After nearly a decade of clamoring for the censorship, deplatforming, debanking, doxxing, and even imprisonment of their fellow Americans, members of the “disinformation” cabal have finally found a form of speech they don’t want to suppress: their own. This revelation was reported yesterday by 60 Minutes, which devoted a 13-minute segment to the plight of the euphemistically termed “misinformation researchers,” who are now apparently concerned that their speech rights are being chilled by criticism. Irony was already dead; by now, it must be approaching rigor mortis.
The 60 Minutes episode, titled “Supreme Court grapples with online First Amendment rights as social media teems with misinformation” — teems! — is ostensibly about the potential fallout surrounding a pair of cases currently before the Supreme Court, Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton. The Verge briefly summarizes the cases here:
In Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, the court will decide on whether laws governing social media from Florida and Texas would violate the First Amendment by compelling the companies to host speech, even when they don’t want to. The laws were passed in 2021, after former President Donald Trump’s ouster from mainstream platforms following the insurrection on January 6th. They also resulted from long-held grievances from conservatives about what they view as social media censorship of their viewpoints.
If the two laws are upheld, the 60 Minutes host informs viewers, social media “platforms could be forced to carry hate speech, and false medical information” — an outcome that should be pondered with abject terror by all decent, right-thinking people. For today’s progressives, the idea that someone, somewhere, is thinking indecent or offensive things is horrifying enough; the idea that those things are being shared in public, on the internet or elsewhere, is often too much to bear. (RELATED from Nate Hochman: Free Speech Is Dead in Europe)
But the true star of the segment is Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington and the “leader of a misinformation research group created ahead of the 2020 election.” Starbird is concerned: “She and her team feel intimidated by the conservatives’ campaign” against their efforts to rid the internet of falsehood. (And, according to “research across the board,” most falsehood just so happens to come from conservatives).
Starbird has two central gripes. The first, as noted above, is that conservative criticism of her guild is “chilling” their speech. The subjects of censorship aren’t supposed to object to the people censoring them, you see; they’re supposed to thank their country’s newly appointed commissars of wrongthink for their heroic, altruistic efforts to defend democracy.
The second grievance is that social media platforms aren’t heeding the wisdom of misinformation experts to the extent that said experts think they should. As detailed by 60 Minutes, teams of “misinformation academic researchers, who began working closely with the platforms after evidence of Russian interference online in the 2016 election,” have been dutifully flagging posts and users deemed guilty of misinformation for Big Tech companies to censor. But Starbird complains that platforms like Twitter — now X — only “responded to about 30 percent of the things that we sent them.”
X, formerly Twitter, only responded to 30% of the notes from researchers flagging misinformation in posts, says Kate Starbird, the leader of a misinformation research group. https://t.co/yCfxH64hAU pic.twitter.com/71SwTl4yUe
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) March 24, 2024
The statistic is greeted with shock by the episode’s host. It’s a number that should, in fact, engender outrage; but not for the reasons that Starbird and 60 Minutes would have you believe. The correct share of “misinformation” or “hate” that should be censored on social media is zero. (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Free Speech on Trial)
This is, of course, the inevitable consequence of empowering these people in the first place: If your prestige — not to mention your salary — is affixed to policing misinformation, you will always manage to find misinformation to police. Today’s “misinformation” industry is enormously powerful and has made a lot of people fabulously rich. But that wealth and power come at the expense of the freedoms our ancestors fought and died to preserve.
The stubborn, unavoidable truth — as much as it may pain Starbird and her counterparts — is that America belongs to the American people. It does not belong to soulless, schoolmarmish bureaucrats who censor and harangue X users for a living. Ours is a nation baptized in the spirit of the patriots of ’76 — lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. Freedom of speech is our national birthright. We have gotten on just fine for more than two centuries without “misinformation researchers,” and I dare say we’ll get on just fine for another two in quite the same fashion.