Analysis

First Amendment Makes It ‘Really Hard to Govern Today’ – Ex-Secretary of State

05:55 GMT, 5 October 2024
© AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin
John Miles
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The comment caused an uproar among conservatives, who have grown increasingly sensitive towards efforts to involve the federal government in the moderation of online content.
Sputnik
Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said the quiet part out loud at a World Economic Forum event recently, lamenting that the United States’ constitutional protection of free speech is a “major block” to stamping out online disinformation.
“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing,” said the ex-Secretary of State during a panel on green energy and sustainable development. “It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It's really hard to govern today.”
“You know there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts,” he continued. “Iif people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just hammer it out of existence.”
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The comment caused an uproar among conservatives, who have grown increasingly sensitive towards efforts to further involve the federal government in the moderation of online content since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. President Joe Biden was forced to backtrack from plans to establish a “disinformation czar” two years ago when the idea drew fierce criticism from political opponents and some experts.
“Kerry is sitting there saying, precisely, [that] we need one central source of information that everybody depends on,” explained independent journalist Jim Kavanagh on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Friday.
“He's [saying] we should be dependent on our information and our judgment of what the facts and the truth are on the government that lied to us about WMDs, the government that lied to us for 20 years about Afghanistan… the government who's lying to us all the time. ‘It's a real tragedy that people are actually undermining the consensus that we want to have for believing those lies that we've been telling.’”

“This is anti-democratic,” Kavanagh claimed. “It's completely contrary to everything that supposed liberals stood for for 50 years and they're all eating it up.”

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Host Garland Nixon pointed to the removal of Glenn Diesen’s channel on YouTube as an indication of the growing trend towards online censorship. The professor and public intellectual from Norway recorded a video four years ago explaining Russia’s security interests regarding Ukraine and the region, concluding that Moscow had been unfairly demonized as a security threat.
The claim was apparently enough to justify Diesen’s channel being suspended, along with accusations the political scientist was guilty of spreading “Russian propaganda.”

“When the goons meet at Davos or wherever else the West is having a little soiree or any of these other foundations – Bilderberg, Chatham House, Bloomberg, all that kind of stuff – they're talking to each other,” said podcaster and commentator Steve Poikonen. “They're never talking to us, only about us and all of the people in that room certainly agree with John Kerry that it would be way easier to enter into a technocratic fascist state than anything that markets itself as a democracy.”

“Let's just move into the technocratic panopticon because all of the digital infrastructure has already been built for it.”

“Let me add because Kerry's talking about how it's hard to build a consensus: there is a consensus – just look at the polling data,” said host Wilmer Leon. “70 percent of Americans polled don't want this conflict in Gaza to continue, almost 70 percent of Americans polled don't want their hard-earned tax dollars wasted in Ukraine. There is a consensus, they're just ignoring it.”

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AnalysisUSJohn KerryJim KavanaghUkrainefree speechfreedom of speechcensorshipmedia censorshipPolitical Censorshippolitical oppositiondictatorshipauthoritarianiasmauthoritarianauthoritarian tendenciesUS mediacorporate mediapropaganda
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