A Terrifying Victory for Extremist Lies!

I agree with the shrewd comments on last night’s brief post about Missouri v. Biden, which just ended with a consent decree in which the federal government agreed to stop pressuring social media companies to take down content the government doesn’t like. Commenters here mostly yawned at the settlement, arguing about enforceability and the limits of the behavior government agreed to quit. I understand that point.

However.

Here’s a sample of how the New York Times covered the effort against social media takedowns, just a couple years ago:

That’s what was supposedly at stake: Purehearted progressive officials were fighting to filter lies online, but evil MAGA was trying to fight for their right to hate the truth and hurt everybody. Missouri attorney general fights to protect VICIOUS NAZI LIES! Right-wing scum battle for the right to spread their sick filth on the Internet!

Here’s STAT News, a website that covers medicine, pharmaceuticals, and public health in a generally adulatory manner: “Supreme Court to weigh whether Covid misinformation is protected speech.” The framing in the Saint Dr. Fauci media has been about the right to lie, the right to spread disinformation, the right to trick people with evil assaults on truth. White hats and black hats, public health experts who care and are kind versus knuckle-draggers who don’t believe in science. Here’s how that STAT News story opens, after a manipulative headline:

WASHINGTON — As social media sites were flooded with misleading posts about vaccine safety, mask effectiveness, Covid-19’s origins and federal shutdowns at the height of the pandemic, Biden officials urged platforms to pull down posts, delete accounts, and amplify correct information.

Now the Supreme Court could decide whether the government violated Americans’ First Amendment rights with those actions — and dictate a new era for what role, if any, officials can play in combating misinformation on social media.

There’s a shamelessness at work here that I almost have to admire. People spread terrifying disinformation during the pandemic! They said that the mRNA-based vaccines might not prevent infection and transmission, for example, and they claimed that cloth masks didn’t offer ironclad protection against viruses. Can you believe that people think they have a right to lie like that? Now the courts are deciding if government is allowed to combat disinformation.

There’s no possibility in this framing that government can ever be wrong. If officials say that something is misinformation, then it is misinformation. Officials are always, inevitably, and eternally correct.

SCOTUSblog, also covering Missouri v. Biden in 2024, depicted the Biden administration as rigidly objective truthtellers who “encouraged social media companies to restrict harmful or illegal content.” Full stop. Anyone who questioned or disagreed with officials was spreading harmful content, and Missouri v. Biden was only and entirely about protecting the right of bad actors to hurt people.

Government is truth, godlike and all-seeing.

The media framing, for years, was that wholly unbiased experts, scientists and administrators with a deep commitment to the purest scientific gospel, were facing cruel opposition from dumb monsters who lied on purpose. Journalists depicted a world in which, please consider me as shouting this next part with both middle fingers in the air, THERE COULD BE NO DEBATE, ever, between sanctioned credentialed classes and outliers who engaged in scientific dissent. Saint Dr. Fauci was presumptively and inevitably correct; anyone who doubted Saint Dr. Fauci was a heretic, and witches must burn.

There’s virtually no end to the ironies of the pandemic era, as the Great Barrington Declaration was written and signed by well-established and widely published epidemiologists who were denounced as cranks because they disagreed with Saint Dr. Fauci, a career office manager who didn’t run a lab or do research. But the ironies don’t touch the core point: Missouri v. Biden was a legal contest over the possibility of debate in questions of science and policy. And the mainstream view was that debate simply wasn’t ever possible or permissible. Experts speak, are validated by officials, and then disagreement becomes harmful disinformation. Dissent and argument are irresponsible, cruel, dark, destructive, even criminal. People shouldn’t be allowed to say this stuff!

However much of an impact the consent decree really has, the federal government has just formally agreed to the validity of argument. For a few really awful years, that wasn’t a settled question. From the perspective of 2026, the consent decree in Missouri v. Biden is meh. From the sick perspective of 2021, it’s thunder and lightning.

Remember the dark years, and see what the government just agreed to. It’s at least a signpost that tells us we’ve escaped from cultural prison.