How the Left Weaponizes 'Misinformation' to Silence the Right and Shape Public Opinion

What qualifies as “disinformation” or “misinformation” depends on whether you're on the political left or right.

The left and their media allies frequently express grave concerns over the threat that "misinformation" and "disinformation" pose to democracy. However, this worry only targets the political right and any ideas that challenge leftist narratives.

But a recent article in The Atlantic sounded the alarm over a perceived threat far greater than “misinformation”—what author Charlie Warzel calls a “far-right world-building project, where feel is always greater than real.”

This supposed right-wing strategy is “designed to silence voices of reason because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in [the political right’s] current worldview.”

He also accuses the right of abusing their right to free speech to attack “any person or institution that operates in reality” - meaning the left’s expert class.

One of the examples Warzel highlights involves posts on X (formally Twitter) about Hurricanes Milton and Helene. In these posts, users speculated over conspiracy theories about government control of the storms and insinuated that the media and specific meteorologists were using natural disasters to further a global warming agenda.

I mean, can you imagine the media using storms to further a climate change narrative? How crazy would that be?

However, Warzel’s real target wasn't just individual conspiracy theorists—it was X as a platform, and more specifically, Elon Musk.

Not only has Musk been critical of FEMA and other government institutions, especially as he campaigns to help elect Donald Trump, but he also allows such discourse to happen on X in the first place.

Similarly, Donald Trump has not hesitated to question institutions cherished by the left. He has repeatedly attacked FBI crime statistics, calling them "fake numbers" and accusing the agency of misrepresenting violent crime data.

Predictably, legacy news outlets, “non-partisan” institutes, and fact-checking websites were quick to defend the FBI’s statistics in an effort to counter Trump's “misinformation.”

After all, according to the Atlantic, these are the institutions that “operate in reality.”

Yet, in this case, the FBI’s crime statistics were, in fact, fake.

When the FBI first released "final" crime data for 2022 in September 2023, the agency reported a 2.1% decrease in the nation's violent crime rate.

However, according to a report from Real Clear Investigations, the FBI has since updated those figures, revealing a 4.5% increase in violent crime for 2022. The revised figures showed “80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021, including an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults.”

However, crime statistics aren’t the only realm where important (i.e., policy-influencing) numbers are routinely released and revised.

For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its March 2024 total employment estimate downward by 818,000 in August, marking the largest adjustment in fifteen years. While the original (more favorable) numbers undoubtedly helped bolster the Harris campaign’s narrative on the economy, the negative revision received far less media attention.

Would these two examples qualify as “disinformation” or “misinformation” in the minds of our media elite?

Of course not.

The reality is that their “experts” can release, revise, or suppress critical information at will because they control the institutions where the information is held and how it is disseminated to the public.

This selective amplification of favorable statistics and suppression of less favorable figures underscores how institutions and media shape public perception and, by extension, democracy itself.

Despite this outsized influence on the public, the left insists that the real threat to democracy comes from the political right and their instance of exercising free speech as protected under the First Amendment.

Addressing an audience at the World Economic Forum about the threat of “disinformation,” John Kerry said, “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are” adding that in the United States, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.”

This comes after Hillary Clinton stated on MSNBC that Americans who are engaged in disinformation “should civilly, or even in some cases criminally charged” while separately calling for a repeal of Section 230, the law that grants social media platforms immunity from user-posted content, arguing that if these platforms don’t moderate and control content, "we lose total control."

Kerry and Clinton’s willingness to do whatever it takes to regain control of their preferred narratives and censor their political opposition is why Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and his endorsement of Donald Trump for President have been so incredibly important in the fight to protect what remains of free expression.

This is also why both Democrats and neoconservative “Never Trump” Republicans like Bill Kristol consider the combination of Donald Trump and Elon Musk a threat to democracy, and liberal political columnists like Seth Abramson criticize Musk for not being politically neutral.

The neutrality the left longs for is the kind where social media platforms were free to censor right-leaning outlets like the New York Post for publishing stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop or to label op-eds suggesting that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab as "false information." In both cases, social media companies acted as arbiters of truth, following the guidance of figures like Kerry and Clinton—and in both cases, they were wrong.

In reality, neutrality can never be fully attained, but under Musk, X has come closer than ever to functioning as a neutral public square. It just doesn't feel that way to those on the left because dissenting voices on the right have always been heavily censored.

Ultimately, the battle over "misinformation" and "disinformation" is a battle over who gets to control “acceptable” public discourse, and up until recently, the left has dominated that space.

Why? Because leftists comprise a majority of employees in mainstream media, tech companies, and social media platforms. This allows them to amplify the narratives they desire and suppress those that are detrimental to their political goals.

But with X/Twitter now in Elon Musk’s hands, the left no longer has an absolute monopoly on what is considered acceptable speech.

And for that reason, both Elon Musk and the First Amendment are seen as threats to the ruling class and must be destroyed.