Corona Daily 027: The Anti-Truth Movement

Before judging the role of Facebook or Twitter in promoting anti-vaccine sentiment, I must make a distinction between private and public. Our conversations with family and friends, phone calls, emails are generally private. In them, as we know, people have the highest freedom to express themselves. But take a young man who uses F language as punctuation, put him on a stage in front of an audience, his swearing gets restricted or stopped. Newspapers and TV can sparingly use taboo words if at all and pornography never. Facebook, Twitter and other social media are designed to be public platforms. The nearly-unrestricted private freedom of speech is not suited to public platforms. By banning obscene language and images, these companies accept the limits on the freedom of speech.

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In democracies, people are free to express opinions, even on public forums. One could tweet “President Trump is an idiot”. It may or may not be reality, and there is no reason for decent people to be nasty on public platforms, but the freedom exists. Also one may passionately love or hate fish, rock music, Elon Musk, communism, Marmite, bitcoin, Salman Rushdie or Picasso. It is a matter of taste, and we have the freedom to unashamedly voice our like and dislike. In true democratic spirit, we are also free to hate whites, blacks, Asians, gays, religious groups or atheists. That may be our prejudice. It is neither nice nor decent to give vent to that prejudice on public forums, but advocates of freedom of speech would not think of banning it.

However, when someone says “the president should be killed” or “mosques should be demolished”, that is no longer an opinion. One can hate the president and one can hate Islam, but suggesting killing or destruction is not an opinion, it is violence, an act against core moral values. Based on their current rules, FB is likely to ban such posts and their owner.

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Truth is another core moral value. ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ is as important a commandment as ‘Thou shalt not kill’.

Truth has very little protection, only under oath in the courts of law (perjury). Out of courts, in the vast world; Truth is naked, vulnerable, open to being twisted, bullied, denied, and suppressed.

Like an anti-vaxx movement, imagine an anti-maths movement, where people deny 5+8=13. According to them 5+8 can be 1o or 200 or whatever they say it is. I call this the Anti-Truth movement.

Donald Trump, holding the planet’s most powerful position, legitimized this movement. Populist leaders of the world joined it. The likes of the ‘disinformation dozen’ gleefully carried the torch and earned millions of followers.

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Scientists spend years analyzing viruses and developing formulations for vaccines. They publish scientific research for review and scrutiny. Companies conduct trials on animals and hundreds of thousands of humans. Experiment and control groups are created with vaccines and placebos. Regulators scrutinize the process and results at every stage. Once approved, their effectiveness and dangers are monitored in the real world. This is the scientific method that gives birth to vaccines. Anti-vaxxers with a single Tweet can call them killers, causing infertility, autism, surveillance tools.

Since the conception of the idea, it took 30 years to build the Twin Towers. But it took only 56 and 120 minutes to bring them down.

Seeking the Truth is always a lengthy, laborious process. Murdering Truth takes seconds.

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Vaccines, just like everything else, can be doubted and challenged. Those who wish to challenge should conduct their own trials, write papers, get them peer-reviewed and published, and open them to public scrutiny. Following the scientific method is the way to challenge, as against stating 5+8 equals zero.

The toxic Anti-Truth movement is led and followed by lazy, opportunist, fake, unscientific people. (I know some people who deny the existence of the coronavirus. I urged them to work as volunteers in a Covid ward. Not a single person has taken up that challenge). Dictators always favoured anti-Truth, but after Trump’s triumph in 2016, it has also infected the democratic world. Facebook and Twitter have offered the movement a stage and loudspeakers.

If the guidelines of the social media platforms don’t allow posts urging violence and terrorism, they should not allow the serial killing of Truth. Truth, a core moral value, needs to be protected.

Ravi