A poll from Pew Research Center released last week shows that a majority of Americans don’t value free speech as a fundamental right. When asked whether the government should restrict free speech online as a means of curbing misinformation, 55 percent of Americans said it should. Even worse, 65 percent of Americans believe tech companies should censor misinformation — as though the unelected oligarchs in Silicon Valley are more trustworthy than the elected oligarchs in Washington, D.C.
As one might expect, there was a stark difference in responses when they were broken down by political affiliation. Whereas 39 percent of Republicans approved of restricting online speech, 70 percent of Democrats supported the idea, contradicting the “liberal” label that Democrat supporters often use to describe themselves. Writer and journalist Alex Berenson dolefully concluded, “The left — the entire left, readers and writers, consumers and producers of information — is clearly losing confidence in the First Amendment, telling itself a tale of the dangers of too much speech, and trying to wall off opinions and even facts it does not like.”
It wasn’t always this way. Only five years ago, 40 percent of Democrat-leaning respondents approved of restricting free speech online, on par with 37 percent of Republican-leaning respondents. Something happened in society that swayed a significant portion of leftist Americans to flip their position on free speech.
Overdrive Campaign Against ‘Misinformation’
It’s no mystery what this event was: the catastrophic response to Covid-19. Even though the mass campaigns against misinformation started happening after Donald Trump’s
