Truth, politics not always a match

Elon Musk is buying Twitter and has promised to rededicate the site to untrammeled free speech. Meanwhile, former president Barack Obama, citing the dangerous spread of “misinformation,” has called for governmental content regulation of social media. Both claim to be defending democracy and truth.

Who’s right? The answer is: Jonathan Haidt. Also, Hannah Arendt.

Haidt is a social psychologist at New York University and author of a cover story in the Atlantic about the destructive political impact of social media.

While sharing Obama’s assessment of social media’s harms, Haidt is more realistic about how hard it would be to design government-mandated content controls without sacrificing social media’s benefits — or devolving into censorship. It’s more important, Haidt convincingly argues, to fortify people’s independent ability to evaluate social media content than to control their access to it.

That means changing platform architecture to slow the spread of fake or anger-generating content, a substantively neutral reform that would infringe no one’s free expression but could create time for that basic democratic act: deliberation.

This gets at what’s genuinely new about social media — its sheer velocity and “virality.” Haidt also calls for ridding social media of bots and fake accounts by making “verification … a precondition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.”

Musk has said he would soften, but not abandon, content moderation, which seems like it would keep Twitter in the business of facing dilemmas and managing trade-offs.

And that brings us to Arendt, the 20th century student of totalitarianism and author of a classic 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics.”

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other,” she wrote.

From the demagogue’s bigotry, to the candidate’s unkeepable promise, to the diplomat’s white lie, some form of mis- and disinformation has forever been enmeshed in political discourse and activity and always will be. To this “commonplace” observation, Arendt added the admonition: “Nothing would be gained by simplification or moral denunciation.”

Gloomy words, but a useful corrective to Obama’s belief in “public oversight” of social media, which is so reminiscent of Walter Lippmann’s proposal — a century ago — for a “specialized class” of advisers to mediate between propaganda-prone voters and government officials.

As a sheer matter of unalienable individual rights, Musk’s free speech maximalism is preferable to Obama’s neo-Lippmannism. Yet to the extent the case for free speech hinges on its social benefits as well as individual fulfillment, Arendt splashed some cold water on it, too.

A Jew who had witnessed the collapse of Weimar Germany and fled the Nazi regime, she knew democracies were vulnerable to extremists bent on using freedom of speech and assembly to destabilize and destroy the system. “The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed,” she wrote. “It is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially, forever.”

Arendt placed her hope in intellectuals — artists, scientists, historians, judges and journalists — whose vocations centered on the pursuit of truth, however inevitably imperfect, and thus “require non-commitment and impartiality, freedom from self-interest in thought and judgment.”

The more apolitical these professionals are, Arendt argued, the more paradoxically useful and necessary they are to “the political realm,” as sources of trusted information, analysis and ideas.

These notions seem anything but realistic today, when academia has embraced social activism, judicial nominations are subjected to partisan vetting and many journalists disclaim “bothsidesism.”

Still, Arendt reminds us that seeking truth requires a willingness to consider opposing points of view, a form of empathy that is at “the root of … this curious passion, unknown outside Western civilization, for intellectual integrity at any price.”

American society needs to rededicate itself to that tradition, without which ownership changes and technical tweaks to social media will not make much difference anyway.