The war on disinformation is a war on dissent
humanevents.com
humanevents.com
A certain amount of mis- and disinformation, manipulation, falsely raised expectations (e.g., if masks do not stop CV19 dead in the track, it's also not a viable tool of mitigation), etc, is to be expected. A certain amount of dissent is vital to a thriving society, as opposed to a slow descent into dogmatism. A certain amount of dysfunctionality is actually functional to societies. However, if we are losing a common point of reference and the discussion turns from an ever varying problem space towards questioning and problematizing consent per se, society itself is at stake, as partitioning and claims to rightful dominance by one side or the other are inevitable. Dealing with this is not a matter of free speech, even, if suppression of free speech may be empirically observed as an – mostly failed – attempt to address this. It's actually more connected to the question, what speaking freely actually means: Is it to enter into or to contribute to a discussion, or is it a means of claiming dominance? In other words, does the address include those who do not share the specific set of believes and points of reference of the speaker, or does it exclude and/or ignore them, by this turning into an hermetic or even radical argument, meant only to augment the position of the speaker? Is it still pervasive, or has this turned into a hegemonial discourse? If it's the latter, it's not about manufacturing consent anymore, but about establishing a new, biased one, probably by force.
Do you have an actual specific example of this happening? I can't think of a single time I've heard someone say "I refuse to agree with the prevailing consensus simply because" as opposed to "I find the prevailing consensus mistaken in such-and-such ways and so I disagree with it."
We need to find a way to fundamentally change the incentives in media, change the public’s expectation of separating opinion versus news, and remove the cancer(s) of “think tanks” that only serve to undermine and destroy.
“When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” Dr. Fauci said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
-- source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/24/health/herd-immunity-covi...
It's up to you to decide whether that makes him an asshole or not, but I think the fact that he's discussing it with reporters says a lot about his transparency and honesty all by itself.
I’ve had leaders that misrepresented facts in order to obtain compliance, as Fauci has, and leaders that were honest with me. I know which I prefer and I know which is considered ethical.
He’s clearly saying he changed his statement based on the compliance of the population and not medical research. He misrepresented the medical consensus as to what percentage of the population would need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity.
If he's willing to lie about that, what else is he lying about?
"In the pandemic’s early days, Dr. Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did. About a month ago, he began saying “70, 75 percent” in television interviews. And last week, in an interview with CNBC News, he said “75, 80, 85 percent” and “75 to 80-plus percent.”"
"In a telephone interview the next day, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks."
The problem Dr. Fauci and other scientist have is if they share their opinions and then evidence comes out that makes them change their opinions, they have people who will call them liars and pull quotes out of context. But, this is exactly how science works.
> the average person starts to distrust the "science"
Unfortunately the average person doesn't understand science and that is why they distrust it. I still see people citing papers relating SARS1 is killed by hydroxychlorqine in vitro, ignoring all the papers describing RCTs in vivo dealing with SARS2.
That isn’t to say he should be vigilant when he speaks to be accurate, but sometimes advisement needs to be done before all the data is there.
“We need to have some humility here,” he added. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Herd immunity is also a moving target based on a lot of factors. Hopefully it doesn't reach measles level requirement.
If you’re massaging your answers to questions based on what people want to hear, you better hope they don’t find out.
So it’s really an educated guess, and he took a lower estimate. People don’t do well with ranged and errors— just look at how stocks move based upon whether they beat or not their analyst estimates in quarterly reports… they almost always are within the range stipulated but people pick the middle value and hold everything to it.
None of this would cause me to characterize him as untrustworthy. We need far more Faucis in this world.
Is it all a plan, another kind of elaborate conspiracy? Nothing so elegant. As Steve Bannon kindly told us, the informational strategy of the Trump era has always been to “flood the zone with shit.” Four years later, we can see what this looks like in practice.
It makes no sense, and that’s just fine by the likes of Bannon, and Kenney as well. Because if you want to keep waging war on the Earth’s life-supporting ecology, a great way to do it is to deliberately pollute its democracy-supporting information ecology. In fact, the pollution is the point.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/08/great-reset-conspiracy/
There is no we here. I do not believe in the things you believe in.
from Anthem by Ayn Rand
We understand why he did it, there was an absolute crisis of PPE and there was fear that medical staff wouldn’t be able to get any masks because of regular folks hoarding.
That’s fine. No one is denying that he’s a very smart, well-intentioned health scientist doing his absolute best to help the country.
But don’t pretend he didn’t say what he said.
He said it on 60 Minutes, and he explained why he said it months later to the Washington Post.
Here’s the real problem — despite his good intentions, when people in authority tell you that they had, or perhaps still have to, lie to you “for your own good” — that’s not a hallmark of a free society. That is the hallmark of an authority which considers the public a problem to be dealt with and it dissolves trust.
And a quick google shows this:
https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-doesnt-regret-advising...
If was stupid anyway. “Masks don’t work and also we need them for healthcare workers.” Did anyone actually believe this?
So it’s a complex issue. I do support mask wearing in public. It certainly doesn’t do any harm and I think it encourages good habits and makes people think about what they do and why. I suspect if they are effective, at least some of that effectiveness comes from those peripheral effects. Still, every little helps.
Very simplistic statement. What is “in public”? How is touching a mask (and therefore your face) constantly a guaranteed win? Why has the virus not raged incredibly in locations with fewer mask mandates? Would it make more sense to require masks “in private” where people are in closer contact? Requiring them outside “in public” where people are spaced out is symbolic and authoritarian; it makes people like you feel better. Hardly a reason for a policy.
You mean a location like the entire US? It has raged incredibly. Don't fool yourself into thinking anywhere in the US, mask mandate or not, actually has a high rate of mask usage.
The only way to do any sort of comparison would be the US versus another country which actually follows a mask mandate. Even then, the comparisons are hard because those countries likely did lots of things right.
> Requiring them outside “in public”
Yes, masks outside are dumb in many situations. But, this was in direct response to people just moving their large parties outside with no distance. Unfortunately any time a rule is not spelled out in great detail, people look for loopholes as a form of protest. Ironically, this leads to rules spelled out in symbolic and authoritarian ways.
it just reflects how the ruling class view the peasants.
This to me resonates with what happened in France during 2020. Many were complaining about how the government was treating the people "like babies" instead of treating them "like adults". Nothing came up related to the "rich vs poor" strife which, usually, comes up very, very quickly here.
I think this whole crisis shed some light on the communication skills required from the various authorities. I sympathise with people not liking to be treated like kids, I don't either. But then, looking at people's actual behavior [0], it did make me wonder what the actual, correct, communication should have been.
It's clear to me that "the people" is not one homogenous blob made of identical individuals. People will interpret a message differently and will behave differently when faced with the same exact situation. I guess the whole difficulty of this is that the government and various authorities implicated in managing this crisis can't have the message wrapped in different packages, each targeted to a certain group of people.
---
[0] I'm thinking of an episode in early March 2020, right before the lockdown, when the message was "let's all try to take measures to prevent the spread, namely let's stop all bunching up". This was a message from the President, broadcast on public TV, at the time one of the most widely viewed ones. Can't remember the day, but it was during the week. The very next Sunday, so less than one week later, people swarmed the parks in Paris with no attempt whatsoever at distancing.
Was everyone out there? Of course not. Was it even a majority? I don't know, probably not. But those same people would then take public transportation with hundreds of thousands of other people to go to work with other people and so on. All when we were concerned about a virus that was easily spreading through air.
You are being idealistic. Even if 99,99% of americans would not hoard masks, the remaining 0,01% could hoard virtually all of the supply. I don't believe you genuinely believe that literally every single american would "not hoard masks when asked to".
I'll be happy to take your word for this if you want to confirm "yes" you actually believe this. Otherwise I will assume you don't actually believe this, you were just throwing rhetoric around.
As well, the aspect of HCW shortages, while real, inverts the "front line" of the pandemic to be in the clinics and ICUs and not ordinary gatherings. Prevent spread in the latter and you won't need so much of the former.
Fauci also made a mess of AIDS too, so his track record with public health is...questionable.
To these I would say:
1. Public health officials start out more trusted than controversial politicians, but they don’t have many die-hards who will just believe no matter what either. So, someone like Fauci has more to lose from being dishonest. I don’t think we can conclude that because Trump “got away with it” that Fauci can too.
And even if he were as impervious to criticism on this front as Trump, 40% of people trusting someone in his position wouldn’t be nearly good enough.
2. I’m not sure about this one. I think Trump got a lot of (completely deserved) criticism for being mendacious. It’s true that some of the people who always gave him a pass criticize Fauci for dishonesty, but what are you donna do? People are hypocrites. I think more people would trust public health experts if they were more honest, and that’s all that matters to me.
The fact is though, people are willing to accept being lied to by people they otherwise view favourably. For example a lot of the people decrying Fauci as a liar support Trump, who at the beginning of the pandemic was telling a journalist in private how the coronavirus was deadly and more dangerous than the worst flus, but in public at the same time was saying it was a hoax and nothing to worry about, and obstructing efforts to prepare for it.
People will choose the truths they care about. That’s why integrity in public life is so important. I don’t think it can be an absolute in practice, politicians, even scientists are only human. But there must be a cost to knowingly deceiving the public, and there must be contrition, it can never be considered an acceptable practice. It can never be good enough to just point to an ideological opponent and say, well, they do it too. That’s not an argument.
In the current political climate lying and wilful deception have become normalised. That has to stop, as an urgent priority. Democracy relies on the electorate making informed decisions, and that system is compromised if they are being mislead and manipulated.
After watching the results in Australia and China, I think they do.
I disagree. The people being called anti-science and liars are not asking the second question at all, but instead wanting to act like there is no virus. Big difference.
Truly asking the second question, which everyone else seems to ask and evaluate constantly, is what gradient of lockdown works for what situation.
I do wish he'd said, instead, that masks provide asymmetric protection -- protecting the wearer less than protecting others from the wearer, and that ideally everyone would wear masks to protect each other, but that there were extreme shortages, and that first responders needed to be the priority for now. Or, something that included enough information to remain straightforwardly valid over time despite the situational dynamics.
edit -- in a July 15 interview with InStyle magazine [1] he said: "I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct..."
"When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks."
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-...
[1] https://www.instyle.com/news/dr-fauci-says-with-all-due-mode...
He was understandably trying to prevent people from buying and using surgical masks because there was a dangerously limited supply. When the supply was secure he advocated masking.
It’s this sort of talking around the issue, Jesuitical hair splitting rather than conceding what is manifest that makes discussing this so frustrating.
I appreciate skygazer quoting his exact words so that I can form my own opinion.
It happens to differ from yours.
The world isn't black and white. New information is obtained. Sometimes experts have to change their recommendations.
I, personally, do not believe Fauci was lying on 60 minutes. I think he was making a recommendation based on the information he had at the time. Soon after, that changed. He changed his recommendation.
https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...
> JUN 12, 2020
> "Masks are not 100% protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who may feel well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don't even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else," said Fauci. "But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work."
> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
>...> when people in authority tell you that they had, or perhaps still have to, lie to you “for your own good” — that’s not a hallmark of a free society.
True and well put.
I watched the video, to make sure that I wasn't missing additional context, and I don't see it (though these videos do get edited, I've been shocked plenty of times once I saw the full raw footage vs the condensed, edited footage).
Now, he doesn't quite say the claim I wrote above. His argument (I am now condensing it) is: at the time, we were unaware masks offered protection, physical distancing was our best strategy, and we wanted to keep our limited supply of masks for medical personnel.
So, how can masks not be effective and yet also be so effective that we must save our critical supply for medical personnel? Well, one possibility is that medical personnel treat all kinds of illnesses, and that N95s are generally critical for this work, and we wouldn't want them to go without while the public buys them up for an ineffective use. Another could be that they are effective and critical against the virus when you must be around sick people constantly, but not especially effective when you're about town. These are difficult concepts to convey, especially in a soundbite or short interview driven format.
Unfortunately, Fauci's line or reasoning does lend support to the claim that he knowingly mislead the public, for what he (perhaps reasonably) believe was the greater good. I still am open to the possibility that he was trying to make a nuanced point and either bungled or it was lost in short media format.
Medical personnel wear masks for more than just protection from Covid. Surgical and N95 mask availability is critical to the day-to-day operation of a medical facility, is it not?
Here's my interpretation: initially, he was concerned about a run on masks and believed masks provided minimal protection against Covid. Later, as mask availability was no longer as much of an issue and as there was increasing evidence that wearing masks might help contain the spread of Covid, he changed his recommendation.
I recall there being an evolution in thinking around mask wearing, from masks being worn to protect the wearer to masks being worn to protect people from an asymptomatic wearer. Lots of studies posted here about effectiveness or lack thereof of non-N95 masks.
I also recall us learning about asymptomatic spread, the degree to which to virus was aerosolized, and so forth.
Yes... this is exactly what I meant when I wrote "one possibility is that medical personnel treat all kinds of illnesses, and that N95s are generally critical for this work, and we wouldn't want them to go without while the public buys them up for an ineffective use."
Unfortunately, if this was Fauci's point, he did not communicate it well. Some of what appears to be deception may just be bungling an answer that requires a lot of nuance (though again, after what I've seen from hostile or even just lazy soundbite-driven media, at this point I just wouldn't be surprised he actually did say this hat some point and it was not reported or just edited out of a longer interview).
To me - and this is my own standard, not a set of rules - whataboutism a fallacy is specifically used to avoid acknowledging a problem by derailing the discussion.
If a person fully and thoroughly acknowledges a problem, and does not minimize the importance of that problem, then it is not whataboutism to point out the hypocrisy of the other side during the analysis - especially if someone denies or minimizes the existence of bias from the other side.
In short, an article like this from The Atlantic (including a reference to an early pandemic NYTimes article that claimed advocating for travel bans was racist) is not whataboutism. These are not just reasonable but important observations:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/03/what-...
And lastly, while I agree with you about much of Trump and right wing media, I was pretty aghast with the times, WaPo, and other media outlets (this link also from The Atlantic). To be fair the National Review also got this wrong at first.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...
As an aside, The Atlantic is an interesting publication - it is a very left leaning, but has a number of writers who are absolutely willing to go straight at the left when they feel it is behaving hypocritically.
It's not about you. It's about the greater good (even if maybe there was a misstep (I'm not saying there was/wasn't)).
I would be ok with Fauci saying masks weren't effective because the best science avialable was incorrect at that time. Science can be flawed, especially early on when facing a new disease. We might not know if the virus is surface spread or airborne. We might believe that it is transmitted through droplets after a cough - something medical staff would experience much more of than people at a grocery store. There are all kinds of reasons they could be wrong. So the CDC, and Fauci, would lose no credibility with me merely by being wrong, in retrospect, if they were presenting the best answers science had that that time.
Now, if the CDC deliberately misled, then it absolutely isn't fine. The CDC has authority because they are scientists. We respect and follow their advice not because we believe they are our noble leaders, or our moral betters, or know best for us, but because we believe that what they say is the truth, grounded in science. If they in fact used this trust to deliberately mislead, it would be devastating to his credibility and the credibility of the CDC for a very, very long time. For our own benefit? Perhaps, but it would still be a deep betrayal of his specific office because of the source of his authority.
The CDC could say, in that case, "we believe that masks are effective, and N95 medical grade masks are best - however, there is a shortage right now. Because cloth masks can provide some protection for essential activities such as grocery shopping, and medical grade masks are essential for medical providers who will work in close proximity with many infected people, we implore the American people to allow all medical grade masks to go to medical providers, and we support regulations that require these masks be reserved for medical providers".
That would be fine. But you can't represent science and truth and then lie about the science. Not if you want to be trusted ever again.
To be clear, these are scenarios. I'm not sure it's entirely established that Fauci clearly knew that masks were effective for day to day non medical use and deliberately told people the opposite in order to keep them from buying masks. I've done some reading, and Fauci stumbles a lot over this - he keeps saying two things at once - that it wasn't clear that a masks were important, and that we badly needed to reserve them for medical personnel. The second statement actually badly undermines the first, IMO, because it would provide a justification for lying (even if this isn't what he did).
Anyway, if you have that WaPo link, please send it. That would change how I see this situation.
Except, apparently you can! Here you are acknowledging the lie, and yet you still trust them.
He said healthy people did not need to wear one.
Masks are still ineffective at stopping the spread. This didn't change. What changed is governments all over the world understood the value of the way to mark the population willing to follow any stupid regulation.
>...
>I realize it doesn't sound like it, but I'm trying to excuse the CDC here. I'm not just saying they're corrupt. I'm saying they have to deal with the inevitable amount of corruption which it takes to be part of a democratic government, and they're handling it as well as they can under the circumstances.
>...
>Dr. Fauci (and WebMD) are legibly good (or at least legibly okay). They sit on a giant golden throne, with a giant neon arrow pointing to them saying "TRUST THIS GUY". If a random shmuck who doesn't know anything about anything Googles "who should I trust about COVID?", Google will return Dr. Fauci's name. This is a position of great power; Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).
Quotes from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-.... I think it's a good read overall, maybe a bit long for some. I share your concerns for apparent bad public policy. Having a government that messes things up and then patronizingly dodges all criticism while lapping up unearned praise (looking at you Cuomo) is frustrating and makes people lose faith in experts and "the system". The general social and media environment we live in today is definitely not helping.
I agree that figuring out when to reward users is the hard part. My best solution at the moment is to do something like slashdot/HN/reddit/others with upvotes, moderation, and meta-moderation, but I don't think there is any system completely impervious to manipulation.
This is pretty rich in an article about misinformation. If people had worn masks, we would have better outcomes. If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
> Similarly, censorship of election fraud claims are well-documented, with President Donald Trump, along with a host of other conservatives, being censored for “promoting disinformation.”
Pathetic. It talks about how the Coronavirus response was bungled, tries to pat dipshits who refuse to wear masks on the back, and the only mention of Trump (7 times) have nothing to do with his oafish incompetence regarding the Coronavirus response, and have to do with election fraud. Amazing. I wonder if the author has any political agenda?
I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.
The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
Are you prepared to close the borders and imprison anyone who tries to come in indefinitely?
This is what Australia does to illegal immigrants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sovereign_Borders
The camps have been condemned as concentration camps by amnesty international. NZ benefits from this policy since it is a further 6,000 km from the usual point of attempted entry into Australia.
You can't pick a third of the policies you like and ignore the ones you don't. I find it astonishing that 'left' people in Australia have taken up a position further right of the white nationalist Australian parties on immigration and no one is even talking about it.
Australia is not indefinitely imprisoning arrivals from overseas, nor is NZ. NZ has repeatedly offered to settle asylum seekers imprison at Nauru. Which ‘lefties’ have adopted white nationalist policies?
This would be impossible in America without a wide no-mans land on the Mexican and Canadian boarders where any trespassers are put in the sort of camps Australia runs.
OP is wrong about it 'ending' if the US just wore masks. Victoria alone has shown that without a closed boarder it is impossible to keep the virus out regardless of what hygiene theater you do.
Citation needed. People do wear masks. And a lot of places where they don't are doing good compared to places wear they do.
> If we had locked down, it would have been over already. Full stop. How is this confusing?
It's not confusing but it's simply not true. I believed this in March and April, however. How long would we need to lock down in your fantasy land?
Australia has some of the harshest lockdowns and it's not over there "full stop". They still have cases popping up. And even if it worked, you can't just look at covid numbers as the only measure of success. You end up demostrating Goodhart's law. It's a huge mistake to not take all the other side effects into consideration. A couple big ones that come to mind are discouraging exercise and sunlight to generate vitamin D.
Quite a few others https://outline.com/JKgfuv
If we outlaw all vehicles (including bicycles) and required everyone to walk, all traffic accidents would be avoided already. Full stop.
If we ...
Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi have a lot of good discussions on this topic that are easy to find on YouTube and general web searches.
Chris Hedges is is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and is incredibly insightful. I am also a fan of Matt Taibbi.
Without this being part of this discussion, there's no way that those worried about disinformation are going to win back anyone's trust.
If democracy and free speech are to survive, I'm all in on the idea that education is the most critical piece. Obviously, bias and falsehoods can be injected into information taught and regurgitated in educational systems, this is nothing new and already practiced. This is why I'm a strong proponent of teaching the process of fact finding, the scientific method, etc. We need to teach people to be better free thinkers and trust in them to make good decisions. We need to teach them on manipulation strategies deployed and show them how to avoid them. Those who want to leverage and manipulate people don't like this idea.
Too many interested in authority want people to be easily manipulated and are playing roulette with who ultimately wins the game of control: wealthy private interests, US government, foreign government, and even your neighbors. We have to trust that educating everyone to defend against these sorts of disinformation attacks is actually in our own best interest, otherwise I think we have to give up on ideals of democracy.
What do you think would be better?
Maybe not the only answer, but it's a good start. And not just science and critical thinking, but also humanities and history.
While I agree with you, in my experience, even PhD researchers in the hard sciences, who know the scientific method thoroughly, throw it out the window when they discuss anything other than science. It's disappointing, but at least I can point out to them that they aren't following the scientific method :-/
What, exactly, is your point? "Corruption exists"? We know that.
There no level of technical education that can fix that. You need either live examples and/or possibly a background in philosophy. That said philosophy doesn’t answer, at some point you still have to “choose”. Easy? No. We learn to avoid responsibility since childhood. Better diverge the responsibility of choice elsewhere.
Even on HN, quite a lot of HNers can not differentiate their strong beliefs, which might be generated from indirect sources like MSM or activists, from solid facts. i.e. something can reach consensus of normal people by verification. The Massive Weapon of Deception can be effectively used again and again if that matches the majority belief.
For instance, say crime is a problem in an area. How do we address it? Do we encourage everyone to arm themselves in defense? Do we establish additional surveillance and arrest/detention ("broken windows" policing)? Do we address the root problems of crime?
The best that we can hope for is that we come to a shared understanding of the current reality: What is the crime rate? Who are the victims? Why is it happening?
Once there is a shared understanding (provided by science), then we can discuss solutions (guided by values/compromise).
The problem is that science is messy, and hard to synthesize for the general public. Just think of all the frustrations around mass media reporting of individual research results (Eggs are bad for you!, Eggs are good for you!). Results are often nuanced and resistant to becoming a meme or a headline. They are often themselves subject to bias and spin.
The best that we can hope for, and that we can strive towards in good faith, is being open to the evidence. "When the facts change, I change my mind." And hope that people in power appreciate this position as well.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2016/11/23/we-tracked-down-a-fake-news-c...
[1] https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/06/17/who-shares-most-fa...
The end result is that there are kneejerk reactions in the media (social, mainstream) to apply this label to information that is at odds with what you want to be the case. Rather than use hard reasoning skills to win an argument, paint the other as being disinformation. Or apply this to people with loaded labels that aren't supported by the evidence.
All of this to push back on things people don't want to hear. Inconvenient and often uncomfortable bits of reality.
This is a very slippery slope. Sadly we've been on our way down it for a number of years. I personally mark the beginning of this slope as the time when our lovely US mainstream media abandoned all pretense at being objective, and decided narratives of resistance made far more sense than objectively reporting. Though I can likely point further back, to 2001, and the reaction of the media to the ascension of Bush the younger.
This is of course, my opinion. Doesn't make it right or wrong. It isn't mis/dis information. I am not a good/bad person for having it.
This article captures it well, but when you look at where the culture is, it's too late. The whole discussion of tit-for-tat ideological accusations and talking point exchanges misses the forest through the trees. I think we're past the inflection point. There is literally a massive volunteer army of people engaged in popular deception, who have by merely adopting certain beliefs and attitudes declared themselves enemies of discourse and truth itself. They were trained in western universities to become activists posing as experts to advance the values, agenda, and powers of bureaucracy. There is almost no discourse left, there is only litigation and war of all against all.
Or, you could say that if the Right were on top, those in the Right who say opposing viewpoints are communism / a fifth column / danger to America / should be suppressed would have the advantage.
The war isn't on dissent, dissent is only an early skirmish. Like previous ones, perhaps we will only be able to piece it together in hindsight.
Antidisinformation is just a different word for counterpropaganda which is just propaganda used by us instead of them. Even the term 'propaganda' has been more positive 80 years ago, it just underwent the usual euphemism cycle, so now we are at '(counter)disinformation', 'fake news' and 'fact checking'. Which all is just a nice word play for the thing it all is: information warfare.
(of course calling it 'warfare' is also propaganda)
eg. I have no doubt that "the 2020 election was stolen" narratives are largely based on disinformation, but it seems to me that the "Trump was a Russian asset" narratives are largely based on disinformation as well. Yet the former are subjected to widespread moderation actions and the latter are not. Maybe the latter narrative is slightly less fantastical, but that doesn't seem obviously true and it's very easy for me to see why ideological bias could explain this outcome.
The only people who think they can say everything they think and not be purged for it are people who don't think much at all.
This is a very dangerous time in the US.
(!) Learn how controlling misinformation is beneficial for society.
You mean someone like Ray Zystzeciez?
Please state where this obligation is documented?
At least in the US (and yes, I realize this is a global site) the vast majority of news organizations have the obligation to make a profit. See "Manufacturing Consent".
I believe you will find 28USC4101 and 47USC588 of particular interest. Fun fact, you are actually accountable for infractions of law whether you know the law or not. Now, either 1) your question was borne out of genuine ignorance; I suspect this is exceedingly unlikely as it would tend to indicate you are incompetent (unless you care to dispute this point) or 2) you posed the question with malicious intent for the purpose of tearing down our common understanding of civil society. Which is it?
Liable and slander are notoriously hard to prove in US courts and use of weasel words commonly let bad actors off the hook in cases.
They have an obligation to report facts and world events, regardless of what they believe to be true. At least in a US context, the infusion of opinion and bias into news that CNN jumpstarted is a cancer that I feel is directly responsible for the highly polarized state of the US.
It seems like public discourse is by and large worse off due to the way news media is structured. In the drive for viewers and ratings, the media has become extremely polarizing. People make it a badge of pride that they don't watch X or Y network. You expose that a bit as well when you assume that the words I wrote should only apply to Fox. All cable news media is problematic in this day and age.
When I was young, I got into short-wave listening. This was during the Viet Nam war. I used to listen to the English language news from Radio Moscow, then the news from Voice of America, just for the sheer, rollicking entertainment value of the ideological whiplash. I suggest a similar exercise using modern context -- it will sharpen your BS detector.
There is no avoiding the need for judgment in news reporting. Any process of judgement may be biased. An institution may itself have biases, and these will make there way in the judgments made there.
The idea that news organizations can simply and objectively report on facts and world events is functionally impossible. What you want are honest judgements made with an awareness of potential bias, knowing it can never be completely removed. As consumers of news, we should look for the organizations that seek to do that, and preferably read/view a variety of they present to us a more complete picture despite the differences in the judgements they make.
Please..... harden and sharpen the edge of your critical thinking skills. News organizations are business entities first. The idea of "just the facts" news reporting idealism is a curiously mid-20th century American idea, and even then was only a facade.
Historically, news organizations have always had a point of view. And advertisers to please -- or at the very least maximize the audience that their advertisers could reach.
News organizations have an obligation to pay the rent and make payroll, just like any other business. Beyond that... I remain skeptical.
And they were wrong.
That’s why we need to allow dissent.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...
I suspect the author and I diverge politically in important ways, and think the piece would have been stronger if it had avoided certain topics. However, I think its main argument is solid and succinct.
The problem with limits on free speech is that a certain proportion of what's critical will seem taboo, malformed, or false to the majority until it doesn't. I think this is true regardless of the right vs left leaning nature of those involved.
Some of those are external attacks, others are generic own goals such as: "CEO and Chairman of the Board are the same person", "Official got 5 figures in speaking fees" as well as specifics, such as the suppression of dissent in the media about the second Gulf War. Anti-war protestors faced only mild repression (the lady who ran our soup kitchen got arrested and spent time in federal prison) but the public never got the facts about the war that pointed to it working out the way it did.
That is different from the dumbasses who want to say "black people are stupid" and such.
Basically in USA you have all those lies from the left like "Americans don't want what Europeans have, trying to select such a candidate will just let the even worse Republican get into power and we can't have that!". Obama was an extremely popular president, who had so many traits democrats today would argue makes him unelectable. If Trump went against Obama it wouldn't even have been close, so why are democrats continuing to push their corrupt career politicians who people don't really want to vote for except to get Trump out of office?
Edit: To me it seems like democrats care more about keeping corporations happy than winning elections. Keeping a corporation happy is worth a lot of money since it allows you to earn a lot of money in the future as a lobbyist, that is way more important to them than having a bit higher chance of winning an election.
They were there because they 110% trusted select twitter accounts (including the president).
People go on about young kids on social media. The real issue is older people, people with mental and social issues, people who are easily influenced.
I actually suspect the author is on that very list.
The disinformation factory serves one purpose only: to avoid people from reaching agreement, it is a wedge that is driven into society by an avalanche of garbage that drowns out any reasonable discussion.
By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation under the guise of having a rational discussion, which is quite funny given the theme, and a pretty cynical display of the degree to which this is now something that you can get away with.
If you read the article, you will see that the point is that the war on disinformation can be misused to marginalize those who dissent.
If you want to level some relevant criticism of the OP then you are better off with the "read the actual article and not just the title" line.
> The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice
This article isn't saying that Drugs is Racial Justice.
If I were to write an article saying "the war on terrorism is a war against us all", would that mean that I'm accusing everyone of terrorism? Or claiming that terrorism doesn't exist?
And so they are rendered immune to logic-based arguments.
If this article is equivocating (I haven't read it), then it isn't in the title. The title makes a clear claim that doesn't even equate disinformation and dissent. It rather makes the claim that the war is dishonest with its stated goal.
It just so happens that I think that's accurate.
Framing anti-disinformation as anti-dissent is about as deliberately evasive as it gets.
Try this analogous title, perhaps from an article arguing that exaggerated fear responses are all rooted in X or Y:
"Fear of mice Is Fear of spiders"
Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?
Another good example of a title that tries to conflate two concepts and ends up being nonsense as a result. Thanks for helping prove my point.
> Surely, whether you agree or disagree with the article's thesis, you'd not argue that the article is implying that mice == spiders?
That is indeed what that title implies: that the root causes are the same and that therefore both fears - and the subjects thereof - are equivalent. And that implication is not just wrong, but - I'd argue - deliberately misleading and in bad faith.
And unsurprisingly, the people who disagree with that assessment are also apparently the ones who appear eager to frame said assessment as somehow "illogical" or "irrational" - you know, as is characteristic of bad-faith argumentation.
You must have really struggled with poetry in school.
Poetry at least makes sense,
unlike those headlines.
You must understand this if you have read about the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide .
This is a good point.
Most propaganda doesn't tell many lies. It mostly tells the truth, but is selective about which truths it tells.
To quote a German of ill repute:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Modern propaganda has advanced considerably. Just look at the advertising industry if you want to see state-of-the-art propaganda. Lifestyle marketing, creating perceived social pressures, reinventing the past - these are all techniques which work much better than simply telling a lie, especially if you can't just point a gun at anyone who doesn't at least pretend to believe your lie.
It seems to me like it works better than it ever has.
The polls I've seen show between 67%-80% accepting the result as correct; none support anything like half believing Trump won.
"Q" wrote his initial lies once, and people ate it up and spun it around among themselves. This is folklore, not propaganda.
this is the central problem. a tool for censorship is in no way tied to "truth" (whatever you pretend that means). censorship is for everything - disinformation AND dissent.
You often can. Let's try some exercises:
1) Bill Gates wants to inject poison/5G chips into your body to bring about the 'new world order'
2) COVID-19 is a hoax
3) There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other
4) 9/11 never happened
5) Asbestos causes cancer
6) All forms of Asbestos cause cancer to the same degree
7) Disinformation is harmful
And so on. For each of these you can figure out for yourself if they are simply positions or disinformation based on the content presented and the lack of or presence of supporting facts.
Also: by stating that something is 100% false you are engaging in the exact fallacy that the article suffers from: you exhibit a degree of certainty that does not leave any room for dissent, making a fruitful discussion impossible because up front you have already indicated your unwillingness to shift your position. A more reasonable line of arguing would have started with 'I disagree, because:'. By declaring your apparent opponents view to be '100% false' up front you actually disqualify yourself.
Disinformation isn't hard to spot. What is hard is to get people to stop spreading it once it is in circulation, and the fact that there are people who get paid to do this - and to do it on both sides of an argument at the same time - shows that there is something a bit more nasty going on than mere disagreement about some details. That you are so ready to pull that cart a little further should worry you.
Censorship is bad, but spreading disinformation under the guise of 'free speech' is also bad. Now you need to figure out a way to stop the second without falling into the first. This is a hard problem, and one that you will not solve by parrotting absolutist positions.
I for one set my hopes on tools that augment empathy across wider digital chasms. After all, empathy is the biological "technology" that conscious networks already invented/evolved to stabilize the network. The pattern has been proven a success by virtue of the fact that... civilization worked up til now. We just need to bolt on some things that allow it to work just as well online as it does in meatspace
All imho, of course :) And very kindly stated, with willingness to be wrong
Democratic institutions and free speech are both great goods and very fragile. They also both have the core capability of destroying the other, which presents us with some considerable difficulties that I do not think will be resolved in my lifetime or that of my children, simply because I do not believe humanity to be mature enough yet to recognize that the powers that divide us are endemic and would need serious attention first if we are to overcome this particular barrier.
There are very few arguments about observable facts that start with 'for the sake of argument' and then postulate something utterly ridiculous, to engage such an argument would require one to shift ones worldview into the realm of the insane and that just isn't productive.
If you want to postulate that argument you are going to have to come up with some proof, the burden for any kind of argument that is so far out there lies with the one making that argument, it does not lie with the people addressed to dispel it other than out of hand until there is even a whiff of support. That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Now I'm curious what your take is on "There is a pedophile ring run by democratic operatives who shield each other" because there's even more smoke around that fire (although of course it's not limited to Democrats).
A more illustrative example than "asbestos causes cancer" from your list would be "asbestos manufacturers are hiding the fact that their product causes cancer." There was a point in time where the conspiracy to conceal asbestos's cancer-causing properties was in a liminal state of knowledge: you couldn't read about it in the New York Times or even initially in scientific journals, but now it's simply a matter of the established record. It's certainly an "insane" idea (company executives explicitly deciding to kill thousands of people rather than endanger their profits), even when contemplated in retrospect. How would this idea have avoided a preemptive dismissal as "disinfo"?
> That a ridiculous proposition would require other ridiculous things to be true as well is not support, it is lack of support.
Those other things I pointed out w.r.t. Gates may seem ridiculous, but they are actually true.
That's of course not to say that fringe beliefs MUST be rigt, of course. But if I claim that it's obvious Epstein was murdered,am I spreading disinformation or am I dissenting? If I claim mRNA vaccines are potentially dangerous and that we can't just trust the clinical trials?
It's sometimes easy to sort fact from fiction with hindsight. There are certain facts that can be discounted as disinformation on the face of it. But it's very hard to entrust anyone with such power.
For an example of how this is dangerous, just look at how hard it is to criticize the state of Israel and its actions without being labeled an anti-semite (or a 'self-hating jew' if you are Jewish). This is an excellent example of how dissent in proximity to disinformation can easily get swallowed along. Bill Gates is not trying to poison us with 5G, but if people start removing such facts, they may also start removing posts that accuse Bill Gates of using his money and influence to pressure states into trying his experiments, e.g. with his disastrous ideas about education in the US.
https://en.arguman.org/the-war-on-disinformation-is-a-war-on...
trailing slash gives a 404
As a mild defense, I'm just worried that the internet (and emerging distributed web) might make for a landscape where facts no longer are predisposed to win, as they were in the very carefully calibrated prior social systems. There are no chokepoints as there have been through all prior history, where power could exert control, be that through kings, politicians, media, capital, overton window, or whatever.
The tactics of persisting signals in a sea of liquid and a sea of air are different. Maybe we're in a different phase. I'm willing (though not welcoming) toward the idea of this being a phase change, after which it's not particularly helpful to focus on the "rightfulness" of factual information.
I'm not saying there is no role for facts, I'm saying we might have to start thinking differently about how we expect the larger systems to integrate them
EDIT: For example, removing Trump (the liar in chief) from Twitter has UNDOUBTEDLY improved public discourse imho. I wish we'd done it sooner. But we're actively building a world where that will be less and less possible. And while removing his lying megaphone improved things for a bit, we sure as heck haven't figured out the right way to deal with a Trump anomaly without that lever.
What will we do in a digital regime where the mathematical guarantees and data structures at their core prevent us from silencing him? To what authority will we negotiate about "truth"?
8) God is the One True God and Jesus Christ is His Son.
Depending on the year you use to measure, ~65% of Americans believe this. It is a "fact" in the GP's sense of the word. So much so, that we have actual laws that derive from the chain of conclusions that stem from it. These laws arose under the normal processes of democratic institutions and free speech. When something is believed by the majority of people, it becomes a de facto fact.
The distinction between faith and fact is an important tenet of Christianity.
Islamists and Christians will disagree on this because they feel that 'their set of facts' is the one true set.
But the fact is: both of these positions have very poor support, which is why theology is not a branch of science. That a lot of people believe this and that those people can subvert democracy to give their 'alternative realities' preferential treatment is one of the major reasons most forms of government try hard to keep religion out of government. This usually doesn't succeed 100% but at least they recognize that there is something not ok about this.
Islamist:Islam::Dominionist: Christianity
not
Islamist:Islam::Christian::Christianity
Most of the times most of these things are complete straw men that people claim _others_ believe. And you fell for it. so no you can't.
- all American presidents in the last hundred years have been war criminals, and would have been hanged if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials.
- despite what all tabacco company medical studies claim, tabacco causes cancer
- there are no WMDs in Irak, all of the agencies claiming that they have evidence of such are simply lying to our faces
Which of these are dissent and which are disinformation? What do you think your thoughts would have been on them before their truth became public knowledge?
This will not age well.
These both cannot be true. If disinformation is easy to spot, then not many people will be taken in by it.
Ever wonder what kind of person responds to spam, such that there's an incentive to send spam? I have a friend who regularly asks me, "Hey, what do you think about [insert conspiracy theory]? Pretty crazy world, huh?" Then I ask, "Where did you hear that?" They say, "It's in the news!" I ask, "In the regular news? Or like, InfoWars." They say, "The regular news!" I Google it. The only result is a site even worse than InfoWars. I tell them that site is pure garbage, that the story appears nowhere in mainstream news, and if I can find a debunking I send it to them. This happens, like, biweekly.
This person is a highly educated, extremely intelligent, experienced professional. Not a rube. What's the difference between us? It's not that I'm smart and they're dumb.
Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that
Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!
There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.
These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.
Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).
But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.
Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.
I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.
However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from...
https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...
> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.
> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.
Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.
I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.
From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...
The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.
Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis
They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.
People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.
If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.
If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.
If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.
One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.
Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.
Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?
Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.
You should check out Poland.
You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.
So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"
So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.
If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?
I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.
> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will
Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.
Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.
So really I don't think that this kind of moderation helps.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/
In general we need more humility and less confidence. Many of the scientific "facts" that we're certain of today will eventually be disproven.
People aren't getting banned for talking about studies, they're getting banned because the video they make opens with "the secret cure THEY don't want you to know about". They're not starting from a point of view grounded in facts about the actual scientific process of data.
By the way, there was another study published a few days ago indicating that Hydroxychloroquine might offer some limited benefit. The observational study was rather weak from an evidence-based medicine standpoint, but maybe it does work at least slightly. Research continues.
One of the main planks in the "hydroxychloroquine is bad" narrative actually had some disinfo elements itself: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/the-surgisphere-scand...
But with honor now totally absent from politics (being factually wrong or lying knowingly is no longer a reason to fall one ones' sword) we will need some other mechanism to deal with this, especially because the cost of spreading disinformation has gone down tremendously. It's a bit like spam: when it cost 50 cents to get your spam in front of an audience you made sure it landed as targeted as possible. But with the cost approaching zero you can afford to spread it in bulk and indiscriminately all day long.
What about when gatekeepers (such as Google/Facebook/Twitter) say they are banning disinformation, but are really banning dissent?
> Disinformation is spreading factually wrong information to push an agenda.
(1) Who decides what is factually wrong?
(2) If you look at accounts that G/FB/T have banned, I'm sure the vast majority of them said some things that were true; in fact I'm sure the vast majority said more true things than false things. But the gatekeepers banned the whole accounts, not just the bits containing factual inaccuracies. This demonstrates that in the guise of combating disinformation, they are actually combating dissent.
The problem is trust. Were you yourself there to witness all controversial events? If not, you have to rely on the testimony of others and trust that they're not lying and have not themselves been tricked.
Edit: See what I mean? I didn't question anything, I just brought up questions about questions and people judged me for it.
I dislike that we are in a race to create a ministry of truth(it's ok we will only silence the baddies).
Somewhere else in the thread a poster thinks we should not engage with these ideas as it fuels them. I think censoring the idea engages with it more than letting it be taken apart and ignored in the public view.
Many of what you would probably call “facts” I would call “beliefs held by a critical mass of connected people.”
However upset you are about it, there is an enormous counterculture that disagrees with you about the facts, and no amount of rhetoric will ever bully these people into submission.
I find myself necessarily allied with that counterculture, and you can go ahead and call me names like “flat-earther” all you want, it will not make a difference.
The new speak being pushed by people that want to censor the internet "for the good of society" is they are doing it to stop the spread of false information, when in reality they want to stop the spread of dissent.
they use easy targets like Anti-Vaxer's or 5G death rays to institute the frame work of censorship, then slowly start grinding that knife edge to the point where unless your position on something is endorsed by an "authority" then you will have no right to say it
We do not have to look very far to see the problems with this when at the start of the COVID pandemic people were being censored for saying people should wear masks in contradiction to "authority" who said they should not, only after "the experts" in "authority" approved the messaging of mask wearing was it "acceptable" to say that, now however it is not longer "acceptable" to question the policy (or any aspects of the policy) of mask wearing..
But more do you need 1, 2 or 25 masks... Do you need to continue to wear a mask after vaccination... Are masks now a permanent mandate for all of time....
The narrative is we just need to "Trust the experts", but of course only the experts that agree with 1 political party or agree with the CEO / Tech leadership of the large tech companies...
So what exactly is your test to work out that this is disinformation, and how do you intend to defend it when I accuse it of being highly subjective? The war on disinformation will have spectacularly bad unintended consequences - far in excess of any successes - if it is run by Democrats based with only a partisan criteria. There needs to be some level of objectivity and observability to the label.
I could follow you right up to there.
The Democrats have nominal control of Congress and the presidency. It is extremely fair to point out that - as the article in fact does - that they don't have an objective criteria to seriously cut down on disinformation and that if it is a partisan push then there is no way they can identify "disinformation". And that it will probably be political and damaging in the style of the anti-communist manias that swept the US, like McCarthyism.
[0] https://raskin.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-democrat...
Likewise, there are quite a few who are _truly_ dissenting. Some may be mistaken on some points, but they are being quashed along with the malicious disinformation. It is not a good time for truth, since it is being lost in competing agendas, with very few major players being interested in the truth.
Our current climate doesn't encourage looking for truth. I think that is the major issue-- even if you don't believe dissent is needed, dissent is currently very unwelcome.
Even in business and tech, there is a lot of centralization and it is harder and harder to innovate as a little guy. That is a form of dissent, and it is becoming harder to do.
Untrue. There are lots of issues (climate change, for example) where one side (oil companies, in thise case) is spreading information that they know is not true by paying people who claim to be neutral.
The latter is what people are raging against: the weaponization of social/ad networks by disingenuous actors, like authoritarians and oil companies.
When people say they want to "stop disinformation campaigns," they're not talking about sincere individuals on the opposite side of an issue.
It's a very optimistic view and it's certainly how things are often framed. What I've seen over the past few years though, is a very efficient filtering of the internet of almost all content that isn't left learning from all major forums and a shutting down of those that could not be filtered.
Framing this as an anti mis/disinformation campaign is very clever, sometimes pointing at flagrant examples while actually censoring widely.
No, you are mistaken. What is 'left leaning' in the United States would already be considered considerably right-of-center in most of the developed world, besides that, there is plenty of right leaning content out there. What has happened is that a bunch of companies decided to stop supporting some of the more batshit crazy outlets on the extreme rightwing part of the spectrum. But that doesn't mean you won't be able to read the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator or a ton of other right leaning publications.
It's just going to be a little harder to organize the next insurrection or to spread outright lies. But that's fine.
Framing this as anything to do with censorship is very clever, but it really isn't. For many reasons.
Again, I understand that the crux of your argument is that this discourse (that of the "crazy right wing,") is solely the fermenting ground of lies; however, I find that very difficult to believe, personally, and I believe that--while any side may develop misconceptions--exposure to these allows you to better explore your own beliefs in the face of adversity.
What is crazy is a relative concept--to be cliched, homosexuality was considered a mental illness until fairly recently.
Instead I would say that there's some hot button topics like immigration, racism, climate change, discrimination of all kinds, etc and there's a faction which is for more immigration, aggressively and militantly fighting racism and climate change, etc and several factions which don't agree with the above to different extents. The positions of the pro faction have become the default in mass media, to the point that the media is educating and shaping opinions more than reporting facts. Members of the against factions are typically portrayed as wicked and associated with negative labels such as nazi, right-wing (has become a slur), racist, sexist, etc and silenced or forced to grovel in order to not lose their jobs/reputation/standing, etc.
This is by the way not localized to the US, instead it's visible in several (if not all) Western European countries.
The facts, the arguments should win the day. Not the histrionics.
Sadly, we are human. We are fallable. We see political winds that impact our funding for our research, and we avoid rocking those boats.
In 1918, Einstein's theory of General Relativity was not considered the way things worked. Eddington and Einstein made a prediction about deflection of photons near the sun during and eclipse. Newton's equation gave one result, while GR gave another. Eddington made the measurements, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Theories rise and fall based upon evidence. Attacks on evidence you don't like, or the source of funding for research that raises difficult questions, really doesn't help.
Look up Lysenkoism for a great lesson in why following political/popular guidance can be a really bad idea for science.
You felt the need to identify your field of expertise there. Does this not imply that you actually do believe it matters? There is body of knowledge shared by the experts in a field that help facilitate the process by focusing efforts on productive discourse. Sure every now and then som crazy theory needs to be entertained to advance the field. But it would be a colossal waste of energy to give credence to every amateur with a dissenting view point no?
In fact, that would be a very nice project: to trace back any kind of meme (positive, negative, disinformation, I don't care) to its origin.
One of the communities I wondered about for a while was The Great Awakening. They had a way of speaking that was so over the top that I couldn’t help but wonder just how real can it be? Specifically, they keep always calling each other “patriot” the way that Soviet citizens called each other comrade. Except, in the Soviet case it was a long thing in the making while TGA popped up overnight on Reddit so where did that come from. And their way of speaking really smelled to me like there were a ton of bots there. So, can you imagine waking up one day and realize that the political identity you’ve taken on and been discussing with people you now consider friends online has been in fact handed to you by a bunch of boys? And on top of that, the very “friends” you were talking to were largely bots? That’s gotta be a rude awakening to say the least.
So there won't be any rude awakenings, or, at least not many of them.
But I’ve also been reading some stories of people who were seemingly true QAnon believers who after January 20th realized that marshal law wasn’t being declared and that Trump really was leaving and how it seemed to shake them. There was also the woman who called CSPAN if I recall correctly, crying because she felt like Trump betrayed her by distancing himself from the Jan 6th insurrectionists and how she just couldn’t make sense of the world. To think that she is the one who finally saw reality for what it was while others continue to believe that this is all a part of some grand plan... how do you even come out of that?
Was it misinformation or disinformation when the CDC told us not to wear masks? They did it because they thought us dying was better than doctors dying. Which does not inspire confidence in anyone who pays attention and doesn't count themselves members of the in group worth saving according to the CDC.
We're not facing a war on "well, my opinion is that increasing minimum wage will harm businesses," or "my opinion is that we are not doing enough for workers' rights in Silicon Valley." We're okay arguing about those points, because there's actual facts either way and it's largely political. These are dissenting opinions, and they're fine to have in a society. It's healthy even to have those discussions in a moderated community setting where conversation doesn't devolve into personal insult.
But that's not what we're talking about when we talk about disinformation. The war on disinformation that we are facing is on complete and total bullshit: "Anderson Cooper drinks the blood of children and eats babies" - a real QAnon conspiracy. This isn't "dissent" - it's a bald faced lie told in attempt to discredit a journalist. "But you can't prove he doesn't eat babies!" is all the evidence they need - they want to believe it, their 'thought leaders' tell them to, and so they do.
The fact that we can't even get some of these people on the same page about what disinformation actually is just shows you how far down the path these people are. That's how articles like this one get written. We can't even talk about "dissent" because people are too busy trying to tell us lies about facts, and distorting the very definition of disinformation to allow space for their lies. How long are you going to stay in a conversation with someone trying to sell you the sky is polka dotted purple and pink, when you can look up at the blue sky yourself? How long should you bother with them?
Craig Mazin asked us a very simple question in Chernobyl: "What is the cost of lies?" At least five people died because of a große Lüge told about the US election - pure propaganda, a lie so big and grotesque that only 'true believers' could accept it. Thousands are dead because of lies repeatedly told about COVID-19. It's hard to even measure how many people would be alive today if the lies about climate change had been stopped earlier. And they will not be the last, not as long as we keep "both siding" and acceding to dissent on objective fact.
The end result will be no dissent whatsoever, just two groups calling each other liars at every step.
You might as well say "There is no way to separate pornography from innocent family photos, other than by making assumptions about the othes party's good faith."
Yes, it's a judgment call. But it's a judgment call that's not hard to make; it's a judgment call that we need to make in order to maintain a civil society.
I think sexual activity and nudity are a lot more relevant than one’s perception of the creator’s good faith in thise case.
Who are you arguing against here? A strawman?
It's almost as if you just read the headline and you didn't read the article.
> By positioning the two as equivalent the author engages in disinformation
The author never calls them equivalent. Maybe you're trying to be clever with your "positions them" wording. More likely though, you didn't bother to read the article. You saying this is disinformation.
There's a big difference between a sincere, good-faith exchange of ideas, and weaponized disinformation for the explicit purpose of manipulating the public. Knowingly spreading lies is not a "political opinion," and doesn't deserve the same protections that actual opinions do.
This article and a lot of the comments here conflate the two. I don't see any desire on the part of the media or big tech to censor political thought. I do see efforts on their part, especially after 6 Jan, to fight disinformation, which is as it should be.
Example of sincere opinion: "I support small government and lower taxes." Example of weaponized disinformation: "Dominion source code shows that Trump really won the election."
One of these statements is more likely than the other to be banned on Twitter, despite the fact that both are ostensibly "conservative" positions.
Depending on exactly what you want to know about, the integrity of the news and journalistic ethics have never existed as anything other than isolated incidents. The press has by and large always been subject to the truth of the powerful, whether the rich owners or the political elite. This is usually by construction - The Propaganda Model from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman presents a very simple and compelling model of how this happens without any kind of conspiracy being involved.
You quite literally reap what you sow and by polluting people's minds with factually wrong stuff the stage is set for much more consequential moves at a later date. After all, if people were critical about what goes into their heads advertising, religion, the bulk of the news and so on wouldn't stand a chance and large sections of society rely on those mechanisms.
The actual numbers matter less than the implications for reaching groups exclusively consuming particular “systematic feeds”.
This is from early 2019:
“There is an alternate reality in American politics, and it plays an outsized role in the way many experience and form opinions on the most important issues facing the country. Progressives should be mindful of the challenge from the Fox News echo-chamber and how it skews public perceptions. At the same time, there may be opportunities to reach people who aren’t in the chamber: Republicans who don’t watch Fox News, and non-Republicans who do.”
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5776522/Navigator...
But how it apparently works in practice is the powerful routinely engage in disinformation while accusing those who point out hypocrisy, ineptitude and corruption of the same.
Given this, I'm immediately suspicious any time the topic of disinformation is raised.
That, and that "it's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Oh but this has already happenned, and is showing no signs of abating- with the prosecution of journalists and whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and less recently Daniel Ellsberg [1], Jack Anderson [2], Thomas A. Drake [3], and many others over the years; and those are just US citizens that let out information about US governments.
But of course these were not people who shared raging tweets and facebook posts about how masking hurts liberties, or about vaccine hesitancy and so on. That is to say, these people did not share their controversial views about contemporary matters. They publicised documents and information that is not normally available in the mainstream press (until someone like those people leaks it) and is certainly not something that random "dissenting" tweeters and facebookers can be aware of.
Given all the above I have to think that the article is complaining about the wrong kind of silencing: instead of the very real silencing of journalists and whistleblowers, it points to the "silencing" of dissent, that, in truth, remains not very silent at all.
________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#The_Pentagon_P...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson_(columnist)#Targ...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_A._Drake#Eventual_whist...
While I have you: would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity%20by:dang...
If you flagged it because you don't want politics on HN, then that's a reasonable, respectable stance.
If you flagged it because it's promoting "disinformation", then you're only making this problem worse.
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
~ George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
Color me unimpressed.
When it comes to elections, the war on disinformation is a war on consolidation of power / tyranny. Trump wanted to run the country like a company. Companies are not democracies and do not have a balance of power.
It's very simple. Your freedoms come with responsibilities. You are free to wave a "don't tread over me" flag. But that flag doesn't give you the right to tread over other people.
> For example, reports of Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine and China that were leaked mere weeks before the 2020 Presidential Election were characterized by our infallible national security experts as “Russian disinformation,” before eventually being accepted as fact six weeks later—conveniently after the election had concluded.
Omits the fact that Trump's lawyer was directly involved in the "leak", thus controlling the timing, and mysteriously has no source for it being "confirmed as fact".
I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture. Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman à clef.
Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand audits conducted by conservative state governments and adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke, who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate" even mean?
You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth" story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns out, is completely detached from its original conception, a "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped counting, and then stopped reading.
At any rate, the rhetorical engine of this article's argument is pretty basic. People have a general distrust for the federal government, surprise surprise. And the public health establishment was, in fact, indefensibly dishonest about mask wearing. As a result, why trust anything? Your Moderna vaccine, my HCQ, the guy living in his basement wrapped in grounding wires to avoid the cell tower radiation, it's all the same. Except the stuff about Hunter Biden. That's real.
Also, to those who down-voted me: Do you not see the irony? Thank you for waging war upon my dissent :). I merely pointed out that the article is one-sided, which is obvious. Perhaps you should look inside to see why you are so defensive of it.
Free speech ftw!
Let’s be incredibly clear what the disinformation we’re talking about here. It’s Qanon, “COVID is fake”, “COVID is a Chinese bioweapon”, “Biden stole the election”, and most recently Jewish space lasers. Human Events is a famous very conservative publication, and the Republican Party had embraced conspiracy theories as a way to motivate their base since Bill Clinton’s “Arkansas Flu” death squads. Even this article tries to hold up discredited misinformation as stuff “they” don’t want you to know, while conveniently leaving out all context to fabricate a “gotcha” moment.
These are discredited conspiracy theories spouted by prominent figures in the party, and spread widely, and unquestioningly, in conservative media. It’s the mainstream thought in an increasingly extreme party. So of course, Human Events sees the real problem as a calling bullshit on bullshit, not the actual bullshit being spread.
Honestly? No. It is not well merited at all. It is deliberately stoked and manufactured for political purposes. It came from a decades old idea of discouraging and confusing science for economic snd politics purposes. These covid conspiracies come from the same genesis as climate change denial and smoking is not cancerous nor addictive. The article blames health experts and the CDC for antimaskers, when it was right wing politicians and media personalities promoting the ideas of “herd exposure”, and that it’s not so bad, and we “shouldn’t be afraid”, and the man’s is a “muzzle”. None of this passes the smell test.
This article is simply motivated and insulting, and promptly falls apart when examined by anyone with a memory of American politics the last 10 years, let alone 30.
If only the extreme right country of Sweden hadn’t acted so rashly by promoting herd immunity /s
Wait this was real? I saw something about this the other day and didn't look into it. I figured it was some sort of meme based on hyperbole.
https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/marjorie-taylor-greene...
Congressman Dan Burton implying Vince Foster was murdered. See also: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death, and most recently Seth Rich’s. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clinton...
Senator Tom Cotton said Covid was Chinese bioweapon. (I’m sorry, “just asking questions”) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/11/republican-t...
Over a hundred elected congressional representatives saying Biden stole the election https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-lawmakers-speci...
Qanon we’ve got multiple media officials, but let’s just stick with former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and the embracement of the conspiracy theory by both the Arizona GOP, and the Texas GOP
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/202...
https://www.businessinsider.com/texas-gop-denies-new-slogan-...
The space lasers, have already been linked.
EDIT: Also, what bothers me is the turn of phrase he uses “to agree on facts” - this is insidious, facts are not a matter of negotiation to agree on.
It’s not “freedom of truthful speech”.
* The CDC “errors” are from the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, when we didn’t know that much about COVID-19 and were still learning about the virus. As just one example, the author seems to have a short memory: It was pretty hard to wear a mask all of the time when masks were not available to buy, so initially saving masks for front line medical workers until they were widely available was a sensible idea.
* The allegations of corruption on Hunter Biden’s part are still considered a conspiracy theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
* Whenever I read an article which talks about the “establishment narrative”, alarm bells ring in my head. This is a common trope among conspiracy theory proponents.
I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
Edit: The article has been flagged. Good riddance to bad rubbish. The article used, for the CDC example, the fallacy that, in so many words, “since the CDC made some errors in the early days of COVID-19, the CDC is deliberately spreading disinformation to support a narrative”. No, COVID-19 was a new virus, there was a lot we didn’t know back in March of 2020 when we shut everything down, and the scientific consensus has changed as we got more facts to build conclusions from. Changing what we know based on new research is not evidence of spreading disinformation; that’s how science works.
Breaking down Wikipedia's claims:
> [...] containing purported emails of unknown authorship which suggested [...]
> [...] but their authenticity and origin have not been determined [...]
You can use the DKIM signature to verify that the "smoking gun" email is real - including contents, sender, and roughly when it was sent (before October 2015, when gmail changed signing key).
> A reporter for The Wall Street Journal observed the PDFs' metadata showed they had been created in the fall of 2019, though the emails were supposedly from 2014 and 2015
Because a PDF compilation of emails (probably created by Mac Isaac, or NYP for their article) is not the original email file.
> but once this was completed, the shop had no contact information for its owner, and nobody ever paid for it or came to pick it up [49]
There are images of the quote with Hunter Biden's contact details on them, and story they cite only claims "he tried repeatedly to contact the client".
> Criticism has been focused on Mac Isaac over inconsistencies in his accounts of how the laptop came into his possession and how he passed it on to Giuliani and the FBI.[49][46]
The citations are Business Insider articles which both quote the same The Daily Beast article.
The TDB article tries to imply contradictions with juxtaposition (like with "At one point, Mac Isaac claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device’s existence. At another he claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop.") but doesn't actually present anything mutually exclusive or inconsistent with Mac Isaac's timeline of events.
Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
So far, no editors have come forward and been able to assert that Hunter Biden got a high paying job because of his father pulling strings using reliable (ideally, secondary) sources. Until such sources are found, the allegation remains a conspiracy theory.
For my first claim: The "smoking gun email" and its DKIM signature are publicly available, and can be verified regardless of their original sources. I can guide you through the process if you wish.
For my second claim: The fact that a PDF compilation of emails is not an original email file: http://www.pscs.co.uk/manual/email-file-types.html
For my third claim: Given Wikpedia's claim is already contradicted (or at the very least, not supported) by their cited article, I don't see why it's included in the first place. As far as I can tell it's just been made up by some editor. The original NYP article includes: https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/10/Comput...
For my fourth claim: Again I feel it's a matter of the original source not supporting the claims made. I have no source for, and can't claim with certainty, that Mac Isaac has never said anything contradictory in any interviews (since that's akin to proving a negative) but I can point out that the original source presents no inconsistencies.
> Wikipedia is the article anyone can edit, and, yes, they will embrace any point of view which comes from a reliable source.
My IP range (and VPNs) are blocked, and the article is protected. If you have an existing account that meets the requirements then I'd appreciate if you could correct the article, at least on the matter of the third claim.
The DKIM issue has been brought up, and there are legitimate reasons why that assertion is not included in the Wikipedia.
Edit: If the Wikipedia article is making an assertion not backed up by the reliable source it cites, this is something which needs to be corrected. I don’t have time to look at it right now, but maybe I’ll have some time tonight to look at it and bring up the potential issue as needed.
Not even mentioning DKIM because of the unsupported possibility that Google's private key could be compromised (by hacker or rogue employee) is a weak excuse when opposing claims ("the shop had no contact information for its owner") just seem to be pulled out of thin air.
Even if they don't want to state that it's verified (again I think the email has met a far higher standard than opposing claims already being stated definitively), at least a mention of the DKIM verification and its limitations (like how it doesn't say anything about context) is surely warranted.
Also my main claim is that Wikipedia is wrong/misleading here. Something false being included in the article is still false even if they have policy reasons (like RS requirements) for doing so. I'd say that claim three does already violate their policy, but I'm not defending their policy as a perfect diviner of truth.
And how exactly is science supposed to do that when dissenting voices are censored as "disinformation"? If you want science to self-correct, you need to allow free speech around questions like "are masks useful".
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than making stuff up and posting it on the Internet without any evidence to back up the claims (which is what conspiracy theories do).
Oh, now you're a proponent of free speech? That's surprising, considering that a moment ago - in this very thread - you literally asked the moderators to censor this article that exists for the sole purpose of exposing the kind of censorship that you were advocating:
> I’m disappointed this kind of article borderline espousing conspiracy theories made the front page of Ycombinator. @deng: I don’t think it serves Ycombinator’s interests to have this kind of article prominent.
That’s not censorship. That’s moderation. Censorship is getting shot by police in Burma for protesting the military coup that recently happened there, or beaten up in Russia for protesting the arrest of the opposition candidate.
Back to the original conversation, I have seen online forums get ruined once unpleasant argumentative cranks, usually people who have been kicked off of other forums for inappropriate behavior, start overtaking a forum. Soon, the forum is a cesspool of conspiracy theories, and pretty soon, the place is inciting violence. For example, Parler. I don’t want to see that happen to Ycombinator.
Ah, yes. You are one of those "free speech proponents" who value people's ability to speak freely in dark corners where no-one can hear them.
That's a bit of white-washing on your part (but the article in indeed pushing a bad narrative in addition to what I think is a good point in the title).
The CDC and other national organizations knew very well at the time that masks were important to protect from the disease. Rather than recognizing that they were unable to provide the necessary masks to the population and had to prioritize their distribution, they knowingly lied about their effectiveness - deliberate disinformation, even if performed for a noble goal (debatable - it's also easy to see that it was convenient politically, instead of admitting the incompetence in preparing for such a pandemic ahead of time).
The mid-March version of the Wikipedia page states “The use of masks is recommended for those who suspect they have the virus and their caregivers but not for the general public” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coronavirus_disea... using CDC and WHO recommendations as a source. The WHO page from the time can be seen at https://web.archive.org/web/20200312051930/https://www.who.i...
At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
Edit: This is going to be my last reply in this thread. It is unfortunate that @deng is not doing more to stop Ycombinator from being overrun by conspiracy theories. For an online forum to have a reasonable, intelligent discussion, you need to have moderation: Moderation against spam, and, yes, moderation against crank theories. Otherwise, the discussion board gets overrun with spam, or it gets overrun with unscientific notions.
No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
Here is a source, from an interview with Faucci[0] in Washington Post:
> At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci originally discouraged mask-wearing by the public because he was concerned about PPE availability for health-care workers. “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptotic spread…what happened as the weeks and months came by, two things became clear: one, that there wasn’t a shortage of masks, we had plenty of masks and coverings that you could put on that’s plain cloth…so that took care of that problem. Secondly, we fully realized that there are a lot of people who are asymptomatic who are spreading infection. So it became clear that we absolutely should be wearing masks consistently.”
So while they did know that masks prevent the spread, they decided it was more important to stockpile them.
> At the time, our scientific understanding was that COVID-19 mainly spread from infected surfaces, so the advice was geared towards that. As science learned more about COVID-19, we realized that it was mainly spread through the air, and could be by and large stopped with masks.
This is a retroactive justification that people keep claiming. In reality, it has always been known that the virus spreads both through the air and from surfaces (how else would it get on surfaces?). It was indeed (mistakenly) believed only people showing symptoms were likely to spread the virus so only they would need to war masks.
Still, all east-Asian nations immediately started wearing masks at a much higher scale, as they had done for the first SARS and flu epidemics, and generally fared much, much better than Europe or the US.
> No, The Earth is not flat. Yes, we really landed on the moon in 1969. Yes, masks and the COVID-19 vaccine do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and they do help save lives.
Absolutely. I do not leave my house without a mask, and plan to get a vaccine as soon as I am allowed to (I am not in any risk group).
Your comment is an excellent example of how policing speech is dangerous. I was attacking a political stance (Faucci and the CDC, probably under pressure from the administration, decided early on that keeping PPE available for healthcare workers was more important than preventing the spread at any cost, and they were proven extremely wrong; both this administration and previous ones have done too little to prepare) and you decide to lump me in with flat earthers and Covid19 denialists.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/washington-post-live/fa...
When you censor, you censor the possibility of society changing for the worse ...but also the better.
And there's no single person or group of people who can make these determinations.
Because otherwise I couldn't speak honestly about certain events: I'd either make myself unemployable or make a mess for innocent people.
I.e. because of my unnamed accounts you get to hear more facts.
I also take as much care to be correct on my unnamed accounts such as this one as on the other ones, and I take care not to upvote my own comments. I sometimes have started a discussion with one account and replied downthread in another (not sure if this account or my previous unnamed one) but I try to limit this.
PS: no, haven't breached NDA.
I can't see any strategic gain for the people who disbelieve in COVID-19.
For climate change denial, which the managing editor of this blog practices, I can see how you can make enough money from it to give yourself a good life and leave others to pay the cost.
But with COVID it's like that element of weaponised science skepticism has gone rogue and started killing it's host (sometimes literally).
Is there some secret plan I can't see to make money from this or are we really just letting these people drive us towards a cliff with their insanity?
I would strangely feel better if I felt someone was going to profit from all the misery and death.
Obviously I won’t give examples of any of the above dissenting points because that’s a good way to get banned here and in any other space where the socio-political narrative is enforced.
Edit: Furthermore I’m not saying anything about my own opinions in the question. Just giving my answer to the OP’s confusion.
The rational people rationalize it is not worth risking their livelihoods and reputations to condemn restriction of their ability to express themselves. The irrational people then rise up in this case and dominate society as their voices become dominant.
How to reverse this process (without using authoritarian claims of dis/mis/noninformation) to promote proper discourse before a powder keg erupts even bigger than what we have seen this past year and does it for us?
* ~2,300,000 deaths globally, according to google.
* ~$28,000,000,000,000 cost to global economy, according to the IMF.
That's a cost of $12M per death, and mostly for deaths of non-working-age retirees.
Do you really think it's the "covid deniers" that are driving us towards a cliff?
There is a profit motive, in continuing to profit as before. That includes deprecating masks, because if masks were needed then perhaps shutdowns are justified.
But mostly it's about ego, which is even more important than profit. It takes only a few profiteers to spark a general reaction on ideological grounds. Defending their rightness and righteousness against their ideological opponents is emotional profit.
More hardcore variant: instead of predictions, keep a record of bets, or imaginary scrip in some kind of prediction market. Maybe call it "AccuracyCoin". If someone has a lot of it, that means they were right on a lot of bets where many others were wrong, so you should pay attention.
But in the end? None of that mattered. His partisans didn’t care. What mattered is what he tweeted today. That he said the entire opposite the year before didn’t matter.
politicians and partisans across the board have realized that consistency and facts do not matter. hypocrisy has no effect on any politician and their followers. they flip flop position with no hesitation at this point.
None of their arguments were arguments in the context of debate. They were post justifications of what they wanted to do. And telegraphing what they wanted done.
Ignoring what politics say is an American (actually global) pastime.
There are very few directly testable predictions. Even something as basic as whether the Earth is flat is hard to conclusively prove without enough background - how could you hope to understand the economy?
1. The competency (are they measuring correctly?) or truth-fullness of the institutions (are they cooking the numbers?)
2. The relevance of the number (why not just look at people older than X who don't have a job?)
3. The relative importance - maybe unemployment has gone down, but underemployment has gone up, which some would claim is more relevant
These are not even hypothetical concerns, these are all real complaints reasonable people have about the unemployment numbers in various places.