Don’t Break the Internet - Episode 662 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's fricking October 2nd and it's 90 degrees outside. And if you recognize that laugh, you know Mike Masnick, our guest today, who is the CEO and founder of Techdirt. Welcome.

Mike Masnick (00:27)
Ha

Yeah, it's good to be here. It is not 90 degrees where I am.

Christopher Mitchell (00:37)
I'm

no, I we had a really nice fall for a little bit. Actually the fall came in like August and September and then it disappeared again. ⁓

Mike Masnick (00:46)
Yeah, well,

I mean, out in California where I am, we're sort of famous for the hottest times of the year are September, October. And so we've been having some warm weeks and it's actually a little bit humid, which never happens here, but.

Christopher Mitchell (00:59)
It's all over the place. ⁓ So we're going to talk today about some of the issues that recently we've been talking about. ⁓ In fact, we kind of announced earlier that we're hoping to have you on. We're going to wind our way to Section 230, but we're going to get there and talking about some of the concerns we have because we want to talk about why the Internet should stay awesome is the way I keep thinking about it to be clear.

Mike Masnick (01:00)
Yeah.

I

am on team, Internet should be awesome. yeah, that sounds good to me.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25)
Yes.

So that's where we're going to be going. for people who aren't familiar, Mike is someone who I wanted to have on because you've corrected me multiple times on my misunderstandings on Section 230. You have a very good understanding of it.

Mike Masnick (01:36)
Ha

I have spent a lot of time with the ins and outs of 230. And I should say I'm not a lawyer, but I've spent a lot of time talking about it and talking with the people who wrote it. I've spent many, many hours talking to the people who wrote it. I've talked to judges, I've talked to lawyers who have had cases about it. I have spent a lot of time understanding the ins and outs of 230. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know.

Christopher Mitchell (02:08)
We'll find out over the next 25 minutes. So first of all, though, I do want to note, we both work frequently with Karl Bodie. He's a writer for Techdirt For people who aren't as familiar, you founded it. What is Techdirt

Mike Masnick (02:20)
Yeah, Techdirt I mean, it's publication just sort of on that basis of like, how do we make the Internet more awesome or how do we make innovation and technology more awesome and more accessible for people? it's just this, it started as this weird experiment when I was actually in business school and I wanted to sort of write about the technology industry and hope that it would get me a job and then it turned into my job and here we are,

Seven years later, and I'm still working on it.

Christopher Mitchell (02:49)
And that's one of the things I really enjoy about it is you get a sense of the history when you see both the commenters, the stories, and that sort of a thing. But I was curious if you have any plans to merge to get more synergy.

Mike Masnick (02:54)
Yeah.

We are a proudly independent news organization and have remained as such even as lots of others have gone down other roads. But we are being a small, scrappy, independent operation, I think. It gives us some freedom to speak our minds.

Christopher Mitchell (03:21)
Yeah. And then also the other podcast, which is also filled with great interviews and catch a lot of like Cory Doctorow and folks that have a lot of ⁓ really, I think, well thought out ideas on there. So I wanted to, I wanted to say for 18 years, I focused on Internet access and I do feel like lately I've been more concerned than ever about the encroachment of, of government power on the Internet. And, and also I feel like in the past we saw more resistance to it.

So we're gonna delve into that. And to do that, I feel like it is helpful to know, like, you know, one of the conversations I had with Karl, we were talking about it felt like you kind of have come through an evolution, I think, where, and again, I think might be useful for a background where I suspect you're in a place now where you might not have anticipated 20 some years ago that you would be perhaps, I don't know, maybe you're more concerned about government power, maybe you're less, I feel like.

I feel like you've evolved a bit in terms of libertarian ideology.

Mike Masnick (04:19)
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure I've definitely evolved. mean, everybody evolves and you should evolve kind of with the nature of what is happening in the world and you should always be sort of checking your priors. I mean, I don't have like a clearly locked down ideology and like I will in terms of like a sort of, know, one that is easily defined, right? And so.

At different times in my life, people have called me all different things. So I've been called libertarian. I have been called a radical leftist. I've been called an extreme right-wing free marketer. And none of those are true, I think. I don't think any of those are particularly, I'm sorry? No, I hate that too, right? mean, it's like, I don't, it's not like, I'm not,

Christopher Mitchell (04:56)
Heterodox. You're heterodox, right? you do? Okay.

Mike Masnick (05:05)
I'm not here to disagree with everyone. I'm not here to just take a different viewpoint. I have a sort of mental model of how I think the world works that changes over time as I learn and as I see more things and as I get more data. I sort of, yeah, oh yeah. mean, yeah, we're living in a very different world and I sort of follow where that goes. so sometimes it might feel like my

Christopher Mitchell (05:20)
And also the world changes. mean, like, the world itself is changing too.

Mike Masnick (05:34)
I don't think my overall positions, I think I can make arguments for why they remain consistent, even if some of the conclusions might change in part because of the different world or the different factors or the different situations that we're in. But I don't, I think it bothers some people that I don't subscribe to any particular philosophy and say, I am this. And I've used this story before, which was that when I first registered to vote,

I got, this is ages ago in a different era, in a different lifetime. And I got a card where I had to fill out the card to register to vote and the options on the card were Republican, Democrat or Independent. And I looked at that and I said, know, I'm not a member of any party. I don't think I wanna be a member of any party. And I remember the people who like, it was at the school in my high school. And as they were handing out there, like you really should.

be a member of a certain party because that'll allow you to vote in the primaries and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, I don't wanna do that. But then I was like, I also don't wanna check independent, because I sort of, like that feels like it has a connotation too that I'm like making a statement, I'm independent. And I was like, I don't like that either. And so I was like, what happens if I don't check any of these boxes? And so I filled out the rest of the card, I handed it in and you know.

Christopher Mitchell (06:51)
and the database

crashed.

Mike Masnick (06:53)
Well,

no, what happened was about, a few weeks later, I get my voting card, because at the time you had a voting card, I got a voting card in the mail and where it said party, someone had typed in, there's a line and then in all capital letters, it said blank, B-L-A-N-K. And I was like, I kinda like that. I am blank. I'm not wedded to any particular philosophy or idea.

Christopher Mitchell (07:12)
you

Mike Masnick (07:19)
But there are concepts and that doesn't mean that I'm just sort of like out here, waving in the wind and going back and forth on things. I think I have very strong feelings about the way the world should be in sort of different policy positions. But it just doesn't fit neatly into any sort of particular philosophy or ideology that is named. And there are times where I'm like, I'm even to the point where it's like, I should write a book about sort of like, laying out all of my ideas. But then I'm just like,

No, because then someone's gonna take that and turn it into a philosophy, and then they're gonna misrepresent it, and they're gonna twist it, and it's gonna become nonsense, and I don't want that either.

Christopher Mitchell (07:57)
Yeah,

yeah, no, I feel I feel pretty similar to you. I mean, I, I feel like a lot of my political ideas came from reading Heinlein and reading Heinlein in the 90s was different from reading Heinlein in the 60s and 70s. And so like, you know, I just I've always been all over the place and trying to trying to figure it out. The ⁓ so what I what brought me on to like, try to prioritize this because I've wanted to have you on forever was ⁓ watching this Jimmy Kimmel situation.

Mike Masnick (08:04)
Yep. Sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (08:24)
where ⁓ without getting too much into the details, because I feel like people are aware of them, ⁓ right, the White House flex muscles in order to drive Jimmy off the air. you know, was part of a larger project, clearly, that's been going on and that there's greater ambitions. And one of the reactions I saw from Scott Galloway, most notably, but I saw in other places too, was this idea that like, well, if the worst thing happens that Jimmy gets driven off the air, he will have a podcast and he will...

Mike Masnick (08:29)
Everybody knows.

Christopher Mitchell (08:52)
hire five people rather than 40 or whatever it is, and they'll have a company and it'll be wildly successful and nobody can mess with him on the Internet land. And, and I just had this foreboding feeling of like, I don't know that that's true. And, you know, and this is something that we could talk about a lot of things we could talk about PayPal and like, and how like different payment systems have changed in the threats there. But, but in this case, I wanted to talk about Section 230, because that has come up a lot, it seems like it's a little quiet right now.

Mike Masnick (09:08)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (09:19)
But to me, my first reaction was to think that in the Telecommunications Act, we have this thing, Section 230, that protects me and you, and it also protects Google and Facebook and others. Whoever hosts a website, someone else comes along and posts a comment that's illegal or violates a law somewhere, it's not our fault. We're not held liable for that. And that is sort of the short version of Section 230. But there's been a lot of talk about changing it in order to...

Well, I would say we can start with the White House saying that it would like to change Section 230 starting in 2018-2019 in order to punish the companies for stifling conservative speech at that time. And so I don't know, if we want to maybe ease into the short how we got here, if that makes sense, the two minute and 30 second version of how we got here on Section 230.

Mike Masnick (10:10)
Yeah, mean, there is a long history there, but it's known and deeply reported and talked about. And the basics are that there were some lawsuits about as early Internet services were coming about, in particular, two early ones, Prodigy and CompuServe were both sued over comments that were posted on their services, and there was a question of who was liable for that. And...

The cases came down in different ways and I don't necessarily wanna get into the specifics, the one that was really concerning was the Prodigy case where they were sued by Stratton Oakmont, which people may be familiar with as that was the firm that was in the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. So if you're familiar with like Leo DiCaprio being evil, like that was the firm, they, so people had posted on Prodigy that this firm was kind of sketchy.

and they sued for defamation, but they didn't sue the poster, they sued Prodigy itself. And this judge who was very problematic in lots of other ways had sort of famously spewed a bunch of like racist nonsense at one point, just a bad judge. He said, well, because Prodigy holds itself out as a family-friendly service and moderates different posts to keep it family-friendly, that means that anything that they do let through,

they are officially sort of taking ownership of as a publisher and therefore they can be held liable for that. And that seemed very, very problematic to a bunch of people, including two members of the House of Representatives, Chris Cox, who was a Republican and Ron Wyden, who was a Democrat. And they had been sort of getting together to talk about like, hey, we should do something together in a bipartisan basis. And they saw this and they were both sort of,

very into technology and early Internet adopters. And so they came up with Section 230, which was designed to be sort of very simple thing, which as you described it, it's basically just saying, hey, the liability goes on whoever made the speech. It doesn't go on the intermediary that's hosting the speech. It goes on the party who actually said the thing. And...

Christopher Mitchell (12:15)
Which is

historically the way we've handled things, right? Like if I have a conversation to plan a bank robbery, AT&T was not held liable.

Mike Masnick (12:22)
Exactly, exactly. And there are sort of some gray areas in all of this, but that is the basic concept behind it is just make it explicit that the liability goes to the party that actually said the thing. And in theory, that shouldn't be too controversial. And in the early days, soon after it was passed, I had actually made the argument that do we really need 230 because it sort of feels obvious that

you don't blame the company, you blame the speaker. But I have since seen, you know, no, like the American legal system is basically like who has the deepest pockets and that's who we're gonna sue whether or not they're actually responsible. And so realistically what 230 is doing is it provides ⁓ a sort of faster off ramp for frivolous litigation by saying this would never survive

a full First Amendment challenge, but a full First Amendment challenge is really expensive. So if we have this quick off-ramp that says, no, this case is going nowhere because of Section 230, you get those cases dismissed very quickly.

Christopher Mitchell (13:27)
So that's how we got here. And now there is a sense that Section 230, think, as I said on the right, there is people that wanted to modify 230 in order, I think, to threaten the companies, at that time Twitter, pre-Elon Musk, Facebook, Google, and others who had some form of censorship power in terms of what they publish. And so there's the right wing wants to find more levers to force their speech out.

And on the left, see people who, I mean, including many of my allies, I think, who ⁓ are deeply concerned about the power of these companies. And they see Section 230 potentially as a way to knock them down a peg and try to hold them responsible for something, perhaps. And they probably have a, I mean, they would have a much better, like I'm not steelmanning it. I don't know that I'm capable of steelmanning it in this moment, but that's the gist of the argument, I think.

Mike Masnick (14:18)
Yeah, though, I mean, the crazy thing is that it's flipped in the last few weeks in some context in which you have people who are suddenly saying, well, you can't criticize Charlie Kirk, that's clearly bad. And so therefore, maybe we leverage Section 230 to punish any website that allows people on it to say something bad about Charlie Kirk. So, it's basically both sides, incorrectly and misleadingly, I think see it just as a

tool for leverage to force their own views on speech, whether it is you must keep this up or you must take that down. And again, both parties have some elements of both of those things onto different platforms. And so they see it as a tool to sort of control speech. Both what should be allowed and what should be required, what should be forced to be hosted and what should be taken down.

Christopher Mitchell (15:07)
What is your level of being horrified at some of the ideas you've seen for reforming Section 230?

Mike Masnick (15:14)
I mean, almost every reform idea I've seen is horrific, right? And there are a couple of like specifics to get into here to sort of understand why, because the one thing I hear from well-meaning people, like there are lots of people who are not having good faith debates about this, but there are people who I think are having good faith debates about this, but who I think don't fully understand the mechanisms by which how...

by which Section 230 works and why their reform ideas will actually make things much worse. And so part of that is that you have to understand how the First Amendment and Section 230 work together because a lot of people say, ⁓ well, if we only got rid of Section 230, we'd be allowed to force this speech down and we'd be able to sue these companies and punish these companies. The reality is not that because of the First Amendment. The First Amendment,

protects the vast majority of speech that is out there, and that includes publishing decisions. It protects the decision to leave up content. It protects the decision to take down most content. Most of these things are absolutely protected by the First Amendment. If they went to trial, the companies would still win. Almost every situation where you say, okay, well, if we took away Section 230,

and then, we could open up the floodgates of lawsuits, the companies would still win. Now that leads some people to say, well, then you don't need Section 230 because you already have the first amendment there. So here's where people get most confused. And I sort of hinted at this earlier, but the Section 230, this gets into civil procedure, like the most boring class that everybody takes in law school. And again, I didn't go to law school, but I've heard this.

Section 230 allows you to get the case dismissed very early at the first stage. Effectively, and I've spoken to lots of lawyers and lots of companies about this, effectively using Section 230 to get rid of a case like this. If you're sued for moderation decisions and you can get it kicked out on Section 230 grounds, that is probably going to cost you in the range of $50,000 to $100,000. That is a lot of money for me, is a lot of money for most people, but for a larger company, that is not too much.

If you were to take it to, if you were to get rid of 230 entirely and have to defend it on First Amendment grounds, you could still win, but you're probably talking more about three to $5 million, which is a lot more money. Now, again, we get to the sort of the scale question. For a company like a Google and a Meta, three to $5 million is nothing. To them, it's effectively not.

that different than 50 to $100,000, it is right. You would just sort of dismiss it and make it go away. If you are a smaller company, if you're a startup, if you're trying to compete with a Google or a Facebook or any one of these services, you're trying to make something new, a three to $5 million case can destroy your company. And in fact, we have examples of that in history of.

Christopher Mitchell (17:57)
For one case.

Mike Masnick (18:20)
know, smaller startup companies that were sued over moderation decisions that went out of business because of those lawsuits. And so the real difference here is not so much like in the weeds of like, ⁓ if we change 230, the real difference is how much is the lawsuit gonna cost? And what does that mean for the different players? So with 230, smaller companies can effectively get these lawsuits tossed for, you know, not a...

it's still expensive and it'll still hit your bottom line, but it's in that 50 to $100,000 range. You take away 230 and it's three to 5 million. So the end result of tinkering with 230 and enabling more lawsuits and more expensive lawsuits is that you lock in the biggest companies who can afford those bills and who have, mean, Metta has a building full of lawyers, right? They can take on these cases and spit them out and they're going to win and it doesn't matter. But,

the smaller companies, the ones you want to compete with Meta, the ones where you want smaller communities, local communities, different groups to be able to build their own sites and do their own things and have an open, awesome Internet, those guys can't handle it and those guys will get sued out of business or because of the threat of liability, they can be threatened out of business or they just won't start in the first place. And so...

Almost any attempt at reforming 230 is effectively getting rid of it because you're going to just enable more expensive lawsuits, which the big companies can handle no problem and the little companies will get completely screwed over if they exist at all.

Christopher Mitchell (19:54)
And I think we've talked about companies, but this is nothing about being a company. Like you could be an enthusiast for like some small engine repair or something and you could be caught up in this.

Mike Masnick (19:59)
Yes.

Absolutely. And it goes

even further than that too, and this is also widely missed in the discussion about 230, but 230 protects interactive computer services and their users. So when you retweet something, you are protected by Section 230. If you take away Section 230 and you get sued for retweeting someone, now suddenly that is much more expensive for you as well. And so that creates problems.

in addition and people sort of forget the user aspect. There's this weird belief out there, which is just not true that Section 230 was like a gift to big tech. And the reality is no, like the big tech companies, they can handle whatever lawsuits come, even if they lost 230. It is the individual users and it is the smaller sites and the smaller services that are the ones who would be most damaged by, as far as I can tell.

almost any reform that has been proposed to 230. I will keep an open mind, someone can still present to me some sort of 230 reform, but they have to deal with that. And none of them seem to deal with the idea that the legal costs associated with the different kinds of lawsuits are the really damaging.

Christopher Mitchell (21:16)
Right, and I would say that even if you're dealing with ⁓ someone like one of the Silicon Valley types that enjoys using lawsuits to try to pursue their visions, even if you're really wealthy and engaging in this stuff, I don't know why I picked that in particular. I was just coming up in two different directions. the point I was trying to get at was that there's time. You've talked purely about money and the lawyer's fees.

Mike Masnick (21:25)
Yeah.

Yeah. yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (21:38)
There's a simple fact that if you can get something dismissed at the first opportunity, that is different from waiting for a year. And I will just say that I've lost any confidence I have in the ability to predict the outcome of court decisions at this point, at the high level especially. ⁓

Mike Masnick (21:49)
Yes. Yeah,

yeah. I mean, you have that to deal with also. But I mean, as someone who has been sued and has gone through the legal process more than once, everyone always focuses on the money aspect and that's certainly a part of it. But like, it is incredibly just time consuming and distracting and stressful beyond just the money. And when you're talking about, you know, like a...

an individual or a small entity, it probably takes years off your life. And that leads to also certainly pressures to just settle and give in. And so having something like 230 that basically says, you're protected, you're gonna get rid of this lawsuit very quickly, it can be handled, it can often be handled with insurance sort of helping you take on the cost of it.

That's really, really helpful. And almost every reform to 230 does not take that into account.

Christopher Mitchell (22:49)
So is it your position that Section 230 does not need to be reformed? There's just nothing wrong with it. There's other areas in which if you're trying to deal with the problems people want to deal with, Section 230 is the inappropriate way to deal with it.

Mike Masnick (22:56)
Yeah.

I mean, again, like I am open to like somebody maybe has an idea somewhere that I have yet to hear of and I've heard many, many ideas. If you think you have a new one, like think very carefully and look at what else has been proposed. I'm always happy to listen to them, but I have yet to see one that does that. And in fact, I think it is misguided and a misfocus and there's a long list of other things and other laws I would change or laws I would put in place.

to deal with the problems that people are discussing before I would get anywhere near Section 230. I have been, I'm hoping, I say this all the time, in part because the more I say it publicly, the more people will get on my case about it. I have a half written paper that lays out a whole bunch of policy proposals for how do we fix the things that people keep saying need fixing instead of attacking 230. And there's a long list of things that can be done that I think would be way more effective.

because I don't think changing Section 230 would be effective at all. And I think it would backfire on the goals of everybody. And this is on every side, like people who say they're gonna reform 230, what their underlying goals are, it won't do that.

Christopher Mitchell (24:11)
You, I think have, I'm guessing it's happened a few times, but for people that really want to dig in, you've written it. So before they reach out to you, they might look at Techdirt for Mike Maznik's articles on 230.

Mike Masnick (24:24)
Yeah, I mean the biggest one is it's a little snarky, but it's the hello, you've been referred here because you're wrong about 230. It's a very handy link to pass along to people who say the wrong things about 230. It's a little snarky in terms of its approach, but it sort of walks through a bunch of things that people commonly say about Section 230 that tend to be.

Christopher Mitchell (24:46)
Yeah, I feel like for people who aren't familiar, Tector does have some snarkiness to it. feel like we have the, like I have the, what is it, Dr. Hyde ⁓ and you have Dr. Jekyll, I think, or I have Mr. Hyde and you have Dr. Jekyll or, no, the opposite. I have Dr. Jekyll, you have Mr. Hyde for Karl Bodie. Cause like we, we're like, man, we're trying not to be funny here.

Mike Masnick (24:50)
Hahaha

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah,

we have, we have Karl unleashed.

Christopher Mitchell (25:10)
Yeah.

Okay, one last question for you then. Do you feel like there are other avenues that we should be concerned about in terms of a government that wants to start being more heavy handed? You know, there's concerns from the right, which I didn't share as much, but I continue to think about in terms of how they pressured on the language that was used around the pandemic.

right, in terms of that. I didn't feel like it went as far as some people did who are very anti the Biden administration. but like, I don't want any administration reaching into changing speech. So I'm curious if you see other avenues we should look at.

Mike Masnick (25:45)
Yeah, I I think the story about the Biden administration has been really greatly exaggerated as well. I do think they probably went too far. They probably did not violate the first amendment and there was a big Supreme Court case where Amy Coney Barrett basically said there was no evidence from any of the plaintiffs showing that they had standing because there was no evidence that the Biden administration had actually pressured the companies in a way that was coercive. That's a whole thing. I do think the government should basically just be

staying out of telling any platform what speech they must carry and which speech they must take down. I think that is inappropriate. There are reasonable concerns, however, that we are relying on just a very few companies that have their own rules and have their own incentives in terms of what speech they allow, what speech they promote, what speech they demote. And I think that is a legitimate concern. And I think the best way to deal with that

is through competition and getting more competition because if Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have as much control over what speech is allowed and what speech is not and what is promoted and what is demoted, then we have less and less of a problem. So a lot of my focus is on how do we get more real competition and that can include things like interoperability between different platforms because...

the right to exit, right? Like everybody, you know, there's, there's a momentum issue where it's like, if you're stuck in Facebook and your whole family is in Facebook, you can't leave Facebook because you want to stay in touch with your family. So is there a way that we can get people to still be able to talk to their cousins on Facebook, but not actually have to use Facebook? And so I think there are a lot of things that can be done there. But you know, none of that involves the government telling anyone what, what to say and what not to say and putting pressure on, on different platforms about that.

I think that remains a legitimate concern and we are in an era where again, not in the same way and not to the same degree. I am not, this is not me saying both parties are bad, but both parties have problems with how they look at Internet speech and how they approach it. And we see really bad bills from both sides. And just as one example of that, in 2021 or 2022, Amy Klobuchar is a Democrat from Minnesota.

Christopher Mitchell (28:03)
Now I'm familiar. She says Wi-Fi instead of Internet drives me crazy. And she's a former telecom lawyer. ⁓

Mike Masnick (28:04)
You as you should be. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

God. I mean, she had a bill that was, you know, it was about COVID misinformation officially, but it was, it was just sort of health misinformation that would allow the secretary of health and human services to, you know, by themselves declare certain health information to be misinformation.

that every platform would be required to take down and would not have Section 230 protections over. And she thought this was a great idea because it would force COVID misinformation offline. Who is our Secretary of Health and Human Services right now? Would you trust Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be able to declare to the entire Internet what speech is allowed and what speech is not allowed? I would not like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have that power.

Senator Klobuchar seemed to think that would be fine. I think that's a problem. And so, I think so many of these discussions just focus on this is the speech I like, this is the speech I don't like, how do we get more of the speech I like and less of the speech I don't like? I don't think that's a good idea because you don't know who's gonna be in power all the time. And so.

Christopher Mitchell (29:21)
Right. And I feel like

there's a sense that lives are at stake over speech and it's correct and it's unfortunate and we live in a messy world and and I feel like you can this is one of those things I feel like people like you get this when you think about tech because you have a sense of what could come and protecting that and I feel like some of the people who are making these laws there's a sense of well if we do this thing we know that we'll immediately protect I don't know tens of hundreds of people thousands of people you know

Mike Masnick (29:24)
Yeah, yes.

Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (29:49)
And there's no sense of, but that's going to result down the line of like a threat to so many more people.

Mike Masnick (29:53)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. And I think it's a big deal. And this is not to diminish the idea that like health misinformation is bad, right? Like people die, like lots of people die because of health misinformation. It is a serious concern, but there are better ways to approach it than saying, that power to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to decide what speech is allowed and what is not. And part of what frustrates me about this is that,

Christopher Mitchell (30:03)
Right. Yeah.

Mike Masnick (30:19)
the political class, and I would argue a lot of the media as well, seem to focus on the simplest solutions, which are bad, right? They're like simple, easy, and wrong. And so it's, know, well there's bad speech, okay, just figure out a way to outlaw it. It's like, no, that's, you know, one, creates serious First Amendment problems, but two, it doesn't seem to work in the long run. Well, you know, there are big, difficult ways to deal with like the fact that a,

a huge percentage of the population is misinformed about things in dangerous ways. Part of that is like education, right? Like, and people get mad at me when I say that, but it's like, yeah, there are no easy solutions, right? So like your easy solution is bad, right? Like you have to take on the big projects here and that includes like media literacy. It includes education. It includes like, you know, building up infrastructure to give people access to more services.

Christopher Mitchell (30:54)
Right.

Mike Masnick (31:14)
that are not controlled by individual billionaires who have bad incentives, right? There are all of these factors that you have to do as a whole, a sort of whole of society approach to actually dealing with these problems. And yeah, it's hard and yeah, it's gonna be difficult, but like, that's the only way to do this right. And looking for shortcuts is going to lead to more problems down the road as well.

Christopher Mitchell (31:37)
Yes, I do feel like, and we'll wrap up here, but I think some of this is definitely a sense of these are horrible things to contemplate with, you know, whether it's we talked a little bit about health issues, but there's any number of other ways in which incitement to violence is truly awful. At the same time, trying to just attack the speech and figure out how to de platform it is I feel like sweeping the symptoms under the rug and not dealing with the root causes of what allows that to come about.

Mike Masnick (32:02)
very much.

Christopher Mitchell (32:06)
And it's hard work and we're not going to get there in our lifetime, like, feel like shutting down speech makes it harder to get where we want to get, I think.

Mike Masnick (32:09)
Yeah

And historically, things like that where you sort of just directly target some sort of speech also creates this feeling of martyrdom and people feeling incorrectly that, ⁓ they're only stifling my speech because I'm onto something. And it creates a really dangerous culture in response. There are better ways to do it and it's complex and involved and it involves a lot of work.

⁓ But just saying like don't allow that speech just just historically doesn't work and historically creates more problems

Christopher Mitchell (32:46)
Anything else you wanted to share and we didn't get to?

Mike Masnick (32:49)
I mean, I could go on forever on this particular subject. mean, I just think that, you know, I understand the frustrations that people have about bad things happening. The world is a mess right now, like more so than it has been in a while. And there's lots of really bad stuff and there's lots of really bad speech and there's lots of really problematic things happening. But the way to approach these things is, you know, you have to think through the longer term.

impact of what it is that you're trying to do and how all the different pieces fit together. any simple solution will almost certainly make the problem worse.

Christopher Mitchell (33:26)
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate your time today.

Mike Masnick (33:28)
Sure, thanks for having me, it's always fun.