Concern about false information is legitimate, but the proposed solution — empowering governments or institutions to determine what is true and suppress what is false — has a far worse historical track record than the problem it claims to solve.

Let's start with the track record of official 'disinformation' labeling in just the past five years. The theory that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in Wuhan was labeled disinformation by media outlets, social media platforms, and public health officials. It is now considered a plausible hypothesis by the FBI, the Department of Energy, and a growing number of scientists. The Hunter Biden laptop story was called "Russian disinformation" by 51 former intelligence officials and was suppressed by Twitter and Facebook before the 2020 election. The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed the laptop's authenticity in 2022. The claim that natural immunity to COVID provided significant protection was censored as dangerous misinformation. It is now standard scientific consensus.

In each case, the institutions that claimed authority to identify "disinformation" were themselves wrong. The "disinformation" was accurate, and the official narrative was false. This isn't an anomaly — it's the predictable result of centralizing truth-determination in institutions with political interests.

Historically, every government that has empowered itself to combat "disinformation" has used that power to suppress political opposition. The Soviet Union's concept of "dezinformatsiya" was used to silence dissent. China's internet censorship apparatus exists to combat "rumors" and "misinformation." Even Western democracies' attempts to regulate information — from the UK's proposed Online Safety Bill to the EU's Digital Services Act — have faced criticism for potential overreach.

The Biden administration's short-lived Disinformation Governance Board, announced in April 2022, was disbanded within months after bipartisan backlash. The very concept of a government ministry to determine truth alarmed civil libertarians across the political spectrum.

The First Amendment's answer to bad speech is not suppression but more speech. This principle has served American democracy for nearly 250 years. Information ecosystems are messy, and people sometimes believe false things. But the alternative — empowering fallible, politically motivated institutions to be arbiters of truth — is historically and demonstrably more dangerous.