After her DNA fiasco, Senator Elizabeth Warren rebooted her campaign by announcing endless plans. Now that her campaign is dying again, she’s rebooting it with another plan.
To go after the First Amendment.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday released a plan to fight disinformation and to hold tech companies accountable for their actions in light of the 2016 election.
“Disinformation and online foreign interference erode our democracy, and Donald Trump has invited both,” Warren said in a Tweet Wednesday. “Anyone who seeks to challenge and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election must be fully prepared to take this on – and I’ve got a plan to do it.”
Warren proposed to combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google responsible for spreading misinformation designed to suppress voters from turning out.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote,” Warren said in a release.
If that sounds like gibberish, that’s because it is.
Parse through Warren’s plan, which is interspersed with desperate pleas for money, and it becomes more cynical than that.
1. Warren falsely claims that the Russians set out to influence the election. That claim has been disproven. And the bulk of the Russian IRA ads were placed after the election and targeted black people.
2. Warren ignores the former revelation and seizes on the spin that Dem apparatchiks used to justify their conspiracy theories. They claimed that the Russians targeted black people to depress voter turnout. Again the ads were focused after the election. And while a few did appear to discourage voting, it was as part of a message challenging the legitimacy of the United States, rather than as a focused election strategy.
3. Warren then takes a new approach, seemingly advanced by the radical left-wing Brennan Center, which claims that there was an organized campaign to provide people with false information about voting, telling them they can vote by text or giving them the wrong voting dates. Some people from both sides tried to troll the opposing side with claims like these. But they were transparently false.
Warren is proposing to criminalize anyone providing wrong voting information on the internet.
This is a blatant attack on the First Amendment and is quite obviously unconstitutional. Furthermore there’s no way to distinguish between someone accidentally tweeting the wrong voting date or location. Or doing so deliberately.
And where exactly does this end anyway?
If tweeting the wrong voting date can be penalized, why not claim that tweeting false allegations about the candidates should also be treated as interfering with elections?
And that’s where Warren is really headed.
Leave a Reply