Billionaires promote their favored speech to tilt the free marketplace of ideas

Saying bad ideas are bad isn't censorship. The core goal is a free and fair public debate.

Earlier this week the U.S. State Department announced they would be fighting “censorship” by revoking visas from people who are studying misinformation and online hate. But this is just a part of a bigger plan, a plan that involves many parts of the American rightwing world — driven by the billionaires who fund the US right. This discussion of free speech may all seem unrelated to science and medical research, but in fact it affects science worldwide.

There is a direct line between Marco Rubio now weaponizing the government against “censorship,” Jay Bhattacharya crying “censorship,” Michael Shellenberger lying on Substack about “censorship,” and the ongoing destruction of our public health, vaccine, and science infrastructure.

Norman Rockwell, “Freedom of Speech,” the first of four paintings about FDR’s Four Freedoms

First, real talk about the root issue: Today’s neofascist oligarch political movements, who seek to concentrate power into the hands of a few billionaires and their lackeys, require lies and propaganda. That’s why Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch own the New York Post, Fox, and the Wall Street Journal, why Phil Anschutz owns the Washington Examiner which is widely circulated inside Congress, why Saudi Arabian and Qatari oligarchs and Larry Ellison helped Musk buy Twitter, why Charles Koch funds pro-Trump media like the Daily Caller, why after WarnerBrosDiscovery took over under David Zaslav and his patron, billionaire John C. Malone, CNN fired John Harwood and Brian Stelter and elevated a former Daily Caller reporter, why Paul Singer’s Manhattan Institute funds City Journal, and why conservative pink slime outlets exist.

Because they depend on misinformation, the power of oligarchs is threatened by any action that makes public debate better, fairer, or more truthful.

That is the reason why the US right systematically campaigns against “censorship” and fights any efforts to block or even study misinformation. It’s about preserving their ability to pay for propaganda. That’s why House Republicans came after Nina Jankowicz and Renee DiResta.

And while rightwing billionaire mouthpieces scream “censorship” and demand free speech, what they want is to boost their own speech, to tilt the marketplace of ideas. Elon Musk, Murdoch, Thiel, and Koch all know that “free speech” principles can be weaponized to elevate speech they like. That can be done by publishing or interviewing people whose ideas they like. Or by using feed algorithms or changing AI language model outputs to boost ideas they like, as Musk has done on Twitter.

This reason — weaponizing free speech to drown out speech they don’t like and preserve their ability to boost their ideas with money — is why Koch funded FIRE and a “free speech” project at the Atlantic, why FIRE was founded as a SPN (rightwing thinktank) member, and why at Koch donor summits discuss the progress of their “free speech” efforts. And why the Bradley Foundation gave Bhattacharya a “free speech” prize along with a few hundred thousand dollars.

Free speech is a vital right. It was one of FDR’s Four Freedoms and we should not give that up: the government should not suppress speech, and not retaliate against people for speech.

But freedom of speech isn’t the same as freedom of reach. When the focus is on the unfettered ability for money to promote selected individual speech, any effort to improve platforms and media can be spun as censorship[1]. This is also why Stephen Miller and his billionaire-backed law chopshop (Am First Legal) is suing Renee DiResta. These efforts are all about preserving billionaire oligarchs’ ability to influence public debate with money[2].

And now back to science: Billionaires also found during Covid that they could make scientists villains and divide the country (to get votes) by lying about public health and vaccines. American oligarchs also want to protect their ability to spread those lies.

Jay Bhattacharya is nothing special, he’s just a vessel and a tool the billionaires elevated, via money and by putting him on TV and podcasts, because he helped them by lying about science.

It’s useful for him to scream “censorship” falsely[3] because it helps protect their ability to lie.

So all these four cases in the first line here are connected — and the underlying cause is oligarch power and agenda. Seeing that and talking about it is important.

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[1] The hard-right libertarians on the Roberts Supreme Court have also realized they can weaponize free speech, perverting it, to achieve their political goals. More on that in a later post.

[2] More left and liberal organizations should help fight back against these “free speech for me” efforts.

[3] What happened to Jay Bhattacharya is that his views were wrong, other scientists told him so, and he failed to persuade the scientific community using data. But rightwing money elevated his views, which is why we are still talking about them. To say it most simply: Bhattacharya wasn’t censored, he was just wrong. His ideas about herd immunity were bad, and so he failed to persuade people. Scientific institutions should reject views like that, and platforms should not elevate them. Imagine the quacks from one hundred years ago who sold bad elixirs that killed people saying “We were censored when scientific groups and the FDA said our products were deadly.” The FDA, scientific societies, and medical societies can and should say speech like that is junk science that kills people. Same for Bhattacharya — his junk science would have killed people if adopted, and the scientific community was right to say his views were fringe.

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From the MAD team: We are happy to share this guest post from Mark Histed, one of the MAD co-founders. Mark is a neuroscientist and policy researcher. Cross-posted with permission from the Science and Freedom Alliance blog. Mark is writing in his personal capacity about issues of public concern, and this does not represent the views of any government agency or organization.

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