YouTube censorship is a symptom of a corrosive philosophy

YouTube's "Medical Information Policy" is worth a read. The site has a virtual monopoly of video streaming in much of the world. Its censors are more powerful and less accountable than most governments. YouTube says its policy is to take down content that "contradicts WHO or local health authority guidance" about Covid-19. It recently took down the channel run by TalkRadio, because it has given a platform to lockdown and vaccine sceptics.

Included in the list of things that YouTube will ban are content that "claims that any group or individual has immunity" or "disputes the efficacy of local health authorities' or WHO's guidance" or "alleges that social distancing and self-isolation are not effective in reducing the spread of the virus". Explaining its decision to ban TalkRadio, YouTube said that it objected to "content that explicitly contradicts expert consensus".

This is dangerous twaddle, and it is not confined to internet platforms.

The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific society, has proposed "legislation and punishment of those who produced and disseminated false information" about vaccines.

Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, of the Metropolitan Police, who is responsible for counter-terrorism, has questioned whether it was "the correct thing for society to allow" the dissemination of misinformation.

I am not an anti-vaxxer. Some of the arguments of the anti-vaxxers deserve an answer. Most of them are absurd. None is convincing. However, I have to remind myself, as we all should, that every proposition in science is provisional. It reflects the current state of knowledge, experience and opinion. Once upon a time, the consensus of experts was that the sun moved around the Earth, that blood did not circulate around the body, and that Dr Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination, was a quack. On many issues, science does not speak with one voice. The scientific consensus eight months ago was that masks were useless and possibly dangerous. Now it is that they are essential. There are reputable scientists advising the Government, and others who regard the Government's measures as scientifically indefensible.

Dissent is fertile. Science advances by confronting contrary arguments, not by suppressing them. The objection to the growing appetite for censorship is not just scientific. It is also moral and political. YouTube's ban on TalkRadio was quickly reversed, and did not reflect government policy.

But the important point is that the ban was imposed in support of government policy. YouTube's definition of acceptable opinion is opinion that does not overtly challenge views of public authorities.

A century and a half ago, John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian apostle of liberalism, warned that the main danger to liberty came not from the state but from our fellow citizens. It came from social pressure to conform and from collective intolerance of unsettling ideas.

In the current crisis, it comes mainly from fear. It is fear that drives people to surrender basic civil liberties to the state in return for what they hope will be a measure of protection from illness or death. It is the same fear that makes them angry with other people who disagree. Because the pressure for mass coercion comes from below, it quickly slides into intolerant demands for the suppression of dissent in the name of social solidarity. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.

Anger and fear are enemies of truth.

Perhaps the ugliest example is the slander implicit in the YouTube policy that opponents of lockdown are "Covid-deniers", fantasists or fools. Most of them do not deny the gravity of the pandemic and understand perfectly well what is at stake. But they believe that there are better ways of dealing with it and that in the longer term, the economic and social effects of the Government's countermeasures will be worse. A rational society would take these points on board.

Ultimately, the approach of YouTube is based on submission to authority. They demand respect not just for the law but for the values, opinions and priorities of the state. This reflects a view of society as a great collective, which must have a single collective notion of the public good. On this view of the world, dissent is inherently anti-social, even treasonable. It is a widely held view, but profoundly corrosive. "If our civilisation is to survive," a great philosopher once wrote, "we must break with the habit of deference to great men; great men may make great mistakes."

Lord Sumption is a historian and former Supreme Court judge