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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ office is pushing back on a false claim about a new state law that Twitter users, including author Stephen King and several well-followed journalists, have been spreading, though it was debunked there a year ago.
The law, which calls for “intellectual freedom and diversity of viewpoints” in state colleges, states that schools in the Florida College System must conduct an annual survey of “the extent to which ideas and perspectives are presented” and students, faculty and others “feel free to express their beliefs and views on campus and in the classroom.”
The narrative that King and others pushed on Twitter went one step further.
“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students and faculty to register their political views with the state,” King tweeted.
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This notion appears to mirror a 2021 Salon article with this exact title that was published after the governor first signed the bill into law. DeSantis deputy publicist Bryan Griffin told Fox News that this is a misrepresentation of what the law actually says.
“No, students and faculty are not required to ‘register their political views,'” Griffin said. “This same false claim was doing the rounds in the liberal Twittersphere after the bill was signed in 2021. It was debunked then. It’s been debunked again, now.”
This debunking included a June 2021 Politifact report that said the bill did not require anyone to record their views. Wednesday. DeSantis’ office has confirmed that there is no recording involved.
“Diversity of Views surveys are anonymous, voluntary, and no personal information is collected by them – only comments about the intellectual freedom of the campus environment, which the survey was designed to determine” , said Griffin.
Governor Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference in Pembroke Pines, Florida on August 18, 2021.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Yet despite the request for registration not being backed up by the text of the bill and proven false more than a year ago, Stephen King was far from alone in repeating it this week. .
USA Today Homeland Security correspondent Josh Meyer, MSNBC columnist Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and University of Miami professor and MSNBC analyst Fernand Amandi all aired the claim Wednesday morning, with Meyer and Amandi both sharing the same article from the Salon 2021.
Former New York Democratic local lawmaker Jon Cooper, who has more than a million Twitter followers, including White House chief of staff Ron Klain, also ran the Salon article. California Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener also shared it, with a comment that included another famous misrepresentation of a Florida law.
“Apparently the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law wasn’t enough punishment from the GOP for speech she doesn’t like. Now the FL GOP requires faculty/students to register their views with the ‘State,’ Wiener tweeted.
As for how a claim that turned out to be false a year ago could come back now in attacks on DeSantis, the governor’s office blamed the political climate.
“We think it has a lot to do with blinding partisan hatred that overshadows the facts,” Griffin said.
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Ironically, the repetition of a false narrative deals with a law specifically intended to prevent one side from dominating the discourse.
