Dave Ross: How is censorship possible anymore?

A federal judge has ruled that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. can sue the government for trying to censor his views on vaccines.  He says Biden Administration officials pushed social media companies to suppress content from a group Kennedy supports that urges parents not to get their children vaccinated.

“When a US president colludes with or outright coerces media companies to censor free speech, it’s an attack on our sacred right of free expression,” RFK Jr. said.

But what I want to know is: How is it possible anymore for the U.S. government to outright censor a point of view?

Is there anybody who doesn’t know where Kennedy stands on vaccines? All I had to do was ask Microsoft Co-pilot.

I got the whole list of Kennedy’s vaccine warnings. Vaccines and autism, the safety record of the COVID vaccine, his claim that research labs have created whole new diseases. It’s all there.

Of course, I then asked Co-pilot, “Which of these claims have proven to be correct?”

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And the answer was “none.” “None have been proven correct by the scientific community.”

Which I think is the real problem and he seemed to admit as much in his speech over the weekend.

“Even today users who try to post my campaigns videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards,” RFK Jr. explained.

I’m sure that stings – but ending up on the wrong side of a fact-check isn’t censorship.

For there to be meaningful censorship there would have to be some centralized control of all media in this country.

I admit, once upon a time, mainstream media companies like us could bury ideas for being too fringe, or in poor taste, or just false. But those days are long gone. Social media is the mainstream media now.  And it resists censorship efforts from both the right the left.

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Liberals complain about Conservatives trying to yank books from libraries. But it’s become a badge of honor. Libraries now put up displays of banned books, where they gather up the banned books under a big banner so you don’t even have to search for them!

And even when censorship can be enforced it doesn’t work. Take swear words: We broadcasters – by government directive – have been censoring swear words for years and yet – your kids still know every (BLEEP)ing swear word in multiple languages.

But I will say there is one type of censorship which is  working. And that’s the relentless censorship of anything smacking of rationality. A media that survives on clicks –as social media does – must avoid boredom at all costs.

And that leads to a particularly insidious form of censorship. A The censorship of complexity-avoidance imposed by the crushing boredom inherent in any story that offers a solution, or corrects a falsehood, or calms a crisis.

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

 

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