[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Hello and welcome to id the future. I'm Casey Luskind, and today we have on the show with us the id friendly science writer and journalist Denise O'Leary. And we're going to talk about censorship in science. Denise O'Leary is a canadian freelance journalist and blogger based in British Columbia who specializes in science and faith issues. She's written for publications such as the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and canadian living. Denise, it's a delight to have you come on the show with us today.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Glad to be here.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: And I have to confess something. I was having lunch with a friend today, and he is a chat GPT aficionado, and we use chat GPT to write your introduction for this podcast. So did chat GPT get it right?
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Well, I haven't written for those publications for about 20 years, but if you can overlook that, it was okay.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Okay, so maybe chat GPT's information is a little outdated, but at least you know it was on the right track.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, back then, I think we were still using pre Windows computers, but never mind.
Always time to learn, I suppose.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: The abacus. The abacus, yeah.
Well, great. Well, so, Denise, I wanted to talk to you about the topic of censorship and disinformation in science, in journalism, in the media, on the Internet. It's a big topic today, and I think that it is relevant to intelligent design because as we know, there are many forces out there that are trying to suppress intelligent design and the evidence for design through various means. And this is not conspiracy theory stuff. I mean, we've been direct victims of this. We know people who've been fired from jobs and lost jobs, et cetera, et cetera. It's a real thing. But maybe we want to help our listeners appreciate what disinformation is, what censorship is, how all of this works. And so I thought that it'd be great to have a conversation with you because you've done some really interesting writing on this topic recently. You've been writing at Mindmatters AI, and you wrote recently about the concept of disinformation. And I think when most of us think of disinformation, we're thinking about snake oil salesmen telling us that if they take this pill or drink their lemon juice, then it'll cure cancer or whatever. Or maybe KGB agents spreading flyers around telling you that if you work for a living and drink Coca Cola, then children in the jungle somewhere are going to die of starvation trying to attack capitalism or crazy stuff like that. But when you talk about disinformation. In some ways, it's actually something far more sinister because we would never expect it. So what exactly do you mean by disinformation and how does that work exactly?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Well, first, disinformation is a term that comes from intelligence agencies that often sow discord in various countries for various purposes. Right. Most countries have them. I've always found it hilarious when canadian politicians are grousing that the american government tries to influence canadian elections. As if the canadian government doesn't try to influence american elections. Right. Everybody tries to influence what's going on elsewhere in their own interest. Okay, so that was the intelligence world. Sometimes it's nefarious, sometimes it's just what you'd expect. Right. Okay, well, disinformation does not mean false information.
One of the things that I had to learn, and I'm very grateful for mind matters news letting me research and publish on this, is it means information the government doesn't want you to have, irrespective of whether it's true or false. I can't stress how important that is to understand.
For example, if during the COVID thing, and I won't go on about it, Anthony Fauci might have said, masks are not necessary one month, and masks are absolutely necessary a few months down the road. And the point is, you're just supposed to do what he says, believe what he says. Disinformation would be whatever he didn't say, it has nothing to do with what a proper science approach to the subject might be. So just for example, on that particular topic, a number of public health experts got canceled, sidelined, and censored simply for stating things that were quite reasonable in the public health community about how a pandemic should be handled. But it would be disinformation as far as the government was concerned, because the government didn't want people to have that information. Now, you're an american, right? So you would be familiar with the first amendment of the US constitution, which basically says, government has no business doing that. I mean, you're a lawyer too, so you probably could parse that much more carefully than I can. But I think I get what it means that disinformation is essentially a totalitarian concept, not a concept associated with representative governments or democracies, because it assumes that the government is in charge of what people are allowed to know, irrespective of truth or falsehood. Now the example I used in one of my articles is you almost never hear the term false information anymore from people who are going on at length about the problems of misinformation and disinformation. They don't talk about false information. And I found that interesting because it was a term I grew up with in the sense that a public health agency might have to deal with claims that menthol cigarettes are not nearly as harmful for you as ordinary cigarettes, but of course, that's false. So they would just say that's false information. All cigarettes are harmful to your health and in more or less direct proportion to the number that you use. So, okay, so they just said that's false information.
They did not try to ban cigarettes. They didn't try to sue or imprison people who said that menthol cigarettes were not harmful. They just said, that's nonsense and it's false information. And that's really all you can do in a free society about something like that. The people who insist on believing that because they won't give up smoking no matter what, are going to believe it anyway, the other people will be wise enough to realize they just shouldn't smoke. Okay, I'm just saying that was the old days. But now we have disinformation, misinformation, malinformation. We have all these bodies, including the National Science foundation, getting involved with trying to fix things so that people can't get hold of information that they don't think they should have. And that's a far more dangerous form of censorship than we used to have to deal with, in the sense that. Well, I remember when censorship just meant misses umbid picketing the bookstore because she didn't approve of some of the books in there. Well, she's not a threat. But when the government colludes with Amazon and Facebook and YouTube, and they used to collude with X, but Elon Musk said something really rude to them, so they don't collude with them anymore. They're trying to get them legally. But never mind about that. The thing is, that's far more dangerous because you don't even know it's happening. You don't know why you can't find a book on Amazon. You don't even know about the book because Facebook posts the talk about it, YouTube vids that discuss it at one time, formerly Twitter accounts that talked about it. What would happen is they'd be downranked. That just means even though you might have otherwise seen them, you don't. So you don't know about it. And most people, I think, have not yet realized that that's the modern form of censorship. Misses umpadiddle is long retired.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: So, Denise, if I'm hearing you right, it sounds like disinformation is really the government trying to get involved with censoring certain ideas they don't like. It's when the government is telling you you need to avoid this idea or basically preventing you from even having access to that idea in the first place.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: That's the big one. Preventing you from even having access to the idea in the first place.
Right now, a big one is they don't want anybody questioning human caused climate change. I know this because I happen to be reading some post on YouTube about something or other, and it was related to climate change, but it wasn't anything rabid or anything, just somebody talking. And there was a note appended below saying essentially human caused climate change is a real problem. So given an opportunity to respond, I just wrote back, quit putting this propaganda on YouTube videos.
You are entitled to respond, but that won't make any difference. That may just have me going on a list somewhere of people who object to that kind of thing, but the real goal is to make sure I never saw that video.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: This raises another question then. You're talking about the government colluding with all of these big tech companies to sort of suppress certain ideas, prevent the public from having access to them. You mentioned the Twitter files in one of your posts where I think maybe we saw that going beyond behind the scenes there was some collusion. So this raises the question, and you raised this question in one of your articles, the Internet was supposed to be the great democratization of ideas, where people would have access to all this information and they'd be able to sift through it and decide what was right, what was wrong, and. And it was going to be sort of this wonderful thing. Has the Internet succeeded in being sort of this wonderful marketplace of ideas, or has it become a battleground of disinformation, suppressing information, spreading disinformation, whatever. Is the Internet, basically, is it helped this problem or has it hurt this problem?
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Well, there's a couple of things we should see here. First, it's not a conspiracy theory, okay? If anybody tells you that they obviously haven't read any material associated with the Twitter files or a number of other sources that have come out about active collusion by governments with big social media to suppress certain trends they don't like, okay? So that's one thing. The other thing is the Internet got started in the US defense establishment. It didn't get started with, say, Martin Luther nailing the 99 thesis to the Wittenberg church door.
If you follow my thinking here, okay. There always was the potential for government and big corporations to get hold of the system. In my personal view, one of the big issues here is people don't pay to use it. See, one reason the telephone company couldn't listen in on my telephone calls all those years was I was paying for the phone service and I wasn't paying for them to snoop on me, right? So, I mean, however bad things might seem in Canada, the government would absolutely have kiboshed any idea that they had the right to just plain snoop or that anybody did. But when you have something like social media, it all sounds wonderful that it's free. But then the question becomes, what right do I have to say that they can't constantly snoop on and manipulate me? If I had to pay them $100 a month to use it, I would say, well, can I find a place for $150 a month that isn't snooping on me and isn't censoring my news?
You see what I mean? What it did was it eliminated the market from the system. And that always creates a situation. Well, it's like, if the government offered to give you free food, do you think that would be food at the level of a good restaurant, or would it just be food? And there might be all sorts of things about it that you wouldn't like, but what are you going to do?
You didn't pay for it. So where do your complaints go? At least that's one approach.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that from the vantage of us here at, you know, the id community, we have seen that the Internet has helped us to overcome some, you know, barriers to getting our ideas out there. As far as, say, for example, the educational establishment, it does not want to allow intelligent design to be discussed or taught, especially universities. You know, we've seen speech codes at some universities that have said, officially, our policy is you cannot talk about intelligent design. Okay, well, I guess, you know, that's their right. If that's what they want to do. That's definitely a form of very open censorship. So we can put our ideas on the Internet and people can have access to them, which is great, but then it's sort of like this endless game of cat and mouse. So we put our ideas on the Internet, and then Google or YouTube or whatever is making it harder to find that information through shadow banning, using the algorithm, quote unquote, the almighty algorithm. And so it's this constant game you're playing where we're trying to get our ideas out there and certain folks are trying to suppress them. But let's talk about another place that I think is supposed to be a wonderful marketplace of ideas, but is not always. And that would be the journalism establishment. You had another article on Mindmatters AI earlier this year where you talked about whether or not the US journalism establishment is celebrating a diversity of opinions. So where are things at these days with the legacy media? Are they celebrating diversity of opinions or are they trying to enforce particular opinions? How are things going there?
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Okay, well, first I just wanted to backtrack about something you said about the intelligent design community. Don't forget that the real advantage of a university saying you can't discuss intelligent design is they admit it. They've actually admitted it. It's like when Galileo was told not to discuss his ideas publicly. Okay, so that's the gauntlet thrown down. Now we know what's not allowed to be discussed, which is as much as a red flag to a bull, right? Okay, but shadow banning is different. You don't know why your brilliant video didn't go anywhere. That's much scarier. It's a much more serious problem, because how are you even going to prove that anybody did anything? It could have been a brilliant programmer working in Taiwan, Singapore, Holland, Norway.
Who does that?
[00:15:41] Speaker A: You're kind of left sitting there at your computer terminal thinking, am I crazy? Am I the crazy? 01:00 a.m.. I. Becoming a conspiracy theorist for thinking that my ideas aren't getting out there. It's impossible to know what's going on behind the scenes.
[00:15:54] Speaker B: Okay, so that's all. I didn't mean to interrupt. I just thought to understand what's happening here and why it's serious. It's because you will never know. And if you try to say that, people will say, oh, but you're just not accepting the fact that people aren't interested in your ideas. But in fact, they may not know about them, may not be able to, and no one knows why. Okay, now about the legacy media. Essentially, they're doomed. I notice you smiling broadly. Okay, fine. But when I say they're doomed, I'm not a prophet here in a robe or anything like that. I'm just saying they depended on a world where people did not have easy access to information. Let me give you an example. Let's go back to 1975. I was around then. In fact, I was a young adult. I bought the Toronto Star so I could find out things like the weather forecast for the weekend, the house league sports scores, what was on tv that night? The Toronto Star had a very strong left wing slant in its editorial pages. That wasn't why people bought it. They bought it for the kind of thing I bought it for. Now, what happens when you can go to the Internet? Maybe just click through an icon on your desktop to find out the weather, the sports scores, the supermarket specials. The supermarket will email you the specials. Well, the Toronto Star no longer has a business base. They can be as left wing as they want, but that wasn't what people were paying for. Or for that matter, they could have been as right wing as they wanted. It would be the same thing, right?
They're all doomed. And essentially what they're doing is they're trying to side with government. They're trying to, in the United States, not just in Canada or Britain or Australia, but in the United States, get government funding to continue.
I've written about that in a few of my posts. It's tacked onto various bills. You probably know way more about how the US government works than I do, but things can be tacked onto bills. One such bill almost passed, and essentially what it would mean is journalists become bureaucrats. It still is called, let's say, the Milwaukee truth teller. I'm making that up because I don't mean to insult any particular actual Milwaukee publication, but, okay. Its journalists are, in fact, paid via government grant. So the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that they won't publish anything that endangers their government grants. We have this system in Canada, actually. And of course, people don't go to the legacy media anymore. They go to independent media.
They want VPN's virtual private networks, so nobody's tracking them about where they're actually getting their news. And of course, every such medium wants it. They're perfectly willing to be bureaucrats, and they will defend any government that gives them money. Now, that, of course, makes it awkward, because even if the government changes hands, it may be in the interests of the new government to give them money. If they think that the media will, in fact, support them, I'd advise against that because it becomes a bidding war. I think a more realistic approach is to say these kinds of media are almost obsolete because most people just aren't getting the news they absolutely need through them. And the danger is they can become a branch of government that's not advertised as a branch of government. I mean, the Milwaukee Firearms Registration Bureau, if there is one, is obviously a branch of government. You can tell by its name, right? But the Milwaukee truth teller could just as easily be a branch of government. For all practical purposes, but that's not in its name. Now, does this make sense to you?
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Well, what I found really interesting is that you talked about the number of journalism jobs that were cut in 2023, and it was something like in the US, 2681 journalism jobs were cut. And then you noted that because these legacy media companies are struggling. Yeah. As you said, there is the proposal to have the government fund the media to sort of prop up this failing industry, almost like we, you know, we propped up banks, we propped up this. Now we're going to prop up the media. So to me, I does not seem like a good idea to have the government funding the media, because then, as you said, the government interests come into play and you get the problem of disinformation, where the government is controlling what is allowed and what is not allowed to be known. And that just does not. It does not seem like this is what the role of government is supposed to be.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Well, there's more to it, though. Many of the fire journalists have gone into the business of trying to prevent disinformation. There's been a huge number of agencies getting started and demanding funding, of course, that claim to fight disinformation, which simply means fighting information that the government or some big boffin of an organization doesn't want people to have. Okay, so that's one of the things that the fire journalists are doing. Another, of course, is those that aren't yet fired to try to get the government to pay them. There's a third element in this all of these people consider as deadly enemies. Independent media. Independent media are like evolution news. They get their funding from people who support them and they provide news for those people. But if you think the legacy media like that. No, they don't. And in the case of broader media with, you know, some issue, whether it's police brutality or illegal immigration or whatever you want, they do not like it at all, because those are people who break stories. And often the stories they break are not the stories that government wants them breaking. Remember, the first amendment says that government shall make no law respecting freedom of the media. It doesn't say the great and glorious government will graciously give you the right to read those media. It says they shall not make a law respecting it. That's very powerful. I wish we had a law like that in Canada, where basically a judge could rule against the government's position simply because the government was attempting to make a rule about it.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Yes, and Denise, as you said, these fired journalists, they are now going onto substack or finding their way onto these alternative platforms. And now they are sort of becoming, you know, an alternative media, and they're essentially competing with the legacy media. And you can, if you have a journalist who you like and you trust, you can now follow them on some platform and they can be your source for news. And this is not what the legacy media wants. One. One person with your keyboard can now have an. As big an influence as, you know, the Washington Post. Well, maybe not the Washington Post, but, you know, they can influence a lot of people, and that's very significant or evolution. News people come to us for our mindmatters. Aa people come to us for a source of news that they trust because they don't trust the mainstream media. And I can tell you, having dealt with the mainstream media, I have ish. I have done interview, many interviews with the mainstream media where I've then seen the story comes out and they print the exact opposite of what I said, trying to attribute that opinion to me. How can I trust the mainstream media when it's so clear that there's an agenda? Not always. I've had some good experiences, for sure, in fact, some very good experiences, but very often bad experiences. People have seen this. They've been burned so many times, they don't trust it anymore, and so they're looking for alternative ways to get their information.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Well, that's true. Some fire journalists went to work for these anti disinformation groups, which are essentially censorship groups. But others, the good ones, really good ones, like Matt Taibbi, who was, I think, the key person exposing what happened with the Twitter files, where the government was basically dictating content to social media. Okay, they have sub stack accounts. That's absolutely true. And that's becoming something that the legacy media that want the government to fund them don't like. Because obviously, if you actually really wanted to know what was going on, it might be worth $5 a month to you to get a subscription to one of those substack accounts. And that journalist basically tells, oh, I don't know, five or 6000 subscribers. Here's what's going on in these areas that you're interested in.
Of course, it's modern technology that does this. There's no printing press, no newsboy shouting on the street, nothing to recycle. It's just you can go in and read what maybe it's Jane Smith has to say about corruption at city hall. And if you think the mayor likes it, he doesn't. But he can't stop her, at least not yet. So, I mean, if she's got her story straight and she's got 5000 subscribers, she can make a good living out of that. And yes, more and more, that's what's happening. But don't expect the government to like it. And there have been efforts on the part of legacy media to deplatform, substack. Ridiculous stuff, actually.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: So I've got one last thing I want to raise, then that this comes out of something that you just said. Denise, the government can't stop these alternative media sources, at least not yet. And I don't think we're anywhere close to that. At least I'd like to think we're not. But I will say this. I think that there are a lot of folks out there who would like to see more official censorship of ideas that they deem dangerous. And I wrote recently about an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was published last year at the end of 2023 titled Pro Social motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists, a perspective and research agenda. And there were many authors of this paper, including some pretty widely respected people. Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Glenn Lowry were authors on this paper. And what it talked about is there is sort of an up and coming generation of scientists right now. It found that between nine to 25% of academics and 43% of PhD students support dismissal campaigns for scholars who report controversial findings. Basically, this suggests that there's an up and coming generation of scientists who believe that if you are researching something that is deemed, quote unquote controversial, that you should be dismissed for that. This, to me, almost sounds like there's sort of a younger generation of scientists that are being brought up right now in the PhD student category, who are kind of like the. The voice of the next cultural revolution, where they are going to go out and suppress any ideas that they don't like. And of course, when these people go and get tenure and they have a lot of control in sane society, I hope it doesn't come to this, that we start to see the government officially blocking news sources that it doesn't like. But I'm nervous that the younger, sort of up and coming generation of influential academics, statistics like this. This is proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 43% of PhD students support dismissing scholars who report findings that are controversial. What happens when these people go and get jobs? This is what the article says. You know, this says dismissal campaigns may increase as current PhDs replace existing faculty. These are exact quotes from this paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So I'm not coming up with this conspiracy theory. Scary stuff. This is being published in PNAs, reporting on the attitudes of young, up and coming scientists that they strongly support censorship. And as these people grow on their influence in clout, I think it's going to be very dangerous to society, and censorship is only going to increase. There is a quote from this paper. Scientific censorship appears to be increasing. And I would encourage folks to go on evolution news, go on mind matters, look up these articles that Denise and I have written, and you can get the documentation of what's going on out there. Just not paint a pretty picture. Denise, I want to let you have the last word here as we bring this conversation to a close.
[00:28:56] Speaker B: Okay. Well, as Elon Musk said, yesterday's conspiracy theory is today's news, and you just proved it. Okay, I don't know if I want.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: To quote Lena on less talking about conspiracy theories, but go ahead.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: No, of course not.
But for what it's worth, that generation, when they control the system, could easily bring about a dark ages of science. Do you remember that during the nazi era, there was a book published called 100 authors against Einstein?
[00:29:28] Speaker A: I was not aware of that, but I'm not surprised to hear that.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Well, Einstein's response was, one would have been enough were he right.
And I would leave hearers with that thought that all great new ideas in science are obviously going to be controversial. Now, many ideas that sink out of sight immediately are also controversial, but you can't know just because it's controversial.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: I think if there's any moral of the story, Denise, it's that those of us who recognize the threat of censorship in our society need to support alternative media, whether that means, you know, getting the message out to your friends that these alternative media sources exist so that they can, you know, basically not have to go to the legacy media for all the information and find ways to stand up and speak out in favor of the right of diverse opinions to exist on the Internet and our society, supporting alternative media and not letting big tech essentially collaborate with the government to enforce disinformation. So, Denise O'Leary, it's been a fun conversation. Appreciate your always controversial ideas and perspectives. You would certainly be canceled if you were in academia today, but that's probably not a bad thing.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Well, it's a good thing I decided to go into freelance journalism instead.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: There you go. You're in the right field. Okay. Well, I'm Casey Luskin with id the future. Thanks for listening, and thanks for not subscribing, censoring us. Have a great day.
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