change ‘science’, the environmental impacts of regenerative livestock farming, light or moderate consumption of coffee or alcohol….the list goes on.
For hundreds of years, inconclusiveness and scientific uncertainty have been dealt with by promoting a process whereby scientific peers attempt to replicate experiments to verify, or invalidate, previous findings, in the process testing repeatability and reproducibility. If multiple researchers do the same kinds of experiments, albeit at different times and in different places, while getting similar results, probability dictates that the confidence of these findings increasingly approximates to what we like to think of as scientific ‘truth’. The incentive to replicate studies also increases when scientific discourse is promoted and there are sufficient funds available to repeat studies and test hypotheses.
Herein lies another fundamental shift in how the scientific and medical establishments function. Censorship, gaslighting and cancel culture, all of which have gathered immense pace since the covid pandemic was initiated in March 2020, have seen fit to silence or marginalise scientific dissent. In addition, there has been a longer standing trend away from ‘blue sky’ public funding, and towards the private funding of research. This is especially the case for medical or health-related research, with private funding entities being directly or indirectly related to corporate beneficiaries, notably Big Pharma, Big Biotech or biotechnology spin-offs. These same interests have extensive control of the media and are the drivers behind the recent emergence of the censorship-industrial complex.
For example, those who have faced life-changing injuries caused by AstraZeneca’s covid-19 vaccine claim to have been censored on social media.
The long and short of this is that it is the censors that get to decide which strands of ‘the science’ the public gets to see, and which it doesn’t. Much of this happens with the
public being unaware of how social and mainstream media apply their censorship practices, more and more of it being programmed and AI-informed. On this note, we will shortly be releasing a short film that exposes the risks of social media shadowbanning. In an effort to increase transparency of news outlets and allow users to filter information themselves, a tool called Perspectify has recently been launched that offers “comprehensive information” about media outlet ownership, and “relevant statistics”. Such a tool might actually end up further distorting a person’s view of scientific information given that mainstream media channels are more likely to be preferentially rated over those which carry information that challenges mainstream science.
What’s so twisted is that it’s now becoming apparent, even in mainstream circles, that such AI interference is going to increase, not decrease, misinformation and disinformation. In effect, AI will be used to both detect what its programmers determine to be misinformation, but it can also create disinformation and fake news.
So much so, the recently released WEF Global Risks Perception Survey found that respondents considered “AI-generated misinformation and disinformation” as the second biggest risk currently facing society, pipping “extreme weather” and exceeding the risks of “societal and/or political polarization”, “cost-of-living crisis” and “cyberattacks”.
This selective and opaque censorship doesn’t just violate our basic right to freedom of expression, it violates people’s freedom of thought.
How do we overcome scientific distortion and censorship?
This may be a 64 million dollar question. But what we can confidently say is that the starting point has to be awareness over the extent, nature, mechanisms and potential impacts of censorship, including on our health and fundamental rights.
One thing the vast majority of us have in common, regardless of where we sit in terms of our interpretation of scientific phenomena or research findings, is a desire to know what we consider to be the most accurate interpretation of reality, something I hesitatingly refer to as ‘the truth’ (my hesitation is linked to the fact that absolute truth, even when supposedly objectively determined, is likely an elusive concept given we remain unclear as to what constitutes reality, with reality being something that can only be determined from the perspective of an individual observer).
Once we know that what’s under the spotlight of mainstream media or mainstream science often represents a selected view or opinion rather than the totality of scientific information, we become motivated to find more trusted information sources that are less likely to be distorted. This loss of trust for the scientific mainstream was the key driver for last year's Nobel Prize Summit in Washington DC. However, as we have argued, the approach taken, including heavy use of stealth AI, is more likely weaken rather than build trust, at least among those who still have the capacity to think critically.
In time, we will all need to re-establish a view on who will become more or less trusted authorities. One thing is for sure, trust in mainstream health authorities, governments and the medical and scientific establishment is at an all time low, and that’s why they’re fighting so hard to try to rebuild trust. Another likelihood is that attempting to rebuild trust by stealth, censorship and the use of AI is doomed to failure among those of us alive to the deception that surrounds us.