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Comment by dfdz | Hacker News Reader

A recent high profile example is the lab leak "conspiracy theory". Facebook block discussion of the possibility that Covid-19 started from a lab leak, but now scientists are seriously considering the issue.

Imagine if Google had this policy last year, and a scientist posted a Google Slides presentation about the merits of the lab theory (and imagine it was banned under the misleading "health" information umbrella) ....

Disclaimer: I use dropbox (mostly since they have supported linux since when I started using the service, and when I started using the service, the syncing was much better than google drive) But now I have another reason!

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Something similar that is happening now is the Ivermectin discussion, which right now, to some sounds as crazy as the lab leak, to some, sounded a few months ago. So we have learned nothing from the lab leak debacle.

There is a distinction between discussing a theory, and presenting it as the truth with no evidence.

Not a distinction I imagine automated moderation systems are going to manage well, of course, but it exists.

This distinction never mattered. Any discussion of the theory besides refuting it as "debunked" was banned on Facebook.

Google will gladly distribute public PDFs that say the elimination of Jews "must necessarily be a bloody process," presented as truth with no evidence.

Why do they get to be the arbiter of what information deserves presentation as truth with no evidence, when they allow Mein Kampf to be presented as such?

This is all assuming that setting a file to public in Google Drive is considered "presenting it as the truth with no evidence."

You are downvoted but this is exactly what happening in the Arabic sphere of discussion and nobody really cares because Google, like most of the discussion here, is very America centric. This is not even about truth but rather about calls for murder which are against the law in many countries.

In some way though, I am happy that this "diversity of thought" exists because that's the only thing that can stop companies like Google from becoming the arbiter of truth. It is just sad that a lot of those countries are also ok with calls for murder and violence.

I agree with this to some extent, how direct should the harm be before you stop distributing it?

I don't think there is an easy, obvious line there—direct calls to harm (murder these people) shouldn't be accepted, and I believe even beyond that there should be limits, but find that line and enforcing that is very hard.

That is a rather curious argument. Google's management come from Silicon Valley and statistically will have a left bias. It is quite likely that a substantial number of them genuinely believe that, say, attending a right-wing rally is similar to presenting Mein Kampf as truth with no evidence. If they start censoring one it is pretty likely they will start censoring the other.

Also, if they use controversy as their metric instead, they're going to start squashing minority views. It is actually much harder than you might think to decide what is and isn't obviously true, particularly when there is a team of moderators involved (or team of people calibrating the robots which is maybe how Google does it).

Censorship is really dangerous.

Rarely does anyone have a problem presenting a majority position as the truth with no evidence.

We should be a little more forgiving of minority positions and a little less forgiving of majority positions, so that the truth can be determined more readily.

A reminder, at the start of the pandemic, the majority position was "Masks are bad". The "Masks are good" minority position had no evidence to back it up besides common sense, yet it is only through the efforts of those people fighting the conventional wisdom that the truth came out.

Maybe it should be the scientists and journalists exploring that possibility, not random Facebook conspiracy nuts? Once an conspiracy is broven true, then FB can let it ride.

First of all it isn't "proven true". It's just not proven false. Which has been the case the entire time.

One of the reasons it was assumed false was that the scientific community bought into the original letter from Peter Daszak. It turns out Daszak has conflicts of interest regarding WIV and GoF research that, in theory, could have caused the pandemic.

It is incredibly naive to allow people to be the gatekeepers of information that is inconvenient for them.

Science isn't a god with priests telling you what it says. It's a process that anyone can and should do.

Scientists? Sure. Journalists? No. Banning discussion but allowing the mass media free reign means people are being fed propaganda.

The same scientists who lied about mask effectiveness at the start of the pandemic which may have contributed to thousands of additional cases and deaths?

The same journalists who said lab leak theory was "racist" (NYT's chief COVID editor made this claim less than a month ago)?

The same organizations who said COVID was not transmisable human-to-human in late January, following orders from the CCP (the WHO made this claim repeatedly, without independently verifying it)?

I remember the original theory going round that was getting removed being that it was a lab leak of a bioweapon not the current theory that it was more normal 'gain of function' research that got out. Those are two very different accusations.

If we are honest however, these are theories however "unfounded" they might be...

Science is a continual pursuit of what is accurate and even then when we have a scientific proof, it's often not always permanent.

It was a theory that this came from a lab. It was perhaps another theory that the lab was working on this perhaps in part as a bioweapon. We can get into the politics of why China in general can't really be trusted and so who the heck knows... and that of course leads to skepticism and theories such as these.

These theories may or may not be true the same way "covid-19" came from a wet market may or may not be true. It's okay to say we don't know, here are some theories... That's science.

We should try to get to the bottom of it so that whatever happened is exposed and we can learn from this.

A third party getting in the way and deciding based on who knows what, what theories are okay to talk about and what theories are not okay to talk about is a horrible idea.

Perhaps Google is working on a multi-billion dollar deal with China to put Google in all of the phones made in China? You better believe that if China told Google, "Hey this theory is false (trust us), you better take down anything that talks about it"... Google would be very pressured to comply.

How could we tell the difference without knowing the motivations of the people responsible for it? Has their conduct been likely to inspire confidence that they were on the up-and-up? Gain-of-function research is used for offensive as well as defensive purposes; it is inherently dual-use, and it can be hard to draw a line between the two. We aren't in a position to be able to exclude the possibility that this research was being carried out with the intention of being transferred to pure weapons development once suitable candidate pathogens had been developed.

They are exactly the same accusation, with the only difference between them whether that researcher is your friend or your enemy. It is, much like security research, easy to predict but hard to be certain which is which until it's been deployed.

I'm not defending Google's policy here. But imagine for every lab leak that Google falsely blocked, it also blocked many dangerous conspiracy theories before they got out of hand. I think is boils down to numbers and I think Google is probably in the best position to have the most accurate numbers, the question is are they also making a decision that is most consistent with those numbers.

There's a big difference between earnest scientific inquisitiveness and at a minimum conspiracy nuts spreading racially biased clickbait, at max coordinated political propaganda to influence an election.

though covid is interesting in other ways too. like vaccines.

I'm ok with allowing someone to think whatever crazy bs they want.

But I'm also fine with removing the 'megaphone' for words that are dangerous to our health. You're allowed to stand on a soap box in a public square, but you're not guaranteed to have your speech boosted on the giant billboard screens above.

The dilemmas we are facing here are inherent to how these platforms are setup and optimized.

The algo is designed to boost the crazy-ness to infect others, therefore stopping the spread of this danger tends to stop the individual speech in terms of how normal posts/content works.

Shadowbanning seems like the answer, and that seems to be what Google is doing here. Though not allowing for instance a public doc url isn't in the shadows.

The key start of the policy is "Do not distribute." Which is why I don't understand why people are up in arms about.

it's a totally different thing if Google goes beyond this and just deletes private content from some algo filter.

The Hunter Biden laptop scandal is maybe the worst case yet¹.

New York Post got hold of it, published some very damning articles in mid October.

So Facebook and Twitter promptly banned sharing the article as "misinformation". It has all since been confirmed, but now the election is over.

¹ Or maybe there are worse cases where the silencing was more effective.

Lab leak theory has always been taken seriously but it was also largely hijacked by racists at the time who were much louder than the scientists. If memory serves.

I heard it was hijacked by Emmanuel Goldstein and the Brotherhood, those vicious rogues. Just look at the evidence.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein

edit: viscous indeed

Viscous rogues, the gelatin based lifeforms fighting in the shadows

Is your position that scientifically plausible ideas should be censored because random racists use it?

No.

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