Who wants a job with the Ministry of Truth?
Concerned about a . . . deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this year’s midterm elections, [Connecticut] plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation. With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information . . . Colorado has hired three cybersecurity experts to monitor sites for misinformation. California’s office of the secretary of state is searching for misinformation and working with the Department of Homeland Security and academics to look for patterns of misinformation across the internet.
The First Amendment protects private companies in deciding when to suppress speech on their own platforms, and they do not act as agents of the government simply because they censor things that the government publicly dislikes. But things get into much murkier territory legally, and should set off major warning bells, when the government employs full-time agents whose job is to cause the suppression of political speech.
And what we’re talking about here — even flagrant lies — is political speech. The New York Times account cites things such as made-up stories about missing ballots or voter fraud. How is this different from false stories about any other political issue? There is an entirely reasonable argument for government countering false speech with the truth, and it has a compelling interest in narrowly targeted efforts to quash misinformation aimed at depriving people of the right to vote — the textbook examples being falsehoods about when an election will be held, where the polls are, or who will be eligible to vote. But for the government to set up permanent, well-paid, most likely unionized positions as censors is an Orwellian step that ought to be resisted.