Time magazine editor-at-large and global-warming alarmist Jeffrey Kluger called on Facebook today to censor users who promote criticisms of vaccines, commonly known as anti-vaxxers.
While Kluger is absolutely right to note that Facebook would be well within its rights to do so and that private-party censorship is not a First Amendment free-speech issue, Kluger's paternalistic lecturing and the logic undergirding it is quite telling.
As you read his argument, it becomes abundantly Kluger thinks the average Facebook user is too stupid to judge for him or herself about the validity of the claims of the anti-vaxxers or well, pretty much any other controversy in the public domain involving the intersection of scientific inquiry and public policy. This, obviously, is where enlightened minds come in to censor and curate the digital for-profit public square we call social media (emphasis mine):
Social media sites can do an exceedingly good job of keeping people connected and, more important, spreading the word about important social issues. (Think the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge would have raised the $100 million it did for research into Lou Gehrig’s disease if people couldn’t post the videos of themselves being heroically doused?) But it’s long been clear the sites can be used perniciously too.
Want to spend some time in the birther swamp, trading conspiracy theories with people who absolutely, positively can tell you the Kenyan hospital in which President Obama was born? You can find them online. Ditto the climate-denying cranks and the 9/11 truthers.But the anti-vaxxers have a particular power. People who buy the nonsense on a birther or truther page can’t do much more than join that loony community and howl nonsense into the online wind. Climate change denial is a little more dangerous because every person who comes to believe that global warming is a massive hoax makes it a tiny, incremental bit harder to enact sensible climate policy.
Anti-vaxxers, however, do their work at the grass-roots, retail, one-on-one level. Convince Mother A of the fake dangers of vaccines and you increase the odds that she won’t vaccinate Child B—and perhaps Children C, D or E either. And every unvaccinated child in her brood increases the risk to the neighborhood, the school, the community—the entire herd, as the epidemiologists put it. The multi-state measles outbreak that began in Disneyland, along with the epidemics of mumps and whooping cough in Columbus, Ohio and throughout California, have all been fueled by falling vaccine rates.
One thing that would help—something Zuckerberg could do with little more than a flick of the switch, as could Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the other bosses of other sites—is simply shut the anti-vaxxers down. Really. Pull their pages, block their posts, twist the spigot of misinformation before more people get hurt.
The very idea of muzzling any information—even misinformation—will surely send libertarians to their fainting couches. Similarly, people who believe they understand the Constitution but actually don’t will immediately invoke the First Amendment. But of course they’re misguided. Is Facebook a government agency? No, it’s not. Is Zuckerberg a government official? No, he’s not. Then this is not a First Amendment issue. Read your Constitution.
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It’s worth wondering if Facebook would consider a page arguing that HIV does not cause AIDS and that therefore condoms are not necessary a threat to public safety. What about one that told teens that bogus research shows it’s OK to drive drunk if you’ve had no more than, say, three beers. If the site managers didn’t block these pages and a multi-car crack-up or a cluster of HIV infections occurred as a result, would they wish they they’d made a different decision? It’s hard to know. (As of publication time, Facebook had not responded to TIME’s request for a comment on, or further statement about, its policies.)
Facebook is equal parts town square, medium of communication and commercial bazaar—complete with ads. And it does all of those jobs well. What the site shouldn’t be is a vector for lies—especially lies that can harm children. Free speech is not in play here. This should be an easy call.
Don't get me wrong. I too have little use for hysterical anti-vaxxers who are doing a grave disservice to both parents and, more importantly, their vulnerable children. But there used to be a time when liberals believed in fighting speech with speech, not censoriousness.
"In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action," the vaunted liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once argued. He also famously counseled that:
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
Loopy, abhorrent, offensive, and downright unscientific and fallacious ideas should have a place in the broad daylight of the marketplace of ideas, that they may be exposed for the foolish things they are and better ideas vanquish them in the hearts and minds of a witnessing public.
Liberals used to believe this, or at least hold lip service to this ideal, but now it seems to be, more and more, ground held exclusively by those of us on the right side of the political spectrum. It is conservatives who fundamentally trust the individual as a moral, intellectual, and political agent in a robust, cacophonous marketplace of ideas. It is leftists like Kluger who fundamentally disdain, belittle, and ultimately dehumanize these same individuals, seeing them as, at best, immature children who need babysitting by their social and political betters.
