A social-media spat has spilled over into the courtroom, writes our reporter Sean Mulkerrin in a front-page story this week.

The founder of a popular site for restaurant reviews is suing the owners of a local Italian restaurant over what she claims are false and defamatory statements on social media that have hurt her and her business.

Words, whether true or not, have consequences.

The suit opens with words it says were spoken by George Washington. We found those words, from a reputable source — National Archives — were written in a May 8, 1796 letter from George Washington to John Jay. 

Washington was towards the end of his second term and looking forward to retirement; Jay had left his post as the first chief justice of the United States the year before and was serving as New York’s governor. Both men were Founding Fathers of the fledgling democracy, still in its infancy.

Those words written 229 years ago can still enlighten us today.

“I am sure the mass of Citizens in the United States mean well; and I firmly believe they will always act well whenever they can obtain a right understanding of matters,” Washington wrote.

Ah, there’s the rub. In this new nation, an experiment in governance by the people, our first elected leader was concerned that citizens “obtain a right understanding of matters.”

Washington’s letter continues, “But in some parts of the Union, where the sentiments of their delegates and leaders are adverse to the government, and great pains are taken to inculcate a belief that their rights are assailed, and their liberties endangered, it is not easy to accomplish this; especially (as is the case invariably) when the Inventors, and abettors of pernicious measures, use infinitely more industry in dissiminating the poison, than the well disposed part of the Community do to furnish the antidote.”

These words resonate today in an era when so much poison is being disseminated with so little antidote.

Washington concludes this thought, with his final words quoted in the local lawsuit: “To this source all our discontents may be traced, and from it our embarrassments proceed. Hence, serious misfortunes, originating in misrepresentation, frequently flow, and spread, before they can be dissipated by truth.”

Misrepresentation flows easily while truth takes effort to discern.

We have seen, in just our own short lifetime, a massive change in how information in our democracy is disseminated. 

The First Amendment of our Constitution guarantees our fundamental freedoms: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It used to be that the rights of free speech and assembly were exercised in the town square.

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, published “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror,” in 2004 in which he set out a “town square test,” a threshold for a free society: 

“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm,” Sharansky wrote, “then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a ‘fear society’ has finally won their freedom.”

President George W. Bush endorsed Sharansky’s views and his secretary of state used his “town square test” when she identified nations under tyranny.

During the Bush presidency, it became clear to us that the town square had migrated to the mall. 

Just before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, a local lawyer sparked a controversy  —  covered internationally   —  when he was arrested in Guilderland’s Crossgates Mall over a T-shirt with a message of peace. 

Stephen Downs and his son, Roger, had purchased T-shirts at Crossgates and had them printed with messages of peace. Downs’s shirt read “Peace on Earth” and “Give Peace a Chance,” and his son’s read “No War with Iraq” and “Let Inspections Work.” 

The previous December, The Enterprise had written about a group of individuals who entered the mall wearing peace T-shirts. They were escorted out by security, touching off First Amendment debates.

Downs joined the New York Civil Liberties Union and, after months of studying the law and how it relates to free speech in malls and shopping centers, decided to file a suit.

On this page at that time, we wrote, “Our nation’s history has been shaped by citizens speaking out in public places on public issues. From our earliest days, with patriots like Thomas Paine rallying forces for a revolution (‘From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms!’) to our more recent history with Martin Luther King Jr. leading a civil rights movement (‘I have a dream!’), words spoken to masses in public places have moved us.

“Our First Amendment insures our right to free speech and to peaceably assemble. But not in the modern meeting place, not in malls — they are privately owned. And the owners set the rules.”

We detailed the long legal history of rulings on free speech on private property but also recalled how, when a store at Crossgates Mall discouraged a mother from nursing her baby there, protesters held a nurse-in. The protest brought apologies and a change in policy.

So we naively urged Crossgates Mall shoppers to wear messages stating their beliefs. “Some may wear ‘Peace on Earth.’ Others may choose ‘Bomb Baghdad’ or ‘Support the President.’ Still others may choose to express themselves on issues besides the impending war,” we wrote. “They may wear ‘Save the Karner blue butterfly’ or ‘Shop at Colonie Center.’ 

“The point is to ensure our right to quietly and peacefully express ourselves. If even half of the thousands of people who frequent Crossgates Mall every day state their beliefs on their person, the mall would be unable to expel or arrest them all. Free speech would be guaranteed as a matter of practicality. Now is the time for public discourse, and malls are the American gathering space.”

How times have changed in those two short decades. Protests are now largely organized online and malls, many closed or facing financial challenges, are no longer the public square.

In 2022, when Elon Musk took over Twitter, now X, he said during a TED interview. “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

Nearly a decade before, in 2013, Dick Costolo, then Twitter’s leader, had similarly said, “We think of it as the global town square.”

After the 2016 presidential election, when it became clear that Russian operatives had tried to tilt the election towards Trump, Twitter and other social-media platforms worked to beef up content moderation so that users could distinguish between fact and falsehoods.

Musk dismantled those efforts and now Meta has followed suit.

The problem of course is that these giant media platforms, just like the malls such as Crossgates, have owners. They are not public in that sense. Those owners have not just tremendous wealth but tremendous power.

They and their algorithms determine who has access and what information gets shared with whom.

A true town square — for example a public library — is accessible to everyone. The director of the Altamont Free Library, Joe Burke, put it eloquently to the Guilderland Town Board this month when he said Altamont’s library makes “people feel like, if there’s no place else in the community, if there’s no place else in the world that accepts them, then they have a home in the library and, because they have a home in the library, they have a home in the community.”

Our nation is entering an era when we may not pass Sharansky’s town-square test, when people are fearful to speak the truth.

We take some slender hope in a recent presentation by Barry Alex Finsel made to the Guilderland School Board on teaching social studies. Students now are taught to use inquiry and inductive reasoning, he said, to interpret sources.

“I have to emphasize this source part,” Finsel said, “because that is probably the most important thing in a practical application today.” 

This week, New York state released a ‘Media Literacy’ toolkit for educators; we encourage everyone, not just teachers, to read it.

The tool kit describes what the RAND Corporation, a not-for-profit American think tank, has termed “truth decay” made up of four trends: Increasing disagreement about facts and data; blurring lines between fact and opinion; increasing volume and influence of opinion over fact; and declining trust in formerly respected sources of factual information.

In releasing the tool kit, the governor’s office said it was spawned by the revelation that the perpetrator of the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo was radicalized online, after which the governor directed the State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to work with experts to develop “an ideologically neutral product which gives teachers resources to develop students’ ability to analyze, evaluate and assess all forms of media, including information delivered through social media.”

Again: Words, whether true or not, have consequences.

The tool kit lists five key questions that students should ask when absorbing information, focusing on authorship, format, audience, content, and purpose. Examples of Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation, called MDM, include conspiracy theories, propaganda, and hyper-partisan content. Modern technology and the proliferation of social media has not only made MDM more potent, the toolkit says, but more difficult to identify.

MDM can also cause confusion, waste resources, and risk lives in times of disaster, the toolkit notes, as we saw with the recent pandemic. 

“Finally,” the toolkit says, “MDM presents a grave threat to the health of American democracy. At a national scale, we are witnessing a significant decline in trust in formerly respected sources of factual information, and much of the democratic process relies on the validity of facts and data. Should the truth lose its value, it may cause the continued deterioration of healthy civil discourse, heightened political polarization and erosion of faith in civic institutions.”

We shall return to the place where we started, with George Washington’s words: “Serious misfortunes, originating in misrepresentation, frequently flow, and spread, before they can be dissipated by truth.”

A good place to start with an antidote to the poison of false information is to, each of us, run through the questions posed in the toolkit as we absorb information.

As Timothy Snyder has written in his book “On Tyranny”: To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.