E-Pluribus | April 8, 2024
Taiwan does it right; striking the right balance on campus speech; and navigating the ideological jungle.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jacob Mchangama: How to Fight Misinformation Without Censorship
Bad governmental responses to “misinformation” are a dime a dozen, but finding examples to emulate is a challenge. At Persuasion, Jacob Mchangama asserts that Taiwan is striking a healthy balance, neither ignoring the issue nor intervening with an overly heavy hand.
Taiwan is an instructive example of a young and vibrant democracy that views freedom of expression as a competitive advantage against authoritarian censorship and propaganda. In large part, Taiwan’s response to China’s aggressive disinformation campaigns has relied on a model where organic and civil society-led initiatives serve as first responders and heavy-handed government intervention is treated with great skepticism. Taiwan’s success provides a proof of concept that should prompt a change of course in European democracies, which increasingly believe that preserving their open societies requires sacrificing free expression.
[. . .]
Taiwan’s civic tech initiatives have been instrumental in defending Taiwan’s democracy and depend to a large degree on freedom of information. “Civic tech” describes informal volunteer and nonprofit initiatives building digital technology for the public good, aiming to make government more open. In Taiwan, a web of organizations mutually reinforces each other’s work. By researching Chinese influence operations and disinformation campaigns using digital tools, think tanks like Doublethink Lab provide source attribution and analysis that helps Taiwanese society tweak and patch its digital resilience against Chinese disinformation campaigns. Another vital player on Taiwan’s civic-tech scene is Cofacts, a crowdsourced initiative that allows users to send suspected disinformation to its chatbot on Taiwan’s most popular messaging app, LINE, where queries are posted and fact-checked in real-time.
In the first ten days of January 2024, Cofacts received over 16,000 inquiries about a DPP candidate alleged to have a mistress and illegitimate child. This claim was quickly debunked by a fact-checking organization called MyGoPen. This episode reinforces recent research from Cornell University which found that crowdsourced sites like Cofacts often responded to queries more rapidly than professional fact-checking sites, which is crucial given the speed at which disinformation can spread online.
These bottom-up and organic civil society initiatives are not at odds with but rather encouraged and complemented by official government policy. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, has pioneered a nonrestrictive policy based on her philosophy of “Radical Transparency.” The Ministry of Digital Affairs’ website proclaims that it combatted the COVID-19 “infodemic with no takedowns.” With assistance from the civic-tech collective g0v, Taiwan’s government implemented a robust contract tracing and vaccination system, while civil society organizations debunked COVID-19 disinformation.
Taiwan’s deep skepticism of government censorship was also on display when the proposed Digital Intermediary Services Act was abandoned due to political and popular opposition. The draft law aimed to regulate platform accountability to counter illegal content and ensure transparency. Taiwanese cyberlaw specialists were particularly concerned that the law gave government authorities powers to file for “information restriction orders,” which—subject to court approval—would limit access to online information. In the context of Taiwan’s recent authoritarian past, many viewed the law as thinly veiled state censorship and an excessive restriction on free speech. In September 2022, the effort to pass DISA was suspended due to sustained public pressure. Moreover, when Taiwan’s communication commission took the unprecedented step of refusing to renew the license of a Taiwanese pro-China TV station, it was overturned in May 2023 by a Taipei court, which ruled that the commission had failed to provide adequate reasoning.
Read it all.
Mika Hackner: Stifling University Free Speech: A Tale of Two Campuses
Mika Hackner at Real Clear Education writes of two recent examples involving campus speech: one in which the school’s leadership caved and another where the administration tried to protect student rights while maintaining appropriate order for a learning environment.
In Michigan and Maryland, we see two polar opposite responses to infringements on freedom of speech: one that endeavors to uphold free speech values and one, while using words that suggest otherwise, that fundamentally undermines campus speech. We can only hope that the Michigan model prevails.
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A spokesperson for the University of Michigan stated: “Although we support students’ right to protest, such rights are not limitless. Disrupting speakers and events is not protected speech and is a clear violation of university policy.”
Both the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland are public universities and therefore bound by constitutional protections under the First Amendment. Indeed, the University of Maryland purports to take freedom of speech on campus so seriously that in 2018 it adopted a Statement on Free Speech Values. It states that “every member of the campus community has an obligation to support the right of free expression at the university, and to refrain from actions that reduce intellectual discussion.”
The University of Maryland goes on to say: “ The right to speak on campus is not a right to speak at any time, at any place, and in any manner that a person wishes. … the First Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to disrupt a class... Freedom of speech does not give one permission to silence the speech of others by shouting, heckling, or otherwise disrupting a speech to the point that the speaker cannot continue or that the audience can no longer listen, and UMD policy expressly prohibits such interference.”
It is all the more remarkable, then, that the president of the University of Maryland and a professor of Physics at that same university would characterize the disruption of Rep. Raskin’s lecture as a win for freedom of speech and democratic values. Perhaps the president simply needs a refresher on his university’s free speech policies. Perhaps he disagrees with those policies. Or perhaps, for President Pines, this was the path of least resistance – allowing the protestors to shut down the lecture was the most politically expedient option available to him - which he could then characterize, after the fact, as a sign of the university’s commitment to its students’ freedom of speech.
Read the whole thing.
Mathis Bitton: A Map for Those ‘Lost in Ideology’
The word “ideological” is often used as a pejorative. Mathis Bitton at The Dispatch says philosopher Jason Blakely has exposed the fallacious thinking behind that rhetorical trick in his new book Lost in Ideology. Rather than mocking ideology, Blakely argues that we should learn to see it as an imperfect but necessary map of experience.
In common parlance, the word “ideology” summons a slew of negative connotations. The term often functions as a negative epithet, a demarcation between those who understand reality as it is and those lost in wishful thinking. He who deems others as “ideological” casts himself above the political fray. In his own mind, he becomes a champion of facts against falsehoods, of common sense against absurdity. For conservatives, progressives overturn centuries of tradition in the name of rootless abstractions. For progressives, conservatives hold society back in the name of baseless prejudices. Either way, the other side is “ideological” and we, guardians of the only defensible politics, are not.
It’s precisely this sort of attitude that the philosopher Jason Blakely contests in his new book, Lost in Ideology. For Blakely, the attempt to position oneself above ideology proves both futile and dangerous—futile because we all need ideologies to make sense of the world, and dangerous because failing to recognize as much prevents us from admitting our limits. Paradoxically, those who think themselves above ideology are deeper in its grip. The most delusional of all confer “natural” or “scientific” status on their vision of society. They mislead themselves into thinking that they can navigate the territory of experience without a map, so to speak, or that their own map is the only viable one.
Yet for Blakely, neither is ever the case. To make sense of the world is to cultivate the right attitude toward its complexities and contradictions: the humble, critical attitude of an ethnographer in a foreign land.
Blakely thus begins with an ambivalent rehabilitation of ideology as an imperfect but necessary map of experience. As he puts it, “ideologies are not merely distortive,” but also “illuminating for interpreting social reality.” Like a map, an ideology “both orients and disorients—one must learn to read its markings and symbols properly.” Blakely’s task is to teach readers how to think about the most influential maps of our time, and how to navigate the treacherous terrain of ideology more broadly. To that end, the book offers a guided tour of major ideologies: liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, fascism, socialism, nationalism, feminism, and environmentalism. In every case, Blakely shows that every –ism hides a set of –isms, a mosaic of influences, sometimes in concord, often in tension, residing under the same label.
Consider liberalism. In Blakely’s account, the liberal tradition begins with John Locke and other early-modern theorists who believed that individual rights could be derived from the mere observation of nature. These classical liberals mistakenly assumed that “beneath the crust of inherited custom, all humans are spontaneously liberal.” Trapped in the prison-house of ideology, Locke and his fellow travelers thought that nature had inscribed their preferred form of government into the hearts of men. Their successors would show otherwise.
Over centuries, liberalism underwent many renovations and reformulations, making new mistakes along the way. Though utilitarian liberals like Jeremy Bentham, for instance, rejected Locke’s conception of natural rights, they also reduced ethics to a coolheaded attempt to increase pleasure and diminish pain—thereby claiming to have turned politics into a science as empirical and objective as the study of physics. For Bentham, legislators merely had to calculate the effect of every policy on overall pleasure (“utility”) to determine the right course of action. Gone was Locke’s liberalism of nature, replaced by a liberalism of economists, experts, and managers who would resolve all questions of public interest through some combination of social forecasting and mathematics. Of course, as Blakely shows, the technocratic reduction of politics to administration is no less groundless than Locke’s absolute rights.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Here’s Aaron Sibarium with another catch on how some hospital are using race to determine care. Click for a long thread.
A good question from KC Johnson for the University of Michigan. Click for video via Steve McGuire:
And finally, Colin Wright with a very short wokabulary lesson: