Censorship as private conduct
In the excerpts, censorship is defined by Bob Zadek as the suppression of political, social or religious ideas that one group may not approve of — nothing more than the suppression of somebody else’s views so they do not reach the public at large. On this account censorship itself is not illegal: an individual may tell others not to read a book or watch a television program, and a business may take a position on controversial issues and try to suppress other views, at the risk of losing customers. The law enters only through the First Amendment, which Zadek describes as defining the relationship of government to its citizens and, as extended to the states by the 14th Amendment, barring state and local governments as well as the federal government from interfering with broad free speech rights, subject to limits such as incitement to violence. [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]
Frank Buckley states the same starting point in the social media setting: he and Zadek are not opposed to all censorship, and he does not mind private censorship — if Facebook wants to delete the account of a neo-Nazi, he has no problem with that. The problem, in his account, arose when Facebook deleted the account of someone who was not a neo-Nazi but a loud and perhaps slightly obnoxious conservative comedian who told jokes. Zadek places this in a lineage of American censorship, recalling Lenny Bruce and Shelley Berman, who were arrested for telling a joke, and describing Crowder as in the Lenny Bruce vein — not criminal law trouble, but the loss of the right to publish on YouTube. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Section 230 and the Hawley bill
Buckley describes the statutory backdrop as Section 230 of the ‘96 Act, under which the Facebooks and Twitters of the world are not responsible for content and cannot be sued for libelous material posted on their platforms. He then describes Senator Josh Hawley’s bill, introduced the week before the episode and titled, in Buckley’s rendering, the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act — which Buckley calls the Social Media Shakedown Bill. As Buckley reads the draft, the bill would remove Section 230 protection unless the company proves beyond a reasonable doubt, in the eyes of four out of five members of the FTC, that it does not discriminate on the basis of political viewpoints; he also states the standard as proof by clear and convincing evidence, and summarizes the burden as having to prove a negative. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Zadek frames the bill as the next chapter in the censorship conversation, federal legislation he calls scary and counterproductive, and he introduces it by way of analogy to The Music Man — solving the non-problem of pool by buying trumpets and trombones. He notes Hawley’s electoral path, that he beat the libertarian Austin Petersen in a Missouri primary and then defeated Claire McCaskill. Buckley also dismisses the proposal to break up the large platforms as beyond stupid. Who Will Censure the Censors? (2019)
Censorship through noise
Robert Mahoney’s premise is that the COVID-19 pandemic was not just a health crisis but a crisis of personal freedom and censorship: governments, terrified and lacking capacity, doubled down on censorship rather than engaging citizens in dialogue, to cover their own incompetence. He distinguishes two forms — the old-fashioned restriction of the flow of news, which he associates with the Soviet Union, China and modern Russia, and what he calls censorship through noise, which he says occurred in the US and a couple of other liberal democracies, where people are confused by misinformation, lies and propaganda until they do not know what to believe. He offers social distancing and mask-wearing as measures about which the information landscape left no clear idea of purpose. [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]
Zadek draws out the mechanism: physicians, healthcare professionals and epidemiologists who disagreed with the government party line on lockdowns and school closures held an equally loud competing view, and learning requires exposure to as many points of view as possible; if the government’s view had enough volume, other views were drowned out, which he says was as effective as locking up those who held them. Mahoney agrees, and adds that the confusion in the US reflected confusion in the White House itself, that people in some of those conversations were interviewed, and that there was a desire to cover up and suppress bad news and downplay the severity of the disease. He cites Steve Bannon’s instruction to flood the zone with garbage, in less polite wording, to create confusion, and contrasts the more than a million COVID deaths in the US out of six million globally with the US share of world population. [[episodes/life_line___guest_hosting__robert_mahoney_on__the|Life!Line - Guest hosting: Robert Mahoney on The Infodemic (2023)]]
Across episodes
The same question — whether private platforms should be made to carry speech, and by what authority — is argued in the two 2019 episodes and revisited in the 2023 episode, but the excerpts show no development from one to the next: Buckley in June 2019 works through Section 230 and the Hawley bill, while Mahoney in January 2023 supplies a different vocabulary of censorship through noise and government pressure on platforms, and the excerpts contain no exchange in which either later speaker responds to the earlier argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what Section 230 says in its own words, what any court has held about platform moderation, or how the Hawley bill was drafted beyond Buckley’s description of its burden of proof. They do not give the fate of that bill, the contents of the Twitter Files beyond Zadek’s reference to them, or any figure for de-platforming beyond the Crowder incident. Mahoney’s account of Brazil and of the White House conversations is reported only at the level of his own summary, and the excerpt of his remarks breaks off mid-sentence at the comparison of COVID deaths.