“Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like.”
The Importance of open debate.
Free speech is essential in allowing individuals to express unpopular opinions. The purpose of free speech is not to protect popular ideas but rather to shield unpopular ones, as popularity and truth are not synonymous. Censorship is not the answer to harmful speech; more speech is.
Suppressing dissenting voices reflects insecurity rather than strength. If you refuse to let others express their views, it implies that you fear their statements will challenge your narrative. Allowing everyone to speak their minds provides for a fair exchange of ideas.
This BBC reporter's inability to grasp this concept is amusing. He resorts to clichéd misinformation and hate speech arguments, assuming these to be irrefutable. However, they are easily dismissed if one rejects the underlying assumptions. The reporter struggles to address who decides what constitutes misinformation, revealing his limited understanding of truth and narrative.
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments were the primary sources of misinformation, making false claims about safety, effectiveness, and containment measures. The solution to combatting this disinformation was providing accurate information and elevating the debate by including those who had been silenced but had valuable insights to share.
A simple truth exists: trust cannot be placed in what cannot be questioned.
It is impossible to identify "disinformation" before a debate occurs.
Science does not commence from established "facts" and discarding everything else. Instead, it originates from competing hypotheses, methods, and arguments, progressing towards "facts" through open, adversarial engagement. In theory, journalism should function similarly.
This approach is mainly absent from modern journalism; many journalists do not wish for its return. The reporter in this video views his narrative as absolute truth and focuses solely on defending it. He often appears lost and resorts to discussions centered on safety and the age-old "hate speech" excuse. The situation becomes more pitiful than amusing when the reporter claims to have experienced increased "hate speech" on Twitter. When pressed repeatedly, he fails to provide specific examples, only offering vague references to "mildly sexist" remarks. Eventually, he admits to not using Twitter much, or at least not recently, and cannot explain his knowledge of the supposed "rise in hate." His futile efforts to backtrack and rely on empty rhetoric are pathetic.
What do you think about this exchange?
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Honestly, I don't know which is more dangerous: a moldy and increasingly far-left state-sponsored 'news' service which has managed of late to over-rate itself into cartoonish irrelevancy, or the latest self-admiring 'tech-mogul' personality cult who currently has the far right hanging on his every word as though he were some kind of messianic oracle. In the case of both, they can free-speak themselves until they're blue (or red, as the case may be) in the face, and I won't be listening to either of them.
Legacy media at its obsolete worst, versus the extreme manifestation of personal branding as its own reward? I'll check off 'none of the above' on this one. Neither represents anything of value to me.