Defending Free Speech, Again

Bret Weinstein on confronting the new threat to free speech.

Transcript

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Hey folks, I'm feeling pretty out of sorts this morning and I want to take a crack at explaining why. I'm watching several different things unfold. One of them is that Jimmy Kimmel has apparently been fired by ABC and that has a lot of people who under other circumstances would be champions of free speech cheering for his cancellation.(...) I'm not arguing that his cancellation is a violation of his free speech rights.(...) It's not perfectly clear, but obviously he's privately employed and so the First Amendment doesn't apply directly.(...) You could argue that because he's on public airwaves that the First Amendment does apply, but there are certainly limits of what's allowed on television. So let's assume that there is no constitutional issue in the Jimmy Kimmel cancellation. There's still a question about whether or not we want to make certain topics undiscussable in the public square. And as much as X has been discussed as the public square, it is also true that things like broadcast networks function as a part of the public square and we can't have sacred topics. We can't have topics that are off limits. Now I don't like Kimmel one bit and I did not resonate with his joke, but the concern is watching people who know the importance of speech rallying on the opposite side of the fence. That however is not the most important issue that's got me concerned. I also saw a story about an AI engine private that is being employed. The claim is by all platforms, including X to spot antisemitism. What it does is nominally remove anti-Semitic tweets when I asked Grok if it's active and if that's all it does, I'm told it is active and that that's not all it does. It also deboost tweets. Now there are multiple problems with this. One, while I know from my own work as a biologist going back decades that antisemitism is in fact special as a process, it must never become legally special. In the West and in the United States specifically, our laws have to be indifferent to who is facing judgment and over what. In other words, we are entitled to equal protection under the law and that means if something is intolerable, then it has to not matter who it is said about. Either the speech is intolerable because, for example, it incites violence or it is protected. You can't have a special class of speech in which the topic or the subject, the people in question are the reason that something crosses a line. That's true at the level of law, but it must also be true at the level of the public square. The second reason to be concerned is that AI is nowhere near capable of doing this job with the level of nuance that would be necessary even to do what is advertised. That is to detect true antisemitism. Think for a moment about whether or not you've ever seen AI make a proper joke, something really funny, something you would laugh out loud if a comedian said it on stage. AI isn't up to the challenge and that's because humor is actually highly complex and very difficult. How exactly is an AI that is incapable of making a proper joke supposed to distinguish(...) between jokes, irony, paradoxical claims, hypotheses? The answer is it can't. Humans can't and AI has not yet gotten to the point of being able to do the job of an intelligent human. What are we to make of the fact that Elon, by his own accounting, purchased the right to free speech for $44 billion when he bought Twitter and he is now apparently allowing an AI engine to regulate what can and cannot be said on the platform. Further, as we discovered during COVID, as soon as you carve out a right to regulate speech based on its content, then whatever definitions there are that dictate what is allowed and what is forbidden will be altered and modified to do the bidding of whoever controls that algorithm. Let us not forget that during COVID we discovered many people imagine there was an exemption(...) to the First Amendment and to other amendments surrounding public health emergencies. That's simply not true. As Kennedy has pointed out multiple times, the Founding Fathers were well aware of the danger of public health emergencies and made no exception in the Constitution for one. But people's belief that there was such an exception allowed them to relax their protection of our most fundamental rights. Having done so, definitions were modified. I would point out that in fact, antisemitism has been in recent memory proclaimed as a public health emergency by public health officials. If you think it's far fetched that using an AI to remove antisemitic content or prevent people from seeing it on X could lead to other topics, we've already seen the prototype. Now, I shouldn't have to say this because having been through COVID, we should all be familiar with the argument. But the fact is Western civilization depends on free speech more than anything else. This is why it is our first enumerated right. We have to be able to talk about what is taking place in order to figure out what to think about it and more importantly, what to do. If topics are taken off the table, then we are incapable of even knowing what the citizenry thinks. That is an intolerable situation and it cannot last. So once again, we find that the West and our Democratic Republic are jeopardized by those who would narrowly target free speech in order to solve a particular problem either because they are willing to let the West fall or because they do not understand the connection between the First Amendment and its preservation. I hope people understand how important this is. And although there's a lot going on in the world, I don't think there's anything more important than this. We had a public square. There was a lot of very ugly speech in it, to be certain. However, we have to pay that price. The Founding Fathers knew we had to pay the price of vile speech in order to protect difficult but necessary speech.(...) So let's sober up and get back to our job of protecting the West because we and future generations are depending on it.