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How does one justify squelching free speech and censoring opponents?
By justifying it by “science.”
The authors of a new study published by the scientific journal Nature submit that “differential sharing of misinformation by people identifying with different political groups could lead to political asymmetries in enforcement, even by unbiased policies.”
In plain English: Conservatives face more punishment by social media companies because they share more misinformation.
How did they reach such a conclusion?
By grading a number of news outlets and then knocking conservative users for sharing links to sites the researchers themselves deemed were “low quality.”
The takeaway: Those aforementioned sanctions against right-wing speech are justified.
Fact-check scheme
There are some glaringly obvious issues with this construction.
According to the study, outlets favored by conservatives — like The Post and Fox News — are of a lesser quality than The New York Times and CBS News, because they are less prone to being tsk-tsked by biased fact-checkers who themselves often turn out to be wrong.
It’s a rigged game built on circular logic, not objective measures.
Liberals affirming other liberals’ reporting isn’t confirmation of that reporting’s validity, it’s proof that this study is tainted by confirmation bias.
Contrary to the authors’ assumption, neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on good or bad sources.
But let’s say you give the Times the nod over The Post, too (shame on you, by the way).
How does the study account for the Gray Lady accusing Sen. Tom Cotton of repeating a “fringe theory of coronavirus origins” when he posited that COVID-19 might have escaped from the coronavirus research facility in Wuhan?
Or for the widely panned, ahistorical 1619 Project?
Or for the Trump assassination fantasy it published in its book review section?
Or any number of other either mistakes or intentional obfuscations it has made in just the last few years?
Its authors eschew evaluations of actual misinformation being spread in order to roundly dismiss right-of-center media as a whole.
The problem is that this study, written by researchers at liberal universities, will be used to justify the censoring of conservative media by social media giants.
Google will prevent ads from appearing on the news sites, Facebook will limit the sharing of articles from those publications, then say “well, researchers from Yale and Cornell said it was bad.”
Institutional neglect
This particular attempt at using “science” to the advantage of Democrats is unfortunately part of a larger trend.
A functioning democracy needs institutions it can trust to provide accurate information and use the scientific method correctly for the benefit of the entire public, rather than making a mockery of it to benefit a political party.
Yet all across American society, those institutions are betraying the public trust for nakedly political reasons.
CNN Business has a preposterous “Fear & Greed Index” that it uses to undermine faith in the free enterprise system.
Anthony Fauci sounded more like Emperor Palpatine of “Star Wars” than an earthly public servant when he pronounced that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”
Survey the work of any one of the many professional fact-checkers littering the Internet and you’ll find that Democrats’ false claims are sanitized as “mostly true,” while Republicans’ accurate ones are undermined by their supposed need for “context.”
Strip all of these pseudo-sophisticated attempts down to what they are and you’ll find that they’re not good-faith efforts at discerning the truth, but arguments from authority meant to elide the substantive issues Americans are eager to debate.
Like so much of social media moderation, they’re glorified methods of telling dissenters to elite opinion to “Shut up!”
Fighting back
The good news is that people are fighting back.
The left-wing establishment may think they can falsify their way to victory with poorly designed studies, ill-conceived quantifications and an endless sea of misbegotten fact-checks, but the American people see through it all.
Between COVID, the whitewash of Joe Biden’s failed presidency, and its attempt to cover first for his decline, and then for Kamala Harris’ superficial candidacy, they’ve burned their credibility to ashes.
So they can invent as many fake statistical measures as they want; the left is still stuck in an echo chamber every bit as cloistered as the one they accuse conservatives of having fallen into.
The Nature study, as it turns out, is a useful reminder — if not the one authors intended it to be.
Progressives’ professed fidelity to the truth is just another smokescreen they use to try to accrue power.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.