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Is it censorship to delete lies? Are lies free speech? Should lies be protected as free speech?
Mark Zuckerberg apparently thinks so.
[META] CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration had pressured the company to “censor” COVID-19 content during the pandemic, apparently referring to White House requests to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.
Medical misinformation isn’t mere “content” – it’s misinformation.
In a letter dated Aug. 26, Zuckerberg told the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that he regretted not speaking up about this pressure earlier, as well as other decisions he had made as the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp around removing certain content.
I have to wonder why he wishes that. Does he wish more people had received bad information about Covid?
In the letter to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Monday, Zuckerberg said his company was “pressured” into “censoring” content and that the company would push back if it faced such demands again.
“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter, which was posted by the Judiciary Committee on its Facebook page.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg regrets not allowing more lies about Covid on Facebook.
Zuckerberg has recently tried to appeal to conservative users, by complimenting Republican nominee Donald Trump’s response to an assassination attempt as “badass” and going on right-wing podcasts. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jim Jordan, is a longtime Trump ally.
In its Facebook post, the Judiciary Committee called the letter a “big win for free speech” and said that Zuckerberg had admitted that “Facebook censored Americans”.
So we shouldn’t distinguish between bad medical advice and the other kind – social media should just be a free-for-all, and if thousands die as a result that’s Free Speech.
I suppose they could have just added context, but I don’t imagine that would be believed by those who think they’re being lied to about COVID being bad.
I don’t agree with censorship as a general rule, but I don’t think people have an absolute right to post bad information about a disease during a pandemic. That could prove fatal.
I have mixed feelings. Without knowing what exactly was being censored, I’m not sure if I side with then-Zuckerberg or present-Zuckerberg. Some of the critics of the Covid response had reasonable concerns. For example, the cost-benefit of lockdown, in terms of human lives, was debatable.
Also, this–
(Emphasis added by me)
–gets my spidey senses tingling.
@Ophelia:
That’s a distortion of what Zuckerberg said, and it is naive to suppose that the only stuff that the Whitehouse asked Facebook and Twitter to restrict was untrue “misinformation”.
In fact, over covid, the Whitehouse (and also, taking that cue, most of the mainstream media) tried hard to control the conversation by clamping down on much that was defendable and arguable on the evidence. This included:
— lab-leak theory: This was denounced and censored as a “racist conspiracy theory”, but was actually an entirely viable suggestion that deserved proper consideration (though, overall, the evidence now accumulated seems to point against it).
— the Great Barrington Declaration, and similar ideas. This was denounced and censored as though it came from fringe nuts and was obviously wrong, whereas in truth it came from senior and reputable scientists and can be seriously defended on the evidence. With the benefit of hindsight they were likely right.
— the effectiveness of masks. With the benefit of hindsight, the evidence seems to be that widespread masking gave very little or no benefit. But, at the time, any questioning of this was denounced as “misinformation”. In America widespread masking continued long after it stopped in Europe, largely because the media (largely Democrat leaning) identified not-masking with being Republican.
— school closures. In hindsight school closures were a disastrous policy, giving no benefit to kids, and giving rather little benefit to adults (compared to a policy of isolating and protecting the vulnerable adults), but costing kids greviously in terms of their development and education. Again, school closures continued in America much longer than they did in Europe, and again this was because the media largely labelled any dissent from the approved line as “misinformation”.
— vaccine mandates. While vaccines did a good job of greatly reducing people’s likelihood of serious illness or death from covid, they were not that effective at reducing transmission (which undercuts the case for mandates). It was the Whitehouse who was putting out the misinformation on this point. Fauci has indeed admitted that, accepting that he “curated” the message to what he thought it best for people to hear, not what was supported by the evidence.
The fact is that the Whitehouse was as guilty as anyone of producing “misinformation”. And what they were most keen for Facebook and Twitter to censor was anyone questioning the Whitehouse’s misinformation. We know all this from the Twitter files. Twitter spilled the beans when Musk took over, and now Zuckerberg has said something similar.
It’s the old question, who gets to say what is or is not “misinformation”? You can be certain that if politicians or governments are the ones who get to say which is which then they will always, always misuse that power.
And supposing that everything that the Whitehouse asked to be censored was indeed “misinformation”, and that the only reason Twitter and Facebook might resist is because they want people to be able to spread lies, is utterly naive.
We can only determine what is or isn’t misinformation if we are allowed to question what the government is saying.
You routinely and capably document that much of the Whitehouse messaging and mainstream-media messaging on trans issues is utterly ideological misinformation, but then don’t seem to realise that it’s the same on many other issues (notably race).
I’m surprised you don’t value the ability to dissent on social media more highly. Especially given the arrest of a social-media CEO in France, the closing of Twitter’s Brazil office under legal threats to hold them responsible for anything the government dislikes, and the threats from the EU to censor anything they regard as meeting the vague and subjective standard of being “harmful”.
It’s just pandering to the preferences of what is a potential incoming administration; “Please don’t fuck with my bottom line Republican arseholes, let me kowtow to you so you don’t nationalize DeSantistan”.
Not at all different in motivation to Facebook’s COVID response to the Biden administration. Not passing any judgement on the specific.
And once again Coel returns to say a couple of true things while padding it out with bags and bags of utter nonsense.