A majority of “Americans” now support online government censorship, according to new polling research from Pew. The Pew Research Center has been tracking American attitudes toward freedom of speech and online censorship for the past five years. Republican attitudes are virtually unchanged from 2018 when Pew first began tracking this. The totalitarian left, on the other hand, is now all-in on tyranny. They think that the government that they control should be the sole arbiter of truth online.
Pew conducted the survey in June and interviewed 5,000 adults. The question they asked was whether the US government “should take steps to restrict false information, even if it limits freedom of information,” or whether “Freedom of information should be protected, even if it means false information can be published.”
When Pew first asked this in 2018, Republicans and Democrats were equally split about 60-40 in favor of freedom of speech. We agreed equally that freedom of information was more important than the fact that false info could be published on the internet. Republicans were 60-37 in favor of freedom of speech in 2018, and Democrats were 57-40.
This started to shift dramatically after the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. When Republican voters realized the lengths that the government was willing to go to in order to suppress factual evidence of voter fraud, the number in favor of free speech went up. When Pew asked the question in 2021, a whopping 70% of Republicans favored free speech, compared to 28% of Republicans in opposition.
The Democrats, realizing that they had totally just benefited from the stolen election, suddenly shifted and started opposing freedom of speech online by a big margin. They wanted all the evidence about the stolen election suppressed, and they didn’t care if it was the FBI, the CIA, or the Department of Agriculture that was doing the censoring. Their rate in 2021 was suddenly 65% opposed to freedom of speech, while just 34% were in favor.
Fast-forward to 2023, and the numbers are even worse. Republicans were back to a 59-39 split in favor of freedom of speech. 70% of Democrats now favor government censorship online, compared to 28% who oppose government censorship. As long as they’re the ones holding the power to censor, they love the idea of being able to shut us up online.
How well has government censorship worked against so-called “misinformation” anyway? We have some perfect examples from the COVID-19 pandemic.
One instance, of course, is the communist obedience thongs that everyone was expected to wear on their faces. Masks don’t protect against respiratory viruses like colds, cases of flu, or coronaviruses. Every doctor could have told you this. Yet every doctor who tried to say that online was censored by the US government colluding with the tech companies.
Remember social distancing? That idea was retarded!
“Stand on a piece of tape, and everyone will be safe!”
Doctors were censored by the government for pointing out that social distancing was ludicrous and had no science behind it. Doctors were censored from talking about effective treatments like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Doctors were censored for talking about all their patients who were developing sudden neurological disorders or myocarditis after they got the injection of government health juice. The list goes on and on.
The “conspiracy theorists” got everything right about COVID and the vaccines. The conclusion from that is pretty clear. Allowing the government to decide what is true and what is false is a terrible idea for our civilization. If a majority of Americans oppose freedom of speech, how much longer are we going to have this civil right?
