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Editorial Roundup: United States

inquirer.com · 7d · first reportShare

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad: ___ July 31 The Washington Post says democracy doesn't require truth police It became fashionable a few years ago for people to blame “misinformation” for others holding views they find wrongheaded. Social media platforms, sometimes jawboned by the federal government, invoked this supposed crisis to justify censorship, especially during the pandemic. This insulted the intelligence of the American people, who can make up their own minds without being told what to think. A new study explores how exposure to “misinformation” on social media affected voters in 2020. The answer, drawn from a three-month experiment on nearly 16,000 users, is very little. Academics received rare access to internal data from Facebook and Instagram. They considered “problematic” content anything posted by sources that Meta’s third-party fact-checkers had repeatedly flagged for spreading falsehoods. That material turns out to have reached a small,