A pair of university professors are urging Democratic President-elect Joe Biden to create a presidential “misinformation commission” to counter the spread of right-wing “lies.”
In an opinion piece published by the Hill on Tuesday, professors Bill Adair and Philip Napoli, both of whom are public policy instructors at Duke University, argued that the recent storming of the U. S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters proves the need for a government panel to decide what speech ought to be permitted.
“Last week’s attack on the U. S. Capitol was based on lies,” they wrote, adding: “The mob that stormed the building was acting on a tidal wave of misinformation about the election that was spread by the president, his fellow Republicans and their supporters using a web of partisan media outlets, social media and the dark corners of the internet.”
“The lies flourished despite an extraordinary amount of debunking by fact-checkers and Washington journalists. But that fact-checking didn’t persuade the mob that stormed the Capitol — nor did it dissuade millions of other supporters of the president. Fed a steady diet of repetitive falsehoods by elected officials and partisan outlets, they believed the lies so much that they were driven to violence,” they continued.
In the op-ed, Adair, who is the founding editor of the well-known fact-checking website PolitiFact, admitted that recent attempts to censor speech have failed, writing, “… (Read more)
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