In a NY Times piece they state:
President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of Covid-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems. A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.
Who decides what is misinformation? What right does the SG have to act this way? Frankly this is a chilling act amidst the Ukrainian savagery. They are asking the tech platforms to seek out and determine what they think is misinformation. That is an impossible task and a chilling one in terms of Free Speech!
In fact, the more one thinks of this the more chilling it becomes. It is the antithesis of a free society and against all principles of science. Science is a give and take as information changes. What competence does one have in the woke tech folks in California? Is the intent to silence, to intimidate, to control, the eliminate?
Take vaccine information. Yes it seems to work, but there are an infinite number of unknowns we still do not have answers to. If one poses one of these questions, is one then to be hunted down as some heretic! Are we bringing back stakes and fires, metaphorically I hope, but in reality if one looks at Ukraine. Trust is going and when gone what have we left.
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