Will Kamala Harris attack free speech as president? “In 2019, Kamala Harris promised to direct the Justice Department to” restrict speech on the internet, notes Townhall, including having it do the following things:
- – Counter “extremism” online
- – Bully social media companies into censoring “hate”
- – Take action against online “misinformation”
- – “Police” platforms who pose a “threat to our democracy”
Speaking to the NAACP, Harris endorsed “regulation of social media platforms to force takedown of what officials deem hate and misinformation. That’s a dreadful position inconsistent with our First Amendment liberties,” notes a constitutional expert at the Cato Institute.
Having the Justice Department restrict “misinformation” is a bad idea, because government-funded “disinformation experts” define it to include factually correct information that gives people attitudes viewed as bad by the government, such as an adversarial attitude toward the government. “The government-funded Global Disinformation Index’s stated mission is to stifle ‘disinformation’ it defines as ‘factually correct’ & ‘adversarial narratives’ (like the Covid-19 lab leak),” notes Matt Orfalea. For example, no matter how true something is, if it is “ideologically motivated” and “create[s] a risk of harm” by “targeting at-risk individuals or institutions,” it is deemed disinformation by the Global Disinformation Index.
Governments have a long history of using laws against “fake news” or “misinformation” to punish truth-tellers and whistleblowers who expose government wrongdoing. “The first doctor in China who tried to raise the alarm about COVID was accused by the Chinese government of posting medical misinformation, and threatened with jail if he didn’t recant his warnings. He died the following month from COVID,” notes an expert on social media.
Yet, Harris wants to censor “misinformation,” telling technology moguls, “if you act as a megaphone for misinformation …. if you don’t police your platforms we are going to hold you accountable,” reports the London Daily Mail.
It is wrong to “confuse ‘disinformation’ with ‘adversarial narratives,'” notes historian Muriel Blave. Confusing the two, as the “disinformation experts” at the Global Disinformation Index do, means that “Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful” in the eyes of the Global Disinformation Index, “an international, government-funded ‘ratings agency’ that is trying to defund” various groups for “misinformation” by driving away their advertisers.
As Professor Michael Munger noted, “the worrisome thing” about this “is that the U.S. government pays substantial sums to a foreign organization whose literal, self-professed job is to pressure advertisers to boycott publications that….disagree with the U.S. government.” As the New York Sun notes, the London-based “Global Disinformation Index defines ‘disinformation’ as narratives that are ‘adversarial’ to democratic institutions” — that is, the government — “or at-risk groups.”
James Bovard, who writes for the New York Post, notes that “V.P. Harris proclaimed that she ‘would require’ social media companies to submit to Biden administration disinformation edicts to ‘protect democracy.’ But ‘disinformation’ is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.”
The press is supposed to serve as a watchdog over the government, exposing government abuses of power, not be the government’s lapdog. So the press should criticize the government when it misbehaves. But the government’s allies may label such criticism as “disinformation.” A recent example of this was the government-funded Global Disinformation Index, which blacklisted news outlets critical of the Biden administration in an effort to starve them of advertising dollars. Meanwhile, it praised progressive pro-Biden “news” outlets such as HuffPost that have lost libel lawsuits after repeatedly making false claims, giving them its highest ratings despite their history of factual errors because of how they gullibly repeat Biden administration talking points praising Biden and attacking his critics.
As a result, GDI views publications that publish criticism of the government to be “misinformation,” even when they make no factual errors. GDI claimed that the 10 “riskiest” news outlets for disinformation are the New York Post, Reason, the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, and RealClearPolitics. These are all either conservative publications that criticize the Biden administration, except for Reason, a libertarian magazine that criticizes civil-liberties violations by both Democrats and Republicans, and RealClearPolitics, a political news and polling-data aggregator.
Its explanation for giving these publications bad ratings does not even suggest that most of them made factually false claims. GDI’s explanation of its rating for the New York Post admitted that “GDI’s study did not review specific high-profile stories and attempt to determine whether they were disinformation.” The closest it came to asserting factual inaccuracy was in explaining its rating of the American Conservative, which it alleged — without any specific examples — was prone to “unsubstantiated claims” and “logical fallacies.”
By contrast, GDI gave high ratings to left-wing publications such as HuffPost that frequently make false claims and engage in slanted, sensationalistic coverage. GDI’s co-founder, Clare Melford, wrote for HuffPost in the past. GDI claimed that “HuffPost largely featured fact-based, unbiased content free from sensational text or visuals. This domain also refrained from perpetuating divisive narratives…” It claimed that the “ten lowest risk online news outlets” included Huffpost, Buzzfeed News, NPR, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post.
As the New York Post notes, these left-leaning publications given good ratings by GDI are all friendlier to the Biden administration: “The outlets it labels less risky — NPR, BuzzFeed, the AP, The New York Times and the like — are all those that happily parrot whatever actual disinfo comes from the White House or other corridors of power, up to and including the 100% fake Steele Dossier.” GDI has nothing bad to say about left-wing news outlets that have committed libel or journalistic hoaxes, such as Rolling Stone, which peddled a gang rape hoax and had to pay $1.65 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against it.
The Global Disinformation Index was funded by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, and the State-Department funded National Endowment for Democracy.
Government officials should not be deciding what ideas are true or false. Government officials often lie themselves, and cannot be trusted to decide what is true or false. As the Supreme Court recognized in Thomas v. Collins, “‘every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the truth from the false for us.’”
Harris also wants social media firms like Facebook to crack down on users posts that she views as hateful. “‘We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy,’ Harris said during a speech to the NAACP in 2019,” reports the London Daily Mail.
But banning “hate” or “hate speech” is very risky. Government officials view whistleblowers and dissidents as being motivated by hatred for the government officials whose crimes they expose or whose policies they oppose.
“Hate speech” is also broadly “defined” by leftists to include “offensive words, about or directed towards historically victimized groups.” The concept of hate speech has expanded to include commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects. That includes criticizing feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, or gay marriage, or opinions about how to address sexual harassment or allegations of racism in the criminal justice system.
These broad definitions of hate speech aren’t based on the First Amendment. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, which protects speech that offends minority groups. But foreign countries are banning hate speech on social media, and many legal scholars and civil-rights activists are now calling for America to follow their example and ban hate speech by limiting the First Amendment.
That’s a bad idea, because both normal people, and even experts, run the risk of running afoul of broad bans on “hate speech.” For example, Twitter applied its “rules against hateful conduct” to briefly ban an expert on sexuality for stating in passing that transsexualism is a disorder. That was true even though, back then, the “bible of psychiatry,” the DSM-5, said that transsexualism is a disorder, and the expert chaired the group that worked on that section of the DSM-5. Sharing his expertise was deemed hate speech. As Ben Bowles noted, Ray Blanchard was known for “his scholarly writing on gender confusion.” He also was “chairman of the working group on paraphilia” for the fifth edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5), in which the classification of transgenderism was changed from a serious disorder to a milder one, “gender dysphoria.”
Kamala Harris has a record of hostility to free speech, notes the Wall Street Journal:
Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information. She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering “self dealing” or “improper loans.” The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.
Her bullying came amid the Internal Revenue Service’s notorious targeting of conservative nonprofits; Wisconsin’s probe of GOP donors; Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin’s intimidation of donors to the American Legislative Exchange Council; and a campaign of harassment against donors who supported California’s Prop 8….
Free-market nonprofits challenged the Harris dragnet, suing the AG’s office in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, the High Court ruled 6-3 that the AG’s disclosure demand broke the law. The Court pointed out that a lower court had found not “a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts.”
The Court said California’s claim that it would protect donor information lacked credibility, since during the litigation plaintiffs discovered nearly 2,000 Schedule B forms “inadvertently posted to the Attorney General’s website.” It noted that the petitioners and donors faced “threats” and “retaliation.”
The Supreme Court said Ms. Harris’s policy posed a risk of chilling free-speech rights, and it cited its 1958 NAACP v. Alabama precedent, which protected First Amendment “associational” rights. Ms. Harris is citing her experience as state AG as a political asset, but the Bonta case is a warning to voters that she’s willing to use the law as a weapon against political opponents.
