How Are Social Media Companies Supposed to Handle Government-Sponsored Misinformation?

Plus: Joseph Kennedy losing in Massachusetts, the White House is preparing an eviction moratorium, and more…

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason.com

The trouble with anointing Twitter and Facebook as gatekeepers of coronavirus truth. This is not a post about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on COVID-19 being wrong. It is a post about the possibility that the CDC could be wrong—as any government agency or respected private authority might be—about some aspects of the coronavirus, and about how we address government-sponsored misinformation on social media.

In the past few years, a lot of Americans have decided that it’s the responsibility of popular tech platforms and apps to police the truth for their users. In a fog of notions about Russia and right-wing trolls, many left-leaning lawmakers, pundits, and politically active social media users demanded that Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk “fact-check” certain types of information, prioritize content from selected media and government sources, and downplay or entirely suppress content that counters experts’ claims.

Continue Reading at Reason.com…