President Joe Biden wants to suppress speech that discourages Americans from being vaccinated against COVID-19. Because the First Amendment doesn’t allow him to do that, he is asking Facebook and other social-media giants to do it for him.
Vaccine skepticism has existed since the advent of the technology itself. However, the mass uptake of social media is blamed for the significant traction recently gained by the ‘anti-vax’ movement. A recent report found that 400 anti-vax social media accounts contain 58 million followers based primarily in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
Government-based censorship laws & big tech censorship policies should not be implemented for three main reasons.
#1 - Many people have legitimate concerns around the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines due to factors including the speed of their development, the underrepresentation of ethnic minority groups in clinical trials and the unknown longevity of their immunological effects. The public must feel freely able to voice these concerns, raise challenging questions and expect transparent replies from trusted institutions. An unintended effect of shutting down anti-vax groups may be to silence those with legitimate questions for fear of shame or ridicule and lead them to harbor greater suspicion of public health authorities and sympathize with anti-vax rhetoric.
#2 - Emergency laws would enforce censorship and de-platforming and threaten the democratic cornerstone of freedom of speech. All ideas – even the bad ones – must be allowed a public airing, and their qualities debated in the marketplace of ideas. It is through this process that institutions foster influence, respect, and public trust, by presenting empirical evidence, reasoned arguments, and a scientific method based on critical thinking. Conversely, widespread de-platforming of anti-vax campaigners is unlikely to dissuade those sympathetic to these messages but rather reinforce their strongly held beliefs about vaccine conspiracies while deepening their mistrust of public health authorities. In addition, removing the social media stages of anti-vax campaigners is likely to drive them underground to adopt alternative stages that are more difficult to identify, monitor, and respond to with public health messaging. The lack of evidence to support censorship as a reliable means of producing desirable health behavior change should deter against the deployment of this strategy.
#3 - The features of an ‘anti-vax campaign’ are themselves undetermined and, depending on the breadth of the definition imposed, may include both the mere voicing of concern for vaccine safety and the intentional distribution of dangerous falsities. Governments will be without the substantial resources required to identify all online anti-vax campaigns and thus will be forced to hand over decision-making powers to social media platforms themselves. This is unlikely to be an optimal strategy for the delivery of public health messaging and risks triggering dangerous normative shifts in the ability of social media platforms to control what the public is and is not able to see.
In any event, all Americans should be alarmed that these giant firms are acting as judge and jury on enormously important issues, like our health or our elections. They must not be allowed to control our information, nor our country. Today, they are doing both.
Here are 4 legitimate health issues that are being censored by big tech and not be covered by the mainstream media:
#1 - Bell’s Palsy Linked To Covid Vaccines?
#2 - COVID-19 Vaccines Enlarged Lymph Nodes Suggest You Already Had The Virus
