“Laura Ingraham on a July 7 show played a clip of White House press secretary Jen Psaki outlining Mr. Biden’s plans for the door-to-door campaign. ‘Going door-to-door?’ Ms. Ingraham scoffed. ‘This is creepy stuff.’… [Tucker Carlson stated] ‘I honestly think it’s the greatest scandal in my lifetime by far. I thought the Iraq War was — it seems much bigger than that’…

“Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Twitter made it sound like a Soviet plot. ‘When the Biden admin calls for ‘targeted’ ‘door-to-door outreach’ to get people vaccinated, it comes across as a g-man saying: ‘We know you’re unvaccinated, let’s talk, comrade.’…

“[Meanwhile] The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Tuesday that new cases in St. Louis County had skyrocketed 63 percent in the past two weeks. Missouri is among several states with vaccination rates well below the national average. Across the country, those getting sick and being hospitalized are almost exclusively the unvaccinated. For Fox News and conservative politicians to be frightening people about vaccines with words like ‘creepy,’ ‘scandal’ and the conspiratorial ‘let’s talk, comrade’ is not mere pandering. It can be fatal.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post

Regarding social media, “[Psaki] made crystal clear that the White House is not demanding [the dozen] people be silenced; that is the sole purview of private companies, she correctly stated… All the administration and responsible public figures can do is warn the public about the lies they are fed, and try to shame media companies and right-wing politicians into curbing their deadly disinformation campaigns. Unfortunately, media companies’ owners, executives, employees, board members and stockholders will likely refuse to stop promoting such content.”
Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post

“[You could] blame individuals themselves for believing in lies and not doing due diligence and checking their facts. After all, deciding to forgo a vaccine is a personal choice, even if it is an unfortunate one. But the ability to resist social media juggernauts pales in comparison to the tremendous power of these platforms to amplify bad information. Attempting to stop falsehoods by claiming to offer good information is like using a single sandbag to hold back an impossibly fetid ocean…

“Is Facebook killing people, then, since it provided the invention that allows all this to happen? Not exactly. But it reminds me of the famous quotation that ‘a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,’ which is — ironically — misattributed to Mark Twain (it is considered to actually be a version of a line first written by Jonathan Swift). Wherever it came from it remains even more prescient, except now lies travel much faster— thanks to Facebook.”
Kara Swisher, New York Times

Critics of the administration argue that “In 2018, when these entities engineered a simultaneous cross-platform purge of Alex Jones, there was an avalanche of media apologia for this hitherto unprecedented act of censorship. Jones had caused unique harm, the journalists cried… Now, just around three years later, we receive a declaration from a spokesperson for the President that the Federal Government is seeking to coerce, mandate, or otherwise bring about routinized cross-platform purges…

“Please don’t even try to argue that Psaki’s dictum is somehow going to be limited to ‘misinformation’ surrounding vaccines, and that’s fine because of the unique danger of vaccine-related misinformation in light of the Delta variant blah blah blah…

“There’s always going to be a situation deemed sufficiently ‘dangerous’ by those in power to rationalize encroachments on free expression. Always some ‘emergency’ — Islamic terrorism, white nationalist terrorism, a communicable disease, severe weather events, racist Academy Awards ceremonies, whatever. It will never end. Because those in power are extremely adept at finding rationalizations for the power they seek to exercise.”
Michael Tracey, Substack

Filmmaker Matt Orfalea notes, “People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: ‘It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.’ Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, ‘Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.’ What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies… The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model.”
Matt Taibbi, Substack