The pandemic, and the lies and incorrect information that have come from health officials and politicians, have done little to convince Democrats that censorship is a terrible idea. In fact, more Democrats support censorship now than in 2018.
This is according to Pew research, with the outfit’s latest poll on the issue being released on Wednesday. According to Pew, “roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) now say the government should take steps to restrict false information.” This is up from 39% in 2018, and it’s driven entirely by Democrats.
Democrats and Democratic-leaners have increased their support of government censorship from 40% to 65% and their support of tech companies censoring online content from 60% to 76%. Over the same time, Republican and GOP-leaning adults have soured on both, dropping from 37% support for government censorship and 48% support for Big Tech censorship to 28% and 37%, respectively.
Partisan divisions on the role of government and tech companies in addressing online misinformation have emerged since 2018. https://t.co/p7waw4EUDQ pic.twitter.com/wNwPTJBwJZ
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) August 18, 2021
It seems that the pandemic has increased Democratic support for censorship when it should have had the exact opposite effect. From Dr. Anthony Fauci’s repeated lies to the World Health Organization accepting the Chinese government’s information about the virus uncritically, health officials have shown that their declarations can’t be trusted when it comes to policing the internet.
And, of course, the big winner is the Chinese government, which caused this pandemic in the first place and used its clout at the WHO to suppress that information by dismissing the theory that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It wasn’t long ago that the lab leak theory was treated as a conspiracy theory by many public health experts and American media outlets, including most notably by the Washington Post.
This is something that some Republican politicians and pundits should keep in mind as they advocate for more government regulation of the tech policies on censorship. Democrats are increasingly eager to use both tech companies and the government to restrict the flow of information, even if it means censoring content based on inaccurate information.
