Efforts to police misinformation are prone to significant error and overreach. Governments, media organizations, and tech platforms have all made serious attempts to limit the spread of misinformation by cracking down on speech they thought was wrong or dangerous—but time and time again, these measures have resulted in censorship of legitimate discourse.
Facebook, for instance, took great pains to prevent users from theorizing that COVID-19 emerged from a lab. Twitter faced pressure from the Biden administration to purge accounts that criticized the mainstream consensus on vaccines, masks, and other subjects. YouTube’s policies prohibited content creators from spreading so-called COVID-19 misinformation, including statements like “masks don’t work” or “COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu.” Some of those statements have more validity than others, but they’re no longer considered outside the bounds of acceptable conversation. What the gatekeepers termed “misinformation” is now just information.
The government’s so-called misinformation experts have performed no better than media organizations or social media platforms. Remember Nina Jankowicz, who was chosen as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board? Though she had wrongly flagged the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story as fake Russian nefariousness, the department picked her to advise elite law enforcement and national intelligence on misinformation trends. …
PayPal is free to put in place whatever policies it thinks are best, but the company shouldn’t be surprised if people don’t trust it to correctly define terms like misinformation, hate, or intolerance—and, thus, take their business elsewhere.
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