OPINION: Shouting Fire
Kent Barker argues that Neil Young unintentionally aided free speech when he removed himself from Spotify.
A hundred years ago a Supreme Court judge ruled the US constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech did not cover ‘falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic’.
Justice Wendell Holmes’ opinion was swiftly overturned leaving the First Amendment right untrammelled but his phrase is still quoted in debates over censorship. In Britain we have no written constitution but both common
law and our adherence to the European Human Rights Convention theoretically ensures similar freedom of expression here.
Although dormant for the moment, HIP’s podcasts have become popular in Hastings as a useful adjunct to the paper – thus demonstrating podcasting has become a mainstream media activity. For people of my generation this is a novelty, and I freely admit that I had never heard of Joe Rogan or his Experience podcast until Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others threw their music out of the Spotify pram. This was in protest at Rogan in general and his interview with Dr Robert Malone in particular.
You may not have heard of Malone, but he’s an interesting man. A Doctor of Medicine and mainstream research scientist, virologist and immunologist, he was a pioneer of mRNA the technology behind the Covid vaccines – indeed he claims actually to have invented it. He worked for a pharmaceutical company Vical, and has himself been vaccinated against Covid. At least one colleague says he could be in contention for a Nobel Prize for his work. The trouble is that he has started to question some of the orthodoxy about the vaccine and, as a result, has effectively, been ‘de-platformed’. Wikipedia and most other mainstream organisations now accuse him of ‘promoting misinformation’. Twitter has removed his account and he’s twice been banned from Linkedin.
I have no idea whether his claims are right or wrong. All I would say is read them yourself and make up your own mind. But the problem is it’s increasingly difficult to do so as more and more organisations either ban him or assert he’s a dangerous anti-vaxxer – somewhat ironic for someone who is vaccinated with the very product he helped invent.
And this is where Neil Young has perhaps scored an own goal and done us all a service. By highlighting the podcast, he’s directed our attention to Joe Rogan’s lengthy interview with Dr Malone – something many would never otherwise have considered listening to.
In it Malone outlines some concerns: “People should think for themselves. I try hard to give them the information, not to tell them what to think.” He’s clearly shocked to find himself vilified and says his being ‘cancelled’ goes to the heart of “fundamental constitutional principles of free speech.”
Spotify – initially anyway – stood out against the pressure and decided to take down Young’s and Mitchell’s music rather than the immensely popular Joe Rogan. Subsequently they promised an “advisory button” referring viewers to other Covid information and, at time of writing, around seventy Rogan podcasts (out of 1,700) have gone from the platform. Nevertheless some might view Spotify’s original stance as a beacon of independence in a world of increasing censorship.
To return to our theatre analogy. Who benefits from gagging a fire-marshal who thinks they’ve seen smoke? It may not actually be a fire, but don’t we in the audience have the right to know that someone thinks it just could be? As Voltaire might have put it, I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
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