Government Censorship by Proxy

Cato Podcast

Cato Institute

Cato, Peace, Policy, Politics, Markets, Defense, Government, News, News Commentary, 424708, Immigration, Libertarian

4.5 • 979 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During the pandemic, governments placed significant public and private pressure on social media companies to remove speech protected by the First Amendment, blurring the line between acceptable government speech and unconstitutional censorship by proxy. Concerns about this “jawboning” only grew with the recent decisions in Missouri v. Biden finding that the pressure applied by various government actors likely violated the First Amendment. But this case also revealed the limitations of broadly prohibiting government communications with private companies or merely relying on the courts to police government abuse. Join us as the panel discusses the options available to policymakers and why greater transparency is essential to combating such censorship.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome everyone today to the Cato Institute for this conversation on the topic of government censorship by proxy.
0:07.0	Right off the bat, let me just note that sadly, one of our panelists Kristen came down ill last night so we will miss her here today.
0:15.6	But we will carry on with this discussion that is really even more relevant today than
0:19.5	actually when we first started planning the event as you are all probably aware that the Supreme Court has
0:24.5	decided to take up this issue of what is government censorship by proxy and they'll be discussing
0:29.9	that in there they'll be taking that up in the next term. Just to quickly introduce
0:33.8	myself, my name is David and Sarah and I serve as a fellow for free expression and
0:39.0	technology here at the Cato Institute where I handle issues of social media content policies, attempts
0:45.3	to regulate online expression, and how we can encourage a culture of free expression both
0:49.7	online and offline.
0:52.0	Previous to Cato, I was part of Meta's content policy team
0:55.0	that was responsible for crafting the community standards,
0:58.0	what you can and cannot say on Meta's platforms.
1:01.0	In this role, I also made foul decisions on content that were escalated because they were rather difficult for reviewers to reach that decision at scale or because of the high profile nature of the content.
1:12.0	And so when it comes to today's topic, this is one that I'm
1:15.4	personally familiar with. When developing policies there were times when what
1:20.1	governments were doing or threatening to do,
1:22.7	this was brought to my attention,
1:24.6	and I had to figure out how to proceed.
1:26.4	Did my team craft a policy that is easiest to enforce,
1:30.8	ensures user expression, or should we remove more speech to align with government requests
1:36.6	and maybe fend off government regulation.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cato Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Cato Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.