The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
Labelling misinformation online is doing more harm than good. The possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab accident is just the latest example.
Social media companies tried to suppress any discussion of it for months. But why? There’s no strong evidence against it, and evidence for other theories is still inconclusive. Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.
Social media fact-checkers don’t have any special knowledge or ability to sort fact from misinformation. What they have is extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire if it leads people to believe there’s a “real story†that is being
suppressed.
Misinformation is dangerous. It can keep people from getting lifesaving medical treatments, including vaccines. But flagging it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It’s much better to provide additional information than to censor information.
Part of the problem is that people think they know misinformation when they see it. And those most confident of their ability to spot it may be least aware of their
own biases.
That includes the fact-checking industry within the mainstream media, who were caught removing earlier posts on the lab leak theory, as well as social media “fact checkers†who aren’t accountable to the public.
I interviewed physician and medical podcaster Roger Seheult who said
that he was censored by YouTube for discussing the clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as potential Covid-19 treatments. No wonder so many people still believe these are the cures “they†don’t want you to know about. Much better would be an open discussion of the clinical trial process, which could help people understand why scientists think those drugs are unlikely to help.
Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labelling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as anti-science because they question prevailing wisdom.
Of course, there are ideas that are very unlikely to be true. These generally involve elaborate conspiracies or a complete overhaul in our understanding of the universe. Or, like cold fusion and the vaccine-autism theory, they’ve been tested and debunked multiple times by independent investigators.
Censoring information — or what one deems “misinformation†— isn’t as helpful as it seems. The best we can do is keep questioning, and give people the most complete story we can.
—Bloomberg