The real issue with freedom of speech
English original of article published in Italian this morning by La Stampa
There has been a great deal of talk recently on both sides of the Atlantic about how valuable freedom of speech is. Yet Donald Trump’s every action makes it clear that the real issue for all our democracies is not speech but power. Trump’s threats this week against the philanthropist George Soros, his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to force Disney to remove the comedian Jimmy Kimmel from its TV network and his lawsuits against the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are all about exerting state power to intimidate opponents in the hope that critics’ voices become quieter and less influential. The same motive, mixed with vengeance, explains the indictment of the former head of the FBI, James Comey.
Neither Trump nor his senior officials make any secret of what they are doing. George Soros’s philanthropic organisation, the Open Society Foundations, has donated funds to the Democratic Party and to associated progressive organisations, so it is considered to be a political enemy. Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times, which the judge has ordered to be re-drafted because it was too long and too political rather than legal, explicitly claims that that distinguished, independent and reputable newspaper is some sort of propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Comey stands accused of lying to Congress about an FBI investigation he was leading into whether the Trump election campaign in 2016 had collaborated illegally with Russian officials, an act which Trump treats as having been political rather than concerned with law-enforcement.
Increasingly, Trump is using federal government agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission (which oversees the media among other industries), as his political tools. It is normal to use such agencies to implement the White House’s policies, but it is highly abnormal to use them to help win a political contest. The way in which they stand to help Trump politically is by giving him a greater influence over public opinion, which could be especially valuable at a time when his actual policies, over tariffs, vaccines, healthcare, foreign policy and other issues, are making him less popular.
When he was Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi used to respond to criticisms that his government was suppressing free speech by pointing out that Italy remained a country where plurality of opinions was guaranteed and where anyone was allowed to say anything they wished to. This was perfectly true if one disregarded the use of defamation lawsuits to intimidate journalists. But even the truth that free speech was protected in Italy missed out the key issue: that if one person owned most commercial TV channels and could also constrain what was being said on public broadcasting, then there was a huge, inbuilt imbalance between noise levels achieved by some ideas compared with others.
Similarly, Trump’s actions against critics and against media that carry those critics’ views will not eliminate freedom of speech in the United States. But his hope, like that of Berlusconi, is to produce a big imbalance of noise levels that will benefit him and his Republican Party. In fact, another of his administration’s actions this week implicitly acknowledged the key role of noise levels rather than pure freedom.
The action concerned TikTok, the popular video-sharing social media service founded and owned by a Chinese company. After months of delay and debate, the Trump administration has now allowed TikTok to continue to operate in the United States on condition that ByteDance, the Chinese owner, sells most of its shares to a consortium of American investors, and that Oracle, the US software giant which will be one of the investors, be empowered to “train” the algorithm that controls TikTok’s service to its users.
What this means, in effect, is that Oracle will be given the job of setting the noise levels for different types of content and different viewpoints on TikTok, a platform that has become especially influential among young people in many countries, both in America and Europe. Speech will still be free on TikTok’s American service, but the influence of the views and facts provided to its users will be under Oracle’s control.
This may turn out to be a sinister development for American democracy, or it may not. But what is clear is that this plan provides an excellent precedent for the way in which regulators in the European Union can deal with the main venues through which free speech is exercised today, the social media platforms of Facebook, Google, X, Microsoft and indeed TikTok. It would be anti-democratic for EU regulators to tell those platforms what kind of content they can carry. But it would be legitimate to regulate the way in which the platforms’ algorithms set the noise levels for their users.
The main problem posed by social media both for society and for democracy is that the platforms’ business models incentivise the distribution of hostile, provocative, angry content over more mainstream, more factual, calmer material. The business formula is that “enragement equals engagement equals profits”. It is the algorithm that dictates the way each platform deploys this formula, and not surprisingly the online platforms try to ensure that their algorithms are kept as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola.
The EU’s landmark Digital Services Act gives the European Commission the power to regulate these algorithms, which could be done by requiring them to be disclosed to outside researchers or by laying down rules about how they can work. Trump has threatened tariff retaliation against the EU if it uses the Digital Services Act to “discriminate” against American tech companies in this way. In fact, whatever the EU does will apply to companies of any nationality and so cannot be classed as discriminatory. In any case, Trump has now provide the EU with a gift: the EU can now say that by regulating the algorithms it is just following Trump’s own example with TikTok.
Freedom of speech has always posed difficulties for democracies because freedom can never be absolute: if by what we say we put other people’s lives in danger, most democracies would want such dangerous speech to be regulated. Defining the danger posed by different forms of speech is difficult, however. But what democracies can try to do is to ensure a reasonable balance in terms of the noisiness and potential influence of competing forms of speech. Berlusconi and his emulator Trump have taught us why this is important.
Really enjoyed this.
What a brilliant idea! Using Trump's playbook to bring decency to the social media swamp.