A former secretary of state and one-time Democratic presidential hopeful, John Kerry, speaking in a panel at a World Economic Forum meeting in New York City, suggested that the Constitution’s First Amendment is an impediment to efforts by the government to tamp down what he calls misinformation and disinformation and build ‘consensus’ around such issues as climate change.

Mr. Kerry says there are “sick” people in the press and online who are pushing false narratives for political purposes who should be stopped.

“If people only go to one source and the source they go to is sick and … has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to our ability to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” Mr. Kerry warned at the meeting, which was meant to be focused on sustainable development.

Mr. Kerry served as a senator from Massachusetts for nearly three decades before being elevated to Secretary of State in President Obama’s second term. Up until March of this year, he was an international envoy for President Biden on climate issues. 

He says that social media firms themselves are thriving off of spreading misinformation and disinformation, though the First Amendment still protects most online speech, causing even further problems for all democracies around the world. 

“Anguish over social media is just growing and growing and growing, and it’s part of our problem — particularly in democracies — in terms of building consensus around any issue,” he says. “It’s really hard to govern today.”

Mr. Kerry says the “referees” that used to decide what was and was not fact have largely been neutered, leading people to “self-select” for where they decide to go for news and information. “It’s really, really hard … to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this.”

The Biden administration has been widely criticized by conservatives and free speech advocates for what they view as government control of speech on social media platforms. In 2023, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the administration’s contact with social media giants for the purpose of censoring some online speech was unconstitutional, though the Supreme Court later upheld the government’s actions in those instances. 

The Louisiana jurist, Judge Terry Doughty called the administration’s contact with social media firms “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” 

Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky libertarian, wrote on X on Sunday that the First Amendment was written specifically to guard against men like Mr. Kerry from abusing their government positions. “John Kerry and other elite democrats hate the Constitution. They see it as a roadblock to ruling over people. As a matter of fact, that is why it was written,” Mr. Massie writes.