Censorship is free speech, says top ‘disinformation’ expert

Top “disinformation” expert and censorship operative Kate Starbird last month told an audience at Cornell University that censorship is a form of free speech.

A key figure in the government-censorship complex

Starbird, currently an associate professor at the University of Washington, was instrumental in the widespread suppression of online content during the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic. She remains one of the key figures in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a mass censorship operation backed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In 2020, the EIP partnered with Stanford University to censor content that questioned the integrity of the presidential election. The EIP acted as a censorship “switchboard,” where around 100 operatives worked around the clock scouring social media platforms for unapproved content. Once they flagged the offending posts, the content was sent to the social media companies for removal.

Kate Starbird is director at the Center for an Informed Public, one of four bodies that make up the EIP. In 2021, the US government awarded Starbird’s Center for an Informed Public $2.25 million in taxpayer funds through the National Science Foundation.

Censorship: A ‘valid act of free speech’

Last month at the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, Starbird was invited to speak as part of a series on free expression. In her remarks, the disinformation operative complained that “purveyors of disinformation” are trying to “rebrand” content moderation — the act of suppressing certain content — as censorship. Content moderation, she said, is a “valid act of free speech.”

Starbird also told attendees that Russia influenced the 2016 election, though she considers any suggestions that the 2020 election was influenced to be “disinformation.”

Free exchange of ideas mostly breeds misinformation

And while Starbird claims that censorship is an expression of free speech, she believes that the free exchange of ideas breeds mostly “misinformation.” In a virtual panel at Stanford University in 2021, Starbird said just that:

You center on that idea of sort of, freedom of speech and this level playing field on which ideas compete. And unfortunately, from my perspective as a researcher in these spaces, this playing field is tilted in favor of misinformation.

Starbird’s fellow panelist, Francis Fukuyama, agreed with Starbird and said that the marketplace of ideas is an outdated “18th century notion.”