NY Post: Fact Checking Is Now Censorship

Free Speech

from the fact-checking-is-more-speech-you-goons dept

This was inevitable, ever since Donald Trump and the MAGA world freaked out when social media’s attempts to fact-check the President were deemed “censorship.” The reaction was both swift and entirely predictable. After all, how dare anyone question Dear Leader’s proclamations, even if they are demonstrably false? It wasn’t long before we started to see opinion pieces from MAGA folks breathlessly declaring that “fact-checking private speech is outrageous.” There were even politicians proposing laws to ban fact-checking.

In their view, the best way to protect free speech is apparently (?!?) to outlaw speech you don’t like.

This trend has only accelerated in recent years. Last year, Congress got in on the game, arguing that fact-checking is a form of censorship that needs to be investigated. Not to be outdone, incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr has made the same argument.

With last week’s announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that Meta was ending its fact-checking program, the anti-fact-checking rhetoric hasn’t slowed down one bit.

The NY Post now has an article with the hilarious headline: “The incredible, blind arrogance of the ‘fact-checking’ censors.”

So let’s be clear here: fact-checking is speech. Fact-checking is not censorship. It is protected by the First Amendment. Indeed, in olden times, when free speech supporters would talk about the “marketplace of ideas” and the “best response to bad speech is more speech,” they meant things like fact-checking. They meant that if someone were blathering on about utter nonsense, then a regime that enabled more speech could come along and fact-check folks.

There is no “censorship” involved in fact-checking. There is only a question of how others respond to the fact checks.

What the MAGA world is upset about is that, in some cases, private entities (who have every right to do this) would look at some fact checks and decide “maybe we shouldn’t promote utter fucking nonsense (or in some cases, potentially dangerous nonsense!) and spread it further”.

This is all still free speech. Some of it is speech about other speech and some of it is consequences from that speech.

But not one lick of it is “censorship.”

Yet this narrative has become so embedded in the MAGA world that the NY Post can write an entire article claiming that “fact-checking censors” exist without ever giving a single actual example of it happening.

There’s a really fun game that the Post Editorial Board is playing here, pretending that they’re just fine with fact-checking, unless it leads to “silencing.”

The real issue, that is, isn’t the checking, it’s the silencing.

But what “silencing” ever actually happened due to fact-checking? And when was it caused by the government (which would be necessary for it to violate the First Amendment)? The answer is none.

The piece whines about a few NY Post articles that had limited reach on Facebook, but that’s Facebook’s own free speech as well, not censorship. Also, it’s not at all clear that any of those issues had anything to do with “fact checking,” rather than a determination that the Post may have violated Facebook’s rules.

It does cite the supposed “censorship” of Trump’s NIH nominee Jay Bhattacharya for the Great Barrington Declaration:

Most notably, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and his colleagues from Harvard and Oxford got silenced for recommending against mass lockdowns and instead for a focus on protecting only the elderly and other highly vulnerable populations.

Except, as we called out just recently, even Bhattacharya’s colleague who helped put together the Great Barrington Declaration (and who hosted the website) has said flat out that the reason the FB page was taken down had nothing to do with Facebook, but rather anti-vaxxers who brigaded the reporting system, claiming the Great Barrington Declaration was actually a pro-vaccination plot.

The Post goes on with this fun set of words:

Yes, the internet is packed with lies, misrepresentations and half-truths: So is all human conversation.

The only practical answer to false speech is and always been true speech; it doesn’t stop the liars or protect all the suckers, but most people figure it out well enough.

Shutting down debate in the name of “countering disinformation” only serves the liars with power or prestige or at least the right connections.

First off, the standard saying is that the response to false speech should be “more speech” not necessarily “true speech” but more to the point, uh, how do you get that “true speech”? Isn’t it… fact checking? And, if, as the NY Post suggests, the problem here is false speech in the fact checks, then shouldn’t the response be more speech in response rather than silencing the fact checkers?

I mean, their own argument isn’t even internally consistent.

They’re literally saying that we need more “truthful speech” and less “silencing of speech” while cheering on the silencing of organizations who try to provide more truthful speech. It’s a blatant contradiction.

The piece concludes with this bit of nonsense:

PolitiFact and all the rest are welcome to keep going, as long as they’re just equal voices in the conversation; we certainly mean to go on calling out what we see as lies.

Check all the facts you want, as long as you don’t get to silence anyone else.

But… that’s always been the case. Fact checkers have never had the power to “silence anyone else.” They just did their fact checking, provided more speech, and let others decide how to deal with that speech. The Post’s argument is a strawman, railing against a problem that doesn’t actually exist.

In the end, the Post’s piece inadvertently makes the case for more fact-checking, not less. In a world awash with misinformation, we need credible voices providing additional context and correcting the record. That’s the very essence of the free marketplace of ideas.

The Post seems to want a “free marketplace of ideas” where only ideas they agree with are allowed to be expressed. That’s not how free speech works.

Trying to silence voices calling out misinformation in the name of free speech is the height of hypocrisy. The Post should take its own advice – if you disagree with a fact check, respond with more speech, not by celebrating the active silencing of fact checkers you disagree with.

Filed Under: fact checking, free speech, marketplace of ideas, more speech
Companies: facebook, meta, ny post