0:03 - Censorship and Its Impact
1:49 - Education and Propaganda
3:53 - The Nature of Power
5:56 - The Illusion of Free Stuff
9:18 - The Shift in Moderation Policies
10:32 - The Bias of Fact-Checkers
15:43 - The Role of Censors
18:30 - Consequences of Misinformation
19:39 - Censorship as an Invasion
In this episode, I delve into the critical issue of censorship, sparked by Megan McArdle's recent article discussing Meta's decision to end its fact-checking initiatives. My passion for the topic drives me to explore how censorship operates, not just as a political tool, but as a profound manipulation of the human mind. Censorship, I argue, is an invasive method of rewriting the neuronal connections within our brains, dictating what we can and cannot know. It's an affront to personal autonomy, echoing the principle of "my body, my choice" as a rallying cry against such psychological interference.
I challenge the necessity of fact-checkers in a supposedly educated society, questioning why a population that has undergone twelve years of schooling still feels the need for oversight in determining truth. If education has failed to equip citizens with the ability to discern right from wrong, then it’s a clear indictment of the educational system, which has devolved into mere propaganda. The reliance on fact-checkers unveils the larger narrative: the government is unable to instill critical thinking, which leads to the manipulation of public opinion and the perpetuation of misinformation under the guise of protecting citizens.
As I analyze Meta's shift in moderation policies, I highlight the inevitable power dynamics at play. Those who advocate for censorship often assume they will be the ones in control; however, history shows us that such power is regularly abused. The commentary extends to examining how political environments shape discretion in what information is promoted or suppressed. I emphasize that the call for more fact-checking stems from a lack of faith in the general public’s ability to engage with differing viewpoints. This handicap not only reveals the fragility of prevailing narratives but also reflects an unsettling trend in which free speech becomes increasingly rationed by those in positions of influence.
By dissecting the interplay between fact-checking and censorship, I draw attention to the biases inherent in the system itself, including the left's dominance in shaping narratives. I make a compelling case that when technological and social media companies suppress speech in the name of protecting society, they disproportionately favor certain ideologies while stifling dissenting voices. The transition towards a more laissez-faire approach in moderating content could signify a necessary shift in power dynamics, where individuals are empowered to decipher information for themselves rather than relying on corporate entities or third-party fact-checkers.
As I conclude the discourse, I reinforce that genuine autonomy over one’s mental landscape is crucial. The erosion of this autonomy through censorship is a direct affront to our integrity and self-ownership. It’s paramount that we reclaim the ability to engage critically with information, transcending the limitations imposed by institutions that have historically prioritized control over knowledge. The episode serves as a poignant reminder of the cultural significance of free speech—an essential pillar of personal liberty and an irreplaceable catalyst for societal growth.
[0:00] All right, hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
[0:03] I hope you are doing way-ell. Megan McArdle. She wrote, this is two days ago, there's a big article. Here's the truth, meta-ending fact-checking is a win against censorship. Now, I haven't read this article yet, but I'm pretty keen on riffing about censorship because, you know, it's a topic near and dear to my heart. So it says, when fact checkers turn into censors, a power shift had to happen. Fact checkers.
[0:40] So censorship fucks with your brain. Let's be real clear about that. Censorship is an attempt to get inside your head and rewire your brain.
[0:53] Censorship says you can't say this, you can't be exposed to this, you can't know this. it is either preventing neurons from connecting, or it is causing neurons to connect that you otherwise wouldn't choose. So, it is incredibly invasive. Like, you understand, my body, my choice means my brain, not yours. Do not fuck with my neurons. My body, my choice means fuck off with your censorship and let me choose and decide for myself. Let me own my own brain. Do not screw around with my neurons. Do not get inside my head and rewire it for your fucked up fun and profit. That's censorship. My body, my brain, my neurons, my fucking choice.
[1:50] When fact checkers turn into censors. Foundational question, of course, why does a citizenry that is raised in government schools need fact checkers? Right? I mean, you're in school for twice as long as it takes for people to become doctors. Can you imagine?
[2:19] You go to medical school. You do your interning. You do your residency. You finally pass all of your exams. And then they say, well, you know, we've got to have a doctor, a competent doctor, follow you around and tell you what's good and bad medical advice. How to treat things, what illness is, right? That makes no sense, right? The whole point of becoming a doctor is you shouldn't need a doctor to tell you what doctoring is. The governments have 12 years to teach you how to determine truth from falsehood. And the fact that they didn't, the fact that people need fact checkers or think they need fact checkers or think that, well, the general population educated by the government is helpless, completely helpless in the face of misinformation and disinformation and malinformation. They don't know. Why don't they know? Well, because the government can't teach you what's true and false and right and wrong for obvious, obvious reasons. So it's a massive condemnation of government schools. But of course, nobody wants to talk about that. You know, that kind of tired trope. Oh, people aren't ready for that conversation. Yeah, they're not even close to ready to that conversation. Why do you need fact-checkers when you have been educated for 12 years? And if your education doesn't teach you how to distinguish truth from falsehood, right from wrong.
[3:47] Then your education is not education, it is propaganda.
[3:53] So censorship is propaganda, and it is needed because government, quote, education is just propaganda. It can't teach you how to determine truth from falsehood, right from wrong. It can't. Because if you have the independent means to determine truth from falsehood and right from wrong, then you can't be controlled, manipulated, bullied, and threatened in the same way. So, he says, if you want to know who wields power in a society, there's a simple and effective test, who supports censorship. Well, as we know from my presentations on free speech, white males are by far the greatest advocates for free speech absolutism.
[4:37] So, clearly, since white males don't support censorship, white males have no power in society. So he says, if you see someone advocating for more suppression of dangerous speech, be it heresy, hate speech, or misinformation, you can be sure they expect their side to have exclusive use of the banhammer. The natural corollary is that when censorship regimes collapse, you know a power shift happened. That's how you should understand the kerfuffle over changes in Meta's moderation policies. Yeah, of course, censorship is just a very corrupt and low IQ position. I'm not saying that everybody who advocates for censorship is low IQ, but you can't get censorship without the approval of the masses. And most people are not trained to think of the hidden costs rather than the immediate benefits, because that would be required. It would be required to teach them effectively about economics in that situation, right? And you can't teach citizens in a democracy or a republic about economics, because then you can't promise them free stuff. Because they would know it's not free, right? So, the entire slate of hand of politicians is to pretend that they can give people free stuff, right? To basically wire into their neglected and abandoned childhoods, to pretend that government can be big daddy and big mommy and give them all the free stuff that their parents didn't give them, which should have been free when they were kids.
[5:56] So, it is all just exploiting bad childhoods with the illusion of free stuff.
[6:01] And if you teach the citizenry economics, then politicians can't promise them free stuff. And what's the point of wanting power if you can't bribe people with the money that their children will be enslaved to pay for? That's no fun. So.
[6:24] The reason why censorship is just so stupid is because, yeah, everyone thinks, oh, I'm going to be in control of the censorship, right? And this is the wild thing, right? This is why people, they don't think in principles at all, can't think in principles, because again, the government can't teach you to think in principles. So if we say there's such a thing as speech that is dangerous, well, communism killed well over 100 million people in the 20th century alone, and the body count continues. Communism killed 100 million people. I mean, I remember when the New York Times put me on the cover because one of my listeners had gotten out of a toxic relationship and got a job and a girlfriend. So apparently that's just terrible and I need to be censored. But an ideology that has slaughtered 100 million people is absolutely welcomed and promoted in mainstream, mainstream American academia. There are many departments where a significant number, and sometimes the majority, of professors are outright Marxists. So the idea that you should censor speech that could be dangerous is completely ridiculous, because there's almost no more dangerous speech than the advocacy of communism, which is widely accepted, promoted, funded, and secured.
[7:44] On Tuesday, the parent company, this is the article of Facebook and Instagram, released a video of CEO Mark Zuckerberg explaining that Meta's moderation policy had gone Australian, would now be overhauled. Now, of course, we all know that Zuckerberg would in no way, shape, or form be doing this if Kamala Harris had won the election, so he's just an anyway-the-wind-blows kind of guy. He says the automatic moderation algorithms would be fine-tuned to be significantly less sensitive, and the company would be terminating its relationship with third-party fact-checkers such as Reuters Fact Check, Org, PolitiFact, and The Dispatch, whose verdicts could result in adding warning labels, limiting the reach of some content or even removing the posts.
[8:25] So, anybody who talked about the rape gangs in England, well some people were often censored or suppressed, which meant that many British parents were not warned about this danger which resulted in children being brutally raped. So, censorship, if you're not troubled by that I don't even know what to say to you. So Zuckerberg said, experts like everyone else have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time, we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor. And he said, you know, this came after Trump because Trump's victory in 2016, because nobody could imagine that Trump would win based upon facts, because nobody, they're in such a bubble that nobody I know but voted for Trump, therefore, right?
[9:19] So, yeah, it was just a political tool.
[9:23] She goes to say, among conservatives, this was long overdue. They see fact-checking as an exercise that enforces left-wing biases of the indigo blob, the elite institutionalists that dominate media, academia, and other centers of cultural and political influence. For the left, however, it was more evidence of big tech bending the knee to Trump. Oliver Darcy wrote, Zuck isn't just kissing the ring, he's slobbering all over it. Yeah, vivid analogies that are actually kind of gross are not an argument. Ollie Butt, all right. Left-wing critics were not wrong that this represents a major shift in how some of our biggest media companies do business mirroring changes that happened at X after Elon Musk acquired the company they're also not wrong that these changes are more palatable to conservatives than to liberals and they're right that Donald Trump has no interest in promoting free speech as a principle, he just wants different people deciding what gets throttled, oh, that's a link here.
[10:18] Trump has vowed to save TikTok lawmakers are wondering how I don't know, this is just a bunch of Trump stuff So, I don't quite understand that. Donald Trump has no interest in promoting free speech as a principle? Really? I don't know that that's true. All right.
[10:33] That said, Zuckerberg is correct to recognize that the fact-checking industry leans well to the left, though outlets like the Dispatch are an exception, and that political bias inevitably creeps into the decisions about what facts to check and about how those facts are contextualized, and the right can fairly complain that conservative ideas have been suppressed under the guise of ostensibly neutral information hygiene. So it leans well to the left. Biased and liars, right? Biased and liars. So this is the funny thing, right? So the amount of material that needs to be fact-checked, both in terms of automated and manual review, it's so enormous that you can't pay people much to do it. Now, just understand this, right? I don't know how many thousands or maybe tens of thousands of fact-checkers have attached themselves to social media over the years, maybe more, maybe less, but it's a lot. So, because there's so much manual review that is required for any amount of fact-checking, you can't pay people much.
[11:36] So, because you can't pay people much, you don't have skilled people doing this job. So let's say that you were an absolute expert at determining... This is just an IQ test, right? The censorship is just an IQ test. So let's say that you were an absolute expert at...
[11:58] Determining truth from falsehood. You just knew what was true, and you knew what was false, or with a small amount of research, you could determine truth from falsehood, because you'd have to, you know, how many, I don't know, dozens of claims to adjudicate every day, so you'd know what was true, and you'd know what was false. Amazing. Like, what an incredible gift that is. It's divine, really. You would have to be pretty much omniscient. So, you would have to have an amazing ability to determine what was true and what was false. Now, if you had an amazing ability to determine truth from falsehood, you would be a multi-zillionaire. Because companies are putting out statements about growth and projections and sales and opportunities and potential partnerships and so on. And some of this is true and some of this is fluff and some of it is the opposite of true. So if you knew how to determine truth from falsehood, you would make such a killing, just in the stock market, you would make such a killing in the stock market that the idea that you would then end up grinding away in some Indonesian digital sweatshop, adjudicating truth and falsehood in the vast landscape of human interaction is so laughable, it's ridiculous.
[13:14] Please understand, if there are people who have an amazing ability to determine truth from falsehood, then they would take that amazing ability and use it to make a lot of money and do a lot of good in the world. Well, maybe not do a lot of good, but, right? See, if you could determine truth from falsehood, then when central banks said they might be raising or lowering their rates, you'd know when they were telling the truth or lying and you'd arbitrage that into massive amounts, like almost infinite amounts of wealth. But because that's an extraordinarily rare ability, if it even exists, you're not going to get it for $10 an hour in some sweatshop of fact checkers, or $20 an hour, or $40. Like, there's just no way. If you had the ability to determine truth and falsehood, you wouldn't be working for semi-slave wages for fact-checkers. So, by definition, you're asking for an incredibly powerful and rare ability and paying minimum wage for it. This is not going to happen. Again, it's just an IQ test, right? The article goes on, checking the veracity of information circulating online is a worthy project. Well, why don't you teach people, right? Why don't you teach people how to determine truth from falsehood?
[14:42] Why don't you tell? I mean, this is the great epistemological project started from the pre-Socratics, right? Epistemology is the study of the nature of human knowledge, which is foundational on accuracy versus inaccuracy, truth versus falsehood. So why don't you just have a course where people say, here's how you can determine truth and falsehood. Teach people how to think rather than telling them what is true and false. Because if you can pay people 10 or 20 bucks an hour to determine what is true and false, then clearly you don't need high-skilled, because if they're high-skilled, they won't be working for 10 or 20 bucks an hour. So, if you can, if people can be paid 10 or 20 bucks an hour, and what is the training in these fact checkers, right? You've got thousands of fact checkers grinding away. What's their training? Is it a couple of hours, a couple of days? Whatever it is, well, then make that course available to the general public so that the general public can pursue it, right? So, that's crazy.
[15:44] But when you use those checks to decide what other people are allowed to say, you turn fact checkers into censors, a power that is inevitably open to abuse and error. Which is why it's so revealing that a fairly minor change to moderation policies felt so apocalyptic to progressive. Yeah. And when you don't get to control what people see and hear, when you finally say to people, it's your brain and your choice. My body, my choice. It's not just about the uterus, not just about the womb, it's about the actual brain, your neurons. After all Meta isn't announcing that henceforth it will let conservatives decide what information is allowed on its network though that's what Trump might prefer users progressive and conservative alike will be given more freedom to speak their minds their audience rather than algorithms or professional fact checkers will decide what to believe again government's got your brain for 12 years straight if you graduate without knowing what is true and what is false what needs to be reformed is not algorithms or fact-checkers, but government education itself. But nobody wants to talk about that, of course, right? The fact that merely letting people talk to each other feels like a dangerous concession to the right tells you just how much power progressives have amassed.
[16:54] Ironically, it reminds me of a quote cited often when conservatives complained about progressives throttling their opinions. When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. The rejoinder from progressives is that the things conservatives want to say are awful, intolerable, and false. Having spent time during the pandemic debating vaccine skeptics, I won't argue that there's disinformation circulating on the right.
[17:18] But there are plenty of cases in which the indigo blob was badly wrong. About the virtues of masks, first understated, then overstated. About the health benefits of protesting police brutality. About the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab rather than mutating at a wear market in Wuhan. Of course, the pandemic was an exceptional moment charged with maximum anxiety and uncertainty. But consider other cases where the left spread misinformation, like the New York Post. A story about Hunter Biden's laptop, which turned out to be true, but was suppressed by the power of an indigo blob that wished it wasn't. Then there's President Joe Biden's precipitous cognitive decline, which was somehow missed, or at least absurdly underplayed, by media establishment that prides itself on speaking truth to power.
[18:00] Now consider that in the year when this happened, PolitiFact decided that the lie of the year was the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating household pets. This was a scurrilous allegation without any evidence to support it amplified by Trump and J.D. Vance. But was it a more important lie than the partisan pretense that the President of the United States was in full possession of his wits? Obviously, one of these lies, those lies, was much more consequential than the other. Fact checkers amplified that lie, blah, blah, blah, boring, boring, boring.
[18:30] All right, is that about it? This, as much as the election results, is responsible for the power shift we are witnessing.
[18:38] Oh, the missing of the, okay, which is a response not just to the rights to send in power but also the failures of the old regime as always the censors claimed that they needed sweeping powers to make the world better safer and more truthful and the censors always do they prove themselves unworthy of those powers, which they deployed not just against ideas that were false but against politically inconvenient truths in the process they demonstrated why no one of any ideological stripe should be trusted with that kind of authority well again if you have the power to magically determine truth from falsehood, you can amass so much money that you could start the largest and well best funded network in the world, hire away all the best talent from everyone else and end up with a massive monument to truth and reason and virtue and goodness. So, of course, if you try that, you'll probably just get censored. So, yeah, censorship is a violation of personal integrity. It is a violation of your body. It is an invasion and a manipulation of your neurons in your brain By denying you information, by amplifying other information, they are playing around with the constellation of your brain.
[19:39] It is a massive invasion and an attempt to hijack the very essence of who you are, which is your neural connections. So yeah, my body, my choice, fuck off with the censorship.
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