Let’s keep Elon Musk and speech free

Funnily enough, Reich has been heavily insinuating for years that there was some nefarious connection between former President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that secured Trump’s presidency. That connection, remember, was ultimately proven to be largely exaggerated, if not completely false. One wonders whether Reich would hold himself to his standard for “spreading lies,” which would require his arrest. We won’t hold our breath.

To be fair, Reich is not alone. Many prominent leaders have called for more internet censorship to “fight disinformation.” In 2022, the Biden administration briefly tried to establish a “Disinformation Management Council” (i.e. 1984-Ministry of Truth style) through the Department of Homeland Security to combat online disinformation. The administration ultimately backed off that effort after significant public backlash.

However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that Biden administration officials have continually pressured the company during the pandemic to “censor certain content related to COVID-19, including humor and satire,” despite DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ emphatic denials in congressional testimony in 2022.

To a large extent, this type of discourse and behaviour has been normalised by the results of the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the UK.

Many in every country’s political classes have seen these results as destabilizing for their democracies. The argument goes that we now need government bureaucrats monitoring the internet, choosing what opinions should and should not be allowed, because otherwise Russia will elect our president.

But is it true? Was the 2016 election really decided by a group of Russian troll farms somewhere in Moscow? That seems unlikely. Last year, researchers published a paper in Nature communication examining the voting attitudes and behavior of 1,500 American voters and their exposure to Russian-created content on Platform X (then Twitter).

The researchers ultimately concluded that just 1% of the users studied accounted for 70% of the total exposure to Russian accounts, and that exposure was heavily concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans and were therefore likely to vote for then-candidate Trump. Finally, this information was overshadowed by domestic news sources, ultimately leading the authors to conclude that there was “no evidence of a significant association between exposure to Russian foreign influence campaigns and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Beyond the empirical question of whether foreign “disinformation” definitively influences voters in any meaningful way, it’s worth considering who exactly would be the altruistic arbiter of what we’re allowed to see and say online. Would we be forced to hand over that responsibility to some supposedly impartial group of “fact checkers”?

In the 2023 report Free Washington Beaconreporters found that nearly 100 percent of political contributions from self-proclaimed “fact checkers” went to Democrats. So, ironically, the same people we informally trust to separate fact from fiction are themselves some of the most partisan people in the country.

Unfortunately, Reich and others who have advocated for centralized Internet censorship or the arrest of those who try to resist it have refused to show their work as they make extraordinary claims about the impact of so-called “disinformation.”

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If the past five years have taught us anything — whether it was the Hunter Biden laptop story that intelligence officials wrongly labeled as foreign disinformation or government officials censoring the media during the pandemic TRUE stories about vaccine side effects to avoid “vaccine hesitancy” — the government is unable to wisely manage the information it provides to the public.

Americans must stand up to these types of measures and call them what they are: a threat to our civil liberties and our way of life.

Joshua Rauh is a professor of finance at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2019 to 2020. Gregory Kearney is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.