Democrats say they hate misinformation. The party has become so obsessed with controlling speech that it has a website devoted to snooping on what people say online.
Under “comparative social media analysis,” for example, the Democrats write, “Social media has quickly become a major source of news for Americans. In a 2022 survey, half of Americans reported getting news from social media often or sometimes—including 31% of Americans from Facebook, 25% from YouTube, and 14% from Twitter1. Despite huge numbers of Americans turning to social media for news, major social media companies haven’t done enough to take responsibility for information quality on their sites. As quickly as these sites have become destinations for news seekers, they have just as quickly become large propagators of disinformation and propaganda.
The DNC is working with major social media companies to combat platform manipulation and train our campaigns on how best to secure their accounts and protect their brands against disinformation. While progress has been made since the 2016 elections, social media companies still have much to do to reduce the spread of disinformation and combat malicious activity. Social media companies are ultimately responsible for combating abuse and disinformation on their systems, but as an interested party, we’ve compiled this comparative policy analysis to present social media companies with additional potential solutions.”
While the party may say they are fighting “disinformation” in an attempt to “defend democracy,” what they really mean is they want to use censors to shut down criticism. Nothing reveals that impulse more than how Democrats react when misinformation by the media helps them.
On Thursday evening, they showed it in full force when the Associated Press deleted a tweet purposely misconstruing something J.D. Vance said about school shootings during a rally, writes The Daily Caller.
The tweet linked to an article about Vance, implying that he’d called school shootings a “fact of life” shortly after a deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia on Wednesday. The AP replaced the story roughly 90 minutes with correct context, that Vance said he “laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and says the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage” like the attack in Georgia.
Community Notes called out The AP’s original tweet for the “misleading headline,” including an accurate quote.
Despite The AP’s retraction of the original tweet, both Vice President Kamala Harris’s and her running-mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, still have posts up that completely misrepresent Vance’s statement to their combined 22.1 million followers.
“Kamala wants to take security out of our schools instead of protecting our children. Instead of addressing her own failures, she lies about what I said,” Vance told his followers. “More desperation from the biggest fraud in American politics.”
School shootings are not just a fact of life.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children—and we will. https://t.co/Oi8s9MfgvU
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) September 6, 2024
This is pathetic. We can’t quit on our kids — they deserve better. https://t.co/ozYdvpDJ4u
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) September 6, 2024
Of course, Hillary Clinton also jumped in on the dishonesty.
We know regular mass shootings aren’t a “fact of life” (Vance) or something we just “have to get over” (Trump) because they weren’t always a daily reality in America.
We CAN have safer communities.
Don’t stop demanding action to get them.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 6, 2024
Liberal misinformation has gotten so bad that even The New York Times wrote that it was “having a moment” this year.
“Several elected officials, along with a top political aide for the billionaire Reid Hoffman, recently suggested, without proof, that former President Donald J. Trump may have staged an attempt to assassinate him in July.
Mark Hamill, an actor and advocate for Democratic causes with more than five million followers on X, criticized a conservative policy proposal by railing against ideas that were not part of the document.
And last month, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign misleadingly suggested, in posts viewed millions of times, that Mr. Trump was confused about his whereabouts during a campaign stop. Her followers seized on the posts to claim that Mr. Trump was suffering from cognitive decline.
For years, the discussion about misinformation online has focused on falsehoods circulating on the American right. But in recent weeks, a flurry of conspiracy theories and false narratives have also been swirling on the left.”
Misinformation researchers told The Times that they fear that the new spate of left-leaning conspiracy theories will further polarize political discourse. Over a third of Joe Biden supporters believed the assassination attempt against Donald Trump may have been staged, according to a poll in July by Morning Consult.
No one should be surprised that Harris and Walz are happy to push misinformation when it suits them. Democratic operatives began pushing the theory almost immediately following the assassination attempt.
[Read More: Liz Cheney Outs Herself]