The Harvard commencement ceremony this week received some press attention after Harvard’s Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi confronted Maria A. Ressa, a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, on stage over her prior allegedly antisemitic comments. However, her commencement remarks were equally chilling in another respect; a full-throated condemnation of free speech principles and a call for a crackdown on disinformation. As is often the case with anti-free speech tirades, the speech included disinformation while seeking to silence others to combat disinformation.
The speech was alarming for many of us who respect Ressa’s courage in opposing the regime of then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, including her struggle to support the free press and free speech that won her a Nobel Prize with Dmitry Muratov.
Nevertheless, a speech calling for censorship and speech regulation is not viewed as problematic while civil libertarian Michael Smerconish is blocked from giving a commencement address and denied his honorary degree.
The commencement speech lashed out at her critics, including those who call her an anti-Semite. She described the critics who call her views antisemitic as examples of “power and money because they want power and money.”
In her full remarks, Ressa (a supporter of Hillary Clinton) suggests that the 2016 election was substantially influenced by Russian disinformation efforts:
“If the tactic worked on us, then it was deployed for you. That’s what happened in 2016, when 126 million Americans were targeted by Russian disinformation, and on January 6, in the violence on Capitol Hill when Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost.”
As I have previously written, Clinton and Trump were the least popular candidates ever to run for the presidency, according to multiple polls. They hardly needed the help of a dozen or so Russians in St. Petersburg to materially add to those divisions. Indeed, the sheer premise of the operation was moronic. It was like trying to speed the descent of a falling locomotive by jumping up and down on it. We were already a nation plunging into political chaos with the selection of these two candidates and long simmering political divisions stretching back to the Bill Clinton administration.
There are hundreds of “legitimate” Democratic and Republican trolling sites (some supported by campaign activities) that did little but generate gossip, conspiracies and false stories. From the descriptions in the indictment, these Russians look like the tee-ball league in comparison to these major league players of political slime.
“I said this in the Nobel lecture: an atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem because social media turned our world upside down, spreading lies, faster than facts, while amplifying fear and anger, fueling hatred. By design. For profit…
And here’s three sentences I’ve said over and over. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without these three, we have no shared reality, no rule of law, no democracy. We can’t begin to solve existential problems like climate change.
…Too many powerful people are getting away with impunity – from countries to companies, and it is dividing us in ways that are literally destroying us, destroying democracy, destroying trust.
In Cambridge Commons just on the other side of that gate, there’s a marker to American patriot William Dawes, who, like his more famous friend Paul Revere, rode through here sounding the alarm: ‘The British are coming.’
…I will say it now: ‘The fascists are coming.'”
“Now, Big Tech is now choking traffic to news sites, which means you will get less news in your feeds. How do you know what’s real, how do you know what’s fact when your emotions are what’s manipulated, when our biology is hacked? Instead of facts, And instead, the “enshittification” of the internet is in full bloom: more trash, more propaganda, more information operations that push our emotional buttons. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo deleted X last year, calling it a human sewer.
We will have to struggle harder for agency, for independent thought.
And it’s not just the tech companies that abdicated responsibility for protecting us, it’s also democratic governments like the United States. Tech is the least regulated industry around the world.
That’s why the US needs to reform or revoke section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. We need to stop the impunity.”
So to sum up, you will get “less news” unless you eliminate opposing viewpoints on the Internet and “stop the impunity” in the use of free speech. You can only achieve “independent thought” by relying on the government and corporations to limit what you see on the Internet. For some of us, free speech requires a sense of impunity to exercise a human right for self-expression.
Ressa concludes by calling on the graduates to “make it a world that is safe from fascists and tyrants” by limiting free speech and supporting government and corporate regulations to promote whatever she deems to be the truth on subjects like climate change or election integrity. That does not make her or their allies “tyrants,” of course. They are simply right.
How long has she worked for the CIA?
What is a Chabad Rabbi?
A rabbi affiliated with the Chabad movement. In this case Rabbi Zarchi runs Harvard Chabad, an institution serving Jewish students and faculty at Harvard.
With Memorial Day a couple days away honoring all veterans for all conflicts to preserve our way of life of Freedom, along comes Maria Ressa.
I wonder what pronouns SHE uses? 😎
Devilish sophists shouldn’t have any influence, anyway. They just throw monkey wrenches into the works. What good is that?
Professor Turley I greatly appreciate your commentary particularly on legal matters but have a suggestion for your site. It would be useful if you added a function to the commenting portion. How about adding the ability to up or downvote a comment to quantify support or lack thereof?
@Steven
That is absurd and can be so easily gamed it would basically destroy the utility we DO have remaining – forgive me, but your suggestion is just naive (and antithetical to the notion of free speech). If you create a WordPress account, you can already login and ‘like’ posts.
Up and down voting was always a foolish idea when technology is so trivial to exploit. This is a forum, not an electronic coliseum.
an example from someone who is only seeing the backyard from one side of the fence… and from someone who should know better.
I didn’t think that the N9bel prize could lose anymore value after awarding it to obama….but I was mistaken.
Isn’t it ironic, that Ressa, who was jailed by the Philippines for cyberlibel promotes the same laws that resulted in her being jailed. The argument will be, well, we can trust our government. Really?
There seems to be a mind worm out there and I am afraid it is affecting many Democrats and not just RFK Jr. I’m really not surprised that Harvard would promote such an address. The fact that they could do it with a straight face is what is frightening.
When people still claim the Russian Collusion after all that has been laid bare in the 8 years since, one has to wonder if the ears of these people are simply a corridor for sound through the head that connects one ear to the other but with no visible or electronic means of contact with the brain. Maybe that brain worm of JFK Jr. is the culprit and it has feasted on the cranial nerves that carry sound to the higher brain functions.
These people do not really speak, it’s just the wind through their brain tunnel that changes pitch and mimics cogent speech.
Kind of makes you wonder who was on the right side of history there in the Philippines.
It’s sort of like certain types of chemotherapy. If the disease does not kill you then the treatment may.
“Fascist” is a term that is almost as widely misunderstood, and misused, as “racist.” This woman once again shows that the people awarded Nobel prize are far from our intellectual, or moral, superiors.
The Noble Peace Prize is very symbolic thing. It shouldn’t be viewed as anything other than a political statement made by the Nobel committee. The proof is previous recipients.
Obama?
What about all of the secrecy of the Manhattan Project?
Are you aware the 1st amendment, well all the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, protect the rights of the People and strictly limit the Power of the Federal Government?
Or are you an ill informed moron?
A valid question is asked, and all you can do is to call him a moron? You should be on the Jerry Springer show.
Valid? Hell no.
Infantile attempt at sea lioning.
The Manhattan Project, does not intersect with Free Speech.
Strawman fallacy by a usual suspect.
What the hell kind of people am I dealing with here?
I don’t know why I am wasting my time trying to get through to you morons.
Notre Dame invited Ressa to speak this year to kick off their Democracy Initiative. I was disappointed by her remarks.
It’s our government that’s most responsible for the “disinformation” they purport to decry – and they worked in tandem with “Big Tech” to throttle the truth.
It isn’t “democracy” to tell people to “shut up and do as you’re told.”
https://keough.nd.edu/maria-ressa-keough-school/
“Instead of facts, And instead, the “enshittification” of the internet is in full bloom: more trash, more propaganda, more information operations that push our emotional buttons.”
“We will have to struggle harder for agency, for independent thought.”
That is funny. Seems to me it is her and people like her who are the ones pushing the emotional buttons and attempting to block independent thought.
The Grabblers want power and money.
Easy solution end Federal Aid to colleges, cities, states and non-profits including backing loans. Defund Democrats!
Democrats are clearly backed by the enemies of America….they are fascists!
Soros obvious wishes to destroy the west! China gave millions to bidens…why? Sen Menendez had $1/2 Million in cash from various foreigners…but doesn’t go to jail! China backs US universities with Billions….so they can steal information and destroy the universities with terrible appointments of presidents, etc
Title should be NOBEL**** not Noble****. C’mon, man.
That is your takeaway?
She knows that the fascists are coming – she is in the vanguard
What was it Pogo said again?
We had a little taste of government misinformation and government overreach during COVID. That is when the “enshittification” of our so called “news” organizations and self appointed government officials was on full display.
These are the folks who were happy to bypass normal research protocols and force an experimental drug on the populace. These are the ones who were happy to wipe out independent businesses and faith based gatherings while allowing big box stores to stay open. The ones who wore masks in their car while alone.
The new radical leftist shares much in common with the Nazi: They despise Jews, they loathe free speech and are willing to throw out due process and absentee legal system when attacking their political enemies. The next step is to extend the arm and dutifully shout “Heil.”
No thank you.
Abuse
E.M.
Well said.
I’m old enough to remember when Obama was celebrated for outfoxing Republicans by his expert use of the internet to get elected. But once conservatives caught on, now the internet is evil. lol.