A Biden Appointee’s Troubling Views On The First Amendment – TK News by Matt Taibbi
Listening to Wu, who has not responded to requests for an interview, is confusing. He calls himself a devotee of the great Louis Brandeis, speaking with reverence about his ideas and those of other famed judicial speech champions like Learned Hand and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the Aspen speech above, he went so far as to say about First Amendment protections that these old opinions are so great, it s like watching The Godfather, you can t imagine anything could be better.
If you hear a but& coming in his rhetoric, you guessed right. He does imagine something better. The Cliff s Notes version of Wu s thesis:
The framers wrote the Bill of Rights in an atmosphere where speech was expensive and rare. The Internet made speech cheap, and human attention rare. Speech-hostile societies like Russia and China have already shown how to capitalize on this cheap speech era, eschewing censorship and bans in favor of flooding the Internet with pro-government propaganda.
As a result, those who place faith in the First Amendment to solve speech dilemmas should admit defeat and imagine new solutions for repelling foreign propaganda, fake news, and other problems. In some cases, Wu writes, this could mean that the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control. What might that look like? He writes, without irony: I think the elected branches should be allowed, within reasonable limits, to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the 1950s.
More ominously, Wu suggests that in modern times, the government may be more of a bystander to a problem in which private platforms play the largest roles. Therefore, a potential solution (emphasis mine) boils down to asking whether these platforms should adopt (or be forced to adopt) norms and policies traditionally associated with twentieth-century journalism.
That last line is what should make speech advocates worry.