This week, President Joe Biden was asked whether he had any message for social media amidst a dramatic rise in the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases thanks to the delta variant. Biden immediately responded that companies like Facebook were responsible for murder: “They’re killing people — I mean, they’re really, look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they’re killing people.” Meanwhile, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that Facebook had not stopped misinformation thoroughly enough on its platform, calling misinformation a “serious threat to public health.”
None of this is accurate. Facebook is, first of all, a platform; it is not a publication with the same responsibilities of editorial oversight as a publisher. To treat Facebook as such would be to transform its purpose. Furthermore, on a purely factual level, it is simply untrue that Facebook users are disproportionately likely to avoid vaccination — in fact, according to Facebook’s statistics, vaccine acceptance in the United States among their users now stands between 80% and 85%, and 3.3 million Americans have used their vaccine finder tool to seek a location for a vaccine.
So, what’s driving the Biden administration’s finger pointing? Its broader agenda to utilize the massive market dominance of the social media platforms to squeeze alternative media sources out of existence. Before the rise of social media, most Americans who used the internet for news bookmarked a variety of pages and then visited them individually. Over time, as social media grew and as people began to access stories they liked through an algorithmically controlled newsfeed, Americans used social media for news. This centralized the mechanism for information dissemination.
Now, the left sees an opportunity: If all the news is accessed in one place, by restricting access in that place, the news monopoly once held by legacy media can be reestablished. All that will be required is labeling everyone they don’t like “misinformation.”
Kara Swisher of The New York Times, who has spent the past several years attempting to pressure Facebook into exactly such censorship, says as much openly. According to Swisher, Biden wasn’t wrong to say Facebook was killing people. Actually, writes Swisher, the problem is that Biden restricted his analysis to the coronavirus: “Attempting to stop falsehoods by claiming to offer good information is like using a single sandbag to hold back an impossibly fetid ocean. It’s like that when it comes to a range of once-anodyne, now divisive issues, from election integrity to critical race theory to whatever.”
“Whatever.” Literally any topic on which Swisher disagrees is now dangerous misinformation that must be curbed. This week, NPR went so far as to pressure Facebook to suppress traffic to my website, Daily Wire, on precisely this basis. NPR admitted that we don’t print falsehoods, that we don’t spread conspiracy theories and that we are honest and open about our conservative perspective. So, why should we be suppressed? Because, according to NPR, we cover “specific stories that bolster the conservative agenda.” And, quoting an expert, NPR reports, “If you’ve stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation.”
There it is: even truth can be misinformation. And misinformation kills.
The authoritarianism of the left is in full swing. Americans must spot it and fight it before it destroys our ability to see anything other than that which the left wants us to see.
Ben Shapiro, 37, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “How To Destroy America In Three Easy Steps,” “The Right Side Of History,” and “Bullies.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
The Biden administration appears to have in mind the creation of what was once known as state run newspapers. Today it has become a whole panoply of media each with its its own peculiarities. The idea is to bring them into one fold and have them be the disseminators and the censors all at the same time. Truth will be confined to the official government line!
ZIGGY HEILL.. You vill get your info from DA state approved news.. YA! You vill not hear anything da state does not VANT you to.. COMPLY OR ELSE!
Political sanity survival rule number one, Whenever a Democrat accuses someone of something out of the blue, you just know they themselves have been doing it all along and smell an exposure about to happen so like rattlesnakes they try to bite first in lies to divert THE PEOPLE from the truth. Rumor has it in east Texas the rattlers are evolving and no longer rattle before biting. Accusing others is the democrat equivalent of the rattle, but they too are evolving and might just bite you out of the blue. If the media is COVID killing people like Joe accuses, they have a long way to go just to catch up to Cuomo whose rattlesnake lusting after women and rattle brain media prattling led many trusting American sheep to the Politicized Pandemic socialist slaughter. Their latest rattling is to cover their own guilt in the January 6th so called investigation, aimed at striking at and defaming the innocent to divert attention from the socialist guilty. Apparently their own shock troops are running out of rocks to hide under.
I agree. THE LEFT WAS literaly SHOVELING truck loads of misinformation, ALL THROUGH OUT trumps tenure as potus, WITH THE AID and full support of big tech and big media..
YET IT NOW is supposed to be a ‘dire threat’?
GIve me a ******* break.
Biden, “calling misinformation a “serious threat to public health.”
Hummm….. Wouldn’t the Democrat Party’s political propaganda misinformation be a “serious threat to public health.”??
Wouldn’t the Democrat Party’s CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS misinformation be a “serious threat to public health.”??
To Democrats, Truth, Facts, Reality and History are all irrelevant,
If the Democrats do not WANT to believe them.
Democrats will just make up their own Truth, Facts, Reality or History to fit what they WANT to believe or fits into the Con or Deception that they are running at the time.
Well, Joe, here is some missed information that you (purposely, no doubt) didn’t mention:
The lockdowns killed people—teenage suicide went up. And, while each incident may not have resulted in death, domestic violence also went up. In New York, Mr Cuomo placed COVID patients in nursing homes—do we even yet know the number of deaths as a result of that? There have been deaths as a result of people getting the vaccine—and there are sources suggesting that the true number is being suppressed. Your border crisis from which you are sending untested and unvaccinated illegals all over the country is certainly upping the number of cases—and probably deaths.
The next time you stand in front of the camera with your BS, why don’t you tell it like it is and stop spreading misinformation.
Stop? I DOUBT a single dem can EVER STOP spreading bull.. LYING IS inherent in their DNA!