A rather bizarre interview with Hillary Clinton by the Atlantic was published recently. Read the entire interview article here (or the Fox News take here).
Below are a few interesting snippets from the article:
The ordinary nastiness she’d come to expect from a lifetime in politics had warped into something much darker and more nihilistic, all fueled by misogyny, conspiracy theories, and other lies distributed to appear true. “I didn’t really know this was happening to me,” she told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, at an event hosted by Emerson Collective at the Sundance Film Festival today. (Emerson owns a majority stake in The Atlantic.) “We did not understand what was going on below the radar screen.”
I think it’s important to note that many would argue Clinton herself is at least partly responsible for the “…ordinary nastiness she’d come to expect from a lifetime in politics…”. It seems a bit hypocritical for her to complain about the current state of politics. However, what I find most interesting is how the description “…conspiracy theories, and other lies distributed to appear true…” does not differ in any meaningful way from general gossip. This is a key point because later in the article Clinton appears to be calling for censorship of Facebook postings (by Facebook itself to avoid that pesky 1st amendment thing…). The fact that Facebook simply increases the reach of gossip is no different than how the postal system, telephones, and email did the same. If we can justify censoring gossip distributed via Facebook, how long before these other forms of communication fall victim to censorship as well?
Even the article itself confirms the large-scale, gossip nature of Facebook:
Facebook is, in a sense, the world’s first technocratic nation-state—a real-time experiment in connecting humans at massive and unprecedented scale, with a population of users that eclipses any actual nation, nearly as big as China and India combined.
I find it difficult to believe that enabling more communication between people could be bad. But the most interesting tidbit immediately follows:
It’s also an institution with gigantic levers at its disposal to affect the lives of its user-citizens.
But if this is true, wouldn’t Clinton’s position that Facebook be required to censor its posts be asking Facebook to pull those levers? And on whose behalf (and in what direction) would they be required pull those levers to appease Clinton’s demands? Perhaps the best action is to not pull the levers at all and let the users decide what they wish to believe (just as with gossip). Clinton cites a conversation with Facebook where they say pretty much exactly that:
“…And their response was, We think our users can make up their own minds.”
I’m with Zuckerberg on this one. We don’t defeat gossip with censorship; we fight it with knowledge and open discussion. And if our citizens are too stupid to recognize truth – well, that’s another story. However, the answer cannot be censorship of any form.