(Screenshot image taken from the YouTube account of 'The Jimmy Dore Show')
I must admit that one should approach the work of Jimmy Dore with a bit of caution. At first glance he seems like many other progressive voices on YouTube, aiming to act as an advocate for the underprivileged in their struggle against America’s corporate and political elite. However there is a certain arrogance and pompousness to his style that I find unflattering. At this point in my life I’ve been conditioned to be skeptical towards those who anoint themselves as ‘truth tellers’, and sadly Jimmy Dore is one such person.
It should be stated that Dore is not a journalist, and should never be thought of as one. The only time any real journalism appears on his channel is when he gives exposure to the work of others, which occasionally includes his small cadre of guest commentators. As for his numerous critiques against the news media, it’s a common staple of many progressive channels on YouTube and honestly most of it is rather passé and pointless. I can’t imagine many today who still see any journalistic integrity existing within a televised corporate media operation. Such a notion has long been dead and was largely killed off by the capitalist virtues that have long been ingrained within this country along with the shift of news to the more competitive, decentralized realm of the Internet, which has likely hastened its demise. Anyone still bemoaning how complicit the corporate news media has become in advancing the ideals of the oligarchy are currently flogging a dead horse.
The problem with the news media today is the same problem it’s had for decades. The production of ‘news’ as we might call it has drifted into the domain of the content-creation industry. This is a phenomenon that people like Neil Postman were discussing back in the mid 1980s, and he probably wasn’t the first to broach the topic. If you create content for the purposes of profit, then after awhile your audience will dictate the content that you produce. This is the biggest problem with the corporate news media; they are operating on a profit motive and not on the notion that they should be achieving a social good by nurturing a well-informed populace.
The biggest problem with Jimmy Dore and other ‘progressive’ channels on YouTube is that they are either blind to this rot or refuse to admit it publicly because they are participating in a similar money-grabbing scheme. In spite of all the anti-capitalist rhetoric on Dore’s channel, his videos are still accompanied by advertisements, not to mention on-screen graphics meant to persuade viewers to subscribe to his channel. The only difference between Dore and the corporate news media that he often lambastes is the audience that both aim to cater to. And with Dore’s intended audience it appears as if the more appropriate strategy is to manufacture rage rather than consent.
This is not to say that Dore’s videos aren’t worth watching. When it comes to subjects that Dore has a lot of intimate personal knowledge on, like police culture in America, his videos can be very illuminating and downright engaging. However the worst videos from Dore are the ones where he drifts into subjects that he knows little about, without any external input from an expert commentator. Here Dore’s aversion to do any sort of basic research in order to understand an issue better gets him into trouble. But again the purpose of his videos often is not to keep his viewers well-informed, but rather to continually feed them the anti-corporate, anti-establishment talking points that he knows they love to consume. This approach does not prevent Dore from looking like a complete idiot at times, nor in producing content that is utter garbage. There may be no better example of this than the video that he did on the conflict between Twitter and President Trump.
The video starts with him showing a clip of President Trump talking about Twitter and their supposed ‘liability shield’. The liability shield in question here is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Trump specifically mentions in the clip that is shown. Most of what Trump argues is nonsense and demonstrates little knowledge of the statute and what its’ intended purpose is. But apart from that Dore’s response to this is just as bad.
For the entire 26 minute video, Dore never once refers to the law as ‘Section 230’, never discusses what is actually coded into the law, nor what it is designed to do. Nor does he ever cite anything from the law itself, and largely misinterprets how it is used. Let’s start with Dore’s first statement after airing the clip.
If you put something in a book and someone publishes your book and the thing in there is untrue. You can sue that publisher.
This is not how things work. Generally you can’t sue people for publishing things that aren’t true. What people get sued for are things like libel or slander, which in the United States you can protect yourself from, by insuring that your content is truthful in nature. Regardless of the veracity of your speech, you ultimately have to show a desire to unfairly destroy someone’s reputation with your content before you can get sued. While I’ll give Dore credit for eventually getting around to the concept of defamation after babbling on for another minute, his initial foray into this topic wasn’t completely accurate.
It should also be mentioned in relation to Dore’s video that there are numerous examples of ‘unfactual’ content that should be viewed as completely legal. Works of fiction are ‘unfactual’ as well as critical commentary. Earlier in this essay I expressed the notion that Dore’s work can sometimes be utter garbage. This is not a factual statement. It is merely my subjective, opinionated assessment of his work. Unless someone thought of this particular critique as libelous, I can not be sued for it. And even if someone did, Section 230 would not prevent them from filing such a claim. What Section 230 is supposed to do, is determine the civil liability for my hosting company, for all the naughty content that I produce and self-publish to the Internet.
Next comes more confusion from Dore and one of the worst analogies on this subject that I’ve ever heard. Let me start with Jimmy’s own words:
If someone put something in a book that’s unfactual, defamatory and illegal, you can’t sue the bookstore that sells that book. You can sue the publisher of the book, but you can’t sue the bookstore. And so Facebook and Twitter and YouTube are like the bookstore.
First off, if someone states defamatory statements about you, you should initially go after the producer or author of such content. Whether or not other people or companies can be a party to such a claim has historically depended on whether or not they were aware of the material before it was published and could exercise editorial discretion over whether or not it should have been disseminated to the public. It is not impossible for a bookstore to have such awareness or to make decisions about the availability of certain content. If a bookstore were aware of a book’s libelous content and still made a conscious decision to acquire copies of it to be sold in their store, I don’t see why they couldn’t be sued as well, although such situations are probably extremely rare. If you think that any entity is at fault for the public dissemination of defamatory content I’m not aware of any law that would prevent them being sued.
As for the notion of Facebook, Twitter and their ilk being analogous to bookstores, that’s only partially true. To expand on this notion, let’s identify the various roles within the act of publishing content. First, you have authors or producers of content. Then you have distributors who produce copies of said content and arrange for them to be made available on the marketplace. Then you have retailers who are thought of as the objects of a distribution strategy and who offer direct access of content to the public. A bookstore is a retailer, but not necessarily a distributor, although it is possible for one company to play multiple roles within this structure. In the 20th century newspapers would act as both a producer and distributor of content. A company like Netflix dares to be the producer, distributor and retailer for its films. But nonetheless in traditional modes of content publishing, civil liability was determined by one’s awareness and ability to hold editorial discretion over the availability of content.
Section 230 of the CDA was developed to determine civil liability within the unique nature of self-publishing content electronically via the Internet. You could argue that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are retailers in the sense that they are websites that provide people with direct access to content. If your only interaction with YouTube is to watch the videos that other people post to the site, then perhaps to you YouTube would be nothing more than a bookstore. But since YouTube also allows people to self-publish the content that they make, they are also distributors of content. The biggest difference between online publishers and traditional publishers is that online publishers are for the most part completely detached from the content production aspect of this process. This means that they exercise very little editorial discretion before content is published. In addition to this the more popular distributors are likely unaware of a large portion of the content that gets posted to their sites. A bookstore could literally hold a copy of a book in their hand and posses some cursory knowledge about it before putting it on their shelves while the people who run Twitter have no knowledge about the content millions of people post to their site on a daily basis and yet Dore attempts to use this horrible analogy to strike a blow against the Big Tech companies.
As for his next poorly thought out point, which shows that Dore has never actually read the law itself and clearly doesn’t understand it, he states the following:
And so this special thing, that’s what he’s saying, they have a shield. Meaning they’re allowed to actually go ahead and act like an editor. They’re actually allowed to go and act like a publisher, because they get to take shit down.
First of all there is no law that actually grants a service provider or a platform the ability to edit the content that they host. This is not what Section 230 is designed to do. If you think that it does then I would recommend reading what the law actually states. Any service that hosts user generated content has a natural right to set whatever guidelines they wish and to police the content that gets posted accordingly. The so-called ‘shield’ that Dore mentions is in relation to any civil liability that they may face stemming from the editorial decisions that they make or in many cases don’t make. In addition to this most Internet platforms aren’t choosing to act like a true editor anyway.
In the traditional mode of publishing, all content is vetted by publishers before it is made available to the public. If you define this vetting process as the ‘editing’ of published content, then Facebook, Twitter and the rest aren’t really editors at all. Only the users of such services initially decide what should and should not be published. One of the more vital roles for companies that host these platforms is to review content after it has been posted to determine its suitability for the site and to act accordingly. This process is typically referred to as ‘content moderation’. Ideally US law should recognize the conceptual differences between the two and establish an appropriate level of liability for companies that largely engage in one practice over the other. This is what Section 230 effectively does. It grants a shield to companies when they make an attempt to moderate the content of their users. The essential concept of content moderation is conveyed at the end of Dore’s quote when he states, ‘take shit down’. This wording suggests that such awful content was ever put ‘up’ to begin with.
Let’s also point out that Dore is a man who has published books, while also posting loads of content to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. He should already be familiar with the nuanced differences between editorial vetting and content moderation, and yet he wants to conflate the issue by treating both concepts as the same in order to argue that social media companies should face the same civil liability as traditional publishers. While I think there is a reasonable argument for not thinking of Twitter or Facebook as bookstores, this doesn’t necessarily imply that they should be regarded as publishers as the only other alternative. The truth of the matter is that the nature of online self-publishing is so askew from traditional publishing that any analogy comparing social media platforms to either a bookstore or a traditional publisher is outright flimsy and inadequate. The problem with Dore’s arguments in the first 3 and a half minutes of the video is that he tries to establish a false dichotomy in that one of these analogies have to be true. Neither Twitter nor Facebook produce the content that they host, and make hardly any effort to modify it before it is initially released. They do not act as a traditional publisher would and should not have to face the same civil liability.
For Dore’s next dubious statement he states the following:
Just like when Facebook fake fake fake fact checked the Jimmy Dore show, and they were full of inaccuracies and biases themselves, which they always are. They were allowed to do that because they have this exemption from this law.
Oh! so now it becomes apparent why Dore did this video. He got upset because Facebook dared to say he was wrong about something and now he thinks they should lose their rights as a platform for hosting content. So his entire argument might have more of a punitive rather than an intellectual basis. Look I have no idea what actually occurred between Dore and Facebook but given how poorly he understands Section 230 of the CDA, it would not surprise me if others have taken him to task for saying something inaccurate. As for what the verb ‘fact checked’ implies here I will state that if Facebook actually did remove some of Dore’s content on the basis that it was inaccurate, then this would be a completely unjustified act that grossly extends far beyond the intent of Section 230. This ‘exemption’ as it were is granted to companies in order to, in good faith, restrict access or availability of content that they find to be obscene, harassing or generally speaking ‘objectionable’. While I don’t agree with a lot of what Dore states in this video and consider much of what he says to be inaccurate, I don’t find his content objectionable. Strangely Section 230 does nothing to establish a statement’s accuracy as the main criteria for restricting access to content. People should have the right to post idiotic things to the Internet. But of course if Facebook acted in a manner that did not restrict people’s access to Dore’s content, then this has absolutely nothing to do with Section 230, and Dore’s argument here is complete bullshit. Section 230 is not designed to determine who can act as an arbitrator of truth. Rather it simply determines what companies are allowed to do in regards to censoring the content of its users. And how censorship works online is another concept that Dore fails to grasp accurately. Consider the following statements:
Even though you’re acting as a publisher, we’re not going to treat you as a one. We’re still going to treat you like a bookstore even though you can censor stuff. If you’re going to take on the responsibility of being a censor then you should be able to be sued if something goes up on your site that’s untrue.
First off, while it may be rare, it’s not entirely impossible for bookstores to censor material. In some cases, they can review material and make a determination not to house certain content for sale. Granted for strictly commercial retailers this almost never happens and if any censorship happens in such establishments it’s likely to be the economic induced variety. But for publishers, there are noticeable differences in how censorship is conducted between online and offline systems. A publishing house will review all the content that it contemplates publishing in order to determine what should be made available to the public. They act as gatekeepers to published content. They decide what is fit to be published and exercise complete, totalitarian control over how they choose to fill the shelves of a bookstore. In such a system it makes perfect sense to inflict upon them the full civil liability of the law for the content that they publish. Online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter however are more anarchistic in how they operate. They seemingly have little to no control over the content that is self-published on their site. And since the ability to publish content is available to anyone, the growth of content on such sites tends to resemble something more natural and organic. It’s far less pre-ordained and less orchestrated than traditional modes of publishing. In order to prevent the access of content that many would deem unsavory, social media companies have to act more like weedkillers than gatekeepers. This is not to say that some modicum of gatekeeping doesn’t occur on such sites, but the fact that a good portion of their censorship is conducted as weedkilling raises questions about how much liability these companies should be held accountable for.
No one should make an issue of ‘untrue’ content being posted to the Internet. People have been posting such content online since the Internet was invented. It should be noted that Section 230, along with the rest of the CDA, was passed in 1996 long before many current social media companies even existed. Another fact that you will not hear from Dore in his attempt to cast social media companies as traditional publishers is that they host so much content that it would utterly unfeasible to gatekeep all the content that people want to post, nor would it be attainable to weedkill all of its objectionable material in a timely manner. If any online platform were to be held liable for all the content of its users, any surge in popularity would severely threaten its ability to exist. A world without section 230 is a world that would make it harder for people to make their voices heard online and would result in more censorship, not less. In such a world the only way a company like Twitter could avoid being sued is to make no effort whatsoever to moderate any user-generated content. This precedent was established by Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc. It’s hard for me not to see the outcome of this as anything other than a social media platform that’s completely infested by invasive ‘weeds’. I wonder if Jimmy would think of this as a slippery slope.
But sadly the stupidity doesn’t stop here. After playing 3 more seconds of Trump’s speech, a portion so tiny that the viewer doesn’t hear anything particularly substantive from the President, Dore makes the following declaration:
What he’s saying is that if Facebook censored us again like they did, we can sue them.
And thus any credibility that Dore could hold on the issue of Section 230 evaporates into thin air. First of all, if a social media platform were to get into trouble with defamatory speech it’s usually for the stuff that they maintain on the site, not the stuff that they take down. This notion is subtly referred to with Dore’s previous quote about their responsibility as a censor. It’s the stuff that goes ‘up’ on the site that they should allegedly be responsible for. Secondly, Section 230 is supposed to direct platforms to act in ‘good faith’ when restricting the access of obscene and potentially illegal content. If someone held the notion that Facebook was unfairly censoring their speech beyond the good faith intent of Section 230, there is no shield in the law that would prevent a user from taking action against Facebook. I don’t know if the ‘good faith’ clause has ever been challenged, but nothing in Section 230 would prevent such a claim from being filed. Section 230 is supposed to shield Facebook for the actions of its users. It offers no protection to Facebook for its own actions against anyone else. Dore here has no concept of how the law is supposed to be applied. If that wasn’t enough he proceeds forward with his continual lack of understanding to how different the nature of online publishing is from traditional publishing systems. To Dore everything that occurs on a social media platform has a tit-for-tat equivalent to behavior from the pre-Internet publishing world.
As with many other Dore videos, this one tends to be somewhat unfocused and aimless in the rhetoric that Dore wishes to express. An entire video sternly dedicated to the issue of Section 230 could be interesting coming from Dore, if he was willing to spend some time to understand the law and its intent. But his lack of knowledge about Section 230 is not only conveyed in what he actually argues in the first 7 minutes, but also in how transitory and unwieldy the video’s structure appears due to the casual, free-from direction of its various topics. I honestly don’t care about Trump’s tweets about Joe Scarborough, nor any of the ‘Russiagate’ theories, which Jimmy never squanders an opportunity to debunk. A person’s theories about any subject, nor matter how unfounded or supported by evidence they may be, should be protected speech. I did not see any Trump tweets in Dore’s video that would lead me to demand that they be taken off of the Internet. Again I may not agree with the stuff that Trump states, but that doesn’t mean that he should be censored. If anything I could see some virtue in maintaining the presence of outright bullshit on social media sites, just so that we could collectively hone our skills at spotting it.
The thing about such content though is that the speech of those who call out the bullshit should be equally protected. There is nothing illegal about Twitter placing an addendum to Trump’s tweets regarding the supposed ‘facts’ of an issue. If the people at Twitter disagree with something that Trump states and wish to respond to it on their platform, they possess such a right. When it comes to the mail-in ballot issue, Twitter did not censor Trump, since his original tweets were left in tact and were equally as accessible as they where when initially posted. You can criticize Twitter for how they specifically choose to counter Trump’s arguments, but this has absolutely nothing to do with Section 230, and the supposed ‘liability shield’ discussed earlier in the video. Getting rid of Section 230, would not prevent Twitter from taking these actions. Rather it’s the 1st Amendment of the Constitution that allows Twitter to do this. And people often don’t consider the full scope of what is allowed under the 1st Amendment. When Dore cries that Twitter are selectively correcting facts, one should consider that this practice is completely legal under the 1st Amendment. Selectively correcting facts should not be an issue, because this is how all political discourse is conducted online. I’ve seen people from all political inclinations exhibit a strong desire to correct the facts that conflict their narrative agenda, while leaving those that don’t go unchallenged and Dore is just as guilty of this as anyone else.
And what happens when the facts don’t support your agenda? If this video is any indication then you engage in a bunch of red-herring rhetoric arguments to build an overall nefarious profile. Consider the construction for the following argument:
Who’s checking Twitter? They’re the arbitrator of free speech, without a trial, without you presenting your evidence or case, without any hearing, without an adversarial process. Nothing. Twitter just says I know best about free speech. Remember they have special protection from being sued.
Isn’t it interesting how Dore shoehorns in a tepid point about Section 230 (a law that allows platforms to enforce limits on speech mostly in the name of decency) into his general disdain over Twitter engaging in behavior that he himself regularly partakes in? When he claims that Twitter are censoring Trump for challenging the accuracy of his statements, what are we to make of Dore’s claims that CNN is spreading misinformation to the American public? It’s quite staggering to witness the hypocritical gall of Dore complaining about Twitter acting as an arbitrator of truth, when he himself claims to be a ‘truth teller’ and clearly has no qualms about passing judgment on media outlets in regards to the accuracy of their reporting. If that wasn’t enough his condemnation over ‘evidence free conspiracies’ is contrasted against his apparent laziness and unwillingness to delve into the journalistic evidence dug up by Dustin Volz over Twitter’s fact check.
For anybody still reading this essay, I’ll end by offering some passing thoughts. Nobody who dares to pass judgment on anyone else in regards to the truthfulness of their content should be held above reproach. Not the corporate media, not politicians, not independent internet based journalists, not social media companies, not progressive voices on YouTube, not me, not you, not anyone. Everybody’s concept of truth is judged against other people’s concept of truth and the only time any real truth is grasped is when there is an apparent consensus. The most extreme and disciplined philosophers are those who are capable of doubting the notions that they are most inclined to believe. What makes Trump one of the most idiotic public servants my country has ever seen is the fact that he represents the complete and total antithesis to this ideal.