The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis
taibbi.substack.com
taibbi.substack.com
Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered?
What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection?
I find it crazy that we grant those companies so much power simply because they happen to share some of our views.
Perhaps you mean “I”?
You make good points... But, with all due respect, your use of that pronoun evidences a strange collectivist view of the world that may be part of the problem.
Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state?
> What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection?
YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30 years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to be the dominant video hosting platform.
For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it.
> YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores.
This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”?
Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”?
Those models fail when the military puts a machine gun in a sysadmin's face in wartime, regardless of how good or decent their censorship policies were in peacetime. It's the model that's bad, not YouTube's current policies.
That's not an analogous case. YouTube is more like a broadcast medium like TV or radio, and those have never been treated as common carriers. A sexy phone call between two people doesn't affect AT&T's reputation, but pornography hosted on YouTube would affect theirs.
> This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”?
Being taken down from YouTube does not equate to being silenced. There are many other ways you can express your ideas and opinions, especially if you are willing to do so in non-video form.
And the bar to expression on someone else's publishing platform has never only been legal. Every medium has had gatekeepers, generally far more stringent than YouTube's.
> Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”?
I don't see why it should be the responsibility of a for-profit entertainment company to provide hosting for war crimes investigators, any more than I would expect Hulu or Netflix to do the same. It would make far more sense to me for journalists or NGOs or governments to provide a place for people to upload their video evidence. There is no need for them to host it publicly, which is the expensive part of YouTube.
It does not equate to having your free speech violated, but it does equate to being almost silenced. It's akin to a candidate being excluded from the main political debate.
If it's not on the main platforms, it's not on people's feeds. It's not shown by recommendation engines. It's not in Google results. You won't hear about it unless you look for it. We can all agree to censor child pornography, but I feel like we're inching closer and closer to censoring merely controversial opinions.
My point is that a small group of American companies get an immense amount of influence over mainstream culture, since they control most of the internet traffic. It's legal, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
There are some things that are normal in parts of the world, but unacceptable in America, and vice-versa.
There are also some facts different countries disagree with. Should the mainstream internet adopt the American position by default? Should America's terrorists and freedom fighters be Google and Microsoft's too?
A large company that recommends content for a billion users holds significant influence, and that power should not be taken lightly.
It's MS, not Google, but personally I find things like these very wrong and disturbing [1]:
> GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...
The real problem is that YT also influences those social mores. It's a snowballing effect that no one is able to stop. New social trend >> YT starts to promote it >> Becomes social norm >> YT starts to enforce it >> New social trends are able to spawn only from the previous trend.
You might want to keep up this situation as long as it fits your point of view, but you have to take into account that this process will warp this exact point of view in ways that you do not control.
20 years ago the left was synonymous with freedom of choice and individualism, now there are hardly any traces of those values left. Excuse the pun.
If YT always bends to the "popular opinion", then it actually means that it has knee-jerk reactions to the most emotional outbursts. What influences the norm is in reality the base instinct, dopamine fueled, thoughtless reactivity without any plan or purpose.
It does not matter if you will take left or right wing ideology. Platforms like YT are instrumental in making sure that in the end we will get the worst version of it.
How the hell did the left end up in a poistion where they represent the worst mixture of Orwell and Huxley? I have no doubt that it would be near impossible to end at this place without corps capitalising on social moods.
Well it kinda already happened[0] and everyone's ok with that so I guess you have your answer there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#YouTube
But censorship practice is utterly corrupt. It's based on ideological goal-driven thinking, a form of thinking most of us use most of the time (unfortunately). The decisions are made by non-experts who are nameless, faceless and unaccountable. The result is dangerous and divisive.
Experts have a vested interest in protecting the prestige of the knowledge they are expert in. If an upstart comes along with information the obsoletes their ideas - just look at what happened to Galileo or any number of other people.
And note, that an expert doesn't even have to be wrong to be wrong. What I mean by this is that an expert in epidemiology may be completely correct from that point of view, but that viewpoint does not include all of the other fields of expertise that might be relevant when making decisions at a national level. Tunnel vision is a crazy thing, and causes normally smart people to do silly things.
“The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently... Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority.
...Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you, in potentia, are making a rod for your own back.”
Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and what they don't.
I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.
It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then.
Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents.
That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today.
My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom.
Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow.
I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?
I was talking with my mother last week and she had never heard of bitcoin.
She is on facebook literally all day but had not even heard the word bitcoin before.
She is just clueless. She wouldn't even begin to be able to understand this debate.
Even so, that's a totally LMGTFY thing, no?
But it's really not a difficult concept. Just ask someone their position on some contentious issue. And then ask them how they'd react to being blocked from posting about that on Facebook or whatever.
But yes, cutting greenhouse gas emissions would also be prudent.
But at least you can have media that don't enforce filter bubbles.
Not saying it isn't possible to do something like this right but I think it would need to be done very carefully, because IMO it could also make things worse than just having an aggregator that is up front biased in a particular way.
I remember voting for John Kerry, then Obama, and thinking how the liberals were the party that valued individual liberties over maintaining order via social control.
I never thought in my wildest dreams that Trump winning in 2016 would trigger a movement of mass censorship from the party who I thought was on the side of the people.
It's soul crushing. All over a theory that people actually changed their votes over troll posted news articles, with no evidence that voters actually did this after seeing said articles.
Sure, but that's only possible with systems where censorship is possible. Consider Freenet. It's ancient code, but it's arguably impossible to censor. Even to censor what's being stored on your local machine. But unfortunately, there's no anonymity, and users are readily discovered and arrested.
The source of this worry is that we could lose our democracy to what Neil Stephenson calls the Miasma.
I really think Neil Stephenson captured this brilliantly year ahead of time in his idea of the Miasma.
That's the thing: there have been systems like that in place for decades (Freenet, I2P, Tor). Nobody uses them. Why? Because most people are actually depressingly pro-censorship. Even YouTube's censorship could be trivially broken if a plurality of people opposed it: if everybody just flagged every video on YouTube, they'd have to give up on policing them. You can't oppress people without overwhelming consent, and it's clear that the majority of us do consent.
My dad has fallen into the sway of fox news and the people who peddle conspiracies via forwarded email chains (obama did this or that terrible thing, chloroquine will save me from covid-19). He used be a leader of 1000 people in a company, he was an electrical engineer. He's old but its terribly sad to see him there. He'd be better off if he didn't get exposed to all these things. In his case he has heart problems and when I forwarded him an article from a doctor about the interaction of chloroquine with people with issues like this he said it was a lie from a democrat who wanted covid-19 to destroy the president.
He stopped trusting the newspaper in his town because it doesn't talk about these conspiracies he hears about. It does matter that real journalists have the ability to talk about things that are uncomfortable to powerful people, have the freedom and capability to do things. And there have always been people pushing the conspiracy stories to explain things away. The new thing is how much damage the big lie can get today.
But the point is that some may be true. It's not all or nothing.
However, it's important to keep in mind that stupidity and recklessness are generally more likely than malice and conspiracy.
One of the interesting aspects of this censorship is that is taking places in the US is that it probably is taking down mostly misleading information. The main issue with it is that no one actually knows that much, and so whichever faction of experts is most influential or savvy or popular gets to dictate the so-called consensus. That being said, while I still vehemently disagree with censorship, I don't think there is immense harm in taking down a video that advocates, say, psychic consultation to prevent COVID.
Once a culture becomes a censorship culture, the calculus changes. While right now in America, the effort appears to mostly be an attempt to weed out information that these experts believe is untrue, we have seen that in China, the censorship explicitly weeds out information that is true. The so-called conspiracy theory about the virus leaking from either the Wuhan CDC or the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November that has since been corroborated in multiple Western mainstream publications was discovered mostly due to Chinese officials engaging in fairly heavy-handed censorship. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was scrubbed of information about one particular young woman who was working as an intern there, and has been named as a possible "patient zero." A paper released by researchers at the South China University of Technology also suggested the Wuhan CDC as a probable point of origin, and this was also scrubbed by Chinese Communist Party censors. Every instance of this is like a canary for lies being propagated by the CCP. And they have helped astute Western observers of China find the trail of the truth just by looking at differences in what has been censored without a trace.
This is why I am so opposed to censorship (and torture and deplatforming and partisan violence and the list goes on): every time it becomes a regular tool, it becomes twisted only in a way to serve those in power and punish their enemies, often when the authorities are spreading lies and their enemies are daring to tell the truth.
For what it's worth, I do seek out "opposing information" (is that a bit like "alternative facts?"). Much of it has been fairly non-credible because it seems to change frequently, more like whiplash. For example, the CCP has made a big show of shutting down the wet markets, only to allow them to reopen quietly, despite neither bats nor pangolins, the likely carriers of SARS-Cov-2 to humans, being sold at the wet market in Wuhan.
If you're trying to convince people not to take me seriously, or are trying to convince me of that as well, then would it not be simpler (and cost fewer downvotes) to point to the errors in facts I present or my reasoning?
I don't have time to "school" you in everything, because you wrote so much that was wrong that I don't have time to. That's literally the whole point of a gish gallop: it takes 10x more words to refute bullshit than to state it.
While I'm having my morning coffee let me do a few:
> the CCP has made a big show of shutting down the wet markets, only to allow them to reopen quietly
This is completely wrong, because it mixes up wet markets (which literally mean any market that doesn't only sell dry goods, and which also exist throughout Asia, in Europe, and even in the US, and are far less weird than you've been told: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whbyuy2nHBg ), and the exotic wildlife trade. The latter was shut down, and remains shut down. The former have never been shut down, because it's where people get their groceries.
> The Wuhan Institute of Virology was scrubbed of information about one particular young woman who was working as an intern there, and has been named as a possible "patient zero."
If you actually read the complete evidence that Project "Evidence" gives for this, it is:
1. There was a graduate student at WIV that graduated 5 years ago (as graduate students do)
2. There was once a rumor on Chinese social media that this person was patient zero, but absolutely no reason given why that would be the case (and obviously, Chinese social media is just as unreliable as social media everywhere else)
3. This graduate student has not recently made any dramatic public appearances or viral social media posts (because why would they)
4. This graduate student is no longer on the lab website (this is completely normal; they would only remain 5 years after graduating if the lab managers forgot to keep updating the site)
That pretty much sounds like zero evidence to me. But how do they summarize it?
> Would it really be impossible for the Chinese government to get in touch with her and have her issue an in-person statement to the media? It would only be impossible if she was dead.
I mean, forget about how weird this demand is — it’s negotiating with China as it they were the Borg. Even if the demand were in good faith, does that sound like a document aiming to find the truth? Or is it just trying to make a series of low-evidence claims sound maximally sinister? Are you really the kind of person who falls for this?
> conspiracy theory [...] has since been corroborated in multiple Western mainstream publications
Not the ones I've read, and I've read plenty. This is a massive claim with no evidence.
I don't really put much stock into the idea that this particular woman was patient zero. But it doesn't exactly matter.
A better example would have been a case everyone knows about and that is uncontroversial: that of Dr. Li Wenliang. He told the truth that the virus was a coronavirus and probably similar to the original SARS virus, but it was inconvenient to the state, and so he was hauled in by the police for "making false comments on the Internet."
If I amended my initial comment and simply used the uncontroversial case of Dr. Li, rather than discussions about the WCDC or Wuhan Institute of Virology, I think it stands to reason that I would not have been accused of "Gish galloping" (thank you for teaching me a new phrase, by the way).
Not that you'll believe it, but I really had no intention of overwhelming you or anyone else with rumors as a distraction; I was trying to add a couple of examples to illustrate An asymmetry between American and Chinese censorship.
Damn. Taibbi's not looking to make this debate any calmer, is he?
The erosion of free speech is outrageous. Outrage is called for.
When the government starts to mandate what information can and cannot be shared, that is where I draw the line.
What confuses the issue is that the government and big corporations appear to be slowly merging into one elite, ruling body. Not sure how to solve the issue when the lines become more and more blurred.
Independent, peer to peer social media, for example, “dark web”, or just plain old WWW / Gopher /forums discovered without the private search platforms.
On one level, it isn’t that there aren’t public platforms, it’s that the market for public speech is a niche market that isn’t really bought into by the public.
And the government might do it to sell goodwill to the users, imagine having "This search engine is provided to you by Elbonia. Click here to learn more about Elbonia. Click here to find flights to Elbonia" at the bottom of every search result page.
Those are still private platforms. With enough pressure you can get an ISP to cancel someones service, or get a domain service/hosting provider to cancel them, etc, etc.
Would we stand for it if the local electric monopoly started pulling the plug on abortion clinics? On churches?
A monopoly gets limited discretion in exchange for the monopoly.
And we aren’t the customer — the advertisers are. I don’t think they’re bothered one bit by all this.
This is already in process, 48 states are investigating Google today. Support it. Support lawmakers who support it.
More broadly a very large wave of antitrust reform is badly needed in the United States and this is a good place to start. The United States needs free and competitive markets that aren't controlled by illegal monopolies.
One of the benefits of free and competitive markets will be that there will be more companies promoting more platforms, but these companies will be less powerful. Then it won't be such a big deal if one of them decides to censor a certain type of content.
The answer is to support and elect representatives who will enforce the law against these lawbreaking companies.
Searching now, everything looks normal.
I assume it was the result of an automated filter seeing a bunch of bad actors posting about the topic, rather than a conscious action, but it was interesting seeing how inaccessible the information became, at the time.
One more time: “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,”
Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed,
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-pro...
... on a private platform, so? I hate censorship also, but the more these major platforms do this, the more people will begin to recognize there are alternatives. They're shooting themselves in their own foot, and I for one, am happy to stand back and let them do so.
> Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type
Genuinely curious, does anyone know what insinuation is being made here? What does it mean to be of "the Aspen Institute" type?
Couple that with the "self-styled intellectual elites" comment, and I think the idea is that of a group of self-anointed bright people who are out to change the world by sitting around and talking on other peoples' dime, and feeling smug in the process, while actually doing nothing that matters.
But I'm not the author, and I'm just looking stuff up about the Aspen Institute, so this is just (slightly informed) guesswork.
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-win...
Both are just an oligarchic circle jerk.
The problems are simply wealth inequality and the size of corporations. This is what's new and unproven.
At the end he writes, "From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy..."
Does taking down a video of a couple of charlatans, "stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed"? I don't see how at all, maybe I'm missing something about why this has upset Taibbi so much. Other than, maybe anything that involves Google/Facebook playing a role in removing content from the Internet will just make him mad, regardless of the issue at hand.
> The comments section was filled with interesting discussion (I'd say as many against as for, but I didn't count). It gave people a public sphere. The point by point dissection of the doctors' presentation by many commenters expanded understanding. Many of the commenters provided refutation and data analysis. Taking the presentation down ended the discussion.
> The rush to censor is fearful. At least the Erickson and Massahi video provided (for a brief few days) a forum where people of different viewpoints engaged each other.
I haven't read any previous thread on this issue. Just from your comment, it appears that discussion of this issue is absolutely alive and well - we are discussing it right here!
The question of balance between physical and economic health has hardly been suppressed - governors, mayors and public health officials across the country are engaging in it every day and are being quoted in major news outlets regularly.
I too wish, like Taibbi, that we didn't have a left/right media where everyone takes a particular side and vilifies the others, but while that points to a decay in journalistic decorum, I don't see how it qualifies as censorship and suppression of free speech.
If I want to know how conservatives feel, I read the WSJ and listen to Fox News. For middle-of-the-road liberals, NYT and NPR. To get mad about rich people, Red Rose Twitter. It's all out there, completely uncensored!
In the face of all this abundance, I continue to be mystified at Taibbi's rage about this one particular video, whose purveyors have suspect motives to boot. Like, if I was a lawyer trying to make a case, this wouldn't be one of my top witnesses.
As to the discussion here, mind that it is not the discussion that was and may have been there, but a meta discussion on this discussion. The particular discussion is gone, with no traces left.
Regarding bipartisan divides, mind that I am located rather far away from the US (as may be guessed from the previous context, in Europe). However, the big platforms, which have established some kind of oligopoly for virtual assembly, while mostly located in the US, are of global concern and shaping discussions and chances for them happening at all in a global manner. Politics are derailing all over the world, with regard to a second half of the 20th century context, and there's no obvious answer in place. However, inhibiting virtual assembly by silencing those controversial sparks, which may ignite them, probably isn't the way. At best, it may just further the divide. (On the other hand, having a "spark free", homogeneous conversation is probably much in the commercial interest of anyone selling targeted advertising along with providing the very platform for this conversation.) Free speech in a lonely, homogeneous (echo) chamber, maybe in company of a few friends, who are consenting anyway, isn't what free speech ought to about in a political sense. It's more than a right to verbalize.
He’s pointing out a disturbing trend, if you are pro democracy and pro freedom of speech. What’s wrong with that?
Not everyone believes in democracy / freedom of speech, but these two things go hand in hand.
You can’t have democracy without freedom of speech and vice versa.
The disturbing trend towards censorship is the first step towards totalitarianist dictatorships. A lot of people will argue this state is “inevitable” but resisting the urge towards tyranny is an ongoing fight.
Freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to a presence on someone else's platform.
Freedom of speech protects you from oppression of your voice from the government, and even then it's heavily qualified to disallow incitement and such.
As far as I can tell there is no violation at all. In fact, I applaud the non-government organizations taking on the absolutely critical and necessary act of moderating their platforms, they should be doing it vastly more than they are.
The whole point of the internet is you can go and put up your own thing. Thinking the Googles and Facebooks have an obligation to amplify your voice no matter what you say is asinine and flat out wrong.
If platforms were responsible for what they actually distribute there would be fewer of these mega platforms and the world would be dramatically better off for it.
Let these doctors put their own video on their own website on their own computers. If ISPs decided to censor that then I'll start to see your side because ISP choice is limited at least in part by government restriction.
But even then, the constitution doesn't ever mention the internet or anything like it. These people can all go out in public and say what they like still.
They have not had any rights violated.
To quote a Star Wars movie, "this is how democracies die, with thunderous applause".
These platforms are monopolies due to network effects. You know that. When someone says that they're going to shut down Facebook post for organizing protests, they're not motivated to not have the posting be present. Their motivation is to prevent the protest from happening in the actual physical space. Politicians have pressured these platforms to do this.
Again the agenda isn't to remove offensive content. The agenda is controlling the public. If that doesn't disturb you then you don't really get it.
I don't intend to chastise Taibbi at all. I am a fan of much of what he writes - I share his disdain for the journalistic class as a whole, and I like that he gets so mad about stuff.
However, I do chastise his tone and direction with this essay. This essay in itself doesn't convince me that "freedom of speech" is at peril, nor do I think it is, now more so than previously in the United States. And Taibbi's style and targets isn't convincing me otherwise at all. What are the markers of a trend away from free speech? How is there more government suppression of private opinion now than 10, 20, 30, whatever years ago? I have really heard no convincing argument, though I have read and heard dozens of alarmist critiques that focus on this campus protest and that YouTube video personality, without making a strong argument that these are systematic, government-led, erasures of minority opinions.
"With the best leaders / When the work is finished / The people all say / We did it ourselves." ~Tao Te Ching
https://rsf.org/en/news/time-magazine-censored-twice-over-co...
I always remember these things but never take heed because it just doesn’t happen much in the West.
Look up some magazines you know of and see what countries censored them and why. You’ll see how benign some of the triggers are.
It’s the benign censorship that will catch up to us.
My comment will never be seen. I'm not allowed to speak openly about m o d eration here.
I pose the question, to which I don't actually know the answer, were the people who decided they were charlatans better qualified than the two doctors in question? More than stamping out discussion, I don't see how YouTube can authoritatively enforce their own guidelines. They lack the the technical competence to make consistently good decisions.
And yes this stamps out the issues that need to be discussed. The censors will be working on behalf of the 'don't do anything that might cause panic' types who were offering consistently bad advice until this pandemic was completely out of control. Possibly even clamping down on 'racists' who supported border closures and quarantines early when that would have helped. The 'shut down the borders now' types would all have been censored under this policy if it were in place 6 months ago and we'd all be sitting around arguing questions like 'could this risk have been foreseen' rather than 'why weren't the people who saw this coming taken credibly' which is a much more important question.
If we are censoring things on behalf of the UN we might also end up asking other questions, like 'why are you talking like Taiwan is independent of China?'. YouTube have started to enter dangerous territory using government agencies as a source of truth. Government is known to lie and mislead people from time to time, such as during press conferences or when politicians are involved.
Yes.
“If only me or my group of people I like controlled everything, we would achieve the utopia!” -> mindset that leads to totalitarianism
Truth is that it takes a really evolved mindset to support the two party state. A lot of people don’t get this. You actually have to want to stand for people who you might hate, or at least disagree with.
When people stop protecting the views of people they disagree with / think are stupid, that’s when we descend into tyranny.
I also take it you are one of the people with a "really evolved mindset"?
> COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of AAEM and ACEP are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. AAEM and ACEP strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
Having watched the video, the main things that actually stuck with me was when they mentioned the impact of isolation on the community. Explicitly he mentions how molestation, spousal abuse were "up" and suicides were "spiking", and that for those affected by these problems "will be with them forever rather than a season". He asked the question, at what cost does a few deaths outweigh all these other social issues?
The other impact that isolation had (according to the Drs) is that it weakens your immune system. One of their arguments is that a few months could have a devastating effect on the immune system of healthy people and they were worried about the effects on the hospital system when isolation ended several months down the road.
Whether or not the Drs have ulterior motives on re-openinig their hospitals, shouldn't be a primo cause of calling someone a 'charlatan'.
They also explicitly mention how West Coast and East Coast was very different.
They were very explicit in mentioning how isolation was a correct course of action: Initially the virus was unknown & there was fear of it's effects and that all they had were models available. They cited sources that changed their projections downwards significantly just a few days after initial projections were released (I forget exactly who 'they' were)
They were explicit in mentioning that the data was now available on the spread rates and the death rates.
They also mentioned how the Drs everywhere were being encouraged to add cv19 as a cause of death to issues of "Co-morbidity". That is, in their experience, that all the deaths they saw were with people with serious health issues already. Again, they were ok in mentioning how East and West were different.
They also mentioned how Lowes was open, but a coffee shop was closed, which to them made no sense.
So, I while I understand that other Drs might be mortified by the testament made in the video, people should have the right to be heard. At the worst, it certainly made for interesting viewing while isolating!
60,000 deaths in just the USA and counting. That guy needs to revise what 'few' means.
> people should have the right to be heard.
That is an oversimplification of the situation. To allow videos to mislead the public into thinking that there has been just a 'few' deaths may cause more harm. Like screaming fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire is wrong, the same applies to call over 60,000 deaths 'few'. It's a lie and it is a harmful one.
To be clear, however, I don't believe censorship is the right approach. Although, since YouTube is a private company, they should be able to do what they want.
Edit: Here's a link to the video: https://www.bitchute.com/video/WLp53rpJ2B7i/
With all due respect to Taibbi as an outstanding Journalist, in making that statement, he employed the flawed “crash course in relying on the opinions of others” he illustrated in the beginning of the article.
From my own experience, I have been unable to engage in meaningful discussion about economic impact or death rates associated with poverty with anyone. It’s either “fu reopen now” or “are you crazy you selfish murderer?”.
The most concerning discussion I had was with a friend who is County Counsel in one of the Big 6 NorCal Counties that initiated the first lockdown. He’s writing the orders but not setting policy. I asked him why we aren’t talking about opening non-essential businesses with social distancing? He said “the medical experts haven’t green lit that yet”. So I further inquired “are there any economists or sociologists at the table”. He said no. When I said “poverty has a death rate too”, his response was “that’s just a Trump talking point”. I made sure he understood I had read a study by Columbia University in 2001 when unemployment was 4%, and they pinned the death toll from poverty at about 3x the current CV-19 death toll.
Like, I said he’s not setting policy but this type of blindness based on politics mentioned by Taibbi is very apparent to me with the lack of experts other than medical experts at the policy making table. That’s pretty fucking scary to me when at a time like this we need to remain objective. To analyze data. To consider all conclusions may be incorrect or may not be as optimal as others. And bottom line, if the goal is to save lives, then the death toll of the disease must be weighed against the death toll of any mitigations.
And now here we are at these silly extremes on opening versus keeping everything locked down. Neither of which are remotely reasonable.
I'm lucky that I live in Colorado. unlike a lot of the Democratic politicians in other parts of the country Colorado has a tradition of business savvy leaders. Our governor has been excellent on this so far and very balanced in my opinion. He has definitely been consulting with business leaders because he consulted with my CTO and this was clearly a long laundry list of meetings that day with various business leaders.
I do think it's crazy to view this either 100% through public health or 100% through economic health. There has to be a balance.
What I know for sure is that the full lockdowns are not sustainable. Things that aren't sustainable aren't going to work for very long. That's the definition of unsustainable.
Really really frightening to hear that a government official in charge of so many people viewed research out of Columbia as a Trump talking point. WTF.
Actually, that part of what he said I disagreed with the most vehemently. His logic in that paragraph is very hard to follow - it goes:
1. "Experts get things wrong for reasons that are innocent." Okay, absolutely agree with the premise.
2. "Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process". Hm, okay, I agree that "automated fact checking" is a chimera, at least in the journalistic sense, but these examples are about opinions based on models, not "checking of facts." So already I am losing Taibbi in what his thread is about
3. "“Authorities” by their nature are untrustworthy." Is this a new premise? It sounds somewhat axiomatic - are we supposed to believe it follows from the flaw of "expert innocence"? Or should we believe it because Taibbi says so? Now I am starting to feel like I've been bait-and-switched. We have gone from innocent experts, to untrustworthy ones, a real escalation of rhetoric.
4. And then the conclusion: "“Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades." -> Again, this sounds like a brand new premise that drags in the state of the journalism industry into the picture, plus a specific announcement by some large tech companies. What in the previous paragraphs prepared me to believe this? Who are these "independent, less-well known sources" that have entered the picture, and why are they implicitly being cast as the "good guys" in this picture?
Do I put this together and try to believe that innocent experts, who became untrustworthy, decided to shut out more trustworthy people by erecting credentialing barriers in the profession to disguise their untrustworthiness, having made a devil's bargain with large digital media companies? That meanwhile the truth is to be found among others whose chief qualification is that they are not as well known, and/or are "independent"?
And his poster child for this angel of democracy is two doctors with suspect motives, running a clinic somewhere in the middle of California?
This really feels like a post facto conspiracy theory that works as a Michael Crichton plot. I love Taibbi, thoroughly enjoyed Insane Clown President, loathe the Clinton machine as much as he does, and yet, what he does with this essay totally feels like he went off the rails somehow.
3. I agree its not justified to say all authorities by their nature are untrustworthy, and that was an escalation of rhetoric. But I would say this though, that “authorities” (in scare quotes) are untrustworthy if they are claiming to be authorities but don’t have any merit. So in some sense, we ought to be sceptical of anyone who claims to be an authority.
I didn’t read this as a conspiracy. There are many incentives at play, probably too many things to grasp and points like 4 that come out of nowhere (may have some significance, but didn’t fit into the argument well).
Theses doctors aren’t the poster child for democracy. I don’t think anyone’s claiming they are. Personally I think they were just in the right place at the right time to become a part of this censorship war.
Overall I think your criticisms are fair.
He then goes on to point out how often the experts on these things that the media references are completely wrong either willfully or structurally. He cites numerous examples in just the last few years of this including the WMD fiasco where a bunch of journalists and all the experts were just certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Or the Russiagate narrative which was a very specific set of allegations which were all proven to be false. He hates Trump, but he's not a partisan and therefore was capable of seeing wishful thinking and groupthink in action.
The most horrifying aspect of this article was the fact that lawyers are now writing op eds in the Atlantic advocating for Chinese style censorship in the United States. I never my wildest dreams thought I would see this happen in my country. The fact that it's coming from people on the left is a gut punch.
I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist environment where I was all constantly told what words I was allowed to use and what I couldn't. Saying lucky was discouraged strongly. We were blessed instead. This control of speech had a purpose which was to control how you think. It's awful and it's evil. And now the party I've always voted for has decided that that's the way to go. Yesterday Adam Schiff the Democratic congressman who is in charge of the house intelligence committee yet again sent a notice to the big tech companies telling them they needed to censor more of this.
I don't know what to do or say at this point. I just know that if the cost of freedom of speech is that sometimes the masses do dumb things I'd rather live with that than be told what I can and can't say.
At its core, is this not fundamentally true? Not that this makes for a justification, but it is an explanation.
AFAICT, every single President of the past four decades would have handled COVID-19 better. They still would have been full of warm air, but at the very least they would have deferred to advisers. This one has been actively undermining any reasoned approach, including intelligent debate about how some of the current measures go too far, by drowning it out with cheap bullheaded ignorance.
Leaders drawn from an ordained political class get us status quo sustained corruption, but also create predictability when responding to a shared crisis. From a systematic perspective, whereby we all rely on having things administered adequately, there does appear to have been too much democracy.
This is the issue:
Highly intelligent people disagree on things all the time, because human cognitive capacity is so limited in it's ability to assimilate massive quantities of information. We all have filters on all the time to keep from draining our daily limit of cognitive energy, blinding us to most of reality in a way we aren't aware of.
I'm a lifelong Democratic voter, but Trump, for example, has handled certain issues much better than people I voted for in the past would have. Holding China accountable, and the WHO as well, are small examples. (Being an asshole who doesn't care how you are perceived can have advantages) Bigger examples are trade policies. He basically has a classic Bernie Sanders attitude to American manufacturing (unfortunately it comes with Trump himself......).
The point is that elitist thinking, that the population can't be trusted, is the hallmark of every authoritarian regime in history. It certainly is the justification. You can't have it both ways.
Being anti-authoritarian, I certainly was not making my point as a justification. But our society is based heavily on authoritarian structures, and viewed objectively by its function, it has failed by electing not just a self-interested looter but rather someone who is actively self-destructive. If the political outsider had been kept out, the position would have been filled by someone who worked with the system to accomplish goals, and with a nonpartisan health crisis this would have been objectively beneficial.
Id highly recommend googling for the follow up to this story for the curious out there.
The entire piece mostly consists of personal attacks. On elites who are allegedly all corrupt and untrustworthy. On journalists who don't really know anything, and it conjures up an image of all elites only holding the positions they hold because they think of everyone else as if they were unwashed masses.
It's hard to have a serious discussion when that's the premise that the argument is built on. There is no serious discussion on the dangers of false information, what merit there may be to delegating decision making to experts in particular in a crisis like this (I for once have more trust in Fauci than Trump to be honest, and I think many people would agree).
It's almost comical in a way that a piece that asks for more free speech so vehemently attacks people who exercise their free speech to question something that really matters, whether the foundations that the United States are built on are correct. We can and should have free speech about absolutely everything, except of course the merits of free speech and the American constitution, which is timeless, self-evident, and made by god.
During the 2008 financial crisis in the U.S., he channeled left-leaning outrage against banks and financial institutions a la Occupy Wall Street.
More recently he's tapping into right-leaning outrage against the media, experts, and Trump opponents a la the "alt-right". See for example in this piece:
> In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
This is basically a 180 degree turn from a-decade-ago Matt Taibi, who worked in the show business news media (Rolling Stone) and got famous for aggressively wagging his finger at people.
This last decade has, it seems to me, seen quite a rise in hysterical cultism on both major sides of the American political spectrum.
In the last twenty years, a motivated political establishment executed a fraudulent war, with most of the media either being complicit or negligent. Within the same era, you had a financial establishment that concocted economic fraud that was akin to a financial terrorist attack that literally collapsed the economy. Again, the media/press was mostly complicit or negligent as it happened, and the political establishment was mostly unwilling to administer criminal justice in the aftermath.
So, that’s roughly two bullshit wars, and economic collapse due to deliberate fraud on a massive scale, all wrapped up in a package of negligent media coverage, and zero justice.
These institutions don’t deserve respect at the moment. It will take a long time to reestablish integrity on their part. I understand if you find this general attitude snobbish, distasteful, and pretentious, which is fine, you may be more polite than the rest of us.
But the premise is not inaccurate.
What I find especially funny is the political class's persecution complex on this point. For all intents and purposes, the "experts" and their enablers in media and government are still calling a good 98% of the shots, but just losing that last 2% has sent them into fits of finger-pointing rage.
And what person, in all of the USA, would you nominate to be the arbiter of truth? Who decides, then, what is false information and what is true?
“Leave it to the experts”, you might say, “What is false is what Fauci et al says is false.”
And you may be right, but recall that the US still has a military presence in the Middle East due to the “expert opinions” of our intelligence agencies that Hussein had WMDs.