You know the type. They wear their conference lanyards like clerical collars. They are the policy advisers, NGO staffers, university administrators, and professional opinion-shapers who have decided that the greatest threat to modern democracy is not poverty, war, or inequality, but the existence of information they don’t like. We hear endlessly from these people about the terrible harm caused by “mis- and disinformation.” It is supposedly the reason we have anti-migration protests, the reason people are skeptical about climate policy, the reason democracy itself is wobbling. But if you listen closely, you’ll notice an odd assumption running through all their warnings: misinformation is always something that comes from the right. It is always about immigration, or climate, or some conservative grievance. Never once do they consider the possibility that the left also tells lies, or that left-wing lies might be even more dangerous. The recent unrest in France, which has now spread across Europe, should put an end to that comfortable fantasy. The protests were ignited, at least in part, by misleading claims about school budget “cuts” and by the assertion that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. These are not right-wing talking points. They are left-wing ones, promoted by left-wing politicians and amplified by left-wing influencers. And they have produced violence, rioting, and a level of chaos that makes the anti-migration protests look almost respectable by comparison. So let’s say it plainly: left-wing misinformation is not just real, it is currently more dangerous than anything the right has managed to produce.
Start with the school cuts, because that is where the French student protests began. According to the demonstrators, the French government is engaged in a brutal austerity drive against education, slashing budgets and firing teachers, leaving young people with no future. It sounds terrible. It is also not true. In fact, the French government’s spending on schools will rise next year by €1.1 billion, which is a 1.7 percent increase over the current budget. Yes, that is slightly below the projected rate of inflation, but not by much, and it is hardly the kind of hole that justifies trashing the streets of Paris. Yes, the number of teachers is going to be reduced, but by fewer than the decline in student numbers would warrant. In other words, class sizes will actually get smaller. According to the OECD, France already spends more per lycée student than the OECD average, so French students are comparatively well looked after by any international standard. You would not know any of this from listening to the protest leaders. Instead, credulous teenagers were addressed by left-wing rabble-rousers like Bally Bagayoko, the mayor of Saint-Denis, who stood outside the gates of a blockaded school and announced that “violence can become legitimate at a certain point.” He meant, presumably, when students are fired upon by riot police, but that qualifier was lost in the roar. He added that whenever violence can be avoided, it is better, but the students kept rioting anyway. And why wouldn’t they? When an elected official stands in front of you and tells you that violence is legitimate, you don’t hear the caveats. You hear permission. That’s not a right-wing Facebook post. That’s a public official feeding a dangerous myth directly to a crowd of young people, and the result has been burned cars, smashed shops, and hundreds of arrests across the Continent.
The education cuts were not the only grievance. As the unrest spread, the anti-austerity campaigners were joined by pro-Palestinian protestors, and their anger is undoubtedly fueled by the claim that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza. That is not a minor accusation. It is the most serious charge one state can level against another, and it is being chanted on the streets of Europe as though it were an established fact. But it has not been upheld by the International Court of Justice, and it is unlikely to be, given the evidence that Israel has issued evacuation warnings before bombing runs, set up humanitarian zones, and allowed around 100,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza since the war began. That last fact also casts serious doubt on the claim that Israel is deliberately starving the Palestinian people, which is a key part of the genocide narrative. Meanwhile, according to the Israel Defence Forces, Hamas routinely steals food from those same aid trucks, so if anyone is trying to starve the population of Gaza, it is the people running the enclave, not the country trying to deliver supplies to it. Now, you can argue with some of these facts. You can say the evacuation warnings were inadequate, or that the humanitarian zones were not safe enough, or that 100,000 trucks is not enough. Those are legitimate debates. But that is precisely the point: they are debates, not settled facts. In the streets of Europe, however, the nuance has disappeared. There is no mention of Hamas stealing food, no mention of evacuation warnings, no discussion of legal standards at the International Court of Justice. There is only the word “genocide,” repeated until it becomes a religious mantra, and that is what is dangerous. When you take a contested and highly complex situation and compress it into a single, unqualified accusation, you are not educating people. You are weaponizing them.
The Nouveau Front Populaire, the left-wing coalition behind much of the French protest movement, would no doubt respond that these claims are not “lies” but robust expressions of opinion. They are assertions that are, at most, disputable. I actually agree with that, but it is a benefit of the doubt that is never extended to equally contestable claims made on the right. Take, for instance, the review of academic literature on misinformation commissioned by the UK Government Office for Science and published in May. That report labelled “false and misleading” information a “systemic national risk” and called for “statutory frameworks” to tackle it. That is not just a think-piece; that is the language of formal censorship. But what does the report actually focus on? It never once treats anything said by the UK government, public health bodies, progressive campaigners, or, heaven forfend, the BBC as misinformation. Instead, it selects examples that all point in one political direction: alarmist claims about the promotion of “gender ideology” in schools, “transgender athlete controversies,” “misrepresentation of the demographic composition of migrant arrivals,” and “misattribution of criminal acts to migrant communities.” Are some of those claims misleading? Possibly. But why is there no section on left-wing myths? Why is there no analysis of the claim that Israel is committing genocide, or that French school budgets are being slashed, or that protesters are justified in rioting because of austerity? The report’s authors apparently cannot even imagine misinformation coming from their own side. They have constructed a worldview in which falsehood is a monopoly of the political right, and so any censorship regime they propose will inevitably be designed to suppress the voices they already dislike.
The climate section of the report is even more one-sided. It cites campaigns against electric vehicles and heat pumps as examples of misinformation. It mentions claims that net zero is being “decoupled” from climate science. It complains about renewable projects being “cancelled due to misinformation.” But what about the misinformation on the other side? What about the claim that climate-related disasters are becoming more deadly when, by many measures, they are not? What about the claim that Antarctica is melting when it has actually gained ice in recent years? What about the claim that Pacific islands are disappearing into the sea when most atoll islands studied have been stable or have grown? You will find none of this in the report. According to its authors, much science misinformation originates with fossil fuel companies, tobacco companies, tech companies, and unnamed “political actors” running “organised denial campaigns.” Do they mean me? Do they mean anyone who questions the official narrative? It is a strange way to approach the study of misinformation: you start with the conclusion that the only liars are your enemies, and then you find research that confirms you. But if you are genuinely worried about false and misleading information, you have to be honest about all sources of it, including the ones that flatter your own worldview. Otherwise, you are not fighting misinformation. You are fighting your political opponents, and you are using the word “misinformation” as a cudgel.
Finally, consider the evidence of harm that the report actually cites. The three studies it highlights are about right-wing media: AfD Facebook posts, Fox News’s coverage of Covid, and Tucker Carlson. Not a single word about left-wing violence against police, immigration enforcement officers, employees of Elbit Systems, or opponents of “gender ideology” such as Charlie Kirk. Not a word about the French riots, which have involved thousands of people acting on false claims about education policy and on a wildly exaggerated account of what is happening in Gaza. Not a word about the mayor who told students that violence can become legitimate and then watched them go on a rampage. If you are going to claim that misinformation causes harm, you need to show that you are tracking harm wherever it appears. This report does not. It finds harm only on the right because it is looking only at the right. To be clear, I am not suggesting that mis- or disinformation should be suppressed because it may cause harm. In fact, I think the opposite: the best response to bad ideas is better ideas, not censorship, and once you start creating statutory frameworks to police speech, you will quickly discover that they are some other group’s idea of what needs to be policed. But if you are the kind of person who believes that misinformation must be treated as a systemic risk and met with censorship, you had better be prepared for the same framework to be used against the left. You had better be prepared for a future in which the claims about school cuts and genocide are treated as seriously as the claims about migrant crime and gender ideology. The road to censorship is paved with good intentions, and it runs in both directions. The only safe path is to defend the right of everyone to say things you believe are false, even when the speakers wear lanyards, hold office, and influence the young.