New York Times reporter Steven Lee Myers, who covers “misinformation and disinformation” and is a social media censorship supporter and First Amendment non-fan, is back with a story posted on Thursday, relaying the sad news that the Trump administration is against self-styled invariably leftist misinformation “experts” – i.e. social media censors: “Trump Administration Cancels Scores of Grants to Study Online Misinformation.”
But who determines what counts as “misinformation”?
Conservatives can’t be blamed for fearing that the fight against misinformation and disinformation will quickly deform into censoring conservative commentary on issues already settled to their own political advantage by the left. They have a long record of doing so, including dozens of sorry examples from the Biden administration.
Trump’s move has given the Times an opportunity to return to the censorious reporting style it performed a couple of years back, exemplified by tech reporter Kevin Roose, who saw extremism and bigotry whenever he glanced rightward, to the point of repeatedly smearing the innocuous Christian satire site The Babylon Bee:
The Trump administration has sharply expanded its campaign against experts who track misinformation and other harmful content online, abruptly canceling scores of scientific research grants at universities across the country.
The grants funded research into topics like ways to evade censors in China. One grant at the Rochester Institute of Technology, for example, sought to design a tool to detect fabricated videos or photos generated by artificial intelligence. Another, at Kent State University in Ohio, studied how malign actors posing as ordinary users manipulate information on social media.
Officials at the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation contend that the research has resulted in the censorship of conservative Americans online, though there is no evidence any of the studies resulted in that.
No evidence? Seriously? MRC’s Free Speech Project has compiled years of examples.
She was also upset that the cuts were meant to harm censorship from social media platforms:
The campaign stems from an executive order that President Trump issued on Jan. 20 vowing to protect the First Amendment right to free speech, but the scale of it has prompted criticism that it is targeting anyone researching misinformation. The intent, the critics have said, is in fact to stifle findings about the noxious content that is increasingly polluting social media and political discourse.
….
The cuts are part of the administration’s broader push to cut federal spending, but they also reflect a conviction among conservatives that the government used researchers at universities and nongovernmental organizations as proxies to restrict content on Facebook, X, YouTube and other social media platforms.
The researchers say those claims conflate academic study about the spread of misinformation or disinformation with decisions made by tech giants to enforce their own policies against certain kinds of content, as they did when they suspended the accounts of President Trump and others involved in inciting violence on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021.
Myers is conveniently eliding the Biden administration aggressive efforts to eliminate what it termed Covid misinformation by pressuring social media companies to crackdown on dissenting views that countered the administration’s hysteria. MRC’s CensorTrack database found that Stanford scientist Jay Bhattacharya (author of the Great Barrington Declaration, who is now the new-NIH director) was shadowed-banned by then-Twitter, and Facebook disabled the Great Barrington Declaration’s page, which exposed the imminent dangers of pandemic-related lockdowns.
The cuts have also angered Democrats on Capitol Hill. Last week, a dozen members of the House wrote the foundation’s new acting director, Brian Stone, saying the administration was “unparalleled in its hostility to American science.”
Now why would only Democrats be mad, unless they thought the censorship regime in place benefited them politically? Myers betrayed no journalistic curiosity.
