We Can Handle The Truth
Source: Facebook has a climate-denial problem
Oh oh; my days may be numbered. But wait! I don’t depend on Facebook to broadcast my views anyways, so we’ll just carry on until they get enough influence to block everyone on the internet. The way things are going, I figure I have another 4 months at least.
The battle for real information and news keeps getting more intense as the conduits for information join with the information purveyors themselves in steering and shaping the public discourse. No one will deny the hard slants offered by the majority of the popular news outlets, both print and video media. But you don’t expect the vehicles you use to access news to be also gatekeepers for content. This is the equivalent of your forks and knives blocking you from eating a rib steak because they feel you should be a vegetarian. Both Twitter and Facebook have publicly censored conservative speech in favor of egregiously offensive leftist postings. Apple and Spotify have now joined the fray by censoring those that don’t conform to their corporate worldview. It is allowing a very small cabal of people to dictate what the masses are allowed to consume. Free thinkers and libertarians should all have their hair on fire over this. Unlike what Colonel Nathan Jessup thinks, we can handle the truth.
While this may be cause for celebration by the increasingly irrational left, we can easily see such actions engendering serious deleterious consequences for society as a whole. It’s not even a matter of right or wrong, it’s a matter of putting a halt to the progress of civilization. Imagine if Copernicus’ findings were not allowed to be publicly aired because the idea of the Earth orbiting the Sun instead of the then accepted belief of the opposite, was deemed to be heretical. Copernicus prevailed because he could demonstrate proof of his theory. In today’s world, you don’t even need proof of a theory to confer legitimacy. Just a bunch of Facebook likes and voila, it’s truth! If Twitter had been around in the day, I’m sure Copernicus’ inbox would have been flooded by angry and derisive tweeters calling for a good stoning.
The American Economist and Social Theorist Thomas Sowell wrote that, “Darwinian adaptation to environment applies not only to nature but also to society. Just as you don’t find eagles living in the ocean or fish living on mountain tops, so you don’t find leftists concentrated where their ideas have to stand the test of performance.”
Thus, when opposing views are not aired and debated on “public” social networks, it paves the way to groupthink, a condition that would put an end to innovation of every kind. Interestingly, this mindset is a bizarre take on Copernicus’ theory. It portends that truth revolves around the individual, rather than the actual reality that the individual orbits the truth.