Calling it wrong-think is so blatantly untrue. Orwell was talking about governments subjecting citizens to extreme censorship. Societies have always been able to do this without governments, that's how cultures are formed.
Did you miss the part when he explained his reasoning, and then another part where after discussing his reasoning and state of current research he realized he was wrong, changed his mind, and retracted earlier statements? I guess you might have, it was years ago.
Or did you, again, mean correcting language so that allegations made were accurate, allegations that later turned out to be discredited by witness statement?
EDIT: Turns out the realization and retraction statement was published 3 days ago, so in all honesty you could argue this was a reaction to mounting public pressure - but there isn't much evidence that he's lying here either.
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
Cultures can have varying degrees of tolerance for diverse viewpoints, e.g. anything from mobs on Twitter to social credit scores in China. Attacking someone's livelihood for raising a philosophical question is somewhere on that spectrum.
There are a lot of incendiary political topics de jour where it's obvious that important voices are being silenced. See, for example, the pseudoaddiction post from SSC yesterday. Popular uprisings are often based on kernels of truth, but the conversation becomes distorted when experts or just laypeople with diverse viewpoints decide, fuck it, it's just not worth the liability of weighing in.
A couple weeks ago there was a story about a minor girl in high school charged by a prosecutor and found guilty by a judge of distributing child pornography--upheld on appeal--for texting her friends a video of herself. [1] But if it's political suicide to even try to have a conversation about how the laws on child pornography could be harming children, then it will never be fixed.
So at some point it should be acceptable for someone to stick their head out and say, "This term 'sexual assault' it doesn't really mean what most people think it means a lot of the times. It would make for much healthier discussion if we could be more specific!" Or, "These arbitrary age barriers (which change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can catch innocent people engaging in consensual intimate acts." And it's also OK for someone else to say, "That's just not what happened in this case, because <reasons>... and you're blinded in this case by your relationship with the accused." But at the end of it, for everyone to agree that there was a conversation in good faith and everyone can decide for themselves who's right, wrong, or an imbecile trying to cover for a friend, without demanding a head on a platter.
You can take a look at what Lessig wrote about Ito [2] and likewise come away from it entirely incensed and calling for Lessig to resign, or pondering whether the story is more complex than the headline. Where in that case, the NYT took a complex issue that Lessig tangled with, and turned it into;
“It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.”
