Online bullying isn't new, but it's evolving

Recently, the director of a nonprofit that focuses on eliminating waste in government bureaucracies testified before Congress. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette criticized how Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, were going about shrinking the federal government.

Hedtler-Gaudette happens to be blind. Within hours, Musk retweeted a post criticizing his testimony and mocking his disability. The Washington Post reports it got 21 million views, and sparked dozens of hateful messages to Hedtler-Gaudette's account.

Ryan Calo is a University of Washington law professor and a co-founder of UW’s Tech Policy Lab. He told a Post reporter that Musk's attacks now carry a new power to chill speech. KUOW’s Kim Malcolm talked to Calo about that.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Online attacks by Musk and others have been a thing for quite some time now. Can you connect the dots for us? What is it that you're seeing now that's new?

Ryan Calo: Well, there have been trolls on the internet since its inception. I think what we're seeing today that's new is that some of the most influential voices who are bullying other Americans also have the reins of power, whether that be because they own a platform like Facebook or X, or because they're public officials like the president and Elon Musk.

You used the term "jawboning" when you were speaking with the Washington Post. What is that?

Jawboning is a technical term under the First Amendment. It refers to the theory that the government can censor speech by threatening you. The idea is that maybe they're not overtly stopping you from speaking or making you do anything expressly, but there's an implicit threat behind it. It's been a favorite theory, actually, of the right, of conservatives. For example, conservatives argued that the Biden administration was jawboning when it asked Facebook to take down certain material about Covid vaccines or other kinds of misinformation, an allegation that Mark Zuckerberg recently echoed on Joe Rogan's podcast. A court said that wasn't the case and threw that out.

A better example is probably the lawsuit brought by the National Rifle Association alongside the ACLU, arguing that certain regulators and administrators were jawboning when they were threatening, basically, the gun industry, if it didn't make changes to how it made and sold guns. As applied here, there would be jawboning any time someone was fearful that by speaking they would face retaliation by the government.

The chilling of speech, as people are throwing the term "free speech" around right now in the discourse, is a real concern for many. Some people argue that the answer to speech that you don't like is just to speak more, have more speech out there. Is this the moment for that?

Well, I would echo Mary Anne Franks, Danielle Citron, and others in this area who have argued that not everybody has the same access to speech. There are a lot of people in our society, often by virtue of having less power, being marginalized, who fear to speak, or when they speak, they're attacked. But there are also people with less reach. At present, it's hard to point to anyone who has more attention on them than the president and Elon Musk, and that gives them an unparalleled capability of speaking. I’m not sure that more speech is going to be adequate there.

Do you have any advice for people who want to engage politically online and talk about the government, but don't want to put themselves at risk? What would you say to them?

Well, first of all, I think that it's not time to back away from online speech. It's not time to abandon platforms, even platforms owned by people that you disagree with, potentially, for example, X or Facebook. All of our voices are needed today. I would say, though, that people like myself with job security, a straight, older white guy who's not facing the same kinds of threats of deportation or having my medical needs unmet or things like that, I think we have an especially acute obligation to speak out right now.

My colleagues and I in the academy, we've faced retaliation, we’ve faced harassment, we’ve faced scrutiny, but it's nothing like on the order of fearing that one would be deported or targeted. All it takes, apparently, is to be differently abled and to testify in Congress about the best way to deal with government waste, and suddenly you can find yourself attacked by one of the most powerful people in the history of the world.

So, don't shy away from speech. This is a time when everyone's needed, and if you are not a person who feels unsafe or is marginalized, it's really time for you to stand up to speak on behalf of those who are.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.