is brought to you by: Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss-made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program.

A way to experience the roads that BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.

And by the Cygnet Foundation.

Raising funds for those in need through art-related initiatives, contributions to UNICEF, and animal welfare organizations.

The Cygnet Foundation (symphonic music) - [Narrator] "Travels and Traditions with Burt Wolf" is a classic travel journal, the record of Burt's search for information about our world and how we fit into it.

Burt travels to the source of each story, trying to find the connections between our history and what is happening today.

What he discovers can improve our lives and our understanding of the world around us.

(majestic orchestral music) (majestic orchestral music fades) - My work has always been based on my traveling around the world and telling stories about the places I visit.

Their culture, their history, their traditions, what's for lunch.

Central to my work is freedom of speech which is why I decided to make a couple of programs about it.

Our first program was about the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

The first thing we learned was that our right to freedom of speech, which is protected in the 1st Amendment, only applies to the federal government.

The 1st Amendment prevents Congress from making laws that would limit freedom of speech.

It didn't apply to companies, corporations, organizations, and individuals who could rightfully limit our freedom of speech as they saw fit.

It also didn't apply to states and city governments.

But that got changed with the 14th Amendment which said that states and local governments also had to respect freedom of speech.

Then we took a look at how freedom of speech has been legally restricted by the government in the courts.

During the first world war, if you said something that resulted in disloyalty, insubordination, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military, you could end up in prison for 20 years.

And then there are a series of rulings by the Supreme Court that restricted freedom of speech.

They addressed the idea of obscenity and decided that anything of a sexual nature, that was offensive to the general public, was obscene.

Next was defamation, which consists of a spoken or written statement that is false and unjustly harms someone's reputation.

Defamation is not protected by the 1st Amendment.

Governments are allowed to pass laws that prevent defamatory speech.

There's no protection for speech that has harmful content.

- Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

(audience applauding) - Like yelling fire in a crowded theater when there was no fire and no reason to think there might be a fire.

Each of us, as well as different newspapers, magazines, and television networks will see things through their different lenses, lenses that reflect different backgrounds, orientations, and philosophies.

And as new information becomes available, attitudes can change.

Full agreement is unusual, which is why it's important to hear other views.

Blending different views can result in excellent outcomes.

There are also limitations on the time, place, and manner of speech.

A noisy demonstration in front of the home of a politician at night affects the rights of the neighbors and is not protected under the 1st Amendment.

But the same demonstration might be okay during the day or in a public place.

With a few logical exceptions, freedom of speech is protected, but what about your right to hear?

If you can say whatever you want to say but your right to hear is restricted, then freedom of speech is not particularly valuable.

When I was growing up, what I heard came from newspapers, magazines, radio, television.

(Marilyn singing) ♪ Happy birthday, Mr. President ♪ - [Burt] My teachers and my family.

It wasn't until I was in my teens that I realized that much of what I heard was not exactly true.

In some cases, it was what we now call fake news.

- Good evening and welcome to "Tucker Carlson".

Tonight, the defining principle of the American legal system really, of American life, the principle that has kept us free is equal justice.

And the principle's fairly simple.

- If you don't have free access to information, then none of us have any idea what we would really believe.

Because we can't, like I said before, get those building blocks.

So I would say that the balance of danger tilts towards circumscribing the information that people can have access to.

So I would say it's much more important to have as much freedom of speech as you possibly can, that the risks there are much less than the risks of individuals or bots, or algorithms, you know, controlling what we see, what we hear, and, you know, sort of what we're pushed towards.

- As we have said before in these circumstances, there is a cost to us as a news organization to knowingly broadcast untrue things.

We are here to bring you the news.

It hurts our ability to do that if we live broadcast what we fully expect in advance to be a litany of lies and false accusations, no matter who says them.

- So there's a real function in society to have real freedom.

So to have real freedom, sometimes you get stories that you hate or that turn out just to be totally false and can be harmful.

But you also get this sort of radical freedom that makes it possible to get true stories in a world where it's really hard to get true stories.

- [Burt] And these days, hundreds on sites on the internet and algorithms developed by social media companies shape our understanding of many issues and how we respond to those issues.

- Social media thrives and really feeds off of a lizard brain reactivity 'cause that's what drives engagement.

So when someone's in an emotional state, they're not making their best, most rational choices and that's not the space that social media's looking for.

Social media's looking for emotional reaction.

- If you don't have freedom of speech in this country, then people don't have the building blocks of their own perspectives because they're just gonna sort of repeat the monolithic message that they're given.

So are there times when people really do need to be protected?

Yes, but do we wanna severely limit the potential for or the opportunity for governments, for big corporations for powerful people to control what those things are?

- Controlling what we hear is always been a primary objective of politicians.

There may be a story that is completely accurate but if it doesn't meet the objectives of a particular party or individual, they can attack it as fake.

The writings of Samuel Adams, one of the founding fathers was not always concerned with the facts.

He wanted to influence his readers and the truth of what he wrote was not necessarily an essential element.

He was considered a master of propaganda.

And John Adams, who was president of the United States in the 1700s, was described in a Philadelphia newspaper as old, bald, blind, cropped, and toothless.

He was so incensed that he created a series of laws that curtailed any speech that was critical of his government.

And during the American Revolution, the French government played an active role in trying to control the media in our country.

The idea that the Russians may have played a role in our last election is just a new player in an old game.

Behavioral scientist, Dr. Robert Epstein is an expert on covert surveillance and artificial intelligence methods used by tech companies.

He says we are already living in a world with an unseen dictator.

And these technologies are undermining democracy.

- If people can't see content, then it's not part of the conversation, that's the problem.

And you don't know what they don't show.

So we're talking about a handful of executives in Silicon Valley that decide what billions of people around the world and what almost all Americans what they can see and what they cannot see.

And you don't know what they don't show.

That's too much power, period.

- So I think that there's always been some censorship in some categories, but in recent years, it's become so incredibly pervasive that it's really become a way to control what people think, what they do, what they buy, what they read, what they watch.

- In 2004, I spent the month of June filming in Taiwan.

We learned about Daoist traditions, how to send money to your ancestor so they could buy things in the afterlife.

Here you go, grandma.

We took part in the lantern festival and ate lunch almost every day in the world's most famous dumpling house.

It was a great trip.

The day after we got back to New York, I went to bed but was having trouble sleeping.

So I went into my study to do some work.

At about 3:00 AM, my wife Natalia came in and it was immediately apparent to her that I was having a heart attack.

She rushed me into a taxi and took me to the hospital.

My doctor met us there.

I was put on a gurney and the emergency room staff began to examine me.

In the middle of the examination, I had my heart attack.

(monitor blares flatline tone) My doctors felt that my heart attack was caused by a drug that I had been given called Vioxx.

At the time, Vioxx was a popular drug used to treat arthritis.

- [Messenger] Attention Vioxx users, on September 30th, 2004, Vioxx was pulled off the market due to increased risks of heart attacks, strokes, and death to patients.

- I was told that the company that made Vioxx knew that the drug was killing people but kept selling it because it was highly profitable.

They ended up paying almost $5 billion to settle lawsuits related to Vioxx.

When it comes to staying alive, you can't be too careful about evaluating what you hear.

In order to protect your health and wellbeing, it's important for you to get as much information as you can, try and figure out which parts of it are true, and talk to many different sources.

Lots of the information we get is straightforward and valuable.

This morning, I put on my raincoat because the forecast told me that about midday it was going to rain.

Even before I left my house, I did some shopping because my local market told me what was on sale.

That's the easy stuff, but what if the information we are getting has been edited in order to influence our behavior?

What if a bunch of computers at a few internet giants have been programmed to influence our behavior and are selecting what they tell us and what they don't tell us and they do that day after day, and year after year?

- [Reporter] On the virtual hot seat today, oil company executives challenged for the first time ever on their company's histories of spreading disinformation about big oil's role in climate change.

- [Reporter 2] Late tonight, we learned that the fire has once again nearly doubled in size and now stands at more than 73,000 acres.

Firefighters are... - What about the increased fires and floods?

Are we being told all sides of these stories?

Are we getting all the information on medications and vaccinations?

When it comes to our health, massive censorship is extremely dangerous.

We need a free flow of information in order to make good decisions.

The problem is not new.

I grew up with the government and corporations constantly misleading me.

- Back in the Madison Avenue days of the '50s and '60s, we knew that Madison Avenue would manipulate people to buy certain things.

- Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?

- I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.

- [Burt] Corporations implied cigarette smoking was safe.

- [Spokesman] This model shows how just the right amount of fluid containing tetraethyl lead and dye is added to the gasoline.

- [Burt] And that lead in gasoline was safe.

The government misled us about the war in Vietnam, telling us some things while not telling us others.

- But now what we're seeing is that on steroids or 2.0 persuasive things where not only are we being manipulated in terms of how we shop or how we vote or how we interact as humans, but we've been manipulated to the point that we don't even know that we're being manipulated.

You know, we've made rock stars out of the people who are pulling the strings that are affecting our lives in the most profound way.

- I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction.

- [Burt] And we were told that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Eventually we learned those weapons did not exist.

- Found anything yet?

- Nothing yet, sir!

- Now they're using much more insidious mechanisms to not only get us to buy or consume things but now they're shifting the way that we think the way that we process information.

It's become much more all-consuming.

So the jingle to buy a toy has now turned into search engine optimization and much more potentially nefarious ways to change our behavior.

- So what are we being told now that's not true?

When I was in law school, one of the professors taught a class about honesty.

One example was a story about someone buying a used car.

If a salesman says I'm not sure about this but I heard that the car was only used by a little old lady who used it to go to church on Sunday you know that's just salesman's puff.

But if you turn back the mileage meter from 150,000 miles to 25,000 miles, that's a flat-out lying crook.

Most of the time you can spot the flat-out lying crooks, but not always.

Remember Bernie Madoff?

The televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker?

And Jordan Belfort who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Wolf of Wall Street"?

- The real question is this, was all this legal.

- At the end of the day, our ultimate right is the right of free thought which then correlates to free speech.

And I think with those being handcuffed and manipulated with very sort of Orwellian misinformation misinformation agendas, people are not free and that by, to me, is a definition of living in a totalitarian state where we can't freely engage in the thoughts and ideas and speech that we have always had as a democratic society.

- If we're not receiving honest information about the world around us, or hearing different points of view, how can we possibly make intelligent decisions about our life?

In January of 1961, as General Eisenhower came to the end of his presidential term, he warned about the increased power of special interest groups.

- We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought by the military industrial complex.

- Eisenhower warned about the rise of the so-called military industrial complex.

People still remember that phrase.

But in that very same speech, he also warned, based on what he was seeing behind the scenes in government and industry, he also warned about the rise of a technological elite, I'm not making this up, this is President Eisenhower saying this way back in 1961, a technological elite that could control public policy without people knowing.

- The 1st Amendment was designed to protect people who had less power, who had less money, who had controversial ideas that a lot of people disagreed with.

That's the whole point of it.

Why do you need it if that's not true?

I mean, the most powerful people in the country, the government, the big corporations, they can place advertisements, they can use propaganda, they can have people do complicated studies about how to mold the way people think, where they can tell you that the worst fast food in the world is actually good for you.

And they can be very effective in lying to the American public using those traditional methods.

- It is terrifying because we're talking about a handful of executives in one industry who are deciding what to do with the thinking and behavior of billions of people around the world without people knowing and generally speaking without leaving any paper trail for authorities to trace.

- We're in a position now where the tools of censorship and the tools of propaganda, and the tools of advertising, and the tools of just sort of convincing people of things by using algorithms and using likes and using all of these product features are so powerful that it makes much more sense to limit those, that that's what's really gonna protect mankind.

- Eisenhower warned us to be alert about the rise of these new forces in our society.

We have not been alert.

And the technological elite, it exists now and it is very much in control.

- History is filled with trusted organizations being dead wrong about the facts.

One of my favorites is about Galileo.

During the 1600s, the astronomer Galileo who Albert Einstein called the father of modern science said the sun, not the Earth was the center of our universe and that the Earth revolved around the sun.

Theologians who claimed to understand God's laws said that an Earth moving around the sun was in conflict with the scriptures.

Galileo was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to house arrest for life.

Over 350 years later in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo had been right.

- It's okay for somebody to have a minority point of view.

Sometimes the minority point of view is actually right and might save the world.

And there have been many, many times historically where there was sort of like a mass hysteria or a period where almost everybody believed things that wound up not being true.

- So I think the nexus of freedom of speech, being heard, and the right to be heard is critical in any democracy.

I think the ability to have a voice is the price of admission for the democratic process.

So when people feel like they're disenfranchised or they're censored, or they're de-platformed, you've now essentially have revoked the underpinnings of any democracy.

- The question is though is that who's gonna make these decisions.

And what I've been saying very consistently for a long time is whoever makes these decisions has to be accountable to the public.

And the tech companies are not, they're not accountable to us.

Whatever constraints there have to be on free speech on the internet, they have to be put in place by a people who represent and who are accountable to the public.

- [Burt] So what can we do about it?

- How do we avoid being vulnerable to such group effects or such totalitarian?

I think that there is strength in the power of the individual to then grassroots organize and to say here and no further.

So I think the solutions are complex and multiple but there is legislative and legal, political, and grassroots pushback where we say, you know, just like the, I'm thinking of the movie "Network", I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore.

- I want you to get up now.

I want all of you to get up out of your chairs.

I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!

- [Nicholas] And that is the correct response to have when you're feeling exploited by someone: get angry.

- As Justice Brandeis said a hundred years ago, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

And we know that when we monitor and when we find irregularities, we find bias, we find manipulations, and we expose them, these companies back down.

We've gotten them to back down in the past and with a national digital shield in place, they will stay away from our elections and they'll stay away from our kids for the foreseeable future.

- We have to call BS when it's BS.

That's what needs to happen.

The leaders, academic, political in our society have to say stop, let's stop.

We've gone too far in some of this nonsense and we have to be able to get back to what makes sense in a civilized society.

- My work on these programs has made it particularly clear how important freedom of speech is the right to hear and the right to be heard particularly with varying points of view.

Please join us next time right here on your local PBS station.

(light symphony music) If you'd like to see this program again or any of the hundreds of programs we've made for our public broadcasting stations, visit BurtWolf.com or the Burt Wolf YouTube channel.

(majestic orchestral music) (majestic orchestral music continues) (majestic orchestral music continues) (majestic orchestral music continues) (majestic orchestral music continues) - [Announcer] "Travels & Traditions" with Burt Wolf is brought to you by: Swiss International Airlines.

Flying to over 70 worldwide locations.

Truly Swiss-made.

Swiss International Airlines.

And by the BMW European Delivery Program.

A way to experience the roads that BMW was made to drive.

BMW European Delivery Program.

And by the Cygnet Foundation.

Raising funds for those in need through art related initiatives, contributions to UNICEF, and animal welfare organizations.

The Cygnet Foundation.

(bright music)