It's Dangerous to Allow Politicians and Officials to Decide What Constitutes 'Truth'
Despite robust First Amendment protections for free speech rights, the U.S. is not immune to powerful people's desire to control information.
"We're going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can't just spew disinformation and misinformation," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) insisted
last year.
In July, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki called on social media companies to
act as government proxies by removing what the administration flags as "narratives dangerous to public health."
Interestingly, CPJ's Joel Simon predicted the pandemic would empower efforts to control information.
"[W]e must be mindful that when we get to the other side of the pandemic, we may be left with a narrative, being written by China, that government control over information was essential to combating the crisis," he
warned in March 2020. "That would be a devastating blow to the global information system, one that could endure even as the memories of the terrible pandemic we are currently facing slowly fade."
Since then, he's been proven painfully prescient as politicians' concerns have morphed from fighting "extremism" to suppressing "disinformation" to a weird amalgam of the two, unified by the alleged need to control what the public says, reads, and shares.
That's not to say, by the way, that material tagged as extremism isn't extreme, or that posts called out as disinformation aren't false. To open a web browser is to encounter a wide world of bigotry, bogus concerns about vaccine safety, nonsensical charges about election integrity, and fact-free arguments over whether or not COVID-19 even exists. But bullshit isn't a recent invention.