<
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/19/the-disinformation-campaign-that-has-effectively-destroyed-the-ability-to-combat-disinformation/>
"We already covered the oral arguments in the
Murthy v. Missouri case earlier
this week, showing that the Supreme Court appears to be quite skeptical of the
arguments by the states regarding the federal government “jawboning” to
convince social media to take down certain content. For months now, we’ve been
pointing out that the factual record in that case is a mess, driven by
conspiracy theorists pushing nonsense. Unfortunately, a few Judges both
believed the nonsense and then when they couldn’t rely on it to make their
point had to misquote people, quote things out of context, or entirely
fabricate parts of quotes in their rulings.
What became abundantly clear in the oral arguments Monday was that multiple
justices, including Trump-appointed ones, found the factual record to be
suspect and problematic. The crux of the case was effectively (1) the White
House made a few public statements in which they were angry about how social
media moderated, (2) the companies regularly met with government agencies about
a variety of things (cybersecurity, COVID misinformation, election integrity),
and (3) therefore we can assume that any content moderation that occurred on
the platforms was at the government’s command.
It was a weak argument, and multiple justices pointed out how tenuous the
connection was between the government and the actions of the companies.
Over the last few months, we’ve pointed out a few times how this and some
related campaigns have been weaponized by proxies to try to stifle any effort
to respond to (not block!) disinformation campaigns and election interference,
including the misleading publication of “The Twitter Files,” by pretend
journalists who didn’t understand what they were looking at (nor bother to
speak to any experts who might have explained it to them).
The media is slowly, but surely, putting the underlying story together of how a
bunch of nonsense peddlers concocted a full blown conspiracy theory full of
disinformation, all targeted at destroying the ability of disinformation
researchers to counter disinformation by attacking them as censors."
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
