Politicians want social media to shut up. By Alexandra Marshall in The Spectator.
The Enlightenment:
[Consider] the period in English history when Western Enlightenment began to peak and the era of scientific discovery entered its stride. …
Explorers risked their lives on the African continent where the average European was lucky to survive a few months.
These explorers achieved a kind of Hollywood blockbuster status with each published journal. Many of these books sit on my shelf, untouched by so-called sensitivity editors who re-draft history so that events which never happened can be used as an excuse to cancel an entire generation. …
During the enlightened period, there was no credentialed gatekeeping. A layman could wander the cliffs and collect fossils, building knowledge the same as a scientist. …
The sheer weight of Enlightened thought tore the secrets of the world apart and eventually found the many truths that built modernity.
Mistake, misinformation, and fantasy proved to be fertile ground for the trees of knowledge while the voices of the crowd acted as scythes, cutting away the weeds of policy and propaganda.
Today:
Today, we drag the statues down built in honour of this time. The politically correct erase the names of the world’s explorers and belittle their immense achievements. The museums have been emptied. The history books … rewritten.
Our culture of suffocating ‘fact-checking’ has robbed ideas of the time needed to expand, explore, and refine.
Were our ancestors to impose misinformation and disinformation laws onto the world of science, nothing would be discovered for every wrong step would be punished. No one can climb if they are killed for stumbling.
This is what awaits us if we allow politicians, Labor and the Coalition, to continue down this freeway of puritanical political protection. …
Australia’s latest outrage, the social media ban:
There are too many pieces of legislation that came before that wasted hundreds of pages lamenting the irritating freedoms that allowed Australians to question the government line on Covid, Climate Change, and the Voice. These documents, many of which were attached to Digital ID and previous online censorship bills (which passed into law), were quite happy to equate the questioning of Covid policy with domestic terrorism.
These censorial powers have always been about protecting weak, lazy, predatory, and flat-out inaccurate government policy from the rigour of debate.
Covid mandates, maintained for years, barely lasted two weeks after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, fired its Woke staff, and allowed the victims of government policy to tell their stories. Social media did what well-meaning media hosts could not.
Government had to let Covid go (although I note that there has been no attempt, by either major party, to withdraw excessive powers, apologise for the harms caused, or punish public servants and politicians who over-reached their station).
What government cannot let go of is Climate Change.
There are trillions of dollars, every year, being put at risk by social media’s open dissent against climate policy and Net Zero technology. …
It is impossible for a politician to spin the lie that farmers love wind and solar when those farmers are posting pictures of their ruined properties and destroyed communities. While a newspaper can be leaned on to hold back photos of demolished rainforests, the average blogger with an iPhone cannot.
Eventually, the dark side of Net Zero will reach a saturation point where even the ‘greenest’ inner-city activist will see and read something that makes them doubt the narrative.
That is what online censorship is about. That is why it targets the platforms which embrace free speech, rather than platforms where children congregate.
Misinformation and disinformation laws have all the subtlety of the Spanish Inquisition.
Digital censorship is an attack on the collective intellectual mind. It is an act designed to protect money at the expense of truth. And to ensure that those politicians who helped construct a false narrative will never face difficult questions from a truly independent press.
Chaser from Wokal Distance, on today’s world:
If you want to know why institutional trust is collapsing, consider that Scientific American built it’s reputation publishing articles on topics like the structure of DNA or nuclear physics, and today they publish articles about how men on the internet don’t understand cuckoldry.
[And in the comments] I’m old enough to remember CALCULUS equations in articles. SciAm was a STEM inspiration to me in grade school.