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Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

“Free and open” Twitter had it’s chance. People couldn’t handle it and then real people got hurt or died.

Maybe this change seems bad on principle, but the status quo today is a known bad state which is costing lives. Hard to argue that we shouldn’t try something different given the evidence in front of us.

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"Democracy has also had it's chance really. People clearly can't handle it and get hurt or die all the time. The experts should govern, no more of this voting nonsense."

Is what would appear to be the logical conclusion of this idea. If people can't be trusted to speak, they certainly can't be trusted to vote.

We’re talking about likes and retweets here, not even original tweets.

Any idea extrapolated to it’s logical extreme can look stupid. No one is talking about ending democracy

It's worth remembering that the slippery slope is maybe best known in the context of the slippery slope fallacy, i.e. you probably aren't gonna get there (iron-clad rule by technocrats) from here (Twitter not allowing likes/retweets of vaccine misinformation.)

Is the rational to quarantine tweets not itself driven by slippery slope reasoning?

I know you are steelman-ing the argument here (& thank you), but that sounds like "the ends justify the means".

(I do agree that the cost in lives here is a real, real problem. People need to own up that their actions have impact on other people…)

When you use the idiom “ends justify the means”, it summons an imagery of eugenics or genocide eg “in order to have a crime free society, we must exterminate <ethnic group>

The “means” in question is Liking and Retweeting on Twitter and the “ends” is preventing vaccine misinformation.

So one might reasonably conclude that _these_ ends justify _these_ means

If people died, and this is the justification for such a policy, surely there is an analysis on how many. Could you point to one? I can't seem to find any myself, just googling around a bit.

I didn’t make this decision. And of course I don’t have this evidence. Twitter has its proprietary data and proprietary analysis of such data. Twitter would be foolish to publish it… (e.g Twitter internal memo shows X people were converted to anti-vaccine groups via its platform) how could that possibly be a good look?

Of course, even that is only part of the information you would need to estimate deaths. You would need to further extrapolate that anti-vaccine groups were X% more likely to harm someone, etc.

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