Politics
The word games around “content moderation” recall the days of “enhanced interrogation.”
During last month’s Supreme Court hearing on a landmark case on federal censorship, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, “My biggest concern is…the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.” Her comment was mystifying because that is the whole point of the First Amendment: to prevent government from nullifying freedom of speech and press.
Jackson’s assertion exposed the parallels between the current case on federal censorship of social media and the torture controversies from the George W. Bush era. Two decades ago, Bush administration lawyers secretly rewrote federal policies to assure that CIA interrogators were not “hamstrung” when they sought to flog the truth of detainees.
When the government heaves the law and Constitution overboard, euphemisms become the coin of the realm. During the Bush era, it wasn’t torture—it was merely “enhanced interrogation.” Nowadays, the issue is not “censorship”—but merely “content moderation.” And “moderation” is such a virtue that it happened millions of times a year thanks to the feds arm-twisting social media companies, according to federal court decisions.
In the Bush era, torture was justified in response to “ticking time bombs. “ But the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in 2014 that harsh CIA interrogations never led to “imminent threat” intelligence. That failure was irrelevant as long as a snappy phrase exonerated tearing out toenails, waterboarding (mock drownings), rape-like rectal feeding, and pummeling people to stay awake for seven days and nights straight.
Instead of the “ticking time bomb,” Jackson last month touted mass suicide as the latest pretext for censorship in the Murthy v. Missouri case. Justice Jackson luridly warned of kids “seriously injuring or even killing themselves” by “jumping out of windows at increasing elevations” thanks to a social media “teen challenge” that the government would need to suppress. And you don’t want all the teenagers to die, right? Washingtonians presume the First Amendment is archaic because Americans have become village idiots who must be constantly rescued by federal officials.
For both torture and censorship, Washington policymakers were presumed to be the smartest people in the room—if not the world. Yet the CIA regime was largely designed by two preening psychologists who had little or no experience conducting interrogations. The CIA ignored its own 1989 report conclusion that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.”
Similarly, the lead federal agency for online censorship—the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—presumed that any opinion or statement that differed from federal policies and proclamations was misinformation. CISA simply asked government officials and “apparently always assumed the government official was a reliable source,” federal judge Terry Doughty noted in his decision last July. Any assertion by officialdom was close enough to a Delphic oracle to use to “debunk postings” by private citizens.
For both torture and censorship,