Hi Colby,

I have a more nuanced opinion on this. First of all, I agree with you that you can't censor stuff because it might "offend" someone. All this trigger warning stuff is just nonsense.

However, I think you are being a bit too optimistic about human nature. You will never persuade someone who believes in bullshit by using facts and reason. In fact, you might even do the opposite. Hence the backfire effect. That's why populists with simple (and wrong) messages win elections. And that's why garbage is popular on Medium and on the internet, and logical stuff isn't.

I am still fleshing out my thoughts on this (I will probably need to think about this more, and then later will come out with articles), however there are such things as disinformation and misinformation. This is different from opinion. Opinions should be protected, however with disinformation and misinformation, we need to take a different approach (given faulty human cognition).

With disinformation I mean the blatant spreading of bullshit with the intent to deceive. These are things like doctored photos, or fake stories like what Russia was putting up for example during the MH17 crash investigation or now during the war. That for me should be taken down.

With misinformation, there is no intent to deceive, but it involves wrong interpretations. For example, writers claiming the vaccines don't work, while lazily linking to scientific studies that they think "prove" their point, but under close reading actually say the opposite of what the writer claims they say. Here what needs to happen is debatable, however I would argue that in times of an emergency like the pandemic, taking this stuff down is warranted.