Last night I submitted a response on behalf of the Daily Sceptic to the request from Meta’s Oversight Board for comment on the company’s COVID-19 misinformation policy. I tried to keep it fairly short and punchy.
The Daily Sceptic’s Response
I’m not going to respond to the questions directly. The way they’ve been drafted, it’s as if Meta is taking it for granted that some suppression of health misinformation is desirable during a pandemic – because of the risk it might cause “imminent physical harm” – and what you’re looking for is feedback on how censorious you ought to be and at what point in the course of a pandemic like the one we’ve just been through you should ease back on the rules a little. My view is that suppressing misinformation is never justified.
The first and most obvious point is that it’s far from obvious what’s information and what’s misinformation. Who decides? The government? Public health officials? Bill Gates? None of them is infallible. This was eloquently expressed by the former Supreme Court judge Lord Sumption in a recent article in the Spectator about the shortcomings of the Online Safety Bill:
All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change. Once upon a time, the scientific consensus was that the sun moved around the Earth and that blood did not circulate around the body. These propositions were refuted only because orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics. Knowledge advances by confronting contrary arguments, not by hiding them away. Any system for regulating the expression of opinion or the transmission of information will end up by privileging the anodyne, the uncontroversial, the conventional and the officially approved.
To illustrate this point, take Meta’s own record when it comes to suppressing misinformation. In the past two-and-a-half years, you have either removed, or shadow-banned, or attached health warnings on all your social media platforms to any content challenging the response of governments, senior officials and public health authorities to the pandemic, whether it’s questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy, expressing scepticism about the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccines, or opposing mask mandates. Yet these are all subjects of legitimate scientific and political debate. You cannot claim this censorship was justified because undermining public confidence in those policies would make people less likely to comply with them and that, in turn, might cause harm, because whether or not those measures prevented more harm than they caused was precisely the issue under discussion. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that most if not all of these measures did in fact do more harm than good. It now seems overwhelmingly likely that by suppressing public debate about these policies, and thereby extending their duration, Meta itself caused harm.

Which brings me to my second point. Because there is rarely a hard line separating information from misinformation, the decision of where to draw that line will inevitably be influenced by the political views of the content moderators (or the algorithms designers), meaning the act of labelling something “mostly false” or “misleading” is really just a way for the content moderators (or the algorithm designers) to signal their disapproval of the heretical point of view the ‘misinformation’ appears to support.
How else to explain the clear left-of-centre bias in decisions about what content to suppress? We know from survey data that content that challenges left-of-centre views is more likely to be flagged as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ and removed by social media companies than content that challenges right-of-centre views.
According to a Cato Institute poll published on December 31st 2021, 35% of people identifying as ‘strong conservatives’ said they’d had a social media post reported or removed, compared to 20% identifying as ‘strong liberals’.
Strong conservatives were also more likely to have had their accounts suspended (19%) than strong liberals (12%).
This clear political bias is one of the reasons suppressing so-called conspiracy theories is counterproductive. One obvious case-in-point is Facebook’s suppression of the lab leak hypothesis in the first phase of the pandemic, which the Institute for Strategic Dialogue described as a ‘conspiracy theory’ in April 2020. This censorship policy was so counterproductive, that today even the head of the WHO is reported to believe this ‘conspiracy theory’.
Okay, that particular conspiracy theory is very probably true. What about when a hypothesis is clearly false, such as the claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 Presidential election? That’s still not a reason to censor it. That particular conspiracy theory, energetically promoted by Trump himself, played a part in the violent protests by Trump supporters that took place in Washington on January 6th 2020 and for that reason anyone sharing this theory on Facebook will see their posts instantly removed and they risk being permanently banned from the platform.
But if the intention of suppressing this conspiracy theory was to stop its spread, it hasn’t worked.
According to an Axios-Momentive poll from earlier this year, more than 40% of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden won the Presidential election legitimately, a slight increase on the number expressing the same belief in 2020 in a poll carried out before January 6th.
To be fair, I don’t think the content moderators (or the algorithm designers) are deliberately acting in a partisan way to promote their favoured political candidates and causes – at least, not most of the time. Rather, they believe removing misinformation is good for the health of democracy – it will promote civic virtues like well-informed public debate and increase democratic participation and make ordinary people more responsible citizens. But the problem is that this idea is itself rooted in left-wing ideology, a point made by Barton Swain in a comment piece for the Wall St Journal earlier this year attacking the new Disinformation Governance Board:
The animating doctrine of early-20th-century Progressivism, with its faith in the perfectibility of man, held that social ills could be corrected by means of education. People do bad things, in this view, because they don’t know any better; they harm themselves and others because they have bad information. That view is almost totally false, as a moment’s reflection on the many monstrous acts perpetrated by highly educated and well-informed criminals and tyrants should indicate. But it is an attractive doctrine for a certain kind of credentialed and self-assured rationalist. It places power, including the power to define what counts as ‘good’ information, in the hands of people like himself.
So what should Meta’s policy be on health-related and other forms of misinformation? Simple: leave it alone. As the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies said almost 100 years ago about attempts to suppress false information:
If there be time to expose through discussion, the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
This is known as the Counterspeech doctrine and this quote should be carved into the desk of every Facebook content moderator, algorithm designer and external fact-checker. Meta should behave as if it’s owned by the U.S. Government and not engage in any act of censorship that the Supreme Court would rule is contrary to the First Amendment.
As President Obama said, echoing Louis Brandies, before he decided that misinformation was the scourge of liberal democracy: “The strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech.”
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Once you have understood this, you have understood ‘pandemic!’ ‘the world is on fire!’, nut zero, ‘Blair’s Britain’ and everything:
‘Combining data for the past five years, from 2018 through 2022, allows for a more robust analysis of demographic differences in views about marijuana legalization than is possible from a single poll. Using this aggregate, Gallup finds support for legalization averaged 67% among the general population but varied significantly by subgroup. Conservative, religious and older Americans are the least supportive, while liberal, nonreligious and younger Americans are the most supportive.
Specifically, subgroups whose support for legalization exceeds the national average by 10 or more percentage points include those with no religious preference (89%), self-identified liberals (84%), Democrats (81%)’
‘Marijuana Views Linked to Ideology, Religiosity, Age’ Nov. 2022
‘….the concentration of THC in cannabis has increased significantly over time meaning that cannabis used today is typically much stronger than previously.’
‘…people who use high potency cannabis are more likely to experience addiction than those using low potency products. It also suggests that people using high potency cannabis are more likely to experience a psychotic disorder, such as schizophrenia.’
‘High-strength cannabis linked to addiction and mental health problems’ July 2022
Cannabis addiction is a very real phenomenon[*] but this has nothing to do with the perennial chestnut of the new superhigh potency weed. I’ve already read these stories more than 20 years ago. But then, that’s just another instance of participiants of the so-called culture wars on all two sides being equally corrupt and equally willing to use bad fabrications to further thier dubious causes.
[*] If you’re used to consuming Cannabis-products all day, suddenly stopping this will result in a very miserable feeling one will usually desire to end as soon as possible. This lasts for about two weeks and needs a conscious effort to overcome. Before I moved to England, I gave my last piece of hashish as present to someone (much thanked for in the falsely cozy ways of this subculture) because I had grown intellectually tired of this (and of the people associated with it). That wasn’t exactly pleasant for about half a month but I like my non-stoned self better.
You are entitled, of course, to your own opinion.
Others will base theirs on the evidence:
‘This study finds strong evidence of an association between cannabis use disorder (CUD) and schizophrenia among both males and females, and the magnitude of this association appears to be consistently larger among males than females, especially among those aged 16–25. Importantly, 15% of cases of schizophrenia in males may be preventable if CUD was avoided. Although CUD is not responsible for most schizophrenia cases in Denmark, it appears to contribute to a non-negligible and steadily increasing proportion over the past five decades. In young males (21–30 years, possibly up to 40), the proportion may even be as high as 25–30%. There are global increases in legalization of nonmedical use of cannabis, increases in THC content of cannabis and in total THC doses consumed (Caulkins, Pardo, & Kilmer,) increases in the prevalence of cannabis use and CUD, and decrease in public perception of harm from cannabis use (Chiu, Hall, Chan, Hides, & Leung,)
Alongside the increasing evidence that CUD is a modifiable risk factor for schizophrenia, our findings underscore the importance of evidence-based strategies to regulate cannabis use and to effectively prevent, screen for, and treat CUD as well as schizophrenia.’
Association between cannabis use disorder and schizophrenia….May 2023
Addicts don’t like to hear the truth.
You are hereby awarded the medal for the idiot who’d certainly be posting this. It’s truly deserved. I was actually reluctant to publish the comment just because one of your species was going to react in exactly this way to it. But since it’s widely claimed and believed that cannabis is actually not addictive, I thought pointing out that it definitely is was worthwhile.
PS: You’ve also crossed into illegal territory here by making factually wrong statements about me I could easily disprove weren’t you hiding your name.
Your text has absolutely no relation to my comment which was about two things
1) The wrong myth of cannabis not being addictive.
2) The eternal superweed hoax.
As I have mentioned before I have a few mental problems from the Army. After my wife died I fell apart and spent 20 years in both a bottle and smoking industrial quantities of ‘blow’. I am clear of both after finally getting some help, other than the offered prescription ‘zombie’ drugs. NHS Veterans (Wales) were marvellous in helping me understand and work through my problems although it was brutal. I did not start smoking it until I was in my mid forties and I think that this makes a big difference, my brain is fully formed and I was, ostensibly, an adult. I often wonder if the age at which these others started is ever taken into account, or if it is just monstered to fit a position without reference to the still growing brains of the young. Alcohol and other drugs do affect the development of the immature mind, as is well known. Including abuse by a parent while pregnant (Greta Thunberg, allegedly) causing FASD.
You are clearly too lazy to have read the reference, or even the brief quotes from it, thereby undermining your own protestations.
Bon voyage!
It’s bloody well causing me mental health problems having to listen to all their shyte!
Same here, I keep getting the great urge to go and biet da schidt out of something that really deserves it. Which is causing mental conflict with the part that says that this is not rational. Also with all this safety baggage that is toted these days, why has no one been done for causing harm to others by their actions, as indicated within the introduction of the H&S at work act 1974, from which all the ails of today are derived.
In order to maintain most woke ideological religious tenets, you must hold multiple counter factual lies and inconsistencies in your mind. Moreover one must constantly change these ideas once they are proven false without using the change of information as a basis for reevaluating your information sources and your peer group networks.
To continuously lie to yourself requires a lot of emotional energy which the woke cult tries to keep fired up through media dog whistles. However the right wingers are also caught up in these hysterical stories and suffer as a consequence. For them, it’s constantly seeing lies endorsed by the left and ratified by the news and media never seeming to improve and always leading to more disasters. Then the ever present impending fear that it’s all going to hell and there’s nothing we can do about it, including banging away at our cultist lefty friends and family in the vain hope they will “wake up” and have their heads deeply buried in the sand.
Its a war on all our minds, woke or awake.
56% of white, liberal women aged 18–29 had ever been diagnosed with a mental health condition by their doctors
Old joke, but has to be made here: Didn’t you just write that they were woke liberals?
This sort of Left Wing Politics is a mental health problem. Think running around with leaky facemasks to protect oneself against submicroscopic invisible enemies lurking everywhere, believing that a weather beast god will one day kill us all and that some demonic superhuman entity places human souls in wrong bodies solely to torment them.
Doesn’t strike me as particularly sane and balanced.
Holding multiple contradictory opinions at the same time can’t be good for one’s mental health either.
On a related topic I heard that a BBC reporter at a presser for the Women’s football asked a Moroccan player how many lesbians where in the team. Completely ignorant of the fact that not every country is as tolerant of that sort of thing as Britain – and despite the same BBC regularly contributing to the argument that Britain is a sexist, homophobic hell-hole of oppression.
And there was me thinking they were referring to trans women who had not changed their sexual preferences once they had transitioned.
No need for an explanation or question really. Being woke is an identity relationship (as in algebraic identity) with being mentally ill. It requires devotion to an ideology beyond reason and elevation of a victim mentality over healthy self sufficiency. It has taken over from traditional left wing politics. Plus as Jordan Peterson points out, as the latest research shows, it is also accompanied by a big dollop of psychopathy.
I have always thought that supporting left wing politics was a mental condition, particularly of young people. Most tend to grow out of it as they grow up and assume the responsibilities of adult life.
One does not need to look far at all in Clown World for examples of mentally ill people trying to normalize their behaviour. I’m pretty sure adults identifying as babies would qualify. Eat your heart out Damian Hirst;
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1683464633527549952
https://twitter.com/_The_Bayou_Boy/status/1683112626664898560
I think you will find it’s mental health problems causing the left wing politics
Just what I was going to say!
“Could Left-wing politics be causing mental health problems?”
What?!! Perhaps Left-wing politics is the mental illness. Prolonged efforts of a person (or the group) to keep reality outside of their head is not conducive to good mental health.
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Thomas Sowell
It is a very small number of people who give a monkey’s about these trendy ideas. I think that even in hotbed USA it was just eight percent. The whole thing is a psy op to convince you that these are the most important issues whilst they fleece you dry.
A small proportion will have genuine mental health problems, for the rest it’s a trend, just another bandwagon to jump on or a label that’s a useful tool for getting out of anything they don’t want to do.
It could also be that this is the mollycoddled generation who have been raised to be perpetually offended and taught that the world is a scary place. These young adults have never known the freedom of spending long summer days out with friends with no parental supervision, sorting out their own differences and entertaining themselves. Instead, their lives have been micromanaged by over anxious parents, they’ve been picked up and dropped off everywhere, run crying to the nearest adult if another child called them a name and won prizes for failing because ‘everyone’s a winner’. Now they’re adults they don’t have a clue how to operate in the real world and peddle all this woke crap to try and make it all a bit less scary with the ‘be kind’ message and such like.
Ofcourse when you believe things that are not true you get yourself into a whole lot trouble. Once you think capitalism is evil when infact it has brought billions out of miserable poverty then right away your world view that does not match what is actually happening in the real world will cause you some anxiety. Once you believe that humanity will be wiped out by a little trace gas that makes you glue yourself to the street then perhaps it is long past the time you saw a shrink. etc etc all the way down the list of absurd Liberal Progressive anti human policies.
You don’t have to be a nutter to espouse left wing ideas, but it certainly helps