Almost. Jeffrey A. Tucker admits he was wrong to think that just giving people more information would reduce panic — or that Big Tech was a force for human freedom:
At one time, Tucker, who describes himself as a “Victorian Whig” (an old-fashioned liberal), believed that merely giving people access to more accurate information would improve our response to crises. He had good reason to believe that: Historically, dictators like Stalin, Hitler, or Xi have restricted access to information in order to keep the public easy to control. So what happened when, in the Western world, the internet opened the dam?
“The speed and abundance of information actually amplified error. At the height of the pandemic response, anyone could have looked up the demographics of risk, the failings of PCR and masks, the history and significance of natural immunity, the absurdities of plexiglass and capacity restrictions, the utter futility of travel limits and curfews, the pointless brutality of school closures. It was all there, not just on random blogs but also in the scholarly literature.”
The problem was, many people were not even trying to make sound judgments …
News, “Economist confronts painful truths about COVID-19 information” at Mind Matters News (June 10, 2022)
Takehome: Tucker’s dilemma is easier to interpret if we keep in mind something Bill Dembski stressed in Being as Communion (Routledge, 2014) about the nature of information: it is connective, not causal, and using it wisely is an act of the will.
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Dox show Disinformation Board was for use against Americans too. A whistleblower leaked a cache of documents to two U.S. senators who have put them online. Special targets for attack were U.S. public doubt about face masks and COVID vaccines and suspicion of Big Science claims that the virus arose naturally.
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Whew! Twitter now offers Musk a “firehose” of data from Botworld. Looming in the background is Musk’s proposal to make Twitter more of a free speech zone, a prospect that worries many Big Tech power players. An independent group found that 10% of Twitter is bots, not the 5% Twitter told the feds). It comes down to 1) how you count and 2) what’s an agreed fair price?