Government should not be the information police

The late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made an astute statement on the role of government in managing citizens. He wrote: “It is not our government’s job to keep citizens from making mistakes; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from making mistakes. ”That mindset served the United States well for nearly two and a half centuries.

Judge Jackson would have been shocked and saddened to see the results of a recent Pew Research Center poll that assessed public perception of the government’s role in controlling false information. The poll shows that nearly half of Americans (48 percent) support the government in taking action to limit misinformation in the public. Worse, these Americans are willing to submit to government information control even if it means losing the freedom to access and post content.

Justice Jackson was a shrewd and independent thinker in his day. In 1942 he was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Franklin Roosevelt. He is the last Supreme Court judge who has not graduated from law school. He was named United States Chief Prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi War Criminals by President Truman – and received praise for his administration of this unexplored area of ​​law. Because of his experience in persecuting Nazis, Jackson knew the dangers of the flow of information determined or restricted by dictatorial regimes.

Jackson’s quote that government does not play a role in keeping citizens from making mistakes is consistent with the thinking of the nation’s constituents. In particular, the nation’s founders feared that monarchs could unilaterally determine what information and ideas were approved for consumption by citizens. So the founders created a republic that restricted this government. The Pew poll respondents who trust the government to decide what is “wrong” are abandoning basic philosophies on which the First Amendment was drawn up. Nobody should assume that the government has sufficient knowledge of what information is actually “wrong”, or even less, needs to be restricted. In addition, the government itself can and has often been the dissemination of false information.

The First Amendment was introduced with the assurance that free citizens who debate robustly will ultimately be able to tell right from wrong. Founding father Thomas Jefferson said that a free people could “tolerate any mistake as long as reason remains free to fight it.” A free press and citizens who express themselves freely can combat misinformation in society more effectively than politicians or government bureaucrats. The First Amendment was created primarily to give citizens the opportunity to examine the information landscape and to request “information” from the authorities.

Only the darkest people in a culture support spreading false information, but that is not the main concern here. The question is how a society separates the wrong from the sensible and who is allowed to act as arbitrator.

Heads of government, no matter how noble, are still highly selfish and certainly have no sense of common sense or reality. The truthfulness or falseness of information is not always clear, as Americans certainly know in these confusing times. The picture of reality is pretty blurry today in national affairs, from Afghanistan to COVID logs to rising crime rates and so on.

World War II challenged the United States in a tougher way than anything we see today. A recent study by the Library of Congress reported that it was around this time that the Office of War Information became aware of the massive rumors and misinformation floating around the nation. The OWI admitted that its own lack of transparency gave rise to speculation and rumors. The organizers of the OWI reacted with greater openness and wrote at the time: “Rumors can be converted into a positive value if they are viewed as a guide to information gaps that need to be filled – not through denial of rumors, but through intensive information programs.”

Americans of all political leanings should be concerned when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki proudly announces the government’s efforts to “flag” Facebook any pandemic news that contradicts White House-approved content, as she did earlier this summer Has. Worse, these efforts are done in collaboration with social media channels. Instead of labeling it as disinformation material, which the White House does not like, the government should simply use its giant megaphone to bring its own perspective into the public dialogue. If this rhetoric is convincing enough, the White House needn’t worry.

The censorship of unwanted content only works if it is accompanied by the hammer of authoritarianism. Free societies address questionable content with debate and more information, but it seems like 48 percent of Americans have yet to grasp the term.

Jeffrey McCall is a media critic and professor of communications at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, newspaper reporter and political media advisor. Follow him on Twitter @Prof_McCall.