In the past few years, the Supreme Court has considered a number of important cases about social media and free speech. From the Florida and Texas NetChoice cases determining whether state governments could regulate platforms’ content moderation practices to the Murthy v. Missouri case about pandemic-era censorship, at the heart of each of these cases was the question of whether government power should be used to regulate how private companies elevate speech and truth on their platforms in response to a growing fear of social media’s dangers.

In Moody v. NetChoice LLC, Justice Elena Kagan described social media platforms as services that “make our lives better, and make them worse—create unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented dangers.” The biggest danger created by, or rather exacerbated by, social media platforms is the obscuration of truth. In recent years, fake news, rumors, conspiracy theories, and contradicting ideas online have dominated the Internet, making it increasingly difficult for social media users to discern what’s true from what’s not.

The danger social media poses to truth-seeking is not entirely unprecedented. Nearly two centuries ago, English philosopher John Stuart Mill witnessed the widespread influence of mass media on British civilization during the Industrial Revolution. While many academics appeal to On Liberty to demonstrate how Mill’s principles endure amidst our modern media-centric world, few, if any, look to his earlier and lesser-known essay, Civilization. In this piece, Mill offers an educational model that can encourage individuals to pursue truth amidst a rapidly developing technological period not unlike our own.

Mill believed that the mass production of books and newspapers in the nineteenth century would elevate and empower the voices of the many. At the same time, he feared a world where societal progress resulted in the individual becoming “lost in the crowd,” depending more on public opinion and “less and less upon well-grounded opinion.” The sheer velocity of communication, in his mind, threatened the quality of information spread by these new technologies.

Furthermore, the liberal theorist recognized that these new technologies could empower bad-faith actors at the expense of what he called “the laborious and learned.” When a civilization allows for free speech and free press, there will inevitably be true speech and false speech. But in Mill’s view, both have merit. If the purpose of free speech is truth-seeking, then all ideas should be on the table since some ideas contain the whole truth, a portion of the truth, or a falsehood which can provide a “clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth.”

Although there is some merit to false speech, there are a myriad of detriments. False speech in the media can negatively influence individuals’ politics, voting patterns, obedience to government, and more. Those who want to regulate the spread of false speech recognize this, but so do many who oppose regulation.

Mill’s solution to bad-faith actors and competing ideas differs vastly from the common solutions we hear from top academics, government actors, and social media companies today. Some academics like Renee DiResta, the former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, want social media companies to limit the reach of false speech on their sites. In her book Invisible Rulers, she argues that platforms shouldn’t have to promote false content “on all surfaces, or recommend it to potential new followers, or run ads against it.” Some platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, took action to combat fake news by installing misinformation features, perhaps to DiResta’s partial satisfaction. X, formerly known as Twitter, has a “Community Notes” feature on its platform, and now other companies, like TikTok, have adopted similar features on their platforms.

The government has taken action as well, but not without facing adjudication. In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court refused to rule on the constitutionality of the government’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Biden administration ordered Facebook, a private social media company, to take down disagreeable and misleading posts and instead “promote quality information sources” on its platform. Instead of ruling that the Biden’s administration’s actions unconstitutionally compelled the speech of private entity, the Supreme Court returned the case to the lower courts, saying the case lacked standing.

Columbia Law School professor Philip Hamburger described this as the “worst speech decision in American history.” Justice Samuel Alito notes in his dissenting opinion that the Court in Murthy that the government succeeded in misleading speech along with valuable speech that sought to further intellectual discussion on an issue (i.e. the pandemic) that many Americans disagree on. He adds that “the Court … permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.” 

For Mill, and Justice Alito, it seems, the solution to bad-faith actors and the false information they spread isn’t more content moderation or more censorship. When Mill discusses the ramifications of mass media on British society in his Civilization essay, he doesn’t call on the government or newspapers or book publishers to censor bad-faith actors in the media. The main object of his critique is, perhaps surprisingly, the reader.

It is the reader, the individual, the social media user, who poses the greatest threat to technological advances in modern civilization. If the individual cannot think for themselves and resist the influences of public opinion in mass media, then the individual succumbs to the influence of fake news and allows bad actors to maintain their power over the masses. Mill calls this the problem of the indolent man.” In his time, Mill warned that “the public is in the predicament of an indolent man”—a man who is so incapable of applying “his mind vigorously to his own affairs” that he falls prey to the wayward influences of the masses.

Thus, if we want to counteract the influences of the media and the spread of fake news, we have to fix the predicament of the “indolent man” in our contemporary society. Social media users must be capable of thinking for themselves, deciphering fact from fiction, participating in the truth-seeking endeavor, and arriving at their own conclusions. Richard V. Reeves, a Mill scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, notes that “Mill knew that liberal societies could only flourish if the individuals comprising them did the necessary work of citizenship, which includes the work of self-knowledge, self-improvement and individual growth.”

But how do individuals do this? The answer is education.

Mill concludes his essay on Civilization with a prescription for individuals within a progressive society who are overcome by the influence of the masses. He makes a strong case for the individual’s pursuit of liberal education, writing that “the very corner-stone of an education intended to form great minds, must be the recognition of the principle, that the object is to call forth the greatest possible quantity of intellectual power, and to inspire the intensest love of truth.” A love of truth, however, cannot be instilled in the individual who allows himself to be told what to think by influencers online, op-eds in newspapers, fact-checker pop-ups on Instagram, or the government. “Intellectual power and practical love of truth are alike impossible where the reasoned is shown his conclusions, and informed beforehand that he is expected to arrive at them,” Mill writes. So, the individual must be taught how to think, how to seek truth, how to love it, and how to guard their minds against falsehoods.

But where can an individual acquire such an education today? One answer is universities. If colleges and universities were living up to their original mission, their students would be taught to pursue truth and knowledge there. In an ideal world, such skills would transfer from the university to the public square of social media. But too many universities have drifted further and further away from their original mission. Twenty-first-century professors and university administrators are doing what Mill urged British professors not to do in the nineteenth century: they are teaching students what to think, instead of how to think.

It is a “deep-seated error,” Mill writes, to assume that the purpose of education is “not to qualify the pupil for judging what is true or what is right, but to provide that he shall think what we think true, and right what we think right—that to teach means to inculcate our own opinions and that our business is not to make thinkers or inquires, but disciples.”

Truth-seeking is a lost mission at many universities, and it appears to be a lost one online. In response to digital illiteracy, some academics have advocated for the institution of digital citizenship courses or propaganda literacy efforts that can teach future users how to identify misinformation and bad-faith actors online. These solutions are more Millian in nature than the regulations advocated for by other academics, state and federal governments, and sometimes even platforms themselves. There may be hope in these efforts.

The solution to fake news and bad-faith actors is not, and never should be, empowering governments and private entities with more influence over the regulation of information. That’s the easy, but far more dangerous solution to the fake news dilemma. Concentrated power in the hands of the few—whether it is the government or private entities—presents its own dangers, which could be far worse than what any bad-faith actor could do online. Kalev Leetaru suggests that social media companies already have too much power as society’s truth arbiters. “Today social media platforms not only decide what is acceptable for us to see and say, but in their efforts to combat digital falsehoods, they are increasingly defining ‘truth’ itself,” he writes. “In our rush to rid ourselves of false information, we are rushing headfirst towards Orwell’s 1984.”

Mill warns against those who control what opinions, ideas, and information are orthodox in On Liberty. He says that “it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side.” Social media companies and governments have become super-regulators online. It is telling that in First Amendment cases such as NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, it is not left up to the government to tell the public what is true and what is not. Mill might go further and say it isn’t the duty of private companies either.

More litigation in the courts is bound to arise unless our modern civilization realizes what Mill realized two centuries ago: the key to resisting mass influence lies in the individual’s “intellectual power” and a “practical love of truth.” In the aftermath of the many social media cases litigated at the Supreme Court, we are now presented with an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on Mill’s teachings and consider one of the most important questions of our time: What role will we allow the multitude of voices on social media to play in our lives? Will the media do the thinking for us, or will we do the thinking for ourselves?