The leftist taxpayer-funded Voice of America is very concerned about the spread of “misinformation” amid the 2024 presidential election. The outlet is so concerned about the spread of online hate that they are contributing to the fight by spreading hate against political dissidents and Israel.
Investigative Reporter Matthew Kupfer wrote a Feb. 13 piece for VOA headlined “Will Disinformation Disrupt the 2024 US Elections?” Shockingly, the piece is nothing more than an excuse for another tirade against social media companies for supposedly not censoring enough speech that VOA found objectionable. Tellingly, VOA itself has perpetrated the same kind of online “disinformation” environment it accused others like former President Donald Trump of creating.
Kupfer claimed that the fight against disinformation began in 2016 when Russia supposedly tried to influence the 2016 election. One of the ways the insidious Russians accomplished this brazen offense was through the use of “a Russian ‘troll factory’” which allegedly “created thousands of social media accounts” to influence Americans. Yet, according to doom-mongered Kupfer, the U.S. is still not properly inoculated against wrongthink. “Eight years later, as Americans prepare to select their president for the next four years in November,” the outlet claimed, “some experts believe the U.S. is no better positioned to block disinformation than it was in 2016.”
Kupfer continued to cry wolf about disinformation. “They say that the problem has grown bigger, politics has entered discussions of disinformation, and social media companies are increasingly backing off content moderation,” cried Kupfer. Kupfer is outraged that social media companies don’t tell people what to think.
But VOA is hardly one to pass judgment about “disinformation.” In fact, the media organization has a history of white-washing anti-Semitism through its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The outlet gave an internal memo to its staff in 2023 warning them not to describe Hamas as “terrorists” after the organization perpetrated a mass genocide against Israeli citizens on Oct. 7.
Moreover, one of VOA correspondent Patsy Widakuswara even suggested during a White House press briefing in November that the U.S. supporting Israel might put it “on the wrong side of history” and cited a report from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation suggesting that Israel was the aggressor in the conflict. Positions like these make Voice of America look like it cares more about censoring views it doesn’t like rather than preventing “disinformation.”
This belief was further enforced when Kupfer dutifully parroted the assertions of the George Soros-funded Free Press when it claimed that social media companies were enabling extremism. Kupfer quotes the Free Press, writing, “This has ‘created a toxic online environment that is vulnerable to exploitation from anti-democracy forces, white supremacists and other bad actors,’ the organization said in a December report.” For some reason, Kupfer didn’t disclose that Free Press was funded by Soros, or mention its concerning history of trying to force Big Tech to ratchet up their enforcement of censorship.
The article also links the proliferation of content by “anti-democracy forces, white supremacists, and other bad actors’” to the moderation decisions and free speech policies of platforms like Elon Musk’s X. Pro-censorship voices have often criticized X with this accusation, but they rarely provide evidence.
This was pointed out by Elon himself in his rebuttal of a BBC reporter who made the same allegation. In terms of its platform enabling forms of hate like anti-semitism, X actually outperforms a lot of its competitors, and even Voice of America itself. One survey noted that Chinese app TikTok and Meta-owned Instagram both were more likely to drive their users to become more anti-Semitic compared to X.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
