Science requires the free exchange of ideas and arguments. Any genuine scientific undertaking should be open to as many informed voices as possible. As we’ve known for millennia, iron sharpens iron. We all benefit from intelligent, spirited debates. And our public debate over COVID-19 policy’s relationship to scientific truth has raised our public debate to the highest of stakes.
Ideally, when we debate, we expose holes in each other’s arguments. We uncover flaws in each other’s assumptions. We notice the formerly unnoticed. We tug at a singular thread that can unravel an entire tapestry of flawed thinking. That’s all part of coming to know the truth together. The public debate over COVID-19, even up to this moment, has shown us that we desperately need common sense, informed by scientific truth and fashioned through robust, open debate.
‘TWITTER FILES’ HAVE EXPOSED THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN DEMOCRATS, THE FBI, BIG TECH, AND THE MEDIA
Now, with Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files,” we see those in control of Twitter during and after the pandemic were determined to privilege ideas and arguments they liked and diminish voices they disliked — voices such as that of my Hillsdale College colleague Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. Mistreating him and other prominent voices, Twitter employees routinely created “de-amplify” lists, limited the visibility of entire accounts, and kept unfavorable tweets and topics from trending.
As a result, the academic and medical communities, the credibility of the media, the general public, and the very pursuit of science itself have suffered.
Times of emergency are precisely when we want the public to know they can trust that media and public forums such as Twitter are being honest with the public. Instead, they misrepresented the debate to us, putting a thousand secret thumbs on the scales we weighed as we deliberated the science and policy of the pandemic. We were told that everyone had our best interests in mind so we could answer the difficult questions of the pandemic together. But that was a lie. Twitter clearly favored some arguments over others and hid its biases under a false guise of neutrality and safety concerns.
Yet as Shakespeare reminds us, “’Twill out, ’twill out!” The truth must come out. The reasonable skepticism about the efficacy of cloth masks and prolonged lockdowns has finally been vindicated. Policymakers, the public at large, and countless needlessly masked children could have benefited from this information and from varied voices offering their counsel. Many negative ramifications, from delayed speech development to depression, may have been avoided or lessened for America’s youngest.
If additional voices skeptical of the unfairly privileged COVID-19 talking points had been allowed to communicate on a level playing field with the secretly approved and cryptically promoted so-called authorities on the matter, who knows how many more hours children would have been blessed with in-person learning?
Who knows how many doomed businesses could have reopened earlier, preventing the shuttering of their doors forever?
We’ll never know. And that makes it all the more tragic and maddening.
It takes a while for institutions to build up requisite trust with the public, but they can lose it overnight. When we hear that a prominent social media company such as Twitter is not truly operating as an open platform for everyone’s voices but tampering with the organic spread of information and ideas, how can the public be sure that similar suppression tactics aren’t going on within other outlets?
It’s not journalism, nor is it debate that took place on Twitter and in the media. It’s not news, and it’s certainly not science. It’s a destructive and absurdist exhibition of petty tyranny, like the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, verdict afterward. These secret censors of our public debate sentenced our children and our neighbors to needless harm. Only now in the court of public opinion are we hearing the arguments required for a true verdict on our handling of COVID-19.
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Dr. Matthew Mehan is Hillsdale College’s director of academic programs for Washington, D.C., and assistant professor of government for the Van Andel Graduate School of Government. He is the author of The Handsome Little Cygnet as well as Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals.
