It's not hard to figure out what is keeping USA Today "domestic security correspondent: Josh Meyer awake at night. The gnawing fear that a lack of censorship could lead to disinformation being spread during the 2024 election. This is reflected in his sprawling 2,618-word USA Today article on Wednesday, "Amid Elon Musk's Twitter changes, why 2024 presidential election threats now pose bigger risk."
Their shortened version of the headline: "The 2024 election on Twitter: Are Elon Musk's changes posing a danger?"
What is the danger? "Misinformation," according to nebulous unnamed "lawmakers and regulators, former Twitter executives, national security officials and other analysts."
With the 2024 presidential election campaign ramping up, they told USA TODAY that Twitter is more vulnerable than ever to the spread of misinformation, the amplification of divisive content and coordinated disinformation campaigns that could influence the outcome of the race.
Of course, "misinformation" and "disinformation" often means just information that liberals and their media stenographers want to keep from the public. A two-sided exchange of information is "divisive."
The biggest throbbing example of this is the Hunter Biden laptop that was labeled as "disinformation" by 51 former intelligence officials which was used as justification to censor the New York Post story on this topic in the middle of the 2020 election. And yet despite this example of how censorship was used as a form of election interference, Meyer makes it clear that he wants to continue this odious process.
Meyer brings up the recent court ruling prohibiting the government from engaging with social media for the purposes of censorship which he seems to find disturbing...according to his unnamed experts:
Earlier this month, a Louisiana federal judge restricted some branches of the Biden administration from communicating or meeting with social media platforms about content moderation on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter unless it involved national security threats and criminal activity. The ruling was a response to a lawsuit brought by GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, alleging that government officials, under the guise of curbing misinformation, colluded with social media platforms to remove conservative voices and viewpoints, including posts about the COVID pandemic and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The ruling comes as a debate about possible government intervention in social media political activity is intensifying, and national security and cybersecurity experts wonder if foreign countries will try to influence the U.S. election. Some analysts want social media companies to do more policing of their own platform. And they worry that Twitter, under Musk, lacks the tools to do so.
Meyer reveals his bias with the use of the term "far-right extremists." They are supposedly dangerous yet, as Meyer himself reveals, the most aggressive interference in the runup to the 2020 election came from those advocating for censorship.
And Musk, a staunch free speech advocate who envisions Twitter as an unfettered public square, has reinstated high-profile election deniers – including former President Donald Trump – and far-right extremists who are already laying the foundation for future clashes over what they claim are rigged local, state and national U.S. election systems.
...Two months after taking over, Musk released internal documents that he said bolstered his claims, including some that purportedly showed Twitter’s interference in the 2020 presidential election by censoring New York Post reporting on President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and the alleged evidence of Biden family corruption it contained.
Any complaints of election-rigging are mere "claims," and negative information on the Bidens is "purported" and "alleged." Somehow national reporters can't figure out whether the allegations are true. They just want to present them as a "danger."
