Per week in the past Jay Bhattacharya gave a terrific discuss on the weekly Stanford Classical Liberalism workshop. (Hyperlink in case the embed does not work.) He detailed the story of presidency+media Covid censorship, together with the dramatic injunction within the Missouri v. Biden case. The invention in that case alone, detailing how the administration used the specter of arbitrary regulatory retaliation to get tech corporations to censor covid info — together with different issues, together with the Hunter Biden laptop computer — is astonishing. We now know what they did, it doesn’t matter what judges say about its technical legality.
Towards the tip, it got here out that Stanford hosts an “web observatory,” particularly named within the injunction for colluding with the federal government to seek out and censor individuals on the web. Inner issues at all times drawing consideration, there was a longish dialogue about that. It does matter. Utilizing (tax exempt) universities and different “nonprofits” to do issues which can be unlawful for the federal government to do is, at the least, not very fairly. As with all issues Israel, educational freedom and free speech appear to be fairly selectively utilized.
One other instance of college efforts on “disinformation” got here up in later dialogue, at Cambridge. It has an attention-grabbing mandate:
“Strategic disinformation is an accelerant for main societal issues akin to local weather change,…. “
Sure, I believed, channeling Bjorn Lomborg and Steve Koonin. The climate-catastrophe, climate-justice, degrowth, anti-capitalism, let-them-stay-poor, get-back-to-the-farm-and-set-my-soul-free crowd has unfold immense disinformation about precise local weather science. Oh wait, in some way I do not suppose that is what they take into consideration. Orwell could be proud. (I might be delighted to be unsuitable on this case. Let me know.)
However these inside issues are minor, actually. The story of presidency, utilizing menace of regulatory assault, to censor the web is the true shocker. It additionally reveals loads about our regulatory state. Cannot web corporations say “properly, regulation follows guidelines and procedures; you may’t damage us with regulation after we have not finished something unsuitable and there’s no provable case?” Ha Ha. Give us the corporate, and we’ll discover the regulation.
