Censors’ appetite for shutting down free speech is forever growing.
This old (January 2024) story by Zahra Hirji from Bloomberg is a reminder that censors’ appetite for shutting down free speech is forever growing. Hirji’s article concerned the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a U.K.-based censorship shop.
The CCDH has been actively trying to persuade online service providers to “demonetize” providers of information that it considers to be climate “denialism.” However difficult it is to reconcile with the idea of scientific enquiry, the idea of shutting down debate over climate change is by now nothing new. But according to the CCDH, climate denialism is evolving.
Hirji explained that the CCDH believed that “old denial” (global warming is not happening, human-generated greenhouse gases are not causing global warming) had been overtaken by “new denial.” This included claims that “the impacts of global warming are beneficial or harmless” or that “climate solutions don’t work” or that “climate science and the climate movement are unreliable.”
If this intended to add ideas to the list of the anathematized, it only highlights the authoritarian streak running through climatism, an ideology increasingly at odds with democracy. Attempting to shut down debate over a scientific question (even one that is “settled”) is unhealthy, but going on from that to trying to muzzle debate over the correct approach to a changing climate takes this authoritarianism far, far further.
Even if “the science” were settled, that would not mean that the same is true of climate policy, which, if done properly, would involve serious consideration of trade-offs, detailed cost-benefit analyses, and the like. The “right” response would be constantly evolving. Climate policy is not “settled” and never could be. To claim otherwise makes a mockery of science and democratic politics.
Many of today’s climate “solutions,” from wind turbines to electric vehicles, are deeply flawed. The same can be said of the broader net-zero 2050 framework, which is highly unlikely to succeed even on its own terms, and, by consuming capital that could be better deployed elsewhere, could well be actively counterproductive. On top of that, its drag on economic growth is likely to reduce further the money available to help deal with the challenges posed by a changing climate. These are topics that merit discussion, not censorship.
“New denial” also includes arguing that the climate movement is “unreliable.” If, by climate “movement,” the CCDH means the activist core, “unreliable” is among the mildest of possible adjectives. Besides, criticizing the other side is, in a democracy, standard operating procedure.
Hirji quotes Imran Ahmed, CCDH’s founder and CEO, as saying that “old denial” content has collapsed on YouTube:
[CCDH’s] report attributes the shift in part to the visible impacts of climate change, which are getting too big for the public to ignore. It’s likely also a reflection of YouTube’s improving policies around misinformation. In 2018, the site teamed up with Wikipedia to add fact checks to climate videos. In October 2021, YouTube instituted a ban on advertisements for videos that explicitly deny that climate change is real and/or that humans are to blame.
Teamed up with Wikipedia, eh?
Hmm. . . .
Hirji:
“Our climate change policy prohibits ads from running on content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” Nate Funkhouser, a Google spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “Debate or discussions of climate change topics, including around public policy or research, is allowed. However, when content crosses the line to climate change denial, we stop showing ads on those videos.”
But, with “new denial” surging:
Ahmed’s team is urging Google . . . to also ban advertising on videos that attack climate solutions and experts. “Given that the battleground has shifted and the new denial is the biggest component of climate denial content overall, it’s time for them to extend their rules to that as well,” he said.
And the CCDH has been moving on a number of other fronts, too. In late October, Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi, writing in The Disinformation Chronicle, claimed that leaked documents from the CCDH included a list of its annual priorities drawn up earlier this year. Top of the list: “kill Musk’s Twitter.”
Thacker and Taibbi also reported that:
CCDH was strengthening ties with the Biden/Harris administration and Democrats like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who has introduced multiple bills to regulate online “misinformation.”
Senator Klobuchar’s office did not respond to request for comment.
As I noted in some posts, an article, and a Capital Letter before the election, the concept of “dis/misinformation” is being used to cloak a broad attack on the First Amendment. Much of this is, one way or another, directed at X. X’s real offense, I suspect, is not the nasty stuff that can certainly be seen there, but for being a very public platform for reasonable, reasoned points of view at odds with the leftish/progressive “consensus” promoted in large swaths of the media and by much of the West’s governing class.
That consensus has room only for the house-trained right, such as that which dominated Britain’s string of failed Conservative governments, rather than for those who take more robust positions. X has disrupted that model, and worse still provided a forum where those advocating that consensus can find themselves questioned, checked, and challenged. For progressive bubble-dwellers that must be an unsettling experience, which explains why some of them, including the Guardian, are quitting X. That they are doing so noisily is designed to stigmatize X, and, by extension, those who post on it, in the hope, presumably, that they no longer do so. Their silence is required.