A thread: Getting a lot of messages about censorship of certain social media accounts and websites, how “dangerous” this is for freedom of speech & how we all need to make up our own minds. Sigh. When I was a kid (pre-internet), my parents bought us a set of encyclopedia books

It was a big deal to have them, they were expensive, paid for month by month, but meant we didn’t have to trot off to the library every time we needed information on something. Our friends would come over to use them too, you’d get a call from someone who had to do a project on

Egypt (usually by tomorrow) & they’d pop over to plagiarise the section on Pharaohs and pyramids and we’d crack out the biscuit tin. I remember the scandal when Britannica had to admit to an occasional typo or date error in any of their books – they were so well fact-checked that

...a mistake was a big deal. Our school once got a letter to advise of the incorrect date of the death of some obscure French artist in one volume, and we all looked it up immediately to marvel at the cock up (even if the correct date still meant nothing to us).

Accurate information is really, really important. So as brilliant as the internet is, we have to remember that anyone can upload anything, and it is not fascist or tyrannical to remove factually incorrect content from YouTube/ Facebook/ Twitter – especially if it is on an

important subject. It is so unbelievably naïve to think that disinformation should be allowed so that we can “make our own minds up”. By that logic, our encyclopedia should have said that the pyramids might have been built by ancient Egyptians OR aliens,

...and we can decide for ourselves which is true. It’s been said a thousand times, but opinion and fact are very different, and it’s vital that the former is never treated as the latter. *ends* ;)