The Government’s License to Lie

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, July 23, 2021

 

Last week, President Biden said Facebook was “killing people” because it hosted misinformation. He later backed off the comment, but the White House has been consistently putting pressure on social networks to deplatform people who, they believe, are getting in the way of their vaccination goals.

 

Yesterday, Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ben Ray Luján introduced the Health Misinformation Act, which would open Facebook and other social-media networks to lawsuits if they host or use their algorithms to boost and spread health misinformation. “The coronavirus pandemic has shown us how lethal misinformation can be, and it is our responsibility to take action,” said Senator Klobuchar.

 

So, I have a question. Would this apply to people who used all major platforms to tell us that COVID wasn’t as serious as the flu, and that masks don’t work? That is, would Facebook be obliged to delete Dr. Anthony Fauci?

 

Would the social networks be obliged to throttle or perma-ban institutions that spent a year promoting literature that misstated how COVID-19 was transmitted between people? So the Centers for Disease Control would be banned, too. That organization refused to update its guidance about surface transmission for a year.

 

We know the answer. Of course they won’t.

 

Censorship laws by the government aimed at “misinformation” about contentious events don’t actually prevent the spread of misinformation; they merely license the spread of official information, whether that be the truth, lies, or just nonsense.

 

We’ve already seen how compromised such a process can be. Groups that received grants to study gain of function in coronaviruses from NIH and NIAID organized public statements and letter-writing campaigns to important journals, demeaning the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, causing Facebook to censor discussion of it. This act of censorship very well could have slowed down the ability of dissenters to communicate with each other and form the best scientific case to challenge the corrupted promotion of the natural-emergence theory. Although it is just speculation, it is possible that by slowing down such communication, they may have made it more difficult or impossible to actually track down the origin of the virus.

 

Facebook has no competence to judge political or scientific statements as true or false. It cannot develop this competence just by hiring more journalists. All Facebook can do is try to determine what is the consensus among powerful and organized people.

 

This demonstrates one of the most important dangers of censorship in the social-media age. When there is a platform that can slow down or monitor the communications of more than 1 billion people, then there is an urgent temptation to manufacture a phony consensus where none exists. Suddenly a consensus itself is more powerful and more useful to have; it becomes an important mechanism in the machine of social control.

 

But used this way, it will create nothing but cynicism. In practical terms, a regime of instant, government-influenced social-media censorship would mean that any scientist who correctly pointed out that our public-health bodies were misleading the public about masks, or surface transmission, or outdoor transmission would be liable to be banned. But there would be no punishment for the CDC when the official line changes. Worse still, precisely because the CDC’s recommendations would be attached to major forms of censorship across the entire country, CDC itself would become more aware of the enhanced reputational costs of changing its views as the scientific consensus changes.

 

That means censorship wouldn’t just be a potential brake on the development of knowledge and new discoveries; it could provide huge incentives to maintain a false party line after it has been established.

 

Facebook is not competent to do this work well or wisely. The government, particularly the executive branch, is even less well-equipped to give carrot-and-stick inducements to be our social censor.

 

Ultimately, a campaign of censorship would only fool public officials about the level of intellectual dissent in the country at large. The White House and Senate need to stop worrying about what people are sharing on Facebook and instead focus on how governmental authorities and institutions can begin to conduct themselves in a way that wins back wide public trust in their pronouncements. Trying to ban their critics only undermines a government’s credibility.