Kerry i panel hos WEF

Panelsamtale i regi av WEF 25. september 2024
Foto: Skjermdump fra WEF

John Kerry beklager at First Amendment hindrer sensur

Av Tron Lande Andersen 30. september 2024

USA`s tidligere utenriksminister og inntil nylig Bidens klimaansvarlige, John Kerry, mener det var bedre før da referees ("fagkyndige") avgjorde hva som er faktum og hva som ikke er det. Det er nå delvis borte, i stedet velger folk selv hvor de henter sin informasjon fra.

Kerry sa dette i i en en WEF-panelsamtale om investeringer i grønn energi og bærekraftig utvikling. Det er derfor langt vanskeligere å bygge konsensus i dag enn for 40-50 år siden. Styring blir vanskelig.

Hvis folk bare kan gå til en kilde, og den gir feilaktig informasjon, står det første grunnlovstillegget som et hinder for å fjerning (av den feilaktige informasjonen).

Vi (demokratene) må derfor vinne retten til å styre (dvs vinne valg) for å få til forandring. Åpenbart er det folk i landet vårt (USA) som ønsker å gjennomføre endringer i en helt annen retning.


JOHN KERRY: The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is 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 -- the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn't a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.

So it is really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 40-50 years I've been involved in this.

You know there's a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you're going to have some accountability on facts, etc.

But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda and they're putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you're free to be able to implement change.

Obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in a whole other way, but --

...

I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough of big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?