John Kerry, the former US Secretary of State, participated in a World Economic Forum panel on green energy Wednesday, where he referred to the First Amendment as a “major block” in addressing climate change and combating so-called disinformation.
Kerry made these remarks in response to a question from an audience member about combating disinformation in online climate change discussions. He stated, “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.”
He continued by explaining that achieving his desired changes requires the left winning elections. “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,” Kerry said.
Kerry emphasized that this challenge is unique to democratic systems. He claimed that it is particularly difficult to build consensus on any issues in democracies, and that the “referees, who used to determine what was true or not, have largely disappeared.”
In a separate comment, Kerry remarked, “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are.”
Kerry’s comments follow his tenure as President Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, a position from which he stepped down earlier this year.
