Has the Internet made our speech a little too free?

By Ben Bova
Naples News
Jan. 23, 2007

You wouldn’t drink unfiltered water. So why are you reading unfiltered information?

Municipalities around the world spend a great deal of money and effort to make certain that their drinking water is safe. But the Internet provides no such protection to the billions of people who use it every day.

Anybody can write anything he or she wants to and post it on a blog or a Web site, or send it out as an e-mail message to anyone and everyone the writer knows. Anyone can read as much material as he or she wants to. There are no filters, no fact-checkers, no arbiters of taste or manners, no one to object to abusive language or foul words or just plain lies.

It’s the ultimate triumph of freedom of expression, our Constitution’s First Amendment at its widest possible application.

But, as a wise man pointed out more than half a century ago, when radio was a new phenomenon in public discourse, freedom of speech can lead to giving the village idiot the freedom to shout his blatherings around the world with the speed of light.

In earlier eras, communications generally went through filters. There were almost always editors in the loop whose job it was to make certain that the writing — or broadcast, in the case of radio and television — was understandable, factually accurate, and in good taste.

As a writer, I’m no great fan of editors. I don’t like having my prose tinkered with, especially when the tinkerer doesn’t know as much as I do about the subject matter. A good copy editor is invaluable, though. A good copy editor can spot inconsistencies in a long novel, correct the occasional lapses in grammar or spelling that even the most meticulous writer can sometimes make, point out redundancies that creep into long manuscripts.

On the other hand, sometimes an editor wants to make changes that the writer abhors. I remember one time, early in my career, when a nonfiction manuscript on astronomy was chopped up so badly by the copy editor that I wanted to commit suicide. Or maybe murder. The editor wasn’t correcting errors, she was rewriting the manuscript to suit her own fancies. I asked for a different editor. And got one.

But there is none of that on the Internet. You write it and send it out. No editor stands between you and your audience. This brings great spontaneity to the Internet, and more than a little passion. But these advantages come at the cost of accuracy and believability.

A trivial case in point: The Science Fiction Writers of America published a newsletter that consisted mainly of letters by the members dealing with topics of interest to the organization. Writers can be intemperate souls, and some of the letters were hot with invective. The newsletter’s editor (an SFWA member, of course) filtered out the more excessive letters, which often brought howls of protest and accusation of bias from the member whose letter was not printed.

Comes the Internet, and the newsletter became a model of decorum. That’s because members could attack each other in the hottest language imaginable, with no editor to insist on good taste or at least worry about the libel laws. Internet postings went directly from a member’s spleen to publication, with no apparent rational thought in-between.

A more serious case in point: My grandson (age 12 at the time) read on an Internet site that the government is lying about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon. With graphics and supposedly expert testimony, the site purported to show that the Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked airliner, but by a missile fired by the Department of Defense itself.

I looked at the presentation and it was pretty convincing, as far as it went. It’s easy to prove a point when you don’t allow any contradictory evidence to be presented. I showed my grandson the images recorded by a surveillance camera in the Pentagon parking lot, horrifying images that showed the airliner swooping in below treetop height and slamming into the building.

Perhaps that is the saving feature of the Internet: there’s so much information available that you can — if you want to — find a tremendously wide variety of views. The men who wrote our Constitution thought deeply about freedom of expression and concluded that instead of government censorship we’d be better off allowing everyone and anyone to express his view. They trusted the public to have the wits and determination to sort out the truth from among all the different viewpoints.

But that was in an era when newspapers were the major source of information, and cities had around half a dozen newspapers to choose from. Today the Internet presents us with millions more choices.

And most people, sad to say, go looking for opinions that match their own and usually refuse to consider other points of view. “Don’t bother me with the facts,” they say, “my mind’s made up.”

So the danger of the Internet’s unfiltered babble is not with the Internet per se, but with our own attitudes. Most people lack the will to seek out opinions that contradict their own, to deliberately and conscientiously attempt to sift through the avalanche of information available to them in an honest attempt to arrive at the truth.

Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had to choose between having newspapers and no government, or government and no newspapers, he would take the former and not the latter. His point was that it’s better to have a free flow of information rather than government censorship of the news. Of course, that was before Jefferson became president, and had to face vicious newspaper attacks on his political and private life.

So, faced with an ever-widening flood of information, opinions, outright lies and wild accusations, should we think about ways to “tame” the Internet and make it more responsible? Or should we think about ways to make ourselves more responsible in the search for truth?

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Naples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 110 carefully-edited books. His Internet address is www.benbova.com.