Censorship in the Time of Pandemic

Censorship has become an important issue in America over the past two decades. It encompasses the news media, academia, and, lately, the Internet. Censorship impacts what we hear, what we read, and how well we are able to express our first amendment rights. Although it bears no relationship to the pandemic, the disease has become weaponized for political purposes and, in this election year, all things are political. One side provides information that the country should open and the other side says it shouldn’t. Even the president’s task force is not immune from bias because they are working for the benefit of the Republican Party.

For most of the history of our country, the first amendment stood as a measure of the value democracy brings to its people. Photos of flag burnings during the Viet Nam War were often cited as proof of this most fundamental freedom. The 1960s were a decade of the New Left attack on the establishment, which they said was out of touch and leading America in the wrong direction. Protestors fought for the right to speak freely and campaign against government misbehavior and censorship. A climax in this battle was reached, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when student protestors were attacked by the police.

The broadcast and print media have evolved in tandem with the growth of tribalism in the United States. As Left and Right split farther apart, the tone has sharpened between them. Because the Left controls most of the broadcast spectrum, we get exposed to views of the Left more than the views of the Right. Forty years ago, we received most of our news from three networks and newspapers. Most biases showed up on the editorial pages and not the headline news pages. As citizens, we couldn’t know whether the reporting was shaded, because there was no way to validate the content. Still, there were accuracy standards journalists applied to their craft.

That has all changed now, because journalists have become ideology advocates, who attack those who do not share the opinions of their employer. As a citizen, if your beliefs match the content of your favorite media outlets, you’re hearing the truth. If they come from an opposing news outlet, you hearing lies.

Academia has trended left over the past thirty years and most conservative professors have left the stage for retirement or think tanks. The political voice of our universities is solidly left, with no probability of changing. How ironic it is, given the Left’s advocacy for free speech in the 1960s, that universities now prevent conservatives from speaking. Their view is that the Right does not tell the truth because its narrative was created by white privilege or a white man’s corrupt aristocracy. Bigots once are bigots for all time. The university’s fault is not that they are actively preventing free speech; its that they are afraid to oppose their students. Of course, the faculty shares the political views of the students so they are very supportive.

Starting in the middle ages, universities advocated a fundamental right that all points of view should be heard. The basis of that intellectual freedom was “debate leads to truth.” If that debate is missing today, we end up with propaganda.

In the last ten or fifteen years, the Internet has extended its role as a major communication platform across the globe. Facebook, Twitter, and Google control a large percentage of the content we receive. These platforms began with noble intentions; the desire to create platforms mankind could use to communicate and share common interests. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for bad actors to start using these platforms for their own nefarious purposes. Skinheads, anarchists, pedophiles, human traffickers, and other groups appeared, who would not normally have access to the personal sites of millions of people. The social media companies responded to these “attacks” by allocating resources to automated and human filtering of content to block the bad actors.

At the end of 2016, Facebook started looking into presidential campaign abuses and discovered that Russia had created false identities for the purpose of influencing the American election. They also started to look at ways to identify fake news so it could be barred from their platform. In May 2017, Facebook created new policies for dealing with sexual predators, sexist, racist, and hate speech. These changes were appropriate given the potential for abuse.

Since then, Facebook and the others have stepped over the line regarding censorship. Complaints have recently started to surface that conservatives are being blocked. Others including LGBT and African-Americans also complained, but the conservatives have been the most vocal. A widely cited example is Prager University, which is an online conservative website. YouTube took down several of their videos because they portrayed harmful or dangerous activities. These videos included “Are the police racist?”; “Why do people become Muslim Extremists?”; and “Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?” Prager University sued YouTube in 2017 and lost the case. The court ruled that YouTube is not a public forum, so they are not a state actor for the purposes of First Amendment rights.

This is an unfortunate outcome because it means that YouTube has the ability to censor free speech based on their own rules – and their political views. If they lean Left, there is even less balance in political expression than there was previously.

Now we move on to a more egregious example. On April 22^nd, two California ER doctors, Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi posted a YouTube video discussing results from their own analysis of COVID patients. The opinion was that stay at home orders were excessive, the disease had spread further than reported, and they recommended that the economy more open. At the beginning of the pandemic, they were on board with the CDC strategy but had changed their minds after two months of experience with patients. They were expressing their opinion, not advocating a revolt. Soon after its posting, the video was removed by YouTube.

YouTube issued the following statement, “We quickly remove flagged content that violate our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance," said the statement. "However, content that provides sufficient educational, documentary, scientific or artistic (EDSA) context is allowed -- for example, news coverage of this interview with additional context. From the very beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”

How is this video dangerous when CNN can falsely report that Trump suggested people drink bleach?

YouTube is an extremely influential platform worldwide. Millennials say it is their number one source for news. To the extent that YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter censor content based on their own rules, these actions remove alternative viewpoints from public view so that only one side is heard.

Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook guidelines in a recent interview. He said that Facebook was blocking all organizations trying to organize protests against stay at home orders because they oppose government rules. This is raw censorship. It assumes that the government always knows what is best for the public. Wrong. The government is supposed to be working for the public. What is the difference between censoring opposing opinions here and Nazi propaganda? Hitler won because the opposition was worn away to nonexistence.