Should The Government Regulate Fact Checkers?
TL;DR - no. Do conservatives think it's a good idea? Yes.
Among the conservative commentariat class, it has become popular to offer up ideas on What Should Be Done About Bias On Social Media. The latest idea comes from David Marcus who, in an op-ed for Fox News, proposes that the government should be regulating the fact-checking industry.
No, I not kidding.
Marcus, who has convinced himself that such a scheme wouldn’t run afoul of the First Amendment, has also convinced himself that the federal government would most certainly not get into the practice of censorship.
Again, I am not kidding. If you were wondering how someone who considered himself a conservative squares this idea with, y’know, conservative ideas here’s his explanation
“This may seem antithetical to traditional conservative values of small government, but the ubiquitous and monopolistic nature of social media, the power it has to frame how we see the world, is an existential challenge. We cannot be slaves to orthodoxy if that means Americans are subject not only to lies, but also the censorship of the truth.”
Marcus cites the sudden about-face that has taken place on the lab leak theory, which is the theory that COVID-19 was not introduced through a Chinese wet market but was instead an experiment that escaped the lab. He is right that social media platforms did not allow posting about the theory until recently but he misidentifies the reason why -- it was not because the theory was a “conservative idea” but because the federal government was very invested in not exploring that option and downplayed it as a potentially viable explanation. He also cites John Tierney’s struggle to promote his story on the dangers of children wearing face masks, noting that Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers wouldn’t allow the story to be run on Facebook. Again, this wasn’t an idea that was shot down due to being “conservative” but because it ran counter to the CDC’s guidance on mask wearing.
To sum it up, Marcus’s big idea is to counter misinformation and disinformation emanating from the federal government and that information being accepted by fact checkers is to...put the federal government in charge of regulating fact checkers. Gee, what could go wrong.
He also cited the New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story debacle, in which Facebook and Twitter temporarily banned posting any links to the story. I wrote about the controversy at that time and was (and remain) critical of the platforms’ decision to ban the story. But once again, Marcus is leaving out a critical part of the story to make his point -- the story was controversial not only because it involved the son of the Democratic nominee for president but also due to the fact that no media outlet was provided access to the laptop or its contents in order to verify the details of the story. The inability to verify the veracity of the claims being made (that’s a fancy way of saying fact checking) led most media outlets, including Fox News, to pass on running the story. In addition to the sketchy provenance of the story, it ran just two weeks prior to the 2020 general election. Even under Marcus’s government approved fact-checker plan I fail to see how the same decisions wouldn’t have been made, especially given the panic over fake news and disinformation in the wake of the 2016 election.
To that point, Marcus has some interesting ideas about how fact checking should work
“Facts are supposed to be stubborn. Either an article or post is factual or it isn’t. At the point at which fact checkers are citing lack of context, or concerns about methodology they are no longer fact checking and should not be allowed to claim the service they are selling is doing so. ”
Evaluating context and methodology are extremely important for determining if a statement is true or false, and I’m not sure what other criteria Marcus would rather use to determine truth from falsehood.
Setting aside the logistical issues with the federal government regulating fact checking outlets, the ethical and philosophical issues with such a plan are insurmountable. To think that a federal government with the power to decide if an outlet is being “fair” and “honest” with what it deems to be facts is a splendid idea requires a hell of a lot more faith in government than I will ever have. I see no way such a regulatory system would not get abused in ways that would make you wish for the good ol’ days when social media platforms made those decisions.
If COVID taught us anything it is that the federal government has no issue pushing its own narrative and agenda, even if the facts don’t support it. I would think that conservatives would want the government kept well away from anything that involves being the arbiter of facts, but I guess power grabs and owning the libs is more important than avoiding the dystopian hellscape of a government with explicit power to shut down any fact checking outlet it decides isn’t doing the job correctly.