Facebook, YouTube erred in censoring misinformation

Labeling 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? Pathogens have escaped from labs many times, and people have died as a result.

Social media fact-checkers have an extraordinary power to shape what people believe. And stifling ideas can backfire.

Misinformation can keep people from getting lifesaving medical treatments, including vaccines.

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.

Earlier this year, 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.

Even without the power of censorship, social media culture encourages the facile labeling of ideas and people as a way of dismissing them — it’s easy to call people deniers or as antiscience because they question prevailing wisdom.

I discussed the new interest in the lab leak with another science journalist.

We agreed this isn’t like the connection between carbon emissions and climate change. Here, even if a few scientists favored the natural spillover early on, the question is still open.

Last year, some scientists rightly objected that accusing any lab of causing a worldwide pandemic is a serious charge and one shouldn’t be made on the basis of proximity alone. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the possibility, or assume that some other equally unproven idea is right. In the face of an unknown, why would the fact-checking people deem one guess to be a form of misinformation, and another guess to be true?

And the lab leak idea got conflated in some people’s minds with conspiracy theories.

Writing in his blog, journalist and Bloomberg contributor Matthew Yglesias calls it a media fiasco. “(T)he mainstream press … got way over their skis in terms of discourse-policing.” He admits he tweeted his disapproval of a thoughtful, well-written New York Magazine piece that helped revive the lab leak debate last January.

The author — novelist Nicholson Baker — didn’t claim any smoking gun, but made a convincing case that the issue was still open. A Medium piece by former New York Times writer Nicholas Wade added little to what Baker said, but came at a time when the public was ready to reconsider. A recent Vanity Fair account details how the issue was suppressed inside the U.S. government.

Looking back, there really wasn’t that much new news to report. Very little new evidence has been uncovered over the last year. The pandemic’s origin is still unknown. The fiasco was the media’s propagation of the lie that the issue was settled and that anyone questioning it might be deemed an idiot or conspiracy theorist.

And maybe the intentions of the Facebook factcheckers were good. If there was magical way to identify misinformation, then social media platforms could do more to refrain from spreading it. Suppressing ideas they don’t like isn’t the way.

Yesterday I had a long talk with someone who volunteers at a girls school in India, and she said she’d been in contact with some students who expressed fear of COVID-19 vaccines, even though their neighborhood has been ravaged by the pandemic. When she gave them additional information, about relatively greater danger of the disease, they chose to get vaccinated.

What helped was not taking away information but giving people additional information. 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.