Is disinformation protected by the 1st Amendment?

[UltraBudgie]

It just becomes such a confusing, suffocating mess. For example, on Facebook you can say "Zionism is poisoning Israel", because that's pretty clearly a political opinion and is not using Zionism as an antisemetic proxy-term for Jew. But, you can't say "Zionism is poisoning American media", or "Zionism is poisoning American politics", because that buys into the antisemetic trope of Jews running the world or controlling the media; clear proxy-term there. You could say "Zionism is unsustainable", because that's an opinion on a political movement, but you can't say "Zionism is invalid", because that's a denial of existence for a protected class. Policy

It gets even worse when you start talking about enemies of the American state. None of the platforms want to allow support of terrorism. For example, Facebook bans this:


Not because of antisemitism, but because of community standards on dangerous individuals and organisations. Source

And there's the crux: what falls under that umbrella?  Well, Facebook's policy is that it includes "entities and individuals designated by the United States government as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) or Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs)" Policy

The author made the point:

This is indistinct from government censorship. If the US government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of US wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with US law, then the US government is just censoring speech which criticizes US warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.

So this is straying a bit from the topic of mis/mal/dis information specifically, but the exact same dynamic is being played out there as it is with hate speech and support for extremism. We've seen attempts to create government boards to determine exactly what is and isn't disinformation, and tech media companies are pulled before Congress and browbeat in various ways to get them to accept an authoritative source in their policy operations. Certainly during COVID the red line on what was acceptable speech for public safety was set by government entities.

All this is akin to government-mandated infringement of free speech, just with more steps. And as the graph I posted on page 1 shows, the American public is increasingly conforming to view it favourably.