Former Labor Secretary turned TikTok influencer Robert Reich just last week penned an op-ed in the Guardian suggesting that “regulators around the world should threaten [Elon] Musk with arrest” if he refuses to “stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Funnily enough, Reich has for years strongly insinuated the existence of some nefarious link between former President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that won Trump the presidency. This link, mind you, ultimately proved to be largely exaggerated, if not completely false. One wonders whether Reich would hold himself to his standard for “disseminating lies,” necessitating his own arrest. We won’t hold our breath.
To be fair, Reich is not alone. Many prominent leaders have called for greater censorship online to “combat misinformation.” In 2022, the Biden administration briefly attempted to establish a “Disinformation Governance Board” (i.e., a 1984-style Ministry of Truth) through the Department of Homeland Security to combat misinformation online. The administration ultimately pulled that effort after significant public backlash.
But recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) that during the pandemic, Biden administration officials constantly pressured the company to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” despite emphatic denials by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in testimony before Congress in 2022.
Much of the normalization of this sort of discourse and behavior came as a consequence of the 2016 election results both in the United States presidential election and in the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum.
These results were deemed by many within each country’s respective political classes as having destabilizing effects on democracies. The argument goes that we now need government bureaucrats monitoring the internet, choosing what opinions should be allowed and disallowed because otherwise, Russia will elect our president.
But is this true? Was the 2016 election really decided by a bunch of Russian troll farms somewhere in Moscow? Seems unlikely. Last year researchers published a paper in Nature Communications studying 1,500 U.S. voters’ attitudes and voting behavior and their exposure to Russian-produced content on X (then Twitter).
The researchers ultimately concluded that just 1% of users studied accounted for 70% of the total exposure to Russian accounts, and the exposure was heavily concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans and thus were already likely to vote for then-candidate Trump. Finally, this information was far overshadowed by domestic sources of information, which ultimately led the authors to conclude that there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaigns and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Beyond the empirical question about whether foreign “misinformation” definitively affects voters in any meaningful way, it’s worth pondering who exactly would be the altruistic arbiters of what we are allowed to see and say online. Would we be forced to outsource this responsibility to some supposedly unbiased group of “fact checkers”?
In a 2023 report from the Washington Free Beacon, reporters discovered that nearly 100% of political contributions from self-styled “fact-checkers” went to Democrats. So, as it ironically turns out, the very people who we are informally trusting to discern fact from fiction are themselves some of the most biased people in the country.
Unfortunately, Reich and others who have advocated for centralized censoring of the internet, or arresting those who attempt to resist it, have refused to show their work when making extraordinary claims about the impact of so-called “misinformation.”
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If the last five years have taught us anything — whether it was through the Hunter Biden laptop story being falsely deemed foreign disinformation by intelligence officials or during the pandemic when government officials censored true stories of vaccine injuries to avoid “vaccine hesitancy” — it is that the government is not capable of judiciously handling information for the public.
Americans must resist these types of measures and call them out for what they are: threats to our civil liberties and our very way of life.
Joshua Rauh is a professor of finance at Stanford University, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and served at the president's Council of Economic Advisers from 2019 to 2020. Gregory Kearney is a researcher at the Hoover Institution.
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