No, You Won’t Get ‘Cancelled’ for ‘Just Asking Questions’

I’ve seen so many anti-vax talking heads, social media martyrs and the like, using the double edged logical fallacy that we should be ‘asking questions’ about things they don’t understand (true), and immediately following up with some sarcastic comment suggesting you’ll be branded a far right conspiracy theorist and cancelled if you do (false). The formula is usually something like:

1. Cobble together some links/headlines you’ve not read properly, not vetted, or not understood but that seem to support your strongly held pre-existing belief.

2. Call this ‘asking questions’ or allude to it, but don’t actually ask a question (or ask so many questions at once that it’s impossible to answer based on the size of the explanation).

3. Follow up with a conversational shut-down which was actually your own doing, hasn’t happened yet, or portrays you as the victim of a non-existent cancellation.

Oh! Much like this below tweet:

I’m going to briefly try to expose some of the (many) flaws in this kind of online behaviour and analyse them to a small extent. I stole this tweet from a larger and better article from David Gorski if you want to read what this was about (spoiler, vaccines aren’t the cause), but I’m just taking a closer look at these kind of social media attitudes.

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Asking Questions

Anti-vax narratives always seem to assume that nobody in their respective medical fields have ‘asked questions’. Well guess what, they have; and those questions extend far beyond the questions non-experts can come up with. As such, there are answers. Things are knowable.

You’ll notice the tweet does not ask a single question. I’d hedge that if they read every one of those links through, and not just the news articles – but the links (if there are any) to the sources, they’d have a lot less questions. Providing they tried to understand it to a degree.

This is no more than a pre-empted attack on vaccines, not credible independent research/investigative journalism. As one real scientist put it:

The tweet serves to legitimise the very behaviours of far right conspiracy theorists – because it’s exactly how they do business. It’s how they talk. It’s persuasive – a tweet absolutely brimming with assumptions/insinuations about vaccines and people who support them.

Ironically, the people who would have no problem answering questions about them are the ones being demonised here, because they do and have answered real questions thousands of times over the pandemic – but who are the ones continually ignoring the answers? Conspiracists, grifters, and the like.

More appropriately, the tweet should say:

“But don’t dare ask any questions [you don’t like the answer to] [the answer of which, you won’t properly consider] [that have well-supported answers which debunk your nonsense]”

This is in total bad faith – these people are not interested in asking questions or finding answers. They have their conclusion. They want to do all they can to appear more credible in their opinions but have no real evidence to back it up.

If you read this and disagree, try finding one case at all, where someone was cancelled for simply asking questions. I promise there will always be a bigger/additional reason if someone was ‘cancelled’.

A question being asked will turn up right or wrong answers – and the correct answer is knowable if there is one. You will find that the consensus of expertise will consistently reinforce the most accurate one, and back it up robustly. However, to continually assert something which is demonstrably false (your opinions, assumptions, pattern seeking) is neither asking questions nor searching for the truth. It’s disinformation. Motivated reasoning.

Safe to say, the only thing that makes you:

“a far-right conspiracy theorist worthy of cancellation on social media.”

…is being exactly that.

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‘Just Asking Questions’ or ‘JAQing Off’

This is a common technique used by contrarians, denialists, conspiracy theorists, grifters, you name it. It maintains the appearance of innocence and honest discourse to mask the undermining of scientific expertise and integrity. Typical motives are political gain, personal/financial gain, or simply the spreading of a false narrative for views/clicks/attention.

Put simply, the term ‘JAQing Off’ means ‘asking questions in bad faith’. That is, with no intention of hearing/considering the answers they may not like, and no intent to find the truth. Instead it feeds into their audiences’ biases and pre-existing beliefs.

Above: one format to ‘JAQ’. You hear this kind of tone a lot with influential people such as Joe Rogan. Notice that a question wasn’t actually asked!

The damage of this is that it can appear as harmless discourse to people on the fence, when really, it’s deliberately sewing doubt into real expertise and robust science, while bolstering false narratives and encouraging conspiracy thinking, through a false sense of legitimacy.

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What is ‘Being Cancelled’?

The cancel culture phrase gets thrown around an awful lot, with often unjustified negative connotations. I don’t think it is truly defined consistently among those that like to use it most. Can getting cancelled be wrong, or a bad thing sometimes? I’m sure it can, but this isn’t the most likely scenario I’ve seen, compared to the usual outrage it follows.

Being cancelled is just one necessary option for genuinely bad or damaging behaviour, which affects others. It’s maybe an apologist’s phrase for ‘being held accountable for, and facing the consequences of ones actions’. Therefore, it makes little sense to use the word pejoratively as though it’s the ‘act of cancelling' which is inherently bad and never the person being acted upon.

When it comes down to being banned by a private platform, there would be real reasons for this which breach their rules. If you break them, it doesn’t matter what your opinion is – it is at that platforms discretion whether to let you carry on breaking their rules or act with consequences.

Don’t get me wrong, no one platform is perfect. But rules can protect people and promote honest discourse, for instance. If someone influential was using fear and divisive, unscientific nonsense to persuade a loved one to take unnecessary financial or medical risks, wouldn’t you consider it justified if they were banned from the platform for continuing to do so, and to prevent others from experiencing the same?

People often conflate being cancelled from a platform with being a violation of free speech, which is simply not the same thing. Try to think of a person who has been cancelled. If you can, then ask yourself how or from what have they been cancelled? You’re most likely going to find there’s only one platform that’s happened, and for a legitimate reason within their terms of use. If you hear someone complaining they’ve been cancelled, guess what? They’re still being heard and are among the loudest people out there.

Being banned from one platform which upholds such standards doesn’t mean there isn’t a place out there for you to continue behaving however you want. But whichever place you choose, be it the town square or the depths of the internet, you’re not free from consequences of that environment – and nor should you be. You’re not above others, and you’ll still find a set of rules, whether more or less stringent, and whether in a carefully listed terms of service or a simple unspoken etiquette of normal human interaction.

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Always Vet the Source!

Why might you get ‘cancelled’ then? Again, it depends on the platform you are using. Far from being a ‘free speech’ issue, it’s in the interest of any platform to decide what their threshold is for spreading potentially harmful misinformation. It would have to be demonstrably false, of course. Things like persistent lying, continually spreading fake news and propaganda, hateful speech, grifting, etc. Nobody wants that kind of behaviour, right?

But controversy is like gold in the online business of interactions driving web traffic, and creating false balance is a way to harbour it. Social media is a business after all. The algorithms are designed to keep people engaged, and a misinformed, provocative snippet is going to win against a nuanced scientific discussion 99 times out of 100. There’s no room or desire for truth if it loses out to viral interactions.

Not surprisingly, it turns out the tweeter is David Freiheit. He is verifiably an ex far-right wing politician for the People's Party of Canada, now turned YouTuber, featuring political content.

The People's Party of Canada, for context, advocates for reduced immigration, scrapping laws that preserve multiculturalism, withdrawing from the Paris agreement (climate change), and opposing all COVID-19 mitigation measures. So, quite a far-right anti-science stance.

This might explain why he’d be called out as far right. Literally no relevant qualifications at all to be passing commentary drawing medical conclusions, but a following for which he will surely tailor his output to the far right conspiracists taste. As he’s a full time YouTuber/Vlogger now, it’s in his financial interest to gain web traffic – and as such, boosting interactions with disinformation is one run of the mill strategy during a pandemic.

He is quite literally a far-right conspiracy theorist, or at least conspiracy enabler. This is not a personal attack, but a verifiable truth. His behaviour in this tweet plus the lack of any attempt to provide supporting evidence is conspiratorial in nature, and a reflection of how conspiracies operate (pattern seeking, connecting dots, jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions) – and again with no apparent desire to ask a question or learn a thing or two about the science.

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Logical Fallacy

As always, it’s worth identifying logical fallacies that occur.

Post hoc fallacy:

As you can probably guess, there are more fallacies implicit in the tweet we’re discussing, but the most tangible is the above, and non-experts trying to confirm their biases are frequent offenders of this. Antivaxxers are the worst for it, and they are virtually always wrong or inaccurate at best.

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Conclusions

You’ll notice that a lot of the time, someone talking about just asking questions doesn’t necessarily ask any. They use the illusion of ‘open mindedness’ to appear reasonable or unbiased.

Even to state that you’re only asking questions strikes me as a qualifier for saying “I’m not making accusations, but…” which to me, sounds sort of accusatory.

They may ask (or imply) questions which have very robust answers but won’t invite those answers; the sort of questions research communities have asked long ago. The real answers are often necessarily long and nuanced. But they will rarely ask these kinds of questions:

• Am I biased? Do I want this to be true?

• Am I searching for the truth, or for validation?

• Have I considered what experts are actually saying? Do I understand it?

• Have I read the other side properly, or just skimmed it?

• Is what I already believe evidence based; is there any evidence?

• What counts as strong evidence?

• Am I questioning my own sources as rigorously as the opposing sources?

• Do I understand what is being said enough to have an opinion?

If you actually ask these questions, you are going to be engaged with at length by the scientific community.

The reality is, to be cancelled you have to cross some lines. If you get cancelled, or rather are held accountable for your behaviour, then you should probably ask yourself a set of different questions pertaining to why.

There are probably tens of other questions they could legitimately ask. However, for all their ‘free thought’, they seem dedicated to one side of the coin.