policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
British actor Sacha Baron Cohen.
Photo: Valerie Macon / AFP
Wrong to be right
Social media, fact-checking and why
‘false equivalence’ drives Sacha Baron Cohen crazy.
By Stephen Green and Ines Dunstan
The recent discussion about the appropriateness or
otherwise of putting fact check notices on social media
posts has once again raised profoundly important
questions which concern truth and free speech.
This article re-ignites a more specific concern raised in
November last year, in a speech at the Anti-Defamation League
summit in New York by actor Sacha Baron Cohen, in which he
denounced the fact that there are Holocaust deniers on Facebook
and that through a simple click, Google leads its readers to the
most repulsive denialist sites.
“One of the heads of Google once told me, incredibly, that
these sites just show both sides of the issue. This is crazy.” Baron
Cohen, who has a degree in History, argued that on the internet,
everything appears to be equally legitimate. “We seem to have lost
a shared sense of the basic facts on which a democracy depends.”
Without entering the debate over whether Holocaust denial
should be criminalised or not (Mark Zuckerberg, for example,
defends the right of denialists to publish positions in Facebook
which he ‘personally’ finds offensive), the idea that denialist
positions must be ‘respected’ for being merely ‘perspectives’
within a ‘debate’ is of unusual banality and does not withstand
serious analysis.
Such thinking, however, is part of a serious misunderstanding
that exists around the concept of ‘open-mindedness’. It is also a
disturbing rationale for a version of free speech according to which
the truth should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.
This type of thinking is often supported (sometimes unwittingly) by
those who endorse the ‘catch all’ postmodern notion of parallel
equivalent versions or narratives.
Although the concept of ‘open-mindedness’ has enormous
merit in itself and is of utmost importance in critical thinking,
it is important to note that a completely open mind is also
a completely empty mind. The mere fact that there may be
multiple interpretations and versions around a theme, historical
or otherwise, does not mean that they are all equally valid and
respectable.
An attitude of openness and intellectual humility does not
imply the equal respect for all perspectives; rather, it involves a
consideration of relevant differing positions, followed by a critical
evaluation of such perspectives on the basis of their merits. In
other words, the attitude of openness and intellectual humility
must be underpinned by a quest for Truth with a capital letter.
Even though absolute truth in complex matters is often beyond
our reach, the search for it is paramount. That search also implies
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