Jailing People for Misinformation is a Horrible Idea

What the people calling for this REALLY want.

In a recent clip, Hillary Clinton seemed to advocate imprisoning people for “misinformation” on The Rachel Maddow Show:

This is worth discussing for at least two reasons.

First of all, on its face, it may sound reasonable to people who haven’t thought much about the issue. If you start with the presumption that misinformation is bad, deliberately done, and causes harm, well, doesn’t it sound like lots of other things we legally punish in our society? So MAYBE, some people are wondering why this would be a problem.

The second thing we should acknowledge is that at least part of that statement is true. Misinformation is bad, it often causes real harm, and it is sometimes deliberately done. Plus, we should all want to see real, honest information. Right? In fact, the health of our society at least partially depends on it. When people can’t trust the information they’re getting, it often leads to them making bad decisions. This is not good or something any of us should want.

So, what is the problem with making misinformation illegal?

Well, the first thing we have to start with is that “misinformation” is INCREDIBLY COMMON, so what sort of “misinformation” are we going to criminalize?

If Billy’s mom tells him dinner starts at 6 tonight, but he thought she said 5 PM and he tells someone else that, should he go to jail for passing on that “misinformation?” Obviously (wow, I really hope so anyway) not.

What about politicians telling lies? That’s a daily occurrence, right? For example, should Joe Biden go to jail for telling this legendary whopper?

We can be sure Hillary Clinton wouldn’t support that. Few politicians in either party would because they all lie so much. Do you think there’s any chance Hillary Clinton would ever be in favor of a law that would put her in jail for doing something she loves to do on a day-in-day-out-basis? No chance.

Well, so what about journalists then? Would Hillary Clinton support Rachel Maddow being put in prison for telling a lie on air? What about a reporter at the New York Times or Washington Post? Not a prayer. This is notable because if you want to know the biggest sources of misinformation in America, any informed, objective person would have to agree it’s the mainstream media. They have very slanted takes on most subjects, they get things wrong all the time and they have huge audiences.

Who spread the “Trayvon Martin is a little kid” lie or the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” lie about Michael Brown? Who was calling riots where buildings were burned to the ground “mostly peaceful?” Didn’t an awful lot of mainstream media outlets call the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian propaganda? How many media outlets today insist that men in dresses are actually women? We can go on and on with these stories and if they’re not “misinformation,” what is? Yet, we all know there’s zero chance any mainstream media reporters would ever face jail for spreading this misinformation that many of them undoubtedly knew was untrue when they said it.

So, who would ever be targeted by a law like this?

Conservative media outlets, amateur media outlets, and YOU. The sort of people who don’t have contacts on Nancy Pelosi’s staff, who’ve never been to a cocktail party with AOC, and who don’t have any Democratic donors advocating on their behalf.

And what would this “misinformation” consist of? Certainly, there are people who make up “misinformation” from scratch and that should be considered indefensible. People who get caught doing that -- and it happens semi-regularly via Community Notes on X or via other ways -- should have their reputations ruined, lose their audience, and lose all credibility. Sadly, this seldom happens anymore in our highly partisan, entertainment-obsessed society.

However, most of the people who get it wrong, on the Left and Right, are not deliberately lying per se. Many of them are just careless, prone to be conspiratorial or so hyper-partisan that they believe pretty much any negative thing they hear about the opposition. 

But there’s another level beyond those people. Most “misinformation” tends to be things like someone misinterpreting a study or a statistic and rolling with it, an initially reported fact that was later discredited without the person repeating it realizing that, someone legitimately buying into a fake story or fake claim, an educated guess that turns out to be wrong, uncharitably interpreting something that actually happened, people talking about things that are far outside their areas of expertise, etc., etc. In other words, many of the people in these groups are not even malicious per se, they’re just wrong.

So, how could we morally justify jailing some guy with 100,000 followers on X who misinterpreted a study or some small news website for “misinformation” when politicians and guests on CNN do worse on an almost daily basis without ever facing any real consequences for it?

We couldn’t.

Of course, there’s a much bigger issue here.

That being, who’s the arbiter of truth? Who gets to decide what’s misinformation? Fact-checking sites that have made mistake after mistake? Heavily partisan mainstream media sites that spent years flogging untrue stories and that have published numerous stories based on anonymous sources that were later proven wrong?

How about hyper-partisan politicians and bureaucrats whose first, second, third, and fourth goals are remaining in power at any cost? Maybe the same ones who declared that if you took the vaccine you couldn’t get COVID, that the idea a Chinese bio-lab leak could have caused COVID was racist and impossible, that lockdowns would “stop the spread” and that masking would put an end to COVID. People were censored over disagreeing with those beliefs, all of which turned out to be “misinformation.”

Is that a problem? I think so. Most of you probably think so, but to a lot of people, that kind of thing was a FEATURE, not a bug. For example, you have to suspect that Kamala Harris’s VP, Tim Walz, is one of the people who thinks like this:

When he says, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech,” you better believe that he wouldn’t look at it like that if he believed that Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and Dan Bongino were going to be the ones deciding what constituted “hate speech” and “misinformation.”

He only likes this idea because he believes that people who think like him will be the ones defining those terms and shutting down people who disagree with him. You see, most of the people who like this concept, or the idea of censoring people, aren’t so much concerned about “misinformation,” they just see it as yet another way to shut up their enemies.

There’s nothing they’d love better than to define what things people are allowed and not allowed to say with the threat of jail hanging over anyone who colors outside the lines. A world like that wouldn’t actually have less misinformation in it, but it would have a lot less freedom.

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