I'll ask a dumb question about free speech:
Why aren't there sanctions on Russian state-sponsored media agencies?
And why doesn’t that mean they should be deplatformed?
On-face it seems to make sense: RT and RIA Novosti have a track record of making false statements with manipulative intent, and right now, they are not only making provably false assertions, they are engaged in misleading framing of true information and facts, or 'malinformation'. This is among the reasons why the UK blocked, then designated them.
And it's all at the service of a military operation that's being characterized as 'genocidal' with increasingly solid basis. It's going to be fairly hard to look at state-sponsored Russian media's lies about mass graves in Mariupol, for instance; it's already hard to look at Russian lies about Bucha spreading on Facebook.
It seems like a no-brainer.
The reason why there aren't, when you really look at it, look a lot more difficult than at first glance.
The problem comes down to the Berman Amendment to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or the IEEPA, which is generally held to be the centerpiece of existing laws regarding the President's ability to regulate international trade and commerce through things like sanctions.
In 1988, and subsequently in 1994, Congress made very clear - via the Berman Amendment - that the President is not supposed to regulate informational materials coming into the United States; in 1994, the Berman Amendment was amended itself to include information “regardless of format or medium of transmission”, which includes, by most readings, electronic formats and the Internet.
The original reasoning was that we shouldn't be banning free speech from dissidents of, say, Iran, just because we stood against what Iran's foreign policy was. In practice, this is much more limited in interpretation; there are exceptions that appear to have been made in specific instances like publications that are authored in Iran.
And say whatever you will about intent, it wasn't to allow state-sponsored disinformation operations to run on the American public.
The question comes down to, then, defining the specific harm that’s supposed to be prevented, and setting forth the line that’s supposed to delineate between sanctionable disinformation and legitimate, if disagreeable, free speech. If we're arguing for an exception to the Berman Amendment, at a bare minimum, I'd say, we need to be explicit about exactly why and precisely how we're going to go about restricting free speech (even if it is provable lies from a hostile foreign actor).
On the first count, we need a general theory of influence operations. It is insufficient to merely state “Russia changed results in 2016” and point, hand-wavily, at something like the Senate Intelligence Committee finding from 2020; the problem you run into, for starters, is that a lot of the damn thing is redacted. This doesn’t point to any kind of preventable harm that Russia is engaged in right now through influence operations, either, much less its state-sponsored media outlets (don’t get me wrong, I think they’re there), it just means that once they did a good influence op through their state-sponsored media outlets.
These are two different things.
Without some idea of “how much disinformation leads to how many votes”, or “how many people on the hard-right and the hard-left went permanently to conspiracy-theory la-la-land echoing Russian narratives” - without numbers, without efficacy data, that is - it ends up being somewhat difficult to quantify what exactly we’re supposed to be creating as far as a real-world impact with sanctions.
On the second count, I don’t think there’s any kind of bright-line answer. We could set the line at merely what’s provably false, but then we run into the problem of systematic malinformation, which I alluded to earlier; and we also end up setting a precedent one way or another.
That is, once we set that line between disinformation and not-disinformation, we set a precedent. At some level, the bureaucratic inertia that characterizes Meta’s inaction on sanctioned entities makes sense; they don’t want to set a precedent that will then make them have to remove all sanctioned entities, because, considering the scale and applicability of some of America’s sanctions regimes, they’re going to have to remove a lot of sanctioned entities and cease being neutral in any sense of the term. Virtually anything in Crimea or the Luhansk or Donetsk People’s Republics are fair game, for instance, sheerly by virtue of where they happen to be located; similarly Iran, or for that matter Cuba. Thousands, if not millions, of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp accounts would have to be removed, just for Meta, if that precedent were set.
There are work-arounds. A colleague I’ve spoken to about this has argued, for instance, just in Meta’s case, that RT and RIA Novosti, to return to our original examples, are in such flagrant and repeated violation of Meta Community Standards that they should be removed, as a one-off decision analogous to the way that Trump was (and still is) deplatformed. You could try to bypass the sanctions argument altogether, so to speak.
To me, this is still unsatisfactory. It goes back to what I think are the root-level issues at stake here, and what sanctions can do to address that, really.
I’d argue that the root-level issue is not merely that state-sponsored media partakes in, and exploits, platforms designed for very effective, programmatic inculcation of opinions and harvesting of personal data. It’s also that state-sponsored media is deceptive about the way it suborns Americans to its causes. If Russia had been 100% up-front about everything they did in 2016, for instance, so that “Heart of Texas” ads in 2016 had said “Sponsored by the Government of The Russian Federation”, and Americans could have at least known the source of the lies they were consuming… I don’t think I’d have as big a problem with them as I do.
The thing that sanctions do is not to really punish, or strike back against, things that we don’t like as a country. It’s not like we’re arresting, say, Vladimir Putin’s daughter, or authorizing an airstrike on her; these are not just quantitatively different, they are qualitatively, categorically different policy options than sanctions.
Sanctions in the modern meaning are, above all, a restriction on people from our own country, because they stop Americans from doing business with anyone even remotely related with a sanctioned entity.
Sanctions, in the way that they are intended to act, should stop Americans from being coopted and manipulated and paid by Russian media to spread disinformational messaging and false narratives.
We are not presenting options akin to punching RT in the face, or arresting RIA Novosti. More realistically, we’re talking about doing something against every American that does business with them, even indirectly, even through intermediaries or very slick arrangements with cryptocurrency and offshore accounts. The Dan Bonginos, the Tucker Carlsons, even the Tulsi Gabbards of the world, all start to look a lot different if they’re operating on behalf of a sanctioned entity.
They start to look a lot less scary, and a lot more like targets for lawyers.