NOTHING SAYS FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY LIKE A MINISTRY OF TRUTH HEADED BY A “REALITY CZAR.” Liberalism’s Ministry of Truth: Academics and the progressive press mull state media controls.
The academic establishment and progressive press want you to know two things: First, conservative claims of social-media bias are bogus. As Silicon Valley firms police content, their decisions are, miraculously, wholly uninfluenced by ideological preference.
Second, there is an urgent need for a much wider crackdown on political speech, perhaps led by the Biden Administration and requiring the creation of new government agencies. In other words, all that conservative suppression that’s, er, not happening? We need more of it.
New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights released a brief this week that is being amplified in the press entitled, “False Accusation: The Unfounded Claim that Social Media Companies Censor Conservatives.” It argues that “some conservatives believe their content is suppressed on partisan grounds when, in fact, it’s being singled out because it violates neutral platform rules.”
That is sometimes true, but the report doesn’t remotely prove that it always is. What about when Twitter and Facebook tried to suppress a New York Post story about Hunter Biden before the 2020 election? Even the report concedes that “the question of whether social media companies harbor an anti-conservative bias can’t be answered conclusively.”
That doesn’t stop the authors from unabashedly asserting that “the claim of anti-conservative animus is itself a form of disinformation.” It is perpetuated partly because “it appeals to the same conspiratorial mindset that has fostered the QAnon movement.”
Got it? Anyone who argues social-media moderation has a progressive slant is spreading disinformation, and possibly drawn to a bizarre cult. And remember that disinformation is against the rules—which, once again, are neutral.
Among the solutions to the non-problem of progressive bias is, naturally, government control. The NYU report recommends that “the federal government . . . press Facebook, Google, and Twitter to improve content policies” and “cooperate with these companies” on enforcement. This political suppression—er, neutral government-backed content policy—“could be enforced by a new Digital Regulatory Agency.”
Since we’re devising new entities for speech control, the New York Times offers another idea. Experts recommend “that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar,’” the beacon of progressive tolerance avers.
1984 wasn’t supposed to be an instruction manual, you know.