To play devil's advocate, isn't it a little bit generic to just name a few instances of abuse of censorship, rather than working with data to determine to what degree misinformation rather than truthful information was targeted? Because just from a bird's eye view, if one plots the press freedom index against the covid-19 death rate, I don't think you'd get a plot that the author would expect based on this article.
I don't think the article tackles hard and serious questions around speech. Banning the doctor in China from speaking out was extremely bad, but say, what about a potential effect of stopping a panic in Wuhan and people from fleeing the region and taking the virus everywhere?
I don't necessarily mean this as a defense of censorship but rather as taking a genuinely critical view of failures in our systems.
The problem is that such effects generally don't end up working out. Despite China's world-leading information suppression efforts, there was a panic and millions of people did flee Wuhan before the lockdown. I can't quite take a hard line and say censorship never achieves good results, but much more often it's just an attempt by authorities to seize the illusion of control.
The problem with your proposal is that your methodology is a false approach. Freedom of thought (and it’s close corollary, freedom of speech) is foundational to all inquiry — if I must adhere to some idea, I’m not free to think, and if I’m not free to think, then philosophy (inquiry) can’t exist. So we know that censorship is wrong as a matter of principle, and we don’t need any extra data beyond the a priori arguments of the type above.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of thought. In fact speech doesn't equal speech. There is public discourse, there is commercial speech (which in fact even in the US receives fewer speech protections than non-commercial speech), there is private speech, political and religious speech, propaganda, and so on.
Unless someone invents a mind control helmet thought is always free. Speech is a much more differentiated and nuanced issue. In fact it's slightly hilarious to resort to some sort of ideological, axiomatic defense of free speech, because that in itself is thought terminating. You're basically censoring yourself from any criticism of free speech, because you don't want to think it.
The basic principle of philosophy is questioning unquestioned assumptions, that includes questioning freedom of speech.
There is degrees to freedom of speech and until the chinese invent telepathy, freedom of thought is preserved, always.
But to the first point I just made; you can have freedom of opinions and freedom of facts. The former means you are free to state your opinion on things and it's something you get for example in germany. The later means you can state anything you want as a fact, regardless of if it's true and if you know it's true. That part is something most countries, even the US, regulate to some extend (false advertising in medical supplies for example).
Spreading false facts about a pandemic ought to be regulated by law, you do not have freedom of fact and never had it. You continue to have freedom of opinion in a lot of countries and IMO the number of countries that have it hasn't change since the pandemic started.
I think censorship doesn't really work anymore. It is maybe restricted to certain demographics, but we have pluralistic sources of information that cannot be undone completely. So we are lucky, but censorship can still do a lot of damage.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 35.4 ms ] threadI don't think the article tackles hard and serious questions around speech. Banning the doctor in China from speaking out was extremely bad, but say, what about a potential effect of stopping a panic in Wuhan and people from fleeing the region and taking the virus everywhere?
I don't necessarily mean this as a defense of censorship but rather as taking a genuinely critical view of failures in our systems.
Unless someone invents a mind control helmet thought is always free. Speech is a much more differentiated and nuanced issue. In fact it's slightly hilarious to resort to some sort of ideological, axiomatic defense of free speech, because that in itself is thought terminating. You're basically censoring yourself from any criticism of free speech, because you don't want to think it.
The basic principle of philosophy is questioning unquestioned assumptions, that includes questioning freedom of speech.
But to the first point I just made; you can have freedom of opinions and freedom of facts. The former means you are free to state your opinion on things and it's something you get for example in germany. The later means you can state anything you want as a fact, regardless of if it's true and if you know it's true. That part is something most countries, even the US, regulate to some extend (false advertising in medical supplies for example).
Spreading false facts about a pandemic ought to be regulated by law, you do not have freedom of fact and never had it. You continue to have freedom of opinion in a lot of countries and IMO the number of countries that have it hasn't change since the pandemic started.
edit: speaking of the "few instances of abuse of censorship" cases we saw in history.