Too many efforts to weed out falsehoods have been marred by politics.
By Megan McArdleAugust 15, 2024 at 6:45 a.m. EDTWhen Donald Trump seized control of the Republican Party and the White House, the aghast Western establishment decided that his ascendancy had to be a mistake or a foreign trick. Enter the disinformation specialists: the journalists and academics who devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump.
Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy. (Your inauguration crowd was larger than Barack Obama’s? Um, sure, Mr. President.) But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false.
Think back to the years the American public spent on the verge of finding out that Trump was a Russian plant. Recall when it was “misinformation” to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a “Russian information operation” rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop. If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified “cheap fakes.”
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After each embarrassment, I thought, “Aha, this will teach the disinformation experts some humility.” And each time, they have reemerged, unchastened. Most recently, when Elon Musk announced that he would interview Donald Trump on an X live stream. European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton sent and then published (on X, no less) a huffily worded and, as it turned out, unapproved letter warning that X might face consequences in Europe unless Musk took “effective mitigation measures” to ensure against “the amplification of harmful content.”
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FollowThe episode sums up all the ways in which the “disinformation” specialty has gone wrong with Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical fact, the destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it attempts to shore up democracy by clamping down on political speech.
Not to mention the ineffectiveness of it all.
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For Breton’s interference made no difference; Musk quite rightly went ahead with his show, and what followed was more dangerous to the Trump campaign than it was to democracy.
Listeners who tuned in Monday night heard … well, actually, they heard nothing for the first 41 minutes, as the feed immediately crashed. Those who persevered were rewarded with a couple hours of soporifically familiar Trump........