Another social media giant caves to censorship
April 21, 2023
TikTok is about to become the propaganda outfit that so many worried it would be. Except it’s not going to be Chinese propaganda, this is to come from the United Nations instead.
As Engadget applauds, nothing that contradicts the UN’s “climate science” is to be allowed in TikTok videos. There free speech, scientific inquiry and even just plain good common sense.
“Last month, TikTok updated its community guidelines to add policies that prohibit videos with climate change misinformation on the app,” Engadget reported.
This idea of having censorship of “misinformation” sounds so lovely and cuddly. Why wouldn’t we want people not to be misinformed? Except all that does is push the definition of truth back into the background.
Instead of it being an open conversation bout what best describes the world we’ve now some group in the background determining what people can say in public. The dangers of this were exactly what the Founding Fathers insisted on the First Amendment. Yes, we know they said Congress shall make no…but what’s the UN if it isn’t a collection of the worst Congresses from elsewhere? You know, the UN that put Saudi Arabia in charge of the Human Rights committee once. These are the folks who get to determine what appears in a TikTok video?
Yeah, right.
This is even before we get to this:
“TikTok will no longer allow content that ‘undermines well-established scientific consensus’ regarding the climate crisis.”
The entire point of science is that it doesn’t need protection from misinformation. In fact, the scientific method is exactly the opposite. It’s the prizefighter in the ring at the County Fair insisting to all – bring it on. Bring what you’ve got and test it against me. Science will win against any such tests because that’s what a scientific result is. The thing that survives all the tests thrown at it. If it doesn’t survive the tests then it’s not true. That’s simply, no really, the way science does work. Any single fact can destroy a theory. A theory is an explanation that explains all the facts. If there are facts contrary to the theory then the facts win and the theory is wrong.
The absurdity is that people are trying to curb that free speech in the name of science. When the entire point of the whole scientific enterprise is to always, but always, be subjecting every single scientific idea to continual testing, even attempt to undermine it. Because, again, that’s what science is. Trying to prove the other ideas wrong. It’s the failure to prove the idea wrong that shows that it’s right.
“TikTok will still allow videos that tackle discussions about climate change, such as government policies related to it, as long as they don’t go against scientific consensus. However, it will start deleting content that violate its new policy today, and any user searching for climate information will be directed to ‘authoritative information’ that TikTok had decided on in partnership with the United Nations,” the article says.
Welcome to the new America. Where what you can say on the internet is now determined and censored by the United Nations.