If people are gullible, censor. If not, let them speak.

Censoring others can seem like a noble pursuit. If someone of influence is inciting violence on a public platform, then it seems the best approach is to keep that person away, so that they will not influence others in a violent cause. This assumption, which from now on I will call the censorship assumption, rests on the premise that people who follow those in influence are gullible and easily deceived. If someone goes on Twitter or Facebook and says, “We should get our country back!” this could influence others to do something extreme: such as storm a federal building. People who want to censor are not always bad. If anything, they are very empathetic and believe that censorship will prevent violence. People of Influence (POI) are those in a position of power and who use their charisma over a general good. Censorship is useful for the followers of POI’s because followers are generally gullible. Censorship keeps the follower away from bad ideas and replaces those ideas with “good ideas” from surrogates or “experts.” These surrogates help followers be well informed and less prone to violence.

In summary: The censorship assumption believes that people are susceptible and easily manipulated by people of influence. Surrogates are needed to keep the gullible away from bad information and replace it with good ones.

If people are easy to manipulate, censoring people is a noble pursuit, and the end cause is practical. If a platform can silence POI’s “violent tweets,” then no violence will occur. However, if violence does occur, it’s not the listeners (remember these people are naïve and gullible). Instead, the platform had a blind spot and POI’s will need to be censored before it influences others.

Since the riot on the Capitol, several big-tech companies have taken a gullibility assumption. Big-tech assumed Donald Trump was responsible for the Capitol attack because he questioned the validity of the election results. After all, he is a POI and told the crowd that “the election was rigged and that he will walk with them to the Capitol.” Since Trump has nurtured “hate under a tense national climate that he has helped cultivate,” he is responsible for what occurred and should be held accountable — See: (Trump). The people who follow him? They are the uneducated and uninformed and need surrogates to keep away bad ideas and replace them with well-informed ones. Trump’s followers must be protected from believing false data. Big Tech (who plays the role of expert) censors Trump so that uneducated followers do not blindly follow him. If not, then more violence will occur. One can see the passion and intensity people who censor put themselves in. It’s a big job: censor or the world burns.

I bring up the Capitol and Trump as examples and I don’t want to write about them anymore. One can argue the censorship assumption has some historical context. In the past 100 years, our world has had its share of dictators and POI’s from Hitler to Stalin, who overtook the naïve beliefs of their nation’s youth to murder millions. In the Trump case, it’s argued that he is the modern-day POI and could sway millions of voters into thinking the election is rigged and that the only possible solution would be to get the country through force. Big-tech wants to do its job and cancel a parasitical belief from growing. If someone believes that the election was rigged, then why shouldn’t those same people commit violence?

The logical problem: belief does not always lead to action

But there’s a problem when evaluating this argument because the validity of the premise (people are gullible) is essential for applying the application — people will need surrogates who can censor. If people are gullible, then censorship is the only option. However, if people are not gullible and easy to manipulate, what then? If this is the case, censorship will not work because people may or may not want to revert to violence, but address their concerns by another means such as peaceful protest, putting in laws protecting the integrity of the election, having a healthy debate about voting laws, or putting more energy in future elections to make sure there’s a higher sense of accountability in the process. What’s going on if people choose something other than violence? In these situations, the people may believe something that is “false” according to the surrogates. But, the way they apply the information given to them does not lead to violence, and in many cases, can be a valuable good (debate, looking at integrity, and accountability).

This is a serious problem to the censorship principle. Why? The censorship assumption only makes sense if you can prove that it must lead to some unethical action if someone believes something false. The censorship assumption has a binary belief system: you must censor bad ideas (A) to prevent violence (B). But, what if violence (B) does not happen from bad ideas (A)? What if, instead of B, you see other ethical options? People who believe in an open and free society understand that the censorship assumption does not work because liberal and educated societies are not binary. History is rife with examples from Luther, to Galileo, to Einstein, to Steve Jobs where free debate with bad ideas was how good ideas often thrived. Why was this? Because good ideas rarely came out as “pure” vs. “impure” or “good idea” vs. “bad idea.” Instead, communication worked like a maze in the story of the Minotaur.

Let me diverge for a moment…

In the Greek story of the Minos, there is an evil Minotaur who is trapped in a labyrinth. Every year the Minotaur would ask for the sacrifice of several children of the city. Over time, this exhausted the king and demoralized the city to where they wanted to kill the Minotaur. Over several years, many warriors were sent to kill the monster but were eaten because they didn’t know labyrinth’s complicated structure. The Minotaur would take advantage of their naïve ignorance and devour them, and Minos was held captive by the monster’s desire. One day Ariadne, the king’s daughter, falls in love with an Athenian hero named Theseus. She tells him that she will help him if he promises to marry her. She fears that Theseus will die before entering the maze and speaks to the designer, Daedalus, who happens to be in prison for murder. Daedalus advises Ariadne to give Theseus a ball of thread so that he can find his way back. Theseus takes the thread and kills the beast and saves the town. However, when he returns from the maze, he abandons Ariadne because he didn’t love her back and returns to his city.

What does this have to do with censorship? Everything. Contrary to the censorship assumption, good ideas rarely need “protection” from bad ones. In this story, a good idea came from a gullible person (Ariadne), administered by an ignoble man (Daedalus), and put in practice by a deceiver (Theseus). In other words, there are few “pure” vs. “impure” ideas because there are few “pure” vs. “impure” people who believe them. The censorship assumption believes surrogates are the ethical ones. Yet, a monster was defeated from the hands of a womanizer (Theseus), whose idea came from a murderer (Daedalus), and delivered by a naïve teenage girl who wanted to get away from her father’s town. These three people were not more “ethical” than the many who tried to kill the monster. In some ways, they were ethically worse. But this is often how good ideas come to fruition in an open society. People who argue for the censorship assumption do not understand that good ideas are much too complex when defeating monsters. The people of Minos tried several tactics to defeat their enemy. Contrary to a pro-censorship position that only wants “good ideas rather than bad ideas” in their society…In Minos and in free societies, good ideas do not appear out of a vacuum. Rather, some of the most unethical people perform in the most utilitarian way.

Psychology and the Gullibility Assumption.

Let’s evaluate the gullibility assumption using psychology. Does psychology prove people are gullible? The short answer is no. Recent studies in Cognitive Psychology argue that people are not easy to influence and that their environment is not as influential as people assume when making decisions. The Cognitive Psychologist Hugo Mercier states that people aren’t gullible but “have all the cognitive mechanisms required to evaluate communication carefully,” therefore, mass persuasion attempts — from propaganda to advertising — nearly always fall on deaf ears. In his book Not Born Yesterday, he states that gullibility “isn’t a good explanation for the popularity of our most unfounded beliefs.” Mercier argues people have an intuitive belief and reflective belief. What’s the difference? Intuitive beliefs guide people’s behavior, such as wearing a condom to prevent pregnancy or not drinking mouthwash. Reflective beliefs have no impact on behavior, such as believing that aliens are about to take over the world while still planning for a 401K. Mercier states many of our assumptions are reflective and will rarely predict behavior. People may believe foolish things, but rarely act on them.

To prove this point, Mercier gives an example of Pizzagate — a debunked conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. Pizzagate claimed that several high-ranking Democratic Party officials and U.S. restaurants held an alleged human trafficking and child sex ring in a pizzeria restaurant in Washington D.C. and according to polls, millions of Americans believed it. Yet, the question here is how did they believe it? Because according to the censorship assumption, the people who believed it were prone to violence because they thought A (inaccurate information) which would lead to violence (B). But, in this scandal, as in many scandals, many people believed this conspiracy as a reflective belief and never acted as it were true (contrary to censorship assumption). These people loved their kids, were good spouses, good employees, and paid their taxes. Even though they believed something false, very few of them lived their lives any differently. Out of the tens of millions who did believe it, only one — Edgar Maddison Welch — believed it intuitively and behaved as if children were being abused. In response, Welch stormed the pizzeria with a gun and demanded that the children be freed. Now the question here is not why so many people believed this theory (we know people can believe in false information). Rather, if the censorship assumption is true why only Edgar Welch and not millions more?

We all believe bullshit. Go have a beer and debate it out.

Contrary to our assumptions, people are not very gullible. People are actually quite stubborn and do not trust enough people and will often refuse to act intuitively. Evolution has honed us in that while people can make extreme claims, many people can tell if something is trustworthy or not. So, does censorship helps? Hardly. If anything, censorship will often confirm that one’s reactive belief may be more accurate than assumed. This is why we must look for ways to persuade and not cancel. How to do that? Have a beer with someone who disagrees with you. Good beer and seeing that person vis-à-vis will cause us to be less reactive in our stubborn beliefs but more empathetic and nuanced. We must not assume disagreement will conclude in the same way. We must assume that while we all hold false views, we need one another to point out our blind spots, lest we censor our ability to think in the process. And hopefully, like Theseus, we may defeat a Minotaur in the process.