from the well,-if-that's-what-it-takes dept

MAGA World’s Belief In Their Made Up Claim That Biden Is ‘Censoring’ Conservatives On Social Media May Kill KOSA

MAGA world’s false belief that Joe Biden is “censoring conservatives” on social media may actually kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we mentioned earlier this week, while KOSA has already passed the Senate and advanced in a different form out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there were still big concerns among House leadership that likely prevented the bill from moving forward.

Some of those concerns were legit and some were not. It appears that House Leadership is leaning in on the concerns based on a myth that they made up and apparently now believe to be true.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise made it clear that House leadership has some problems with the bill, in an interview with the Washington Times:

Mr. Scalise said there would not be action on the legislation before the Nov. 5 election and declined to predict whether it could advance later this year before the current Congress ends. He said he’s provided feedback to Energy and Commerce members leading the bills, and “everybody’s going to keep working,” but the concerns raised by various ideological GOP caucuses are “important to note.”

Among the outstanding concerns is that the bills, particularly KOSA, give too much power to the executive branch to regulate online content.

“You want to protect kids, but you don’t want to give more ability to the Biden administration to censor conservatives. And unfortunately, they’ve abused these powers in the past,” Mr. Scalise said. “And so you got to narrow it. You got to focus it just on kids.”

This is somewhat hilarious and stupid. Yes, KOSA could be used for censorship, which is why we’ve spent years calling out its many flaws. But the claim that the “Biden administration” has “abused these powers in the past” to “censor conservatives” is a myth. It’s a myth made up by the MAGA world.

We’ve gone over this before. Multiple studies have found no evidence to support the claims that social media companies engaged in politically biased content removals. Indeed, many of the studies have found that sites actually adjusted the rules to give Trump supporters more leeway in breaking the rules to avoid even the false appearance of bias.

Then there are the false claims that the Biden administration, in particular, engaged in censorship of conservatives. But that’s made-up fantasyland nonsense based on a misunderstanding of reality. It is true that the administration requested that social media companies do a better job dealing with COVID and election misinformation. However, the companies basically all either pushed back on those requests or ignored them entirely.

As the Supreme Court made clear in its Murthy ruling, there’s a huge difference between using the bully pulpit of the Presidency to encourage certain activities (perfectly legal and expected) and illegally coercing speech suppression (which would violate the First Amendment). The Supreme Court noted that the lower courts had mixed those things up, as had the plaintiffs in that case.

As the majority of the Court noted, all of the moderation scenarios presented in the lawsuit seemed perfectly normal content moderation decisions that platforms always make, exercising their own editorial discretion. The scenarios showed no signs of interference or coercion from the administration.

We reject this overly broad assertion. As already discussed, the platforms moderated similar content long before any of the Government defendants engaged in the challenged conduct. In fact, the platforms, acting independently, had strengthened their pre-existing content-moderation policies before the Government defendants got involved….

This evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.

Yet, MAGA world still wants to insist that this myth is true. They made up the myth whole cloth based on a cluelessness with trust & safety.

And now that myth might kill KOSA. Yay?

To be clear, there are all sorts of reasons that KOSA should go away. It includes problematic censorial powers that could be abused by any administration seeking to remove content for ideological reasons. And there are principled reasons why Republicans should reject KOSA. Senator Rand Paul recently laid out a compelling argument for why KOSA is bad that had nothing to do with culture war nonsense or made up fairy tales.

But here, it appears that the GOP’s leadership may have played themselves into making the right call for the right underlying reasons (the censorship powers), but based on a near total misunderstanding of how the world actually works.