Who Decides What Counts as "Medical Disinformation"?

Crisis thinking and communication tends to erode civil liberties as authoritarian governance and censorship are legitimized by the exigencies of crisis. I have demonstrated this argument that was outlined in political theory by Schmidt and Agamben (among others) in my book Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy & Sustainability.

I have seen that the "social media crisis" produced by the participative web 2.0 environment is producing a backlash of demands for censorship.

We see this trend illustrated in the JAMA (a journal of american medicine) where authors demand cybersecurity techniques be deployed against medical "misinformation":

Eric Perakslis & Robert M. Califf, (2019, June). Employ Cybersecurity Techniques Against the Threat of Medical Misinformation. JAMA. Published online June 14, 2019. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.6857.

...Although it is clear that technology companies must increase their efforts to improve the rate at which truthful information is disseminated and revisit product strategies and algorithms that actively amplify misinformation, technology companies cannot solve this problem alone. Indeed, the misinformation driving current measles outbreaks in New York has not been spread primarily via the internet, but by the relatively low-tech means of paper flyers and telephone hotlines.

...Given the urgency of the threat to US and global health, it is time that the medical, scientific, regulatory, and law enforcement establishments weigh the merits of an active cyber response to the problem of medical misinformation.

So, now some experts are calling on policing medical information in the name of securing public health.

I am a scholar whose research has examined the social and environmental contributions to disease so I know that there is often no single and exhaustively "correct" information about disease, particularly multi-syndrome conditions, such as autism (see Nadesan, 2015 Constructing Autism). 

I am very concerned by, and opposed to, efforts to police medical information given the ethical and political complexities.

I fear that all those complexities and ethical commitments to free speech will be sacrificed on the alter of public health.

While transparency of sourcing needs improvement and audiences need to be educated to be more sophisticated readers and producers of knowledge, BRUTE CENSORSHIP is extraordinarily dangerous for the future of free speech.