Misinformation Is Bad. Prohibiting It Is Worse

On 19 February 2020, just three weeks after the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 an international public-health emergency, a group of 27 prominent scientists published a letter in the Lancet headlined, Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19. 

“The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” the group warned. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin… Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”

The letter—cited formally as Calisher et al. 2020, in reference to microbiologist Charles Calisher, its lead author—was only four paragraphs long. But during the first year of the pandemic, it proved enormously influential among journalists and public-health officials, many of whom found it otherwise difficult to follow the complex evidence trails that virologists were then investigating in the search to understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Here were more than two dozen renowned scientists instructing readers of the Lancet—one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals—that the debate was effectively over: SARS-CoV-2 was caused by random genetic mutations and zoonotic spillover, not by a leak from a Chinese microbiology lab. To suggest otherwise was to traffic in Sinophobic “misinformation.” Case closed.

Except that it wasn’t. In May 2021, fifteen months later, US President Joe Biden ordered intelligence services to investigate evidence suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may indeed have originated in a Chinese lab. That same month, Science magazine—one of the few publications to rival the Lancet in prestige—published a letter from 18 scientists arguing that the lab-leak and zoonotic-spillover theories both remained viable. They noted that no less an authority than the WHO Director-General himself had taken colleagues to task for failing to adequately analyse the possibility of a lab leak in a 5 November 2020 report, Global Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2.

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This editorial isn’t intended as an argument against the zoonotic-spillover thesis of COVID’s origins, which on balance, offers the more likely explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (for reasons discussed in detail by Quillette editor Jamie Palmer in a 2023 essay). But it’s important to acknowledge that, at various times, highly respected scientists have populated both camps in this debate. And so the fact that a leading clique within one of those camps was able to stigmatise its opponents as agents of “misinformation” (or even full-blown conspiracism) presents an important cautionary tale. While the dictionary instructs us that “misinformation” signifies information that is incorrect (or at least misleading), leading lights of our society now sometimes use the term as a catch-all rhetorical tool to disparage impolitic conclusions, or to otherwise end-run the task of engaging seriously with other points of view.

As in most cases in which accusations of misinformation are made, the argument over COVID’s origins comes with a political back story that helps clarify the underlying motivations. In early 2020, scientists around the world—including many in China—were collaborating to understand, and eventually stop, the emerging pandemic. The Calisher et al. 2020 authors suggested that promoting the lab-leak accusations risked alienating the Chinese scientific establishment, thereby putting this urgent international enterprise at risk.

Some commentators even claimed the theory was inherently racist, as it was being pushed most aggressively in western nations by right-wing political actors. And a Yale University paediatrics professor urged colleagues to suppress “inaccurate” references to China when discussing the disease, on the basis that such references risked stirring up hatred against Asian colleagues, and possibly even compromising their safety. Not for the first or last time, the stigma of misinformation was applied not just to ideas that are factually inaccurate, but to those judged politically or morally unhelpful.

The question of what does and does not constitute misinformation may soon have important legal ramifications in Australia, where Quillette is based. As editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann recently reported in an op-ed column appearing in The Australian, a bill put forward by her country’s Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, would target digital platforms that publish content “reasonably verifiable as false, misleading, or deceptive,” and “reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm.”

And no, these provisions would not merely ban the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre: the stipulated definition of “serious harm” is so broad as to include alleged injury to election processes, public health, the reputation of identifiable groups within society, and even the Australian economy as a whole.

Numerous examples from authoritarian societies such as Russia and China demonstrate the ease with which such laws can be applied to ban any information that embarrasses the government or contradicts their policies, on the claimed basis that its dissemination could stir up “unrest” or besmirch the nation’s international reputation.

While Australia is certainly no autocracy, and Ms Rowland’s bill contains checks and balances intended to prevent misuse, the tendency of politicians and bureaucrats to bend tools of censorship to their parochial purposes is universal. And even if Ms Rowland’s supporters believe her motives to be as pure as the driven snow, they might pause for a moment to imagine how a future Australian government with more conservative tendencies might seek to apply such powers—such as using the bill to censor information pertaining to the treatment of migrants, alleged abuses committed by police officers, or disclosures of discrimination in public institutions.

Again, the political back story here is important. In 2023, as Ms Lehmann notes, the governing Australian Labor Party (ALP) expected to prevail in a constitutional referendum on a proposal to enhance the political influence of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders through the creation of a new body known as the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. As one might expect, progressives largely aligned themselves with the Yes side. And when the No campaign prevailed by a large margin, many on the losing side suggested the result should be blamed, at least in part, on voter ignorance, racism, and misleading internet memes—a combination summarised by an Australian Broadcasting Corporation copy editor under the heading, “Misinformation Nation.” 

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Of course, propaganda and smear campaigns are part of every high-stakes political contest—this one included. But there was also a social and class-based phenomenon at play, as many of the government officials, journalists, and activists who championed the referendum’s Yes side most vigorously inhabit professional ecosystems in which support for “the Voice” (as the project became known) was seen as de rigeur. This siloing effect led them, in turn, to presume that anyone in the opposite camp must have been misled by lies, bigotry, or both—despite the fact that No voters had plenty of perfectly valid and principled reasons for opposing a constitutional innovation that would have established an ethnically defined body charged with making representations to the Parliament and Executive Government.

One observes a corresponding phenomenon—and not just in Australia—when it comes to other debates surrounding group-based rights, including those pertaining to affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, the “decolonisation” of school curricula, the insistence that biological sex is a phantasm that serves to oppress the transgender community, and other similarly sensitive issues.

In all these spheres, the definition of “misinformation” has metastasised to encompass not just incontrovertible lies, popular delusions, and conspiracy theories (of which, we freely acknowledge, there are more than enough, as the pet owners of Springfield, Ohio will readily attest), but also facts and arguments that are simply inconvenient to the culturally dominant class.

This tendency further erodes public trust in mainstream news sources that channel the received wisdom among society’s elites—a problem that will only be amplified if such biases are seen as being hard-wired into laws such as the one being put forward by Ms Rowland.

On this score, Australian civil libertarians might look to Canada for an example of how the campaign against populist “misinformation” can not only be co-opted by progressive ideologues as a form of de facto censorship; perversely, it can even provide a pretext to enshrine other, more fashionable, forms of misinformation.

As Quillette has documented, Canada has been in the midst of a three-and-a-half year long social panic following false claims that the “unmarked graves”—or, in many lurid media accounts, “bodies” or “remains”—of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been found on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia. It has since become apparent that no such discovery was made, but only that a local Indigenous band had reviewed ground-penetrating radar data that may or may not indicate the presence of graves.

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Since 2021, when the news first broke, no actual graves have been identified, let alone excavated, and it now seems likely that most or all of these claimed graves never existed. And yet, the wave of feverish national self-recrimination that emerged from the initial hysteria was so strong as to overwhelm sceptics. And dozens of churches were razed by Canadians who’d been fed horror-movie tales of child homicides committed by residential-school priests—a classic example of fake news leading to real harm.

And yet even to this day, it is still seen as taboo in some circles to candidly debunk the misinformation—for that is the correct word—Canadians were fed back in 2021.

This past week, a left-of-centre federal politician named Leah Gazan introduced a bill to criminalise what she vaguely described as residential-school “denialism”—a term whose usage, as noted in Quillette, seems intended to smear any plain talk of the “unmarked graves” scandal as morally tantamount to Holocaust denial. As with Ms Rowland’s Combating Misinformation and Disinformation bill, this proposed Canadian law has been justified by reference to the supposed harms that would ensue if “denialism” (such as this article you are reading) were permitted to be communicated publicly. Specifically, Ms Gazan claims it would cause unendurable psychic harms to Indigenous people.

While her bill has little chance of becoming law (and even less chance of surviving constitutional scrutiny in the courts), it demonstrates the 180-degree truth-bending contortions that ideologically programmed politicians will engage in as a means to censor dissent or protect cherished myths. Ms Gazan’s claimed campaign against misinformation is, in fact, a demand to enshrine it. And the fact that she has received largely favourable media treatment while embarking on such an Orwellian exercise demonstrates that she is hardly an outlier.

Gazan’s claimed campaign against misinformation is, in fact, a demand to enshrine it. And the fact that she has received largely favourable media treatment while embarking on such an Orwellian exercise demonstrates that she is hardly an outlier.

By way of closing, it should be noted that Quillette itself has been targeted equally by right-wing anti-vaccine activists who peddle false claims about COVID-19; and by left-wing extremists who seek to cast us as transphobes because we acknowledge the reality of sexual dimorphism in mammals. And so we recognise that this kind of misinformation can be exasperating, and can often distort public discourse. We understand that the impulse to ban it is often sincere and well-intentioned.

We equally concede that in certain specific cases, the spread of (actual) misinformation can have serious real-world consequences that go beyond abstract political and ideological questions—as in the case of Canada’s burned churches. And when this is done intentionally and maliciously—putting it into the category of dangerous disinformation—there may well be a role for government oversight, investigation, and, in rare and extreme cases, intervention. But laws aimed at curtailing “misinformation,” such as that being advanced in Australia, are too broad for this purpose, and have no place in a free society.