The Crusade Against Malinformation Explicitly Targets Inconvenient Truths

Disinformation and misinformation have always been contested categories, defined by the fallible and frequently subjective judgments of public officials and other government-endorsed experts. But malinformation is even more clearly in the eye of the beholder, since it is defined not by its alleged inaccuracy but by its perceived threat to public health, democracy, or national security, which often amounts to nothing more than questioning the wisdom, honesty, or authority of those experts.

Taibbi’s recent revelations focused on the work of the Virality Project, which the taxpayer-subsidized Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) launched in 2020. Although Renée DiResta, the SIO’s research manager, concedes that “misinformation is ultimately speech,” meaning the government cannot directly suppress it, she says the threat it poses “require[s] that social media platforms, independent researchers and the government work together as partners in the fight.”

That sort of collaboration raises obvious free speech concerns. If platforms like Twitter and Facebook were independently making these assessments, their editorial discretion would be protected by the First Amendment. But the picture looks different when government officials, including the president, the surgeon general, members of Congress, and representatives of public health and law enforcement agencies, publicly and privately chastise social media companies for not doing enough to suppress speech they view as dangerous.

via reason.com