Pun Salad

From time to time, I make sure to re-read George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics And The English Language.” It remains the best guide to writing non-fiction, and it usually prompts a wave of self-loathing even more piercing than my habitual kind. What it shows so brilliantly is how language itself is central to politics, that clarity is as hard as it is vital, and that blather is as lazy as it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because the relationship between our words and our politics goes both ways: “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” We create language and language creates us. If the language is corrupted, so are we.

Sure, I’ve read the studies that say masks probably don’t do much of anything, and yes, I’ve been quintuple-vaccinated. But I’m going to keep wearing my mask forever. It feels like the right thing to do. I know this because it’s the opposite of what those horrible right-wingers think. You call this a meaningless strip of fabric; I call it my emotional-support cloth.

Masking up every day when I get out of bed fills me with a sense of calm, wellness, and moral superiority. Frankly, I’m not ready for a future in which I just go around the community without a visible display of my self-righteousness. I suppose I could get a Queen Kamala tattoo on my face or something, but that seems impractical. (What will I do when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is president, haha.)

Signaling things to others is a really important part of my identity. That’s why I have one of those “DARWIN” bumper stickers on my fuel-efficent Mini Cooper, why I have an “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” yard sign (okay, in my case it’s a window sign because we don’t have a yard in Park Slope), and why I spent nine years getting a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies. Keeping a mask on indefinitely is like shorthand for all of the stuff I want to indicate to others, right there on my face.

I don't know the correct level of content moderation by Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Amazon. And neither do you.

Sometimes I can pinpoint what looks to me like an obvious misstep: Facebook's decision to block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election, for instance, or Amazon's refusal to carry a small number of books about trans issues without adequately explaining its decision. Tweets containing threats of violence left up indefinitely while mere tasteless jokes get swiftly removed.

But I also know deciding what and whom to allow on your platform is a hard problem. Scale is hard: I know I'm not seeing millions of pieces of spam eliminated, bots blocked, irrelevant content filtered, duplicates removed. Consistency is hard: I know sometimes what's in my feed is the work of a robot doing a good job following bad directions, and sometimes it's a human being doing a bad job following good directions. The application of Hanlon's razor is almost certainly called for in many cases of perceived bias: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Search for “vaccines” on Amazon’s bookstore, and a banner encourages shoppers to “learn more” about COVID-19, with a link to the Centers for Disease Control. But the text almost vanishes amid the eye-catching book covers spreading out below, many of which carry Amazon’s orange “bestseller” badge.

One top-ranked book that promises “the other side of the story” of vaccine science is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Health Policy.” Next to it, smiling infants grace the cover of the top-selling book in “Teen Health,” co-authored by an Oregon pediatrician whose license was suspended last year over an approach to vaccinations that placed “many of his patients at serious risk of harm.” Another book, Anyone Who Tells You That Vaccines Are Safe and Effective Is Lying, by a prominent English conspiracy theorist, promises “the facts about vaccination — so that you can make up your own mind.” There are no warning notices or fact checks—studies have shown no link between vaccines and autism, for instance—but there are over 1,700 five-star ratings and a badge: the book is #1 on Amazon’s list for “Children’s Vaccination & Immunization.”

Many economists, after noting that government regulations have harmful unintended consequences, advocate replacing government regulation with government-provided information. These economists see the bad consequences of having government officials make decisions for people and not allowing people to make their own decisions. At the same time, they argue, the government officials might have good information and if they simply provide that information to the public, that will improve the situation.

In the cases other economists and I discuss, a replacement of regulation with government provision of information would be an improvement. With such a shift from regulation to information provision, people could take the government’s information into account but still make their own decisions. Would it be preferable to a situation with no regulation? For it to be preferable, the government would have to provide good information and not mislead people. But does the government generally provide good information? Figuring out the answer would take years of research, but recent evidence during the COVID-19 pandemic, and some basic reasoning about government officials’ incentives, should make us hesitant to trust government information.