Was Censorship the Greatest COVID Threat to Freedom?.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: BOOKS

"WE'RE NOT JUST fighting an epidemic," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020. "We're fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous." Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney expand on that concept in The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Since Simon is a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where Mahoney currently serves as executive director, it is not surprising that they see state efforts to suppress inconvenient information as part of the problem that Tedros described.

That makes sense, since authoritarian governments in countries such as China and Russia contributed to the "infodemic" by censoring, discrediting, and intimidating journalists and other observers who tried to tell the truth about COVID-19. Meanwhile, these governments promoted their own version of reality, in which the pandemic's impact was less serious and the political response to it was more effective.

But folding censorship into the "infodemic" creates an inescapable tension, since democrats as well as autocrats were frequently tempted to address "fake news" about the pandemic through state pressure, if not outright coercion. The Biden administration, for instance, demanded that social media platforms suppress COVID-19 "misinformation," which it defined to include statements that it deemed "misleading" even if they were arguably or verifiably true.

The problem of defining misinformation is evident from the debate about face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19. After initially dismissing the value of general masking, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided it was "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." More recently, the CDC has acknowledged that commonly used cloth masks provide little protection, largely agreeing with critics whose statements on the subject had previously triggered banishment from platforms such as YouTube.

Simon and Mahoney make it clear that they do not favor state speech controls. But their concerns about the ways governments used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers are curiously limited. While they view censorship as beyond the pale, they are inclined to see other restrictions on freedom--even sweeping impositions such as stay-at-home orders and mass business...