Elon Musk purchased Twitter with the avowed purpose of restoring free speech because, he said, it is “important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner without resorting to violence.” Twitter is still in a transition period under Mr. Musk’s new leadership. Nevertheless, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk decided that he could not wait before strongly urging Mr. Musk, in an open letter he wrote earlier this month, “to ensure human rights are central to the management of Twitter under your leadership.” Mr. Türk then laid out in his letter six fundamental principles from a human rights perspective that he believes Twitter must follow.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights put some brakes on free speech
The first principle was the protection of free speech itself and the right of privacy. That’s great. But instead of stopping right there, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights put some brakes on free speech in his very next principle. “Free speech is not a free pass," Mr. Türk wrote. “Viral spread of harmful disinformation, like that seen during the Covid-19 pandemic in relation to vaccines, results in real world harms. Twitter has a responsibility to avoid amplifying content that results in harm to other people’s rights.”
Melissa Fleming, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Global Communications, wrote in her November 10th Medium article that “Elon Musk’s promise to make the platform an online haven for free speech has us worried. What does that really mean in the age of disinformation?”
“The nemesis of free speech is not content moderation. It’s disinformation, hate speech, incitement to violence,” Under-Secretary General Fleming added. “It’s disinformation that chills free speech and amplifies authoritarian and populist agendas.”
Ms. Fleming is right to raise serious concerns about posts that constitute incitement to violence. Speech that is directed to inciting imminent violence or other lawless action and is likely to incite such action should be prohibited to prevent looming actual violence and disorder. No reasonable person would dispute the need for such a prohibition even if it is at odds with freedom of speech absolutism.
Restricting non-violent speech because it spreads alleged “harmful disinformation” or hurts other people’s feelings is too subjective a standard
However, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not contemplate restricting the right set forth in Article 19 to “seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers” in the name of prohibiting “disinformation.” There is no mention at all of “disinformation” or “misinformation” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Restricting non-violent speech because it spreads alleged “harmful disinformation” or hurts other people’s feelings is too subjective a standard to apply without risking overly broad censorship and viewpoint discrimination. The result of such restrictions would be to chill the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression and the sharing of potentially valuable information.
For example, under its previous management, Twitter censored very shortly before the 2020 presidential election a New York Post article reporting about disturbing material gathered from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter did so on the grounds that the article was allegedly based on disinformation. The New York Post report turned out to be true. But the damage had already been done because millions of Twitter users who were preparing to vote in the presidential election were deprived of access to significant information that might have influenced their vote.
Twitter’s previous management clearly discriminated against the viewpoints expressed in tweets by conservatives that Twitter’s management did not like. It banned for life an ex-president of the United States for spreading alleged disinformation and hate speech while permitting rabid anti-Semitic Twitter posts by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, including disinformation about the Holocaust.
Support Canada Free Press
UN high-level officials have not rung loud alarm bells regarding the disinformation that has appeared regularly on Chinese-owned TikTok
It is worth noting that UN high-level officials did not publicize their concerns, if any, regarding these decisions of Twitter’s previous management with the same intensity as they are now voicing to Elon Musk. Moreover, UN high-level officials have not rung loud alarm bells regarding the disinformation that has appeared regularly on Chinese-owned TikTok. According to the findings from a recent investigation by NewsGuard, “TikTok’s users, who are predominantly teens and young adults, are consistently fed false and misleading claims when they search on TikTok for information about prominent news topics.” TikTok has also reportedly accessed nonpublic personal data about TikTok users repeatedly for surveillance purposes.
Relying on unaccountable content moderators to decide whether to block the postings of alleged disinformation takes us down a slippery slope towards extinguishing the robust exchange of ideas that is the hallmark of freedom of speech.
Take scientific information, for example. Science does not stand still. Better data can render prior assumptions based on less complete or less accurate data obsolete. As a Scientific American article put it, “Science is a process of learning and discovery, and sometimes we learn that what we thought was right is wrong.”
Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), admitted as much last August when she said that the CDC was “responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications.”
The United Nations has an extensive global social media presence on multiple platforms
What if someone had posted on social media medical information that contradicted what the CDC was saying at the time? Should that posting have been taken down immediately on the grounds that it was disinformation even though it may have ultimately turned out to be correct? Shouldn’t people be able to make up their own minds?
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1927, the remedy to be applied against “falsehood and fallacies” is “more speech, not enforced silence.” Of course, social media did not exist back in 1927, nor the ability that social media makes possible to spread “falsehood and fallacies” instantly to hundreds of millions of users like Twitter can. However, Justice Brandeis’s teaching that the remedy for dissemination of falsehoods – disinformation, in today’s parlance - is more speech that is truthful remains as valid today as it was in Justice Brandeis’s time. Posting corrections or warnings about posts with alleged disinformation can be done as quickly, with as broad a potential reach, as it took to post the original information in question.
Melissa Fleming, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Global Communications, has the right idea in assigning her social media team to, in her words, work to “distil trustworthy UN information into accessible posts for our millions of followers.” The United Nations has an extensive global social media presence on multiple platforms that the UN should continue to use in good faith to counter what informed people consider to be “falsehoods and fallacies” with facts that are true.
Ms. Fleming said during an interview last month that since the UN and its partners launched a “Verified” campaign to lead the fight against misinformation and disinformation, “our reliable information has reached more than a billion people worldwide.” They endeavor to be “the first to get the facts out” and “to proactively offer fact-based counter-narratives.”
Such steps are all to the good. However, senior UN officials will undermine the spirit of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects “freedom of opinion and expression,” by pressuring social media platforms to ban what they believe is “disinformation.” Zeroing in so quickly, publicly, and critically on Elon Musk, who is just getting his feet wet as the new owner of Twitter, was a bad idea.
