Political censorship from technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and other internet-based technology companies increases the likelihood of political polarization and politically-motivated criminal violence, said professors Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson during a Friday-published appearance on Joe Rogan’s eponymous show.
Rogan offered his iteration of the phrase “sunlight is the best disinfectant” in defense of free speech, expression, and debate. Censorship — formal and informal — prohibits open dismantling of immoral and destructive ideas:
The importance of having uncensored discussions [is that] when you have forbidden discussions, you energize those topics, and the topics grow in the absence of discussion; in the absence of being picked apart and analyzing for what their core components are.
“Open communication and debate [and] analyzing all the components of [an] issue completely objectively” is the best solution to combating immoral and destructive ideas, said Rogan.
Human capacity for reason is being shortchanged by technology companies holding a contemptuous view of the public, with electronic censorship increasing the likelihood of civil war:
I believe we have exactly the [evolutionary] tools for navigating this puzzle [of political stability and polarization]. They’re built into us, also. … We are now in a very dangerous situation, because, for example, if Google and other of these online goliaths start deploying algorithms that decide what we get to talk about and see, then we cannot use the very tools that are necessary in order to escape and avoid something like civil war. …
We empower those terrible ideas by making them chronically taboo, and the point is they’re going to fester. We can defuse the ones. We can spot opportunities that we don’t know we have, and we can move forward instead of descend into civil war, which seems more and more likely.
“The consequences of suppressing [free speech and expression] are so much more dangerous than the consequences of allowing it,” said Peterson. “They’re not in the same universe. … Google and Facebook are doing pre-conceptual censorship.”
Google has demonetized and restricted videos from a variety of dissidents from and critics of leftism, including but not limited to persons and channels such as Philip DeFranco, Gad Saad and The Saad Truth, PragerU, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin and the Rubin Report, and Lauren Southern.
Facebook established a team of “curators” to manage which information enters its “Trending” section.
Watch the discussion below (relevant portions begin at 22:25 and 27:25):
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