Doctor banned from Twitter and LinkedIn for “promoting vaccine hesitancy” | Hacker News Reader

Doctor banned from Twitter and LinkedIn for “promoting vaccine hesitancy”

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32 pointsTbobbyZ26 comments

I believe some tech censorship hurts society more than it does good. The video in the OP appears to be a good example of this.

Can someone give a good argument for why China’s Great Firewall is good? Tech Censorship and China’s internet censorship appear to be the same.

I can’t picture a future utopia with the direction tech censorship is going. Who can?

At some point, when someone is spewing disinformation that has been already proven false many times, what else can you do to improve the signal-to-noise ratio but to mute them?

Then explain why Pfizer is not blocked on Twitter. They also "spewed disinformation" to promote "vaccine hesitancy" against a rival product: https://www.cityam.com/pfizer-accused-of-funding-anti-astraz...

Pfizer didn't write those slides, a third-party did, on which Pfizer claim they had no input. One could argue they did, but there isn't tangible evidence to claim they did.

That's extremely naive. Why would you give a company, that has a terrible track record of doing absolutely horrific shit just for money, the benefit of the doubt?

This doctor did not spew misinformation, he was right scientifically. The press does spew misinformation on a weekly basis, also for COVID-19. Was the press deplatformed? No. There is a process to determine truth, that's called science. Abandoning the scientific process for political goals, and economical goals in the case of the press is harmful.

Here he was deplatformed for political reasons, like crying fire in a theatre. Vaccinations are important, and criticism has a huge effect on the percentages. And under 85% the policies are not working that much.

Science can almost never determine truth. Usually the best it can do is a high level of probability.

It’s really sad to see smart people argue against their own interests.

This is not good.

Read the papers and fine print on everything. Science should be inherently skeptical. If you haven’t read the papers and understood them, you have no business claiming this person is spewing disinformation or not.

Your opinion is not yours otherwise.

Example, the CDC points to an Arizona study about mask efficacy in public schools. The study did not address the large range of total days in school for each district/school. Some unmasked schools were in session almost 3x longer than the masked ones, so of course there was more spread. Also there was no specification if the spread occurred at home or in school.

I understand this is a horrible disease and we need to do our best to get through this, but there is some seriously janky/inept science going on.

What I read, some schools were actually closed and only had remote work. That is clear evidence of bad data and grounds for doing a new study.

Ya but if instead we just label you disinformation for bringing it up, then its much neater for us. We don't have to admit our ability to field studies is not up to the task of guiding a nation growing towards half a B. Enjoy the void looser.

Major social media sites and fact checkers all shunned “lab-leak” as a fringe conspiracy theory simply because Trump professed to believe in it. Once he left office we acknowledged it as a real possibility. I don’t think these organizations or people have the knowledge to correctly assess what he’s saying. This I suspect the ban happened wholly because he’s a controversial fringe contrarian.

Since I think that, I’m much more ambivalent about the ban. The politics of such a situation will NEVER allow for such a voice to be on a major platform if the stakes are so high and they’re rather effectual in their influence.

No, the lab leak theory was fringe. It still sort of is. Everything pointed to animal origin, but since we haven't found it and it's less and less likely we'll ever find it (the evidence may no longer exist), other theories are back on the table.

Though lab leak has exactly the same amount of hard evidence going for it. None.

First off they're not the same thing, comparing the removal of questionable healthcare information voluntarily on a private platform to the government mandated removal in China is a false equivalence.

Secondly if you want to discuss the Chinese approach to tech it's pretty trivial to find good reasons for their conduct. They've enabled a domestic, competitive tech industry free from foreign interference. You just need to compare it to Europe which is dominated by American platforms. If you don't own your software you have no sovereignty and live by other people's rule, which China is tired off. It's that simple.

Also East-Asian societies, not just the scary authoritarian China price social harmony and health highly and above individual interests. Which I'm inclined to think is fairly sane seeing the bodies pile up over here.

Why should tech companies be trusted to do this? If the software developer community is representative of tech companies' intellect, they are a group of pretentious people who think because they can copy paste some stuff from SO and parroting software "engineering" best practices, they now have the intellectual capability to project their opinions on every problem facing humanity onto everyone else.

> not just the scary authoritarian China price social harmony and health highly and above individual interests

As long as you are Han Chinese, sure. If you are Uyghur, enjoy the reeducation camp!

Scary to see westerners (including some western leaders!) praising these regimes.

Circumventing censorship, or just saying/writing the wrong thing in China can result in imprisonment at the whim of unaccountable officials. Banned from twitter isn't even remotely similar.

This man has a great track record:

https://www.logically.ai/articles/who-is-dr.-robert-malone

This site has wayyyyyy too many adjectives to be trustworthy.

This problem will sort itself out. As twitter becomes nastier and nastier and only one voice is left allowed on the platform, eventually people will get tired of it and go to other places.

But you've got to think, when you are banning MD's from giving their input on medical issues because it doesn't suit your political narrative, "are we the baddies?'

What other places? If you get banned from Twitter and Facebook, where would you go?

Someplace where people are less toxic and not as racist, like 4chan

Twitter is just a telecom utility and public square that has escaped the regulation it legally and ethically deserves. It’s time to hold them to the standards of the first amendment, along with any social media platform that has more users than individual states.

Twitter is a public square without the Bill of Rights: a secret Twitter court with a noname judge issues a permanent speech-ban in accordance with a secret law that forbids talking about a secret list of things; approved and signed by a noname commissioner of the internal (and secret) department of censorship.

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