Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen – 23 July 2020
There is yet another new threat to an important right that Americans and all freedom loving peoples hold dear – the right to express one’s opinions on important societal issues in open public forums. In the 1960s, I, and many others, fought this fight on university campuses all across America. This fight was called the Free Speech Movement.
Today, university campuses are the locus of a new, and sadly misguided movement, the Anti-Free Speech Movement. Some refer to it as “Cancel Culture”, which is ill-defined, but in essence, by whatever name, it is a movement spurred by the pernicious idea that one group of people should be able to dictate what other people are allowed to say, what opinions they are allowed to express, what they can write and the very words they are allowed to speak. Writers and speakers that do not fit into a very narrow window of what is deemed “acceptable” by the Twitter-mobs are shouted down, dis-invited, slandered, libeled, subjected to calls for dismissal from their employment and have their very lives threatened.
Bari Weiss, who has just resigned after a three-year tenure as an op-ed staff editor and writer about culture and politics at The New York Times, put it this way:
“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”
And, my personal favorite line:
“The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.”
[Read whole resignation letter on Bari’s web site here. It is well worth the ten minutes required to do so. Frequent readers at WUWT will realize I have been saying much the same about The NY Times on these pages for years.]
The Free Speech Movement resulted in universities designating certain areas where anyone could come and speak, hand out pamphlets and fliers and express whatever opinions and political views they chose. Any opinion – any speech – any written material. It didn’t matter how offensive to some; how nutty, whacko or anti-American it was. They could say it, write it, distribute it. Most of these free-speeches and pamphlets were simply accepted in passing and trash-canned. But they were not forbidden and not mobbed out of existence.
Sadly, this is not the case today.
Today’s Public Forum, today’s Free Speech Zone, is the internet. Personal and organizational web sites, Facebook pages, Twitter-feeds. The beauty of the Internet was that one could say whatever one wanted, and as long as one didn’t violate certain laws (pornography, death threats, etc), one could publish his or her views and if other people chose to read them, they could freely do so.
You are reading one of these free-speech efforts at this very moment: Watts Up With That. There have been attempts to shut this site down, there have been personal threats against its founder and some of the authors here. There are ideological opponents who falsely label this site as mis- and dis-information and slander and libel those who write here. That opposition has a right to express their views – just as we do. They do not have a right to endeavor to enforce their views on others through attempts to shut this site down or direct traffic away from this site. Google has de-legitimatized WUWT in its search engine while legitimatizing slander sites. (Some of my previous pieces on Google here, here and here.]
Now, a new evil has arisen, on the largest public forum in the world, Facebook. Facebook’s attack on free speech is being labelled “fact-checking” — and a similar attack has been mirrored in many newspapers.
FACT-CHECKING or OPINION-CHECKING?
The “incident” occurred last August – the publishing of an Opinion piece in the Washington Examiner by Pat Michaels and Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Coalition. The post was subsequently mirrored to the Coalition’s Facebook page.
The CO2 Coalition’s Facebook page copy was promptly labelled “false”. Here the story is unclear, and different media outlets report differently. One version says that a more enlightened Facebook employee (the press call him/her a “conservative” employee, as yet unidentified) removed the “false” label on the basis that the Washington Examiner piece was clearly an Opinion. Other news outlets state that that Facebook reacted to a protest from the CO2 Coalition, and removed the label. That story should have died then – it was a “tempest in a teapot” — but curiously, it has re-appeared this last week in several places (here , here and more surprisingly, as a letter from Elizabeth Warren and three other U.S. Senators to Mark Zuckerberg [link is a .pdf])
It appears to me that someone has re-issued this story to sympathetic media outlets with a copy to Elizabeth Warren’s office.
What really happened is obfuscated in the press, but if you dig deeply enough and read all the press coverage you discover that Facebook did not ask anyone to “fact-check” the article in question. A private climate advocacy group initiated the action on their own and used their position as an “approved” Facebook outside third-party fact-checking organization, to have the article (on a private organization’s Facebook page) labelled as false. To do this, they only had to make an entry into a Facebook database.
Who did this? Climate Feedback. They are not listed on Facebook list of approved fact-checkers (see this page, at the bottom, select to see list of United States fact-checkers) but they apparently are a sub-group of Science Feedback, which is listed.
One gets immediate “feedback” on their opinions on Climate from this image on the Home Page of the Science Feedback web site:
Facebook has a policy that Opinion articles are generally not be to fact-checked based on the obvious fact that
and on controversial topics, such as Climate Change, they run across a very wide range of viewpoints, from “because of CO2 pollution “We’re all Doomed and We’re all Gonna Die” (with various time frames from 5 years to 30 years) to the stand taken by Michaels, Rossiter (and Will Happer) at the CO2 Coalition that higher “carbon dioxide levels will help everyone, including future generations of our families.”
The Facebook Official Policy on Opinions and Fact-checking is this:
“Opinion:
Opinion content is generally not eligible to be rated. This includes content that advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the interpretation of facts and data, and tells the public what the author or contributor thinks about an event or issue. Opinion pieces may include reported facts or quotes, but emphasize the author’s own thoughts, personal preferences and conclusions. This may also include editorials, endorsements, or content labeled “opinion” in the headline, authored by an identified opinion columnist, or shared from a website or Page with the main purpose of expressing the opinions or agendas of public figures, think tanks, NGOs, and businesses. However, content presented as opinion but based on underlying false information may still be eligible for a rating.”
Facebook believes that people have a right to express their opinions freely (and not have some busy-body, Twitter-mob or issue advocate or advocacy group independently label their opinion as false, mis-information, dis-information, mis-representation, etc). Someone, and I suspect the same individuals involved in Science/Climate Feedback, is again generating a lot of new noise about Facebook’s policy. This issue did not just teleport itself through time from last August to the climate desk of The NY Times, to ClimateWire, the website Heated, or the desk of Elizabeth Warren. Someone apparently has decided to use the ongoing efforts aimed at getting Facebook to censor or control content on other social and political issues [racism, Trump, vaccines, police] to attempt to get them to censor opinions on climate.
You call this a Fact-Check?
It is an interesting read to see the “annotations” – the details of the “fact”-check that led Climate Feedback to falsely label the CO2 Coalition piece “false” – Climate Feedback initiated the “fact-check” of the opinion piece on their own – remember, Facebook did not request any fact-checking of this article.
Go to this page:
The box to the right comes up when one clicks on the story headline. Clicking on other highlighted text reveals that the “fact-checkers” are not Fact-Checking, but rather are Opinion-checking. I encourage readers to view the page and click on each annotation and see the “fact-check” for that item. ALL are matters of opinion that depend on one’s overall view of the climate issue. One “fact-checker”, Stephen Po-Chedley, is happy to link to a couple of his own papers as proof positive that the Coalition is wrong on some point or other.
“Facebook has made it easier to mislead the public because it boosts inaccurate climate claims to an audience only interested in partisan narratives and unwilling to examine the actual science, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and a member of the team that fact-checked the original CO2 Coalition post. He said Facebook, as well as other social media companies, allows people to “live in these bubbles where they only hear the info that they want to.””
[NB: None of the annotations on the Washington Examiner article were posted by Andrew Dessler. Dessler is not listed as a Reviewer on the Climate Feedback web site nor at the Science Feedback site.]
Here’s the sequence of events:
- Pat Michaels and Caleb Rossiter publish an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Examiner on August 25, 2019, putting forward the opinions of their group, the CO2 Coalition, about Climate Change and CO2.
- The Climate Team, including those involved with the so-called Climate Feedback effort, and Andrew Dessler (who is not officially associated with the Science/Climate Feedback group), don’t like those opinions.
- They can’t pressure the Washington Examiner, apparently, so they go after the re-published article on the Coalition’s Facebook page, carry out their independent and unsolicited “fact-check”, and label the Opinion piece on Facebook as “Misleading, Flawed reasoning, Biased, Inaccurate and Cherry-picking”. Note that all of their objections are themselves opinions and their own understandings of complex data – albeit aligned with what is called “the climate consensus”
- In September 2019, about three weeks later, after a complaint from the Coalition, Facebook agrees that fact-checking opinions is a violation of its own policies and un-labels the article.
- Now, In late June 2020,someone, not willing to let this attack on Free Speech remain unsuccessful, having awaited ten months then begins to foment “outrage” by re-issuing the story to news outlets (and, it seems, to Elizabeth Warren in the U.S. Senate).
Those of you who don’t quite get this need to re-read Bari Weiss’s Resignation Letter linked far above. She says, of The NY Times, but it is true of almost all mass media outlets in the United States (and certainly the UK as well):
“Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”
We see this now at Google, Twitter, YouTube and other social media and internet-based platforms. Those who consider themselves to be the “enlightened few” – who believe that only they know the Truth and believe that “Truth = Orthodoxy, Truth = Consensus, Truth = The Will of the Mob” – are seizing the power to block any views contrary to their own.
This has been true in Climate Science for decades. However, it comes as a surprise to those who have lowered their eyes and looked away, glad they were in another field. Now that the Consensus Mob has turned its attention on historians, doctors, philosophers, psychologists, professors and jurists – we are seeing a few more voices crying out against this destructive tide. Those voices are, in turn, being viciously attacked for defending free speech – after all, “it doesn’t fit the approved Twitter narrative”.
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Author’s Comment:
This is an Opinion Piece. If you disagree, please leave your contrary opinions in the comments.
Examples are so rife in everyday life that if each reader left a link to a local story that illustrates this problem, we would have a record-breaking number of comments.
On July 15 2020, Caleb Rossiter gave his version of this episode here.
I do not include strictly two-party politics examples in this essay. Those readers who wish to see how bad this problem is when it concerns two-party politics in the United States can view these pages, select any link, and determine for yourself if the media is fact-checking or opinion-checking. In my view, they are most often checking against their established editorial narratives, not facts. (Again, read Bari Weiss.)
AP News: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck
CNN Fact-Check Politics: https://www.cnn.com/specials/politics/fact-check-politics
NPR Fact-Checks Politics: https://www.npr.org/sections/politics-fact-check
MSN Fact-Check: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck
USA Today Fact-Check: https://www.usatoday.com/news/factcheck/
NY Times Fact-Checks: https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/fact-checks
Note: I will not be responding to any comments that involve US Presidential politics.
This is a heavy problem – we all need to lift where we stand. Demand that your local news outlets practice real journalism – and that they don’t just parrot what the Twitter-mobs are going on about. Demand real unbiased coverage of issues.
And for heaven’s sake, if you feel tempted to “go along to get along” — Stop It! Just, Stop It!
[h/t Bob Newhart]
Read widely, think for yourself and think critically.
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No need for trendy new names like ‘cancel culture’. It’s the new fascism.
A new caricature/stereotype to blame for everything, a new save-the-world theory, a Goebbels-on-steroids press, violence and intimidation as their primary methods – and THIS time with the blessings of our blue-city ‘leaders’.
The power of hate – it works every time it’s tried.
A single word describes the cancel culture and its flagrant suppression of views other than their own.
Tyranny
Warren’s letter is revealing. Four scientifically illiterate politicians pontificating about science as they know it because they have been told . No self doubt to be seen anywhere. No realisation that being illiterate implies the incapacity of judging the veracity of what you have been told.
History repeats itself and we have seen this type of media control before. The latest pogrom is aimed directly at the US Constitution and all that it stands for. All perceived and manufactured inequalities are game and supported by the MSM. AGW wasn’t enough so it has taken a back seat ….. today. Vote.
“Cancel Culture”, which is ill-defined, but in essence, by whatever name, it is a movement spurred by the pernicious idea that one group of people should be able to dictate what other people are allowed to say, what opinions they are allowed to express, what they can write and the very words they are allowed to speak. “
The Left must invoke its Cancel Culture because it entire Climate Agenda being sold to the public is built on layers upon layers of lies, deceptions and half-truths. The half-truth is the climate scammers favorite tool, because it is demonstrably “true”, but still just a deception by omitting other data or alternative explanations that expose the deception.
Allowing an informed debate by knowledgable skeptics to be heard by the Public is in effect Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story.” The allowing the rest of the climate “story” being supressed to be “heard” exposes the lies and deceptions employed to push the anthropogenic climate change scam. The Rest of the Story in the climate scam is of course the failure to acknowledge massive physical and paleorecord uncertainties, the jiggering of historical temperature records to always and inevitably make the past cooler and present warmer, and the utter anti-science that are the climate models and their gathered “ensemble” that is underpinning the IPCC and COP process.
In other social areas far from climate, we see the Cancel Culture being employed in the on-going culture war. One prominent area where the Cancel Culture must be employed to save a gargantuan lie in the push for Black Lives Matter agenda, which is based entirely on the premise that “systemic racism” exists in police departments across the US.
And just like the climate scam, the BLM movement is about political power into the hands of a few, and many in the core of that group are openly avowed Marxists. Practical Marxism has at its core the concentration of power into an “enlightened” few. And hence this harkens back to the Bari Weiss resignation letter quote, where our “enlightened” betters what us to cede to them political power and thus control over us.
A critical examination in public discourse of the this utterly false premise cannot be allowed in public discourse, else the entire BLM scam being perpetrated on the US would fall apart. And to shut it down, the Left simply throws out the Race Card to those attempting to expose the lie that “systemic racism” exists. Certainly racism exists in individuals, that is not the issue and the system now for 50 years has learned how to deal with racist individuals and groups. But BLM is about power, and power by any means into the hands of those pushing it, truth be damned.
The reason I bring this up is essentially because the Climate Scam is quickly being replaced by the Cultural Revolution being undertaken by the Left. The Climate Scam has been existing on Life-support for some years now ever since the “hiatus” exposed the flawed climate models and the inability keep adjusting surface records to match model theory with the satellite-provided troposphere soundings acting to prevent wholesale surface temperature frauds. So the unwieldy and massively complex climate scam is now getting kicked to the curb and sidelined because a quicker and more decisive tool-set has come to the hands of the Socialist-Marxists. These new tools for inciting public fear-mongering and suppressing the truth come the form of pandemics and cultural wars, and a cultural war with race being front and center.
My humorous take on this from several weeks ago in this popular meme summarizes what is now happening:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xlbOFZOI035P529OeBptdtYORqSlYneN/view?usp=sharing
The climate girlfriend just got jilted by the better looking cultural and race wars combined with a pandemic attacks on the core of Western society that has achieved in 4 months what the Greens have labored for for decades, a drastic throttling of Western economies and energy use via COVID-19 fear mongering.
The solution is simple:. Don’t use FB, Twitter, Google, NYT, etc.
The Leftwing Media, as far as I know, has never been about fairness or reporting “just the facts”.
In the modern era, since the Vietnam war, the Leftwing Media have been actively promoting the Leftwing agenda.
The difference between now and then is several decades of leftwing brainwashing taking place in the schools, along with a Leftwing Media that has grown by leaps and bounds, and those on the Left have become so emboldened by their newly acquired power that they are blatantly trying to censor and silence the poltical opposition and dare you to try to stop them.
The fly in their ointment is President Donald Trump who exposes the Leftwing Media for the liars they really are. Trump may even be a vehicle for establishing alternative social media platforms. Remember MySpace?
The good news is that the Leftwing Media has a very low favorability rating with the public. For good reason: The Leftwing Media lie constantly.
The bad news is there are a lot of credulous people out there who don’t suspect the Leftwing Media is lying to them.
I still say the greatest danger to the Republic and our freedoms are the lies put out by the Left and the Leftwing Media. People can’t govern themselves properly based on lies, and lies is all they are getting from the Leftwing Media and these lies will cause the dupes to cast votes that are not in their interests such as electing Democrats to political power.
We’ll know a lot more about the national psychology come November 4, 2020. Then we’ll know whether all that school brainwashing and Leftwing Media lies were effective in electing a criminal cartel like the Democrats to the presidency. Our last free election, if that’s the case.
Conflation of logical domains is imperative for social progress, and necessary for social justice.
Diversity today ostensibly justified by systemic racism. Diversity yesterday, reproductive rites (“selective-child”), and clinical cannibalism, socially justified by claims of rape… rape-rape culture.
Marxism has at its core the concentration of power into an “enlightened” few
Consolidation of capital and control are central features of Marxist philosophy, and its derivatives: communism, socialism, fascism, imperialism, dictatorship, et al, in obeisance to mortal gods, goddesses, and minority regimes. The names change, the concepts persist, the so-called secular “ethics” (religion) of olde.
Kip-
I think you must have been in college in the 60’s, and were too close to the trees to see the forest. I graduated from college at the being of the ’60s so I was in school in the very beginnings of the ” Free speech movement.”
The movement was not about “free speech.” It was the attempt by far left wing agitators to gain a foothold in what was at that time, a very conservative academic culture. They were very successful and changed the academic culture to a very liberal one. They were never interested in “free speech.” That was just to sucker in the undergrads. Once they became the majority, free speech went out the window, The “cancel culture” you see today is the direct consequence of the phony left wing “free speech” movement of the ’60’s.
.
Most of these university professors are useless. My company has hired many an ex university professor and they have totally failed at the job. Of course there are a small percentage that are gifted and creative, but those are the ones typically not involved in trying to silence others.
https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share
A poll question is asked at the link above that says “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe”.
77 percent of Conservatives and Strong Conservatives agree with that.
64 percent of Moderates agree with that.
52 percent of Liberals agree with that.
42 percent of Strong Liberals (radical Leftists) agree with that.
So what do we have here?
What this shows is that the radicals feel much more free to say what they think. They do so because they don’t fear any consequences from what they say because the extreme Left is in control of the national narrative.
All the other groups are afraid to speak their minds to one degree or another because they fear criticism from the Controlling radical Left if they say what they really think and it does not conform to the radical Left Thought Police narrative. Even those Leftists who are not radicals are afraid to speak up for fear of being criticized by their more radical party members.
The Radical Left and its Propaganda Arm, the Leftwing Media, are causing serious problems for free speech here in the good ole USA. They are to some extent, succesful at shutting up their political opposition.
This has to change if we are to maintain our personal freedoms. We can’t allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence. The crazies win if that happens.
As a student at Berkeley in the early 60’s where the “free speech movement” started, I have to continually point out that that was NEVER about “free speech for everyone. It was entirely about free speech for communists and communists only. Those same people were constantly denying any speech rights of those who disagreed with them. This was no different than the Marxists of today. Falsely branding what they are doing is the way they always do business and I object to those who accept the false branding.
The turmoil of the 60’s lasted for years and it is difficult at this distance to recall the exact sequence of events. But I’ll try. There was at one point a small bulletin board outside our department’s reading room on which anyone could post comments on current events. Angela Davis had just stated that she didn’t believe in academic freedom, a statement that was widely reported. I posted a brief note referring to her statement and adding one of my own: “I don’t see how you protect academic freedom by hiring people who don’t believe in it.”
I think my post had a half life of minutes. The Free Speech Movement was mainly motivated by the desire to transmit a message that the advocates thought was important, not necessarily to protect other messages.
Of course in our school (UCLA, you may have heard of it) we were attentive to problems that were more local than galactic, like the school food services. Berkeley had the Free Speech Movement. We had the Fresh Sandwich Movement….
: > )
Each half of people in the US thinks the other half is crazy.
Half of each half is right.
The half-nots are restless.
The sun is spotless but for a little one.
The ENSO meter is poised perfectly in balance.
We are living balanced on a knife edge.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
~T.S.Eliot
RICO. This may not be the racketeering that inspired the legislation, but the corruption is plainly an organized criminal effort to subvert the first amendment. And it’s is every bit as deadly. Eliminating free expression eliminates democracy – because, as history has shown, that freedom is the last gate to tyranny.
As is illustrated by recent events at the NYT, the ballooning corruption is being facilitated by corporate and institutional management (notably of media), which is surrendering to and underwriting the suppression of free speech.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/07/these-18-corporations-gave-money-to-black-lives-matter-group/
The conduct isn’t new. It’s an ironic parallel of the conduct of petroleum corporations, who, to appease climate activists, funded the very outfits who seek their demise.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last.
– Churchill
What’s needed is a bow shot across corporate management, like the one recently issued by William Barr for their implicit abetting of Chinese offenses against American interests.
My opinion is commenters are missing a key type of people.
1.They are not the true believers.
2.They are not the people seeking power.
3. They are the hanger ons.
An example of a hanger on might be, a millennial who grew up in the not fair, I need a prize culture. They have good winging skills. Being a millennial, they probably can articulate how they want to improve things and change the world. They don’t want to learn by experience.
They are insecure and are intimidated by colleagues who speak there mind or just want get in and do something.
A hanger on might be someone who has climbed one or two rungs higher than their ability.
The hangers on, aren’t true believers, and they don’t seek total power, they just don’t want to be exposed.
I’m starting a new movement — Suspend Stupid
Who’s with me?
A few days ago I read about a bunch of “reporters” at the Wall Street Journal” whining that the opinion pages need to be fact checked.
So NO ONE is going to comment on Yahoo disabling comments? Really? The complete collapse of one of the world’s most used, and commented, websites gets no mention AT ALL? WE ARE BEING SUPPRESSED! Does no one see this but me?
Kip
I observed today that Yahoo had suspended comments to all their ‘news’ articles. The implication was that it was temporary, but the survey they provided, in lieu of comments, suggested that, depending on the survey results, it might be a permanent situation. The comments tend to be very polarized. However, it seems to me that lately Yahoo has been getting a lot of push-back about their ‘protest’ reporting. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo resumes letting readers comment on their usually biased articles.
On July 15, the Winnipeg Free Press ended comments online regarding their articles. Now you can only write letters to the editor which of course they control. So they have effectively become a propaganda paper especially since they have a climate writer who is partly paid by the federal government.
Snopes is at it too. They just did a “check” on the article about Polar Bears disappearing by 2100. They called it mostly true. they referred to the usual “scientists” who have erroneously for years been predicting that the Polar Bears will decrease due to “disappearing ice” which is not happening. I referred them to Dr. Crockford’s blog which I expect they will ignore.
The media are a bunch of useful idiots, but in my opinion the bigger long term problem are the educators, or I should write mis-educators.
What I find amazing and appalling is that 4 US Senators would actually sign their names to this anti-free speech screed. They are essentially demanding that a non-governmental entity impose restrictions on free expression of ideas and opinions that would be clearly illegal if done by any governmental entity. I seems clear that Warren, Whitehouse, Carper and Schatz would quite happily run the 1st Amendment through the shredder if given the chance. I remember a time when any politician who might advocate for taking away constitutional rights would have been unelectable. I would consider the position expressed in the Warren et AL letter to be disqualifying for any elective office.
I went to university in Canada in the early 70s, and the suppression of unpopular (and therefore immoral) opinions was very much a fact of life then. Professors, then as now, taught opinions as fact and if you demurred from the opinions taught, you failed the courses in which they were taught. In English Literature classes, the thought that kept bubbling up in my young brain was, if all these poems and stories and plays are so great, why is reading them so tedious? In Zoology, I could not put aside the thought that there was no way that the Theory of Evolution could be correct. But I just sucked it up and pretended to agree. I ended up taking a lot of Math, because I was perfectly confident of the truth of it.
Of course, in those days in Western Canada, the student body was overwhelmingly white and middle class. At the University of Alberta there were literally no Negroes (as Black people were called) at all. Everybody was straight, or else. I think at least half of us were not only virgins but committed to staying that way until marriage, and the people who weren’t kept quiet about it. Very few of us cared enough about politics to vote. But of course we were young, clever and arrogant, which are powerful inducements to intellectual and social bullying of all kinds, and I was on both ends of that spear pretty often. I owe a lot of my old classmates apologies.