“The Telepathy Tapes” Turns to Censorship To Try To Protect Itself From Scrutiny

But this story has a happy ending: YouTube sided with freedom of speech.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Late last year, I reported on The Telepathy Tapes, a new podcast series that purports to prove that telepathy is real and that nonverbal autistic kids are the keys to unlocking it.

Over the course of ten episodes (as well as a new companion series called The Talk Tracks), host Ky Dickens tells us that she conducted a series of experiments where nonverbal autistic children are able to do things like guess a number their mother has in their mind or what they just read on a page in a book.

The problem, as you may know if you read my reporting, is that this viral podcast series had less rigor than you might expect from a freshman-level research methods class. Dickens repeatedly misrepresents the communications methods the kids are using to demonstrate their telepathy, failing to explain to the audience that letterboards have never been proven to be reliable tools to help nonverbal people express themselves. What’s worse is that these communications methods have been linked to sexual abuses and even murder.

Perhaps understandably, Dickens decided to paywall the videos of the experiments she ran with the nonverbal kids and their parents. She is, after all, raising money to produce a documentary that is expected to be released next year. But those videos also show how deceptively she described the experiments.

She never tells us, for instance, that the entire time one child named Mia is typing out her answers, her mother is holding her entire forehead in one palm — allowing for an easy way to manipulate the answers.

Janyce Boynton spent time using these faulty communications techniques with nonverbal autistic children. One day, she realized that the technique she was using — facilitated communication, where a facilitator helps guide a student’s hands as they type — was so deeply flawed that she had subconsciously manufactured false allegations of abuse against a child’s innocent parents. In the decades since, she has dedicated herself to helping expose autism pseudoscience and help steer people towards more legitimate forms of communication.

It’s not a surprise then that Boynton has been critical of The Telepathy Tapes. On a YouTube channel dedicate to debunking autism pseudoscience, Boynton used part of one video that Dickens posted featuring a boy named Akhil spelling out messages with his mother. Boynton highlighted the video to show how Akhil’s mother can cue him about what letter to tap — which can risk robbing him of his voice in the process, as he is not typing out his thoughts but hers.

That was when the producers of The Telepathy Tapes issued a copyright complaint against the channel, resulting in YouTube delivering a copyright strike.

But the complaint was oddly sloppy. As Stuart Vyse of Skeptical Inquirer explained:

Boynton’s video was eight minutes and twenty-three seconds long, and the Telepathy Tapes’ complaint claimed that the violation occurred for a three minute and sixteen second span. However, the entire Telepathy Tapes clip was only forty-four seconds long, and Boynton used only sixteen of those seconds in her YouTube analysis.

Boynton teamed up with a California attorney named Pamela Koslyn to fight back, arguing to YouTube that the use of the clip falls under fair use. YouTube stated that The Telepathy Tapes had 10 days to sue in federal court for copyright infringement; if they didn’t, the content would be restored. The strike was removed and the video is back up on Boynton’s channel.

I reached out to Boynton and asked her if anyone from The Telepathy Tapes ever contacted her personally.

“No,” she told me.

To Boynton, the entire incident demonstrated just how uninterested Dickens was in the scientific debate around telepathy, autism, or facilitated communication.

“You'd think if they were interested in scientific inquiry, they'd have reached out to me directly instead of putting a copyright strike on my teeny YouTube channel. To me, it seems like they were trying to use copyright/fair use to bully me into silence,” Boynton said. “It makes me curious why they'd be so threatened that I used 16 seconds of one of their videos to point out what I see are red flags in terms of facilitator cueing. All they'd have to do is set up reliably controlled testing to prove me wrong.”

Since I’ve been reporting on this topic last year, what’s stood out to me is how different Dickens’s private persona is from what she presents on the podcast. On the podcast, she sees herself as blowing open the doors of debate, taking on the gatekeepers who’ve suppressed the truth of telepathy all these years.

But privately, she seems completely unwilling to even talk to anyone who doesn’t agree with her conclusions. And now we know that weak attempts at censorship are part of her toolkit. Anyone who is confident in their views doesn’t need censorship to prove anything.