What Anti-Vaxxers Actually Mean By "Free Speech"
What Anti-Vaxxers Actually Mean By "Free Speech"
Dishonesty in Pseudoscience
There's been a couple of incidents in recent news that call for a need to re-evaluate a phrase which is a frequent calling card of the modern crusade against public health:
"Free speech."
Now if you survey a hundred random people off the street, odds are over 90% of them will be in favor of the idea of free speech. Ask them to define it, and most would likely say that free speech means the government isn't allowed to stop you from speaking your mind. A trickier question would be to ask that, since fascists seek to seize power to take away everyone else's rights, should they be allowed free speech rights? Aren't we then protecting everyone else's free speech rights by crushing fascists? People's responses will likely vary, but that's not the point here.
Free speech is much more complicated than simply saying "free speech." The definition can widely vary between people for a variety of reasons. In the anti-vaccine movement, the abuse of the term "free speech" is used as a cudgel to rebrand oneself as the oppressed underdog hero, and their critics as part of a vastly powerful conspiracy to destroy liberty, freedom, and the American way. Rebranding oneself in the window dressing of a fictional narrative of good versus evil, the scrappy Rebellion versus the Galactic Empire, etc. - when Stanford academic Jay Bhattacharya endorsed anti-Semitic, anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for President, Jay hid behind delusions that RFK, Jr. was some sort of stalwart defender of free speech.
To understand "free speech" in theory versus practice, we need to revisit the ancient World Wide Web, long before the Great Social Media Consolidation, to a vastly more unruly era... of around 20 years ago.
1. Moderation & Message Boards
The Nameless Mod is a Deus Ex modification inspired by the now-defunct PlanetDeusEx message board. Characters are based off of actual posters & often voiced by the same users. A beautiful artifact of a forgotten digital age.
If you were a computer gamer in the late 1990s through the early 2000s, you were likely a member of an online message board - a discussion hub for like-minded people to share news, opinions, custom maps, game modifications, etc. - a collection of anonymous personalities, largely adolescent. Pure "free speech" failed in practice as spammers, racists, flamewars, topic derailments, and other issues quickly sucked the life out of these boards, driving users away. Quality moderation quickly became a selling point of many popular discussion hubs, and keeping the trash like outspoken Nazis out was a high priority for any moderation team.
Many "trolls," often young teenage men discovering their first hit of testosterone bravado, would complain that their "free speech" rights were being violated by having their abusive rants deleted or their accounts banned from these message boards. It was widely understood that the American government's understanding of "free speech" did not cover private forums; would you expect the police to violently defend my "free speech" rights to break into your living room at 2AM to perform a dramatic reading of Mein Kampf? Is my speech truly free if I can't force it down your throat?
Throughout the 2010s, internet discourse was consolidated into vast social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, and the role of moderation became much more complicated. All of these same problems only multiplied in severity as scammers were granted access to pools of millions of users, or white nationalists could tap into audiences of millions of young gamers to radicalize against an imaginary scourge of LGBTQ fiends plotting to corrupt their videogames. A brutal exploitation of a permanent underclass belonging to poor nations was quickly embraced, leaving many of these digital laborers with PTSD after deleting their 500th gruesome beheading video of the week. This consolidation was always a terrible idea; a single "feed" of posts from a wide gradient of users seamlessly jumping from one topic to the next creates far more distraction than utility.
Regardless, the topic of social media moderation quickly became a political wedge - as outspoken white nationalism gained influence in the Republican party, it sought legislation to further protect their hateful bile from moderation. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine crusaders and other quacks have fought to paint themselves as victims of unjust oppression - when in reality, selling dangerous snake oil "cures" such as an anti-parasitical drug for a viral infection is little more than a ridiculous, harmful grift. Claiming to be a “real scientist” when advocating for the mass, repeated infections of unvaccinated children with a new disease that you clearly know nothing about it, isn’t “free speech:” it’s simply reckless lying.
As the law stands, if you own a message board - much like your own living room - you're given a wide berth to what speech you may or may not permit. The former ownership of Twitter removed a great deal of unscientific nonsense related to the COVID-19 pandemic, largely by anti-vaccine grifters seeking to profit from a crisis, with the understanding that letting this scourge flourish would destroy the business value of the platform. They wouldn’t have to wait long to have this view confirmed.
2. The Opening of the Floodgates
The 2004 global phenomenon that was World of Warcraft was a major influence on social media platform design: a steady dopamine treadmill of positive feedback loops, wrapped in an engrossing fantasy universe - and has left a notable bodycount as some users succumbed to addiction to the game, going so far as to neglect their own children. "Damage Per Second" became "Impact Metrics," as users chased after likes, retweets, and followers as a way to track their "influence," whilst having their own behavior & beliefs influenced by the platform’s addictive structure. One Twitter "power user," a tech billionaire grifter who grew up watching the end of the privilege he enjoyed in apartheid South Africa, overdosed on white nationalist propaganda and went on to buy the Twitter platform under a dishonest promise of restoring "free speech” - especially with regards to unbanning viral sycophants and anti-vaxxers.
Nearly 20 years after learning proper message board etiquette the hard way, it was so bizarre watching supposedly reputable people - public figures - celebrating having their accounts unbanned from a terrible message board. And yet, here we were. Worse was enabling massive waves of harassment against actual qualified experts who could explain these complicated, highly technical scientific concepts. This sort of drama was funny as a fifteen-year-old but pretending that the new ownership of your favorite message board unbanning your account was a big deal is just... pathetic to watch grown adults, who at least pretend to have careers, cheer on.
Advertisers have left Twitter in droves. Revenue is down, and the value of the company that was Twitter is massively down with no end to the decline in sight. The platform is largely unusable at this point; overloaded with scams, bots, and rampant abuse. Many credible voices that cared about public health before Twitter went under new ownership have now jumped ship to Bluesky, whilst the anti-vaxxers which remain have gone essentially rabid. All of the early-2000s lessons on the need for dedicated moderation of message boards has essentially gone out the window. Much like dedicated hate speech platforms such as Free Republic or Stormfront, an accurate stock valuation of 2024 Twitter would be precisely $0 per share. No decent person wants to hang around a noisy bar full of obnoxious, rowdy bigots.
Doesn't matter. Twitter's ethnostate fetishist billionaire owner promised to pay the legal bills of anyone who lost their job for tweeting about how we need to pump our kids full of COVID-19. Well, in action that's actually...paying the legal bills of anti-vaccine cranks like Dr. Kulvinder Kaur MD, and not because she lost her job or was sued - but because she filed frivolous lawsuits against those who publicly criticized her pro-COVID infection views on Twitter. Read for yourself (Law Times):
In Gill v. Maciver, 2024 ONCA 126, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill brought a defamation claim against 23 doctors, journalists, and journalistic institutions. The defendants moved under s. 137.1 of the Courts of Justice Act – an anti-SLAPP motion – to dismiss her claims because they were an attempt to limit debate on a matter of public interest. The motion judge ruled that Gill’s claims were “precisely of the kind that s. 137.1 is designed to discourage and screen out.” The judge dismissed her claim and awarded over $1.1 million to the defendants.
The hope of SARS-CoV-2 “free speech champions” Kulvinder, Smilin' Jay, and the Muskhole is that they can weaponize the legal system into intimidating the critics of their war against public health into silence - the very opposite of the “free speech” dogma they claim to be fighting for, but instead, privatized censorship.
This is the "libertarian" view of free speech in action: actual intellectual discussion is suppressed - whilst thought-killing bigotry, hate, and abuse is not only endorsed, but in fact rewarded with Twitter Blue revenue sharing. Not the correct voice, but instead the loudest voice, gets to pretend to claim victory in this "debate," as if population-wide crises like pandemics - which Twitter's present owner himself denies ever happened - should be resolved by demanding the condemnation of countless people to an early and needless grave, all to construct an unsustainable fantasy of “normal.” The feelings of the wealthy overrule the scientific facts of qualified experts.
If this was truly a popular, or sensible view, then Ron DeSantis would be challenging for the White House in November after embracing the Great Barrington Declaration. Or perhaps Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. would be a serious contender for the Oval Office in November, after being endorsed by the Great Barrington Declaration. Thankfully, neither of these events will come to pass - instead, those central ideals of shrugging mass infection, especially of unvaccinated children, with a brand new deadly & disabling pathogen was laundered well across the political spectrum by unscientific opinion editorial pundits with zero public health qualifications, other than publicly crying about whenever they see somebody wearing an N95 respirator.
3. The Marketplace of Linguistic Dishonesty
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the interchangeable billionaire-owned conservative jackasses not worth remembering championed the phrase "facts don't care about your feelings," at the start of some hate campaign against transgender people. In truth, conservative “thought leaders” don't have anything to offer working families except the opportunity to abuse and exploit their supposed Lessers.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has rolled on, and our understanding of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with the many potential harms - we've been forced to entertain a public discourse that is much more centered around feelings of personal discomfort and a need for consumerist irresponsibility over a sense of collective accountability to one another, and to disregard bad-faith actors with nefarious agendas - like, say, the long-running herd of anti-vaccine ghouls that have seized upon the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to gain influence.
For years now, we've seen so many different accounts of people - mostly women - wind up disabled and even bedridden from "mild" COVID-19 infections. Then jumping on a platform like Twitter only to find themselves being harassed & abused by men who insist that they're lying - and profiting from said nastiness. The very sort of abusive vulgarity that moderation is supposed to crack down on.
This is the anti-vaxxer ideal of "free speech" in action: Not only should my speech be protected - but it should also be promoted. Your speech, consisting of the facts that prove I’m full of crap, needs to be suppressed. Also, you need to bury the bodies that prove my entire belief system is utterly full of shit - completely and utterly silenced from this public "debate." My feelings are simply more important than the facts. Me, me, me. My perspective is the center of the universe, and my positive feelings are simply more important than any fact in life which might induce a slight discomfort! How can you possibly begin have a “debate” with such a thoughtless mind that only sees human beings as a disposable object to advance their own delusions of grandeur?
When you hear an anti-vaxxer crying about “free speech” and how they’re being “censored,” call them out head-on as the liars they are. What they actually want is the opposite - their own speech protected - no matter how wrong it is - and their critics suppressed and harassed into silence. There’s no debate to be had with the chronically dishonest, and we can’t begin to have a serious discussion about repairing the dire state of public health in America without shutting out the quacks.
