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Perhaps the most curious aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the flourishing of anti-science movements, despite the demonstrable triumphs of science in producing life-saving antivirals and vaccines. Mistrust of science is spreading well beyond COVID-19. Political challenges to climate action, notably the goal of net zero emissions, are growing, especially as economic stress impoverishes millions. 5G remains a target for many science sceptics. And libertarian politicians condemn scientists as unelected threats to democratic freedoms. The Times recently reported that YouTube, owned by Google, is profiting handsomely from the propagation of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines. The campaign group, Avaaz, published a report in January showing how Facebook (and other social media platforms) “continue to empower disinformers with various ideological agendas by letting anti-science and anti-scientist false content spread”, thereby “providing a petri dish for threatening, discrediting, conspiracy-theorist, and hateful comments”. Scientists have been individually intimidated. Avaaz found that Anthony Fauci had been subjected to appalling threats of violence and calls for his assassination. Abuse has been heaped on UK scientists who have played an important part in explaining the latest data and discoveries about SARS-CoV-2 to the public. Their families have not been spared. © 2022 SSPL/Getty Images2022

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the flourishing of anti-science movements, despite the demonstrable triumphs of science in producing life-saving antivirals and vaccines. Mistrust of science is spreading well beyond COVID-19. Political challenges to climate action, notably the goal of net zero emissions, are growing, especially as economic stress impoverishes millions. 5G remains a target for many science sceptics. And libertarian politicians condemn scientists as unelected threats to democratic freedoms. The Times recently reported that YouTube, owned by Google, is profiting handsomely from the propagation of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines. The campaign group, Avaaz, published a report in January showing how Facebook (and other social media platforms) “continue to empower disinformers with various ideological agendas by letting anti-science and anti-scientist false content spread”, thereby “providing a petri dish for threatening, discrediting, conspiracy-theorist, and hateful comments”. Scientists have been individually intimidated. Avaaz found that Anthony Fauci had been subjected to appalling threats of violence and calls for his assassination. Abuse has been heaped on UK scientists who have played an important part in explaining the latest data and discoveries about SARS-CoV-2 to the public. Their families have not been spared. © 2022 SSPL/Getty Images2022 How should disinformation be dealt with? The Royal Society's 2022 report, The Online Information Environment, made several important recommendations. Governments must take account of how misinformation could cause societal harm, as well as personalised harm. An emerging fact-checking sector should be better supported. Regulators must focus on fringe online platforms as well as more established providers. Private messaging services should be targeted for action. Best practices for countering misinformation must be gathered. Media plurality should be encouraged. Governments must invest in information literacy. Academic journals and scientific institutions should do more to support open science. The most controversial proposal from the Royal Society was that “Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal as a solution to online scientific misinformation”. The Royal Society believes that removal of content from the internet will do more harm than good. It would be prohibitively expensive. And it could worsen mistrust. The Royal Society is wrong. (I note without further comment that Google's Chief Internet Evangelist was a member of the working group that produced the Royal Society's report.) The reasons why the Royal Society is wrong can be found in Cass Sunstein's book Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception.

rust. The Royal Society is wrong. (I note without further comment that Google's Chief Internet Evangelist was a member of the working group that produced the Royal Society's report.) The reasons why the Royal Society is wrong can be found in Cass Sunstein's book Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. © 2022 Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy Stock Photo2022

rust. The Royal Society is wrong. (I note without further comment that Google's Chief Internet Evangelist was a member of the working group that produced the Royal Society's report.) The reasons why the Royal Society is wrong can be found in Cass Sunstein's book Liars: Falsehoods and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. © 2022 Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy Stock Photo2022 Sunstein asks: is there a right to lie? Surely if societies are committed to freedom of expression, they must also be tolerant of lies. The creation of a truth police would be a danger to us all. Dissent would quickly fall outside the circumference of officially endorsed truth. Dissidents would be punished. Criticism would be deterred. We would edge towards totalitarianism. If you want a real-world example, look no further than Hong Kong. Here is the defence for taking no action to take down falsehoods. Bad speech should be met with more, not less, speech. These are powerful arguments. Sunstein isn’t convinced. He believes that, in very specifically defined instances, governments should have the power to censor lies and falsehoods. What would those instances be? He offers a framework to judge the impact of a lie—the state of mind of a perpetrator, the magnitude of harm, the likelihood of harm, and the timing of a harm. A falsehood that caused no harm would not deserve censorship. A deliberate lie that risked imminent, certain, and grave harm would merit action. The mistake the Royal Society has made is to put faith in the notion of a “marketplace of ideas”—that a free trade in ideas will winnow out the true from the false. But the market, as the past 2 years of a pandemic has proven, is a poor discriminator of truth. COVID-19 has shown that lies can be harmful, sometimes fatally so. Lies stick around. Lies are hard to erase. Lies spread easily, more easily than truths. Corrections or annotations do not consistently diminish the power of lies to deceive. Sunstein argues that Twitter, Facebook, and the rest should be doing more to control harmful lies. Not merely deamplifying and demonetising, as the Royal Society proposes, but actually striking out. Truth matters. Harm matters. There is no right to lie.

tations do not consistently diminish the power of lies to deceive. Sunstein argues that Twitter, Facebook, and the rest should be doing more to control harmful lies. Not merely deamplifying and demonetising, as the Royal Society proposes, but actually striking out. Truth matters. Harm matters. There is no right to lie. © 2022 Andrew Toth/FilmMagic2022