John Kerry: First Amendment Stands as a Major Block to Us Hammering Disinformation ‘Out of Existence’

KERRY: “It’s so tough. Everybody is wrestling with that right now, and I think the dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing. And it’s part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t — you know, there’s no — referees we used to have to determine what’s a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of, you know, been eviscerated to a certain degree. And people go and then people self-select where they go for their news or for their information, and then you just get into a vicious cycle So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in 45-50 years I’ve been involved in this. And, you know, there is a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they are putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence. So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having, you know, winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change. Now, obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implementing change in other ways.”