Big tech becoming big brother

Covid-19 is exposing many things about the world we live in and the people we live with.

It has shown to us that at the first sign of danger, many will barter their freedom for a perception of safety. It’s also shown how fragile many businesses are and how little financial resilience we have as a society.

Now, it’s showing us that tech behemoths like Google, Facebook and Twitter aren’t platforms that allow for free, unfiltered speech, but actively censor and remove content that don’t align with what they deem to be authoritative sources. They’re censoring dissenting, contrarian ideas and this is cause for serious concern.

When governments act in the same vein, the public is rightfully livid.

For instance, when the previous Barisan Nasional government enacted the Anti-Fake News Act, Malaysians were up in arms, denouncing it and calling for its repeal.

But when something comparably insidious happens on the internet, it generates considerably fewer ripples.

Maybe people don’t care much about it because there is no threat of imprisonment. Or maybe it’s because it’s not as obvious or as in-your-face as instances of government control and overreach.

The most blatant recent example is YouTube removing a video by two doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, from California, who argue that the lockdowns should be lifted as they’re doing more harm than good considering the fact that the Covid-19 fatality rate is much lower than initially presumed.

Their hour-long video garnered much attention and more than five million views as it was contrary to the advice of medical bodies and a majority of experts.

However, the video was soon taken down by YouTube, citing a violation of their community guidelines.

The doctors were merely exercising their right to free speech and the content they presented wasn’t pornographic, libellous or illegal. So why would YouTube take it down?

Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO explained their stance on such matters in a CNN interview: “Anything that would go against World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

YouTube, and by extension Google, isn’t the only internet behemoth guilty of such brazen censorship.

Both Facebook and Twitter have similarly appointed WHO as the arbiter of absolute truth when it comes to Covid-19.

According to Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president for integrity: “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about Covid-19 that we have since removed.

“These messages will connect people to Covid-19 myths debunked by WHO, including ones we’ve removed from our platform for leading to imminent physical harm. We want to connect people who may have interacted with harmful misinformation about the virus with the truth from authoritative sources…”

Twitter has even removed posts from Brazillian President Jair Bolsonaro for spreading what they deem is misinformation about the highly publicised anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine.

This is a common occurrence — Twitter routinely takes down posts that it says violates its community guidelines.

I appreciate the need to disseminate accurate information, but censorship is unwise. The internet should be a platform for ideas to flourish and people to communicate freely, no matter how ludicrous or controversial they are.

You might not agree with someone but that doesn’t mean they can’t exercise their right to free speech, especially if it conforms to the law, just as you should be able to. YouTube’s ban flies right in the face of this.

Secondly, the underlying presumption for such a ban is that we can’t be trusted to be able to handle and process conflicting or contentious information on our own, and so they need to nanny us by curating, sanitising or removing it for our own good.

However, the mature way to handle the situation is to entrust us to be able to gather the data on our own and make up our own minds, not to spoon-feed us information that they think is correct or is best for our wellbeing. We’re not toddlers.

Sure, there will always be people who blindly follow the advice of uninformed kooks online. But this is where those with the correct information need to put forth their case.

Dan Sanchez from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) puts it eloquently: “… censorship can actually boost the perceived credibility of an untruth. Believers interpret it as validation: evidence that they are onto a truth that is feared by the powers-that-be. And they use that interpretation as a powerful selling point in their underground evangelism.”

Also, anyone with even a fleeting knowledge of philosophy would know that the underlying argument for only allowing information that is congruent with a recognised authority, say WHO, indicates a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority (argumentum ed verecundiam).

Just because someone or an organisation that is deemed authoritative says something doesn’t mean it’s automatically true. It still needs to be backed by facts and solid reasoning.

The problem is, we enjoy jumping to conclusions and having someone, who’s deemed an expert, connect the dots for us in an easy and effort-free way of forming an opinion, without actually having to do the intellectual heavy-lifting that is involved in developing it.

This strategy gets especially frayed when we’re faced with a never-before-seen issue like the Covid-19 crisis.

We need contentious debates, contrarian ideas and controversial thinkers in a time of radical uncertainty. We need all the information we can bring to bear to spur dialogue and to help us arrive at the correct conclusion.

We need to remember that there was a time when respected scientific experts and authorities thought that the earth was the centre of the universe, just as there was a time when experts thought that infectious diseases, not entirely unlike today’s Covid-19, were caused by miasma or “bad air”.

They were wrong then and they could be wrong today. An expert or so called authoritative source is not infallible. No one is.

That’s why it is absolutely imperative that we develop the cognitive faculties necessary to discern good information from bad by evaluating the data ourselves.

Censorship strips us of this ability and stifles independent thought.

Finally, and most damningly, WHO, which these internet giants seem to think has a monopoly on scientific truth that relates to Covid-19, has made various missteps, including uncritically accepting erroneous early Chinese data which indicated that there were no animal-to-human transmissions, which unsurprisingly delayed the international response to the deadly virus.

In fact, the data from WHO is so suspect that a publication from the University of Oxford recently stopped relying on it, citing errors and other reasons.

What alarms me the most is the fact that so many don’t see the perils of internet censorship.

Writing in The Atlantic, Jack Goldsmith of Harvard and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona sum up today’s internet zeitgeist: “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.”

This is a preposterous proposition. It raises many questions, including the question of who defines what constitutes society’s norms and values.

The precedent such internet censorship sets is dangerous.

What else will Google, Facebook and Twitter deem unfit for their platforms in the future? Political dissent? Unpopular opinions? Politically incorrect speech? This is undoubtedly a slippery slope into the suppression of speech.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. And it wouldn’t be if we don’t allow it to be. The beauty of the internet is its unfettered access to information and the ability to exchange ideas without having to submit to state or corporation-mandated sanitisation and censorship.

Let’s keep it that way, shall we? - FMT