A University of Washington misinformation study supports the effort to shut down “all opposition media” that counters the leftist narrative, according to Mike Benz, the executive director of the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).
The study entitled “Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation” tested the effectiveness of different “virality circuit breakers,” or methods of censoring viral content. Describing the study’s recommendations Benz compared the severity of the censorship to the impact of an electricity circuit breaker on the Just the News, No Noise television show Monday. “There’s a circuit breaker that every house has that can sort of just quickly cut the electricity, so it’s basically like cutting the electricity of all opposition media,” he said, before adding: “This is essentially a sort of God mode button in order to stop your opponents from being able to open their mouths online.”
The study, published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal tested the effectiveness of fact-checking, waiting to censor content, “Nudges and reduced reach” and “Account banning.” According to the study’s findings, a combined approach may be the most effective way to silence opposition by 53 to 63 percent depending on how aggressively the censorship is enforced. The study disingenuously cautioned that “Crude approaches such as outright removal and banning of content or accounts will certainly work if applied in excess, yet they come with costs to freedom of expression and force private entities to be arbiters of truth.” But the study missed the point that any amount of censorship will have the same effect.
Benz noted an example of one test the study examined. “If you are labeled a repeat misinformation spreader,” Benz added, “you are placed in a distribution purgatory after 120 minutes after you post.” Basically, users would have two hours of free speech before being silenced by so-called anti-misinformation algorithms.
He added that “this is basically a way to have these easy buttons to toggle up or toggle down, in this it’s all toggling down, their political opponents.” Benz emphasized that this is politically motivated. “They explicitly state that the purpose of this censorship psychology study is to eliminate resistance to vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes, meaning elections,” he said.
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