FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship

Taibbi: The Folly Of Pandemic Censorship

Earlier this week, in the latest in a series of scolding campaigns, a
Britain-based group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate gave
a sneak peek at a research report on Substack to The Guardian and The
Washington Post. Both outlets came out with their scare pieces this
morning. From The Guardian:

    A group of vaccine-skeptic writers are generating revenues of at
least $2.5m (£1.85m) a year from publishing newsletters for tens of
thousands of followers on the online publishing platform Substack,
according to new research…

    Imran Ahmed, chief executive of CCDH, said companies like Substack
were under “no obligation” to amplify vaccine skepticism and make
money from it. “They could just say no…”

The Post, citing “some misinformation experts say” — the pandemic
version of “people familiar with the matter” — added:

    These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific
content that accommodates their viewpoints — potentially making the
services less responsible for spreading harmful views, some
misinformation experts say.



If these stories sound familiar, it’s because this same Center for
Countering Digital Hate two years ago tried to pull the same stunt
with The Federalist, using NBC to ask Google to crack down on them.
Humorously, and typically — this happens a lot with these stories —
that effort ended in fiasco. The piece NBC ended up writing boasting
of the success of its “Verification Unit” in getting the site
demonetized, entitled, “Google bans two websites from its ad platform
over protest articles,” turned out to itself be misinformation. The
Federalist was never banned, only warned, and the issue was its
comments section, not its articles. Google had to issue a statement:

    The Federalist was never demonetized.
    — Google Communications (@Google_Comms) June 16, 2020

Substack is home to tens of thousands of writers and over a million
paying subscribers, quadruple last year’s total of 250,000. The sites
range from newsletters for comics enthusiasts to crypto news to recipe
ideas. Like the Internet as a whole, it’s basically a catalogue of
everything.

Still, panic campaigns in legacy press consistently focus on handfuls
of sites, and with impressive dishonesty describe them as
representative. I was particularly struck by a recent Mashable article
that talked about a supposed “backlash” against Substack’s “growing
collection of anti-trans writers,” which seemed to refer to Jesse
Singal (who is no such thing) and Graham Linehan and — that’s it.
Substack is actually home to more trans writers than any other outlet,
but to the Scolding Class, that’s not the point. The company’s real
crime is that it refuses to submit to pressure campaigns and strike
off Wrongthinkers.

Substack is designed to be difficult to censor. Because content is
sent by email, it’s not easy to pressure platforms to zap offending
material. It doesn’t depend on advertisers, so you can’t lean on them,
either. The only real pressure points are company executives like
Hamish McKenzie and Chris Best, who are now regular targets of these
ham-fisted campaigns demanding they discipline writers.

The latest presents Substack as a place where, as Mashable put it,
“COVID misinformation is allowed to flourish.” The objections mainly
center around Joseph Mercola, Alex Berenson, and Robert Malone. There
are issues with the specific critiques of each, but those aren’t the
point. Every one of these campaigns revolves around the same larger
problem: would-be censors misunderstanding the basic calculus of the
freedom of speech.

Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was,
the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception,
official.

Whether it’s WMDs or the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco or the missile gap or
the red scare or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, the worst
real-world disasters always turn out to be driven or enabled by
official falsehoods. In the case of Afghanistan (and Iraq, and Vietnam
before both), the cycle of war disaster was perpetuated by a sweeping,
organized, and intricate system of official lying, about everything
from the success of missions to the efficacy of weaponry to the
political devotion of supposed allies. The only defense against these
most dangerous types of deceptions is an absolutely free press.

People know authorities lie, which is why the more they clamp down,
the bigger their trust problem usually becomes. Unfortunately, censors
by nature can’t help themselves. Our official liars are always trying
to learn from their errors. For instance, film of wounded, suffering,
or dead American boys, as well as of the atrocities we committed, not
only resulted in pressure to end the Vietnam War, but probably
prevented future invasions of countries like Nicaragua, as voters
recalled the sickening “quagmire.”

Military officials saw this, and when they finally got to go to war
again, they banned the filming of coffins and instituted an embed
system that closed off the bulk of adversarial reporting. Of course,
that was not enough, because organizations like Wikileaks found ways
to sneak out forbidden pictures. So, the powers that be imposed much
tougher penalties on whistleblowers going forward. Instead of letting
the Daniel Ellsbergs of the world write books and give lectures, the
new reality for people like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden is
permanent exile or imprisonment. The jailers seem quite proud of this,
but the unofficial pseudo-ban on Assange coverage has only added to
the impression of a not-free, certainly not trustworthy system of
media.

Instead of seeing the root causes of this atmosphere of rapidly
declining trust, officials keep pushing for even more sweeping
campaigns of control, most recently seeking to make platforms like
Google and Twitter arbiters of speech.

I’ve used Substack to show the amazingly diverse range of speech
deemed unallowable on private platforms, from raw footage of both
anti-Trump protests and the January 6th riots, to satirical videos no
one had even seen yet, to advocates and detractors of the medication
Ivermectin, to a Jewish tweeter’s pictorial account of Hitler’s life,
to a now proven-true expose about the president’s son. The latter case
is on point, because the widely distributed story that the New York
Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was the actual
disinformation. If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and
you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really
screwed.

This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and
center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does
not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as
well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been
untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of
issues in the last two years.

NIAID director Anthony Fauci has told three different stories about
masks, including an episode in which he essentially claimed to have
lied to us for our own good, in order to preserve masks for frontline
workers — what Slate called one of the “Noble lies about Covid-19.”
Officials turned out to be wrong about cloth masks anyway. Here is
Fauci again on the issue of what to tell the public about how many
people would need to be vaccinated to achieve “herd immunity,”
casually explaining the logic of lying to the public for its sake:

    When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a
vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then,
when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought,
“I can nudge this up a bit,” so I went to 80, 85.

We’ve seen sudden changes in official positions on the efficacy of
ventilators and lockdowns, on the dangers (or lack thereof) of opening
schools, and on the risks, however small, of vaccine side effects like
myocarditis. The CDC also just released data showing natural immunity
to be more effective in preventing hospitalization and in preventing
infection than vaccination. The government had previously said, over
and over, that vaccination is preferable to natural immunity (here’s
NIH director Francis Collins telling that to Bret Baier unequivocally
in August). This was apparently another “noble lie,” designed to
inspire people to get vaccinated, that mostly just convinced people to
wonder if any official statements can be trusted.

To me, the story most illustrative of the problem inherent in policing
“Covid misinformation” involves a town hall by Joe Biden from July 21
of last year. In it, the president said bluntly, “You’re not going to
get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” pretty much the definition
of Covid misinformation:

It was bad enough when, a month later, the CDC released figures
showing 25% of a sample of 43,000 Covid cases involved fully
vaccinated people. Far worse was a fact-check by Politifact, which
judged Biden’s clearly wrong statement “half true.”

“It is rare for people who are fully vaccinated to contract COVID-19,
but it does happen,” the site wrote. They then cited CDC data as
backup. “The data that the CDC collected before May 1 show that, of
101 million people vaccinated in the U.S., 10,262 (0.01%) experienced
breakthrough cases.” Politifact’s “bottom line”: Biden “exaggerated,”
but “cases are rare.”

Anyone paying attention to that story will now distrust the president,
the CDC, and “reputable” mainstream fact-checkers like the Pew
Center’s Politifact. These are the exact sort of authorities whose
guidance sites like the Center for Countering Digital Hate will rely
upon when trying to pressure companies like Substack to remove certain
voices.

This is the central problem of any “content moderation” scheme:
somebody has to do the judging. The only thing worse than a landscape
that contains misinformation is a landscape where misinformation is
mandatory, and the only antidote for the latter is allowing all
criticism, mistakes included. This is especially the case in a
situation like the present, where the two-year clown show of lies and
shifting positions by officials and media scolds has created a
groundswell of mistrust that’s a far bigger threat to public health
than a literal handful of Substack writers.

About that: here’s the lede of a BBC report about an incident that
took place in December, called “Australia police arrest quarantine
escapees”:

    Australian police have arrested three people who broke out of a
Covid quarantine compound in the middle of the night.

    The Howard Springs centre near Darwin in the Northern Territory is
one of Australia’s main quarantine facilities for people returning to
the country.

    Police said the trio scaled a fence to break out of the facility.

    Officers found them after a manhunt on Wednesday. All had tested
negative to Covid the day before.

Although I’m very much not a fan of Dr. Joseph Mercola’s, the fact
that the CCDH wants to shut down articles like his “The Unvaxxed May
Soon Be Shipped to Quarantine Camps” — which among other things
contains passages about the Australian program — shows how little they
understand about how media audiences think.

As is the case with the Assange story, the paucity of information in
mainstream press about the serious draconian measures in places like
Australia and Germany has already massively heightened distrust in
those outlets and in official reassurances. The “nothing to see here”
attitude about the potential downsides of authoritarian policies has
reached sick joke status (see Russell Brand’s hilarious but depressing
take on the Australia situation here). As the Substack folks
themselves pointed out today, our society has a trust problem, and
attempts to sweep it under a rug only make things worse.

Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and
Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the
holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true.
If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher
levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong
with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow
everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a
better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the
censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is
spreading.

Lastly, while the Post certainly has its own problems in this area,
the Guardian editors should puke with shame for even thinking about
condemning anyone else’s “misinformation,” while their own fake story
about Assange’s “secret talks” with Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian
embassy remains up. Leaving an obvious hoax uncorrected will tend to
create a credibility problem, and you compound it by pointing a finger
elsewhere. This is a lesson in this for health authorities, too. Clean
your own houses, and maybe you won’t have such a hard time being
believed.


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-folly-of-pandemic-censorship
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