ALL FACT-CHECKING IS CENSORSHIP?

During last fall's presidential campaign, "disinformation" and "fact-checking" and "misinformation" came up again and again.  I lose track whether it is the legacy media or the political class that are most fretful.  Douglas Murray made the case for the legacy media losing their credibility.

Look around the media and you see the same problem everywhere. Much of the media will tell you that they regard their job as being to decide what is true and what is false. But the problem is that most of them aren’t any good at the task they set themselves.

In Britain, the national broadcaster — the BBC — recently set up a special department called “BBC Verify” that is meant to “fact-check” content across the media. But it can’t even get the BBC’s own facts right.

On issue after issue — foreign and domestic — “BBC Verify” has overseen verifiably untrue stories.

I understand the panic in these media institutions.

It is true that since the arrival of social media, the role of the media as the “gatekeepers” of what is true has fallen away.

On platforms like X, anybody can point to a piece of false information put out on the main news channels.

At the same time, the eruption of a whole new set of media platforms has diluted the power of the gatekeepers.

But the truth is that the new landscape is not so impossible to walk across as the BBC, ABC and others seem to think.

The public is wiser than it knows.

For instance, a story can be “fake” not just because it is untrue, but because it is a story that is either published or not published in order to suit a particular narrative.

Which means it's on each of us to call attention, to contribute our local knowledge to the conversation.  "What Mr Lukianoff is about to do is connect the dots by which the Critique of Pure Tolerance goes from treating the ownership of a printing press (or social media platform) from being a hidden restraint on freedom, i.e. a manifestation of repressive tolerance, to a means for propagating false consciousness, i.e. something that must be suppressed in order for tolerance to be liberated."

To do so, though, is to go against the fundamental principle of serious inquiry, No Final Say.  Good luck with that, notes Richard "Belmont Club" Fernandez.

[I]sn't authority, and consequently censorship necessary to save the world? Only if it is based on truth. The problem with the system of virtuous censorship proposed by the [World Economic Forum] is that for it to work it must have the truth: a system of values, what is permissible and strictly forbidden. Most of all it must have a body of reliable knowledge, or else it will never know what impulses or beliefs to proscribe. Censors must, in other words, solve the epistemological challenge of determining moral universality and scientific truth that has proved impossible through history.

He concludes, " Among the Global Risks in 2024 must be counted the threat posed by those who in their zeal, would ruthlessly save world from dissent."  In 2024, law professor Jonathan Turley suggested the zealots were that cosmopolitan coalition of legacy media, higher education, and national Democrats.

This is why, for the free speech community, the prospect of a Harris-Walz administration is chilling. Where President Joe Biden was viewed as supporting censorship out of political opportunism, Harris and Walz are viewed as true believers.

We are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. We have never before faced the current alliance of government, corporate, academic and media forces aligned against free speech. A Harris-Walz administration with a supportive Congress could make this right entirely dispensable.

Others are laying the groundwork for precisely that moment.

The Trump-Vance team took office and at first did the right things.

Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed a bevy of executive orders earlier this week, including one that seeks to end the federal government's pressure campaign on social media companies.

The "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order reaffirms the free speech rights of social media users and prohibits government agents from engaging in unconstitutional censorship.

And new vice president J.D. Vance went into the Brussels den to defend sifting and winnowing.

America’s vice president could have easily used his address to regurgitate the same worn-out platitudes about diplomatic “cooperation” and “improving relations” routinely espoused by Washington and European dignitaries. Instead, he took a much bolder approach.

Throughout his nearly 20-minute remarks, Vance gave a full-throated defense of free speech. While acknowledging the Biden administration’s censorship practices, Vance eloquently explained the importance of maintaining open discourse in civil society and lambasted self-professed “democratic” European states for deploying authoritarian tactics to silence their own peoples.

“… [T]he threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe … is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America,” Vance said. “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

European elites were stunned. For the first time in ages, they were confronted with the reality of their own hypocrisy on natural rights — an issue they regularly lecture other nations about on the world stage.

While watching Europeans throw temper tantrums over Vance’s remarks is certainly amusing, the significance of the vice president’s address cannot be overstated. It’s arguably one of the most consequential foreign policy speeches given by a leading U.S. political figure in the modern era and represents a dramatic shift in America’s approach to free speech, both domestically and internationally.

In one fell swoop, Vance delivered the message that, under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers — even those that portend to hold an affinity for such principles — will no longer be ignored by the United States.

All too soon, though, I have to add Donald Trump to the roll call of censors.  "Pope Linus, Herbert Marcuse, Tim Walz, all of them threatened by an emergence they cannot manage.  Maybe suppressing that emergence isn't the best idea."

A month ago, it wasn't.

"Under the guise of combatting 'misinformation,' 'disinformation,' and 'malinformation,' the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government's preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate," states the order. "Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society."

This order is, as the Abundance Institute's Neil Chilson recognized, "good and appropriate." Much of the censorship on social media sites that rightly irked libertarians, conservatives, and dissidents of all stripes was not enforced by the platforms of their own free will; on the contrary, they were browbeaten by various federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the White House.

It's right and proper for Trump to tell the bureaucrats who work at these agencies: that's enough of that. The First Amendment protects misinformation and hate speech, and the feds have no business policing these categories of speech on social media.

Needless to say, self-described disinformation experts hate this order—and mainstream media organizations are always happy to provide a megaphone to their complaints. CNN saw fit to enlist Nina Jankowicz, the discredited former DHS disinfo adviser, to offer a thunderous denunciation.

"Disinformation is not a partisan issue; it's a democracy issue," Jankowicz said in a statement. "America's adversaries benefit when our country is internally divided and politically polarized."

A lot can change in a month.

Trump's claim that journalism he does not like is "illegal" and constitutes a tort justifying massive civil damages should be familiar by now. He has made such claims not only in social media posts but also in actual lawsuits against news organizations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explains in a motion filed last Friday, these chilling attempts to convert Trump's complaints about press coverage into causes of action are legally baseless and blatantly unconstitutional.

It worked well enough for private citizen Donald Trump.

Given the flagrant frivolousness of these claims, you might wonder, why is Trump pressing them? As he explains it, he is determined to "straighten out the press" one way or another. "I shouldn't really be the one to do it," he told reporters in December. "It should have been the Justice Department or somebody else. But I have to do it [because] our press is very corrupt."

As Trump sees it, the U.S. Department of Justice should be policing the press to make sure it is telling the truth. While any such program would be clearly unconstitutional, Trump thinks he can achieve similar results by filing his own lawsuits.

It would be amusing to see Our President offer theater kid Nina Jankowicz that job.  But perhaps that a national politician gets worked up about disinformation, or fake news, or what have you, comes with the territory.  Consider how State is following up on the vice-president's Munich talk.

“… [W]e can’t allow our message to solely be provided through the filter of legacy, traditional media outlets whose … readership is down, their viewership is down, their ratings are down,” Rubio said.  “[W]e have to take our message where people are getting their news and information, and in these sort of long-form interviews where you’re getting serious questions and can provide answers to nuanced issues, not little sound bites that they run during the cable news hour for news and entertainment purposes.  So, we’ll engage everybody, but we almost certainly see a greater emphasis on independent journalism because that’s where people are getting their news and information.”

Put another way, the current president seeks a favorable press corps.