Deplatforming as Digital Hemlock

The Twitter Files Saga Is a Story as Old as Socrates

David: The Death of Socrates (1787). Public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

In the Twitter files saga, Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and other journalists have told a tale of perfidy at least as old as Socrates. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the social media platform engaged in censorship of disfavored scientific viewpoints via a menagerie of algorithmic silencers: shadow-banning, deboosting, demonetization, deplatforming, and trends blacklisting. Punitive actions were conducted passive-aggressively. Some knew they were targets but given no substantive reasons for their banning or reasonable opportunities to appeal. Others only learned of their punishments long after the fact, if ever. Like Dean Wormer in Animal House, the favored tool of Twitter censors was double-secret probation.  

In 399 BCE, Socrates, too, was deplatformed (chemically, rather than digitally), but as he drank his vial of hemlock, his small consolation was that the process was open and public. He knew his accusers’ names and their rationales. A jury condemned him for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges,” “for introducing new deities,” and for “corrupting the youth of Athens.” Some believed the actual reason for his indictment was his inadequate opposition to the hated “Thirty Tyrants” governing Athens. Since one’s political associations did not constitute a crime, the argument goes, officials had to reverse-engineer crimes of which he could be credibly accused. In 1985, New York Judge Sol Wachtler famously said, “If a district attorney wanted, a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.” Similarly, the prosecution of Socrates may have been whipped up in the Athenian judicial delicatessen.

Social media bans have been delivered for countless reasons, but censorship of scientific information, particularly that related to COVID-19, has received particular attention in the Twitter Files revelations. Putting it in terms parallel to Socrates’s indictment, some have been banned for failing to acknowledge the science that the federal government acknowledges, for introducing new science, and for corrupting Americans. There is zero doubt that dangerous, wrongheaded, unscientific blather circulated wildly over the course of the pandemic. But that does not negate the fact that Twitter and other platforms stifled legitimate questions about pandemic policies, posed by legitimate scholars, while often greenlighting government pronouncements that have since proven questionable or outright erroneous.

There is no shame in being wrong on matters of science and technology. In 1934, Albert Einstein said, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” In 1949, Vannevar Bush, perhaps the leading technological engineer and scientific administrator of the mid-20^th century, wrote a book that dismissed the ideas of maneuverable rockets in space, nuclear power, intercontinental ballistic missiles, missile-launched satellites, widespread nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, and jet-powered long-range bombers. But those who disagreed with these Olympian experts were free to share their ideas and take whatever criticism followed. In today’s environment, social media censors might well stifle those who dared to challenge Bush’s pronouncements.

While there’s no shame in being wrong on scientific matters, there is great ignominy in attempting to silence those with whom one disagrees. Plato said Socrates was a “gadfly” who caused discomfort to the Athenian politicians—and the Twitter Files reporting makes clear just how much censorship occurred as a result of government pressure—in some cases with the government knowingly deceiving. According to Plato, Socrates said that swatting a gadfly was easy but also that, “If you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” In modern pop culture, this sentiment re-emerged in Star Wars as Obi-Wan Kenobi’s: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Having grown up near Southern pine forests, here’s my own version (which I have named for myself, of course):

Robert’s Rule of Rhetorical Rattles: “Don’t chop the rattle off the rattlesnake. The silence is more dangerous for you than it is for the snake.”

The first danger of censorship is that you might actually be censoring information that is correct. While crazed screeds and conspiracy theories about vaccines, masks, and lockdowns did indeed crisscross the Internet, attempts to ban the nonsense also stifled legitimate questions about vaccine safety and effectiveness, the effectiveness and risks associated with constant masking, and societal costs of draconian COVID mitigation (e.g., ruination of businesses and livelihoods, long-term degradation of education, psychological damage from isolation and masking, and fraying of social connections). Rather than reasoned debates over, say, the California and Florida approaches, social media became pits of political tribalism masquerading as science.

Beyond that, censorship often (generally?) fails for a host of other reasons. Disinformation continues to travel relatively unabated through back channels, but unmoderated by the disinfectant of open discourse. Censorship drives the worst offenders underground, rather than exposing them to public scorn. It can paradoxically amplify the disinformation by stoking feelings of paranoia and martyrdom. (“If they’re censoring me, I must be onto something.”)

GBD v CDC

An emblematic episode in the COVID censorship drama was the treatment of three iconic dissenters from the official doctrines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other official institutions. Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya, and Harvard biostatistician Martin Kulldorff issued what became known as the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Their open letter, co-signed by thousands of other healthcare professionals (of varying levels and credibility) argued for “focused protection” of society’s most vulnerable people in lieu of universal lockdowns, masking, vaccination, etc. (Similar to the policies followed in Florida and Sweden.) Their dissent drew vilification, ad hominem attacks, racist smears, fraudulent quotations, and death threats. Social media companies branded their arguments as disinformation and engaged in coordinated efforts to stifle their arguments.

NOTE: I offer no opinion at all as to how the analysis of Gupta, Bhattacharya, and Kulldorff compared scientifically with the analyses of the CDC or other medical authorities. Others with greater medical knowledge than mine can conduct that debate. I note only that (1) all three were perfectly credible, well-credentialed scholars; (2) at least in hindsight, a considerable number of claims put forth by the CDC and others in official roles have proven wrong; and (3) some of the arguments implicit in the GBD appear to have been vindicated. But, to repeat, I’m not judging the relative merits of GBD and CDC recommendations. I am noting only what is now beyond dispute—that Twitter, along with Facebook and other platforms, took steps to prevent the dissemination of arguments offered by legitimate scholars—and often did so surreptitiously.

In her Twitter files reportage, Bari Weiss discovered that Twitter had secretly placed Bhattacharya on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending. Shocked to learn this long after the fact, Bhattacharya tweeted:

Still trying to process my emotions on learning that @twitter blacklisted me. The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.

On February 8, Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) tore into former Twitter legal counsel Vijaya Gadde over Twitter’s censorship of medical professionals dissenting from official U.S. government policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. After asking Gadde whether she had medical training (which she didn’t), Mace asked, “Why do you think you or anyone else at Twitter have the medical expertise to censor a doctor’s expert opinion?” and added that, “You guys censored Harvard-educated doctors, Stanford-educated doctors, doctors that are educated in the best places in the world, and you silenced those voices.” My only quibble with Mace’s questioning is that, as described above, experts of the highest order can be as wrong as laypeople in the roles of social media bureaucrats.

“The Etymology of Disinformation,” by H.Newman as published in The Journal of Information Warfare (2022). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The word “disinformation” came to the English language in the 1940s from the Russian дезинформация (dezinformatsiya). But the concept of disinformation and spurious accusations of disinformation go back millennia. As I wrote recently (“1,600 Years of Medical Hubris”), the medical profession has a long and destructive history of suppressing disfavored scientific information that ultimately proved correct. This history stretches at least as far back as Rome and continues to the present. My article offered the following ideas that were regarded as disinformation, with long-term suppression of scientific evidence:

• Disease is caused by things other than the imbalance of bodily humors theorized by Galen (129-216 CE). Galen went virtually unchallenged for 1,600 years.

• The recommendation by Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) that doctors wash their hands between patients. Despite the powerful evidence he had accumulated, he was met with scorn, personal attacks, and incarceration in a mental institution, where he quickly died from a beating.

• The idea that disease was carried by microscopic organisms (germs). President James Garfield died of sepsis after his attending physicians ignored the then-recent work of Joseph Lister (1827-1912).

• The perverse science of eugenics. Dissenters were advised to keep their thoughts to themselves, and the United States sterilized over 70,000 people.

• The notion that autism is a neurological condition, and not, as Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) theorized, the fault of “refrigerator mothers” with poor child-rearing habits. For decades, mothers of autistic children were blamed and shamed, and treatments were focused on useless psychotherapy.

• The idea that disease could be spread by misfolded proteins without nucleic materials. Stanley Prusiner (1942-date) was regarded as a scientific heretic—a perception that did not vanish with his Nobel Prize for the discovery of prions. He has long avoided the press because of his experience.  

My earlier essay did not include two other vivid examples:

• The late-20^th century notion that ulcers are caused by a pathogen (h pylori) rather than by stress. Theorists were ridiculed for expounding this idea, since widely confirmed.

• The notion that the heart contains four chambers, with circulation through the lungs via capillaries. In Roman times, Galen had theorized that the human heart consisted of two chambers, with blood flowing between the chambers by means of tiny pores. Cadaveric dissection was generally prohibited and regarded as unnecessary, because Galen had already given the world all the information it needed. The Muslim physician Ibn al-Nafis (1213-1288) challenged Galen’s coronary model and came close to the modern conception of the four-chambered heart and pulmonary circulation via capillaries. However, his writings did not penetrate into Christendom. Three hundred years later, however, the Spanish physician and theologian Miguel Serveto, a.k.a. Michael Servetus, (1511-1553) offered a relatively accurate description of the four-chambered heart and pulmonary circulatory, perhaps from reading Ibn al-Nafis, and included his theories in his Christianismi Restitutio (1553). Both the religious and medical content of this work were regarded by Catholic authorities as heretical, so Servetus fled into Protestant Switzerland. There John Calvin ordered him burned at the stake.

Putting it another way, Servetus was accused of spreading scientific disinformation which violated the religious authorities’ Statement of Terms and Conditions and, as a result, was deplatformed.  

Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.