I am seeing a lot of this sort of response to Covid commentators being reinstated on Twitter: that it is dangerous to public health because they were guilty of "misinformation." Unfortunately, the charge of “misinformation” has essentially become a way to emote against people who do not share one’s opinion. Here is a good example of someone throwing out the misinformation charge with a confidence that is only matched by a complete unawareness of the elasticity of this concept, which can be turned against just about anyone one disagrees with:
So let's get a few things straight:
More likely than not, anyone who comments on a public issue for a protracted period will get something wrong, eventually, because they are human and the available evidence is often mixed or limited. So most people occasionally say things that are false. We cannot be saying that most people are guilty of sharing “misinformation” as that would make misinformation a routine part of communication and remove its gravitas entirely.
A mistaken assumption or conclusion is not "misinformation." "Misinformation," if it is at all meaningful, might refer to assertions that blatantly contradict facts that were beyond question at the time of utterance. For example, if someone reported that Britain was currently at war with the United States, this would clearly be a piece of “misinformation,” since this is contradicted by a universally or nearly universally accepted fact.
Covid debates involved some undisputed facts - say, that certain hospitals came under pressure from the effects of a respiratory coronavirus - but they also involved matters that were inherently debateable, not "beyond question," like vaccine safety and the efficacy of lockdowns. Charging one side of such debates with "misinformation" is utterly disingenuous, a rhetorical slate of hand. It's as silly to accuse a vaccine critic of "misinformation" as to accuse a critic of the welfare state of "misinformation." In both cases, complex, debateable issues like risk assessment and risk-benefit tradeoffs are involved. Engage with the argument, don't miscategorise the argument.
If we accept that debateable views about vaccine safety, lockdowns, and the efficacy of Covid treatment protocols are not susceptible to misinformation charges, that does not necessarily mean they are true or especially plausible. They can be challenged on their merits and put to the test in an open debate. However, if one charges one’s adversaries with “misinformation,” on a highly controversial question, one illicitly assumes that what they are saying contradicts settled knowledge or cannot be rationally affirmed, given the available evidence. A more honest way to engage one’s adversary is to use evidence to show up the flaws in their arguments.
One can celebrate the reinstatement of Covid commentators on Twitter, as I do, yet not necessarily think they got everything right, all of the time. I celebrate the reinstatement of commentators’ Twitter accounts because I believe a less restricted public sphere will permit a wider range of facts and perspectives to enrich the conversation. Heavy-handed censorship on political and scientific questions seems to assume the validity of a rigid epistemic hierarchy in which some have the right to silence others. Such a hierarchy of knowledge is a complete sham. Nobody holds a monopoly over knowledge. Certainly, having a Ph.D. or working at the World Health Organisation does not automatically make someone more knowledgeable or wise than everyone else.
The right to speak or express an opinion in a public forum like Twitter (yes, it is a public forum) is not contingent on a prior guarantee that everything you ever say will be correct, nor is it a reward for getting everything right in the past. Rather, it is a way to ensure a fair hearing for diverse perspectives. It is difficult to know in advance which view will prove to be correct. Competing perspectives must duel it out on an even playing field.
To attempt to silence opinions because some "experts" out there (basically, the ones who agree with the censor) think they are mistaken is to corrupt a fundamental principle of free public discourse, namely, that the truth emerges through a vibrant exchange of arguments, in which nobody is beyond challenge, no matter how many Ph.Ds or Nobel prizes they may have.
Ironically, those who claim that anyone guilty of "misinformation" should be purged from the public sphere, often think they are improving the quality of public debate. In fact, whether intentionally or not, they are corrupting the public sphere by arbitrarily empowering a narrow selection of epistemic gatekeepers to silence dissenting views preemptively.
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This post is an expanded and slightly revised version of the following Twitter thread:
Exactly right. It is debate that causes the truth to emerge.
I wish I could say that Twitter is a bastion of free speech. Unfortunately, in spite of petitions by Drs. Peter McCullough and Jay Bhattacharya along with thousands of individuals, Twitter is content to keep me out of the public discourse. Perhaps they know I was calling out CDC, FDA and Fauci as early as Feb 2020 - with a peer-reviewed study in April 2020 pointing to the exceptional pathogenic priming potential of SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins, including the spike protein. I am grateful to Substack for their commitment to sharing objective information... official narratives be damned.