RUTHFULLY YOURS

In September 2016, an Atlantic essay from Salena Zito introduced a line that would become one of the defining phrases of the Trump era: “The press,” Zito wrote of then-candidate Donald Trump’s propensity for exaggeration and embellishment, “take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”

The axiom, or some version of it, comes to mind amid the frenzied response to Elon Musk’s recent loosening of Twitter guidelines on Covid-related content. Last week, users noticed a curt message on Twitter’s “COVID-19 Misinformation” page: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy.” What that means, the New York Daily News reported, is that “Twitter will no longer flag tweets containing misinformation about COVID-19 nor take action against the accounts that post them; the reversal of a longstanding policy implemented at the peak of the pandemic and the . . . latest major shift under new owner Elon Musk.” Since January 2020, some 11,000 accounts — including those of members of Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) — and nearly 100,000 posts have been removed under the auspices of that Vijaya Gadde–era policy.

Musk’s move was quickly denounced as literally homicidal by a chorus of “misinformation” “experts,” progressive think-tank scholars, journalists, public-health censors, and various other professional hysterics. “Twitter has quietly changed their policies to allow COVID-19 misinformation,” Columbia University “science communicator” Lucky Tran emoted. “This change will literally kill people.” The “consequences of not getting this right — of spreading that misinformation — is literally tens of thousands of people dying unnecessarily,” White House Covid coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned the Associated Press. “Misinformation is a life-or-death issue,” tech journalist Emily Dreyfuss told the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz. “It’s certain to get many more people killed from covid than otherwise would,” added Johns Hopkins health sociologist Jon Shaffer.

The Covid-misinformation shift seems to be only the latest in a long line of mass murders that Musk’s content-moderation philosophy has engineered. Last month, Amy Bruckman, a professor at Georgia Tech Regents, drew a comparison between the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar and Musk’s efforts to liberalize Twitter speech code. “No, you can’t just say well, they can say whatever they want and it’s their responsibility,” Bruckman told Them. “You end up literally killing people.” Weeks later, Lorenz penned a column titled, “‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts,” in which she quoted the dire assessment of Harvard Law’s Alejandro Caraballo: “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. . . . I can’t even begin to state how dangerous this will be. . . . It’s literally life or death for people.”

But Musk is only a convenient scapegoat in the campaign against free speech. Misinformation seemingly has been murdering Americans for as long as it has been undermining the preferred narratives of progressive social engineers. President Biden said as much last year, telling reporters that social-media platforms such as Facebook were “killing people” by failing to crack down on Covid wrongthink. When the federal government ordered Facebook to jump, Mark Zuckerberg asked how high. Soon after Biden’s comment, an executive at Meta (Facebook’s parent company) complained about the “finger pointing” — but not because censorship is anathema to a free society. No; the White House’s allegations were misplaced, the executive argued, because they understated Facebook’s crackdowns on misinformation:

Since the beginning of the pandemic we have removed over 18 million instances of COVID-19 misinformation. We have also labeled and reduced the visibility of more than 167 million pieces of COVID-19 content debunked by our network of fact-checking partners so fewer people see it and – when they do – they have the full context. In fact, we’ve already taken action on all eight of the Surgeon General’s recommendations on what tech companies can do to help. And we are continuing to work with health experts to update the list of false claims we remove from our platform.

The rhetoric regarding Silicon Valley’s “literally” lethal tolerance for free speech is a sharp left turn from the techno-utopianism of the 2000s. “A decade ago, social-media companies were hailed in the tech press and across the mainstream media as forces for progress,” NR’s editors noted in October. “Silicon Valley and the data mavens at progressives’ campaigns were hailed as geniuses.” But in 2016, the monster escaped from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab:

After the 2016 shocks of Brexit and Trump’s election, social-media companies were cast as villains. Watching the full weight of the political world fall onto the Valley, historian Niall Ferguson warned, “Make no mistake, 2016 will never happen again.” Social-media companies were blamed for spreading “misinformation.” Conservative-aligned data firms who had done just a fraction of the data-harvesting done by Obama 2012 were portrayed as part of shadowy, privacy-threatening conspiracies. President Obama personally scolded Mark Zuckerberg. We were told that Russia used these companies to hack the brains of suggestible yokels, and that only wise superintendence of social-media conversation by progressives could save the world from fascism. All social-media companies took the lesson and began hiring new fact-checkers and censors out of the progressive media…The result was a moral panic about misinformation, and the creation of unofficial partnerships between government agencies and Silicon Valley’s internal “safety” boards.

This clampdown, and the rhetoric of mass killing that justifies it, is an attempt to stuff the digital genie back into the bottle. The “war on misinformation,” as the title of a June Aspen Institute panel dubbed it, is the latest in a long series of wars — on terror, poverty, crime, drugs, hunger, and so on. All of these crusades, to one degree or another, were preceded by talk of crisis. (When candidate George W. Bush announced his “war on illiteracy” in 2000, for example, he declared that the nation’s reading levels were a “national emergency.”) But the solution is always the same. That most of these wars have failed to achieve their stated goals is beside the point. Their true purpose has always been to award further control to social planners under the auspices of a coordinated “national response.” And in this, they have been victorious.

The result of all this is what the libertarian economist Robert Higgs has described as the “ratchet effect,” by which “crises operate as ratchets in the growth of government.” Once “temporarily” expanded, the power of the bureaucracy never shrinks back to pre-crisis levels, and every successive crisis — from the Great Depression to the Covid pandemic — leaves the managerial state larger and more powerful than it was before. “In personal life, no one relishes a crisis, but in political life, many people pray for a crisis as drought-stricken farmers pray for rain,” Higgs wrote in 2009. “For these people, a societal crisis promises to bring not extraordinary difficulties, dangers, and challenges, but rather enlarged opportunities.”

The problem, as it relates to the ongoing tech revolution, is that many of the bureaucracy’s traditional mechanisms of social control are obsolete in the face of a rapidly changing, decentralized, and unpredictable new landscape. The hurried attempts to develop new mechanisms — whether via government pressure on Silicon Valley, increasingly hysterical rhetoric in the press, or the extra-governmental proliferation of “fact-checkers,” “misinformation experts” and in-house censors — have succeeded only up to a point. At the same time, the haphazard and obviously political and partisan nature of those efforts has made the broader population increasingly skeptical.

The century-long progressive project of cultivating a managerial technocracy relies on the fusion of the state with civil society. As the progressive historian Richard Hofstadter wrote, progressives’ early reform campaigns drew their resources from “large universities with adequate libraries, laboratories, huge endowments, graduate schools, professional schools, and advancing salaries.” The pursuit of legislation and regulation required “the skills of lawyers and economists, sociologists and political scientists” — which created a market for experts.

The double-edged sword of this strategy, however, is that the civic institutions that progressivism captures must march in unison. The unruly, democratized nature of social media and related forms of communications make that project far more difficult today. And the centralization of narrative control in platforms such as Twitter has proved to be an Achilles’ heel — as we are seeing, an eccentric conservative-friendly billionaire with enough money and motivation can simply swoop in and claim the helm of the platform for himself. The journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats who are venting their spleen about the supposedly deadly consequences of Elon Musk’s free-speech reforms want Americans to take their warnings literally. Soon, if they’re not careful, they may not even be taken seriously.