I do not think such bans are the answer, but I am in favor of challenging such controversial talking points. The Internet is vast, far too many "dark corners" on the Net for any sort of bans to be effective.

It is probably almost impossible to do anyway, even defining what is and what is not misinformation is probably not possible. And even if you could entrust the social media with enforcing guidelines laid down by national institutions, acting as independent arbiters, you could still not get any agreements. For example, did China have the same view of what constituted scientific misinformation as the western countries during the early Corona Virus outbreak.

But it could be that in the long term, ( Twenty five, fifty years perhaps.) it will not matter. Because society itself will probably adjust, becoming more cynical, sceptical, less relativist, much less tolerant of fringe opinion, and reverting more to belief in centralized mainstream views as objective truth. In part because people do learn by experience, though very slowly, and do sometime realize they have been fooled, if rarely, but also as the greatest forces in human life, boredom and laziness begin to bite, and people find that they just do not have time or interest in fringe ideas anymore.

That will bring with it its own dangers like dogma, and unquestioning respect for civil authorities, neither of which ever did any good, but it will certainly happen.

The guy who invented the tech for the covid tests was banned from twittee because he said the current tests are used to create false positives..

The people who run these sites are fascists.

FREE SPEECH is the only way to refute actual disinformation...

At least a couple dozen times the past two years REAL science has been banned by the shitfucks at Google, and twittee,.....

That meant conversations about treatments and cures were denied platforms.

The people running these websites are young and profoundly arrogantly ignorant. DON'T LET THEM tell you what is the truth.... They don't know anything about truth. They only care about getting their way.

I would say further study is needed. This is a new problem for H.sapiens, and it will take some time for us to get the balance right. And as the article mentions, their conclusion may be right for the one culture but not for others.

Two comments:

One is... the fact that they think censorship is appropriate for "hate speech, terrorist content, child sexual abuse material" but not for scientific misinformation (or even that those two categories can be cleanly separated from each other) smells more like a cultural value judgement than a scientific study. Seems to me the social/psychological mechanisms that apply to one would apply equally to the other.

And two... my guess is that the large social media companies are doing everything they do primarily to satisfy their stockholders, not to effect any particular moral code or political agenda, so, as long as the general public (i.e. their customers) overwhelmingly think scientific misinformation is unacceptably destructive, then they will continue to censor it. And when the Q-crowd becomes the majority of their customer base (heaven forbid) they will just as happily censor scientifically valid information.

Am I being cynical?

Maybe a little.

Suckerbird may be a real humanitarian. (nah)

Yes. People spread misinformation for psychological gratification, not to educate. Not good for a lethal pandemic.

Science needs to be challenged. So the question is who decides it is misinformation and then who decides what is banned.
Talking censorship here, so a big no. Used to like the internet when it was warts and all.

[royalsociety.org]

Isn't there a big difference between saying "you are allowed to say that, legally" and saying "here's a megaphone, go nuts" ?