Freedom of Speech is Our Only Hope

The MSM have given us many bad-takes during the Corona epidemic, but the most icy-cold of all bad-takes is that Corona proves the need for censorship and control of speech. Innate in the concept of Freedom of Speech is something that gives it precedence over other ideas and notions: we cannot even discuss those concepts without having the freedom to do so.

For example: some say that Corona has proved the need for a more centralized approach to healthcare, while trying to censor those who point-out that the centralized authorities themselves dropped the ball. Even as the FDA lumbered towards designing a Corona test that actually worked, they insisted that no independent labs could move ahead with their own. The result was that the virus spread in darkness with no ability of local and regional authorities to respond to the threat in a logical manner. A German lab had a test ready in January, just a week after China released the genome sequence, but US labs with equal sophistication were unable to help. Nevertheless, the demands for more centralized control via single-payer healthcare in the US, and a "global government" worldwide have come in regularly. I suspect that a storm of red-tape is incoming regardless, but how much worse would it be if we had not the ability to critique the response of central planners?

To take another example, we all know how the media and State governments were clamoring for more and more ventilators to be available. Our own Little Dictator, Andrew Cuomo, said he needed 30,000 of them! Indeed, much of the initial panic that shaped draconian lockdown measures was justified by the false notion that ventilators would be the only treatment and run-out quickly. If many doctors had not spoken-out against the over-use of early-ventilation, at great personal risk, who knows how many more people would have had their lungs blown-out by the dangerous devices?

More and more doctors are coming forward to decry the irrationality of lockdown and the "new-normal," some 500 have signed this letter calling the continuing over-reaction to Corona a "mass-casualty event," with examples from their own practices. Others have done interviews which are promptly banned by Youtube and other tech giants for not complying with the MSM narrative. If anyone is aware of any similar outpouring of doctor whistleblowers let me know in the comments, as far as I know it is completely unprecedented.

Virologists are also being silenced and smeared for questioning the establishment version of reality. We are told by Dr. Fauci, who invested in gain-of-function Coronavirus research (bio-weapons engineering in layman's terms), that there is no possibility that this plague was created in a lab and any dissent is met with the unanswerable charge of "conspiracy-theory!" Yet researchers have found that the novel Coronavirus does indeed attach to human cells more readily than bat cells or other animals. This is quite odd for a virus that is supposed to have evolved among the bats. It does make sense, however, for a virus that was allowed to incubate within human tissue samples over many generations until it gained functionality to easily infect human cells. This is not to say that the genome was bio-engineered in the strict sense, but it does indicate cultivation. Yet, how are we as non-scientists to make a judgement on the subject when the dissenting view is suppressed and ridiculed or banned from the media-platforms that are most popular? We must confront the issue of "gain-of-function" research in a fair manner, it is one of the most important questions that humans are faced with since these bio-weapons hold the potential to wipe us out. What happens if we allow this debate to be hamstrung through censorship? Will we hand-down a world to the future that is even more disfigured than the nightmare currently proposed by the New-Normies?
 The need for open exchange of ideas seems obvious, so how do we explain the rise of censorship on the major tech platforms? Forbes reports that algorithmic-censorship efforts are underway:

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube issued a joint statement and pledged to work together to combat misinformation it continues to spread as fast as the actual coronavirus. Even before the pandemic the social media platforms had been under pressure to address the spread of false news and misinformation, but now the situation seems to be getting worse not better.

It is telling that efforts to gain control of internet speech were underway long before the Corona outbreak. Indeed, as long as dissenting voices have existed there have been pundits discussing the "threat" of "propaganda" and "dis-info" coming from Youtubers and independent bloggers. The de-platforming accelerated in recent years though.  There has always been a robust community of alternate researchers on the internet, so why step-up the censorship to another notch now? What changed in recent years (especially since 2016) is the MSM itself. As more and more media organizations are consolidated under the same corporate structure and infiltrated by the message moderators, the quality of coverage predictably tanks. The steady-drip of "Obamagate" breadcrumbs coming out of the Justice Department shows just how compliant our media was in service of the intelligence community and their patrons in the Executive branch. How could they not only get  Russia collusion so wrong, but also spend literally years trying to paper-over the errors?

The blame is largely with the Big Tech revolution, which is creating tidal shifts in how public opinion is shaped. Facebook and Google have revolutionized the advertising industry, combining forces to dominate the market almost totally and driving-out competition. Without ad-money independent media organizations are folding-up and the quality of journalism as a whole suffers. Why bother doing real journalism if you don't have any competition and you can just repeat talking-points (that tend to attain a gloss of credibility by their mere repetition) and show some Twitter screen-shots? 

Unfortunately for the legacy media, citizen journalists have filled that void, exposing them for the propaganda devices they have become. If a Youtube channel or blog starts getting millions of views they can fund more full-time research and put out more quality material. Being unrestrained by the taboos of the mainstream and the interests of corporate, they quickly begin to rival the traditional news networks as viable information sources. Even though most bloggers and social-media stars have their own biases, they tend to be open about it while the MSM is barely able to maintain their fig-leaf of objectivity. 

Thus we have seen increased targeting of those voices on Youtube when their subscriber count gets to be over 100,00 or so. We see the disappearance of comment sections under MSM articles and videos, we encounter stricter controls to links on Facebook, and we have Reddit crushing entire subs. Even the President of the United States can't have a subreddit anymore. It was killed through the banning of moderators, leaving no-one to stop the trolls. There are a thousand other control methods that various platforms are using as I'm sure you know.

These underhanded methods of speech-control are just as effective as outright censorship. In some ways they are more effective since the state/corporate propaganda system can pretend to 'liberal' principles while achieving the same goals. One can see the results of this system of de-platforming rather than outright censoring through government edict: multiple "echo-chambers" form which have lively debates within themselves, but rarely cross paths. If this process continues you end up with extremism and the political violence that was common pre-Corona; most commonly antifa groups showing-up and starting physical confrontation with other civilians instead of the traditional fighting with the cops. After all, if discourse is rejected then what other option remains for people to settle their differences? 

What America needs is to take a fresh look at the concept of Free Speech, in the context of the electronic platforms. Open discussion needs to be discussed not just through the narrow lens of First Amendment protection from government censorship. Just because a private entity is doing the censoring, does that mean it is OK? Some would argue yes, it is necessary because false information will be disseminated otherwise. Since most of us are not virologists, why should we be allowed to express an opinion that doesn't reflect the party line? I cannot but agree that false information comes from alternative media (as well as the mainstream), I have myself been mistaken and shared articles that were false in part or whole. Maybe it is inevitable that any human effort to encapsulate the truth in words will contain error. But, knowing that the "authorities" often get it wrong too, we cannot expect them to police the truth alone. The idea of Free Speech is that more people becoming involved in a debate and more views being expressed will lead us closer to reality than relying on one narrow view. When I post an article on Facebook I don't always have 100% certainty that it is factual (lot's of times I disagree with most of what it says but am linking for a specific set of facts it contains), and I can be pretty certain that the errors will be pointed-out to me in any forum that hosts a robust debate. 

The "echo-chamber" effect denies this self-correcting property of Free Speech. My own internet-arguing "career" has included some of the most egregious examples of tech censorship gone wrong, Watching Reddit die has taught me an exquisite example of the power of the "network effect" in the polarizing and quenching of debate. The final result is radicalized echo-chambers where once knowledge and understanding was plentiful. Reddit had a great idea of letting each subreddit be moderated by its own creators and their friends. Thus the site was a bastion of Free Speech even though individual subs had different rules, topics, and tolerances of trolling, ect. Since Reddit is nothing but links with a comments section, people naturally gravitated towards the subs with broad focus and open-discourse so that they could hone their arguing skills and confront all viewpoints. 

This is the "network effect," in which the sheer number of users makes more of them come. Subs with enough activity would rise to the top of the posts on the "front page," giving incentive for users to glob on to hot topics and try and boost them. When I first began to use Reddit my comments were designed to stand the test of argument and they contained many links to supporting data. The culture looked down on mere rhetoric and a comment without links was often disdained. In that online climate many of my views simply became hardened, but I did every so often see that I was wrong on other points. I don't know if we can expect more than an occasional "conversion," since humans do cherish their beliefs. Then the site became a victim of its own success.

In the 2016 election cycle Bernie Sanders hit a chord with Redditors that boosted tons of Bernie-posts to the front page, annoying a good portion of the site's users. As a joke, r/the Donald was created to troll the Bernie-Bros by pushing the absurd candidacy of the reality-TV star to the front page. It was quite satirical with lots of HIGH ENERGY posts about BUILDING THE WALL, a quite effective troll that humorously irked the politically-correct.  But Trump was actually quite serious about his wall obsession, the idea caught fire among American voters tired of immigration, and he managed to actually win. Since r/the Donald was the major player in Trump's online presence the site took a good deal of flak for him winning by jokes, memes, Mexican-baiting, and being a true political outsider (needless to say, Clinton was a pretty weak candidate, too). This was the beginning of the end of Reddit. 

Convinced that they had been complicit in electing the next Hitler the mods changed their tune and started banning left and right. Also many subs got the "ban-hammer" by site administrators. By painting anything related to the Republicans or the Right-wing of American politics as inherently racist, the polarization became more and more extreme and users didn't feel the need to engage in good-faith discourse. The culture of providing links and evidence degraded. 

The first lesson here is that censorship has unintended negative consequences. While there is a benefit to imposing social costs on racism, to keep it in check, the effect of imposing those same social costs onto any view not in line with political correctness has the reverse effect. If you are going to be labeled a racist (or some other kind of -ist) just for having basically moderate views on immigration, then they really is no social cost to racism at all. All societies do have their prejudices and biases, maybe in the future this will change, but who knows? If you establish zero as the acceptable amount of bigotry you are just going to push people who never wanted to be considered bigots or racists into not caring anymore. By denying Free Speech Reddit, almost single-handed, lifted to prominence the echo-chamber of the Alt-Right. 

The death of Reddit is a tragedy. To have an open debate on important issues (immigration in this case) one should not have to visit sites that are full of "deplorable" opinions. What's more, there is no hope of moderating extreme views on either side when all you have are echo-chambers. Other sites have tried to re-create the flourishing open-marketplace of ideas that existed on Reddit, but due to the network effect they all fail. This almost total implosion of one of the major players in English-language discussion initiated a polarization of the online world that may be unstoppable. Anyone seriously interested in saving Western Civilization must recognize that a new paradigm is the only hope of solving the problem. This does appear to be in progress as the critical issue of lockdown and police-state drive those with drastically different ideologies into common-cause. As the shifting of the poles carries over into the online space there is a possibility of the network-effect being made irrelevant. Otherwise the centrifugal forces within our societies are going to tear them apart by infecting every debate with the same "Right/Left" dichotomies and making free and open discussion harder and harder. In the linked post above I called the new dialectic the Tinfoil-Hats versus the New-Normies, but this is a crude approximation and will need to be fleshed-out in another post. 

The hottest take of the entire Corona pandemic is that Free Speech is absolutely vital in preventing politicization of every crisis. Without Free Speech we are lost. Without the ability to verbally disagree, what means are left but brute force?