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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The Old Media are dead. They are zombies now. Facebook and Twitter are dying, too. They want to control information, but it’s like herding a million cats — they can’t do it.
Nobody on this site is cancelled. Free expression still rules most of the Internet, and judging by my email it rules there too.
So what if “newspapers” are twisted? In the end they are in the wood products (paper) business, trucking dead trees with fossil fuels and creating a solid waste mega problem. They are past over. Stick a huge barbecue fork in them.
The MSM has comorbidities. They are on ventilators in nursing homes. All they have left is fomenting rage, and everybody is tired of that. Americans are turning the MSM off and changing the channel.
Academia is in quarantine, too. The colleges are deserted. Young adults have better things to do, places to go, people to see. The idea of “education” at brick-and-mortar mausoleums has lost it’s attraction. The truth is most kids went to college to hook up with members of the opposite sex. They studied biology. And that’s what they still do — only somewhere else.
Take heart. People are not sheep. Freedom is too seductive. The end is not nigh. Cancel culture is cancelling itself. Life will go on — the party isn’t over.
People are not sheep.
Certainly Blue Oyster Cult aren’t sheep:
https://youtu.be/A8s02HCUqHo?list=RDA8s02HCUqHo
“People are not sheep.”
Some people are not, I fear that the majority are.
“Freedom is too seductive.”
That may be true for some, but for most freedom is scary, they would rather be safe and secure.
I was debating a “friend” recently, and he told me sociologists found that freedom doesn’t exist, and he seemed perfectly happy with that statement.
I live in Poland and commented on a post about a documentary saying how evil coal was. The whole documentary was just lies, and the facebook crowd where I was commenting basically didn’t allow me to argue and present evidence. I was of course called a chill for the fossil fuel industry. Many people are deep into the statism/technocratic/marxist propaganda.
I have always read AntiFA as anti First Amendment and that seems more in keeping with their agenda as their tactics border on extreme fascism. Perhaps we should be calling them out as such, it would cause some delightful confusion.
They don’t border on extreme fascism, it is extreme fascism.
It’s not as easy as the dreamworld Marxists would have you believe.
In 1970s UK, the place was a communist dystopia. After civil unrest, Comrade Heath was replaced by Margaret Thatcher and similar happened with Ronald Reagan in the US. The History Man was a great parody of the idiocy in Ejucashion…
The Eastern Europeans don’t get fooled again and are pilloried by the MSM for their politically-incorrect voting.
I expect a sharp snap back to more conservative thinking once the (mostly) silent majority lose patience, just as they did back then.
TPTSNB cannot silence all of the internet – there’s always the Dark Side too.
If the liberals are allowed to finish their quest to corrupt the electoral systems, an electoral snap back won’t be permitted.
What about fact checking fiction? For example Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, George Orwell’ s 1984 and Animal Farm?
GC ==> Don’t give them any new ideas — they are liable to take you up on it.
Global Cooling: Well, what about fact checking this very article. I have had Mr. Hansen’s article reviewed, and we found that there is no first name “Kip” in english. Therefore, I am forced to label the above “false” and “cherry-picked”. Seems silly to call him on his name, of course, and “cherry picked” is not even wrong, but I recently discovered that there are no fact checkers for my fact checkers! Sincerely, Mark Z.
(I hope Mr. Hansen gets a good laugh).
“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.”—- thus we have a new secular form of Gnosticism. Those who consider themselves to be the guardians of the mystic truths call themselves “woke”. The question then should be to what transcendent ends? Not clear yet, except the Singularity gives us a hint. Humanity has been here before. Thousands of years ago. Paganism in a lab coat.
A piece in the WSJ opinion section today talks about how they won’t wilt to “Cancel Culture” pressure to change their editorial stance:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-note-to-readers-11595547898?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
Cancel Culture I can suopport:
https://www.westernjournal.com/gop-rep-gohmert-introduces-resolution-ban-democratic-party/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=CTBreaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=conservative-tribune&ats_es=13061887d8cc331cc50b3611d9e7c577
Globally, Trump has destroyed the “flat earth economy”!
The implications are enormous!
Facebook censored one of my posts about the benefits of tea, such as in a cup of tea. It did not meet their standards. Right or wrong what standard can there be about a cup of tea? It has water in it. No one was attacked in the article. The only objection could be the source regardless of content.
Facebook censored a post I made about polarity being the reason we can’t come together for mutually beneficial solutions.
I have been censored by at least a dozen mainstream outlets. I am careful to not violate terms of use. Official statistics, empirical facts and logic which destroys the desired narrative are not allowed anymore by the establishment media. I was sometimes getting the most liked comment in my local newspaper. That gave me too much credibility so they couldn’t allow me to continue posting. They refuse to provide justification or even let me contact moderators.
People who can be dismissed as right wing Trump supporters are allowed to violate terms of use consistently.
All this reminds me of my English composition professor of 50+ years ago. She would down grade you if she didn’t agree with you. I only passed because I got to select the topic for my semester paper and I chose, “The Importance of Sulfuric Acid to the Economy of the United States.” She had no opinion on that subject.
Kip – I’ve always enjoyed reading your informative and thought-provoking contributions, and this one is no exception. But… but,but,but! Never assume that your audience is up to speed with the issue. The section “Here is the sequence of events” should be at the beginning, not near the end! Mods, I think you could help here, by insisting that all contributions define the scope of the topic they are about to address. There are too many worthwhile pieces on this site which fail to make their very valid points simply because only the “converted” will be able to understand what it is they are preaching about.
Alternatively, just pass all contributions for pre-approval to that master of lucid prose, Willis Eschenbach 😊
Phil ==> Is that you, Willis?
Phil ==> Seriously, this essay is not about the CO2 Coalition editorial incident — which is just an example readers here will be interested in — tuis, its timeline comes in later in the piece.
The lede is the first sentence of the first paragraph — with a secondary lede at the beginning of the second paragraph.
The CO2 Coalition is at one of the very far edges of climate opinions but they have a right to express those opinions clearly — and most certainly in the Opinion Section of media outlets — without fake fact-checking.
The big story is the exposure of “opinion control” — in all sections — of the New York Times — in Bari weiss’ resignation letter.
Kip, Die Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the voice of Switzerland, noticeD how the NYTimes censored Senator Tom Cotton by a mob. Their house editorial in June condemned the Times as no longer a legitimate newspaper.
Better late than never.
Orson ==> Thanks for that . . . . hurrah for the Swiss!
The media are full of people who have done well for themselves by repeating “facts” as if they had done the research. Needless to say, few remain who have a first rate intelligence, as defined by Scott F. Fitzgerald.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function
The problem with Facebook is the millions of “cannon fodder” users who share their everyday experiences without a thought about how they unwittingly support a repressive media regime. Such a huge platform as FB should be under some kind of public control or oversight, with full transparency.
Aren’t comets supposed to be portents of doom, or something like that? Just askin’, because Comet Neowise has a 6,800 year orbital period and was last in our area around 1450 -1400 BCE. End of the Bronze Age. Disastrous earthquakes were a possible cause, sending the Sea Peoples and others such as the Israelites to new territory in the eastern end of the Mediterranean.
Just wondering if we should be paying attention to that end of the political mess. Neowise could be spelling “doom on you” for the eager beaver power grabbers, you know. Watching what is going on is like watching a pot of water going past the boiling point but not completely spilling over just yet. I keep wondering when the book burnings are going to start, but I never say it out loud.
Sara ==> Unfortunately, the book burnings have already started — read university campus news — read The College Fix.
“Fact check” was always a con to interject into a debate as an arbitrer and pretend to be neutral while doing naked propaganda. That way the media pretends to not count as an arm of a political party while acting as one.
Because of grotesquely biased fact checking (so inept a child would see through it, but not an adult, because of “education” and “being an adult” which means crushing all the correct intuitions of childhood while not replacing it with anything), I believe the Macron election should be cancelled, as the gift in nature of the MSM amounts to millions in free help, perhaps billions.
niceguy ==> Yes yes and yes — see Bari Weiss’ resignation.
Call the Leftists what they are…… BULLIES!