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How does one justify squelching free speech and censoring opponents?
By justifying it by βscience.β
The authors of a new studyΒ publishedΒ by the scientific journal Nature submit that βdifferential sharing of misinformation by people identifying with different political groups could lead to political asymmetries in enforcement, even by unbiased policies.β
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 βlow quality.β
The takeaway: Those aforementioned sanctions against right-wing speech are justified.
Fact-check scheme
There are someΒ glaringly obviousΒ issues with this construction.
According to the study, outlets favored by conservatives β like The Post and Fox News β 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.
Itβs a rigged game built on circular logic, not objective measures.
Liberals affirming other liberalsβ reporting isnβt confirmation of that reportingβs validity, itβs proof thatΒ thisΒ study is tainted by confirmation bias.
Contrary to the authorsβ assumption, neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on good or bad sources.
But letβs 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 LadyΒ accusingΒ Sen. Tom Cotton of repeating a βfringe theory of coronavirus originsβ when he posited that COVID-19 might have escaped from the coronavirus research facility in Wuhan?
Or for the widely panned,Β ahistoricalΒ 1619 Project?
Or for theΒ Trump assassination fantasyΒ 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 βwell, researchers from Yale and Cornell said it was bad.β
Institutional neglect
This particular attempt at using βscienceβ 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 preposterousΒ βFear & Greed IndexβΒ that it uses to undermine faith in the free enterprise system.
Anthony Fauci sounded more like Emperor Palpatine of βStar Warsβ than an earthly public servant when heΒ pronouncedΒ that βattacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.β
Survey the work of any one of the many professional fact-checkers littering the Internet and youβll find that Democratsβ false claims are sanitized as βmostly true,β while Republicansβ accurate ones are undermined by their supposed need for βcontext.β
Strip all of these pseudo-sophisticated attempts down to what they are and youβll find that theyβre 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, theyβre glorified methods of telling dissenters to elite opinion to βShut up!β
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 Bidenβs failed presidency, and its attempt to cover first for his decline, and then for Kamala Harrisβ superficial candidacy, theyβve 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 β if not the one authors intended it to be.
Progressivesβ professed fidelity to the truth is just another smokescreen they use to try to accrue power.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.