That Elon Musk has the ear of the President-elect should mean that X/Twitter is, for now, immune to Democratic threats of regulation. But X is still being threatened by the EU, while from the UK to Ireland, to Canada and Australia there is a growing clamour that social media must be regulated to clamp down on “misinformation”.

Uncensored misinformation, particularly on the topic of public health, is too dangerous to be left to the “marketplace of ideas”. But, while misinformation is bad, prohibiting it is worse. Who gets to decide whether a claim is “misinformation” and can they be trusted?

One could give a hundred examples to illustrate the point but here I’ll pick just one. Recently, Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, announced a campaign against smoking: “My starting point on this is to remind everybody that over 80,000 people lose their lives every year because of smoking,” he said. “It’s a huge burden on the NHS and, of course, it is a burden on the taxpayer”.

Superficially that “huge burden” claim has intuitive appeal. “Smoking puts huge pressure on our NHS, and costs taxpayers billions”, said a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care. “We’ve got to take action to reduce the burden on the NHS and the taxpayer”, continued Sir Starmer.

But let’s think further. Illnesses caused by smoking tend to kill people towards the end of their working life or in early retirement. What would happen if they weren’t smokers? They’d get older and continue into middle and late retirement. And health-care costs ramp up massively the older people get. And eventually they’ll die of something or other anyhow, and that will also cost the NHS.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine analysed this: “Smokers have more disease than nonsmokers, but nonsmokers live longer and can incur more health costs at advanced ages”. Their conclusion was that: “in a population in which no one smoked the costs would be 7 percent higher among men and 4 percent higher among women”, and that “if all smokers quit, health care costs would be lower at first, but after 15 years they would become higher than at present”.

That’s just health-care costs. Each additional decade of retirement also costs the UK taxpayer £100,000 in pension payments. And if they end up needing a care home that can cost the taxpayer as much as £50,000 a year (whereas smokers tend to die before the advanced old-age when people typically need a care home).

Then there’s tobacco taxes, which, according to Full Fact: “… bring in about £12 billion in direct tax revenues”, which is actually much greater than the “… costs anywhere between £3 billion and £6 billion for NHS treatments [related to smoking] in a given year” (2015 figures).

A study in the British Medical Journal reached similar conclusions: “Smoking was associated with a greater mean annual healthcare cost of €1600 per living individual during follow-up. However, due to a shorter lifespan of 8.6 years, smokers’ mean total healthcare costs during the entire study period were actually €4700 lower than for non-smokers. For the same reason, each smoker missed 7.3 years (€126,850) of pension. Overall, smokers’ average net contribution to the public finance balance was €133,800 greater per individual compared with non-smokers”.

So, overall, smokers save the rest of us money. They pay tax over their working lives, and then tend to die in early retirement, relieving the taxpayer of ongoing expense. Thank-you smokers!

So Keir Starmer’s statements are wrong. He should have said: “ending smoking will cost a great deal over the years, but is worth it in terms of people’s improved life-span and improved quality of life”. But he instead said “we’ve got to take action to reduce the burden on the taxpayer”, because people will find the latter a convincing argument. In contrast, people are rightly dubious about governments adopting policies that amount to telling adults what is good for them.

So should social media, and indeed the traditional media, have censored Sir Starmer’s statements by labelling them as “misinformation” or by removing them entirely? But the people keenest on the idea that social media must clamp down on misinformation tend also to be in favour of left-wing or centre-left governments. Keir Starmer is not who they want censored. (Out of interest, I looked for any “fact check” by the BBC or other mainstream media in response to Starmer’s claims, but found none.)

Indeed, I suspect that, were I to write like this after the requested censorship of “misinformation” had been implemented, then it is likely to be me who would be censored. After all, I’m disagreeing with official UK government pronouncements, and doing so on an important matter of public health!

The question of “who gets to say what is misinformation?” highlights the critical flaw in requests for censorship. The price of a society where we can dispute claims and seek the truth is that we have to learn to cope with information that is wrong and misleading.