The Ministry of Truth Will Outsource Censorship, Just as Happened With COVID

The awful head of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkos, set off a firestorm last week when he revealed that the DHS was setting up a “Disinformation Governance Board,” tasked with fighting disinformation. It has also been announced that a real head case, and a hyper-partisan one to boot, Nina Jankowicz will head the Board.

Left unanswered was how this new entity will combat disinformation. Here is my surmise. It will identify certain stories as disinformation, giving official imprimatur to this designation: it will not take any direct action against anyone disseminating this information. Instead, social media companies will then censor or suppress these stories, claiming that they have been identified as disinformation by the government–and who can argue with that, right? They always have our best interest at heart, right? Mommy is just protecting us from bad things!

This is the way that social media shut down COVID stories it didn’t like. If something contradicted CDC or WHO, Facebook and Twitter would label it disinformation and take efforts to suppress it.

In essence, with COVID, social media companies became the enforcers of bans on speech the government didn’t like. In an effort to circumvent First Amendment issues, the government essentially outsourced censorship to private entities. The private entities were happy to go along, but they were on board with the agenda.

The model worked so well that the government is now looking to expand this privatized censorship model to embrace all speech.

This transparent end run around the First Amendment cannot be allowed to stand. The first time Twitter or Facebook or anyone uses the Ministry of Truth’s guidance to remove or throttle or prevent the posting of content, there should be a 1A lawsuit.

Hell, there should have been such suits already over social media COVID censorship.

The real possibility that an Elon Musk-owned Twitter will not play this game is precisely why there has been such a hysterical reaction to his purchase.

This is the biggest threat to our 1A rights in our lifetime, and possibly ever. It cannot stand. It must be fought, and the battle must be one.