The spread of online misinformation has contributed to a variety of acute issues and concerns in modern politics, economics, culture, security, education and more. These concerns prompted the U.S. government to intervene, sometimes in partnership with private companies. While there’s been broad agreement on the necessity of this intervention, there have also been accusations from both the Left and the Right that these efforts have gone too far, and that they amount to the political censorship of free speech.

Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten examines these allegations by diving into the data behind some of the posts flagged for removal. Weingarten first explains to us how this process works. He then argues that moderators flagged plenty of legitimate content and unfairly targeted conservative viewpoints.

It coordinated these efforts through a digital ticketing system. There, one of up to 120 analysts, or an external partner, could highlight a piece of offending social media content or narrative consisting of many offending posts by creating a ticket and [sharing] that ticket with other participants by tagging them. Tagged participants could then communicate with each other about the legitimacy of the flagged content and what actions they might take to combat it. For the social media companies, that meant removing the content, reducing its spread, or slapping corrective labels on it.

During the 2020 election, EIP [Election Integrity Partnership] generated 639 tickets covering nearly 5,000 unique URLs, content that was shared millions of times, largely related to the de-legitimization of election results. The major platforms labeled, removed, or soft-blocked some 35% of the URLs shared from EIP.