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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here

As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls
for China-style control of the Internet

[7]Matt Taibbi 3 hr [8]109
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[13]The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here[14]As the
Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for
China-style control of the Internet
[15]Matt Taibbi
3 hr [16]109
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Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media
outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type
– ran an [21]in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to
American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:

Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network,
China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of
Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that
the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were
already not that dissimilar:

Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private
sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently
takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater
surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing
involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on
an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech
control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of
the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical
wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do
enormous public good.”

Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their
“understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from
digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively
open Internet multiply.”

This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line
of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” that began sprouting up
in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like
“[22]Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of
a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two
events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican
primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU,
i.e. “Brexit.”

A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in
respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the
people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “[23]I
love the poorly educated!”

The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a
Great Beast, one that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the
toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “[24]American politics has gone
insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters
from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is
striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual
and political elite as society’s immune system:

Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political
professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing
and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally
sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for
asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their
betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to
speech, don’t ask: tell.
__________________________________________________________________

As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube [25]took down a
widely-circulated video about coronavirus, [26]citing a violation of
“community guidelines.”

The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an
“Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a
presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were
perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and
analyzing.

“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” [27]said Erickson, a
vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers
showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate. “Does [that]
necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies,
furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly
clear.”

The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out
that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the
lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry
comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious (at best) data collection
methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for
their video presentation.

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College
of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to [28]issue a joint statement
to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for
medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to
advance their personal financial interests.”

As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any
controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right”
audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’
claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living
for decades” and YouTube and Google have “[29]officially banned
dissent.”

Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor
Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s
monologue:

There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the
network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle
dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus
trutherism.

Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as
the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of
coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president,
along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was
coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the
flu.”

He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so
strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat
processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up
some pork.”

The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump,
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and
strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm
than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new
“[30]Utopia of Scolding”:

Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the
social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and
scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a
finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.

In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal
America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media,
academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of
blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement
society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who
dissented with their preoccupations.

Because Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned
with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer
any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with Conventional Wisdom’s takes
on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment,
Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the
movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance scolding
fixation of the day.

When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer
abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure
to take scolding was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding
experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage
quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against
“[31]expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s
decision to end some shutdowns was, “[32]Georgia’s Experiment in Human
Sacrifice.”

At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms –
Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented
step to [33]combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive
cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable
sources.

H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of
intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of
self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does
not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common
decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”

We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference
between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set injecting fish
cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the
jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so
sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words,
to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent
species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with
staying power.

The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are
more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who
[34]tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they
don’t see this.
__________________________________________________________________

Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an
assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening or Wednesday
morning act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil
war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We
actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a
snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people
what to think about the complex issues of the world.

When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many
people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing
out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the
personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable.
Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do
this in order to explain the [35]Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover
the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and
February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus
threat.

It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant
portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this
disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning
of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast [36]collecting the
headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like
MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:

[37]Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than
coronavirus, for now: Washington Post

[38]Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread :
USA Today

[39]Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things
You Do Every Winter : Time

Here’s my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:

[40]We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus

There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same
elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from
experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:

“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also
help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease
specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things
we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus
is. The routine things work.”

There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from
priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular
communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies
that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most
knowledgeable.

“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all
been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have
a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).

On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016
denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the
Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed
that because they weren’t paying attention, but also because they’d
never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked
a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the
financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned
fraud or malfeasance.

Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to
automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have
of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.

Authorities by their nature are often wrong. Sometimes they have an
interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define
truth as being whatever they say it is. “[41]Elevating authoritative
content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic
take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been
destroying our business for decades.

The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with
military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening
to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a
story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now
proven to have been [42]wrong to a [43]spectacular [44]degree, if not
actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.

We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions
because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy
discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument.
Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of
moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.

Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less
restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why
certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis
might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as
infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that
signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest
the material. “[45]Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in
Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only
conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a
non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an
approach to not work?

From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the
background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be
trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in
addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to
stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed,
like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other
crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide,
stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the
public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We
can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re
confusing real harm with political harm.

Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure
being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by
such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster
on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.
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[51]The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here[52]As the
Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for
China-style control of the Internet
[53]Matt Taibbi
3 hr [54]109
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[63]Josh[64]4 min

"...the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by
being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along...The
people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more
dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who
tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t
see this."

Brilliantly put. We're talking about the same class of people that have
dragged America into one imperialist war after another. At least the
rank-and-file "morons" never (initially) want to go murder other people
to enforce their ideology and values on other human beings. It's the
visionaries of the ivory tower like Howard Mann and John Dewey who want
to spend other people's lives like they're Federal Reserve notes. To
them war is a wonderfully galvanizing, unifying force in society...and
now they want to use covid-19 to escalate their propaganda wars agains
the masses (who are dangerously "divided" by "misinformation" at the
moment) and further consolidate their control over public discourse and
narratives. Internal colonialism in the territorial homeland of a
global empire.

Thank you for reporting on the financial and surveillance reforms
getting pushed through while everyone is looking the other way.
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[69]Mark "Machine" Graham[70]18 min

Once again, Matt, ...you nailed it. Why worry about the Gov't taking
away our rights, when we allow (even pay sometimes [for fucks sake])
the private sector to do it for us and/or even do it to our selves 😑
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