RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/13/fact-checking-was-a-sham-industry/

One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders promises to bring an end to the American government’s censorship of social media. Although the First Amendment forbids the state from censoring citizens’ speech, federal agencies would previously get around this by pressuring the tech platforms to censor content on their behalf. Entire topics, such as the Covid lab-leak theory or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, were branded ‘misinformation’ by the state and then scrubbed from social media. A whole ‘censorship industrial complex’ of self-appointed fact-checkers, disinformation experts and ‘pro-democracy’ NGOs emerged to help enforce the state’s diktats. But what happens next? Could the era of Big Tech censorship finally be on its way out?

Robby Soave – senior editor of Reason and co-host of Rising – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this and more. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are you feeling about the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency?

Robby Soave: I do find myself in a very unusual and frankly uncomfortable position of being happy with a lot of changes that are taking place in the government. I don’t know that I’ve ever been in that position in my entire life.

Initially, I wasn’t quite sure about Trump. We’ve already been through four years of Trump. Frankly, they weren’t that different from what you would have seen from any other Republican, or any other political figure. There was a lot of continuity in policies I don’t really like, so I was lukewarm for Trump running again this time. I thought he talked a good game on some stuff and was wild in other ways.

And then he came in and put Elon Musk in charge of cutting government waste. You’ve got a lot of the other tech titans who are, if not getting explicitly on board with Trump, becoming more favourable towards him. I don’t agree with everything he does by any stretch of the imagination, but there really does seem to be a desire to disempower the censors. That whole movement seems to be falling away.

O’Neill: One of Trump’s very good executive orders was on ‘ending federal censorship’. Do you think that ‘misinformation’ became a shield for what was essentially political censorship?

Soave: I like to say that misinformation is the new hate speech. Hate speech used to be the category of speech that allowed people to claim they supported free speech, while still censoring speech they didn’t like.

A red flag goes off for me every time I hear someone even use the word misinformation now, because it’s just a made-up category. It would be one thing if the supposed misinformation and disinformation experts had an above-average ability to spot bullshit. But almost every person who called themselves a misinformation or disinformation researcher got the major stories wrong, from the Covid-19 lab-leak theory to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Even with companies like Meta getting rid of their fact-checkers, there’s been almost no self-reflection as to why that power has been taken away. The Facebook fact-checkers, particularly on topics like Covid and climate, were just activist groups that got things wrong all the time.

It’s really a sham industry that, unfortunately, gets a lot of funding – particularly government funding. The US State Department is funding disinfo-tracking groups across the world to tell American social-media companies that they shouldn’t run dissenting content. It’s horrible.

O’Neill: What do you make of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) coming down hard on the US Agency for International Development (USAID)?

Soave: I would say that USAID can be substantially scrapped. The reason that DOGE has started this fight is because USAID is giving money to countries or humanitarian causes that are profoundly unpopular with Americans, regardless of their political persuasion.

For me, the conversation begins and ends with the fact that USAID was funding reckless, dangerous scientific research in Wuhan. I thought that had all been done under the National Institutes of Health, but actually USAID funded it, too.

Clearly, we need to do some auditing and accounting if this organisation was giving money to the facility that quite plausibly caused the Covid pandemic.

O’Neill: Now that the US seems to be changing in some quite palpable ways, what consequences do you think we’ll see in normally woke areas like university campuses?

Soave: When Trump won in 2016, there was an explosion of progressive activism. This time, it’s a lot quieter. So far, there has been no mobilisation on the streets, and not very much on college campuses.

My analysis is that the left is a much more fractured movement today than it was eight years ago, or even four years ago. I think Covid broke the left in a big way, and after Bernie Sanders exits the scene, there won’t be another leader to galvanise young progressives.

Young people are also turning towards the right. If you go back to 2005, what are you rebelling against as a young person? You’re rebelling against hegemonic Bushism, the Patriot Act and conservatives’ reflexive opposition to gay marriage. Now, your parents’ generation is a centre-left / liberal, rule-following elite that believes in experts and systems. To rebel against that is more likely to put you in the MAGA camp. There’s an energy among young people that’s not actually with the left – it’s with the right. What I am seeing right now is a left that is more de-energised than I have seen in my adult life.