I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:
As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.
In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.
“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.
Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.
San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.
All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.
Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.
Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.
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What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.
In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.
“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)
All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.
