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Transcript from Real Clear Politics:

Last week at a World Economic Forum panel on Green Energy investing and sustainable development the former U.S. Senator and Biden administration climate envoy John Kerry correctly identified the First Amendment as a “major block” preventing the government from halting spread of “disinformation.”

JOHN KERRY: The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. You can’t — the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.

So it is really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 40-50 years I’ve been involved in this.

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.

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.

Obviously, there are some people in our country who are prepared to implement change in a whole other way, but —

I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough of big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?