A number of prominent figures have called for Spotify to cancel Joe Rogan’s contract with them, so that he can no longer share “anti-vax” misinformation with an unsuspecting public. Rock star Neil Young said he could not share the same platform as Joe Rogan, so Spotify had to remove Neil Young’s music from their platform. The US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, strongly implied, in his answer to a direct question about Covid “misinformation,” that Big Tech companies should cancel or censor people like Joe Rogan. What are we to make of these sorts of comments?
Let’s start by investigating what is behind these calls for Joe Rogan to be censored: the main motivation seems to be that Mr Rogan hosted a controversial guest, Dr Robert Malone, to undertake a critical and wide-ranging discussion of the Covid vaccines.
While Dr Malone evidently is not an “anti-vaxxer” in any of the usual senses (given that he devoted part of his scientific career to the study of vaccine technology), he has expressed serious reservations about the haphazard manner in which data on vaccine side-effects has been collected, the use of Covid vaccines for children, and the blatant disregard of governments for the principle of informed consent. All of these arguments are laid out in some detail in his 3 hour interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in December 2021.
Whether or not you or I agree with Dr Malone’s criticisms of the Covid vaccines, as a key player in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, Dr Malone probably has as much scientific authority to discuss the vaccine rollout and related matters as anyone else. When critics accuse Robert Malone or Joe Rogan of propagating “misinformation,” what they really mean is that they don’t agree with their opinions concerning the Covid vaccines or believe it would be bad for people to follow their advice.
Either way, calling for someone to be silenced or removed from media platforms because one finds their views offensive or harmful betrays a rather shallow view of how information and debate actually works in a free and open society. In a vibrant democratic society, you should expect disagreement and contestation on important issues, on a regular basis. If it upsets you, then you must have unrealistic expectations about what it’s like to live in a free and open society.
If dissenters are silenced, then citizens will only hear a constant stream of one-sided propaganda. Indeed, that is exactly what happens in regimes that have embraced this totalitarian approach to public debate, like Venezuela and China. A society in which “misinformation” is identified and suppressed in a coordinated way is a society in which the State, or some other elite actor, can feed citizens with mind-numbing propaganda on a regular basis, and get away with it.
Those who join in witch hunts to deplatform writers and speakers they personally disagree with, in the hopes of “purifying” the stream of public information, or weeding out false information and “fake news,” profoundly misunderstand how human knowledge is actually acquired and vindicated. They seem to believe that there is a ready-made catalogue of pre-established “facts” that some people have privileged access to, and that these facts can provide a baseline from which to censor deviant information.
There is no such pristine set of “facts,” at least not of the sort that could settle politically contentious debates among citizens, scientists, and politicians. Rather, there is an ongoing conversation and argument, out of which pockets of consensus emerge gradually, over time. Discoveries in the human and social sciences are typically the product of long and winding arguments, evolving bodies of evidence, and rival theories and hypotheses chugging along in mutual contestation.
Scientific inquiry can only proceed if information and hypotheses are open to inspection and challenge, rather than artificially sealed off against potential objections and counterveiling evidence. If scientifically informed opinions are suppressed, censored, or artificially denied access to the public sphere, as has happened frequently throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the loser is not just the censored individuals, but the rest of society, and human progress more generally.
Thanks for reading!
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WELL I HEARD MISTER YOUNG SING ABOUT HER
WELL I HEARD OLD NEIL PUT HER DOWN
WELL, I HOPE NEIL YOUNG WILL REMEMBER
A SOUTHERN MAN DON'T NEED HIM AROUND ANYHOW