of in the 90s and early 2000's. so i didn't really think about it. i think most people didn't rk because it was not a threat, e it was just out of daily life a

. then denmark became the epicenter of the global battle of values over the hrelationship between free-speech and rigid religion when someone who later became a good friend of mine was the editor of a danish newspaper published a number of cartoons depicting the prophet mohammed which led to a global crisis and fleming and many others had xtaround-the-clock security because of threats from extremists but that forced many danes and i think many in europe and maybe around the world really, what is this principle that we hailed as a sort of enlightenment value and the foundation of democracy, is it really that important and a lot of people said he is not so important. these cartoons are punching down on a vulnerable minority and this is not what free-speech was supposed to be about. and that sort of surprised me, shocked me a little bit and what i also saw was that really people on the right

were sort of free speech absolutist when it came to the cartoon and we had a number of governments who then adopted a number of restrictions on religious free-speech basically targeted not formally but everyone knew it was targeted t at extremist muslims . and that limited free-speech and i was sort of saying this goes against the very principles that we held up, the cartoon affair but a lot of people on the right isaid the speech is important but in order to safeguard our fundamental values we have to live with free-speech in these particular extremes. that led me to really try to investigate bowl history of free speech, what's at stake, what does it mean when a society is based on free-speech, and what does it mean if this principle is it really worth all the fuss. and i found that it was. but i think looking at present debate about free-speech you can have a more detached attitude rather

than the culture war tainting everything when youlook at it through the prism of the past . so the book really starts. i locate the origins of free-speech and democracy some 25 years ago where the athenians had two kinds of free speech, one of them either being equality of speech which was exercised in the assembly where all freeborn male citizens had a voice in debating and passing laws but perhaps even more of even more consequence was the second concept called heresy which means something like uninhibited speech which allowed a cultural tolerance and free-speech which so, if you were up late so you could set up an academy and you could basically teach philosophy that was not specific, particularly fond of the democracy that allowed you to philosophize.

you could have foreigners like aristotle set up shop and until the tolerance or thin socrates good people and wrote them in the marketplace and in athens and the athenians i think came up with a, he said there in athens you're free to criticize yet you praise the spartan constitution but in sparta is the bitter enemy of theathenians, you could only praise the spartan constitution and that really still is the litmus test of free-speech, are you able to criticize the political system under which you live ? the athenian system obviously by our standards was not radically a gallon but by the time it was very much and eat yellow cherry on and free-speech idea . i sort of contrast that with

the roman republic where there was a much more elitist top-down approach to free-speech so you would have senators like cato, like cicero who believed in free-speech but mostly sort of or the senatorial elite, not the romans dozens who did not have a igright to address the way that athenian citizens did and i think these two concepts, elitism and a gala carrion free-speech have been intentioned throughout the history of free-speech especially when the public sphere has been expanded even through technology. you have a printing press, radio, telegram and social media or through political development so it could be democracy giving the vote to women, to religious racial minorities. that has always been an elitist pushback against this idea and a consensual dread that the unwashed mom was unfit to be given access to

information. that had to be filtered by the elite because otherwise everything would go to hell. so that's a very important sort of thesis in the book. another one is related to that is that i argue that many today see free-speech as infringing unequal power relations. i argue free-speech may be the most powerful engine of human equality human beings have other stumbleupon at t every single oppressed group or minority has relied on free-speech and principle to further their cause and to qu state 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 literature and ideas. so take virginia of course in 1776, virginia became the first state to adopt a bill of rights even before the declaration of independence. press freedom was the bulwark of liberty but in 1836 virginia passes a law that it's a crime to deny that my masters have a right to property like slaves. and a whole laundry list of ways to try and counter oabolitionist ideas. we argued for a universalist idea of free speech which he said would basically destroy slavery and he argued that free-speech is not does not depend on the color of your skin or the size of your wallet and the right of free speech is a precious one

especially to the oppressed. i would say that is another theme that runs through the book. i'm staying at a hotel here at lafayette square very close to it and go see a placard there showing how in 1917 a number of women's rights advocates were burning an effigy of president woodrow wilson and they were arrested and find many of these women for the right to vote and i remember thinking about that in 2018 and i took my son to a museum and we went outside, tens of thousands of people were protesting most of them wearing these pink pussy at and shouting obscenities at the person at the time and the nypd was there to safeguard their first amendment rights to safeguard y

the president in terms that f were probably more aggressive than those before them and i thought that was really a sign of how free-speech had furthered the rights of ly groups that had previously been persecuted and of course john has written eloquently about how that was also the case for the gay rights movement so when you see this huge increase in acceptance and tolerance of interracial and gay marriage i think that that was not achieved through censorship and putting people in jail, it was largely worn by people using the first amendment rights to do activist and an appeal to common humanity. and the last thing i might want to highlight is that ultimately i believe that free-speech, the health of free-speech in any given nation depends on more on our culture of free-speech been lost so the first amendment was read by 1791 it hadn't changed the wording but 1798 you could go to jail for criticizing president john

adams. and that would be supported by people likehamilton and washington , the federalist where with jefferson and madison on the other side of that conflict. then you go to as i mentioned laws prohibiting abolitionists but if you go to world war i, the supreme court is completely fine with sending people to prison for 10 or 20 ryears for posting americaninvolvement in world war i . you have the red scare and so on and you really have to get into the 50s before free-speech is consistently protected and reaches the threshold e by the end of the 60s with sort of that very high threshold for limiting specific viewpoints and i think that reflects a change in cultural attitudes, and norms and among americans

because you see that actually also in famous works like on liberty. he is at least as concerned about the stifling norms in victorian england as he is about the censorship of the magistrate when society's tendency to ueimpose its values on defendants is engaged in free-speech. george orwellsays some of the same things . that's why i worry for this country because in my view both sides there are probably more than two sides but they're eating away at the culture of free-speech in this hyper polarized partisan nature of american politics which i fear will ultimately have ffdownstream effects that might affect how the first amendment is constitutionally

protectedwhether it's 10 or 20 years .that was an executive summary. >>. >> john, some comments for comment is thank you john, thank you cato even though i think most ofour viewers are online it's nice to be in a room with actual human beings . i feel very good about that. the only thing i don't feel good about is that in your introduction you didn't mention my first and seminal work on this subject now 29 years old. find the inquisitors, then you tax was published by whom? >> the cato institute. >> it's even worse than that because the second edition john and i corresponded frequently because i was a publisher of it for cato. how could i forget that. >> don't forget the audiobook narrated by penn gillette.

>> i hope they get to cato because at the time i couldn't 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 areignored for 35 years . >> it really sold and the second edition did quite well. >> i thought i'd say two things quickly, the first is about the book and the second is about what we learned from the book and the second is about the environment we're in right now. get it, read it. it's not only readable and comprehensive if the only thing like it until this book came along there was nothing that we that took you from the beginning of the ideas of free speech right up to social media is all they are, the ancient greeks, medial times where there were occasional outbursts of very interesting thinking only to besuppressed , the enlightenment, the long history of seditious libel

which reappears again and again. it's a fantastic book, i can't say enough about it. it will be a touchstone for years to come and is also a lot of fun . second thing, what i learned from the book or maybe we learned from it is that the idea of that the government should not only allow but actively protect speech and thought which is icseditious, vulgar, offensive, wrongheaded, bigoted. or just plain wrong, the idea that government should actually protect that is the most crazy counterintuitive wacky social idea of all-time bar none. and if you popthat proposition to someone on the street say what's the matter with you . and it's only the redeeming

feature is it'salso the single most successful social idea of all-time bar none . it gives us the peace, freedom and knowledge that builds thissociety but because it is so deeply counterintuitive , it took 2500 years to build in the form we know it and as nathan just said the current form in the united states is very young. justextremely young . it's the environment in which the founders wrote the first amendment was much more restrictive than today's. so what i remind people of the but i would say take away from this book is that defending and protecting this radical wacky proposition requires getting up every morning and explaining it from scratch. so whole new generation and our kids will have to do that and their kids and grandkids every single day and we just need to be cheerful about that because as this book shows you where doing

incredibly well. i'm not sure jacob would agree with that but compared to for example my grandfather's time the greatest novel of the 20th century ulysses was banned by the government and confiscated . couldn't happen today . right at the present however we have i think a couple of challenges . it's really been the direct paradigm and lejacob and me and john and all of us, because they're quite unconventional. we're used to thinking of free-speech as something that we protect against and intrude by sensors, primarily . free-speech in terms of legal protections is stronger in america thani'd say anywhere in the world . >> i think that's accurate. >> and i think it may be about to get stronger with the current supreme court. vethe kinds of challenges we face however don't think that box. one is disinformation.

and the other is what's often called cancel culture. the systematic use of social coercion to kill and silence. disinformation is not about censorship, it's actually about a stephen batting from former advisor happily and accurately put it sending flooding the zone. so much, silly lies, half-truths, conspiracy theories andexaggerations that no one knows which end is up . and it turns out that forms like social media are tailor-made for this because their business model is to maximize eyeball for revenues in the way you maximize idols is the tracks conspiracy., outraged which is addictive and so forth. what we didn't know when the internet got going which we thought would all be a big iopen forum and marketplace of ideas and the best ideas would rise to the top we did not realize easy it would be to manipulate this environment to make it epistemically toxic. it's now well-known that false stuff travels much

faster and much further online than true stuff which is more expensive to make and much less fun to click on. that is not a problem you can n tackle with traditional free-speech . in fact it does the opposite, itharnesses free-speech, weapon ices it and turns it into a weapon of epistemic destruction, a weapon of chaos . and i think jacob and i we k can talk about this but jacob and i may have something of a disagreement on that because i think he's kind of a purist and once platforms like facebook which he sees as platforms to written essentially adopt all morality though not the law of the first amendment and i think that's impractical, unsustainable and portrays a lot of the rest of the mission which has to do with being a community of business i and a publisher. so i think they're going to have to be contentmoderation and it's a hard problem . but getting it right is a lot more complicated than just saying free-speech online. the second area which jacob

thinks is important, so called cancel culture, the weaponization of social coercion. that's always been around, tocqueville came to the us in 1835 and warns the biggest threat was not from the government, it was from coercion, the tyranny of the majority he called it .wo madison worried about the same thing. john stuart mill worried about it but it can be tyranny of the minority, even small groups of people that are ready to sdemolish your reputation, go to the search engines so that your called a racist the first thing any employee sees. even small minorities of people can make life a living hell for dissenters and cause a widespread chilling effect and at the moment two thirds of americans say they are reluctant to say there true

beliefs about politics. two thirds and that's 60 percent of students on campus. that's four times the level to the best we can compare soap four times the level of 1953, height of the mccarthy era and the reasonfor that is there were a couple things you couldn't do and you can be pretty safe . in the canceling area you don't know when you're safe and when you're not and that's on purpose. i want to make our own police, we're always afraid we will step on a new landmine. this is a widespread thchilling problem and our severe stress on the epidemic environment that is our ability to tell truth from falsehood. they're not things within the traditional bounds of free-speech so this is a ladder up to the kind of next conversation that is now beginning . >> interestingly i want to go back to the disinformation issue before you can respond to it. which is also sometimes

called disinformation, sometimes called misinformation, sometimes called fake news and in general shows up as speech, a wide range of historical backgrounds. so what i want to post, yesterday i was listening to a major university and a scholar was talking about youtube. measuring youtube and so what he saw there was not some partisan differences related to speech for fax or whatever, but rather an insider outsider perspective. and at the end of the, this was a scholar most people would know i think, at the end of the seminar he posed the question which was somewhat ewnervous about posing or uncertain which was that is the category of disinformation a way for us

to basically put down an uprising, a populist uprising ? >> .. i do think john talks about the differences -- it is a problem because there are and some sort of suppression of speech needed but it just happens discussed and thought through because i have had the feeling i might be putting downmy an uprising.

>> you want to explain what the other wrote is? >> indirectly, h support. i have to say -- what's that? yes, kindly inquisitive. what i want to say is i don't have any evidence of anything that's happened for anyone who said they see what facebook is doing in content moderation as political effort to head off a political movement. i should also say i have inside knowledge, no evidence facebook is pursuing a jihad against conservatives outside or inside. however, when you think about the big picture and beyond that

the caller was trying to force on us i think, this may not be popular even if we say we got to stop this. it may not be possible but it's interesting. what you think about this? >> acknowledging free speech comes with cost is essential, the idea that free speech is under all circumstances is not a persuasive idea is amplified and hate speech. i think january 6, the attack on

the capitol probably could not have happened without social media. conspiracy theories have been regurgitated on the media, ' don't think it would have happened but on the other hand, i more skeptical about the share of disinformation, a number of studies show disinformation, how do you define it? it's not the narrative after the presidential election where satan is decided everything and people for manipulative to vote for jump in those most likely to be persuaded by conspiracy theory were already someone who hated hillary clinton and democrats, you're more likely to

share the information that someone who's independent so those are important nuances but even if it's not as effective as we initially thought, in absolute numbers if you convince twoha or 3000 people the electin was stolen and helps motivate them attack peaceful transfer of democracy, that's a problem for the u.s. how do we handle it next this is where the european approach is a cure worse than the disease so is to say to facebook and others who have to remove illegal content or harmful content within 24 hours or you risk a

fine of 50 million euros and the affect is done a number of studies that show russia, turkey, venezuela in this approach do it in bad faith obviously but we see collateral damage to other speech is enormous so i think more in terms of technological developments. i'm old enough to remember there not essentialist platforms that were the frontier of the digital age and no one cared even if they had 1 million followers, it didn't affect the entire ecosystem on the internet because they couldn't act as a tomassive disseminators of false information with billions of people so i think

decentralization is one potential remedy and it's the lessons of the history of free speech so when dutch republic became the first free speech zone in europe and a key reason for the didn't have a constitution or laws protecting free speech but a weak political center so the problems had a lot of autonomy so if one tries to censor someone they could give state lines and stop shop and it cultivated a cultural tolerance comparative to much more extensive elsewhere on the continent. another thing is to provide more control over content allowing ngos that we could use. the issue of anti-semitism, some

people believe boycotting israel for anti-semitism where others legitimate so facebook has to make the decision, should it constitute anti-semitism or not? that's for everyone on the platform. ado that promotes expansive definition of hate speech could itdevelop a filter you can use than you can get yourself but it wouldn't affect everyone else. the same could be said with women, female journalists and authors are flooded with misogyny that might not reach a threshold of illegal speech but nonetheless creates disincentive to engage on social media so you have a filter that filters it

but it wouldn't affect everyone because there might be women who say i want to see what the bigots are saying and expose people. it's more of a solution than the centralized approach where government imposes standards on the company's for the tech companies themselves try to navigate through stakeholder management, what we do to avoid being summoned to capitol hill every weekend and the outbreak of what i call this or that group but ultimately you can -- a pessimistic case about free speech in the 70s in the uk

use free speech as a blowtorch to attack everyone and radicalize and he came to think of free speech, radical speech, abuse of free speech but dangerous to allow the government unavoidable cost of free speech so that's how i look at it but i would not say facebook and twitter, we should be in different but there are other solutions and content moderation we could look at before we go down that road. >> i'll add a response to what you said and expand into a question for jacob based on what you said. john, i think the question about population the university

professor asks would be more appropriate 15 years ago than now because what we have learned is what we are not seeing online is the voice of the broad public, what we discover is how easily manipulable the systems and platforms by small numbers of dedicated actors, internet research agency in st. petersburg, anti-vaccine using a combination of thoughts and controls and search engine optimization to make a small number of activists look like consensusyp online whether they are counselors whether they are typically small numbers, left-wing radicals to protect themselves, the reason we have constitution and knowledge and they wrote a book about it is in the unstructured marketplace, it turns outul instead of getting everyone equal, big

conversation, you get manipulation by small groups using pools of information and that'she why we go to so much trouble to develop the rules and norms, signs and means during journalism, academia, law, a lot of government to set up all this that requires us to be on better behavior and expose views and make it difficult for one to take over at the expense of others, all the things u.s. constitution does, constitutional knowledge says it's naïve to think without those roles,o pete doan, the opposite is true. expanding for question for jacob, if it's the case there need to be roles and there shouldn't be government rules, it's too rigid and top-down and finding people for heaven psaki? how don't think that will work

in its not desirable. it seems what facebook is doing is the right approach. we had earlier problems like this, the rise of offset printing in the united states that led to huge amounts of hyper- partisan media and others is the same way, building up institutions and norms like publishers and. reviews, ethical norms and journalism, journalism school and it seems to facebook is doing, let's see if we can come up p with rules and guidelines. it will be voluntary, you don't need to be on facebook if you are, this is what we expect. it seems to be what's worked in the past and the rest available way. >> i don't think that's transparency but it's difficult tokn find out what's going on ad one of the suggestions is that

the terms facebook and youtube and others -- they should be inspired -- the only thing that approaches something, there's always the free speech debate, the tierney, everything is aviewed through the u.s. land t if the u.s. is not the same in russia or iran social media is the only way for propaganda so what we argue is at least on issues of hate speech and ldisinformation should be inspired by human rights and that's the limit open analyze the content moderation, we find

hate speech deleted comments the say we looked in the piloted and what's being kept up, is less than .006% of comments dadesignated as hate speech that violated the laws in those research, looking at it in that way an important antidote european politicians are pushing the basically what forms are flooded with illegal content. i'm not going to say our research is but it suggests this is not the case. should facebook tinker? it's unavoidable but they will

tinker with the models. they wereha part of it, who woud expense all kinds of things but that's also a decentralized model that would be better because you have more experimentation by various platforms rather than having a dominant but for my facebook which is huge incentive to governments and others to say we want you to reflect our norms because that will give us a huge say on what's being allowed. there's certainly the case for decentralization and the question is not meant to be a got you or pin you down, his curiosity driven. in the world we live in where facebook has large market share, would you rather facebook oversight exist or not? >> is a good idea the board exists and they do show

international norms. the problem is the work at scale because i don't know how many decisions you made so far but a nanosecond of content moderation in real life across the platform and the content moderation, can they reflect the jewish movement? >> i want to go back to john's reply. first r, it's not that there was ever -- are not going to defend completely on structure, the first amendment in the public forum'sen structure. jacob mentioned in 2016 a vigorous resistance and they protect the protesters. you have that structure and you have perhaps not significant but theree was not protected by the

first amendment. the real question is, with the case of facebook youtube is perhaps even morehe important wh a video element you have a platform mobile, one about 2 billion people on it every day. the numbers are a myth then you have things that are false so who's to judge what speech is to come down? is it facebook? are they to judge because it contributed to maximizing shareholder value? 's book answer and part has been to send disputed posts to these groups that decide that, the

various panels that look at the speech and decide if it is disinformation. wheng' mark zuckerberg's concern about the misinformation, he said things you don't want the on the platform, we don't want conspiracy theories. i think there's an assumption, it's easy to tell whether this. american political system, who basically leave it leading up to the incitement. essentially the turnover the question of truth two small numbers of the determination of the facts. i hasten to add, my impression

is that's not the way it works because of what john mentioned which is the problem of scale. if you got 2 billion people, 100,000 disinformation is a small number and if you have a panel, and oversight board to go through these things to determine the truth, they won't get to very many so the one thing about social media that is different is the scale and it turns out to be humans can't manage the system. the 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 the costs are

so i don't think there has been an answer. finally i would say this. this is not about the current administration, it could be any administration. you have a president, and administration that will run for reelection and political concerns and etc. and those are norton known. sometimes they want facebook or others to take down post. and they will call the police in but everyone knows. facebook is on tv asking for regulation considered by congress if the president is that process, he could prevent it. this process -- what is truth in

that context? is involved in ways perhaps first amendment doctrine has been realized and can act on. i'll mention a couple of things that have gone by, areas of agreement can be missed in conversations, jacob said something important and true, i spent a little different way. based on my reading of the literature of misinformation and disinformation, it's not clear that they are even number two. am radio and cable news especially on the right but the biggest spreader of ndmisinformation and disinformation is the oldest and that's politicians. they can use all kinds of schannels and we saw that in the

steel accelerated by social media but a former president of the united states must political party and conservatives media plus dozens of lawsuits pushing a lie, it will get through some all for focusing on social media but a moment to blame technology first and the principles of disinformation and misinformation apply across everyy channel -- and there are many channels, so kudos for pointing that out. i also agree the goal of disinformation doesn't succeed in changing people's minds but the heart of doing, it's primarily interested in polarizing confusing and it's goodo that. secondary agreement, when we do get to social media, i think an area of agreement, it's important to establish rules and olboundaries and norms and i recognize this would be hard to enforce but i also think long

run the larger bulk of the solutions will be in the realm of policy design, it will be product design for grandpa systems to slow people down and aintroduced friction before thy retweet or like something so they are asked, you want to read this? change the way algorithms work in terms of what's promoted not and how fast and there are a lot of ideas about that. i think we're looking at systems designed for an age in which it's all about just getting eyeballs at any price, we've discovered the price is high in the systems looking for ways to integrate more guidelines and guardrails into the user experience. we don't know what it will look like but i think we have general direction and that's where the bulk of the improvement will come from. >> i'm going to direct us away because i must say one of the

things i've learned with facebook, it's hard for me as a person working at cato and d.c. has been to get beyond, one thing i learned by the way, and i love your response to this, if i want to advance free speech argument, the worst thing i could do with my colleagues that didn't come from the united states would say the word first amendment or united states becausece there's this response but also people really do, it they do could the content rather than the american experience, they respond with favorable so what is your general sense outside of europe and united states? how is the free-speech story going? the matter i agree with john compared to 50100 years ago are living in the golden age of free

speech, not only in legal protection a second risk legal protection may not be as strong under the first minute, the human rights and protections and human rights try to uphold and they would have to pay lip service to the idea of free speech. it would argue the golden age probablyly has declined so i wre a piece about the free-speech possession so if you look at the numbers, they suggest free-speech has been in decline for more than a decade and when authoritarian states are on the right, is not a surprise because you learn going back to democracy, the first thing they would do may try to crush democracy is go after free

speech, the 101 trying to establish the regime. what worries me more is liberal democracies you free-speech perhaps as much of a threat as a foundational value in a wave of reflexive laws. one for instance in the european union for the commission want to define hate speech is a crime which would allow the commission to define hate speech across all states and set minimum rules. that to me is a flashing warning sign of how leading democracies are thinking about free-speech. unfortunately i don't see a lot of things in europe pushing back against this. i argue in the book on what i

call a fallacy, a term i borrowed from a brilliant professor but i use it different than him in the idea is one i hope we all share that never again will want to experience totalitarianism and industrial scales on the other side in europe or hopefully anywhere but the european idea is you need this idea of the professor who went to columbia and wrote about how democracies when confronted had to get tough and couldn't worry about free-speech and had to clampdown but i tried to show in the book even though it was liberal compared to empire, it was hostile to speech and

allowed laws and regulations that would never be accepted today. an example, a german state could ban a newspaper up to eight weeks if it spread false news or attack public officials or undermine the government so those who started the newspaper basically to roll jewish high-ranking police officers claim sort of probably was the most frequent band newspaper in germany and the reason was adolf hitler was banned from speaking in german states, the most depraved in history of the editor, justly executed because during the war he illicitly

turned to genocide and i think anyone would argue that's covered by free-speech but he was less especially genocidal but spread on shoes but he was convicted a number of times including 1929, spent two months in prison and they were leaving the courtroom in less than a year later they increased the share of the vote in the hometown. the radio did not allow them and most alarmingly is the nazis used provision in the teconstitution that was supposed to protect democracy and use it to abolish democracy. again it's a warning sign even with good intentions if you dropped laws restrictive of free

speech, they might be used by enemies of democracy and they may not be efficient at countering the rise. how far can you go in democracy especially in the digital age, how much censorship would it take to suppress and the democratic bonuses in a way you could migrate to telegram. >> some extent why they turn to it. access to attention to on the international front, i think you would agree, a development that seems global happening in europe, the u.s. and the thing that breaks my heart about this debateel is the widespread belif free-speech arms minority.

we see again and again on college campuses and the u.s. eu again and again justification for various chilling censorship, investigation, punishable protecting minority groups being traumatizedei, second-class citizens told they don't belong onn the planet. someone who wase- born in a different world in 1960 and same-sex marriage, we couldn't have done that without free-speech. frederick douglass said it, john lewis says it. mandela said it, they all said without we speech as john lewis said it t would have been bird wings, i think that message iss being lost. i think we are losing that battle internationally. >> to be essentially in odemocracies, i think a lot of

pstates where they face censorship and repression, they intuitively get free-speech restrictions on them more than anyone else the idea prominent unfortunately -- i don't know the best way to counter it. hopefully a historical approach is part of the solution but look at europe, free-speech in hungary and poland are used against the lgbtq plus community and that should tell you something. look at the history in the uk when they adopted this law to protect minorities from hatred, the first person convicted was blackte britain who had said

something about why people were white politicians were not prosecuted, it created more but you also see hate speech laws, more categories being protected and you will see the troops were used as a weapon against each other, lgbtq plus community trying to use a speech laws against religious conservatives and vice a versa and that i think is dangerous because that raises to the gutter. >> the trans community now use these tactics in britain and europe. >> let me ask you a follow-up. there's the international covenant in the united states 30 years after it was used, the icc pr, international human rights

law contains interesting parts that relates to goodwill speech and the global element of free speech. article 19, like the first amendment on the one hand. article 20, section two includes a part that requires signatories too essentially fan hate speech and also aggressive warfare clearly there's a lot of debate onon this clearly you can see te article came out of not repeating the national socialist experience and yet, there it is, international law both strong

statement of freedom of speech and the requirement for banning which facebook has and others have strong community standards about hate speech so looking back in from your research, do you think -- which side of the international law within when now? t >> the interesting thing, i won't go down the rabbit hole but basically a provision advanced by the soviet bloc tried to get a similar declaration of human rights because the against it in question states succeeded but then lost the battle civil and political rights. basically it was based on 1937 soviet union in article one, two and three, the obligation to

prohibit hate speech which should tell you about the concept because he is not about using hate speech himself so that's a dangerous instrument but in the past ten years or so the provision has been interpreted narrowly by a number ofhe someone like david k, the n read him of expression and opinion in the human rights committee trying to narrow it and the reason is because it's obvious the number of states are trying to gain the system and expand the interpretation and obligation to prohibit hate speech and allow for him to prohibit this which is exactly what was warned about in the 50s that are more helpful now

that the loophole has been closed and was a crucial role when they fall against the campaign at the national level, andul processed that resulted in more limited but it's interesting as someone who's supposed to that that i rely on the comes to social media, to release that option and having to rely on a provision proposed by the soviet. we have a microphone here if you want to come down so everyone can hear your questions. when you come down, before you

asked the question, you have a choice of revealing who you are or not, we reserve anonymity here. this is david -- >> i want to go back early on, or truck free-speech -- [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]

>> i think you are right, it's not' a zero-sum game, if the culture of free-speech intolerance that underpins, the law is likely to follow behind that but that is coming is of no consequence, a it's very much of consequence. this time inat america without strong protection of the first amendment, i think you would see speech restrictions organized in variouss blue and red states tht would use speech restrictions to pound away at those deemed

ideologically unsound. his against so-called critical race theory we see is limited to education, they probably develop the at a broader level and you can see when you ask republicans about this degree of tolerance partisan gaps, democrats support of racial justice, republican's are supportive of extending misinformation. i think the first amendment is important, i just feel the level of protection would road the culture of free-speech is eroding. >> inar my right to be paraphrad but given the choice between

stronglu free-speech walls plus week culture versus week free-speech, take the stronger culture beingmi more important? >> i i am sometimes asked, how i feel about bands on holocaust in germany? tell people i don't get my underwear and then be mad about it because germany is a special case and what i worry more about, there's the culture of the country, does it support the free-speech? if they do, it probably wouldn't do a great deal of harm, it wouldn't do much is really the culture of free speech and the situation.rs >> unfortunately, germany has a culture of free-speech but what

i found in my book is the german culture of free-speech and elitist one has been -- i won't go down that rabbit hole either but they are really concerned about the mom getting access to dangerous ideas given the history but i worry they interpret it and leave ammunition with their approach to speech. >> a remark about mill here that goes to your earlier remarks. i think it would probably use it to defend free speech and a globalal situation. the problem is that he says it only applies the barbarians who can't do it. he can rescue the armed rentals but it's important to note they

were off-base otherwise think about if you're somewhere else in europe or the united states in your reading and come across the. are you an advocate of free-speech? >> [inaudible question]

[inaudible question] >> they were very upset. but theyre forget -- [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] >> i don't think he would throw aw, punch at all. what's often also said, there is an eloquent piece, free-speech

intolerance were no single group or individual quitclaim social protection and was the bigotry of the station to take special rules should apply, equality and tolerance apply on equal terms yet someone like the german famous author, comparing fleming which i thought was despicable inin many ways and it's also why there was an attack, it was one of very few magazines that showed solidarity. >> this leads me to, i have to reveal this, someone who worked on the obama work at the united

nations talked about harris and so on. she and i were talking one day and she said no when we were going into those un meetings arguing, the one group you can always count on, the diplomats. i'll keep testing this, someday i'll find an intolerant day but it seems to be true so keep your eye out. the probably share your views. >> were the first country in the world that formally abolished any and all in 1770, it didn't go so well the guys did it. the king was executed, but his hands cutlo off in public.

i do want to get to online questions. many people are concerned about section 230, essentially why facebook has the right to do all of this. they are outside the laws for that. a couple of cases, i think some are to come look at to get into but this whole question of culture, one person points out, these are anonymous questioners, this information and so on and the problems, they didn't have people who wanted it. second, there is the traditional last few years anyway, the response to what about education? will, ultimately we can exchange

the was and it creates distortion and ultimately we exchange views that will be better, it may not be perfect it was going to be otherwise. education, the ability to critically think. >> i'd be interested here -- >> is one of education and the other was -- there's a large demand in conspiracy theories and disinformation in the singular sense of knowledge and purpose in the reason we have a constitution is because there are so many ways to manipulate

us, intelligence provides no protection at all mother are dozens of biases and it takes a ndlot of discipline to keep us away, the collective action acproblem may be for good individual, to spread conspiracy theories about say choose but it doesn't take much of that to spoil the environment and that's why we have rules and structures throughout society. the second -- the keyword education seems to have some benefits. [laughter]n it doesn't sound like a controversial phrase, let's put it that way. swhat i have in mind is i thina lot of the problems around social media has not to do just with social media the environment in which to find themselves, a population never

exposedt', epistemically naïve like your professor friend, a lot of people are doing, it must be popular. it seems to be helpful in countries doing it to do educationn on media literacy lespecially middle school and high school and critical thinking education and better preparing ourselves for the pitfalls we encounter so i am a fan of those measures coming to the united states, they shouldn't be dictated by government but i do we can better prepare ourselves we could hardly prepare ourselves. >> one of the things i regret is what i see is the real problem with free-speech is that free-speech doesn't provide a

sense of meaning and purpose, it doesn't bind us together in the same way religion on nationalism because or does in particular circumstances, free-speech and opposition to british attempts to limit bind them together, advancing free speech against british slavery but when the revolutionary war was one, free-speech suddenly became principal that amplified the political and philosophical differences and you suddenly have civil war between the greatest generation of americans, alexander hamilton arguingn it's been nearly enforced against anyone slandering against any

government official should be prosecuted in those responsible, all of them should be thrown out of the greatest, what happens when jefferson wins? he gives a great unifying speech instead of owning defense, which in prosecuted each other but his name was dragged by the mud suggesting it might be a good idea to prosecute them and some of them did so shows if even jefferson is liable to what i call milton's purse, the unprincipled selected free-speech, it's something all

humanvu beings are vulnerable to soof we come with original software,, default mode we've built instead of the patch on top of it but constantly has to be updated and we have to build a firewall around it and where it fails or people were overriding we were back to intolerance. in those circumstances, nationalism or religion would provide a social creation and free-speech would be seen as a threatat that binds us together and it is dangerous in times of uncertainty of political polarization so more or less the times we live in right now. >> i'd be mystified didn't speak on behalf of my anonymous -- i

think he probably agrees pretty closely with john but he felt thereha was -- was it normativey good? john gives you one in the book but he raised the question, is it even possible to commit this suppression and prevent a political movement from advancing? i think that's a good question because it me be that you can suppress beach but the problem isis inevitably suppressed beach that is detected. this is the facebook problem, no going around and being something anything that's bad, there are two billing people, you can't do

that. >> i think it's a strong man question. i don't think anyone seriously believes you can suppress speech innk the current environment. the reason i wrote this, i think the reason pickup is during the work in the book is figuring out for the guidelines are so we can incentivize ourselves humanity has been doing it forever it's not about suppression or rewiring a political outcome, it's figuring out how to be a better self. >> i think are interesting places to s look like taiwan isn interesting place. he basically help us movement, hackers basically, one is now the minister of i think technology and they are

basically working on updating institutions to the digital age and trying to build institutions of apology that will increase rather than decrease the corporation at a local level, if you want to decide in the neighborhood, should there be a bypass? if this can help people come together deciding these issues, areas where people agree rather than looking at this agreement. >> that is an interesting one. cognitive immunology, can you create firewalls and communities to slow virus spread of misinformation? is a lot of interesting speaking

but i will correct something i said earlier, no one can suppress beach, someone does and i think it's china. we haven't got to china yet but talk about the challenge of this paradigm. >> can suppress speech, he does get a lot of false positives. >> china is probably i would say the soviet union was probably the most notorious state at least in the 20th century but china is probably winning those technologies being used but the worrying thing is china is creating the digital space, it's recording of technology and the capitalist will center do think

it's a little bit true with western companies going to china will integrate firewall, google working to build a search engine that incorporates or dictates the chinese communist party to their ambition is they will be able tot control speech in almt every detail and traditional censorship is astounding but they have more devious ways from flooding with propaganda to having round-the-clock details is a more effective way to control what people say if you're being watched in real time s all the time would you be afraid to speak out and social consequences if you lose the right to travel for the ability

to get a promotion if you say something wrong? that is a huge worry so i hope the people online with any questions, i've tried to go through it p here, please don't ndtake offense if i didn't get o your question. cato is a private institution. i think we got to the issues that were raised and it does show the importance of social media. the book is free-speech, author is jacob he's been here at cato today and i hope he comes many times against. our friend has commented you

should look for his book -- thank you very much both online and during the auditorium. i agree with john. lunch is upstairs. [applause] and you can buy books outside, to. ♪♪ >> american history tv 70s on c-span2, exploring people and events that tell the american story. 12:30 p.m. eastern on the presidency, nancy pelosi along with the congressional delegation unveil a statue of harry truman to the u.s. capitol rotunda. 1:30 p.m. eastern to mark the 50th anniversary of the return of american vietnam in 1973. alvin talks about harrowing experience and work of the national league of pow mia family to bring them home.

exploring the american story. watch american history tv 70s on c-span2 and a full schedule in your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. >> recently on the tv, college economics professor caleb fuller talked about missed of economics widely held. >> he lowers the cost is the benefit land like discrimination so to understand logic, compare how the free market works. in a free market prices adjust so there's no housing shortage in the reason it's important for us is because it makes it costly for a bigoted or somehow prejudiced landlord to turn someone away because of their skin color or any other characteristic they have that he

dislikes. the reason it would be costly is because the apartment unit would sit empty the face of such bigotry. behaving as a bigot the landlord for gross rental income that could be his. another one we detected, we stopped the cost but now we want to compare that logic to the situation under rent control. there's a shortage has a long line of people would like to rent housing so now when the vanguard decides to indulge his bigoted case, this time it's low cost to do so. when he passes over a perspective tenant for reasons of skin color or gender or religious beliefs or anything, he can be confident there's someone else in line behind this person who has a preferred