People may view misinformation online as problematic, but that doesn't mean they want the government to get into the censorship business, a new report by the Pew Research Center suggests.
"When asked to choose between the U.S. government taking action to restrict false news online in ways that could also limit Americans’ information freedoms, or protecting those freedoms even if it means false information might be published, Americans fall firmly on the side of protecting freedom," Pew writes in a study released Thursday.
According to MediaPost, that sentiment "cuts across nearly all demographic groups studied, with strong sentiments among young Americans, the college educated and men, as well as both Democrats and Republicans."
At the same time, most respondents (56%) said they favored tech companies taking steps to fight fake news. Here, a larger proportion of Democrats (60%) were in favor of tech companies taking action than Republicans (48%).
That partisan divide may not be surprising, given some Republicans' sentiments that Silicon Valley leans to the left.
It also should not be shocking that most people don't want the government to start censoring news that officials deem false. If anything, the surprise is that only 58% of Pew's respondents resisted the prospect of government interference -- especially considering that censorship by the authorities is almost always unconstitutional.
What's more, the concept of fake news is itself vague: Some posts described as fake may contain empirically false information, but others only contain propaganda.
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