The Censors Are Coming for Mental Health

In today’s open access to information, any amateur can stuff any claim with enough sweetened pie charts and cherry statistics to make any ideology appear appetizing. Truth has always been hard to come by, but nowadays is obscured by the relatively even ability of anyone with WiFi to pontificate publicly. And then, a pandemic. When the stakes are high, lives are on the line, and suddenly the blase allowance of conflicting ideas becomes a liability. People will die without accuracy.

And so, as legitimate fear seeks the comfort of direction, a new way of talking about medical information appears. Attach a prefix, dis- or mis-, and good ideas shall trump the bad. In a utopian world where absolute truth is decipherable, we are surely obliged to separate fact from fiction. But in a corruptible world, it’s worth remembering that medical patients (though not psychiatric ones) are encouraged to seek a second opinion in matters of life and death.

Human beings, no matter how credentialed, are fallible participants in the mysteries of life, and doctors institutionalized with narrow sets of knowledge can therefore make errors of judgment. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re limited. All of us, and our certainties, are subject to revision.

Given that, the question becomes, who is certain enough of their knowledge that they may damn medical information in prefixes for us all?

Major online content platforms have an answer. They defer to institutions authorized by government bodies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. These elite bodies of experts provide sets of standards that demarcate medical truth from falsity, which a hodgepodge of third-party fact-checking organizations then rely upon to hunt down bad information across the web.

Now, in the old days, censorship meant blacklisting (which still happens), but in an internet age where liabilities for unfairness are more visible to the public square, online companies more often engage in a soft censorship—allow the dissenter to speak, but lessen the chances they’ll be heard. As Facebook puts it, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution so that fewer people see it…and we show strong warning labels and notifications to people who still come across it, try to share it or already have.”

Perhaps you believe that demoting bad medical information during a pandemic is a necessary strategy for saving lives. Surely there’s a compassionate case to be made that the common good is more sacrosanct than an individual’s liberty to vibrate their vocal cords in whatever contortions they want, wherever they want, no matter the ruin. The trouble is, new powers of authority rarely contain themselves. Instead, incrementally, they parasitize new territories.

So I was unfortunately unsurprised to see the New York Times—paper of record—publish an opinion piece titled “Joe Rogan is a Drop in the Ocean of Misinformation.” The authors, who worked on the imperiously–named Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges, insist we are living in a manipulated marketplace where specious cures for anything and everything find their way far too easily into ailing bodies. Their solution: the soft censorship of not just pandemic unorthodoxy, but bad information across all medical fields.

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