For the last week, Lee S. Dryburgh disappeared from LinkedIn. When he recently reemerged, the story of the disappearance was as bizarre as it is troubling.
Background
I have been following Lee's posts for several weeks. They provide novel references to the COVID-19 research literature that is otherwise poorly covered, sprinkled in with some informed opinion. The posts I have seen all seemed within the bounds of appropriate scientific discourse on controversial topics, and, as a curious scientist, I appreciated the opportunity to read alternative positions.
Science is the constant battle of evidence and even the most deeply held beliefs must be open to reexamination (although the height of the bar for reexamination should be commensurate with the existing evidence). Indeed, despite the popular misconceptions, there is no such thing as "settled science". We do not care for polls of experts or politicians, only about the evidence, viewed in the most objective light possible.
Indeed, there is an amusing story about a book written by a "hundred" authors from various disciplines criticizing Albert Einstein's relativity on various non-technical bases. Einstein is reported to have responded that even one author would have been sufficient to point out a real error.
The "crime"
An email chain shared by Lee suggests that the initial reason that LinkedIn closed Lee's account related to his quotation from a post of David L. Katz (a medical doctor and company CEO), which LinkedIn considered "false content". When pressed, LinkedIn appeared to provide more evidence of posts of "false content" that are incompatible with their user agreement.
This is consistent with LinkedIn's "Professional Community Policies", to which we are all apparently bound on this medium:
Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.
And the penalties are not subtle, as Lee discovered:
...we may limit the visibility of certain content, remove content from our platform, or even restrict a member’s account...
Big Tech and COVID-19
LinkedIn's actions are not unique. In an Orwellian move, many of the major tech companies have banded together to limit "misinformation" about COVID. In a joint statement published on Tech Crunch, Facebook, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube asserted:
We're helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus.
The result is that Big Tech has now become the sole arbiter of what science is acceptable to be shared informally among scientists and with the public. Were we in different historical times, the tech companies could have just as easily been promoting other (at the time accepted) scientific positions, such as:
Counterarguments
Several counterarguments have been presented in support of Big Tech, most notably:
Liability - concerns about being responsible (legally, but maybe also morally) for misinformation spread.
Danger - people could literally die when bad science is promulgated during a pandemic.
Free market - in a free country, companies should be free to operate however they see fit.
With respect to the first point, Section 230 of the Comunications Decency Act aptly protects companies like LinkedIn from legal liability for the comments of their users. The moral dangers are there, in that people may die from the spread of misinformation, but the key point is that it is not always clear what is information and what is misinformation.
For example, the WHO and CDC both came out strongly against universal mask usage back in March. At that time, the current BigTech policy would have shut down any dissent from scientists who felt that this was a misguided policy, even though the policy was eventually completely revised. Indeed, NIAID director Anthony Fauci himself has sharply changed his public position on issues such as masks throughout this pandemic - in part because of pressure from scientists who disagreed with his first position! Whatever side of the mask fence you take, science is not served by suppressing the alternative hypothesis.
The "free market" argument is, perhaps, the most challenging to counter, in that a free economy rests upon the ability of companies to act in their own best interests. However, the tech companies involved in this campaign represent the vast majority of Internet social media access in the world, something that has become impossible to avoid in personal and professional life. As I have argued before, in order to sustain the "free market" argument, we must break up Big Tech into smaller, competing companies, (although an alternative is to change the liability protections of Section 230 of the CDA).
Takeaways
Two takeaways are increasingly clear:
Your data may not be safe - Any data stored in the cloud can be removed by the provider at any time and for even seemingly bizarre reasons. Users of these platforms must backup all important cloud information locally.
Your livelihood may not be safe - You should prepare for the possibility that any business related to social media may be immediately and unexpectedly terminated with little recourse, like it was for Lee.
Scientific censorship is not just bad business, it is a dangerous business, precluding novel ideas from gaining scientific attention. Even if the vast majority of novel ideas are ridiculous and wrong, scientists live for the very occasional nugget that revolutionizes life as we know it.