When Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News in 2021 for lying about the performance of the company’s voting machines in the 2020 presidential election, it had a lot to prove. Libel and defamation cases are notoriously challenging because the law requires solid evidence that the publisher knowingly, maliciously deceived the public.
It’s a high bar. But Dominion had the legs to clear it.
In a deposition, Fox Chair Rupert Murdoch testified that he believed the election was “not stolen” even though his network was hammering away with that message day after day after day.
Then, Dominion’s lawyers delivered a pile of documents revealing details about how Fox decided to try to win back viewers who were upset with the network’s accurate election-night reporting that Biden had won Arizona. The calculated strategy was to lie to them about the voting machines and the election outcome.
The evidence revealed their plan to curry favor with viewers through a premeditated strategy to mislead them.
Suddenly, Dominion had the upper hand.
Fox agreed to a $787 million settlement to avoid a trial.
This is something Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have to worry about.
Zuckerberg can facilitate the millions of users of his social media sites in spreading dangerous misinformation, disinformation, foreign propaganda and rampant defamation with impunity. He and his fellow social media barons are entirely immune from the civil recourse that Fox News and other traditional media face when they knowingly disseminate lies.
So, Zuckerberg’s announcement that the Meta platforms would no longer do content moderation to prevent maliciously dishonest, racist, antisemitic, dangerous or just plain disgusting posts from circulating on their sites was a no-brainer.
Meta is immune. Every sewer pipe is more stringently regulated.
It all goes back to 1996, when Zuckerberg was 12 years old and the now president-elect, one of the world’s most brazen social media liars, was too busy dealing with an estimated $1 billion in business losses to go public with his bizarre counterfactual hallucinations.
Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which was aimed at online porn, but included the infamous Section 230, a broadly worded guarantee of immunity for internet platforms.
This was “way back in the 1900s,” as my grandson would say, and the famously technologically ignorant members of Congress had no idea what they were doing.
“The internet was in its infancy,” said Steven Zansberg, a prominent Denver First Amendment lawyer. There was no such thing as a social media site. The World Wide Web didn’t even exist until 1995.
Zansberg, a self-described First Amendment zealot, said this measure has subjected us all to “blatant propaganda” and a tsunami of deception.
“It grants immunity for that,” it said. “Now it’s open season for lying.”
Injured parties — which might include businesses like Dominion that are damaged by disinformation campaigns, families who have lost loved ones to treatable diseases because they were deceived about medical interventions, people whose reputations were destroyed by lies — can still sue individuals who post malicious lies on social media.
But the social media barons are untouchable. In fact, the more outrageous the content, the happier they are.
It’s all about the likes.
Zansberg, the First Amendment zealot, thinks that’s wrong, but admits he doesn’t know how to solve the problem with Section 230. But those who promulgate dangerous falsehoods, he says, should be held accountable for them.
In a piece published last year on Medium, he argued, “Government should rise to the occasion and fulfill its duty to protect the public’s health and welfare.”
He put forth a hypothetical situation in which internet influencers aimed a message at kids that Tide laundry pods were good for you and completely safe to eat. As a result, thousands of hypothetical children became hypothetically ill or died.
Should this kind of dangerous and deliberate disinformation qualify for First Amendment protection?
And how different is that from the rampant disinformation campaign surrounding vaccines and bogus treatments that resulted in thousands of preventable deaths from COVID?
Still, Zansberg doesn’t see any appetite for legislation to hold social media to the same standards of integrity, responsibility and truthfulness as the traditional media.
“I’m deeply skeptical of the role of government to regulate the private dissemination of information,” he said. “I don’t know a simple solution from the government’s point of view.”
Which leaves us adrift in an ocean of Russian election interference, online human traffickers, climate deniers all over X, and all manner of garden-variety liars populating the hugely profitable social media sites.
And trying to educate the public about how to verify the information gushing from these platforms has proved all but impossible.
We’re willing victims of grotesque manipulation. We devour it with glee.
Just last week, as the people of Los Angeles were struggling to survive in apocalyptic wildfires, cynical politicians were repeating outrageous lies about state policies that they say led to the disaster.
FactCheck.org, a non-partisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, resoundingly debunked the claims.
It didn’t make any difference. The lies kept circulating, the people of LA kept suffering and hateful politicians celebrated another victory in the propaganda wars.
We can’t handle the truth and the social media barons know it. And while they’re immune to the consequences of our culture of deceit, we obviously aren’t.
Los Angelenos are the victims today. Our communities, our livelihoods, our children could be next.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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