I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.
We can believe taking action against misinformation is a generally good principle while still believing that both our definition of "misinformation" and the kinds of actions we take may need to be improved.
When the stakes are high, exactly the time when you need radical honesty, the benefits of censoring information are also high.
Some might say, "hasn't this always been the case?" And you'd be correct. The difference today is that it is now a fashionable political position to cheer for censorship of any controversial ideas. This prevailing attitude combined with centralization of the public square (social media) is a dangerous combination, and we will continue to pay the price of this well into the future.
The trust in traditional institutions is plummeting, as it should for anyone who has witnessed their actions the past year.
I still remember the "hug a Chinese person" campaign in Italy.
That also means that over time, the credibility of the entities that flag 'misinformation' will inevitably erode: as more people are exposed to things they know, perhaps first-hand, are true, but are flagged as 'misinformation'.
A system that prevents only Holocaust denial and flat earth theories is unlikely to ban anything that is actually true.
A year ago, most people in favor of banning misinformation would have classed the lab leak hypothesis in the same obviously-false bucket with your examples.
When Jack banned zerohedge for their article, there were other reasons than "misinformation". Only he and his masters know those reasons.
This sort of illustrates the problem here. It was plausible to you but what you think doesn't matter if the powers that be decide it's misinformation. You can't just come by after the fact and say "it was always obviously not misinformation" to dismiss the fact that anti-misinformation controls failed here, in a way that ultimately suppressed reasonable speech.
My opinion: in the grand scheme of things this comes down to just letting people express things online, even if they are outlandish or ridiculous or whatever. Letting people speak their mind without being censored even when I don't agree with them ensures that I get to speak my mind without getting censored when I'm in the minority, which is a right I value.
The null hypothesis in this case is certainly animal origin. The idea of a null hypothesis is to identify what the data would look like if they are purely due to chance, if there's no intervening effect to be discovered.
In fact this is part of what makes the lab leak hypothesis weak: it'll be difficult to rule out the null hypothesis without fairly direct evidence of a lab leak, and the lab leak has low probability for many reasons, not least of which is that it's a low probability occurrence in general.
The whole idea is just an excuse for people to larp as CIA analysts.
Censorship is a bottom down initiative. It requires a few bad actors or 'mistakes' to completely change the information landscape. Misinformation is bottom up. It still needs to compete with a whole bunch of other ideas and it requires far more effort to spread. You also don't create a pretence that all available information is correct.
Censorship carries far larger risks, with small short term gains. It's like picking pennies in front of steamroller.
The reason this question became politicized and labelled as misinformation is that politicians started spreading this rumor for purely political purposes rather than based on scientific evidence. It is hard to imagine misinformation being more top down than senators, cabinet members, and even the President spreading it. The fact they may end up being right in the end doesn't mean they were acting in good faith at the time.
The reason this was censored was because there was bottom up support for it to be censored. Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have repeatedly shown that their preference is for less moderation rather than more. Moderation costs them money and they don't want to spend money. The reason they increase moderation is because their users demand it.
Lmao no, the truth needs effort to spread. Because the truth is usually boring and lame.
Lies, misinformation, conspiracy theories are juicy. They make the reader feel smart - either by confirming their biases, or giving them the feeling of being "in" on something that's not widely known. People love being the first to pass on some hot goss to their group.
Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?
'Evidence' is tangential to the decision making behind misinformation tags.
Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?
Who has the right to tell others what they may, and may not, decide for themselves?
Why the Ministry of Truth of course
Don't do this. It's hand-waving and people can read all kinds of things into it.
That hope is lost. It's really easy to get overwhelmed in how doomed we seemed to be because of it. People are believing things in spite of evidence, and are absolutely rooted in that belief to society's detrement. How much further could be be if beliefs were no longer held onto once evidence were present that shows that belief to just not be correct? Sadly, I don't think we will ever know.
We shouldn't take any action, at least at a governmental level. And certainly not on the level of a big corporation like Facebook.
It's very embarrassing that Facebook and YouTube banned this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
I think this kind of automatic linking Chinese government to Chinese / Asian Americans is itself racist.
What you are suggesting is implicitly accepting this racist idea.
To stand against this kind of racist idea, what we should do is to explicitly separate the Chinese government from Chinese people, from Chinese Americans. We should directly call out Xi Jingping the dictator and CCP the dictatorial regime, instead of implying Xi Jingping and CCP own Chinese people and somehow also own Chinese / Asian Americans.
I agree automatically linking Asian-looking people to the actions of China's government is racist. And there are a lot of racists out there. Given the ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes [1] and online anti-Asian hate tied specifically to coronavirus [2] I think we should be unusually careful about excited speculation.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/09/twitter...
I think that characterizing this fact as an “ongoing spike in anti-Asian hate crimes” is a breathtakingly broad generalization.
How does criticizing the Chinese government has anything to do with racism? Because we can't give racists ideas to be racists, so we should restrict ourselves in criticizing the authoritarian (actually also racist) regime? Your logic is strangely twisted.