By: Shea Angus

Earlier this week I listened to Glenn Greenwald on Joe Rogan’s podcast. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Mr. Greenwald, he is a prominent Pulitzer Prize winning journalist most notable for his work with Edward Snowden. It was Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras who worked with Snowden to publish information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the capacity for the United States government and their international partners, to spy on both foreign nationals and U.S. citizens.

In the over three hour podcast, many topics were discussed including Edward Snowden, Greenwald’s political life and upbringing, the Presidential race, and more. Most of the podcast however, focused on censorship and freedom of speech.

It has long been a personal belief of mine that freedom of speech is often an overlooked and undervalued right that we possess. It might in fact surprise you to learn that no Western nation has an “absolute” right to free speech other than the United States of America where their Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is indeed protected under their First Amendment.

What I want to discuss today however is less about the codified or constitutional right to free speech, but the idea of free speech as a value in and of itself to be highly regarded and protected outside of just government institutions. This article is part one of a two part op-ed with the second focusing on making a case for engagement over deplatforming.

I, like many of my fellow Canadians, have been following the American election with concern and interest. At the time of writing, we are days away from E-Day in the United States and polls indicate Vice President Biden is leading, though that lead is shrinking. Something has occurred during this election that in my opinion, and the opinion of Mr. Rogan and Mr. Greenwald, will have effects for years and years to come.

On October 14th, 2020, The New York Post, which is the fourth most circulated newspaper in the US and is one of its oldest (founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton), posted a front page story regarding the contents of a laptop allegedly belonging to the son of Presidential Nominee Joe Biden, Hunter Biden. The authenticity of the contents and emails found therein have not been disputed by either the Biden campaign or Hunter Biden himself. Without breaking down all of the allegations stemming from the information found in the laptop, suffice it to say the allegations would hurt the Biden campaign.

Following the post of this article, Twitter locked the New York Post from being able to access their Twitter account, and they actually blocked the URL from being shared on Twitter, meaning you could not post this article on their platform. Facebook took action as well, although less severe, and admitted to suppressing the circulation of the story on Facebook (meaning it would make it less likely to appear in your timeline on Facebook). The New York Post was locked out of their account for sixteen days during the final month of a Presidential campaign, for refusing to delete their original tweet of the article. On October 30th, Twitter relented and unlocked their account.

Since the initial posting of this story, information continues to be verified by other sources and initial accusations made by other news outlets claiming that this was part of a Russian disinformation campaign have been disputed by the Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, The New York Times, and the FBI among others. What alarms Rogan, Greenwald, and myself was the initial action taken by these big tech companies, but also by the apparent willingness of the mainstream media to try and bury a story potentially harmful of Joe Biden.

Greenwald wrote, “One outcome is that the Biden campaign concluded, rationally, that there is no need for the front-running presidential candidate to address even the most basic and relevant questions raised by these materials. Rather than condemn Biden for ignoring these questions -- the natural instinct of a healthy press when it comes to a presidential election -- journalists have instead led the way in concocting excuses to justify his silence.”

The reason I include critiques of the role the media has played with this story here is because of the relevance it has in the decisions of Twitter and Facebook to actively suppress a story like this. The mainstream media apparatus declares this story to be false, without proof, and enables these tech platforms to simply suppress the story (in Facebook’s case) or to outright ban the story (in Twitter’s case).

What this is to me, is an example of establishment powers coming together to censor something harmful to a political candidate, or put another way, election interference. Now of course it is true that Facebook and Twitter are private corporations and they are under no legal obligation to allow anything they do not want on their platform. This is precisely why I made the distinction between the constitutional right to free speech and the true value of free speech. If freedom of speech were more valued by individuals, Facebook and Twitter would feel no pressure to try and suppress truth.

Greenwald notes, “But it's true of Twitter. It's true of Facebook. It's true of Google. They never wanted this censorship role, not for noble reasons, but because it was just it's better for their business if they get to say, you know what, we don't regulate content.” He adds, “We're like AT&T. Right? Like if somebody calls someone on AT&T telephone lines and plans a neo-Nazi rally or spreads Holocaust denialism, nobody expects AT&T to intervene and terminate that person's service or cut off the call. AT&T is a content neutral platform. They just say we provide the ability for human beings to communicate and we don't control or censor or monitor. And that's better for AT&T. They don't spend the money to monitor, censor… The reason why they ended up censoring is because mostly liberal activists and journalists demanded that they did so.”

The reason I write about this is not because I favour Trump over Biden, nor do Greenwald or Rogan who were both Bernie Sanders supporters during the primary (FWIW I was #YangGang all the way). As someone who correctly predicted the outcome of the 2016 Presidential race, I feel I understand and saw things that many others missed and this topic is directly linked to that.

Issues like this sow doubt and mistrust in pillars of our daily life and in our major institutions. Trump’s #FakeNews mantra would hold less power if the mainstream media he laments stopped playing into his hands. Actively suppressing or downplaying a story, which in my opinion should raise at least some serious questions, because it may be harmful to a Presidential candidate that is the only alternative to Donald Trump, will only cause more problems. This not only strengthens Trump’s case against the media, but it also rallies his supporters or independents skeptical of the so-called “power elite”.

I read a tweet from CNN fact checker Daniel Dale following the second debate that said Biden was “Imperfect from a fact check perspective.” While in the same tweet admonishing that “Trump was, as usual, a serial liar.” I admit that it is difficult for me to read something like that and not see a strong and obvious bias.

In some ways I wish that this was a media overreaction following their poor (over)coverage of Trump leading up to and during the 2016 Presidential election. Unfortunately the actions taken so far will do little to repair the public trust in our mainstream media institutions and encourage people to seek out other platforms. Sadly, these same media institutions that have shattered their credibility in the eyes of most of the public, have also forced what once were alternative and unfiltered platforms to lose their credibility as places where the free exchange of ideas could occur. They’ve done this in part by encouraging places like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, to start censoring stories, de-platform voices, and asking them to become arbiters of truth and determine fact from fiction to their users.

I'm also not suggesting that these media outlets should be compelled to report or not report on specific stories. What I am suggesting is that they should be guided by the sole desire to deliver the truth to the public that they serve even if that truth may hurt their desired outcome. The tagline for the Washington Post is that "Democracy Dies in Darkness''. You can imagine my surprise then when the same Washington Post put out an op-ed with the rather stunning proclamation that "We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren't." What happens when these institutions that exist to challenge the establishment and to "shine the light" become part of that establishment? What happens when they become complicit to censorship? Their repeated attempts to position themselves as arbiters of the truth and the police of speech has been a disservice not only to public discourse but to their own credibility.

Censorship begins where good intentions and bad ideas meet. It is a tool used to stifle progress, silence dissenters, and to suppress minority voices. It doesn’t matter the cause, free speech has been the driving force behind social changes and civil rights movements the world over. Censorship doesn’t allow us to challenge bad ideas, it encourages us to ignore them. Censorship efforts, in the end, will always backfire because as Glenn Greenwald says “It can transform bigots into martyrs.”