"Who the fu*k gets to decide?" - Joe Rogan questions how US government will 'crack down' misinformation without suppressing free speech
Popular MMA commentator Joe Rogan recently had political commentator and renowned author Matt Walsh over in his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. One of the interesting thing Rogan and Walsh talked about was the advent of misinformation in the internet age and the government's plan to eradicate it.
In a time when information can be obtained by anyone, anywhere, anytime, it's hard to cut through the massive ocean of data to figure out which is true or not. The internet is a freeway of information (and misinformation) that's quite impossible to regulate - both from a logistical and ethical standpoint.
On the regulation of misinformation, Rogan said:
"One of the things that's been discussed is cracking down on misinformation and that free speech doesn't include misinformation. Which is a wild thing to say after what we just went through with COVID, where what people were saying was misinformation turned out to be 100% true."
Rogan continued:
"And not just about COVID but about a bunch of things [such as] the Hunter Biden laptop story...Like, who the f*ck gets to decide what's information? Only the government? You guys? The people that have lied about basically everything? This is a crazy thing to say."
Check out the conversation below (2:13:39):
Joe Rogan on the US goverment regulating information and cracking down on misinformation: "It's an insane position"
Speaking more on what he deems as a crazy notion of regulating information in the hopes of stopping misinformation in the aforementioned podcast, Joe Rogan said (2:14:24):
"The lack of understanding of what it means to be freely express ideas and communicate and whistleblowers. Whistleblowers from corporations that are telling you about something they're doing that's illegal. Whistleblowers from govermenent [agencies] that are telling you they're spying on you when it's illegal. All that sh*t. To have that be filtered through the goverment is an insane position. And yet, that's something that they talk about and this is something bizarrely that the left supports."
Rogan and Walsh see this position by the US government to police the flow of information and, by extension, free speech to be a slippery slope. To them, it would bring more bad than good to the American people - and the world as a whole.