Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt tweeted on Tuesday that a federal court had granted a request for discovery to start investigating social media companies and Biden administration officials for what they say is suppression of free speech. Schmitt's claim is that social media sites have been suppressing and censoring free speech under the guise of misinformation.
Media literacy expert Julie Smith laid out on KMOX's Total Information AM what exactly social media companies are doing regarding misinformation. She said the main question is, why would social media companies want to regulate misinformation?
"I feel like anything that they say they're doing is basically lip service," Smith said. "Because of the sheer volume of content that is posted on these platforms, it's problematic to say that they're going to check everything for validity. Because the sheer volume, it makes it almost impossible."
She added that it's not really in the social media companies' best interests to pull misinformation and fake accounts off their platforms, because those increase their profit.
"The the false information on there tends to get us riled up, right. And research says that the angrier we are, the longer we stay on the platforms," she said. "And the longer we stay on the platforms, the more money they make. So there's no incentive for them to clean this up."
Smith said that in terms of the social media companies' responsibilities, they aren't required to do anything legally.
"Because they are not owned by the government, they can do whatever they want," she said. "In fact, in the terms of service that we've all agreed to, we have told them that they can block our account, they can delete our account anytime that they want."
Smith also talked about the Hunter Biden laptop investigation, pointing out that the story was "squelched" right before the election by some social media sites, saying it was unconfirmed, but it was recently confirmed as legitimate.
"So it seems like maybe there were some some shenanigans, but I think it'd be very difficult to prove," she said. "And, you know, the platform's are under no obligation to anybody to do anything they can do what ever they want to."