’60 Minutes’ tries but fails to tackle disinformation crisis

Just days after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the landmark Murthy v. Missouri free speech case, 60 minutes came out shilling for the Censorship Industrial Complex.

I want to provide a critique of that segment.

Let me preface it with this:

The biggest cheerleaders of the Censorship Industrial Complex are the most powerful and prolific purveyors of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information.”

Censoring their dissenters serves their politics and ultimately their business model – but it disserves our republic.

The censorship regime is engaged in a full-scale PR offensive because it’s been caught — and its only defense is to argue that its critics are evil, dangerous, and/or stupid, thereby justifying still more pervasive censorship.

The thing is, if you can’t or won’t compete on a truly free and open playing field, that shows you lack confidence in winning the War of Ideas on the merits.

Now to the segment: Lesley Stahl — a Russiagate superspreader — herself distorts the piece from the jump by omission by failing to discuss the Murthy v. Missouri case. That case asks whether government converted social media platforms into government speech police in violation of the First Amendment by coercing, cajoling, and colluding with them to censor views the feds disapproved of on core political speech.

Even when Stahl gets to the meat of the free speech argument, she doesn’t discuss the findings in the case underpinning the bulk of our knowledge regarding the Censorship Industrial Complex, and that ought to be read in conjunction with the House Weaponization Subcommittee’s additional critical reporting, barely acknowledged, to fully understand the comprehensive taxpayer-funded effort to eviscerate the First Amendment.

Stahl reports under the assumption that social media censorship squads are omniscient arbiters of truth.

“Misinformation academic researchers” is one way to characterize the folks who, often government-funded and/or ex-government-staffed, coordinated with federal officials and the platforms to develop, advocate for, and get social media companies to change terms of service aimed to restrict protected speech particularly around elections; surveilled en masse our speech for violations of their desired standards; flagged it to the platforms for suppression, and got the platforms to take such speech down at high batting averages.

The “misinformation researchers” weren’t passive observers. They were participants in a conspiracy to widen censorship rules, mass-surveil and flag “violations,” and get platforms to censor the content they disapproved of.

Stahl defends the censorship regime by arguing it only batted .333. That doesn’t really account for the size, scope, and scale of the censorship though – at the levels of millions of impacted posts give the impact of the content moderation rule changes, and application. And it’s a useful dodge.

The question is, had not there been a Censorship Industrial Complex coercing, cajoling, and colluding with the social media platforms, would our speech have been abridged? One First Amendment violation — let alone First Amendment violations numbering in the millions of posts and accounts — is one too many.

Stahl of course cherrypicks her examples to defend the Censorship Industrial Complex, rather than drawing on voluminous evidence showing platforms purged protected speech en masse at behest of government.

She makes very clear that the American people can’t be allowed to decide for themselves how to discern fact from fiction, right from wrong.

That paternalistic attitude pervades the entirety of the federal government, think-tank world, press, and as I observed, sadly, seemingly a majority of the Supreme Court.

Stahl also totally ignores Americans’ concerns with the integrity of the 2020 election — massive percentages are reasonably skeptical per polling of the first mass mail-in election in history; where they were mass-censored for having questions about it and the election policies many imposed by executive diktat in the run-up to it; in which there were all manner of statistical anomalies in outcomes; where vote-counting stopped in the middle of the night and results didn’t come in for days; and in which the related court cases were nearly uniformly dismissed on technical matters rather than the merits.

I got censored for pointing out those reasonable concerns under the censorship regime.

Turning to another matter in the segment, naturally, in classic form, 60 Minutes attacks X because it’s one corner of the digital public square the censorship doesn’t fully control — limited narrative control is a threat to their power and prerogative.

The segment should be understood as one part of a comprehensive push we’ve discussed before against Elon Musk — who had the gall to take a surveillance and censorship asset out of the hands of the NatSec/intel apparatus and re-convert it to something resembling a free speech platform.

Of course, Stahl concludes with the whopper that those critical of and scrutinizing the Censorship Industrial Complex are harming its participants — engaging in “harassment” — which of course is part of the underlying justification for the censorship, that there’s a nexus between speech the censorship regime doesn’t like and harm.

The fear that censors are being chilled though, as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan rightly notes in the segment, gets things completely backwards. They not only chilled but censored us and they got caught.

Like Justice Jackson in oral arguments, the Censorship Industrial Complex and its cheerleaders — a media protected by the First Amendment — turn the First Amendment on its head to defend the gross violations of it that the Censorship Industrial Complex has engaged in.

Censors are not victims. They are aggressors.

They have violated our rights.

They need to be held accountable.

And not a single taxpayer dollar should be used to silence ourselves.