At the vice presidential debate yesterday, Tim Walz backed curbs on “hate speech” and misinformation, wrongly believing they are not protected by the First Amendment — even though most hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and most disinformation is protected by the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court explained in NAACP v. Button (1963), the First Amendment protects speech regardless of its “truth, popularity, or social utility.” Yet, Kamala Harris has called for the Justice Department to crack down on “hate” and “misinformation.”
“Hate speech” and “misinformation” mean different things to different people. To taxpayer-funded disinformation experts — who tend to be progressive or left-wing –“disinformation” includes true facts that make people think bad thoughts. For example, it includes facts that give people an “adversarial attitude” toward “democratic institutions” — that is, organs of the government — or minority groups, according to the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index.
For example, the Global Disinformation Index classified a factually-accurate blog post by a black lawyer as “white supremacy content” and “disinformation” because it pointed out that the black crime rate is higher than the crime rate for other races. That factually-accurate blog post was characterized as white supremacist even though the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics has confirmed that the black crime rate is higher. Rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. As the BJS noted in a later version of that same publication, Homicide Trends in the United States, “Blacks are disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders….The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).
“Disinformation expert” tends to mean “progressive.” A Misinformation Review run out of Harvard University revealed that so-called disinformation “experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum,” with the largest fraction of them being “fairly left-wing,” and more of them being “very-left wing” than being centrist (none of them were right-wing, of course).
To many progressive officials — such as those who run our college campuses — “hate speech” includes stating facts, if they produce attitudes detrimental toward “historically victimized groups”, even if the statement of fact is not motivated by hatred. ‘Hate speech” is “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.”
But there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court observed in Matal v. Tam (2017), “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.'”
Yet, in the debate, “Tim Walz reiterates that he doesn’t believe the First Amendment protects hate speech,” which is a “radical position” at odds with the First Amendment, notes Jon Gabriel Simonson of the Washington Free Beacon. “It should be front page news that the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party does not believe in the First Amendment,” says the Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium.
As the head of a civil-liberties group (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) points out,
Convincing people that there is an exception to freedom of speech called “hate speech” has been one of the greatest marketing successes of the anti-free speech movement. I’ve been fighting it on campuses for almost 24 years now and it’s a justification used all the time to target simply locally unpopular opinions, even factual ones.
People have previously pointed out to Walz that the First Amendment does protect hate speech and disinformation, after Tim Walz falsely stated in 2022 that “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” But Walz thinks he knows the First Amendment better than they (and the Supreme Court) do.
Government officials have proven again and again that they cannot be trusted to decide what information is “disinformation” or “misinformation.” All over the world, government officials have used laws against disinformation to punish truthful and accurate speech, such as targeting a doctor for warning that a dangerous new virus, the coronavirus, was rapidly spreading and could threaten public health. Recognizing that reality, a Supreme Court justice warned that “it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” Broad state laws against disinformation in political campaigns have been struck down by appeals courts.
It isn’t just conservatives and civil-libertarians who took issue with Walz’s false claim. A socially-liberal think-tank points out that Walz’s belief
is incorrect. The First Amendment does guarantee free speech when it comes to both misinformation and hate speech. Individuals and public officials may detest and condemn such speech, and platforms may choose not to carry it, but to insert the government into regulation of such expression would both set a troubling precedent and undermine our current First Amendment principles in ways that should concern Americans across the political spectrum.
While policy-makers and individuals may think they are protecting the public from potential harm or propaganda, laws that would allow the government to regulate misinformation would quickly risk trampling on the ability to discuss a wide array of political and social issues. The consensus about what is true regarding sensitive topics such as abortion, the Middle East, and the Covid-19 pandemic can change rapidly. In terms of misinformation, so much of what is called “misinformation” is simply information that individuals may disagree about or that may not be fully understood.
