https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-5-2023
"Yesterday the official account of the Republican National Committee tweeted
Independence Day greetings with a graphic of the Liberian flag, which has one
star, rather than that of the United States, which has fifty.
Even more troubling was the tweet from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) attributing
to founder Patrick Henry a false quotation saying that “this great nation was
founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Historian Seth Cotlar noted that the quotation
actually came from the April 1956 issue of a virulently antisemitic white
nationalist magazine,
The Virginian.
Also yesterday, Trump-appointed judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District
Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction
saying the First Amendment prevents the government from trying to stop the
spread of disinformation.
Doughty has become the judge Republican attorneys general seek out in their
challenges to the Biden administration, and in this case, that judge shopping
appears to have paid off. In a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of
Louisiana and Missouri, Doughty temporarily prevented employees of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Health and Human Services from
talking to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging,
pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or
reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
At stake is the belief among right-wing figures that government officials and
social media companies have teamed up to silence them, although in fact,
studies show that social media algorithms actually amplify right-wing political
content and that social media companies are reluctant to remove it out of fear
of backlash from extremists. Right-wing complaints stem from the removal of
disinformation during the pandemic, and of accounts linked to the violence of
January 6, 2021.
For years, the government has worked with social media companies to try to
address terrorism, images of child sexual abuse, and disinformation about the
pandemic and elections. But disinformation has become a key political tool for
the Republicans, and going into the 2024 election season, they have doubled
down on the disinformation that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent
and flooded the media with that lie.
Fittingly, as Philip Bump pointed out in the
Washington Post today, Doughty’s
injunction accepts right-wing allegations at face value, meaning he cites as a
mark against the administration something that, in fact, didn’t happen."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
