The end of democracy, basically: Supreme Court allows White House to press social media companies to remove disinformation | CNN Politics

Anything someone in government labels “misinformation” or “disinformation” is fair for the government to censor, even the spreading of true facts. The ruling seems to be based on a “lack of standing” of those who sued, which seems to be a technical issue.

But … it seems to imply that we can no longer trust anything we hear – in the media, or the social media, as the government may have, behind the scenes, directed the story spin or even urged the elimination of countering perspectives. No one can ever be trusted, nothing that is said can be trusted since the government now has the right to control speech in online media.

I am a free speech absolutist[1]. I will not vote for anyone who argues that dissenting speech of others must be controlled.

[1] I do not support, nor does existing law, defamatory speech, or hate speech, or “shouting fire in a theater” when there is no fire. There are also problems, with defining what constitutes “hate speech”, however. In the above case, American citizens were prohibited from posting true information online – by the government pressuring social media to censor their content – because their perspective disagreed with government experts (who were wrong). In some cases, the government falsely said the American accounts were “foreigners” – and therefore, justified censorship of that speech – even though the posts came from actual Americans. Apparently, the court ruled that the parties who sued lacked “legal standing”, so the precedent of government-imposed censorship seems to stand, for now.