The world is awash in misinformation and has been since the dawn of civilization. Many hypotheses that have been called misinformation were eventually proven true, and facts that were thought to be true at one time have since been disproved. Take fire, for instance. People used to think that fire was magic or the manifestation of God. It’s not, but I wouldn’t attempt to get someone thrown off YouTube if they made a podcast about how God talked to them through a burning shrub. I believe in possibilities until they crash against the rocky shore of cold, hard, conclusive evidence.

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Recently, the UK’s Royal Society said that “governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combating harmful scientific misinformation online,” and that “such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.”

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It’s a relief that at least one reputable, science-based institution is coming out against the current fashion for censorship, as well as realizing censorship never really works. After quite a few incidences, of “No, you can’t talk about that misinformation or we’re kicking you off the platform” turning into “Oops, we might have been wrong about that one,” aren’t most of us less willing to trust the powers-that-be in government, science, or media to be the arbiters of what’s too dangerous for us to hear?

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Most people aren’t worried that misinformation from Fox News or MSNBC — or something Joe Rogan says on his podcast — might bore into their brains and leave a trail of destruction, like that Sci-Fi earwig that everyone still talks about. We can handle misinformation; most of us have heard a lot of it and developed a defense. Do you know what was misinformation? That the vaccine would prevent us from getting the virus and spreading it. That cloth masks work to help prevent Covid. That the virus almost certainly came from the wet market in Wuhan.

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Don't get me wrong; I did the whole rigamarole. I masked, I vaccinated, I stayed at home and wiped down the Amazon boxes before taking them into the house. I wanted to do my part and be a good citizen and a good human being. But then my dad died of Covid in a New York State nursing home, alone, and when people started asking questions about Covid, they were shut down. I didn't understand why we should shut down discussions about something that had affected so many people and that we knew we didn't have all the answers about.

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I don’t have anything against Joe Rogan. I applaud anyone who says what they want to say and refuses to be shut up by people who want to silence them. But I don't listen to his podcast. Three hours is a long chunk of time, and I can easily catch the highlights or controversial parts of his podcast through various news sources and social media if I want to know what supposedly outrageous thing he said. I’m thinking that would be a good solution for anybody who doesn’t like Joe Rogan. Just don’t listen, and let the people who want to, listen.

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Actually, that’s a great solution. I’m pretty sure I’m not the first person to suggest it.

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I guess Neil Young didn’t think of that — or read the Royal Society’s paper — before he started throwing his not-as-heavy-as-he-thought weight around this week after deciding to try to cancel Rogan. Spotify took Young’s ultimatum of ‘Rogan or Young’ to heart and took Young off the platform. I’m going to miss Neil Young not being on spotify; I love his music. I think he's wrong on this issue, but I'll still think Cowgirl in the Sand is one of the best songs ever. He's entitled to say what he wants to say about whatever, and I have no desire to try to shut him up or shut him down. That's a shocking point of view to have lately, I know.

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Update: while I was writing this, Joni Mitchell also left Spotify over the Joe Rogan thing, as did Nils Lofgren. (I have no clue who Nils is.) Peter Frampton tweeted support about Young’s decision, but so far he’s stayed on my Spotify playlist. I do not feel like they do about canceling Rogan or Spotify. Whose wine, what wine, where the hell did Frampton dine, to get the idea that trying to cancel someone is admirable?

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Spotify has announced they will be adding a content warning to podcasts that feature Covid-19 discussions.

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Misinformation

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Noun. False information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.

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Here’s a thought. One can use their own critical reasoning, knowledge, research abilities (watch out for confirmation bias), and communication skills to fight misinformation instead of censoring it. We can do this on our own, since we are modern people and not parishioners in the Middle Ages waiting for the priests to explain God to us. We have Google now. (Or duckduckgo if one wants to find all the information that Google’s algorithm may or may not be suppressing.)

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In the course of disputing or challenging supposed misinformation, one might even help determine if it is, in fact, misinformation. It may actually turn out to be true. Science and facts on the ground, especially in a pandemic like we have been experiencing, tend to evolve as time goes by and we learn more and acquire more data. In discussing such data, we might even improve our knowledge base, and then we will have provided an actual service to society instead of being soulless censorship advocates.

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“In the early days of the pandemic, science was too often painted as absolute and somehow not to be trusted when it corrects itself, but that prodding and testing of received wisdom is integral to the advancement of science, and society.”

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- Professor Frank Kelly FRS, Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

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I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Big Tech might be getting ready to censor me right now if I were important enough to pay attention to. It’s definitely Hunter Biden’s laptop! News of it shouldn’t have been censored on social media right before the election! Covid was probably engineered and escaped from the Wuhan lab! Zuckerberg helped unfairly influence the last presidential election to the tune of $419 million! See? I just cited a few of the things that people have been getting banned from social media for saying and....nothing happened. Big tech doesn’t care what I say. Anonymity is power.

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In the spirit of being a bit snarky about all the people who are obsessed with labeling things as misinformation that might be better described as working theories that haven’t been proven true or false yet, here are a few examples of things in the past that were labeled as misinformation but turned out to be true.

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HANDWASHING PREVENTS

THE SPREAD OF DISEASE

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In 1846, Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 -1865), a Hungarian-born obstetrician, was working in The Vienna Maternity Hospital, at the time the biggest such facility in the world. Doctors and medical students were taught in one clinic, midwives in another, and patients were allocated to the clinics on alternate days. The death rate in the doctors’ clinic was almost three times the death rate of the midwives’ clinic, and almost all the deaths were from puerperal fever. Semmelweis was appointed to figure out why.

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The doctors and medical students started their day in the morgue examining the corpses of women who had died of fever. Then they headed straight into the maternity ward and used their unwashed, just-touched-a-diseased-corpse hands to vaginally examine the women — part of the students’ training — and then help deliver their babies. The midwives did not spend their mornings examining corpses and didn’t vaginally examine the women.

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Semmelweis had no idea about germs, but he observed that when he and the other doctors, students, and midwives washed their hands, patients didn’t catch fevers and other diseases. In 1847 Semmelweis instituted a policy of handwashing before going into the maternity wards, and the death rate plummeted.

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When doctors in other hospitals heard about Semmelweis’ success, he was lauded far and wide, and — nah, that didn’t happen. His work was rejected outside of the hospital. Other doctors were offended that he seemed to be calling them dirty. Nobody listened to him, and twenty years later, after a nervous breakdown, Dr. Semmelweis was lured into an insane asylum by another doctor, where Semmelweis was put in a straight jacket and beaten by guards. He died two weeks later.

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After his death, Semmelweis’ hospital jettisoned his hand-washing rituals, and deaths multiplied by a factor of six. Why nobody then thought, hey, maybe Semmelweis was right and we should go back to that handwashing thing is almost beyond comprehension, but because the doctors were men and the people dying were women, perhaps misogyny and the patriarchy were a factor. Hopefully, all the women in Vienna started to avoid the doctors’ clinic like the plague and insisted on having their babies delivered by the midwives.

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Eventually, the rest of the world caught up with Semmelweis’ m̶i̶s̶i̶n̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ life-saving practices when Louis Pasteur came up with germ theory and Joseph Lister started his antisepsis system of practicing medicine with hygienic procedures. This is why we were washing our Amazon boxes with alcohol wipes for a while during the beginning of the pandemic. Which turned out to be misinformation, by the way.

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HELIOCENTRISM:

THE EARTH REVOLVES

AROUND THE SUN,

NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND

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This was a big one. There were a lot of rebels down through history who were labeled as misinformationists for saying the earth revolved around the sun when the established thought was that the sun circled the earth. Okay, a lot of the time they were called heretics, but the people screaming misinformation! today seem like the same kind of people that might have screamed heretic! at anyone who disagreed with their worldview a century or twenty ago.

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“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”

- George Bernard Shaw

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Aristarchus was a Greek, born in 310 B.C. The only reason we know of Aristarchus is because he was a contemporary of Archimedes, a famous mathematician and inventor who discovered cool stuff like the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere, and the Archimedes screw, which is a machine used to raise water from one level to another.

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Archimedes mentioned in his own writings about Aristarchus’ proposal that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun but didn’t mention whether he was on board with heliocentrism. Perhaps he was being circumspect because some people wanted Aristarchus put on trial for daring to disagree with the established theory of the time that the earth was the center of the Universe.

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Nobody paid much attention to Aristarchus’ theory, and his work was mostly forgotten for approximately the next 1,800 years until Nicholas Copernicus resurrected the idea that the earth and other planets orbit the sun.

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Copernicus (1473–1543) discussed heliocentrism in his book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), which he finished in 1532 but did not publish at the time because “he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses.” But he did pass his book around to a few people, including Pope Clement VII and a bunch of cardinals who were very interested in his theories and urged him to publish. Which he did, right before he died in 1543.

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The majority of astronomers agreed Copernicus made an interesting and excellent argument, but they did not believe his theory, and most continued to think that the earth was the center of the universe.

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Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) extended Copernicus’ theory by proposing that the stars in the sky were far-away suns with their own orbiting planets and that perhaps those planets, like our own, might also contain life. He thought the universe was infinite, which pretty much amounted to telling the societal elites of the time — mostly the church — that they were not the centers of the universe they thought they were. This did not go over well with the Roman Catholic Inquisition. (Who also had a habit of thinking that every opinion they didn’t agree with was h̶e̶r̶e̶s̶y̶ misinformation.) The Inquisition found Bruno guilty of heresy and burned him at the stake in 1600. That backfired somewhat as far as silencing his ideas, because there was nothing like burning someone at the stake to get people whispering about why the Inquisition wanted to set that person on fire.

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Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) totally believed Copernicus’ theory but wasn’t much more successful at convincing anybody to stray from the old Aristotelian earth-is-the-center-of-the-universe belief. Kepler added to the heliocentric theory by saying that the planets traveled in elliptical instead of circular orbits around the sun. Once again, the sun-centered solar system theory got a lot of pushback, partly based on religious beliefs. (Maybe Pope Clement VII never got around to sharing his love of Copernicus’ theory, or everybody complaining at the time were Protestants, the reformation having started in 1517.) Disbelievers argued that it was plain to see that the sun went around the earth because it rose in the east and set in the west. They were very, very sure in their opinions, just like your cousin who yells at people wearing masks (or not wearing masks, as the case may be) in grocery stores.

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Kepler was largely ignored during his lifetime. Isaac Newton backed up Kepler decades later when he used Kepler’s work as the platform from which he derived his discovery of the law of universal gravitation, and published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687.

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Galileo Galilei. (1564 -1642) I’ll keep this short because everybody knows Galileo. Although it’s possible schools might have cut out teaching about Galileo in order to fit in Brian Stelter teaching kids how to spot misinformation. (Which seems like hiring a wolf to teach someone how to protect sheep, but whatever.)

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Galileo had a great telescope he wasn’t afraid to use. He published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger) in 1610, which included cool stuff about the planet Venus, and Jupiter’s moons, and backed up Copernicus’s heliocentric theory. Galileo didn’t stop mooning about the sun even when the Roman Catholic Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be “formally heretical” in 1616. He went on to propose a theory of tides that same year, which he said proved heliocentrism by the earth’s motion. In your face Inquisition! The Inquisition ignored Galileo’s backtalk (he had Pope Urban VIII as a patron, as long as he presented heliocentrism as a hypothesis, not fact) until 1632 when he published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which defended heliocentrism and got rave reviews.

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If Galileo were alive and spreading his misinformation now, some angry group of anti-heliocentrists would probably ask Amazon to suppress his book in their search results.

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The Inquisition finally said enough of you and your stupid telescope, and Galileo was tried in 1633 and found “vehemently suspect of heresy.” The Inquisition sentenced him to house arrest, heliocentric books were banned, and Galileo was told to not even think about the earth going around the sun, let alone teach his heretical ideas or defend them against misinformation accusers. In today’s terms, this was kind of like being kicked off Twitter or YouTube for citing the Wuhan Lab leak Covid origin story, which was “misinformation” in 2020, and also racist, but is now thought to be plain old probably true information, or at least a rational hypothesis worthy of investigation. And also not racist, because that’s dumb.

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The Church didn’t start to let up on its heliocentric universe ban until the mid-eighteen century. As late as 1820 there was a dust-up with a church censor after he refused to license a book because it treated the revolve-around-the-sun theory as fact. I think I read somewhere the censor was triple masked when he said that, and he had to keep repeating himself because no one could understand what he was saying.

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The Church didn’t declare Galileo innocent until 1992, 359 years after he was declared a heretic for telling the truth.

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“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer

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Eventually, enough other scientists came out with theories, experiments, and mathematics that proved their theories about heliocentrism, and all the naysayers had to admit that the earth and other planets revolved around the sun. But up until then, the heliocentric universe was labeled as misinformation by a whole lot of people: from scientists to kings, priests, and poets; to the peasants in the fields; to the men who sailed the seven seas. They were all wrong, even though they were convinced they were right.

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ULCERS ARE CAUSED

BY BACTERIA,

NOT STRESS

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No one took Barry Marshall (1951-) seriously in 1984 when he said that ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection instead of stress (as was thought at the time) and could be treated with antibiotics. He presented his work at a medical conference and was met with huge skepticism. Fearing that his paper would not be accepted, he took some ulcer-causing bacteria from a patient’s stomach, mixed up a bacteria cocktail, and drank it. When he got sick, he biopsied his own stomach to prove his theory and then cured himself with antibiotics. Is that badass, or what? I bet the people working for the Inquisition never did anything gutsy like that. In 2005, Marshall and Robin Warren (1937-) shared the Nobel Prize in medicine “for their discovery of bacteria Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.”

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THE CONTINENTS DRIFT

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Alfred Wegener (1880 -1930) proposed the theory of continental drift in 1912 — that the earth’s continents are moving very slowly around the planet, but that such movements add up to long distances over millions of years. His theory was of a supercontinent, Pangaea, that had broken up and drifted apart. The almost puzzle-piece fit between the coastlines of eastern South America and Western Africa seems easy to see now, but most of Wegener’s fellow scientists disregarded his theory as misinformation during his lifetime, even though he published a pile of fossil and rock evidence to support his theory. Wegener died in 1930, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that continental drift was resurrected as part of the theory of plate tectonics.

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IT GOES BOTH WAYS:

AN EXAMPLE OF SOMETHING THAT WAS THOUGHT TO BE

TRUE AND TURNED OUT TO BE FALSE

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THE EARTH WAS FLAT MYTH and

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

SET OUT TO PROVE THE

WORLD WAS ROUND

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We’re not talking about the premise that everybody thought the world was flat and it turned out it wasn’t, but the belief that people in 1492 thought the world was flat. They didn’t. Well, there were probably people somewhere in the world in 1492 that thought the world was flat, but not Columbus or any of his explorer friends, or the sophisticated ruling classes. People had been sailing all over the seas in ships for ages; they knew the world was round. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers from as far back as 600 BC had decided the world was round by observing and making calculations on such things as the rising and setting of the sun and how shadows appeared. Greek scholars Pythagoras and Aristotle took it one step further and declared the earth a sphere.

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How did the story become widely believed that Columbus in 1492 was sailing west to get to the East Indies in order to prove the world was round instead of flat?*

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It was Washington Irving’s fault, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. Think of Irving as the media perpetuating a lie they know to be untrue.

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Irving was writing a biography of Christopher Columbus in 1828 and decided the explorer’s life wasn’t quite exciting enough. Irving added a tall tale about Columbus arguing with Spanish Geographers who insisted the earth was flat, questioned Columbus’ faith (never a good thing in 1492 when the Spanish Inquisition was around), and endangered his life.

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We can imagine Irving was tension-building to keep his readers interested in the story, but people took Irving’s biography of Columbus as truthful. During the rest of the 19th century, several French anticlerical writers perpetuated the flat earth myth first started by Irving, in order to attack the church for their alleged suppression of scientific knowledge. This is how misinformation gets halfway around the world before the truth puts on its pants.

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*There’s also the question of how Columbus could be said to have discovered a place that was already inhabited by people, and the fact he wasn’t even the first European on the shores because the Vikings beat him there by almost five hundred years.

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IN CONCLUSION

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Who are we — as fallible human beings who may think we have the answers to everything, but don’t — to silence and censor someone for expressing and defending their opinions and ideas? Isn’t the discussion of ideas, whether we judge them bad or good, true or false, better than demanding silence of those that disagree with us? Knowledge has never been advanced by the refusal to consider anything outside our present fact base or established beliefs. Freedom has never been championed by attempting to curtail people’s ability to speak or express their views. Bad ideas and falsehoods turn to ash under the fire of free debate, while good ideas and honest truth will rise like a Phoenix, renewed and strengthened by the flames of discussion, rebuttal, and critical thinking. Censorship only leads to bad ideas growing in the dark silence of ignorance, with no access to the disinfecting sunshine of discussion.

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Joe Rogan probably isn’t Copernicus or even Washington Irving. But Dr. Robert Malone, whose appearance on Rogan’s podcast set off the latest round of the cancel Joe Rogan movement, is a virologist who contributed research on the development of the mRNA vaccines, of which the Covid vaccine is one. He has 9 patents on mRNA vaccine technology and almost 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times.

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Dr. Peter McCullough — also being accused of spreading misinformation on the Joe Rogan show — is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and a full professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine. He has a master’s degree in public health and is known for being one of the most-published medical researchers in the United States.

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Both these men seem like they would be worth interviewing regarding Covid-19 concerns, and I’m assuming they probably know more about science than Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. Are Malone and McCullough courageous whistleblowers about vaccine technology and the way the pandemic had been handled by our governments and the supposedly non-politically-motivated experts advising them, or are they spewing misinformation? I don’t know. Smart people can be wrong about stuff. Doctors can be crackpots with axes to grind or political agendas. But I think they should be able to give their opinions and I’m willing to listen to what they have to say.

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I’m also willing to hear why Anthony Fauci, Director of the NIAID at the NIH (I’ll let you look up the acronyms), and the Chief Medical Advisor to both our present and our former President, is being accused by multiple U.S. senators, and others, of surreptitiously funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I’d like to hear the details of why he’s under suspicion of having made a concerted effort to conspire with colleagues at the beginning of the pandemic to squash, as “conspiracy theory,” any talk of a lab leak origination theory. And why Scientists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford who were open to the lab leak theory were dismissed by Fauci allies and called “fringe.” I’m not a fan of elite colleges being considered the only source of accurate information, but it seems weird to discount their opinions, doesn’t it? Are we now only in favor of some scientists’ scientific opinions?

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Why were independent reporters, doctors, and virologists who disagreed with Fauci deplatformed, canceled, silenced, and disregarded as conspiracy theorists? When did fair and free debate and the scientific method of testing hypotheses become a bad thing?

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We should want to hear all sides of an issue. We shouldn’t want people to be silenced. The cure for misinformation isn’t censorship and less available information, it’s more information. It’s all the information that is relative to the health, well-being, and interests of the public being allowed to be discussed freely in the public square. The truth will rise to the top.

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If Joe Rogan is the guy who’s going to give people who are being shut down and censored a chance to speak, maybe we should be cheering for Joe Rogan, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with what he’s saying about any particular subject.

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We have to ask ourselves: do we want to be like the towering, question-the-status-quo, genius minds of history, who brought us great discoveries and progress? Or do we want to be the inquisitors, the silencers, the burners that tie people to the stakes and light the fires?

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Next time we watch a beautiful sunset and see the golden orb slip beneath the horizon, knowing it’s the result of the rotation of the earth on its own axis as it orbits around the sun, maybe we should think about that.