Sandy Hook, page 21
“That was the first of the public beheadings that needed to happen,” Lenny told me.
The university said it fired Tracy for failing to file paperwork disclosing his blog and radio show. The firing shook the academic community, long accustomed to protections for free expression that went beyond those in most workplaces.
Kevin Carey, an education policy expert at New America, a Washington think tank, addressed the First Amendment protection Tracy claimed.
“Great universities can afford to shelter a few cranks and fools in order to support genuinely original thinking,” Carey wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.[7] “While Florida Atlantic was right to fire James Tracy, it should be forthright about why: Not because of his offenses against truth and decency, though they are many, but because someone so cruel and possibly deranged has no business being employed to teach undergraduate students. Sometimes, the expansive protections of academic freedom are strengthened by defining where they end.”
Tracy sued Florida Atlantic University to get his job back, claiming his sacking violated the university’s commitment to academic freedom and his constitutional right to free speech. He lost.
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Conspiracy theorists aren’t known for consistency, but they universally insist that the First Amendment shields them from consequences for spreading harmful lies.
The big platforms’ creators also trot out free-speech principles when criticized for failing to rein in abuse. That might sound good, but it’s based on a false reading of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment shields Americans’ freedom of speech against government interference, not Facebook interference. As private businesses, social media companies make their own rules about what users can and can’t say on their platforms. But the law, namely Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, protects them from liability when they fail to enforce them.
Newspapers, television, and news websites enjoy First Amendment protection for the content they publish and air. But the same body of law holds them responsible for its truth. If they knowingly or recklessly spread falsehoods that defame individuals or businesses, they can be sued in the states, whose definitions of “defamation” differ.
In 2017, Beef Products, a South Dakota meat processor, sued ABC News for defamation after a 2012 ABC investigation targeting the company’s use of low-cost, processed beef trimmings, which the industry calls “lean finely textured beef,” and detractors call “pink slime.” The beef processor claimed the ABC segment and its subsequent reports were rife with errors and mischaracterizations of the product, leading to a consumer reaction that devastated its business. Beef Products sought $1.9 billion in damages, which could have grown to nearly $6 billion under South Dakota law. ABC settled with the company for an undisclosed amount that subsequent reports indicated was well in excess of $177 million.[8]
In Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., the Supreme Court ruled in 1991 that the First Amendment’s free expression clause did not shield from liability a reporter who fabricated quotes attributed to Jeffrey Masson, a public figure. The court ruled that although public figures must prove that statements about or attributed to them must constitute a “gross distortion of the truth” in order to be considered “false,” the made-up quotes qualified because they differed in their factual meaning from what Masson had actually said.[9]
In Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, the late evangelical minister Jerry Falwell sued Larry Flynt’s adult magazine for a parody ad depicting Falwell engaged in a drunken, incestuous encounter with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell won a jury verdict in a lower court and was awarded $150,000 in damages. Hustler appealed. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously for Hustler in 1988, holding that public figures cannot recover damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress without showing that the false statement was made with “actual malice,” meaning it was made with knowledge of, or reckless disregard for, its falsity.[10]
The high court further ruled that “the interest of protecting free speech, under the First Amendment, surpassed the state’s interest in protecting public figures from patently offensive speech, so long as such speech could not reasonably be construed to state actual facts about its subject.” In other words, the First Amendment protects media that lampoon a public figure by making charges so outrageous that no normal person would believe them.
The “actual malice” standard was established in the landmark 1964 New York Times Company v. Sullivan, in which the high court set a higher bar for public officials suing the press for libel. The court ruled, famously, that it is not enough for a public figure targeted by a statement to show that it is false. The person must prove the outlet in question either knew the statement was untrue or didn’t care.
The liability that these precedents allow to be imposed on publishers applies to all media—except social media.
Although Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube are fast becoming most Americans’ main source of news and information, federal law protects them from being sued for any defamatory content they distribute.[11]
In 1996, Congress recognized the internet as an extraordinary information and educational resource for Americans, and its potential as “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.” So they tried to protect the internet from excessive government regulation, giving it nearly unfettered possibilities for growth.
Section 230 immunizes social platforms from liability by treating them not as publishers but as mere pipelines for user-created content.[12] Here’s the relevant part:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
The law defines “interactive computer service” as “any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the internet.” That includes services like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
As Lenny learned, the platforms act on content that breaks federal laws against child sexual abuse and copyright infringement. But they do far too little to remove other types of harmful content or users. Free speech principles, they claim, compel them to surrender platforms connecting one-third of the world to democracy’s worst actors. The argument betrays either shocking ignorance of the Constitution, monstrous cynicism, or both.
The companies have spent billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns aimed at preserving their Section 230 immunity. Reminding Congress of 230’s original intent, they rhapsodize about their good deeds. Mark Zuckerberg pivots to the social justice movements and marriages fostered by Facebook when asked about its role in enabling Russian election interference, the neo-Nazis gathering on Facebook groups, and the murders streamed on Facebook Live. While misinformation, menace, and calls to violence circulate among the hundreds of millions of videos viewed each day on Google’s YouTube, the company accepted plaudits for building “global community.”[13]
Twitter publicly celebrated its role in linking activists during the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s while racist and misogynist attacks skyrocketed. “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” former chief executive Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo in 2015.[14]
A year later, Charlie Warzel, then a senior tech writer for BuzzFeed, investigated Twitter’s abuse problem in an article titled “ ‘A Honeypot for Assholes’: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure to Stop Harassment.”[15] Several women and people of color had left the platform in 2016, amid torrents of abuse and threats, including Leslie Jones, then at Saturday Night Live.
“Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority,” wrote Warzel, who now writes for The Atlantic and Galaxy Brain, an online newsletter.
At the time Twitter said it was investing in better “tools and enforcement systems” to find and take faster action against abuse. The platforms have made improvements over the past several years, adding automated filters and better reporting mechanisms. But abusers have grown more sophisticated in skirting them.
“This is like an arms race,” Warzel told me. “The bad actors become more sophisticated, and the company is always a step behind.”
Hany Farid has studied this ecosystem, and it’s made him a hardened critic of internet culture and the big platforms. Farid is associate dean and head of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. Working from the chilly patio of his house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, Farid is an influential voice for social media regulation. His research focuses on digital forensics, image analysis, and human perception. He has provided expert testimony on “deep fake” video and photography in child sexual abuse material, intellectual property, and fine-art authentication cases.
The source of social media poison are its content algorithms, engineered to keep users online for as long as possible while feeding them advertising and separating them from their personal data. The big platforms are paid by advertisers, and the platforms in turn pay content creators for advertising placed on their sites or channels. The more awful or outrageous the content, the more people click, and the more everybody earns.
The big platforms “will have you believe they are neutral arbiters, but it’s a complete and utter lie,” Farid told me. “That newsfeed is algorithmically determined for you.”
The algorithms are secret, but the results are obvious. If you consume conspiracy theories, your newsfeed and recommendations adapt, so you receive more and more of them. “Seventy percent of videos on YouTube is YouTube telling us what to watch,” Farid told me. When dangerously false content goes viral, “YouTube is promoting that stuff.”
It’s the perfect storm, he said. “You have bad people and trolls and people trying to make money by taking advantage of horrible things that happen around the world, you have social media websites who are not only welcoming and permissive of it but are promoting it, and then you have us, the unsuspecting public, who are intentionally or unintentionally propagating it through the economy of the internet, retweets, and likes.”
Farid scoffs at the platforms’ free speech piety. He points out that “from the earliest days Facebook and YouTube said ‘we will not allow adult porn as part of our terms of service,’ ” even though the distribution of adult pornography has been repeatedly affirmed by the courts, as a signal test of First Amendment freedoms.
“For Zuckerberg to rhapsodize about banning the actual speech that gave us First Amendment law? The hypocrisy and the irony is deep here. The reason they banned it is that they knew their advertisers did not want to be adjacent to it,” Farid said. “They can ban all forms of content without running afoul of the Constitution. But they choose not to do it because they’re making so much goddamned money.”
“The internet is getting close to the point where it’s doing more harm than good,” Farid told me. “We keep talking about this dystopian future. I wonder if it’s here.”
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The day after Tracy’s op-ed ended his career, Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson fired off an alarmed email to “Buckley,” probably Buckley Hamman, Jones’s cousin who worked on Infowars’ operations side:
Sent this to Alex. This Sandy Hook stuff is killing us.
It makes us look bad to align with people who harass the parents of dead kids. It’s gonna hurt us with Drudge and bringing bigger names into the show.
The event happened 3 years ago, why even risk our reputation for it?
If Jones ever got their message, he gave no sign. His reputation, at risk? A Republican candidate for president of the United States had just praised his reputation as “amazing.”
13
There were few more blazing warnings of what Americans could expect from Donald Trump than his enthusiasm for Alex Jones. Their meeting signaled a profound change in American politics, the merging of the fringe with the establishment, and the refashioning of truth from an objective, respected standard to a malleable commodity and partisan weapon.
For a couple of years before Sandy Hook, Alex Jones was a regular guest on RT, the international TV network controlled and paid for by the Russian state. Kelly Jones recalls Russia Today, as it was known, calling at all hours, and Jones hopping-to, eager to build his audience by whatever means. The Kremlin was happy too, keen to air his paranoia about the United States—denying citizens their rights, spying on them, and using the police to hunt them down.
Liz Wahl did some of those interviews. An American former RT anchor, Wahl resigned on air in 2014 in protest of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Wahl thought Jones seemed harmless at first, an excitable character darkly speculating about the cabal of billionaires at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. But his theories grew more fantastical and darker. “He didn’t believe in U.S. democracy as we follow it,” Wahl told me. “He thought it was all just a cover for some kind of global elite takeover.”
Even RT’s producers started pushing back. “They were like, ‘We can’t put this guy on. He’s totally nuts,’ ” Wahl said. “We had crazy people on all the time,” she added, but to be effective, RT needed its guests to be at least somewhat credible. They cut Jones loose.
That was a year before Jones began pushing the Sandy Hook conspiracy on his show. And it was three years before Donald Trump, Republican candidate for president, appeared as an honored guest on Infowars.
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“Donald Trump is our guest, ladies and gentlemen,” Jones said on December 2. “He is a maverick, he’s an original. He tells it like it is, doesn’t read off a teleprompter. Neither do I. He’s self-made. This whole media operation that reaches twenty million people a week worldwide, conservatively, self-made. That’s why I’m so excited.”
Describing Trump, bankrolled by his father,[1] as “self-made” was fanciful. But Jones’s father had made Jones too, so that was something else they had in common.
Trump joined from New York. He sat hunched over a desk in his Trump Tower office, his face, spackled in deep ochre, backlit by the window behind him. His bulk blotted out the expensive view of grand buildings, the spire of one of them appearing to protrude, antenna-like, from the top of his famous coif. He bore an indulgent smile, ready to plug his book Crippled America, soak up Jones’s praise, and move on.
Jones welcomed him, calling Trump “Donald.” He began by affirming Trump’s false claim that “radical Muslims” around New York had publicly celebrated the fall of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks.
“I took a lot of heat and I was very strong on it and I held my line,” Trump said. Jones bobbed his head, star-struck.
“Hundreds of people were calling up my office. I was the other day in Sarasota, Florida . . . twelve thousand people, which is fantastic. And the people were saying, many of the people from New Jersey, four or five people said, ‘Mr. Trump, I saw it myself. I was there . . . I saw it myself, Mr. Trump, I was there.’ So many people have called in and on Twitter—@RealDonaldTrump—they’re all tweeting. So I know it happened.”
Trump hijacked Jones’s signature claim, that he had predicted the 9/11 attacks.
“I wrote it in a book, 2000, two years before the World Trade Center came down,” Trump said. “I talked about Osama bin Laden: ‘You better take him out,’ I said. ‘He’s going to crawl under a rock. You better take him out.’ And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, ‘You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden,’ which actually is true. And then two years later, a year and a half later, he knocked down the World Trade Center.” Trump had not in fact “predicted Osama bin Laden.”
Trump meandered through talking points on terrorism, Iran, Iraq, China, Obamacare, trade, his poll numbers, and his crowd sizes.
Jones nodded along for a while, placing an index finger to his lips in a show of rapt attention. But then he started cutting Trump off, pushing for more. Jones had a big, paranoid following to impress. Yapping over the older man’s braying monotone, Jones began nudging Trump further out there, to satisfy his listeners.
“Donald Trump, let me say this. My audience, I’d say ninety percent support you, OK? And you definitely have shown your knowledge of geopolitical systems . . . People love you for tough talk. Is it not time for impeachment hearings against Obama? I mean, what do we do politically to really try to prosecute Hillary Clinton?”
Trump demurred. He was competing in the primary; he needed to vanquish a full field of Republicans and then draw some Democrats. The timing wasn’t right.
“There’s so many things to do, Alex. We will do such a good job. There’s so many fronts . . . You know, everybody running against me in terms of even the Republican side and Hillary, certainly they’re all controlled by their donors and their special interests and the lobbyists. I’m putting up my own money. I’m funding my own campaign. Nobody’s going to control me. I’m going to do what’s right for you and for the American people.”
