the times | Tuesday October 20 2020 1GM 29
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Who will rid us of the facemask refuseniks?
The ignorance of antivaxers and Covid sceptics is mind-boggling but their narcissistic nihilism seems impregnable
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it is certainly true that a great many
similar firms today are trying to stop
people sharing Covid-based fake
news — or what they deem to be
fake news — even to the extent of
Twitter attaching a warning to a
tweet by President Trump this
month, when he claimed his own
Covid infection had made
him immune.
Is this a good thing for them to be
doing? I’ve always argued that it is
better than them not doing it, and I
still think that is probably true. But
the more these companies move into
curating the politics present on their
sites more generally — restricting
articles they don’t like, and nowopenly involving themselves in the
US election — the more I begin to
doubt that tech companies are going
to solve the problems that they,
themselves, have caused us. It’s like
trying to fight off a shark with
another shark. As in, it won’t work.
Because it’s a shark.
Probably, I spend more time than
is healthy worrying about wrong
people on the internet. For
authoritarian regimes, all of this is
very easy. I’m not sure exactly what
happens to Covid sceptics in China,
but I expect it involves something
rather worse than yellow hats. This is
not and must not be our way. What,
though, is? It wasn’t a rhetorical
question. Honestly, what do we do?necessarily the best or wisest ones,
but often just the ones that people
most enjoy listening to. Witness the
columnist for another newspaper
who yesterday tweeted that a recent
study had shown half of all positive
Covid tests were false. It hadn’t at all,
but more than a thousand retweeters
apparently believed her. Patiently,
various more scientific brains tried to
set her straight, but the reality was
boring, and complicated, and nobodywanted to hear it. Again, what do
you do with these people? Ignore
them? Argue with them? Shut
them up?
Social media companies, having
tested the first two options almost to
destruction, are now notably opting
for the third. Google, last week, was
accused of censoring an open letter
by lockdown-sceptic scientists called
the Great Barrington Declaration.
Actually, they didn’t. Search for it
today and you will find it, sitting
there in a manner so uncensored
that it appears alongside lots of also
uncensored articles saying it is
censored when it isn’t, which seems
pretty damn uncensored to me. Still,I am not sure exactly
what happens to Covid
sceptics living in China
handful of Dolans, however wrong
they are. You just need to look up a
lot, and duck. What, though, if it
becomes more than a handful? Do
we still just shrug about it, even as it
threatens to cost us tens of
thousands of lives and billions of
pounds? Or, if we decide to more
than shrug, are we still really a free
and democratic society at all?
When people describe Covid as a
dress rehearsal for tackling climate
change, this is of course what they
mean. Both issues require vast
changes in popular behaviour,
probably, and both raise the question
of whether or not enough people are
going to be up for it. What if theyaren’t? Are we really going to force
them, with menaces? There is a small
minority, I know, which continues to
regard environmentalism generally
as a left-wing, big state conspiracy to
introduce totalitarianism through the
spectre of a looming apocalypse.
God, how embarrassing it would be
to have to prove them right.
Instinctively, I’m a big fan of
people having the freedom to be
dangerously wrong. As an opinion
columnist, let’s be honest, you sort of
have to be; it rather goes with the
territory. Terrible wrongness, though,
has ceased to be merely a personal
matter. It’s a virus. It spreads.
In our new, interconnected world,
the ideas that thrive are notW
hat do you do with
people who are
wrong? Beyond
shouting about them,
I mean. Beyondwriting peevish columns about
them in newspapers. What practical
steps, in this day and age, can one
actually take?
This is not to be a column about
masks, but let’s start there. Or, to be
more specific, let us start with Simon
Dolan, the anti-mask
multimillionaire interviewed in The
Times magazine this weekend. He is
taking the government to court over
various bits of Covid legislation,
because he feels it is acting like
“a dictatorship”.
As a self-made businessman worth
an estimated £200 million, I’d
imagine he’s quite a lot cleverer than
most of us. And yet there he was,
explaining where he stood on masks.
“You know, if you want to go and
wear a mask or have a vaccine, then
I’m really happy for you,” he said.
“But I would want the same courtesy
back. So if I want not to wear a mask
or have a vaccine, or if I want to
wear a yellow hat on a Tuesday,
that’s what I should be able to do.”
Between us, I am now mildly
inclined to campaign for a ban on
yellow hats, just for the gleeful
spectacle of the likes of Dolan
belligerently wearing them. How
strange, though, that this presumably
clever man has so fundamentally
failed to grasp the entire rationale
behind masks, or vaccines, or herd
measures of any sort. As in — as I
thought we had all learnt by now —
you do not do these things to protect
yourself from others, but to protectothers from you. Which means that
making a personal choice argument
against compliance is a bit like
arguing for the personal choice to
toss bricks off the roof of a
skyscraper. “Look, I respect your
decision not to drop bricks,” he might
as well be protesting, as the crowds
below crumple and scream.
Yeah well, you might think: so
what? A free and democratic society
ought to be able to accommodate aInstinctively, I’m a big
fan of the freedom to
be dangerously wrong
@hugorifkind
Hugo
Rifkind