New York Times reporter, social media censorship supporter, and First Amendment non-fan Steven Lee Myers’ “news analysis” led Thursday’s front page: “Voters Strain Under Deluge Of Untruths -- Disinformation Climbs to a Sordid New Peak.”
And who’s responsible? The Russians, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans in general.
Myers noted false claims from Russia about Gov. Tim Walz being spread on social media by a Florida deputy sheriff, then transitioned smoothly to blame “the world’s richest man, Elon Musk” for helping spread it. (Musk is a billionaire that the Times feels free to criticize, unlike George Soros, who the paper shields by accusing conservative critics of anti-Semitism.)
Smears, lies and dirty tricks -- what we call disinformation today -- have long been a feature of American presidential election campaigns. Two weeks before this year’s vote, however, the torrent of half-truths, lies and fabrications, both foreign and homegrown, has exceeded anything that came before, according to officials and researchers who document disinformation.
The effect on the outcome on Nov. 5 remains to be seen, but it has already debased what passes for political debate about the two major party candidates, Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. It has also corroded the foundations of the country’s democracy, undermining what was once a shared confidence that the country’s elections, regardless of who won, have been free and fair.
As if the mainstream media hasn’t done that very thing itself with its own brand of election interference.
And does a sweet image of a girl and a puppy really have a corrosive effect on democracy? If posted by a Republican, then yes, evidently.
A fictitious image of a girl clutching a puppy in a life raft so moved Amy Kremer, the chairwoman in Georgia for the Republican National Committee who posted it this month, that she stood by it even after she learned it was not real.
“Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” she wrote on X, where her initial post received more than 3 million views. “It is seared into my mind forever.”
The Times is disappointed that conservatives have taken steps to neutralize Big Government censorship online.
A concerted conservative legal and political campaign that went all the way to the Supreme Court has abetted the falsehoods about election fraud anyway. The project has undercut government agencies, universities and research organizations that once worked with the social media giants -- especially Facebook and Twitter -- to slow the spread of disinformation about voting.
Myers circled back to the left’s current Public Enemy No. 2, space entrepreneur and X owner Elon Musk.
Perhaps the single biggest factor in today’s disinformation landscape has been Mr. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, which he bought two years after the 2020 election and rebranded as X.
And could this be the first mention in the Times of Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg’s “sorry, my bad” letter to Congress for interfering in the 2020 election process?
In August, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote a mea culpa to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who has led the conservative charge against moderation by the major social media platforms.
Mr. Zuckerberg said that, in hindsight, Facebook had wrongly restricted access to some content about the pandemic and the laptop belonging to Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter.
“We’ve changed our policies and processes to make sure this doesn’t happen again -- for instance, we no longer temporarily demote things in the U.S. while waiting for fact-checkers,” he wrote.
Perhaps the most galling part of the story was recruiting Democratic hack and PolitiFact founder Bill Adair onto Team Truth vs. Republicans:
One of the trailblazers in fact-checking in the United States has been PolitiFact, which the journalist Bill Adair founded in 2007 to measure the claims politicians make on a scale from true to mostly true, mostly false to “pants on fire.”….While “all politicians lie” might be a common lament, Mr. Adair said that the blame has tilted significantly to the Republican Party. “You have a convergence of a politician and a party that believe they can benefit from lying,” he said.
