During this week’s vice presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance attempted to present Donald Trump’s agenda to the American people in a gentler light. The Vance that voters have seen in his cable news and podcast appearances — invoking “childless cat ladies” and asserting parents should have more voting power than nonparents — was nowhere to be found. Instead, for much of the debate, Vance presented himself as a slick, Ivy League debater with an “aw, shucks” exterior.
But by the end of the night, that facade had disappeared, replaced with the extremely online right-wing zealot his public record shows him to be. When Vance was asked if he would seek to challenge the results of the 2024 election if he and Trump lost, he deflected. “I believe that we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country,” he said. “It is the threat of censorship.” Vance later added, “Kamala Harris is engaged in censorship at an industrial scale.”
This manufactured controversy preys upon genuine concerns.
If you were baffled as to why Vance chose to bring up “industrial” censorship at that moment, you’re not alone. This answer wasn’t for you — or for most audience members. It was a flare to Vance’s followers, who for years have been told that their right to free speech is under attack. Republicans (and some on the far left) have manufactured a crisis about a “censorship industrial complex.” They argue that anyone who does research about rumors online, implements social media platform rules that protect safety and health, or talks about either of the above with public or private partners is engaged in unfair censorship.
The narrative that government, academia and the private sector have been supposedly colluding on a massive scale for years to suppress Americans’ political opinions has grown from its roots on the fringes of the internet to the halls of Congress. This manufactured controversy preys upon genuine concerns: It would indeed be bad if the U.S. government were coercing social media platforms to remove speech. But its thin record relies heavily on scaremongering, context collapse and research mistakes that would make a grade schooler blush.
One example appeared in the debate itself, when Vance alleged to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation.” What he — and the conservative influencers who made this old quote go viral over the summer — didn’t tell viewers was that Walz was speaking about misinformation in the context of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement, neither of which are protected speech.
That’s just one example, but there have been many more across the years of this conservative fever dream. At the American Sunlight Project, of which I am a co-founder, we recently published an investigation unpacking these baseless claims. We found a clear and concerted pattern of “information laundering,” in which allegations that are light on facts migrate from online influencers to conservative political groups to lawsuits and congressional investigations. By falsely accusing researchers, governments and social media companies of censorship, these groups have successfully eroded public confidence in essential fact-checking and critical thinking processes before the fast-approaching 2024 election.
We are not the only ones who have highlighted that these claims lack evidence. At another point in the debate, Vance seemingly referenced a recent Supreme Court case in which Missouri and Louisiana alleged the Biden administration had coerced social media platforms to remove Covid falsehoods. “Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance asked. Apparently this Yale Law graduate is not current on his Supreme Court decisions; in June, the court threw the case out. In her opinion for the six-member majority, Trump-appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, “The plaintiff cannot rest on ‘mere allegations,’ but must instead point to factual evidence.”
Vance’s use of ‘censorship’ is a signal to voters who have been told again and again that Democrats are communists, fascists or worse.
A new study on anti-conservative bias published in the journal Nature also casts doubt on the very premise of Vance’s allegations. It found that while conservatives were suspended from Twitter more frequently than liberals, “users who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites — even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople — and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots.”
In other words, conservatives were more often sharing content that was likely to fall afoul of pre-existing policies, even as assessed by those with similar beliefs. We all agree to abide by social media companies’ terms and policies when we sign up to share cat pics or political memes; the implementation of those policies is not “censorship” any more than a bar refusing service to shoeless patrons.
Beyond facts and policy, Vance’s use of “censorship” is a signal to voters who have been told again and again that Democrats are communists, fascists or worse. His use of the term is easy shorthand to solidify an enemy. “Censorship,” apparently, is what Vance believes is a serious threat to democracy akin to an armed mob storming the Capitol. The difference between the two is that one of them actually happened.