I presume that most of us are hostile to hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Politicians and others want social media to be scrubbed of all nefarious postings. Twitter is most recently in the crosshairs on this issue after Elon Musk assumed ownership of the company. They still haven’t settled on a moderation policy. Social media and other information sources have been accused of radicalizing Americans, fostering hate, undermining our elections, providing a forum for bullies and predators, promoting division and coarsening our national discourse.
One man’s cleansing of disinformation is another man’s
censorship.
There is some speech that all reasonable people would agree
should be banned, such as incitement to violence or prurient matter that
children can access.
I challenge those who advocate against publishing hate speech, misinformation or disinformation to offer precise definitions of these categories. Trust me, this is no easy endeavor. And if you are able to construct definitions, can you assure that they will be applied consistently all across the public square?
We can’t even agree on what
constitutes a fact! What is the
definition of a lie? Is there any
politician who has been honest with every utterance and action? If a political leader governs or legislates
differently than he or she campaigned, is this a lie? If the White House issues a statement
praising improved economic metrics while ignoring persistent inflation, is this
dishonest disinformation? There is a huge
spectrum spanning from pure mendacity to absolute truth. There could never be consensus on where to
draw the truth line.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been fertile ground for legitimate
and groundless allegations of misinformation and disinformation. Remember hydroxychloroquine? It is also true that many public health
policies were imposed without rigorous scientific evidence. Remember the prolonged and inconsistently
applied lock downs? Was closing down
our schools for a year truly best practice?
I received the two-shot Moderna series as soon as I was
eligible. Sometime afterwards, I
received the 3rd booster shot as advised by health authorities. However, I declined to take the 4th
booster. Although the government was
advocating this shot, I wasn’t convinced from my reading that there was
adequate evidence of efficacy. Many
experts were divided on this very issue.
It seemed that the government’s position was that they believed it was
effective and hoped that accumulating data over time would confirm this. In my world, proof of efficacy precedes
approval.
When I shared misgivings of this booster with friends, was I
spreading Covid-19 misinformation or was I simply telling the truth? If I posted my opinion on social media, should
it have been taken down?
The election is less than a year away. Brace yourselves for a tsunami of prevarication. If you're in the lie detector business, stock up on inventory as the needles on your machines will be shattered before you can say, Pinocchio!
There are extremes of speech that are obviously, hate speech, misinformation and disinformation that all honest people can agree on. Examples; Mexico sends us their worst people. That is obviously hate speech as Mexico apart from sending diplomats to the us does not deliberately send any of their citizens to the US and declaring that they send us their worst people and pointing at a person of Mexican origin who committed a crime in the US as an example is definitely hate speech which cannot be explained away by any honest rational.
ReplyDeleteVaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they have been approved to prevent is definite misinformation and disinformation and those propagating it should be banned from being able to propagate such information as they are factually wrong, dangerous and can cause breakout of epidemics. COVID vaccine has caused tens of thousands of deaths and banning COVID vaccine in Florida definitely falls into that category.
Hydroxychloroquine issue started out as something that was a maybe and people were desperate for a solution and Fauci addressed it rightly as a maybe and of cause false science from France helped lend it credence, but once the falsity of the science became known and more studies showed it was not effective, continuing to propagate it's use as a therapy became disinformation. Disinformation, and misinformation does not only occur when one voices or outwardly propagates such speech, keeping quiet, or acting as if one is just a passive poster of information should also make one liable in that disinformation, e.g. if Fauci had kept quiet after Trump had said drinking bleach could help treat COVID, he would have been complicit in that misinformation and many more people would have been poisoned from attempting to prevent COVID by drink bleach, which was one of the shortcomings of Dr. Birk as she stood silently by while Trump spewed that nonsense.
With regard to your doubts about the 4th COVID short I will consider that as natural following the law of diminishing returns, availability of more effective treatments for COVID and the significant decrease of the incidence of COVID it was reasonable to ask those questions and raising misgivings will only be regarded as disinformation by a malevolent actor.
Because of the nuances in deciding the intermediate forms of hate speech, disinformation and misinformation the various organizations should institute a fairly diverse panel to police such sites and not just depend on one person, which I believe is what Twitter did before being disbanded by Musk. Unfortunately SCOTUS has allowed money to take by over speech in the country and we are so much worse off for it.
Please define “hate speech”. Trump never said “drinking bleach could help treat COVID”, so are you producing hate speech? Should you “be banned from being able to propagate such information as they are factually wrong”?
Delete“Unfortunately SCOTUS has allowed money to take by over speech in the country and we are so much worse off for it.” Unfortunately, this is nonsense, but your hatred for SCOTUS is blinding you, since the Constitution allows all of us to speak, even those of us who are not spewing disinformation. Censoring doesn’t sound so good when it is pointed at you, eh?
I appreciate the thoughtful and expansive comment above. In medicine and beyond, there is a spectrum ranging from proven medical evidence to uncertain to disputed to false. There are often no clean lines separating these categories. And the introduction of politics into the issue completely distorts the entire process. I believe we can all agree that the pandemic - a medical catastrophe - became superinfected with a political virus.
ReplyDelete