We've been here before. In 1961, President Kennedy was concerned about the rise of right-wing radio hurting his legislative agenda / reelection plans. So he looked about for a policy tool he could leverage into suppressing political dissent from his administration. 1/ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1303301563868479490

One of his surrogates found a set of FCC regulations called the Fairness Doctrine, which had been created by well-intentioned reformers a few years earlier but had never really been enforced. And after all, who could be opposed to keeping the airwaves "fair"? 2/

This would be the leverage (along with targeted IRS audits) that JFK would use to impose the most successful episode of government censorship in America of the last half century. 3/

Broadcasting "fairness" became a selectively enforced cudgel for browbeating radio stations (JFK & LBJ) into dropping conservative programming and, later, tv networks into giving Nixon better coverage. 4/

How do I know this? I wrote the book on it! https://www.amazon.com/Radio-Right-Broadcasters-Government-Conservative/dp/0190073225

And we find ourselves in a similar moment with a new mass media form, the internet. @realDonaldTrump is annoyed by criticism of his administration/allies on social media and in the press. What regulatory tools might be lying around that he can use as a cudgel? 6/

Well, when it comes to traditional media outlets like @washingtonpost, he can threaten the other profitable businesses of the owner, Jeff Bezos, w/ higher postage prices for Amazon packages and encourage the DoJ to probe them for antitrust violations. 7/

This is, of course, similar to how Richard Nixon's FCC tweaked its cross-media ownership rules to make the then owner of the Post, Katharine Graham, have to divest herself of some of her profitable television stations. A less brave person might've caved. Graham didn't. 8/

In going after social media platforms that allow criticism of the regime, Trump has backed the efforts of one of his lackeys, @HawleyMO, to remove a key legal protection for internet companies. 9/

Hawley's proposal hinges on a relatively obscure policy rule known as Section 230. (For that matter, it's about as obscure and accidental in origin as the Fairness Doctrine once was.) 230 protects platforms from being legally responsible for users' posts. 10/

Without Section 230, the internet would be very different, less free, and less open. Social media would be either strictly controlled walled gardens or free-for-all arenas. See @jkosseff's book on the reason for 230 if you want to know more. 11/

In any case, Hawley's bill proposed giving the FTC power to extend 230 protection only to internet platforms that proved that they had been "neutral" in regards to content.

It would be a revived Fairness Doctrine for the internet, and just as open to partisan abuse. 12/

How do I know this? Well, I co-wrote the paper on it w/ @JohnSamplesCato for @knightcolumbia. 13/ https://knightcolumbia.org/content/social-media-regulation-in-the-public-interest-some-lessons-from-history

But Trump is policy agnostic. He's not calling for these things out of some long-held, principled beliefs in proper postal rates, antitrust policy, and legal safe harbors.

He wants to win at any cost. These are tools of convenience just like w/ JFK/Nixon in the '60s. 14/

Which also means, that just as the abuse of the Fairness Doctrine in the '60s exposed the well-meaning naïveté of its authors and advocates (which, coincidentally, included the @ACLU)... 15/

...so too today are well-meaning, naive antitrust hawks finding their cause coopted in order to repress political dissent and gain partisan advantage. 16/

If there is a sweeping moral to this squalid little sequel to a sordid older story, it's that imposing content regulations on the internet--even if done with the best of intentions-- will have terrible, horrible, no good, very bad consequences for free speech in America. 17/

And given traditional (if fading) American dominance of the internet economy, our regulatory decisions are amplified across the world. The internet is the closest we've come w/ any mass media technology in human history to it being truly "born free," to channel @AdamThierer. 18/

Are we really willing to mess up that inheritance because...Donald Trump didn't like a meme about Moscow Mitch??

Say it ain't so!

/fin