WH Mum on Scope of Push to Squelch COVID Misinformation | RealClearPolitics
The White House insists that all it wants to do is save lives. But critics such as Rep. Thomas Massie have compared their efforts to tropes in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Kentucky Republican accused the White House of Ministry of Truth level malfeasance.
Complicating matters is that the definition of what is and isn t misinformation can and does change. For instance, the theory that the coronavirus escaped a biomedical lab in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed early on in the pandemic, with major news outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post labeling it a xenophobic conspiracy theory. Facebook warned its users about spreading false or misleading information about the origins of the virus.
But the head of the World Health Organization admitted just Thursday that it was premature to dismiss that possibility. I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. It’s common.
Whether it is misinformation about the vaccine or the origins of the virus, the content does not matter. At least, so say many Republicans. They argue that coordination with Big Tech companies to censor speech is patently unconstitutional. The government can’t censor speech. The First Amendment makes that very clear, Utah Sen. Mike Lee said during an interview with Fox News. They re a private for-profit corporation that can make its own decisions, but when it’s doing that in collusion with government, it looks to me a lot like a First Amendment violation.