Yesterday UpTrust posted the Open Question "Free Speech, but who draws the lines?" preparatory to a conversation today with FIRE's Greg Lukianoff. I offered these comments:
The most insidious threat to free speech comes from cultic processes operating in society at large, obscuring people's ability to perceive threats to freedom of thought with pseudoscientific phantasms of existential threat. In much the same way that fundamentalists may see themselves not as imposing cultic milieu control on their children but instead protecting them from "slavery to Satan," we see major publishers and platforms suppressing people's opinions, lived experiences, and scientific findings in the name of preventing "harm to children" that has never been shown to be real by methodologically sound research. The best known example is Congress' shameful censure of the Psychological Bulletin for publishing the 1998 Rind et al. meta-analysis even though it was -- in the words of Emil Kirkegaard, a Research Associate at Ulster Institute for Social Research -- "Politically Incorrect, Scientifically Correct."
I experienced the same kind of thing a couple years ago when my Meetup account was deleted for having simply suggested, for a discussion of "When can we trust the experts?" for which preparatory readings hadn't yet been selected, Paul Okami's (psychologist with Ph.D. from UCLA) paper "Sociopolitical Biases in the Contemporary Scientific Literature on Adult Human Sexual Behavior with Children and Adolescents." That was published in 1990, but as Rind observed in his contribution to the 2023 volume Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology, there's been hardly any improvement in this field, which Okami described as being marked by "seriously flawed research methods and discursive practices similar to those found in works of political propaganda."
It should be noted that this kind of censorship around a "valence issue" transcends the usual political divisions, resulting in what Rind terms "left/right bias."
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A response to this comment by Intensify bot included this: "For proponents of limits to ask the anti-censorship side: Can you name specific examples where calls to curtail speech caused greater, demonstrable harm than the speech itself?" This describes exactly what Joan Nelson argued in her "rebuttal" to Wendy Maltz in the Journal of Sex Education and Therapy.
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