Ira Glasser

The interview opens on the fact that fixes the whole discussion: Twitter and Facebook have removed the sitting president. Glasser's first move is classificatory. The companies are not exactly newspapers and not exactly broadcasters, but they sit in the private sector, and the private sector has always had discretion over whom to publish — discretion he treats as a First Amendment right rather than an exemption from one.

His second move is to show that the same act looks different depending on which analogy you accept. A newspaper can fire a columnist it dislikes; that is legal and it is not government action. But platforms also present themselves as neutral infrastructure — an electronic soapbox erected in a park and offered to everybody.

The tension is that the two descriptions are incompatible, and the companies benefit from whichever is convenient. Once a platform starts choosing, it is no longer a soapbox but a gatekeeper, and the danger is exclusion from a national conversation rather than offence to a single speaker.

they really are a lot like a publisher

Glasser's conclusion is carefully split: the bans were within the companies' rights, but the absence of any stated standard is the actual problem, and he dates the difficulty rather than resolving it — print began in the fifteenth century and freedom of the press took centuries to settle into recognisable form, and internet speech is at a comparable starting point.

Rogan's objection is that every available comparison is being used to describe something new: the printing press, the publisher, the utility. He adds a structural difference that matters more than the labels — the press was reproducible by anyone, whereas a rival to Twitter is not something a person can build, and the number of places where a message can actually reach an audience is small.

Glasser answers with a historical baseline rather than a principle. Growing up in the fifties, the problem with free speech was not suppression but access: speech happened in a handful of newspapers and three networks, and ordinary people had no entry to any of it.

you could speak you were free to speak but nobody heard you

On that measure the present is better by orders of magnitude, and he says so while conceding the gatekeeper problem is real. He also refuses the symmetry Rogan offers about the president's lost megaphone: a president retains enormous power to attract attention, and always did — his example is that his own father, a construction worker with a fifth-grade education, could speak at Thanksgiving but never to Roosevelt's radio audience.

The people he is worried about are the ones whose freedom amounts to speaking in a closet. His illustration is the case of Sydney Street, who burned his own flag on a Harlem street corner in the early sixties after James Meredith was shot — not to destroy property but to attract cameras that his words alone would not have attracted, so that he could say on the six o'clock news that if a man can be shot for going to school, American ideals have gone up in smoke. The Supreme Court eventually treated the act as symbolic speech; Glasser's point is the pre-internet technology of attention, which is why Spock burned draft cards and why there were marches instead of only words.

Rogan's discomfort is with a corporation deciding who may use a platform hundreds of millions of people depend on. Glasser agrees the absence of standards is a problem, then states the trap: the only legal remedy for arbitrary private exclusion is to give government the power to regulate the corporations, and the history of that power is not encouraging.

the only way to regulate private power is through government power

The force of the argument is in the list of who would hold the discretion — McCarthy, Giuliani, Nixon, Roosevelt in wartime. His conclusion is that the choice is not between good and bad outcomes but between two dangers, and that locating the decision with government is the worse of them.

Rogan proposes the alternative Glasser had been circling: legislate the category rather than the speech — declare what these services are, as with utilities everyone has a right to use. Glasser endorses it immediately and develops the telephone version: the carrier supplies wires and says nothing about content, and does not listen.

He then supplies the disanalogy himself rather than letting it be used against him. A phone call is private; a feed is a public discussion with the whole population on the line, like a party line. He calls that a difference to be thought through, not a refutation.