Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

This is terrible. I wrote this week how centralized, point-and-click mass censorship has a non-obvious failure mode in emergencies/pandemics/wars that poses an existential threat to a free and self-determined society:

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

(Note well that this exceptionally dangerous failure mode is based simply on the existence of the technological capability of mass instant censorship, not the merit of the specific editorial decisions of what content is censored or not.)

Furthermore, in any crisis or rapidly evolving situation, any one organization deeming themselves the sole arbiter of truth is extremely dangerous. What is true one day we learn with more information is false the next. You may recall this is the same WHO who said that healthy people get no benefit from wearing masks, and that also parroted China’s line about no human-to-human transmission. They are not immune to criticism, nor should they be.

Do you trust Google and the WHO to be superhuman, prescient and perfectly informed at all times? I don’t. (I also don’t think it’s any adult’s business telling another adult what they should or should not be able to read or watch.)

YouTube’s other censorship efforts have been actively impeding the research and prosecution of war crimes in the Syrian war as they are deleting hundreds of thousands of videos, amounting to destruction of evidence.

Either YouTube needs to stop being the default video upload target for most of internet-connected Earth, or they need to stop doing this shit. The current situation is far too dangerous.

Instagram/Facebook are even worse. Same problem.

These point-and-click mass censorship platforms are ticking time bombs for society-wide abuse even if they don’t censor anything most days of most decades.

> parroted China’s line about no human-to-human transmission

This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.

Screenshot: https://twitter.com/Austen/status/1245689629178650624

The ambiguity between their various statements at that time, taken together, just furthers my point that those statements should not be immune from dialog, criticism, verification/falsification, and discussion of those results.

YouTube has banned that.

"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.

You can constrain your statements to only objectively true things and still be confusing and ambiguous. This is a perfect example of that. It warrants criticism.

I've probably seen this tweet 50 times now in the last week. Before that, not even once. It's easy to criticize now with 3 months of additional information and to cherry pick an instance of a few hundred characters out of all the statements the WHO has made. 99% of the criticism of this tweet that I've seen so far comes nowhere near the nuanced criticism you make here. In aggregate, the level of criticism this tweet has received has not been warranted.

It’s partly because around a week ago we discovered evidence that Chinese leadership was well aware of person to person transmission on the day that tweet was sent.

https://apnews.com/68a9e1b91de4ffc166acd6012d82c2f9

There is a lot that a mission-driven version of the WHO would have done differently. This Zeynep Tufekci piece does a good job of detailing that.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-world...

> This mission-driven WHO would not have brazenly tweeted, as late as January 14, that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.” That claim was false, and known by the authorities in Wuhan to be false.. Taiwan had already told the WHO of the truth too. On top of that, the day before that tweet was sent, there had been a case in Thailand: a woman from Wuhan who had traveled to Thailand, but who had never been to the seafood market associated with the outbreak—which strongly suggested that the virus was already spreading within Wuhan.

I've watched criticism of that tweet since the day they posted it. Luckily Taiwan and HK ignored the WHO. And alot of people in Singapore also ignored and have been wearing masks since Jan.

I was referring to the tweet on human-to-human transmission.

Masks are a different story and I'm aware of the early criticism there. Although I think they provided a fairly reasonable argument for their position, especially given suppy constraints.

I'm referring to the tweet about human-to-human transmission. When that tweet happened it got alot of criticism. And despite the tweet we continued to wear a mask knowing the benefits of doing so.

> They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.

No, they were telling governments for months not to put in place travel bans and not to recommend facemasks. The countries that had the most effective responses are the ones that ignored or literally did the opposite of WHO recommendations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com