George Monbiot’s Sage-type panel of experts – which he would like to see “identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament” – would almost certainly be counterproductive, and be a godsend to conspiracy-mongers (Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them, 27 January). Nor would it much affect anyone already inclined to be rational.
People are not simply stupid or misinformed. Those who believe misinformation, such as microchips being injected along with vaccines, do so out of deep emotional or psychological need. The more you try to wean them from their beliefs, the tighter they cling to them.
The fact is that experts are often wrong; some governments lie almost all the time and others at least some of the time. It’s a tricky world out there. Surely education, more than anything that smacks of censorship, is a better approach.
Focus on empowering people – especially young people – to think for themselves, to have the grounding in history and science and the confidence to seek out reliable sources of information and make their judgments accordingly.
Dave Wieberg
Sheffield
• It’s a bit of a cliche to invoke Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, yet the times demand it. George Monbiot’s argument against misinformation is impeccable, but he writes as if the media landscape, and human behaviour with it, have not been completely transformed in the past 30 years.
There is one overarching reason for the role of misinformation in getting liars and extremists elected in western democracies: social media technologies within a system of surveillance capitalism. This has changed not just the extent of the manipulation of people, but the nature of it. Broadcast media now mimic the emotive polarisations of online debate: “the bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime” certainly applies to Nigel Farage’s BBC platform during the Brexit catastrophe.
You can’t reverse new technologies of literacy and communication; their benefits go without saying. But you can change who owns them. Until the power of big tech is dismantled and social media becomes a commons, where we agree to regulate misinformation and hate speech out of existence, there’s little chance of getting anywhere near a rational public sphere again.
Jeff Wallace
Cardiff
• George Monbiot made a very good case for the setting up of an expert committee to identify those people and organisations using free-speech excuses to make false, life-threatening claims about Covid-19, mask wearing, vaccination needs etc. I wholeheartedly agreed with his proposal that such dangerous activity needs to be quickly suppressed or at least refused the oxygen of publicity if at all possible.
Then, to my dismay, you reported that NHS staff are being regularly harassed, insulted and harangued in their hospitals by virus deniers seeking evidence to support their conspiracy theories while the staff struggle to cope with their Covid patients (Hospital incursions by Covid deniers putting lives at risk, say health leaders, 27 January).
The government needs to pay urgent attention to this problem and find a quick and effective means of suppressing the spread of such lies as well as stopping the intimidation of NHS staff.
Gary Bennett
Exeter
