Truth does not rise to the top

Today I listened to an episode of the Radiolab podcast. This one was posted on April 2, 2021 and is about free speech. Much of the conversation is between host Jad Abumrad and reporter Latif Nassar, though there are many other voices. Here’s where to listen. There is also a transcript. Up through WWI free speech in America meant that a newspaper publisher did not need to get a license to operate from the government. Speech was free – one did not need to pay money for it. But if the government did not like what you said you could still be punished for it. In March of 1919 Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled with the rest of the justices affirming that common understanding. In October Holmes dissented on a similar case. He had a close group of progressive intellectuals and one of them, Harold Laski was in danger of losing his professorship at Harvard because of something he said that rich alumni didn’t like. Laski asked Holmes, a Harvard alum, to write a letter of support. Instead, Holmes answered through his dissent in a case that had nothing to do with Laski. Here’s a bit of that dissent read by Latif Nassar, with commentary by Thomas Healy. Professor of Law at Seton Hall University.

THOMAS HEALY: It's short. It's 12 paragraphs. So the first thing he's saying is that we should be skeptical that we know the truth. LATIF NASSER: (Reading) When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths... THOMAS HEALY: We've been wrong before, and we're likely going to be wrong again. LATIF NASSER: (Reading) ...That the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade and ideas. THOMAS HEALY: In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side. LATIF NASSER: (Reading) The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. THOMAS HEALY: Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon. He says, every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge. LATIF NASSER: (Reading) That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

That was the dissent, the losing side, in that case. The other justices lobbied hard to get him to change his mind. However, over the next decade, that Marketplace of Ideas metaphor won over the other justices and has been the common way we see the First Amendment. But that isn’t the only metaphor or model for understanding Free Speech. And, 100 years after it first appeared, it may no longer be the best. Zeynep Tufekci is a professor a University of North Carolina and writes a blog on Technosociology, the intersection of technology and sociology. She wrote an article for her blog, then asked someone with an opposing view to come at her ideas with knives out. The marketplace of ideas can work to refine and strengthen an argument. But... Sinan Aral and colleagues did a study on how far and how fast truth and lies spread through Twitter. They found that lies spread further, wider, and faster than truth. It took truth about six times longer as a lie to reach 1,500 people. In the marketplace of ideas, truth does not rise to the top. More dissent came from Nibiha Syed, a media lawyer and president of The Markup, a nonprofit news service that investigates Big Tech. Some of her ideas: Not every microphone is the same size, which influences which ideas are heard first and more often. There are rights of the listener, such as the right to accurate, healthy information, the right to hear the truth. To be a responsible citizen one must have facts to be able to participate in debate through the marketplace. That prompted Abumrad to say:

Can't you just say it's the marketplace of ideas - asterisk. OK? And then in the asterisk, it's like, assuming that everyone has equal access to the marketplace, assuming that each voice is properly weighted, assuming that truth and falsehood are somehow taken into account.

That sounds like a regulated marketplace. Nassar replied: OK. Who is the regulator? So, back to the last bit of Holmes’ dissent read above: America is an experiment. When we see the experiment begin to fail, it is time to experiment with something different. That includes a revised and hopefully better model or metaphor of free speech. Hunter of Daily Kos reported on the recent rise in the number of cases of COVID around the country. It is perhaps a start of another deadly surge.

It can be blamed, near exclusively, on conservative disinformation about the pandemic and the vaccine pushed by Republican leaders and by Fox News personalities. Meanwhile, inside Fox News itself, the same network sowing nationwide suspicion as to the supposed dangers of vaccination and supposed triviality of COVID-19 infections has already implemented their own "vaccine passports" for use inside their buildings. Anti-vaccine rhetoric is meant to be a political tool for conservative governors like the ambitious Ron DeSantis and ever-grifting movement hacks like Tucker Carlson. Behind the scenes, they're all getting vaccinated and demanding pandemic safety measures even as they condemn those things to their conservative base.

Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Peter Wade of Rolling Stone:

Hypocrisy, spreading lies, and fear-mongering are all well-known staples over at Fox. But Monday’s news about how Fox Corporation has already implemented a vaccine passport-type program for its own employees that is similar to what hosts like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have loudly railed against is a window into how little they actually care about the well-being of the people who watch their shows.

Renee DiResta is at the Stanford Internet Observatory where she is studying how narratives spread. She says the anti vaccine message evolved online. Research has repeatedly shown, well before COVID, that the idea that vaccines are harmful is fake news and because of that the media stopped covering it.

This is because it was harmful to amplify a fake “debate”. There were not 2 sides. An antivax mom’s opinion was not a valid counterpoint to the overwhelming body of research. This was not “censorship”. This was media deciding what not to *amplify* to avoid misleading audiences. But the vaccines-autism True Believers realized in 2009 that they could grow the mvmt on social media. Facebook offered the opportunity to create Pages, to go directly to increasingly large audiences, to target new parents with ads suggesting they follow AV Pages and join Groups. ... Media wouldn't cover them but SOCIAL media is an excellent tool for networked activism and they could get themselves amplified. Platforms want to allow free expression; no one wants to tell people they can’t express a political opinion. The problem is that the “health choice” rhetoric that opened the door to new adherents went hand-in-hand with blatant misinformation. Demonstrably falsifiable claims. Come for the "freedom", get indoctrinated about the toxins and microchips. Babies of parents in the AV groups died on several occasions, after parents took bad advice. There are real consequences here.

Jessica Sutherland of Kos, who is black, wrote about new research from the American Psychological Association that used police bodycams to show cops treat white people differently than black people. This built on research done in 2017 by Stanford University. That earlier research showed:

The difference was so stark that in two-thirds of the cases, it was possible to predict whether the motorist was black or white based solely on the words used by officers.

Black drivers were not pulled over for more serious offenses. It wasn’t because of a few bad apple cops. It didn’t just happen when when the result was the driver was issued a citation or ticket. Sutherland wrote:

“This is a nice car you’re driving. You sure it’s yours?” he said, the implication of grand theft auto barely going unsaid. “I pulled you over because I thought you might be lost,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t think that at all. The cops who pulled me over at least once a week in my final years living in northeast Ohio said at least one of those things to me just about every time I saw flashing lights.

And it wasn’t because she had done something wrong. Later, she related an incident where she had been stopped and ordered out of the car. Pens and a key in a pocket made police think she had a weapon and she had a pistol inches from her face. Her white friends said they had never been ordered out of the car. Her black friends said they had always been ordered out of the car. The newer research disguised the voices so evaluators couldn’t hear words, but could hear the tone of voice from the cop. From the research:

Across the board, clips of officers speaking to Black men got lower marks for friendliness, respectfulness and ease than those of officers speaking to white men — even though the listeners were not aware of the drivers’ race.

Sutherland explained why this research is important:

For Black Americans, both of these studies just confirm what we already know: Systemic racism rules supreme in law enforcement. But for white Americans, who more easily discard lived experiences that don’t mirror their own, who constantly demand data when they find themselves unable to believe Black people, who celebrate this era of prolific video because it gives them proof of that which they previously denied, these studies might actually change minds. If only this research would lead law enforcement to address the rotten wood at the core of its foundation, we might actually see some improvement on this front.

Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that a trans man and trans woman are suing the state of Montana over its new law that said a person could not update their gender marker on their birth certificate without having documentation of gender reassignment surgery. Not all transgender people want surgery and many can’t afford it. But having primary documentation misgender them is dangerous because they could be subjected to bullying and assault. It is also emotionally painful to be misgendered on primary documents. Commenter Padre Mellyrn had a few things to say on the question: Why do birth certificates have to list gender at all? The answer, first the snarky one: How do people tell if you’re a woman and should be bullied? Then the actual answer: In Europe, where the inheritance went to the first male child, someone had to verify that. As for the snarky answer, effeminate men get bullied too. Roberto Camacho of Kos Prism discussed a new children’s book Am I Blue or Am I Green? by Beatrice Zamora, illustrated by Berenice Badillo. Both American and Mexican flags include red and white. The American flag adds blue and the Mexican includes green. The story is about Citizen Child, otherwise not named, who was born in the US of undocumented immigrant parents. He’s “American” and has citizenship but his parents speaks Spanish and maintain Mexican traditions. So which country does he identify with? Maybe neither? Books like this are critical for children. They need to see stories about themselves and there are very few about those like Citizen Child. We need to see these stories too.