Washington Post and Other Mainstream Outlets Flip the Script on Free-Speech After Being Censored Themselves
The Twitter Files journalists, Republican members of Congress, and conservative activists have been persecuting misinformation and disinformation researchers, say the mainstream news media. They have been falsely accusing people like Renée Diresta of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Kate Starbird of the University of Washington of censorship, the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, PBS, NPR, The Guardian, Daily Beast, Tech Crunch, and many other publications have argued. Diresta and Starbird, those outlets claim, were merely helping social media platforms detect dangerous forms of misinformation and disinformation, which could lead to real-world harm.
By contrast, in its story on the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices, the Washington Post expresses great skepticism of Big Tech and sympathy for the people censored. “Meta said in a blog post this week that the company had fixed bugs that prevented some users’ posts, ephemeral videos known as Stories, and short-form videos known as Reels from showing up properly,” wrote Nix, Lorenz, and Oremus. “But not all Palestinian-focused social media users buy Meta’s explanation.” Yet, the Washington Post has also specifically published at least four long articles dismissing the censorship revealed by the Twitter Files and Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, which is headed to the Supreme Court.Lorenz specifically has repeatedly demanded greater censorship in order to protect journalists from “online mobs,” “online harassment,” the “online incel movement,” “misogyny,” “unchecked misrepresentations,” and much else. In early 2022, Lorenz defended a proposed government censorship board, eventually killed by the Biden Administration after it sparked outrage, and claimed it was killed due to “disinformation.”
Tech Crunch similarly dismissed concerns around censorship raised by Twitter Files authors earlier this year as nothing more than hen-pecking over content moderation; it has criticized content moderation of disfavored Palestinian voices. The Twitter Files, argued Devin Coldeway, show Twitter’s content moderation “team grappling with evolving circumstances and figuring out in real time how the company should respond.” Contrast that to its story from the previous week, headlined, “Meta has a moderation bias problem, not just a ‘bug,’ that’s suppressing Palestinian voices.” Suppressing? The article explains “It’s the latest in a lengthy history of incidents on Meta platforms that reflect an inherent bias against Palestinian users.”
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