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“President Joe Biden said [last] Friday that social media companies are ‘killing people’ by failing to police misinformation on their platforms about COVID-19 vaccines.” AP News
Last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated, “we are in regular touch with these social media platforms… We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” She also noted that “there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook — ones that Facebook owns.” White House
The right criticizes White House efforts to encourage social media companies to remove misinformation, arguing that it is inappropriate for the government to encourage censorship.
“Friday, the president accused Facebook of ‘killing people’ and demanded it silence those opposed to or questioning the coronavirus vaccines. Coming from the president, this is a breathtaking accusation and demand. It far exceeds anything Donald Trump ever said or did. Trump wrongly called some media ‘the enemy of the people,’ but never accused them of actually ‘killing people.’…
“Notably, Facebook’s defense is that it is silencing as many people as it can find who question or criticize the vaccines. That’s hardly a defense of free speech.”
Michael Goodwin, New York Post
“There is a dystopian element to telling social media platforms to control ‘misinformation’ when the very definition of that keeps changing. In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook began banning anti-lockdown protest content. Not because it violated any laws, but because such gatherings might run afoul of local guidance and public health recommendations. YouTube began censoring any content that disagreed with the error-prone World Health Organization, removing videos from emergency room doctors and podcasts from Stanford University neuroradiologists alike…
“Just this month, professor Satoshi Omura, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on a drug called ivermectin, was censored on YouTube for discussing how it might help treat COVID-19 patients… Famously, you weren’t allowed to discuss if the virus came from the Wuhan Lab. In other words, the platforms have banned debate and inquiry itself.”
Rachel Bovard, New York Post
Regarding Psaki’s comment that if you’re banned from one social media platform you should also be banned from others, “I can’t tell if she’s suggesting a new regulation that would require platforms to enforce a ban imposed by another, which would be grossly unconstitutional, or if she’s just thinking out loud in a wouldn’t-it-be-nice kind of way, but the more Big Tech platforms collude to suppress a particular person’s speech, the stronger the case for using regulation to rein in their power becomes…
“The core argument against deeming any one platform a monopoly is that there are others you can use if you’re banned by any one. What happens if being banned by one means being banned by all?”
Allahpundit, Hot Air
“Government flagging alleged ‘disinformation’ — which can turn out to be perfectly reasonable theorizing, by the way — evokes McCarthyism or Wilson’s The Committee on Public Information… politicians should never be in a position to dictate what disinformation is or isn’t. If we want to believe that a cabal of satanic pedophiles is using chemtrails and nanotechnology in our vaccines to control the world, that’s our business. The state doesn’t get to dictate the veracity of our statements. Most of our recent presidents couldn’t string two truthful sentences together. We flag them, not the other way around.”
David Harsanyi, National Review
“Even if you think the dirty dozen and identified networks are a bit loony, no one should support Big Tech or the government censoring them. Wouldn’t you rather see the content your loved one is reading so you can give them an alternative point of view?…
“When you ban ideas that oppose the government narrative, it makes people more curious, not less. Call it a modified version of the Streisand effect. If the Biden administration were interested in relieving COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, they would put forth convincing arguments, data, and information to make people feel as if they could give informed consent. More listening and less vilifying would be a much better strategy.”
Stacey Lennox, PJ Media
“There's one national trusted voice who could do more than any other to reach those reluctant to get vaccinated: former President Donald Trump. Whatever his detractors think about him, millions of Americans believe he is the only political leader who truly represents them. And through Operation Warp Speed, he did play a crucial role in developing the vaccines at a record pace. Trump has encouraged people to get vaccinated before. But never as part of a sustained public campaign…
“If President Biden believes what he says about promoting national unity and turning the page on a divisive predecessor's inflammatory approach to politics, he will enlist that predecessor in the national COVID-19 initiative.”
W. James Antle III, The Week
The left is deeply concerned about the spread of misinformation, particularly from right-wing media, and divided about the White House's comments.
The left is deeply concerned about the spread of misinformation, particularly from right-wing media, and divided about the White House's comments.
“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
A libertarian's take
“When a user shares something, it doesn’t necessarily mean he believes it, [researchers] note. It seems that he’s mostly trying to impress his followers and entertain them. Social media is, of course, optimized for engagement, not truth, and the impulse to be the first to tweet or retweet an item prevents many users from judging its accuracy beforehand. These findings counter the common view that we’ve entered a ‘post-truth’ vortex in which people don’t care whether something is true or not. Most people do care, but tweet garbage anyway…
“Instead of jawboning Facebook or accusing it of murder, the White House could consider asking, not commanding, social media companies to prod users into thinking before posting. Whatever strategies the White House ends up promoting to marginalize fake news—banning, ‘prebunking,’ suspending, blocking, labeling, nudging, tweaking the algorithms—we’ve got to accept that there will always be a contingent who delight in writing, reading and sharing blatantly untrue material… The best guideline would seem to be this: If you stumble across an incendiary tweet that could easily be translated into a Day-Glo circus poster, leave it alone.”
Jack Shafer, Politico
Seneca Park Zoo welcomes two red panda cubs.
Rochester First
