The ‘disinformation’ deception

Setting aside First Amendment concerns, the state has no moral claim to dictate the veracity of speech. As we ve learned during the coronavirus pandemic, health officials have trouble conveying truth. The oscillations, obfuscations, and confusing messaging of the CDC and other health officials have done more to corrode trust in science and government than any conspiracy theorist could ever hope to achieve spreading misinformation on a social media platform. We re going to have to figure it out ourselves. One of the obvious problems with regulating misinformation, through state pressure or otherwise, is that a person would have to accept that most facts have already been adjudicated. But that is often not the case. During last year s pandemic, for example, Facebook was pressured, and acquiesced, to ban posts that theorized that COVID-19 had been man-made and manufactured in China. The misinformation was prohibited over fears that such talk would fuel anti-Asian sentiment. Yet, the debate over the origins of the pandemic was not resolved. It is still not resolved. Only when a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report was leaked to newspapers did we learn that three researchers from China s Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick enough in November 2019 to be hospitalized, and Facebook lifted the ban. For nearly a year, it was impossible for millions of people to discuss a completely reasonable question.

You could argue, in fact, that regarding certain segments of the debate, you were only allowed to read misinformation on Facebook. Thus were we subject not to rigorous fact-checking but to the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party, able through U.S. Democrats to crack down on American dissent from the Beijing line.

Sooner or later, every censor in history expands the definition of mis- or disinformation to try to undercut the rights of political opponents. One of the ways they do this is by conflating crackpottery which, no doubt, exists in abundance with legitimate speech and debate. The most infamous recent example of such censorship came after the New York Post broke details of President Joe Biden s son Hunter s shady overseas dealings with Ukraine and China in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Virtually the entire journalistic establishment defamed the newspaper, asserting that the story was unprofessionally reported, and likely a conduit for Russian disinformation. Social media companies buried or banned the sharing of the story, which was never debunked and did not appear to violate any rules the speech police had been enforcing.

via www.msn.com

That’s about the size of it.