"Free Speech Is A Human Right!" Professors Jonathan Turley & Dave Karpf Clash
In a divide that says a lot about where Americans stand, depending on whom you ask “The Twitter Files” were a revolutionary exposé of government censorship or a “nothingburger”.
George Washington law professor and favorite among ZeroHedge readers Jonathan Turley debated his left-leaning GW colleague, David Karpf, on the preeminent speech question of our age: how to secure free online discourse. Moderated by Gene Epstein of The SoHo Forum, they discussed Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and whether its new form — X — has been a net positive for society.
We encourage readers to listen to the full debate (linked below), but for those short on time here were the key moments:
“Nothingburger”
After Musk released internal Twitter documents from the previous regime to journalists like Taibbi and Shellenberger, we often heard from the left and mainstream media that it was exaggerated excerpts from routine and banal content moderation discussions. Karpf shares this view.
Turley, on the other hand, argues that it was a pivotal moment in exposing a censorship apparatus that had grown out of hand.
“The statement that the Twitter files was a ‘nothingburger’ is really breathtaking,” he says. “They were censoring jokes. They were censoring people who had dissenting views of COVID. People were barred and throttled and blacklisted.”
“[Social media companies] were one monolithic whole, and they were all working with the U.S. government in a censorship system that a federal court called ‘perfectly Orwellian’.”
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) December 18, 2024
The Silencing of Jay Bhattacharya
The question of Stanford physician Jay Bhattacharya was raised. The Context: A now-infamous leaked email between Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, then-directors of National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), respectively, revealed that the top Biden Admin scientists privately ordered a “devastating published take down” of Bhattacharya’s criticism of national lockdown policy. It was additionally revealed that he was shadow-banned on Twitter.
Asked whether these actions taken against Bhattacharya — now Trump’s pick to lead the NIH — constituted a free speech infringement, Karpf replied that Bhattacharya’s current success proves that his “cancelling” was ineffective and thus inconsequential.
Turley took issue, saying Karpf and his ilk are essentially advocating for certain voices to be “disappeared”.
“I’m really troubled by this line of argument,” Turley rebutts. “It’s sort of like a doctor saying, ‘Yes I committed malpractice, but I didn’t kill the patient… The fact that people can survive is a rather chilling test when determining whether this was a good or bad thing.”
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) December 18, 2024
Grasping Governments
As Turley points out, for centuries governments have tried to limit the means through which their subjects can communicate via unauthorized channels.
“The internet itself is the most important invention since the printing press,” he argues. “When the printing press came out, the first reaction of governments was to limit the printing press. The internet scared the daylights out of governments. Also now with social media.”
Turley describes social media platforms as powerful tools that have scaled communication from orators standing atop boxes on urban street corners to everyone having global reach at all times. He views this as tremendously positive for speech while Karpf believes Musk abused this power to elect Trump and that Turley is only celebrating because “his side” won.
Karpf: “We are now at a version of Twitter where Elon Musk is spending basically every day with President-to-be Donald Trump, helping to dictate what government policy should be and which agencies should effectively go away. And he's calling for people who work for the government to be fired.”
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) December 18, 2024
Watch the full debate below or listen on Spotify (start at 46-minute mark):
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 17, 2024
