Propaganda, lies and Elon Musk’s tall task at Twitter
People spread lies. There’s nothing new. It goes with the species. It goes with lots of species. Possums play dead for self-protection. Spreading some sort of untruth has always been an effective strategy. That’s why it persists.
Then there’s propaganda. It makes little if any pretense of truth. It is somewhat of a dark art form. It’s usually associated with state actors and shameless autocrats. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s the latest in a long line.
That’s a sizable container of words and phrases — propaganda, lies, mistruths, all with unique meaning, but with the common thread of conveying something short of “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
More recently, the binary is information or disinformation. By definition the first is true, and the second is false. So in the name of that other tricky binary – truth – someone should remove the misinformation, and if it is to be removed it must rest on the other side of some kind of bright line in the sand.
But who’s going to do the removing and where’s the bright line? We’ve turned that over to the usual suspects: the traditional media and the cable news outfits. And the newer social media kids on the block are making lots of the big decisions with even bigger consequences as their algorithms often amplify and spread falsehoods.
Elon Musk has been clear about his reasons for buying Twitter. It’s about making Twitter a full-fledged marketplace of ideas, including much of the kind of material that’s been removed as misinformation. This is a tall order.
It turns out that there are two fronts in this misinformation removal war: removing content and then removing those who provide the content. Free access to the marketplace of ideas is essential for democracies, where the bar for censoring ideas should be sky high if it exists at all.
And then there’s the raucous marketplace of factual information bits that these ideas connect to create a narrative. Lately that’s taken place in two areas: The COVID-19 pandemic and the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. The bar for removing such bits needs to be a lot lower.
Take creating and posting a news story that vaccines will cause infertility. This purports to be factual. It’s not. Restricting it does not keep anything out of the marketplace of ideas. The bigger ideas regarding COVID are about government mandates and who should make these decisions. Let the arguments continue.
Who is making these decisions and with what agenda? The latter reared its head regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. The New York Times and The Washington Post admitted that while they had avoided most reporting about the laptop in question, it did exist and was not a figment of Russian manipulation. They were not alone. Facebook and Twitter had likewise classified laptop stories as misinformation.
Donald Trump’s claim that the election was stolen has been branded as a “big lie.” It’s hard to quarrel with that. Let’s stipulate that this is especially troubling given the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But removing it and a former president’s platform is not the right answer. It’s more of an “idea.” And it’s a bad idea that can’t withstand scrutiny.
The role of any news or social media outlet should be to restrict the dissemination of any made-up so-called fact that would feed any bad idea, but not restrict the bad idea itself. And social media companies need clear, fairly applied rules for removing anyone’s accounts and making sure the removal is for continued posting of demonstrable factual falsehoods rather than broader ideas, no matter how flawed.
Maybe Musk has figured out how to responsibly navigate the misinformation-information conundrum. But he’s going to find building trust a lot harder than building Teslas.
William Lyons is director of policy partnerships for the Howard Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Tennessee. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Howard Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy or the University of Tennessee.