To Obama, Clinton, Walz, Harris: Who Decides Which Content Is True or Harmful? Is This a Campaign Issue?

There is a compelling reason that the Supreme Court has regularly ruled that falsehoods are protected speech. The Court openly recognizes that falsehoods can be harmful and may sometimes be quite harmful, but the Court also recognizes that efforts to determine which information is true and which is false are far more harmful to our democracy. The line between whether content can be labeled true or false, or whether it is simply viewpoint disagreement can be blurry and very much in the eye of the beholder. This is especially true of political content and policy debates. This is also the fundamental premise of the First Amendment, which protects free speech and free press.

Hillary Clinton said on CNN that Section 230 should be repealed and online platforms forced to moderate content or “we lost total control.” Barack Obama said in his speech to the Stanford Internet Observatory that Section 230 should be revised and replaced with a “smart” regulatory system that will slow the spread of “harmful” content. In his speech, Obama also lauded the peer-reviewed Anthony Fauci announcements on COVID vaccines, which turned out to be false, possibly due to Fauci’s NIH partial funding of the gain of function research at the Wuhan Labs where the COVID virus originated. Tim Walz has repeatedly said that misinformation and hate speech should be subjected to regulatory restrictions. Kamala Harris herself has a long history of calling for the government to gain new regulatory powers over the content moderation policies of online platforms. These leaders of the Democratic political party appear to believe that promoting government regulation of online platforms is a winning campaign issue.

Those who wish for regulatory power to ensure “politically correct” content moderation need to answer these fundamental questions: Should the political party who temporarily runs the government be allowed to act as arbiter of what’s true or false, such as effectiveness of COVID vaccines? Should that political party be able to censor opinions or viewpoints that disagree with their own narrative, such as over-estimated employment numbers, or censor information about the number of identified criminals allowed to cross the border from Mexico into the US? No wonder people no longer trust government information from mainstream media.

How will such regulatory power work if the governing political party in the White House switches every four or eight years and the rules dramatically change when a new political party wins? Today, private companies acting as news organizations have their own free speech rights to publish and label their own opinions as true and opposing opinions as false. This works as long as there are multiple competing news companies such as MSNBC, ABC, CNN, Politico, NYT, The Hill, WaPo, WSJ, FoxNews, NewsMax, and more recently, SubStack, The Free Press, and other sites. Opinion polls reveal that the public clearly understands that the traditional media companies exhibit political bias that determines which news stories to publish and drives their efforts to promote particular political viewpoints and candidates. […]

— Read More: redstate.com