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November 5, 2024 - 10:00am
In an October interview, The New York Times’s Lulu García-Navarro asked GOP vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance whether Donald Trump had lost the 2020 election. Instead of answering, Vance replied with another question: “Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story?” He has used the same ju-jitsu move on several other occasions when pressed about Trump’s fraud claims, including during his debate with Tim Walz.
Vance is the respectable face of MAGA, so it seems reasonable to surmise the Trump campaign believes social-media censorship — and not rumours about late-night ballot shenanigans — offers the most broadly compelling case for delegitimising the 2020 election results. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, while there’s no way to prove social media platforms’ handling of the Biden laptop story — which they broadly came to regret — was decisive in tipping the election, there’s also no way to prove it wasn’t. Moreover, even though most Americans disliked Trump’s post-election behaviour four years ago, they also tend to disapprove of the sort of stifling of speech his opponents attempted to undertake under the rubric of fighting “misinformation”.
For their part, Democrats including Walz, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry continue to intone against the dangers of unregulated speech online. But four years after the Biden laptop affair, they have mostly retreated from the battle against misinformation, partly because of Republican pushback, and partly because of its dubious results. Nina Jankowicz, who briefly helmed the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, said as much recently, noting that there is less “coordination between the federal government and platforms” than in 2020. The former “disinformation czar” blamed that shift on the fear that any coordination might “get brought up in congressional subpoenas and lawsuits” — such as the hearings on online censorship led by Rep. Jim Jordan and the 2023 Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri. Statements from those running the platforms also suggest an increased discomfort with earlier actions in this area, as when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed regret for acceding to government pressure to censor.
And so we aren’t likely to see a replay of the coordinated effort between government agencies, NGOs such as the Election Integrity Partnership, and private tech companies to flag, suppress, and remove posts determined to be “misinformation”. For those of us who found that entire project troublingly at odds with the First Amendment, its retreat should be a welcome development.
However, it is also unclear whether the effects of these activities ever corresponded either to their architects’ aims — or to the Orwellian nightmares its opponents conjured up in response. Consider the case raised repeatedly by Vance as Exhibit A of the censorship apparatus: the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The story was blocked on Twitter for two days, after which the company reversed course, with then-CEO Jack Dorsey apologising; Facebook didn’t block it, but algorithmically suppressed it before likewise changing course.
This incident lays bare some unfortunate tendencies, but it doesn’t illustrate the smooth functioning of a well-oiled, top-down “censorship machine”, as has been alleged by some on the Right. Instead, what we see is a clumsy, poorly-thought-out effort that ultimately came to embarrass those behind it. While the online censorship was still in effect, the Biden laptop story was nonetheless being widely discussed, including in the halls of Congress; it is conceivable that it even received more attention than it would have — an instance of the Streisand effect — due to the outrage provoked by the tech companies’ egregious actions.
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SubscribeWhat’s offered here only makes sense looking backwards. Most people are not politically involved, and most people understand things through “framing”, not through an evaluation of the details.
So it doesn’t matter that the Biden laptop story was true, and was being discussed by some people somewhere after the fact. At the time, the mass framing effect was: its reporting was handled differently than everything else, whether by a scrambled effort or a well oiled machine. “True” things just get reported, so reporting that gets broken by one newspaper then censored then has a national letter written by “51 experts” disclaiming it broadly makes it perceived as a “not true” thing or at least something to be held in abeyance.
You’re crazy if you think that it wouldn’t have upended things if ABC, NBC, CBS stood up at the time, looked in the camera at the time and said “tonight, surprising reports have arisen of corruption in the Biden family, raising questions of criminality and…”
Well said.
It’s extraordinary how the whole question of what the Bidens were up to in Ukraine has been memory-holed.
They achieved their goals when they suppressed it. There are still people online who believe their narrative.
Subsequent surveys related to the suppression of the Hunter Laptop story in 2020 indicate that the story would have swung enough voters to Trump that he would have secured his second term as President of the United States (with high probability).
If only media, news and technology companies – and the government itself – had performed what was their credentialed jobs to enable an even pitch for the ‘political teams’ to play on, enforced equal rules for both sides, and kept their eye toward maintaining transparency and providing facts to the citizens.
Alas for democracy’s sake, Americans discovered much later that the so-called ‘referee’ credentialed class were playing on Team Biden while pretending to be referees.
WaPo’s Masthead was an eerily accurate prediction of the colluding actions of these organizations and partners to willfully not provide truthful and accurate information to voters in the run-up to the election … or, in WaPo’s words, democracy died in their darkness.
But, hey, someone told me that ‘Trump is Hitler,’ so of course they must destroy trust in venerable institutions, trust amongst the American people, and trust in democracy itself … because their fevered minds tell them that Hitler must be stopped. They were really acting as everyone’s savior when they destroyed trust in democracy and took the decision away from the citizens by hiding the facts, right?
So what was the real lesson from suppressing the Hunter Laptop story?
It worked.
It secured Biden’s election.
It gave democrats four unearned years in the Executive Branch to push their policies for and preferences upon America.
If a school bully steals lunch money and then is forced by a teacher to say they’re ‘sorry’ without returning the money, making amends and without any real punishment affixed, who would believe the bully’s apology and who would naively think the bully wouldn’t try the same thing again tomorrow? It’s a lucrative business for the bully. He merely learned that it’s best to not be caught in the act.
Try as I might, I have been unable to come up with an alternate reason why both Bidens quietly stepped aside for this Harris debacle other than being threatened by substantial evidence of criminality should they make a fuss. If Jill never rights a book on her experience in the White House that is anything more than a gloss, it will pretty much prove this.
Harris herself is also on record as wanting censorship.
There is no need of any “censorship machine” – real or imagined – in order to distort the pluralist democratic ideal in this election…. or the previous one (or in fact any Western election in recent times). The plain fact is that Progressivism has long since become hegemonic in the Western world – through all of its institutions and its legacy mainstream media. So the Right is, in a real sense, always the underdog at election time. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress: “This has in truth, been increasingly so for most of the last 70 years, allowing Progressives a clear run through the commanding heights of the burgeoning mass education and mass media establishments. So much so that now, to voice the truth – that crass ‘progressive’ progress is mostly counter-productive (Mao was a real first rank Progressive) and that real human advances tend to happen in spite of, not because of it – seems paradoxical and invites blank disbelief. Conservatism is in dire need of somehow finding a new way to express its alternative vision in seductive terms.” Let’s hope so anyway.
If you think the “top-down” censorship machine is slowing down you got everything wrong. They are less effective just because people are more aware of it. Not because they are not trying as hard
The most important lesson here is not primarily that censorship is intrinsically bad – it is intrinsically bad, but if it worked, it’d still be done.
That is the real lesson: Censorship does not work. Attempting it is a bad idea that has never worked (we exploited that against the Soviet Union!), can’t work, won’t work, and will ultimately do the perpetrators more harm than good – just like other bad ideas that don’t work, e.g. sanctions and torture.
But we are once again in a phase where our benighted “leaders” are convinced that it is a new world, that these measures would work, have to work, if we only believe and implement them with uncompromising radicalism and purity of heart.
Sanctions kept Iran at bay for years until they were recently lifted by the sock puppet’s administration. The results were obvious to any thinking person.
How did sanctions keep Iran “at bay”?
Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was primarily aimed at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. When the US disarmed Iraq, Iran suspended its programme.
Sanctions do hurt, but they’re ineffective. Worse, once imposed, they are extremely difficult for the imposer to reverse. For the US, it has proved impossible. The US promised again and again to reverse sanctions, but never succeeded due to domestic politics. The upshot is that the US’ ability to negotiate treaties has dropped to zero.
The mullahs always wanted to create the means to kill the Jews and continue their jihad against the world. They never suspended anything.
I agree with you, but I feel there’s also a level of nuance regarding the effectiveness of censorship. Pure censorship will, as you say, likely backfire in the end, but in the meantime it can do great harm and distort politics with consequences that outlast the period of censorship.
Also, and I think this is what we’re now seeing, censors adapt their tactics. Yesterday I listened to an ABC news summary on my car radio. They started by accurately reporting that Trump was campaigning in city X and Harris was campaigning in city Y. They then reported the least attractive Trump comments and the most attractive Harris comments, thereby distorting the public perception of the candidates. So far as I know, however, all the comments reported were accurate, just cherry-picked for political effect by the news organization. I think we’ll see a lot more of that type of behavior.
There’s also the possibility that, with a Harris presidency, we’ll see a return of blatant censorship even though it will eventually backfire.
That’s it in a nutshell. It’s perfectly possible for news reporting to be both factually accurate and, at the same time, a farrago of lies. And it usually is.
Lies of omission.
Here’s a good laugh!
Recently I’ve noticed some expert blather and op-eds to the affect that “the people must trust their politicians more”.
%{%&?}!!@##?!
And understand that news sources parroting those (progressive/oligarch) politicians are the bestest new sources.
Some one I know gave me a copy of “The Death of Expertise” in an attempt to convince me that fake internet information is the real problem. I read it. It makes several valid points. But it misses the boat ramp completely in terms of checks and balances. “Trust the elites” is the message in a nutshell.
“Facebook didn’t block it, but algorithmically suppressed it…”
Ahh, yes. Now I feel better.
Stopped reading when the authors tried to claim the suppression of the Biden laptop story was clumsy. The security services tested the scenario at Twitter, 50 security agents publicly claimed that the laptop was a Russian hoax. Just because the real world is messy, doesn’t mean you get to re frame the real world actions of individuals as merely ‘clumsy’ attempts at intervening in an election.
Also you claim we don’t know how it affected the election. That is a lie. There are polls that tell us. It did. I won’t google stuff for a journalist though.
As Elon Musk’s cap says “MAKE ORWELL FICTION AGAIN.” vote TRUMP
“It has all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign,” intoned 50 current and former intelligence officials. Just goes to show what the “experts” know! 😉