False

Alex Berenson notes a frightening, but not surprising, polling result:

A majority of Americans - and an overwhelming number of Democrats - no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech.

The government should restrict “false” information online, even if doing so blocks people from “publishing or accessing information,” 55 percent of Americans said in a large poll released Thursday. Only 42 percent disagreed.

The antipathy to free speech represents a sea change in attitudes in just five years. It is driven by a powerful new hostility to First Amendment rights on the left.

In an identically worded poll five years ago, Democrats and Republicans favored free speech online by roughly 3 to 2 margins. Today, Republicans still favor the First Amendment by about that much. But Democrats have turned against it by even more.

The support for government suppression of “false” speech clearly violates the First Amendment, which does not distinguish between “false” and legal speech, or online or traditional platforms for speech and debate.

As I've noted over the past few years, the Left has become increasingly authoritarian and as a consequence, has adopted the primary characteristic of authoritarians—a hatred of opposing views along with the hard facts that conflict with their ideological contentions. These opposing views and conflicting facts are then characterized as "false," which allows the Left to argue that they should be suppressed or censored completely.

The problem with this outrageous position is simple—who determines what is "false" (the Left loves to use the ambiguous term "misinformation") and who enforces the ban on "false" information. Since it's unconstitutional to ban speech, the federal government has worked with private social media sources to do their dirty work for them. This is unethical, yet many Democrats refuse to accept that it happened or applaud the deep state for its efforts to suppress opposing views.

But let's get back to "false," and examine some recent incidents:

• It was "false" to claim that Covid originated in a Chinese bioweapons lab, until it was proven to be the likeliest source of the virus. People who stated the "falsehood" were suppressed, censored, and demonized.
• It was "false" to claim that masks did no good in suppressing the spread of the virus, until it was proven that they did not work. People who stated the "falsehood" were suppressed, censored, and demonized.
• It was "false" to suggest that Hunter Biden's laptop computer was his and not Russian disinformation, until virtually every major news source (even the propaganda media) now admits it provenance. In October of 2020, people who stated the "falsehood" were suppressed, censored, and demonized.
• It was "false" to state that Joe Biden had any knowledge of his son's nafarious dealings with foreign adversaries or that Biden himself somehow benefited financially from those dealings until emails, texts, and whistleblowers indicated the opposite. People who stated the "falsehood" were suppressed, censored, and demonized.

There are hundreds of other "falsehoods" (about race, about climate, about crime, about government) that were NOT false, but in every case, if those "falsehoods" conflicted with the prevailing Democrat narrative, there was an attempt to suppress them. So ... the suppression of free speech has now become a normal part of a prevailing left-wing ideology.

Bottom line: Suppression of opposing viewpoints ultimately leads to bad decisions. Bad decisions lead to damaging government policies. Damaging governmental policies hurt those who are least capable of protecting themselves. And as people suffer the consequences of these policies (due to high prices, over-regulation, authoritarian lockdowns and mandates, etc.) the world become a nastier, chaotic place.

UPDATE:

By now, it's unnecessary to mention a propaganda media that supports and encourages attacks on free speech (the irony of this breathtaking) by labeling as "false" facts/information that subsequently turn out to be true. As an example, consider the  "false" story of Biden and Burisma which is now turning out to be true. The propaganda media worked overtime to suppress it—except to say it was not true. 

Here's one of many summaries of the propaganda medias attempt to "poo-poo" the Biden Burisma scandal.