Of course they would. It's only natural for those in authority to double down when their authority is questioned. I'll leave the obvious snarky joke opportunity open for one of you.
Anyway, it would seem that Dr. Nigel Whittle, a healthcare expert from
a consultancy that does everything is upset. He's not particularly clear about what he's upset with. He starts by talking about the fact that FE'ers exist (how dare they!), and that there is no doubt in his mind that they're wrong and dumb - nothing new here.
He then pivots, making sure to spend as little time describing his change of subjects as possible. Flat Earthers exist and they're uneducated, but you know who else exists and is uneducated? COVID19 conspiracists! Wow, people are burning masts, and look at all these crazy COVID19 theories floating about!
Dr. Whittle then reaches a conclusion, once again encouraging us not to think too much about how he got from point A to B. It might be a good idea to "better manage" the Internet to make sure that like-minded individuals don't talk to each other
too much. The burden, nay, the
responsibility is on YouTube and Facebook - they should vet our friends and make sure we follow the right guys, or at least that we don't follow too many of the wrong guys.
The short article ends with an invitation for discourse. They'd
love to hear your views about this proposal! Just, y'know, make sure they're the
right views.
https://www.plextek.com/insights/coronavirus-and-flat-earth/Of course, it's worth pointing out that while I'm sure Dr. Whittle is an expert in his fields (biochemistry, cancer research, and advancing medical innovations), he is absolutely nobody when it comes to Internet governance. In this particular case, he's acting like the very "armchair experts" he seems to want to curtail. The good news is that, for the same reasons, he probably won't get his way.
Ignoring the dystopian implications of a "better managed" Internet, and stepping aside from the FE vs RE disagreement for a second, I'd like to point out that these sort of initiatives universally backfire. When the Donald Trump subreddit got axed, it moved from a platform that had
some control over the discourse to a platform that's entirely independent and which doesn't
want to filter the content that was originally found to be problematic. When YouTube axed Alex Jones, his audience moved over to other media (again, the result was more Alex Jones, not less). When YouTube started discouraging FE videos, this led people who might potentially be convinced to actively seek out the content ("Wow, what are these terrible videos that YouTube is hiding from me?").
Perhaps if the super-enlightened scientific experts had an understanding of pop-sci concepts like the Steisand effect, they'd have an easier time maintaining their authority?