Censorship Doesn’t Fix “Bad” Ideas. It Merely Shoves the Discussion Underground

Greg Lukianoff explains that censorship, no matter how well intended it is, drives conversation into the shadows, where it festers. It isolates viewpoints away from the mainstream, detached from any interaction with opposing views, where participants experience a false consensus.  Where their reach on important topics exceeds their grasp.  Those who advocate for censorship to cure "bad" ideas, always makes the situation worse by emboldening the "bad" ideas. This is one of the ideas why censorship never works. 

[C]ensorship on one platform may lead to an increase in the amount of similar content on other platforms. This is the unintended consequence of heavy-handed moderation policies.

Social media censorship creates new ecosystems that are ripe for group polarization. As Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein explains in an essay on group polarization: “People who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion [with each other], to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm.”

For a vivid portrayal of how exclusion makes polarization, paranoia, and radicalism far worse, we highly recommend Andrew Callaghan’s documentary This Place Rules, which highlights some of the protests and personalities that played large or small roles in the run-up to, and day of, the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Callaghan has a grave warning about how badly attempts to censor can backfire: “When you take someone who talks about a deep state conspiracy to silence him and his followers and then you silence him and his followers it only really adds to his credibility,” he says in the film. When you’re dealing with people who believe there’s a conspiracy to shut them up, do absolutely nothing that looks anything like a conspiracy to shut them up.

Simply put, censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse.

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New Alumni Group Advocates for Free Inquiry at Colleges

On Oct. 18, five alumni groups announced the creation of an organization to stand up for open inquiry: The Alumni Free Speech Alliance. This group consists of alumni. Why?

Because with rare exceptions, everyone else may feel too exposed to attacks to take a stand against campus culture. Our experience is that the few student free-speech groups don’t have many members (Princeton’s has about 20). Champions of free speech among faculty are badly outnumbered, even as many left-of-center professors are starting to realize that they too can be brutally canceled by the mob. Those few students and faculty who speak up often feel isolated and exposed.

University trustees, presidents and other administrators are also usually mired in the toxic campus environment, which responds to heresy with attacks. Most have either been cowed by or genuinely believe in a woke orthodoxy that sees free speech as an inconvenient disruption.

That leaves alumni as the only university stakeholders with the numbers and clout to lead the defense of free speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity in campus environments. Free speech and academic freedom are fundamental to the advancement of knowledge and to the success of our colleges and universities. Will all teaching and research at these schools soon be subject to a mandated orthodoxy? Will parents keep paying to send their children places where the fundamental elements of learning are suppressed? These institutions constantly seek alumni involvement and contributions. Alumni have the ability and duty to demand that their schools maintain the reasons for which they were created. But to be effective, alumni need to organize.

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The Newly Published Westminster Declaration Seeks to Dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex

From Public, an introduction to the Westminster Declaration, an effort focused on "formal censorship by governments of online speech, not censorship at the level of the workplace or media." Several excerpts from this article:

A group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration ...

The signatory list includes scholars like Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker, and John McWhorter, actors like Tim Robbins and John Cleese, journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang, and scientists like Jay Bhattacharya. It includes prominent free speech advocates like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Nadine Strossen, Greg Lukianoff, and many more.

You may notice that the signatory list features thinkers from the Left, like Slavoj Žižek, as well as thinkers from the Right, like Jordan Peterson. People with very different political views have signed the declaration, and you may also notice that individuals with significant disagreements have signed it. That is precisely the point. It is only through free speech that robust political, ethical, and scientific debates can take place.

“Across the globe,” the Declaration reads, “government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. …the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance.”

Those who claim they are simply “fighting misinformation” are, in truth, attempting to control the minds of the public. This is exceedingly dangerous since, ”time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labeling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defense against disinformation.”

While we do not intend to add any additional signatories to the Declaration, given the significant amount of time already invested, we welcome endorsements in the form of articles and social media posts by those who agree with it. We are happy to note that The New York Post, The Telegraph of London, The Times of London, Die Welt, France-Soir, La Veritá, and other newspapers have written about or will soon publish articles about the Declaration.

The opening passages to the Westminster Declaration:

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

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Dr. Jay Bhatacharya’s Amazing Story

If you asked me five years ago, I might have struggled to name many people I considered to be heroes. I have many heroes now, many of them people who stood up to censorship. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a highly credentialed doctor, which means that we should have been allowed to hear his opinions during the pandemic. But he was censored, so we did not learn of all of these harms that a lock-down would create:

In the following interview, Dr. Bhattacharya tells his story, including his contributions to the Great Barrington Declaration to his role in the case of Missouri v Biden, which appears destined to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I created the following transcript for those who absorb details better through reading:

The sad fact is that we are living in a time where our once liberal societies are no longer liberal. We live in a deeply illiberal society that punishes people for openly expressing heretical thoughts. And that statement that I just made that we live in, in illiberal society requires some justification. I mean, nominally, we have democracies with constitutions, charters, whatever committed to essential civil liberties necessary for a liberal society.

And I admit, before the pandemic, I took these rights for granted. I took the right to free speech for granted. The right to worship. The right to protest the right to free movement across borders. But during the pandemic, what I learned was that the government could violate each and every one of these rights in the name of infection control. During the pandemic, governments made it nearly impossible for independent scientists to discuss and disseminate ideas contrary to government public health policy. The government censored smeared and defamed dissident scientists who criticized government authorities in the name of science. And I say this from firsthand experience.

[More . . . ]

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How Public Responds to its Recent Loss of Subscribers

Public, founded by Michael Shellenberger, has recently lost a significant number of subscribers. They responded with an editor's note, which IMO was beautifully written. Here's an excerpt:

Over the last week, we saw the single largest loss of subscribers we have seen in our nearly three years as a publication. Why?

These are some of the messages we received from unsubscribers:

“Don’t lecture us on human rights wrt fighting terrorism. The Geneva Convention wasn’t designed for this.”

“Unbalanced Pro-Israel garbage, amongst all the other garbage that's been accumulating recently.”

“Comparisons between depraved terrorist atrocity and actions designed to ensure that its population can live in safety and security show too much of an absence of moral clarity (or possibly even worse as bordering on antisemitism) to continue following.”

“This tone-deaf most recent post defending free speech of Pro-Hamas supporters turned me off completely.”

“Your support for Israel and their war crimes is reprehensible.”

At first glance, it may appear that the commenters disagree with each other. After all, some people thought we were too pro-Israel, and others thought we weren’t pro-Israel enough. In truth, the commenters agreed that everything they read from us must completely align with their opinions.

We don’t expect our readers to agree with us all the time. We don’t even always agree with each other. Not every article we publish reflects the views of all the editors. Obviously, if our disagreements were so great, we would not work together. But on issues ranging from Ukraine to UAPs to Israelis and Palestinians, you can expect that we have plenty of debates and hold a diversity of views here.

To reiterate: we hope you continue to be a subscriber, paid and free. We are deeply grateful to all of you who are subscribers, and intend to remain ones. We don’t want anyone to unsubscribe, even if — especially if — you disagree with us on some, and even most, things.

We think highly of our readers and welcome healthy disagreements in the comments. We strive to correct any errors we make, and to consider multiple perspectives. We want Public to be an outlet that sometimes confirms your views, sometimes challenges you to think differently, and always gives you new ideas or information to consider.

This is what we seek out from the publications we read, and we want that to be what you find here.

But we would sooner close up shop than compromise on the principles that we hold as journalists, and that we think all journalists should hold. We strongly believe that the principle of human rights must be universally applied, or they are not human rights. We have the same view about freedom of speech: we believe speech rights apply equally to everyone, even those we most firmly disagree with.

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