Good for him:
Elon Musk has abandoned Twitters Covid-19 misinformation policy after vowing to make the site a free speech champion.
“Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy,” a notice on its website reads.
A page on Twitter’s website titled “Covid-19 misleading information policy” now redirects users to Twitter’s user help homepage.
That page previously said: “Content that is demonstrably false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of harm (such as increased exposure to the virus, or adverse effects on public health systems) may not be shared on Twitter.”
“Misinformation” is of course real and comes in many different forms. “Bill Gates is secretly using the covid vaccine to implant a sterilizing microchip” is misinformation, and it is misinformation of the kind that until last week, twitter was banning. But at the same time, “Mandatory facemask policies dramatically lower levels of covid infection” has also proved over time to be misinformation, but of a different, more approved kind. Twitter was not banning that misinformation, because it tends to come from Governments and journalists and the great and the good.
The interesting thing about both kinds of misinformation, though, is that in both cases, the people spreading it usually believe it entirely sincerely. No doubt, people who claimed that the covid vaccines reduced your chances of catching covid by more than 90% also sincerely believed it, and did not think themselves providing misinformation. They were simply repeating what the experts said.
And there’s the rub: The modern concept of “misinformation” is based almost entirely on the modern piety that experts can never be wrong, and that, in times of crisis, they can therefore never be questioned. We see this playing out, here in Ireland, with the national broadcaster’s coverage of climate change, where it is actually banned as a matter of policy from questioning the claims made by a “climate expert” on RTE’s airwaves. They are experts and cannot be wrong, questioning them is misinformation.
The problem – the very basic problem – is that experts are wrong with great regularity. Economists are experts, and yet very few of them can ever accurately predict a recession. The world is full of political experts – both professional and amateur – who can’t predict an election outcome to save their lives. In terms of the pandemic, experts were getting things wrong from the very beginning, both in terms of how lethal covid was, how easily it might spread, and so on.
Some people might argue, not unreasonably, that the difference between an expert being wrong about vaccine efficacy and somebody tweeting “bill gates, microchips, do the maths” is that the expert, at least, has a subject matter grounding in what he or she is talking about. And that is true: A reasonable person should give the opinion of an expert more weight than they might give the opinion of somebody calling themselves “QPatriotAction” on social media. But that’s just common sense. The problem with a misinformation policy is that it is based off the notion that people have no common sense, and further, that it actually creates conditions where common sense departs the field of play.
During covid, people were not just banned for vaccine conspiracy theories (though even that was excessive). They were also banned for reasonable questions. For tweeting unapproved, but real, scientific studies. For questioning Government policy. Consider that last one.
When you go down the road of “only expert opinions are correct” and challenging those opinions is “misinformation”, then you run into a basic democratic problem, because almost all Governments base their policies on the views and notions of “experts”.
In Covid, these “expert views” became Government policy. And so, it became almost the de facto position of social media companies that questioning Government policy on their platforms was misinformation.
Indeed, in Ireland, the Government actually employed Mark Little and Aine Kerr through their company, Kinzen, to “monitor” misinformation, which was then sent on to the social media companies for “action”. In theory, it might all have been about stopping the (vanishingly small) “Bill Gates Microchip” community. In practice, as Gript reported at the time, very mild criticisms of lockdown and Government were reported to social media companies as “misinformation”.
So Musk is to be applauded, in my view, for this move. In practice this was not a “misinformation policy”, but an “unapproved misinformation policy”. Misinformation was fine, so long as it was the right kind.
We are a society of adults. We are responsible for the information we consume ourselves. If you want to immerse yourself in a world of nonsense where Bill Gates is manufacturing microchips to sterilize your children, well, that’s your choice. But it displays profoundly weak critical thinking skills.
There’s a responsibility which comes with being a citizen – that is to inform yourself, judge whether a source or a writer is credible, and make the best decisions you can based on the information available. No good, though, comes from social media companies shutting up anybody who asks any awkward questions of experts.
Look at China, where criticism is also banned. They’re still doing zero covid. One wonders, without a free media and people fighting back against “misinformation” policies, whether Ireland might not be in the same place, as well.