Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, staff writers, (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.
Today’s Mad Libs was inspired by Jordan Weissmann’s Friday article “Am I a big fat hypocrite on speech?” about the Biden administration’s conduct with social media companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, he argued that “fundamentally, my read is that the administration stayed within reasonable legal and moral boundaries in its attempts to stamp out bad information in the face of a true national public health emergency.” Even within our team, this piece sparked a vigorous debate about free speech. So, we turned it into content:
Kelsey Piper, The Argument staff writer
I disagree with my colleague Jordan Weissmann. It was unacceptable for the Biden administration to pressure Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to remove COVID-19 “misinformation.” I disagree with the premise that doing so could have saved lives. I even disagree with the premise that, if it did save lives, that would have been sufficient reason to do it.
And, finally, I disagree with the premise that there is any meaningful distinction to cling to between censoring anti-vaxxers and censoring late-night comedians, that there is any ground for liberals to stand on between free speech absolutism and “when we’re in power it’s okay and when you’re in power it’s bad.” Yes, free-speech absolutism leaves you defending some awkward and inconvenient ground. But free-speech nonabsolutism leads you to tyranny, so I’ll make my stand on the awkward and inconvenient ground.
To begin with, I do not believe that the efforts to pressure tech companies to take down COVID misinformation saved lives, or could reasonably have been expected to do so. Jordan points out, correctly, that people’s reluctance to take the vaccine cost lives — America had lower rates of vaccination and higher rates of death than other places, and Republicans disproportionately died. If at-risk Republicans had had more confidence the vaccine was safe and effective, it would have saved lives.
Crucially, it does not follow that censoring skeptics saves lives. To be fair, Jordan says he isn’t sure whether it did, but he posits that “letting social media be even more of a free-for-all probably wouldn’t have made the situation better.” I think he thinks that censorship is more likely to help than harm, and that the bad consequences we got were unlucky; I think it is generally at least as likely to harm as help, and that the bad consequences we got were precisely what we should have expected.
The attitudes and assumptions that produced the censorship effort are the precise attitudes and assumptions that tanked public trust. One reason many people became vaccine-skeptical was that our public health communications throughout the pandemic up to that point were often catastrophically in error and there was almost never any public accountability for getting things egregiously wrong.
In February 2020, Vox (where I worked at the time) mocked San Francisco techies for thinking that the virus might already be spreading in the U.S. (we later learned that it was). We were assured it was a conspiracy theory that the virus could have originated from research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (that is now considered by our intelligence agencies to be one of two plausible theories of its origin). We were initially told not to wear masks, and then to definitely wear masks. Papers were published in real academic journals claiming various miracle treatments or huge effect sizes that turned out to be almost entirely falsified.
The bad call that Republicans tend to be most angry about is this one: It was obvious from May 2020, if not sooner, that it was safe for people to congregate outdoors — outdoor transmission was very low. Yet when Florida announced the reopening of their beaches, it was derided as dangerous, and blue states largely did not follow suit. When the George Floyd protests kicked off, though, a lot of people who had previously opposed outdoor gatherings said they were fine.
If you are going to maintain public trust under extraordinary and difficult circumstances, you absolutely cannot give off the impression that you rationalize whatever blue states do and oppose whatever red states do. If, as a public official speaking on a matter of serious public interest, you call something a conspiracy theory and it turns out to be true, you should apologize and, frankly, probably resign.
It’s fine to be uncertain, it’s not fine to be certain and wrong; and it’s obviously not okay to reverse course on the exact same activities depending on the political affiliation of those doing them.
Now, it’s not like the right-wing skeptics covered themselves in glory. They also repeatedly discredited themselves by being blatantly egregiously wrong and never apologizing. They insisted that the virus would be gone by April, that only a few hundred Americans would die, that 50% of people had already caught the virus. Elon Musk made a million-dollar bet that case numbers would be low and then refused to pay out when he was egregiously wrong.
No one came out of this covered in glory; most of us came out of it looking like idiots. But our collective idiocy is an argument for free speech, not against it.
Censoring the critics didn’t make the information environment more accurate. Some of the claims treated as misinformation were actually true, but even when the critics were wrong, their views were often a symptom of the lack of trust in the authorities, not the cause. Censoring them steepened mistrust; it didn’t fix it.
You might be thinking to yourself: “How convenient, Kelsey, that your free-speech absolutism has only good outcomes and no trade-offs,” and this is indeed convenient for me. But it’s also not a coincidence, in my worldview.
Free speech is good because no one is trustworthy with power, because building a perfectly honest and credible institution without its flaws and blind spots cannot be done, because only by allowing a lot of lies can we make sure we don’t suppress any truths. It is not bad luck that censorship didn’t work this time; it is a persistent feature of the world that censorship will work out most of the time the way it worked out this time, which is to say, it will backfire.
I’m happy to bite the bullet, though: Free speech is worth it, even if it leads to more deaths.
Charlie Kirk now famously said that if, in fact, America’s high rate of gun deaths was an inevitable consequence of guns being available, then it was a cost we should be willing to pay to live in a country with the Second Amendment. I think this was a commendable thing to say; admitting that a trade-off is real and arguing that it’s worth it is much better than the usual trade-off denialism that accompanies so much of politics. I personally wouldn’t accept that price for the Second Amendment.1
I will accept this price for the First Amendment. If thousands of people die every year so that Americans can argue for what they believe in without any intermediation by the state, I think that is worth it. If I have a dumb idea that the ideal treatment for cancer is sunshine and classical music, and I persuade people who then fail to treat their cancers and die, this is a tragedy. But it is a lesser tragedy than a world where a board of bureaucrats decides which opinions may be expressed without penalty.
It is, fundamentally, the right of a free people to treat their COVID with ivermectin, to refuse vaccines, to choose classical music over chemotherapy. We are not the property of the state, and it may not make our medical decisions for us in order to maximize lives saved; liberals feel very strongly about this, if you bring it up in the context of abortion.
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