Facebook suppressed report that made it look bad | Hacker News Reader

Facebook suppressed report that made it look bad

theverge.com

275 pointsunderscore_ku30 comments

For anyone else who looks at the comments first, there is nothing to see here. I was hoping for a link to the original report, but this article just states that some VP didn't want an internally generated report to go out because the top shared content wasn't a good look.

The actual NY Times article which broke the story is also on the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257958

So they are at the same time both neutral and heavily biased. Isn't that true innovation - being the first company to exist in a quantum superposition :-)

FB suppressing the accounts of the NYU researchers was a deeply problematic.

FB choosing not to release a report that they, themselves generated, was FB acting as any corporation does.

If every company was assigned an internal watchdog whose reports they couldn't suppress, I'd be fine with that. But that's not happening and companies have the freedom to publish or not publish whatever information they choose.

They're hardly the first.

Every media company is unbiased-but-not.

Marketing vs reality

Wait? So FB needs a report to make it look bad?

Shocked..

Color me surprised.

More news at 11.

The most-viewed headline in the quarter was:

> “A ‘healthy’ doctor died two weeks after getting a COVID-19 vaccine; CDC is investigating why.”

Yeah not a great look.

…as a result of their enragement-optimizing algo. Now they are getting a report showing the effects of their own manipulations. What a surprise!

That death has since been investigated and determined to be natural causes.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/...

That's not exactly what the article you post says;

"Dr. Gregory Michael’s official cause of death stemmed from complications with immune thrombocytopenia, or ITP, a blood disorder caused by an immune reaction, after getting the Pfizer vaccine, the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department said."

What's interesting is that an immune reaction is the GOAL of a vaccine. How did they turn this into "natural causes".

BTW I'm fully vaxed and looking forward to my booster. But I'm not dumb enough to imagine there is no side effect to a vacine that is designed to generate something in my blood to help me fight covid. Blood / heart stuff seems like a somewhat natural area to find occasional side effects?

You don't have to imagine it. Side affects are tracked by the CDC.

Does anyone else enjoy the linguistic contortions this article must engage in to spin this poor doctor's cause of death as "natural?" Even writing this comment makes me feel like some sort of weird anti-vaccer but seriously what the heck, words have meanings and I am going to push back against this! Sometimes, vaccines, just like literally anything else, have negative side effects. It sucks, but to pretend that oh, this was just a natural death? This seriously makes people look insane. What the heck possibly motivated you to post this and spin it like that? Did you read the link you posted? Or did you merely post this because it was sufficiently ridiculous and you are making a meta point?

There are already too many people out there afraid to get a vaccine.

Unless we know for sure, why stir up the pot especially with speculation.

A few weeks ago I got an email from an acquaintance that was in perfect health, and young, from Marin General hospital.

They put him on a ventaliator because of Covid.

He is out now, but will be on blood thinners for 6 months. He had blood clots in his lungs. 23, and an exercise nut.

Every member of his family were anti-vax, until they saw him through the glass.

They all have the first shot of Pfizer.

I may be totally wrong here, but I think the point they're trying to make is that a lot of people are hesitant to get the new vaccines, despite how well they're working and the (for the most part) lack of side effects, because they keep hearing conflicting information about those vaccines. It's hard to feel confident about something when people who are for something are busy saying that there are no negative side effects at all, while others are pointing out that's untrue in some cases.

Rather than withhold information, it's better to treat people as adults, and give them the whole picture so that they can make a decision with all the available information. The example of your acquaintance is a good one, I think, to demonstrate how people are willing to change their mind when they have more of the facts. (In this case, the reality of how bad things can be, and I would guess more accurate information about the vaccines from doctors on-site.)

I'd love if people were just giving the whole picture and the facts. It seems to be difficult to find said truth behind all the lies and misinformation out there.

You have to agree its somewhat confusing when governments (in the UK anyway) are pushing hard while you have professors like Sir Andrew Pollard (Paediatric Infection and Immunity Oxford)

Stating in Parliament that the herd immunity will never happen.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/10/delta-variant-...

I don't find it confusing. Even experts can disagree, and even if we never, or can't ever, reach herd immunity there is still a perfectly good reason for someone to get vaccinated for their own safety.

It's not that inconsistent from a UK perspective, I don't think. The government is still pushing vaccination hard because it protects the people being vaccinated from hospitalization and death and reduces the rate at which Covid spreads, both of which guard against hospitals being overwhelmed, but the idea of vaccinations stopping Covid altogether is pretty much dead here. Official policy is that we'll have to learn to live with the virus.

I know the US media and medical establishment has still been pushing hard on the idea that they could have herd immunity and stop the virus spreading if it wasn't for the evil anti-vaxxers ruining it for everyone, but that seems to be founded more in partisan politics than actual evidence. There's also a lot of pressure on any US publication that runs articles about how ineffective the vaccines seem to be against people catching and spreading Delta not to do so.

I mean obviously anyone with any grasp of numbers will look at the balance of probabilities, note that Vaccines have an incredibly low risk compared to Covid, and get vaccinated. This does not mean that we should literally lie about those risks when they do occur!

When you think you're smarter than someone and so you're going to shape their information in such a way that they do what you want them to? This is called manipulation. It is a dark art. it is evil. Don't do it.

Depending on the demographic you're in the vaccine risk might not be worth it.

There is literally no demographic where the mRNA vaccines are risker than COVID-19. None.

No shortage of fake scary stories whenever anyone suggests that there might be anything wrong with the vaccines, but discussing that possibility is a huge taboo, no matter how probable it may be. At this point even if they're massively flawed you'll be forbidden from suggesting that.

The medical examiner classified it as natural and a causal relationship with the vaccine couldn't be determined. Normal healthy people die of sudden illnesses sometimes, and with millions upon millions of vaccinations then "sometimes" is occasionally going to be "shortly after getting vaccinated."

Without more evidence, those occurrences merely corelate in time, in which case going further than making it a mere foot note is a post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake.

Alt headline: To support public health priorities, Facebook withheld report that risked spreading vaccine fears.

It’s all how you spin it!

They should've amplified it instead. Posted it on the login page.

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