“If you could have cancelled Hitler, and thus stopped his lies from inciting the hatred that lead to the Holocaust, wouldn’t you?”
This was a question that was asked in my Facebook group a
while ago.
I think it’s wrongly asked. Because that’s not a realistic scenario!
Who is more likely to cancel others with the “wrong opinion”, Hitler or a non-Hitler? If Hitler could have cancelled everybody who didn’t share his views, wouldn’t he? Didn’t he? Didn’t he put political dissidents in those death camps?
“Yeah, but that’s not a problem if you only cancel things that are false!”, you may say. “Because true or false is not a matter of opinion, it’s objective.”
Is it, really? Don’t you think Hitler actually believed in his alternative world-view, in which the Arian race sprung from some forgotten deities, and the Jews were the root of all evil? When he cancelled all Jewish scientists and put his own Arian scientists there instead, who said, for instance, that the sun was made of ice, don’t you think he truly believed he got better science that way? He marched his army into Russia wearing summer uniforms in winter, because his Arian scientists had told him it would be such an extraordinarily mild winter in Russia that year!... Surely, he didn’t do this because he was longing for the utter humiliation that followed, when his soldiers froze to death? Surely, he believed that what his Arian scientists had told him was the truth!
So if somebody can be so thoroughly convinced that something that is actually false is true, whom can we trust to decide what is ok to cancel and what is not ok to cancel? Hitler would surely have cancelled all modern talk about “all people being equal” for instance, because according to him, that would be “false”. So would the statement “homosexuals are not a threat, and deserve to live a life in peace like everybody else” be.
Mark Zuckerberg is not a political leader, like Adolf Hitler was. Many people point this out when we talk about Freedom of Speech, that it only applies to governments. And it is true that the way that that human rights clause has often been incorporated in national laws, it mostly limits how government can stop anybody from speaking freely. However, back when those laws were written, and the Internet didn’t even exist, what was the greatest power of any nation? Probably the government. And what is now the greatest power? Facebook has nearly 3 billion unique monthly users. That’s more than one third of the population of the world… just saying. Now, Zuckerberg uses this, what used to be only a technical platform where people from all over the world could discuss whatever they wanted with each other, as his own gigantic propaganda machine for what he regards as true!...
Mark Zuckerberg happens to believe that Global Warming is a really dangerous thing, and that vaccines are the only way to stop COVID-19. So he cancels anybody who says differently. Anybody who even criticizes those two “truths” just a little bit, is cancelled on different levels. Posts are down-rated, attached with “additional information”, deleted, blocked from even being posted, sometimes leading to the user who posted them being suspended from Facebook and entire groups being deleted. One group that was deleted was “COVID19VACCINE VICTIMS AND FAMILIES” – a group where people who felt they had had side-effects of the vaccines could meet and share their own personal experiences.
And when I was trying to find the name of that group for this blog post, this was the result I got on Google:
All about how “false claims” and “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines are circulating on Facebook, and at the very top, a paid ad from the WHO with the “correct” information about the said vaccines.
And this is the result I got seconds later, on DuckDuckGo:
All the 3 first hits were related to exactly the piece of news I was looking for. Nobody believes that this is because DuckDuckGo is more competent at finding relevant information than Google is…
A prominent scientist, Dr. Judy Mikovits, famous for her groundbreaking achievements within the treatment of HIV/AIDS, gave an interview talking about COVID-19 and also about how she had already been going through a “judicial murder” for a discovery that she felt she had made years ago and which wasn’t popular. I found the video interview interesting and posted it on Facebook. It was deemed “Featuring unsupported and inaccurate information”. I read the fact-checkers’ comments, and found that the fourth claim that they “debunked” was when Dr. Mikovits said she was not anti-vaccine!... She said that her job is to work within immune therapy, and vaccines are a type of immune therapy, so she’s definitely not anti-vaccine. But the fact-checkers said that the type of immunotherapy that Dr Mikovits works within is different from the COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines that “anti-vaccine movements” are usually against… as if wanting to say that she actually IS anti-vaccine after all, or at least could be, despite her own statement to the contrary!... As if it’s not entirely up to her to declare if she is “anti-vaccine” or not! How can this be called “fact-check”?
Many of their other “debunks”, at least those that actually concern COVID-19, admit that there is a debate about the issue where Dr. Mikovits is giving her view, but that “most experts” or “the consensus” have a different view from hers. Something she, of course, never denied.
But isn’t this the kind of discussion we could have on equal terms? Dr Mikovits could give her views, Zuckerberg and his mates could give theirs, and everybody would get wiser in the process! Is it sound that Zuckerberg’s mates instead be given the status of “Bringers of The Truth”, while an expert within immunotherapy, with many years of experience on the highest level, be down-rated, deleted and banned for voicing an educated minority opinion? Because surely, if this is how little it takes for a claim to be labeled “false” or “misleading”, is there anybody in the world who can manage to actually give a completely “accurate” or “true” interview?... Can’t ANY statement that one person utters be deemed “misleading” by another, simply because it doesn’t lead to what that person feels we should focus on and talk about?
And isn’t this discussion about where facts and observations should lead us, exactly what Freedom of Speech is for? Isn’t this kind of public debate, on equal terms, what has long been held as the safest and most effective way to produce the best decisions, and isn’t that precisely why it is considered so crucial to our societies that most nations have chosen to protect it in their constitutions?
Hitler and his mates were clearly wrong about the Russian winter. This mistake largely lead to their demise. What if Zuckerberg is wrong about the best way to tackle COVID-19? What if Hydroxychloroquine, zinc, Ivermectin and vitamin D are actually much safer and more efficient treatments than rushed vaccines, and what if this minority opinion would have been able to become a majority opinion had it been given an equal opportunity to be heard on the platform that counts more than a third of the world as its users? How many people will then have died in vain, because it wasn’t given this equal opportunity?
Would I stop the Holocaust by cancelling Hitler if I could? Sure. But since, in reality, it’s much more likely that I will produce a Hitler and unnecessary mass-death with my cancel culture, I’m going to stick with the principle of Free Speech, instead. Because I still believe that Free Speech is the safest, most effective, most robust way for a society to reach at the best decisions. Anything that hampers Free Speech – be it a government that prohibits critical newspapers or brilliant nerds who truly want to save the world using their technical inventions as giant propaganda machines for their personal views – can only make this decision-making process less safe, less likely to lead to the best decisions, and thus more dangerous. Lies and harmful opinions have a much greater chance of gaining majority support in a world that accepts cancel culture than in a world that doesn’t.
