Silent retreat
Digital giants have replaced big government as the modern day enforcers of silence. By Nick Cater.
Some time ago the Western Australian Museum produced a classroom guide that asked students to consider the effectiveness of official wartime censorship. “Considering the huge growth of the internet and social networks like Twitter and Facebook,” students were asked, “is government censorship possible?”
It is doubtful if even the smartest kids would have known then what Covid-19 has taught us: in the modern era it is not governments but tech giants that become the enforcers of silence.
Mercifully, no Australian government has attempted to censor media coverage of Covid-19, although the Andrews government has come perilously close. Eager as governments were to prevent the spread of alleged misinformation, media independence has been largely respected. Nevertheless, news and commentary on Covid-19 is being severely constrained, not through censorship but through the far more effective tool of cancel culture.
Today it is Silicon Valley’s algorithms that wield the blue pen. The technology we once fancied would lead to greater diversity is using its global reach to enforce uniformity of thought. In placing strictly enforced limits on free speech it has raised the age-old question: who gets to decide what is or is not fair comment?
The experience of the past 18 months has taught us how deeply social media and traditional media are intertwined. The federal government’s stoush with Facebook over the copyright of news content illustrated how much media companies depended on social media to extend their reach. Monetising social media hits has become part of the new business model, but it is not without risk, as dealing with a monopoly provider generally is.
The banishment of Sky News Australia from YouTube for seven days in August has had a chilling effect on free speech. YouTube’s three-strikes policy leaves no grounds for appeal. YouTube will determine what is streamed on its channel and the circumstances under which it will allow it to be streamed. As a result, YouTube’s Covid-19 medical misinformation policy determines what can and cannot be canvassed. It has put an end to almost any discussion of the efficacy of the vaccines or their side effects.
There is an effective ban on discussing alternative treatments or questioning the efficacy of lockdowns or masks. In short, it has put a stop to the discussion of anything that challenges the consensus on the handling of the pandemic. As in wartime, heavy-handed censorship has only increased the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
The WA Museum’s excellent class material shows what happened when the wartime department of information attempted to silence news of the sinking of HMAS Sydney by German raider HSK Kormoran off the WA coast on November 19, 1941. Within days rumours were circulating, as one might expect when 645 Australian sailors are suddenly summoned to the deep.
DoI officials contacted newspaper editors instructing them to keep mum while the Royal Australian Navy sent carefully worded telegrams to inform next of kin. The rumours were out of hand, however, and on the evening of November 30 the prime minister reluctantly released a statement to the press.
The tech giants are locked in a losing battle to suppress misinformation. Anyone who imagined that banning errant posts from Facebook and stacking answers to Google searches would quash conspiracy theories clearly didn’t realise that people can’t be programmed as easily as computers.
If you are tempted to think there is a worldwide plot led by some nefarious movement determined to turn us into zombies, being banned from social media may well be the clincher. The vaccine hesitant, living in anxiety about the fear they are not being told, are unlikely to be won over by silence. The fears of those concerned about the influence of big pharma are likely to harden when their search engine is programmed to give only one side of the argument. You can hardly blame people for being sceptical. Last year’s conspiracy is today’s official line. Last year we were being told that masks were ineffective, this year we were told we were reckless if we were not wearing one all the time. Last year Facebook users were being censored for suggesting the virus might have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now almost everyone concedes it probably did in the absence of any supporting evidence from China that Covid-19 naturally evolved in animals.
The breakdown of trust between the populace, their elected representatives and the expert class is no trivial matter. Doctors have enough on their plate in a crisis like this without being thrust into the limelight by politicians hiding behind their advice. The promotion of chief health officers as the supreme authority on managing a pandemic in which the parameters were changing by the day is a cruel experiment that should never be repeated.
American author Jonathan Rauch has written a thoughtful book that helps explain how we arrived in this horrible new place where it is no longer fashionable to counter supposed falsehood with reasoned argument. Why bother when those who hold these views can be deplatformed?
The growing intellectual conformity in universities highlighted by the sacking of Peter Ridd is evidence of a deeper crisis in civic debate. What Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge, the title of his book, is no longer arrived at through rigorous debate. Cancel culture coerces us to conform to prevailing judgment or risk ostracism. As a result, Rauch says, we find ourselves tumbling “down a kind of epistemic rabbit hole, a spiral of silence”.
Diversity of thought and freedom of speech are not just nice things to have. It is essential to the advancement of knowledge. It is the motivating force of scientific discovery and technological progress and the advancement of civilisation that allows us to live longer, safer and richer lives than our ancestors.
Far better than shutting down debate when we begin to feel uncomfortable is to welcome open discussion, allowing us the chance to counter falsehood with truth and test our assumptions.
As John Stuart Mill reminded us in his famous 1859 essay: “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.” In this crisis, even those we might consider the wisest have revealed themselves as all too human.