On March 24, “60 Minutes” published a segment examining the relationship between government authorities and private social media companies regarding the moderation of potentially dangerous content on popular social media platforms. The episode also examined how disinformation spreads, what makes social media users vulnerable to false information and how users can take steps to combat it.
Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten critiques the episode and its host, Lesley Stahl, and argues that Stahl glosses over several talking points from the political Right. Weingarten also accuses media experts and scholars of contributing to disinformation themselves instead of fighting against it.
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, first in the places like The Liberal Washington Post and The New York Times, and then on “60 Minutes,” 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.