Facebook, as is its right, has decided not to publish the junk conspiracy theories of Alex Jones. Much like a baker, photographer, or florist who won’t promulgate messages that they reject, Facebook is refusing to facilitate the peddling of Jones’s dreck.
Some worry, not illegitimately, that this decision is at the top of a slippery slope. Whose content will Facebook ban next? Maybe an opponent of gay marriage. Maybe a news site that doesn’t use pronouns approved by social justice warriors for the transgendered. But so long as Facebook owns and operates its platform, any cries of “censorship” are misguided. Censorship involves government abridgment of free speech. It isn’t about private citizens or corporations editing out BS.
Censorship nevertheless lurks in the halls of Congress. There are plenty of Democrats, for example, who want to tweak the First Amendment to limit election money severely. Democratic senators are now also making it clear that they want to regulate Facebook. One regulation that is being discussed is for software to police hate speech. In other words, the senators want to censor speech by statute, via the bureaucracy, and executed by corporate intermediaries.
It was jaw-dropping to read Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeting on Tuesday that “Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to tear our nation apart.” He doesn’t want Facebook to think it can stop there. “These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our democracy depends on it.”
The survival of American democracy depends on the censoring of opinions that Murphy decides are lies or else hateful, perhaps both.
It can be assumed that Sen. Murphy wouldn’t wish to ban all conservative outlets, just those who push “hate” and who “lie.” But much of the Left believes Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality counts as “hate,” so the senator’s proposed criteria hardly inspire confidence.
It is, of course, true that InfoWars spreads lies — its own legal counsel argues that no one is expected to believe it — and it does harm. But what other sites would Murphy want to target. What’s the shape and size of the “iceberg” Murphy refers to? What does Murphy consider a lie?
Let’s look at how he uses that word.
“Of all the Trump lies last night,” Murphy wrote the morning after a GOP presidential debate, “[his] claim that assault weapons ban didn’t work is maybe the biggest. Data is clear – it saved lives.”
To the contrary, many respected experts writing, for example, in the New York Times, accept as true what Murphy considers a “lie,” and that “even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.”
Is the Times part of the iceberg of which InfoWars is the tip? Should Facebook ban their “lies”?
In 2017, Murphy groused, “Trump rehashed the ‘U.S. pullout from Iraq created ISIS’ lie tonight.” Again, the senator’s rhetorical reflex is to brand a debatable proposition with which he disagrees as a lie? An NPR fact check said assessing the claim was “not simple,” and granted “So, yes, the withdrawal of U.S. troops helped ISIS.” NPR is next!
Branding opinions as lies has become a standard political modus operandi. “Bush lied — people died,” was so much more effective than shouting “Bush made a terrible mistake.”
It turns out that when Murphy says “lies,” he really means opinions he wants stamped out. If Facebook won’t do it, the threat is that the Senate will have to act. With that threat of government intervention, this is censorship with a middleman.
Disinformation and lies are a real problem. They were part of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election. These extensive Russian efforts appear to have had no zero impact on the vote. But Murphy doesn’t have faith in voters to discern truth from lies peddled by two dudes in Moldova. He also believes Facebook needs his guidance on how to play the responsible middleman.
Murphy, as is typical of a progressive, wants to create a country in which government protects us all from ourselves. He thinks that we don’t need virtue to keep this Republic (as its founders insisted explicitly) so long as we have the right rules, and we keep people from hearing the wrong messages.
Murphy’s idea is foul and un-American. Maybe we should take down his tweets. If we don’t, we might end up with Murphy’s law.
