Why Centralising Control of Scientific and Political Speech Is A Terrible Idea
John Stuart Mill, an ardent defender of freedom of the press, made the following remark in his 1859 tract On Liberty: “There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.” Opinions, for Mill, must be tested by opposing arguments, otherwise they become little better than dead dogmas that may be adhered to zealously yet with little rational warrant.
Mill’s defense of a free press makes for sobering reading at a time when newspapers suspend writers and cartoonists for offending popular sensibilities, journalists are pressured into towing the editorial line even when facts “get in the way,” and internationally renowned medical experts giving congressional testimony are censored by private media platforms.
In some media companies, such as Google and Twitter - but also many mainstream print and news media - it seems to be highly fashionable for content moderators to suppress any information that conflicts with “official” opinions or the opinions of certain political and scientific elites. The net result of these policies is to artificially restrict the range of information and perspectives that make it into the public sphere.
Certain perspectives, such as those defending obligatory vaccination, community masking, or the suppression of emerging Covid treatments, are given a free pass, while other perspectives, such as those skeptical about universal vaccination and community masking, or supportive of a more permissive regulatory regime for emerging Covid treatments, are frequently suppressed, censored, or banished from the mainstream.
While censorship arguably has some legitimate role to play in screening out violent and patently abusive content, or content that promotes self-destructive or other-destructive behaviour, there has been a progressive tendency to expand the grounds for censorship to include scientific and political disagreement. The censor, or one of his favourite experts, disagrees with you. So you’re taken off the air, or your newspaper column is axed. That gives a hell of a lot of power to the Information Gatekeepers in a democracy.
Big Tech giants, as well as national and local newspapers and TV stations, have decided to rally behind the views of certain experts and against the views of others, enforcing whatever they take to be scientific and political orthodoxy on a variety of topics.
For example, one newspaper editor justified his decision not to publish a piece of mine with a comment along the following lines: “We can criticise certain aspects of the management of the pandemic response, but we can’t put in question measures that have been adopted by practically all countries.” And why not? Is the assumption that a lot of experts and rulers cannot get something badly wrong?
To get back to our avid defender of the free press, John Stuart Mill: Mill argued that the assumption that some people’s opinions are infallible or superior to the opinions of everyone else is nonsense. No elite group should be given wide latitude to censor other people’s interventions in the public sphere, for the simple reason that nobody - not even the most intelligent, knowledgeable, and wise of citizens, is immune to error. The only way to weed out those errors is to allow competing opinions to duel it out in an honourable and fair fight.
Those who relentlessly invoke “expert opinions” (their favourite ones, of course) in the hopes of shutting down debate, seem to want to transform “expert opinion” (or, more likely certain cherry-picked expert opinions) into unquestioned orthodoxy. The uncritical adulation of “expert opinion” often goes hand in hand with an uncanny zeal for censorship and the relentless persecution of dissenters and “heretics.”
This zeal may, in certain cases, be motivated by the naive view that there is in fact a special class of persons who are either wiser, morally superior, or more knowledgeable and enlightened than others, and can protect the public sphere from ignorant, benighted, or “dangerous” perspectives. But this surely betrays a misplaced faith in the intellectual and moral superiority of the censors, who are human beings and as such are just as prone to error as many of the people they are censoring.
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 scientists, but science itself, and human progress more generally.
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Below, please find my latest short video on the importance of independent journalism in a world in which many media outlets and journalists have become increasingly politicised and the boundaries between journalism and activism are often blurred: