Misinformation

Misinformation is false or misleading information circulated without regard to whether it is true; disinformation is the same material spread deliberately to deceive. Conservatives take the problem seriously and reject the cure that has been proposed for it. The claim that a state agency, a platform trust-and-safety team or an accredited fact-checking body can be trusted to sort truth from error, and to suppress the error, rests on an assumption no conservative accepts: that some institution stands outside the contest of interests and sees clearly.

The record of the past decade supplies the argument. Claims labelled misinformation and removed from circulation — the laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, the durability of vaccine-induced transmission blocking, the authenticity of a laptop reported in October 2020 — were later treated as open questions or confirmed. The error rate of the arbiters was not random. It ran in one direction, which is what a conservative would predict of any body drawn from a narrow social stratum and insulated from correction.

Key Takeaways

• Conservatives distinguish sharply between fraud, defamation and incitement, which law already reaches, and contested empirical claims, which it should not.
• The central objection to official truth arbitration is epistemic, not merely legal: no institution has access to the dispersed knowledge needed to adjudicate live disputes.
• Suppression converts a factual dispute into a question about authority, which raises the credibility of the suppressed claim.
• Government pressure applied to private platforms produces censorship without a censor, evading constitutional limits by outsourcing them.
• The conservative remedy is institutional competition and correction over time, not a designated referee.

History And Context

False report is as old as report. What changed the scale was printing. The pamphlet wars of the English Civil War flooded London with anonymous claims, and Parliament’s response — a 1643 licensing order requiring prior approval for publication — provoked John Milton’s Areopagitica the following year. Milton’s argument was not that falsehood is harmless but that licensers are fallible men with interests, and that truth in open contest needs no state protection.¹

John Stuart Mill restated the case in 1859. Silencing an opinion assumes infallibility; even a false opinion serves by forcing the true one to be defended rather than held as dead dogma.² Mill’s second chapter remains the standard text on the question, and conservatives who otherwise reject his utilitarianism have adopted its conclusion.

The twentieth century added the state as an active producer of falsehood. Soviet active measures ran for decades, culminating in Operation Denver — known in the West as Operation INFEKTION — which from 1983 planted and amplified the claim that HIV had been engineered at Fort Detrick, seeding it through a Delhi newspaper and recycling it through East German scientists until it reached American television.³ The lesson conservatives drew was that governments are among the most capable liars in the field.

The digital phase opened after 2016. Platforms built moderation apparatus at speed; governments built liaison channels into them. The European Union adopted the Digital Services Act in 2022, imposing systemic-risk duties on large platforms. In the United States the question reached the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, decided in June 2024, where the Court reversed an injunction against federal contacts with platforms on the ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing, leaving the underlying First Amendment question unresolved.

The Conservative Position

The conservative argument starts from a claim about knowledge. Hayek’s 1945 account of the price system holds that the knowledge relevant to any complex question exists in dispersed, particular and partly inarticulate form across many minds, and cannot be gathered into one place for a central decision.⁴ What holds for the allocation of tin holds for contested empirical claims. An expert body ruling on the origin of a virus in early 2020 was not consolidating knowledge that existed; it was substituting the confidence of a small group for a process of correction that had not yet run.

The second argument is about incentives. Institutions granted power to define error acquire an interest in the definitions they issue. Reversing a ruling costs them authority, so they defend rulings past the point the evidence supports. Add a workforce drawn overwhelmingly from one political tradition, and the failures cluster rather than scatter.

The third is constitutional. Where officials request removals from private companies that hold licences, contracts and regulatory exposure, the request is not a suggestion. Conservatives regard this jawboning as the mechanism by which a constitutional limit is evaded rather than repealed, and it is the reason American conservatives have moved from defending platform discretion to scrutinising the state’s role in shaping it.

None of this makes falsehood harmless. The conservative position is that the existing law of fraud, defamation, perjury and incitement covers the cases where speech causes direct injury, and that everything beyond it belongs to argument.

Differing Positions

The case for intervention rests on scale and speed. Milton’s London had pamphlets read by thousands over weeks. A false claim now reaches millions in hours, and algorithmic ranking selects for the emotional intensity that falsehood supplies more readily than accuracy. On this account Mill’s marketplace assumed a rough parity in distribution that no longer holds.

Advocates point to measurable harm: false claims about vaccine composition during a pandemic, coordinated foreign operations targeting elections, and manufactured medical advice that reaches people making decisions under fear. They add that platforms are private companies exercising editorial judgment, and that a company declining to host a claim is not a state suppressing it.

The strongest version of the argument concedes the conservative point about official error and proposes procedural answers: transparency in moderation decisions, published appeal routes, labelling rather than removal, and statutory limits on government contact with platforms. That version is close to what many conservatives would accept, and the practical disagreement narrows to who audits the auditors.

References

1. John Milton, Areopagitica (London, 1644).
2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), ch. 2.
3. Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), on Operation Denver.
4. Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945).