There is a lot of factually inaccurate information out on the Internet and Bill Clinton doesn’t like it. He also has a solution. If you guessed that it would be to encourage more speech out there to counter it then you’re probably not well acquainted with Democrats. Well, obviously, we need a new government agency which would be in charge of make sure everything on the Internet is on the up and up.
It would, of course, have to be totally independent to maintain credibility. It would be taxpayer funded, which throws a bit of a wrench into the works seeing as somebody in government will be signing the checks. Mr. Clinton, who says it’s a legitimate thing to do, suggests that this independent federal agency would be structured as such that the president wouldn’t be able to influence anything it does. That would be an overt conflict of interest, people wouldn’t trust such a body to not insert their own spin on things.
“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors.”
In other words, absolutely nothing like NPR or BBC, which are absolutely rife with bias, spin and factual errors. Of course, citations would be needed. I’m not sure what they would cite, though. If a New York Times article is written by someone who wasn’t actually there and fabricated the story out of whole cloth would that still work? Maybe Wikipedia?
In this day of hyper partisan government, when every bit of information that comes out of the Federal demesne is being spun this way and that, it is actually laughable even to entertain the idea that this wouldn’t go horrible wrong. Which, of course, brings up the question of enforcement. Would the Ministry of Internet Truth be empowered to shut down sites with, what they deem to be, factually inaccurate information? If they’re just going to run a blog with citations then you’re just Snopes.gov. If so, I’d love to be the lawyer that gets to take that one to trial on first amendment grounds. That doesn’t even go into the obvious international ramifications. The UN doesn’t have the best record on these things either. I don’t think anyone, especially in America, would accept their hand in the pie.
The internet is a wild free for all. It is an unregulated mass of free speech. It is, for all intents and purposes, the only such unregulated mass of free speech going today. That’s why people love it so. You can put up parody. You can post your made ravings on the convergence of string theory and mozzarella cheese sticks. You can even make stuff up and email it to all your friends. It’s up to the reader to filter out the truth from fiction, just like every other source of information in the world.
The truth is out there. It’s just not the government’s job to make sure that’s what is on the internet.