E-Pluribus | June 5, 2024
"DEI" gets a makeover; a big year for free speech at SCOTUS; and stopping disinformation before it gets out of control.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
John Tierney: Didn’t Earn It
If actor John Houseman were still around (he’d be 122 this year,) a university looking to distance itself from Diversity, Inclusion & Equity might have hired him to promote their school with, “Their teachers get hired the old fashioned way; they earn it.” At City Journal, John Tierney argues that an alternate translation for the DEI acronym has helped drive home the point that merit, not checking off the “right” boxes, should be the standard in the field of higher education.
. . .What DEI really stands for, [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis said, is “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination.”
That formulation hasn’t caught on, but another one has: “Didn’t Earn It.” It went viral this spring after Ian Miles Cheong, a conservative journalist, and Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, tweeted it to their 2 million followers on X. Adams, who had fearlessly predicted in 2015—six months before the first Republican primary—that Donald Trump would be elected president because of his skill as a “master persuader,” tweeted another forecast: “Whoever came up with ‘Didn’t Earn It’ as the description of DEI might have saved the world. Normally, the clever alternative names people use to mock the other side’s policy are nothing but grin-worthy. This one could collapse the whole racist system. It’s that strong.”
Sure enough, “Didn’t Earn It” has become an Internet meme, a buzz phrase on social media, and a conservative talking point on cable television, radio, and podcasts. It appears in posts linking to Kamala Harris, the plagiarism accusations against DEI officers at Harvard and MIT, the 50 percent failure rate on tests of medical students at UCLA, and the sentencing of a DEI executive for stealing $5 million during her work at Facebook and Nike. In the surest sign of its success, “Didn’t Earn It” has been solemnly denounced by DEI executives, progressive pundits, and the left-wing watchdogs at Media Matters, which was so alarmed that it published a report documenting the phrase’s popularity and—inevitably—labeling it “racist.”
[. . .]
The success of Didn’t Earn It owes also to its timing, just as DEI is being banned at public universities in red states and threatened everywhere by the Supreme Court decision outlawing racial preferences. The new scrutiny has forced colleges to reveal—and try to justify—their DEI budgets. Corporations have cut back on DEI hiring and started quietly omitting the D-acronym or any mention of “diversity goals” in their annual reports.
There’s even been a backlash at that devoutly progressive institution, The Daily Show. It came during a recent monologue by a guest host, the popular black comedian and talk show host who calls himself Charlemagne tha God. He began by showing clips of DEI critics, including Greg Gutfeld, uttering “Didn’t Earn It” on his Fox News program. “These right-wingers are crazy, right?” Charlemagne said to the audience. “But here’s the part where you all stop applauding everything I say. The truth about DEI is that although it’s well-intentioned, it’s mostly garbage.” He then went on to sound like a Fox News host himself as he cited the 900 studies showing that DEI didn’t work, that it made things worse, and that it was “just corporate PR.”
When you’ve lost The Daily Show, can the end be near?
Read it all here.
Nadine Strossen: The Supreme Court Is About to Decide the Future of Free Speech
There have been attacks and defenses of free speech since the founding of the US, but Nadine Strossen at Persuasion says 2024 is particularly significant based on several Supreme Court cases under consideration. Battles over “disinformation,” moderation, government pressure and outright censorship in the age of the internet and social media are coming to a head and could have far-reaching effects.
The current Supreme Court term includes a cluster of cases that could well shape the future of online free speech. These cases invite the Court to determine the power of both government officials and social media platforms concerning “content moderation” policies, which in turn define platform users’ speech rights. Given the unparalleled importance of these platforms for all manner of communication—personal, professional, and political—meaningful free speech rights depend on the platforms’ policies. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Court’s rulings over the next weeks may well determine the shape of speech online for years to come.
Current moderation policies have warranted strong critiques, including for unjustifiably disfavoring certain expression and speakers. Yet legitimate government efforts to regulate these policies, even for the asserted purpose of making them more fair, in turn raise serious free speech problems. Government control of the companies’ editorial decisions violates the free speech rights of not only the platforms themselves, but also of all of us who use them. Four cases on the Court’s current docket address these critically important issues: three cases that directly involve social media, which the Court has not yet decided, and one that involves an analogous offline situation, which the Court decided last week.
The Court also recently ruled on two social media cases that present yet another key issue that will shape free speech in our time: the extent to which government officials may selectively exclude certain speakers or messages from social media accounts that the officials use for both personal and governmental communications.
While these six pertinent cases are complicated, both legally and factually, a few core principles help to illuminate their powerful impact on our future free speech.
[. . .]
In the pending Murthy v. Missouri case, the lower courts held that the Biden White House and various executive branch agencies had improperly pressured social media platforms to block expression that was inconsistent with administration policies, especially concerning COVID. The plaintiffs claim that the administration had worked with social media giants to suppress “truthful information… under the guise of combating ‘misinformation.’” NRA v. Vullo, which the Court decided on May 30, dealt with similar general questions, although not specifically in a social media context. The fundamental general issue is how to draw the line between legitimate government efforts to persuade or encourage private actors not to promote certain communications and those that constitute undue pressure or coercion. This distinction turns on the factual circumstances in each case.
In Vullo, the justices all agreed that the facts alleged in the plaintiff’s complaint supported a conclusion that the officials had crossed the line from permitted encouragement to unpermitted coercion. In Murthy, the factual record is more complicated and contested, making it hard to predict how the justices will rule.
Even free speech advocates have been sharply divided about Murthy, which calls into question wide-ranging Biden administration efforts to influence social media’s content moderation practices (although it should be noted that some of these efforts began in 2018, under the Trump administration) and hence could have an outsized impact on those practices. However, it is worth recalling the critical role that the state action doctrine plays in the Court’s First Amendment analysis: above all, the Court should bar undue government intervention in private sector communications channels.
Read it all.
Bina Venkataraman: What’s the best way to fight viral disinformation? Look to South Florida.
The worst ways to fight “disinformation” often get the most press, but Bina Venkataraman at the Washington Post points to the Spanish-speaking communities of South Florida (Florida, you say?) for an example of how citizens can take matters into their own hands.
A national survey conducted late last year showed that Hispanics around the country see open borders and immigration as the nation’s No. 1 security threat — over terrorism, access to guns, cyberattacks, war, China or Russia.
[. . .]
Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, used to communicate within the United States but also with family and friends from countries of origin, have an outsize impact in shaping views in Latino communities, and it’s harder to track false information spreading on them than on more open social media platforms. Big Tech companies have also done far too little in recent election cycles to address disinformation in non-English languages posted by the likes of propagandists and political campaigns on their platforms, providing fodder by way of links used for conspiratorial private-messaging threads.
But what is happening today in Spanish-speaking communities also paints a picture of where the entire nation might find itself in the near future. Artificial intelligence is increasing the ease and slashing the cost of creating and circulating online rumors in multiple languages and formats — from outlandish memes to deepfake videos. Shuttering local newspapers leave information gaps in English-speaking communities around the country that fearmongers with political or profit agendas can readily seize. Traditional arbiters and communicators of truth — journalists, the courts, scientists — have been losing trust across vast swaths of the population, and in some corners never earned it in the first place.
[. . .]
I recently spoke with the leader of a community organization in South Florida called We Are Más who also dreads this future — and spends her days fighting to prevent it. Evelyn Pérez-Verdía works to quell rumors in Spanish-speaking diaspora communities, using the same group chats where they already are and drawing on trusted community voices to influence them. As part of a collaboration with the Information Futures Lab at Brown University, Pérez-Verdía recently recruited 25 local messengers — including the head of a YWCA chapter and a Colombian American hairdresser — to swat rumors as they start flying in South Florida.
The local influencers began by listening for questions and narratives taking hold in the community. They ranged from how safe it was to get the shingles vaccine to whether President Biden had a body double, from how to get a mammogram if underinsured to whether the 2024 presidential election had been canceled — a notion now circulating among Latinos in swing states thanks to a social media post translated into Spanish featuring the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Pérez-Verdía and her collaborators gave the trusted messengers templates to answer the questions in both English and Spanish using WhatsApp and social media vernacular and formats, but also in person. The formula: Empathize with a concern, instead of shaming people or telling them they are wrong. And acknowledge — rather than ignore — the kernels of truth that make false claims seem convincing.
The South Florida influencers, for instance, heard a rumor circulating that the government had put microchips in the coronavirus vaccine so it could track people. Pérez-Verdía and the co-directors of the Information Futures Lab, Stefanie Friedhoff and Claire Wardle, recommended that the influencers acknowledge to community members who raised the rumor that it was a scary thought and of understandable concern. The influencers also explained that YouTube videos showed magnets and coins sticking to people’s skin because of natural body oils. And they noted that private companies and government agencies can track people using credit card and cellphone data, while also explaining what was actually in the vaccine.
The impact of this kind of work on community awareness is still being documented, but it offers a useful counterpoint to the latest trend in investment to fight online rumors, which is far too focused on technological fixes for what is fundamentally a human problem. What resonates most are the stories that speak to people emotionally and that they feel engaged in — whether or not they are true. Bad information meets people where they are when they are afraid and in the dark.
Read the whole thing.
Around Twitter (X)
The heckler’s veto chalks up another win, this time at the University of Amsterdam:
Alex Morey and FIRE call out Columbia Law Review’s Board of Directors for taking their entire website offline in a dispute with the Reviews’ editors:
And finally, forgive the cynicism, but one can’t help thinking “conflict of interest” in this item from Christiana Buttons. The plastic these surgeons seem to have in mind is generally kept in one’s wallet.