Who is to blame?

Did you know that the first Covid-19 vaccine shot reduces your body’s ability to produce white blood cells by 50% and the second shot reduces it by an additional 25%? For good measure these shots contain poisonous ingredients as well.  Did you know that “former” President Trump actually won the 2020 election? Or that former President Donald Trump’s grandfather was, “a pimp and tax evader,” and that his father was a member of the KKK. Or that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a ban on motorcycles, and that House speaker Nancy Pelosi was diverting Social Security funding for the Trump impeachment inquiry. None of these claims are true but they were viewed and often believed by millions of Americans, often on Facebook.

Granted that it is often hard to know who or what to believe, many of these claims don’t pass the laugh test (though they are rarely funny). A debate is now underway in the U.S. over whether social media should do more to weed out such lies. (“What to do with social media”) While the best answer to this dilemma probably requires balancing several approaches, I want to focus on our own responsibility vs the government’s to sort out the “truth”. To what extent should we rely on protection by government (forgive me for referring to it as “Big Brother”) or on our own efforts to identify reliable (trusted) sources of information (“Trust”) and to develop the capacity to spot obvious or likely lies.  Where do we want the dividing line between what we do for ourselves and what we want the government to do for us?

Over the years I have defended free speech as the best way to challenge bad ideas. “Do we really need free speech”  So naturally I resist giving the government much of a roll in protecting us from offensive, or “wrong” speech. Controversies over vaccines, facemasks, climate change, oil pipelines, etc. often involve serious claims on each side that are best tested in open debate.  In my view, Facebook and other social media platforms should be free to set their own rules and standards for posts. According to The Economist “Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of policy and global affairs,… pointed out that last year the company removed 30m posts that violated its policies on terrorism and 19m posts that crossed company lines for inciting hatred.” “Facebook flounders in the court of public opinion” Their users can decide whether they agree or disagree with these rules and either stay or opt out of the social platform.

But we have an interest in and responsibility to evaluate the many claims that come our way. We can do a better job of providing our children with the tools for spotting fake or potentially fake information. Along with civics and home economics (how to cook etc.) that are (or should be) taught in high school, students should be taught how to spot and challenge highly improbably statements.

For example, it does not require any medical knowledge at all to spot the vaccine video referred to above as a fake. The medical “expert” who presents her shocking claims is anonymous, as are her credentials and medical affiliations. The vaccine she reports on and claims will kill 20 to 30% of those who take it is unnamed. All the animals it was tested on died, she said. While many of us have lost confidence in the veracity of the information provided by the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control (drugs might be approved too slowly or too quickly, etc.) none of us would (or at least should) believe that they would approve a vaccine with the properties alleged in the video.

I have seen much better produced videos the were totally fabricated stories for reasons I find hard to understand (we shouldn’t blame Russia for everything). One very well done and potentially convincing video claimed that no plane actually crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Any sensible person should have doubts about claims that are so directly contradicted by pictures and reports to the contrary. But I must admit that my rejection of its big lie was fortified by the fact that at that time I lived next to the Pentagon and saw the damage to the building, and I witnessed the wreckage of the plane laid out for months in the Pentagon parking lot. I also knew a woman who died in that plane.

More could be done by social media platforms to flag potential misinformation, but it should not be censored by the government. We should strengthen our personal capacity to evaluate propaganda but most importantly we need to carefully establish news sources that we trust. Knowing that the Facebooks of the world feed us what they think we like, thus creating an information bubble, we should make the effort to check other sources for their views. We have not flourished as a nation because we turned over our care to the government even if it must provide a critical foundation for our security and interactions.