The War against Misinformation

The simpletons in our midst have been clamoring for censorship. In the name of the Covid pandemic they have insisted that major media outlets, and especially social media platforms, shut down any speech that does not conform to their beliefs.

They are doing so in the name of misinformation. And they imagine that misinformation kills people. Good-bye first amendment. Welcome to the kingdom of groupthink.

Now that the pandemic is winding down, some sane and sensible voices are questioning the war on misinformation. For our part we have done so consistently on this blog, but, sad to say, we have a smaller audience than does, for example, Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic.

So, he opens a recent article about medical misinformation, thusly:

But like wars, terrorist attacks, and other events that confront us with mass death, pandemics cause some people to doubt the liberal project and to clamor for an alternative that feels safer. So a growing faction in the U.S. feels that, when it comes to “medical misinformation,” liberal remedies for false, unreasoned, or uninformed speech are insufficient to our new pandemic reality—as if being wrong on most subjects is permissible, but being wrong on COVID-19 is too costly to tolerate.

The rage to censor differences of opinion has overcome the First Amendment. Media companies have been goaded by Democratic politicians to do their bidding. Dare we mention it, but the Hunter Biden laptop story, removed from Twitter in the run up to the 2020 election was a consequential attack on democracy-- one for which no one will pay a price.

The First Amendment hasn’t kept public officials from calling upon Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other tech platforms to restrict false or misleading claims about vaccination and other COVID-related issues. The White House has urged tech companies to censor individuals engaged in protected speech. Senator Amy Klobuchar introduced legislation in hopes of pressuring social-media companies to do more “to prevent the spread of deadly vaccine misinformation.” And the government can apply pressure on private speech in other ways: The Department of Homeland Security, for example, is characterizing misinformation as a terrorism threat. All of these efforts reflect a judgment that, at least on pandemic matters, the liberal approach to dissent has greater costs than benefits.

As for the reasons why we should have the right to read different opinions about vaccines, Friedersdorf offers these arguments.

First, a point that I have made before, when you discuss an issue openly you increase trust in the conclusions. Appearing to force people to believe something most often causes them to push back.

Open discussion of vaccines enhances trust in them.

The second point, also promoted by yours truly and many others, is a simple fact-- who decides what is misinformation? No one with a brain believes that the fact checkers at Facebook have some superior wisdom and that they can see the unadulterated truth.

As a general matter, no person or group or office is capable of assessing what facts or viewpoints constitute misinformation so reliably as to justify censorship based on their conclusions. A concept as malleable as misinformation tends to be interpreted in biased or self-serving ways—and not only by the Chinese government.

Of course, when social media companies cancel someone, it produces a backlash and enhances the authority of the person being canceled:

The backlash against Americans who try to “cancel” others or to shut down conversations rather than engage in them is so widespread that many attempts to deplatform a person inspire others to rally around the target, increasing their fame and reach as well as support for their views.

While it is true that many Americans have refused the vaccine, there is no evidence that Joe Rogan is responsible or that misinformation has any influence on their decisions. Besides, recent studies have shown that the vaccines are not quite as safe as their proponents have claimed.

And, as everyone knows, sometimes it takes time for the negative side-effects to become evident, even to scientists.

Daniel Engber has written:

Vaccine refusal, in its broadest sense, has taken a catastrophic toll in the United States … But the claim that pandemic falsehoods aired on Rogan’s show are substantially responsible ignores the sticky facts of our predicament. Surveys now suggest that roughly one in six American adults says they won’t get vaccinated for COVID-19. That’s roughly what the surveys showed over the summer; it’s also roughly what the surveys showed in the summer of 2020, when the pandemic was still young. One in six adults, some 45 million Americans in all, is seemingly immune to any change of context or information. One in six adults—a solid tumor on our public health that doesn’t grow or shrink.

Friedersdorf concludes:

It would be nice if everyone agreed about how to fight COVID-19. But normally, Americans understand that this is a huge, populous, multicultural, pluralistic country where diversity and difference are inescapable. In almost every dispute of consequence, tens of millions of us are right and tens of millions of us are wrong. Yet when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, the fact that a minority of Americans have refused to get a shot is being treated as evidence of a “misinformation crisis” for which media and tech companies are responsible. The presumption is that if not for a dysfunctional information environment, uptake would be universal.

And the last is the important point. The rhetoric of it all, as we have pointed out, assumes that if everyone has received the same correct information then everyone will make the decision that health authorities want them to make. This fails to consider the points that Friedersdorf and many others have raised, namely the fact that, the more people believe that you are trying to force them to do something the more they are likely to push back against your presumption.