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Why the War on Fake News is a War on Free Speech

By Vinay Kolhatkar

January 11, 2023

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On the surface, the phrase “fake news” was never meant to cover news alone. It was for any narrative, which purported to be true, but wasn’t, or was wildly exaggerated, or conveyed in a misleading sense. It could have been created or shared innocently, recklessly, or maliciously (knowing that it’s not true). Beneath the surface, however, it was often intended as a smear.

Although the term “fake news” is new, fakery is hardly new.

 

How a Free Market Can Police Fakery

Blatant lies, exaggerations, and inadvertent errors have been around as long as humans have lived in tribes or societies. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is one of Aesop’s fables, and its everlasting moral is that liars are not believed even when they tell the truth. Reputation matters. Even a half-truth is a lie, if carried with intent.

In December 2016, in the “The Long and Brutal History of Fake News,” Politico’s Jacob Soll claimed that:

The New York Sun’s “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 claimed that there was an alien civilization on the moon, and established the Sun as a leading, profitable newspaper.

And that:

Amid all the media handwringing about fake news and how to deal with it, one fact seems to have gotten lost: Fake news is not a new phenomenon. It has been around since news became a concept 500 years ago with the invention of print—a lot longer, in fact, than verified, “objective” news, which emerged in force a little more than a century ago.

What’s the answer? Government regulation? Certainly not.

If the market for media was free, no government authority would hold the power to license media.

If the market for media was free, no government authority would hold the power to license media. Anyone can publish an opinion, post a video they took, make podcasts—as it should be—everyone should be free to become a journalist or have opinions to share widely. It would be up to the consumers to judge what they read or listen to, and what they subscribe to with hard-earned dollars.

Some actual “wolves” will always lurk in the shadows—those who promise quack cures for money, those who float reckless rumors for gain, and especially those in politics on either side of the fence who will twist a story to suit their lust for power. Many “believers” will forward and share, without adequate critical evaluation, because the items in question suit their bias.

But a free society must have litigation avenues open to counter (1) defamation, (2) gross negligence, and (3) fraud.

But a free society must have litigation avenues open to counter (1) defamation, for our reputation is part of our intellectual property (albeit some libertarians have never understood this), (2) gross negligence (e.g. when a media outlet recklessly shares a narrative which turns out to be untrue or exaggerated and damages other persons or entities), and (3) fraud—scams inevitably damage scores of people and institutions.

The correct procedure for defamation ought to be (but isn’t in all jurisdictions) where the plaintiff merely shows that significant consequential damage has occurred or will inevitably occur (e.g., a school teacher falsely accused of being a sexual predator), and that what was conveyed was untrue. It is absurd to put the onus of proving the defendant’s intent on the plaintiff, which some jurisdictions unreasonably require. It’s equally ludicrous to give special protections only to those operating under a so-called journalism license—governments should not be able to license who is and who isn’t media in the first place.

The defendant’s onus must be to try and show, first, that what was said was not false in any way, which by itself would be complete protection and result in an acquittal, and, failing that, that significant consequential damage did not occur, and, in such a case, also that it was an honest error on their part (a reversal of onus). It’s nonsensical to separate human beings between public figures and the rest, at law, as though public figures are less entitled to a protection of their reputation. All must be equal before the law.

In other words, the defendant is acquitted if what was said was either true or that they take the onus of showing both that the consequential damage, if any, was insignificant, and that they had no intent to spread a damaging falsehood.

In the EU, however, citizens who merely share even true posts innocently (about the nature of Islam for instance), can be subject to criminal prosecutions.

What I am proposing is that the plaintiff’s ability to encompass those who merely share should be constrained by a requirement of an onus that they intentionally shared a falsehood or did so recklessly. This would discourage plaintiffs from pursuing those who innocently share a story but would not bar them from pursuing those who originate the lie, even negligently.

Thus, those who merely share posts on social media would be let off, unless the plaintiff demonstrated that they did so knowingly or recklessly, and that significant consequential damage did occur as a result—that reversal of onus here is meant to make it onerous for plaintiffs to enjoin third parties (who merely share a post) in a lawsuit.

E.g., If a parent or a pupil knowingly and falsely claims on social media that a teacher is a pedophile, and other parents recklessly share it without question, then we have a case for enjoining such reckless adults in a lawsuit initiated by the teacher.

In this manner, a market can oust the wolf-criers and the fraudsters (1) by compensating a reputation for serious journalism with subscription dollars (citizens voting with their wallets) or frequent visitations triggering ad revenue and (2) by massive jury-led punitive penalties over and above consequential damages suffered by plaintiffs due to the falsehoods. The market would reward the good guys and punish the evil and the reckless. Neither the government of the day nor a State-appointed media regulator need have any policing role at all.

What kind of a government benefits from controlling information? A fascist one.

But the media market has never been free of government meddling. And now the left-liberal media is turning to governments and the UN to silence their critics.

What kind of a government benefits from controlling information? A fascist one. And now, with fascism rising all over the world, information control is getting to a scary level.

 

Fascism

But what’s a fascist government? In Ayn Rand’s words:

Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

In the West, the government power is not total (yet), but they are exerting an enormous influence over private contracting and private enterprises. Such enterprises include all media including social media. They include publishing and filmmaking industries. They include every sphere of influence over public opinion, and some—even toddlers as young as three are targeted. E.g., they include public libraries which may be using your taxpayer money to facilitate drag queens encouraging gender dysphoria among toddlers.

As Fox News reports:

New York is showering taxpayer funds on a group that sends drag queens into city schools—often without parental knowledge or consent—even as parents in other states protest increasingly aggressive efforts to expose kids to gender-bending performers.

A pernicious influence is also being exerted on public education at all levels—school, college, and university—refer “Why Education Must Be Freed From ‘Social Engineering’” and “Are ‘Grievance Studies’ a Scientific Hoax?”

And every middle-sized and large corporation, every money manager, every bank, is now subject to the absurdities of “Stakeholder Capitalism,” which is a Trojan horse for increased fascism.

This immoral influence is set to expand its reach by the pretend war on “fake news” that began in 2016 after Hillary Clinton lost the un-lose-able election.

 

It’s MDM, not Fake News

Well, it’s not news if it’s not true, so “fake news” was never a good term. Yet, in 2017, the phrase “fake news” was named word of the year by Collins Dictionary.

When he became president, Donald Trump successfully retaliated against the neo-Marxist-media purveyors of fake news by calling them out as the fabricators. For once, a term coined by the left-liberals was turned against them rather than the other way around. Soon, both sides of the political aisle were name-calling with the “fake news” epithet hurled often at opponents.

In 2017, the overall usage of the term was up 365% over 2016.

But even by February 2017, Claire Wardle was already arguing in First Draft that:

By now we’ve all agreed the term “fake news” is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase.

By October 2017, Daniel Funke of Poynter was saying in “Should we stop saying ‘fake news’?”:

Beyond its definitional ambiguity, there’s the fact that fake news has been become a popular mechanism by which politicians discredit the media.

In July 2018, Chris Ratcliffe argued in The Conversation that the term ‘fake news’ is doing great harm.

So began the search for new terminology. Nation-states are now at war with “MDM”—Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation. Here are the new definitions, as per the newly set up U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency:

Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.

Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.

But is MDM damaging to free speech? And to democracy? As the establishment media claims?

But is MDM damaging to free speech? And to democracy? As the establishment media claims? Can a celebrity cause a catastrophe by publishing an opinion about COVID-19 as the United Nations claims? Not in a free society.

To use Rand’s precise expression:

The right of free speech means the freedom to advocate one’s views and to bear the possible consequences, including disagreement with others, opposition, unpopularity and lack of support. The political function of “the right of free speech” is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression.

[Emphasis mine. Note: Rand does not include the consequences of civil lawsuits in the quote, but I do suggest them above as a required deterrent].

Governments, though, via their war on MDM, in collusion with the UN, are doing precisely the reverse—they are ostracizing dissenters, stripping them of their well-earned audiences and sources of income, pushing them into a social Gulag to leave no room for opposing opinions save the mild disagreements that create an illusion of free speech.

 

The War on MDM

In the United States, a new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) was established in 2018. CISA was created to “work across public and private sectors, challenging traditional ways of doing business by engaging with government, industry, academic, and international partners.”

CISA’s task is to build a “national resilience to MDM and foreign influence.” CISA is directed to help the American people understand the scope and scale of MDM activities targeting elections and critical infrastructure. CISA has also set up a rumor-control page, which offers the public a “trusted voice” (trusted…by whom? And why?)—it employs “credible messengers” (credible? By what standards?), which are “most effective at disproving falsehoods.”

CISA encourages Americans to “report real-time MDM” to misinformation@cisecurity.org because “Foreign and domestic actors can use MDM campaigns to cause anxiety, fear, and confusion. These actors are ultimately seeking to interfere with and undermine our democratic institutions.” [Emphasis mine].

In other words, if you dissent from our narratives, you are a domestic or foreign “actor;” your opinion or reporting causes anxiety, fear, and confusion and you undermine trust in government-controlled information and our NGOs.

At least Lebanon honestly calls it a “Ministry of Information.” This ministry has partnered with “WHO, UNICEF and UNDP to counter the spread of COVID-19 misinformation in Lebanon.”

The U.K. government has set up the National Security Communications Unit, which is tasked with “combating disinformation by state actors and others.” That decision came amid an investigation into Russia’s reported use of fake social media accounts to spread misinformation about the Brexit referendum.

A tagline for a 1984 film was “You can blame the night, blame the wine, blame the moon in her eyes, but when all else fails…you better…Blame it on Russia!” It was Rio back then, but nowadays Russia is the Fall Guy for everything that defeats the neo-Marxists—inflation, a 2016 Trump victory, Brexit…and…the Russian flu pandemic? (Not yet).

Even the leftist e-zine The Conversation was warning: The “British government’s new ‘anti-fake news’ unit has been tried before—and it got out of hand” (it was a Cold-War-era tactic).

In July 2019, the U.K.’s education and health Secretaries announced that “there would be new content added to schools’ curricula aimed at teaching kids how to spot misinformation online.” Oh yes, schoolchildren—we have to indoctrinate them young. California has already passed a law to enhance “media literacy” in schools.

In 2018, Sweden set up a “psychological defense authority” (wow, what a term) to combat disinformation. In 2019, Singapore criminalized the dissemination of false information online. In Saudi Arabia, you can get five years in prison for spreading fake news online.

In democracies from Germany, Denmark, and France to India, Canada, and Australia, an all-out war on MDM is on.

Not to be outdone, in May 2019, even Russia announced “plans to launch a public database of news it flags as “fake,” the head of Russia’s powerful media regulator announced two months after President Vladimir Putin signed a law criminalizing the spread of ‘fake news.’”

In democracies from Germany, Denmark, and France to India, Canada, and Australia, an all-out war on MDM is on.

 

Let the Courts Decide

In every case, the government has appropriated the authority to determine truth either to itself or to a “trusted” fact-checker NGO. But, as the New York Post Editorial Board said in December 2021: “The fact-check industry is funded by liberal moguls such as George Soros, government-funded nonprofits and the tech giants themselves” (see: Facebook admits the truth: ‘Fact checks’ are really just (lefty) opinion).

Such NGOs assume that experts who benefit from the government’s research-funding largesse (the way to power and prestige) are in fact independent and that what they say is the truth.

In a Western court of law, facts need either to be jointly admitted by both sides, or, when contested, argued in front of a jury accepted by all litigants as unbiased. This is why climate activists fear court action, they cannot justify their climate beliefs as facts in a court of law.

The State itself is the largest purveyor of disinformation.

The State itself is the largest purveyor of disinformation. Government-encouraged scams include the greatest scam of all time, and government-funded rackets include the climate racket, both of which severely undermine the world economy. What’s the motivation? Politicians are most interested in aggrandizing their power, prestige, fame, and wealth. If the truth got out there that the free market works, there would be far fewer politicians, far fewer laws, and most certainly far less power, prestige, fame, and wealth for doing “public service.”

 

Conclusion

Most of what is censored is opinion, which can be well-reasoned or otherwise, rather than true or fake. Ayn Rand would have been appalled by the international coalition of governments, NGOs, the UN, and establishment media seeking to suppress dissenting opinions.

Fake news can be minimized by giving the citizens access to punitive prosecution when they become victims of a lie.  It’s then in the media business’s self-interest to verify what it publishes, to win over readers/listeners/viewers and to avoid prosecution.

The nation-states’ benevolent-sounding clarion call to eradicate fake news is nothing but an all-out assault on free speech, a means of silencing dissent.

 

 

 

The author’s views are his own and do not purport to stand for Savvy Street as a whole. This author would like to thank Donna Paris and Roger E. Bissell for edits and comments on a prior draft.

 

 

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