Former Secretary of State John Kerry stated that the First Amendment is a hindrance to anti-misinformation campaigns.
Kerry criticized those who independently seek out news information while speaking as part of a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel. “The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree,” he said. “And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.”
Kerry said, “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, etc.”
“But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”
“So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he continued, adding, “The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today.”
According to the former secretary of state, the “absence of a sort of truth arbiter” is a detriment to government systems. He emphasized that “democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?”
