Government behind social media censorship?

 NY Post:

White House press secretary Jen Psaki casually confirmed on Thursday what skeptical conservatives and some civil libertarians have been suspecting for years: that the world’s biggest speech platforms take direction from the government in choosing what content to suppress, amplify, or remove.

“We are in regular touch with social media platforms” about COVID-19 related misinformation, including misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine,” Psaki said. “We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

On Friday, she suggested social media companies should be working together to ban misinformation super spreaders from multiple platforms.

This is a startling admission. It was backed up by a 22-page “health misinformation” guidance issued by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, in which he urged the social media platforms to “impose clear consequences for accounts that repeatedly violate platform policies.”

The White House is motivated by a real problem: overtly wrong information about the COVID-19 vaccine. Some of the posts are factually inaccurate, and some of it misrepresents the fact that vaccines, in general, do work.
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But the administration’s solution — to control what can be said and who can use the world’s biggest speech platforms — is deeply unsettling and, frankly, undemocratic.

“This is the union of corporate and state power,” wrote reporter Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, one of the classic hallmarks of fascism.”

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.

In their haste to bend to the controlling narrative, social media platforms have banned accounts for asking questions, and discussing errant data points or emerging hypotheses around new treatments. 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.
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Banning speech is totalitarian.  I think the left has become unhinged by the failure of fact-checkers who in some cases have also been spreading misinformation.  The facts are sometimes in dispute.  Opinions may vary.  In a free society having a robust debate can lead to better responses to issues.  Instead of assuming people you disagree with are attempting to mislead, it makes more sense to say the matter is in dispute.

See, also:

WaPo Runs to the Defense of Jen Psaki, but Accidentally Reveals Another Problem

And: 

Nothing Is Joe Biden's Fault