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Comment by BurningCycles | Hacker News Reader

>Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic

How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc.

The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question it. The right to question is something we can't give up just to avoid bad actors.

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It looks like you've been caught-up in misinformation as well, as the WHO never said that masks were "worthless" nor that there was "no" human-to-human transmission. Those are distortions of more nuanced and qualified statements by the WHO. You can argue that these more nuanced statements were still harmful, but you're pushing misinformation by claiming the WHO said what you merely think they said.

Claim what you want, but on Jan 14 the WHO stated the following "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🇨🇳."[0]

The nuance is that they were repeating Chinese propaganda.

[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?la...

"no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" is not the same as "no human-to-human transmission"

I don't know how to define what is "misinformation" but I could surely call out a couple examples. Maybe we can figure out what makes them misinformation.

1) 5G causes COVID-19 2) COVID-19 doesn't exist, i.e. it's all a hoax 3) Aquarium cleaning solution is a cure for COVID

I don't know what makes those different from "masks are worthless" but they seem qualitatively different. Maybe for a couple of reasons.

Maybe for #1, there's no plausible mechanism of action linking 5G and covid. But the people claim there is! Using a nested series of faulty reasoning and unreproduceable evidence to back it up.

Maybe for #2, there's no observable evidence that it's a hoax, i.e. people claiming otherwise are doing so with no supporting evidence, only reasoning that they (subjectively) do not trust government or media, therefore their claim is supportable.

But I don't know. I don't think the answer is that it's unknowable (which you may or may not have been getting at).

For me misinformation as a characteristic is a big umbrella, that the discretion for it depends on the measurer. Which makes it an unreliable characteristic to censor content by.

As an example of things that can follow into the misinformation umbrella parody, humour, good/bad science, good/bad journalism, misinterpretation of intent, paranormal reports, religion. It done for the greater good. People have done surgeries in their garage, I can't believe it's from lack of credible information, and that making a general policy from the exception is a sign of a bad design.

Why do you assume that the "powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation" like they do it on purpose?

Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.

They certainly were spreading it on purpose. What's unknown is whether they knew it was misinformation at the time. Perhaps they thought this was a good way to manage supply shocks and keep masks flowing to medical workers. Or perhaps they truly thought masks were useless. That's hard to believe, but not impossible.

But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.

WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.

CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

And the powers that be want to call for violence (and often do) so why do you want to restrict everyone else from doing it?

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