Lies can wreck a business, destroy a career, kill relationships and ruin lives. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is right. When an internet service provider hosts a defamatory, fabricated personal attack that accuses the target of reprehensible and criminal behavior, that provider possesses a certain degree of accountability for their refusal to take it down. Not unlike the print media knowingly publishing a libelous letter or op-ed, the internet carrier may, based on the evidentiary record, be found justly liable for allowing the damage and refusing to act. Sort of like deserting an injured person lying in the street, after you helped cause the injury.
After all, the service provider is the essential link, without which the offense would never occur. Claiming ignorance seems a flimsy excuse, considering how often these same providers take down content they find objectionable. Politically speaking, that objectionable content is almost always from the right. Sen. Paul himself has been a victim of Google’s political cleansing on more than one occasion.
Warning: Paul’s liability proposal could have a chilling effect on lying. It might even help popularize objective truth, and nothing is more dangerous to a creative liar than truth itself. To the chagrin of many, Paul’s bill could undermine our entire culture of internet character assassination – leaving the liars with muted microphones and broken clubs. Then what would they do? Responsibility and accountability, to be sure, are scary things. Especially to those who are neither accountable nor responsible.
It’s not hard to imagine the kind of protest movement Paul’s measure could ignite. Trolls of the world unite! Stop truth-obsessed religious bigotry! Liars’ Lives Matter! Trolls have rights, too!
Granted. Trolls have rights, too. They’re in the First Amendment. Freedom of expression isn’t limited to expressions that are nice. In includes the vulgar, the vicious, the venal and the vile. But we’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill, drive-by trolls here. We’re talking about cynically contrived efforts to spread defamatory lies that steal from another human being their possession of greatest value: their reputation. It’s the blind complicity and moral malingering of the internet provider that makes it all possible.
Consider Sen. Paul’s recent ordeal. It’s exactly what we’re talking about.
It started when a self-styled internet executioner decided to pose as a newscaster and put out on YouTube, a scandalous video about the senator, made to look like an official news report from a TV studio. Her concocted narrative convinced perhaps millions of viewers that conservative, anti-socialist Paul was guilty of treason against his country, having lined his pockets with money from Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro. As the video went viral, paid trolls piled on. People believed the lie.
After the fourth family death threat, Paul had enough. For three weeks, he had appealed to Google (parent company of YouTube) to take down this ludicrous, fabricated video, whose sole purpose was to misinform and to spread hatred and violence. Google repeatedly refused, saying in essence, that they were in no position to determine the truthfulness of the content they hosted! They insisted that they were protecting free speech.
Now wait a minute. This is the same Google and YouTube that regularly takes down free speech that they don’t like or don’t happen to agree with. This includes several speeches by Rand Paul, delivered on the floor of the U.S. Senate where it is fully protected. YouTube objected to Paul’s speech warning that cloth masks did not inhibit COVID transmission (now proven to be true) so they removed it. YouTube objected to one of Paul’s speeches on the Ukraine controversy, so they removed it as well. In both cases, they questioned a U.S. senator’s accuracy and veracity. Yet they say they aren’t able to challenge the truthfulness of a contrived, phony video accusing Paul of treason. How do you spell hypocrisy?
Let’s take a minute to put ourselves in the place of someone who’s been maliciously lied about over the internet and in the mainstream media. At times in our lives, we’ve all found ourselves victims of lies, and the experience can be deeply hurtful. But consider how it would feel to have those lies progressively inflated, and delivered into the minds of millions of people you don’t even know.
I’ve been there, and I can tell you it is hell on earth. I took legal action, and a subsequent settlement ended the matter. (The terms of the settlement limit my ability to say more.) I’m told I was “vindicated” by the process, but especially in defamation cases, you never feel you were really made clean, never believe that justice was truly served, and never experience total peace. Why? Because you as the victim can never reel back in all those hurtful lies. You can never truly clear your name. Most of the damage is permanent. In my case, only prayer has saved my family and me, and allow us to move on. And I was thankful that despite the unhinged internet attacks, at least the print media was self-policing. Every newspaper refused to print the alleged defaming comments, both as a matter of professional ethics and acknowledged legal liability.
Lying about someone is stealing. It is the worst form of theft, that robs from you not physical possessions, but your reputation. And reputation is a sacred, soul-tied thing, and in a very real sense, a property right as well. You own it. No one else. Through court ordered damages and restitution, physical stuff can often be returned or restored. Reputation doesn’t work that way. Much of what is lost never returns to you. People read the juicy internet gossip, and generally believe it. It seems to be human nature to want to believe the worst in people. That’s why a liar’s lies work so well. Moreover, while truth just stands on its own merits, calculated lies can be crafted into the most effective narratives possible – more interesting and more believable than truth itself. If a small news story eventually appears on page 26, partly correcting the record, it is seen by few and remembered by fewer. That’s the way of things. And people go on remembering the lies. Yes. Lying is theft. The worst kind of theft. Often directed against the best kind of people. Like Senator Rand Paul.
The freedom to lie is the freedom to steal. One cannot argue that the First Amendment protects malicious lying against innocent victims any more than one would propose that the Second Amendment protects your right to shoot whoever you please, just to hurt them. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. They can only exist when bonded together. When the bond breaks, freedom turns to rubble.
I appreciate the philosophical arguments of Reason Magazine and the true believers on the libertarian right. Their instincts are not wrong, just misplaced. Rand Paul has it right. Freedom and moral responsibility were created together and must walk together. The internet is no exception to this universal principle. Sen. Paul’s plan to repeal the special, government-granted liability protection reserved exclusively for internet providers under Section 230 of the federal Communications Act is in every sense consistent with good government, the Constitution and the principles of liberty.
Note: This column first appeared at The Epoch Times.
