Facebook versus The BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
bmj.com
bmj.com
Brutal.
Given that, "fact-checking" necessarily has to be overly broad and erring on the side of censorship.
It took the Lancet 16 months(!) to publish a conflict of interest statement revealing that Daszak was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via EcoHealth Alliance.
As somebody who probably incited/funded/created covid19, he was heavily incentivized to hide this crime.
Facebook ENABLED this coverup
> Facebook ENABLED this coverup.
Wat? How is this not considered a conspiracy theory? 5 comments down an article that discusses fact checking...
Hm, maybe my sarcasm-meter is off by a notch again. dunno.
It's at the following link, at about the 1 hour 17 minute mark.
Worse, Daszak was also part of WHO-led international mission[0] to investigate the origins of the pandemic(!!) in early 2021, though he eventually recused himself in June 2021[1]
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9655057/Facebook-fa...
Arguable whether adding a ‘fake news’ label is censorship.
The only real question is why the government exempts this particular corporation from following the usual rules that publishers have to follow.
It's worse - it's poisoning the well, which can be far more effective than outright censorship.
Second, Facebook has removed, completely memory-holed, twenty million posts relating to Covid "misinformation" without any accountability.
I can't find how many of those related to the lab leak theory (a significant fact itself), but I think it's pretty safe to say that many of those 20 million removed posts related to the novel coronavirus lab situated a few miles from the novel coronavirus outbreak.
To this day the lab leak theory is seen by many as unscientific or a conspiracy theory, and that's in no small part entirely due to FB and Twitter deciding that they had the right to tag and remove information on a question that was very, very clearly not actually settled by science.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-remo...
https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1396769717805780994?...
News exists to make money, and a faster but less accurate story is more profitable
I do condemn this lie and believe people had a right to know that it is a possibility. But the condition for that would be that people are able to restrain themselves to not act on suspicions. This was not fully the case.
But even with that they should have come clean with their suspicions and adapt them as further evidence surfaced.
But when you have a huge number of stories, there are going to be edge cases, and BMJ got snared by one here. As I understand it:
BMJ found legit problems with one vaccine's clinical trial. But this kind of thing gets seized on to promote a broad anti-vax narrative. Facebook's approach is to label it with the least-significant category, "needs context", i.e. please don't go overboard with drawing conclusions from this. But then they apply that label to all postings of the story, even ones who were sharing it with the subtext of "Pfizer is corrupt" rather than "don't get vaxxed".
Facebook claims that this category doesn't result in the story or poster being penalized, but I'm not inclined to believe that since the users were reporting that they got nasty messages saying their posting in general would get de-prioritized and show up less if they kept reposting such stories.
This statement "We did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913." was rated "mostly true"[0]
While this one "the U.S. federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913." was rated "half true"[1]
What more evidence do you need that this whole thing is sort of arbitrary?
[0]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/aug/24/jim-webb/j...
[1]https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/jan/31/ron-paul/r...
But the more important thing is the analyses I think, they are quite similar in content. And raise the same caveat about the civil war taxes. These fact checks were 3 years apart, so it may be completely different groups of people writing these fact checks. Yet, they both arrive at similar conclusions with slightly different language. I’d say that’s an okay result.
It wasn’t a permanent fixture. Today it’s a permanent fixture and short of one of the Paul clan winning the office, it will continue into the foreseeable future.
- Wrong, X is 9.999999 high.
- Misleading. While X is indeed 10 metres high, the author of the claim measured it from top to bottom instead of generally accepted bottom to top way of measuring.
etc.
Snopes acknowledges that a convicted terrorist (ie, someone that targeted civilians to enact political change) sat on the board of a BLM funding body then concludes 'mixture' because there is no universally agreed definition of 'terrorism'.
> In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
> In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions of Mohamed Atta - leading a group of young men to hijack planes and fly them into buildings — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
There’s plenty to say about her actions, which are certainly terroristic, but her being “convicted” of terrorism is straight up not true, no matter how you feel about it. That’s why they say it’s mixed and subjective, because there is no objective fact you can point to that would back up the position that she was convicted of terrorism. She wasn’t.
The claim is “convicted terrorist”. Those are two claims: 1) she is a terrorist and 2) she was convicted. Even Snope admits she was convicted of crimes linked to terrorism, but the link is subjective.
”it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
What was this left-wing revolutionary doing with hundreds of pounds of illegal explosives? Starting a mining company?
It’s just splitting hairs to such a degree you try and weasel out of a perfectly rationale take.
It’s like saying someone is a “convicted robber” then saying the claim is “mixed” because they weren’t convicted of robbery but rather assault and theft. Well, ok, but clearly that’s a distinction unworthy of calling out?
You’re trying to tell me that “convicted” is not an adjective applying to the following word terrorist? Is that your argument?
Anyway, even if we accept what you say here, that there were two claims: one she was convicted of crimes. True. Two she is a terrorist: subjective. One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. A verdict of “mixture” given this split seems appropriate.
To quote Bill Clinton, it depends on your definition of “is”.
Terrorism has a pretty well accepted definition - violent acts against civilians to gain political power. That’s exactly what she was doing when caught with hundreds of pounds of explosives.
But again, it’s a distinction without worth - the claim implies she is a violent radical. Whether she was convicted of terrorism, kidnapping, illegal explosives or smuggled firearms is moot - she’s a terrorist that was convicted of terrorist acts.
> the same exact acts can be interpreted differently depending on how the politics or motives of the actor are interpreted.
It seems you didn't read the comment you were replying to, which addresses this point.
That's not true, because Rosenberg was convicted of crimes. It's a fact to state what those convictions were. There's no arguing with that.
- Rosenberg was convicted of weapons and explosive possession: 100% true statement
- Rosenberg was convicted of fraudulent document possession: 100% true statement
- Rosenberg was convicted of terrorism: not 100% true, there are multiple, valid, although subjective interpretations of the facts that relate to terrorism.
> Terrorism has a pretty well accepted definition - violent acts against civilians to gain political power.
If we go by this well accepted definition, then almost every government on the planet fits, particularly the US government. I'm sure you will now argue a caveat and qualifications to the well accepted definition you presented above, but that would undermine your point that the definition is well accepted. We can go back and forth for a while about what the definition of terrorism is, but that would just further prove the Snopes article right - that the definition of terrorism and how that applies to the facts is subjective, and would need to be determined by a court of law.
> the claim implies she is a violent radical. Whether she was convicted of terrorism, kidnapping, illegal explosives or smuggled firearms is moot - she’s a terrorist that was convicted of terrorist acts.
Then why not just say that? You believe she was a terrorist because she was convicted of illegal weapons and explosives possession. That's a fine statement to make, and the Snopes article agrees. But it's different from "convicted terrorist".
You believe there is no distinction, but others disagree. Notably, the Snopes article covers this nuance, includes sources, and makes clear that your viewpoint is valid. It also makes room for other valid viewpoints here, which you refuse to do. Nevertheless, I disagree that words are meaningless, especially highly politically charged words like "terrorist".
I'm advocating for nuance here, and your continued replies seem very absolutist to me. You're instructing me to ignore the nuance in the Snopes article, and replace it with a black-and-white view of the world that aligns with your own. What's astounding to me is that you say the Snopes article is playing games with words and definitions, when in reality it provides a well-sourced and nuanced point of view on this issue. Meanwhile you're trying to tell me that "convicted terrorist" means "someone who was convicted of unstated crimes and is also separately a terrorist". I mean, come on. That's not a fuck-fuck game?
>If we go by this well accepted definition, then almost every government on the planet fits, particularly the US government.
Violent acts specifically targeted against civilians to gain political power.
> I'm sure you will now argue a caveat and qualifications to the well accepted definition you presented above, but that would undermine your point that the definition is well accepted.
I think it's rather than the person you're replying to assumed their audience was acting in good faith. I believe that you are an intelligent person and likely already aware that in the common definition of terrorism, acts have to be specifically targeted towards civilians. I think you're just supporting for football team rather than trying to seek the truth and I feel bad for the parent they're engaging with you.
I think he was a terrorist, but he's not a convicted terrorist. I don't believe he's been convicted of anything to this day.
> Violent acts specifically targeted against civilians to gain political power.
Like I said, the definition of terrorism presented was characterized as "well accepted", but as I predicted, you've now presented an amendment to what was already purported to be definitional. If the definition given by the other poster isn't the well accepted one, how can I be sure yours is? How are you sure it is?
Your own definition of "Violent acts specifically targeted against civilians to gain political power" is equally unsatisfactory. Governments bring violence specifically against their own civilians all the time to gain political power.
In fact, the Snopes article provides what I would say is a generally accepted definition of terrorism, 18 USC § 2331(5), which offers a concise framework we can use to evaluate the case of Rosenberg. Crucially, applying this framework would require facts that have not been established in a court of law. You can say to yourself that the application of the facts fit this code as you see them, and that's valid. But at the same time this code is not a criminal statute, and moreover itself contains a subjective assessment of intent -- "...appear to be intended...". Therefore it's quite hard to get from "I think this person is a terrorist" to "this person is a convicted terrorist".
So I would say that the general accepted definition of terrorism actually is itself subjective, and would hinge heavily on the issue of proving intent, or at least the appearance of intent.
> their audience was acting in good faith.
Please stick to the topic, let's not turn this into personal attacks, thank you.
> likely already aware that in the common definition of terrorism
Literally I'm not. You can't even agree with the other poster with your definition, or the US Code for that matter. Within the span of 3 posts we now just as many "definitions" for terrorism.
And anyway, we are not talking abut common definitions here, we are talking about criminal statutes when the word "convicted" is thrown into the mix. I simply reject the notion that "convicted terrorist" was meant as anything other than "someone convicted of terrorism". And we really don't have to speculate on the intent of that phrase, because the next sentence of the post under fact check was:
She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, the U.S. Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assoc
> I think you're just supporting for football team rather than trying to seek the truth and I feel bad for the parent they're engaging with you.
If you don't want to engage with me, or the other poster doesn't want to, neither of you have to stick around. I'm happy to keep talking about this issue, but please keep the personal attacks to a minimum, thanks.
In fact if you want to know what my football team is, I'm a pacifist and I find the Weather Underground and its members abhorrent. Rather than assume things about me and using those assumptions to draw conclusions about my intentions, you could have just asked me my personal opinions. If I'm rooting for a football team here, it would be the team of nuance in political discussions, rather than labeling people "convicted terrorist" and "convicted for ... bombing[s]" when they literally are not.
What bugs me the most about this is that someone out there was trying to raise awareness about this person's background. But apparently, they made the fatal mistake of using the word "convicted" and now everyone is fixating on that as the linchpin of the argument. Not only does it feel like misdirection, it feels like missing the forest for the trees.
She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, the U.S. Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assoc.
I agree it's important to make clear the history of violent people, and to avoid them when possible. At the same time I would say that mischaracterizing and overstating their past is not a good way to do so credibly. Perhaps that may cause people to miss the forest for the trees, but that's all the more reason to keep one's statements moored to facts.
>"In 1988, Rosenberg was charged with aiding and abetting a series of bombings which took place between 1983 and 1985, at the Capitol building, Fort McNair, the Washington Navy Yard Computer Center and the Washington Navy Yard Officers’ Club, all in Washington, D.C. Bombs were also planted, but did not detonate, at several sites in New York: the FBI’s office in Staten Island, the Israeli Aircraft Industries building, the South African consulate and the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association.
>"However, prosecutors dropped those charges in 1990 as part of a plea deal involving other suspects in the bombings. As a result, Rosenberg was never tried or convicted on any charges relating to the 1983-1985 bombing campaign."
As far as actually evaluating the core message, though, the person on Twitter who wrote this is largely accurate and I am confident I know why that person on Twitter used the word "convicted". This is because she was actually convicted charges that any reasonable person would likely categorize under terrorism:
>"Rosenberg was tried and convicted on the following charges: “Conspiracy to possess unregistered firearms, receive firearms and explosives shipped in interstate commerce while a fugitive, and unlawfully use false identification documents …; possession of unregistered destructive devices, possession of unregistered firearm (two counts) …; carrying explosives during commission of a felony"
>"How do you square a perceived innocent intent of the first sentence with this doozy of a lie in the second sentence, which obviously serves to bolster the claim of "convicted terrorist".
I really don't think it is that much of a doozy of a lie, to be absolutely honest. It is wrong - as has been proven, extensively at this point - but it is not the same kind of "categorically, undeniably wrong with absolutely 0 relation to the heart of the matter" kind of wrong that I sense is being thrown around.
> As far as actually evaluating the core message, though, the person on Twitter who wrote this is largely accurate
But also in very critical and important ways quite inaccurate and therefore misleading. Hence the Snopes rating of the overall claim as "mixed" rather than "false" or "true". Again, I don't see the problem with the fact check. Even you admit that it's not 100% true. Okay, and I've admitted it's not 100% false either. Great. The verdict is "mixed". I think we're in agreement here.
> I am confident I know why that person on Twitter used the word "convicted". This is because she was actually convicted charges that any reasonable person would likely categorize under terrorism
If that were the case, why didn't they cite her actual convictions to bolster the claim of "convicted terrorist"? Instead of sticking to the facts, they instead say she was convicted for things that she wasn't. If the crimes for which she was convicted are enough to prove to any reasonable person she is a terrorist, why did this person lie about her convictions?
This may not have been an intentional lie. It's entirely within the realm of possibility that the person who tweeted this was just wrong and conflated her history and record. I know the average person knows the words "indicted, charged, convicted, exonerated" etc. but probably can't actually tell you what they mean from a legal standpoint. I feel bad returning to the position of "meaningfully correct, yet technically incorrect" but that's what I sense is really going on. Someone on Twitter said something, it got fact-checked 'till-kingdom-come and now people have wildly different takeaways primarily based on the wording of the communiqué rather than the events it is trying to communicate about.
The Snopes article gives ample background context, goes over all the alleged crimes in detail, and it's all fully sourced! It's very hard to come away from this Snopes fact check concluding that Susan Rosenberg is not a dangerous individual.
Please read the post you’re replying to, which specifically addressed this point.
> let's not turn this into personal attacks
You have not been personally attacked. I insisted you were an intelligent person and understood the logical conclusion that terrorism has to be targeted at civilians, and your actions are in bad faith. Criticising your actions is not a personal attack.
Why? What specifically did I say that is taken in bad faith? I've engaged with all your points, I've replied to you extensively, I've given responses with citations and spoken directly to the facts in front of us... and yet you say that my intent here is to deceive? How is that not attacking me, if you are saying my intent in posting here is deceptive? This sounds like an ad hominem argument to me. I'd prefer to stick to arguments relating to the actual Snopes article, and not your interpretation of my intentions.
If you really think I'm acting in bad faith, why are you still engaged in this conversation?
> Please read the post you’re replying to, which specifically addressed this point.
It really didn't, and neither did you. Let's just back up a step and get some perspective. The original claim under fact check was this:
“This is convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg, she sits on the Board of Directors for the fundraising arm of Black Lives Matter. She was convicted for the 1983 bombing of the United States Capitol Building, the U.S. Naval War College and the New York Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assoc.”
Your problem with the Snopes result of "mixed" is that it hinges on the idea that the definition of domestic terrorism is not universal or well accepted, making the determination that she's a terrorist subjective. You are arguing that there is in fact a generally well-accepted definition of terrorism. In support of your position, you proffered a definition that you claimed is a "logical conclusion" and flatly asserted it's generally well-accepted. Notably, you have not provided a citation for your claim, you haven't provided a proof (I assume you have a logical proof, since you said it's a logical conclusion), and you haven't grappled with the fact that your definition is so broad that it applies to literally all governments on Earth.
If you want to assert that your definition of terrorism is generally well-accepted, then prove it. Presumably you can do so without calling me disingenuous. If you can't, then I think you need to reevaluate your original premise: that there's one generally accepted definition of terrorism.
--
Here's my bottom line:
I have a problem with Susan Rosenberg and what she did. However, I would never describe her as a "convicted terrorist" because she wasn't convicted of terrorism. I also wouldn't describe her as being convicted of bombings because she wasn't convicted of bombings. This alone makes the "mixed" fact check verdict well-deserved, and frankly I would be very concerned if a fact checker labeled a thing as "true" which is demonstrably not.
I think it's important to point out that this individual harbors a violent past, but I don't think it's okay to misrepresent her past in doing so. I think the original tweet is deceptive, lacks context, and lacks sourcing; and I think the Snopes article is very thorough, nuanced, and well-sourced. It does not attempt to exonerate or white wash Rosenberg's actions, and actually provides a great summary of all the relevant facts. Reading this article, I am left with a very negative portrait of a violent person, whose past nevertheless was exaggerated and misrepresented in the original tweet. Her past is violent and problematic enough without misrepresenting it.
In short: fewer inflammatory tweets, and more well-sourced nuanced fact checks like the linked Snopes article would benefit political discourse greatly.
Does that work better for you?
No need to bring OBL into the mix.
I am reminded of how Orthodox religious folks manage to get around scripture by fixating on a few qualifying words and weaseling (for lack of a better term) out of what seems to be intent of the law.
This Snopes fact check goes into a measured analysis of the claim. It presents all sides fairly. It arrives at a conclusion that one aspect of the claim is subjective, and they aren’t wrong about that. Therefore they give split rating with caveats and context.
You and others are arguing an absolutist position that removes all the nuance, and blurs technical crimes with subjective interpretations of those crimes. Moreover, you claim those who engage with the nuance are weasels playing fuck fuck games (I know you didn’t say that but you endorsed the comment that did).
For example, I could say that the people who invaded the Capitol on Jan 6 were terrorists. Hundreds have been charged, some convictions are coming down, none of which are terrorism. Would it be fair for me to say they are convicted terrorists? No, there is a lot of nuance here that is lost if I do that.
If they're convicted of planning an attack on civilians then yes. How many instances of this happening do you know of?
They could also be convicted of any number of things, that aren't robbery.
By saying convicted robber, you're assigning more certainty to your claim that they're a robber than there is. You're trying to argue that they're a robber when you're saying somebody is a robber and they haven't been convicted of robbery. Saying that they're a convicted robber pretends that it's already been proven beyond reasonable doubt, which it hasn't
The only mitigating information they gave was that the company only conducted trials on 1,000 out of 44,000 enrolled patients. But that was buried 10 paragraphs in.
There was no neutral party evaluation of the seriousness of the errors.
There was no neutral party evaluation of the implication of the errors on the soundness of the study.
There was no mention of the obvious effectiveness and safety of the vaccine.
In short, it did lack context and it should have been obvious to the BMJ that it would be inflammatory fodder for the anti-vax movement. It should have been nixed and rewritten to frame the errors in a more, as you say, detached and dispassionate way.
This sort of "greater good" proclivity for squelching information is a terribly harmful thing to the free flow of information.
My name is Steve and I’m 35 years old. This statement is half true.
The speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s. This is false, but really not far from the truth.
I think given these examples, there is definitely room for a spectrum rather than a binary. Otherwise everything is false because language cannot 100% accurately represent reality, and therefore you’ll always be able to find an angle to claim something is false.
Prove it, and prove that the underpaid non-specialist moderator who labelled it as such was justified even if they were right.
Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract, and in the concrete the specific people doing the work certainly are not. Where are Facebook getting these experts who know so much about all the hot issues of the day? Are they calling Harvard PhDs in to look at this specific post? Are they getting people with decades of experience in the fields to debate and come to consensus about whether or not this post is in the gray area or shading to the white?
Or are the "fact checkers" random shmoes being paid a pittance to do even less due diligence on what is being posted than the person writing the original post, just checking things off a list that probably fits on a handful of sheets of paper? Assuming it even gets that far, of course, because it's probably also largely just an AI.
Fact checking is a marketing term scam. There is no such thing, or at the very least, Facebook moderators staring at things for a few seconds and clicking based on official Facebook dogma isn't it. Facebook moderators are no different than any other random poster on Facebook, they've just got a particular party line to enforce and a special megaphone nobody else gets. That's all it is, a corporation's enforced opinion, not "facts" or "truth". Why should you trust a corporation's official enforced opinion any more just because the corporation found out they can call it a "fact check" and it slips past people's fully-justified cynicism about official corporation enforced opinion?
>Facebook is not and can not be an arbiter of truth in the abstract,
I'm not sure you're replying to the right comment, because I wasn't claiming that the BMJ story was demonstrably false[1], and I wasn't defending any action that labeled it as such. The action was to label it as "needs context", a category which specifically exists not to claim that the story is false.
So what are you replying to?
And are you really disputing that social media spreads a lot of clearly false stuff that isn't a mere matter of interpretation? Why do you consider that so implausible?
Edit: As exhibit A, I could probably cite your attribution of claims to me that I didn't make. Now, imagine all the people on social media without your exacting standards of integrity!
[1] Just the opposite -- I accepted that they found legit problems!
which stories on facebook dont need context?
this is not snark and the question is not trivial. nothing - NOTHING - means the same in isolation as contextually. facebook isnt applying this label equally. theyre selectively moderating and claiming impartiality.
Probably not many, but the label is like a "watch your step" sign. People should be careful all the time, but sometimes it's best to remind them. You don't put those signs on everything and you don't put them on nothing, you put them in situations where there's a reason to think it's necessary.
> Prove it,
I mean, isn't it obvious from recent history that social media fact checking emerged as a band aid, because of demonstrably false blatant lies like Pizzagate, Q Anon, Stop the Steal, and all kinds of Anti-vax crankery were spreading like wildfire on social media?
And at every step of the way the social media companies dragged their feet before they tried to do anything to address that problems
IMHO, social media fact checking is a bad solution to a real and serious problem. However, the proper solution is probably to nuke social media from orbit; but technology doesn't serve us, we serve technology, so that's not going to happen.
> That's all it is, a corporation's enforced opinion, not "facts" or "truth". Why should you trust a corporation's official enforced opinion any more just because the corporation found out they can call it a "fact check" and it slips past people's fully-justified cynicism about official corporation enforced opinion?
"Corporation" is a loaded word with negative connotations. Let me put it this way: institutions are far, far better at reliably determining facts than individuals. That's true because the world is complicated, busy place and it requires far more effort and knowledge than one person can possess. Corporations are a class of institution, and some of them actually do a fairly good job of fact checking (e.g. publishing and media corporations). That said, Facebook is a shitty institution, but it's the only one in a position to do anything about the crap on its platform.
Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
Powerful people have acted to suppress dissenting opinions; whether it's whether Covid leaked from a lab or Galileo Galilei's 'Eppur si muove' way back in 1633[0], and most likely this has been going on long before that.
When I look at social media I can't help thinking of that line: "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so'?"
> Not the specific issues you mention, but the problem with this approach is that just occasionally "blatant lies" turn out to be true.
> Powerful people have acted to suppress dissenting opinions; whether it's whether Covid leaked from a lab or Galileo Galilei's 'Eppur si muove' way back in 1633[0], and most likely this has been going on long before that.
That's certainly true, but it's also important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, either. It doesn't help those "dissenting opinions" if they're drowned out in a sea of lies or if the lies (collectively) do far more damage.
Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen by anyone (in fact, this case it was little more than a caution sign), and IMHO it's probably better for the truth if it has to pass some hurdles and gets slowed down a bit, just as long as those hurdles increase the single-to-noise ratio. There's reason process like scientific peer review are respected.
It's a fairly central part of the scientific method to be able to construct falsifiable hypotheses and then to attempt to test them.
> Social media fact checking isn't some kind of hard block that can suppress any idea from being seen [..]
Except it just did: discussion on the origins of Covid was almost completely shut down for well over a year by the actions of one or more bad actors, hugely amplified by well-meaning but weak-minded media and social media outlets?
> Except it just did: discussion on the origins of Covid was almost completely shut down for well over a year
So? The idea made it out, though it's far from proven. In any case social media chatter and speculation about the idea like that has little value.
And this is something I'm totally fine with. I think it's totally in the service of truth to let an idea cook, before it's blasted to the public over social media at a loud volume.
It only "made it out" because (thankfully) not all communication has yet to be fully gatekept through "fact checkers".
In the world you are advocating for it would have never made it out.
If that doesn't scare the utter crap out of you I would strongly advocate you are GROSSLY ignorant of history and need to do some serious learning - especially about how a certain party in Europe happened to come to power before world war II. And if you don't think what we are going through right now isn't a precursor on that level - again do some serious reading (preferably from books with copyrights before the 1990s and not online) about the rise of said party. The parallelism going on right now is pretty breathtaking when you stop and really look around.
We've been watching (and really "enjoying" - although the shows are really well-made it's depressing knowing what actually happened):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon_Berlin
Currently half-way through Series 3...
More often than not. Just look at the politicization of COVID. In the last couple of months we have seen a complete 180 on messaging around the lab leak theory, the vaccines don't prevent infection after all, vaccines don't prevent spread by the vaccinated after all, CDC director admitting that at least 40% of COVID hospitalizations weren't because of COVID but because people went to the hospital with something else why also happening to have COVID...
I could go on. All things that would get you "fact checked" just a few months ago (and hell probably still will get this post flagged). It's nuts.
If you really want to get angry just do some searching on Japan and the much maligned horse dewormer. Millions of people sentenced to hospitalization when there are multiple treatments that we know (now and then!) that could have prevented them? Many of these "fact checkers" were (and still are) in the middle of peddling politically motivated BS instead of actual science.
People are literally dying because of it - and still folks here are advocating for better fact checking. Simply amazing...
You start to assume that criticism against your position comes from one of these places. It is a real strawman for once. Pretty sure that the media story of Russian election interference was made up by PR agencies and we heard about it for month. Nobody asked real questions and demanded evidence. Voters were lied to and it was easy since people that believed in QAnon acted as a distraction. But in the end it was much more damaging because official sources mirrored lies.
> "Corporation" is a loaded word with negative connotations
Corporations do what they believe is best in their strategic interest. That does not make them evil. But they cannot ever defend any moral position that runs counter to their goals and management has a responsibility to all their employees.
This is not a negative connotation, it is just the reality of the situation. And if you accept that fact there can be quite a productive exchange with corporations, even with their handicap on ethics.
Not getting a vaccine because the producer is corrupt seems logical to me. What am I missing? The average person has almost no power in evaluating these vaccines and relies almost entirely on trust.
That is not reality. There are many sources of information supporting the same claim even if an important one of them (the manufacturer) can not be trusted. An untrustworthy manufacturer can still make a good product.
And why should Facebook and its partners decide on what the conclusions to be drawn from this story should be?
I'm sorry, but to me your attitude seems arrogant and condescending: the masses cannot tell truth from lie and cannot be trusted to reach the correct conclusions. And I suppose that, if asked, you would advocate for education with emphasis put on critical thinking.
But you can't be both for critical thinking and for this paternalistic attitude where people get their cues from the truth-arbiter du jour.
It would be better if, instead of trying to claim that they were some kind of authority on what is a fact and what isn’t, they just said “this content is not the kind of content we want to host” and got rid of it that way. There’s no need to justify it as some search for the True Truth.
At the end of the day, Company X hosts the servers and decides what they host and if Company X don’t want to host some kind of content they won’t. If I started posting the n word all over HN, they have the right to get rid of it/me. They don’t want that content here and they have the justification to ban it.
I find the notion of allowing an organization with zero reputation to censor a peer reviewed medical journal that has been continuously published since 1840 to be particularly ridiculous.
That may be a charitable assessment.
> censor a peer reviewed medical journal
Is Facebook's content moderation actually censorship? Certainly the BMJ is still free to publish whatever it wants, as it always has.
What obligation (legal or otherwise) does Facebook have to permit content it doesn't approve of (for whatever reason) to be published on its platform?
Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see. The downside is that takes work; many people seem content to be spoon fed as to what to believe/not believe or can't be bothered to get informed on their own so I get why some people seem to think the solution is "better" fact checkers - when that will NEVER be a solution since everyone has biases. Especially the people screeching the loudest that they don't - ha! They are the worst of all. If they can't even be honest with themselves why should I expect them to be honest with me?
The most valuable service these "fact checkers" provide is plausible deniability for their pet censorship decisions. If you think these fact checkers have your interests at heart - I have a really nice bridge in the desert I'll let go for cheap too!
> "But I have yet to see a better alternative."
> Sure you have - openness! Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I'd much rather not see ANY censorship and instead have the tools to make my own decision and filter out content I don't want to see.
Except that is literally the kind of thing the GP described as "clearly worse and not working." I think the error you're making is applying individualist thinking to social problems, which has led you to come up with a "solution" that's actually fuel for the problem (e.g. someone getting exposed to QAnon, making their own decision to believe, then filtering out the content that contradicts the lie).
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," is a slogan. It's pretty clear it's not a very good general purpose solution, at least.
Sunlight requires you to see the stuff you think is inaccurate, and for you to put work into criticising that content. Not only that, but you have to do it unpaid, and it feeds Facebook's bottom line.
That's very reductive. There are many laws limiting how companies can behave, especially once they exceed a certain size, because a laissez-faire approach has been shown to be harmful to society. Workplace safety, food safety, building codes, anti-trust, etc.
Such laws do not yet exist for social media activities, but that's not an argument that they shouldn't, or that these companies shouldn't try to behave better even absent such laws compelling them.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't fact check, or censor according to their whims. I am saying that you can't dismiss it as "they're a private company they can do what they want".
One thing which annoys me about this is that internet corps have gotten with avoiding the framing of "editorial control". Facebook (and others) would like to pick and choose out of the following
1. We have things like the internet, which are utilities and only exist to convey their users intent. They are regulated (at least in europe strongly, in the US to some degree), and your ISP is simply not liable for what you say using them. Facebook doesn't want this because they don't want the commoditization and regulatory control 2. We have media which has editorial control: you have control on what is published on your platform, you can pick and choose for monetization, but you are liable in the end. Of course none of the big corps want this 3. And then there is the sad attempt of a middle ground carved out by the DMCA and similar laws which try to do something in between, but fail to meaningfully specify the amount of legal liability for non-copyrighted material. Who is responsible for publishing this? The platform isn't AFAIK, they only have to worry about brand impact.
Let's clear this up, either put some of the legal responsibilities and liabilities that newspapers and publishers face on the platform and see the problem of fake news vanish as facebook shuts down hard on what they allow on their platform OR classify them as something like a utility and demand openness OR something else, but let's stop the doublethink of "spreading propaganda is okay, but anything that hurts us making money is ok to censor". People might even migrate to new platforms based on their editorial style then
With zero transparency into supposed content moderation decisions and blatantly obvious unequal application of their "rules", anyone who thinks big tech isn't exercising editorial control is either naïve or just blind because the "moderation" happens to align with their personal and political beliefs.
Personally I think before you get any of the Section 230 safe harbor provisions you should be required to post your content moderation rules, and for any content moderation document the decision on how you got there - and show how the decision is supported by rules that existed at the time you made the content moderation decision. No more hiding biases behind opaque "content moderation" decisions that are far often flat out censorship of opposing views.
Want to be able to exercise editorial control and don't want to play it straight? Then fine - open yourself up to get sued like any other sites that have editorial control.
It's entirely possible to be well educated and amoral, either via genuine inability to comprehend or simply not caring.
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/08/17/theftovation-facebook-...
If I share an mp3 the record industry demands ridiculous compensation.
If I steal a paragraph in a college exam and get caught, I'm sent home without credit or refund.
If I sell a drawing of a certain cartoon mouse, or draw a red shirt on Pooh, I can literally go to jail.
... But if I invest my life savings to start a company based on an insightful idea and read of the market, a trillion dollar company can rip me off wholesale and people will call it "business" and "not related to morals"?
Please tell me that sounds as batshit insane to you as it does to me.
If you look at the success of Britney Spears and spawn an entire market of popstar clones, though, that's entirely legal.
That's essentially what Facebook did to Snapchat.
The bigger issue that you are pointing to is that the tech companies are becoming large trusts that do everything and can leverage their size to win everywhere. E.g. see Amazon competing with Intel now.
The anti-trust movement needs to be stronger if society says: ‘wait, this isn’t a good idea to let one company win at everything’
From his perspective, it's not wrong, as long as the "fact-checking" goes his way.
Then, fact checking is attempted, and people claim censorship, an imperfect job, and the idea that "How dare they!"
I literally loath, hate, and despise facebook. But come on, they're only doing this because everyone piled on them, claiming they must fact check and validate things.
If I was facebook, twitter, or google seeking this, I'd rightly think that listening to people is dumb, and they should just ignore them.
People need to adapt to not believing every stupid thing they read on the internet and actually thinking critically about things. The information streams of the world should not be tailored to the critical thinking ability of complete morons.
It blows my mind we went from "trying to censor cop killer is a bridge too far no matter the merits of doing so" to "you can't say things that compromise the interests of powerful individuals, offend the chronically sheltered, or that might confuse the braindead under any circumstances" just in my lifetime. Free speech seemed absolutely unassailable in my youth and has been completely destroyed relative to that in present day.
What the fuck happened?
Sure, free speech is optimal if this happens. But what if it doesn't happen? People are extremely irrational [0], and that certainly won't change anytime soon. What changed is that we got better at exploiting that irrationality at scale.
There's no practical value in stating "in an ideal world, free speech is the solution". We don't live in that world, and we don't get any closer to it by complaining on HN about people not doing enough critical thinking.
Fact checkers, corporations, the media, the state, and any of the elite are just people and so extremely irrational, Why on earth would you want to give any of them power above and beyond the general public, it's so easy to manipulate the so called "rational" with selective publication of information. Do we just forget that covid human to human spreading was "fake news" for an entire month, and basically changed the course of history because some bureaucracy decided it had more authority on the matter than a doctor treating the patients.
Or what about the "Ricard Spencer is a nice guy in Germany" effect, because people in Europe can't see the hate speech he makes, so they think he's fairly reasonable person.
To me it seems that it's the general public, from Snowden to Li Wenliang that is keeping fake news in check, not the elite, keeping the public in check.
I think a few broad trends reinforced each other in the U.S. But kind of prerequisite, people came to get too much of their notion of free speech as a scholastic doctrine in state schools. Mills's On Liberty argues that a doctrine elevated above criticism comes to be held in an empty way, and gets lost over time even if it's true. It seems like that happened here to the idea of free speech itself.
(I'd quibble at your "completely destroyed". We don't want to see what completely destroyed will look like.)
The argument would be that FB optimizes sharing false info, and the proper fix is to either get rid of it completely, or fundamentally change it. Not tack on some "fact checking".
I don't see them as victims of demands for truthiness, but as actors participating in a deliberate charade.
Well, no, not everyone - the half of the people that wanted to silence the other half accused facebook of spreading propaganda to justify censorship. Now that they've won, the half that's being censored are pointing out that it's as bad as they said it was going to be.
No different than warning labels on cigarettes or really boring commercials from the NFL urging you to not gamble too much.
Here's how you know the fact checkers are actually propagandists: you can't find their name or their credentials, or who they work for/paid them.
> Fact checking is better referred to as "authority enforcement" or "mainstream validation".
Fact checking at its core is about analysing assertions that can be objectively verified.
Fact checking must bring forth strong references/sources or proofs to either go in or against the initial assertions.
> Here's how you know the fact checkers are actually propagandists: you can't find their name or their credentials, or who they work for/paid them.
If a fact checker does not provide this kind of info, then yes, it does not seem very trustworthy. Although you could still evaluate them based on the sources they are using for their fact checking.
But, obviously, it does not have to be the case. Fact checkers can and will provide info about their funding, affiliations, composition, etc...
As an example, you can take a look at the FAQ of this fact checker that was active during the French presidential election of 2017 https://crosscheck.firstdraftnews.org/france-en/faq/ :
As you can see, they clearly state that they received funds from Google News to set things up. They also share details about their partners, members, etc.
"Missing context" does not meet this standard of objective verification. Many fact-checking desks and organizations dish out Pinocchios in cases where the "proper context" is political/ideological.
The statement "Iraq has WMDs" switches from false to true
Similarly, "we want to go to war with China" vs "we don't want to go to war with China" switches "the virus is a lab leak" to "the virus is not a lab leak"
Havana syndrome is another one. I was accused of being a unwitting stooge for Putin (on HN) for doubting "Havana syndrome", or at least saying it's also really quite plausible that there's nothing there -- no weapon, no attacks. Now the CIA itself says it does not exist. Which is an interesting position to be in because based on historical precedent you should never trust a word the CIA says, unless they're admitting "we did that"!
Knowing what I know about BS-ing corporate power points and how data can be spun multiple different ways using statistics, the objectively verified information is not enough to prove/disprove an assertion. It always comes down to subjective interpretations and meta analysis of the context behind the facts themselves.
Galileo: "Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun."
Fact Check: Experts say Earth is the center of the universe. Galileo's claim is false and harmful.
A bad teacher is better than no teacher, a bad censor is better than your grandma telling my kid virii dont exist :p
Because they are his fact checkers. It isn't an argument against Zuckerberg or a condemnation, this is just the obvious explanation.
Whoever came up with the concept of fact checkers plainly wanted to establish some form of authoritative voice or judge. I believe the concept is futile and the motives often dishonest. It will not work for whatever reason though.
Just treat them as ideological censors, not unlike those employed by authoritarian regimes. You want to publish an article criticizing the party? Not so fast! In order to get past them you have to use euphemisms hoping they won’t catch them. Or, profusely praise the ideology hoping to appease them so they’d let your article through, hoping they would be flattered and let your one slightly controversial idea at the end through.
No, they won’t send you to a labor camp or come after your family. And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
If you have to ignore 2 mechanisms by which authoritarian regimes enforce censorship in order to say that "the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same", then they're not _exactly_ the same.
> If we're comparing the badness of two words and you won't even say one of them... That's the worst word.
I didn't say they are _exactly_ the same, that's pretty obvious. Especially that one is a country and the other is a company. So it's a bit of straw man, isn't it?
Not every single person who criticized the government or published anything that was censored was sent a labor camp. Those had been eliminated by the 60s. However people didn't get promoted, lost their jobs (is a journalist losing their job and not being able to be hired because they pointed out something controversial that different?), added to blacklist. The response to that was the people auto-censored themselves. They didn't want to get in trouble so they didn't talk about certain things. Those that tried used a few trick to get around the censors, and I outlined those already.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824
"The arrest of a woman in Australia for promoting an anti-lockdown protest online has drawn criticism, after video of the incident went viral.
Footage shows officers handcuffing pregnant woman Zoe-Lee Buhler, 28, in her home in Victoria on Wednesday in front of her partner and children."
>And, yes it’s a private company and if anyone doesn’t like it they can leave, but the mechanics of censorship are exactly the same.
"MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we’re in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern, information that might be useful, information that may or may not be interesting to your viewers.
You all make decisions, just like the social media platforms make decisions, even though they’re a private-sector company and different, but just as an example.
So we are ma- — regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans seeing — are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
Didn't convince me that "fact checking" isn't vile, but it convinced me that in this specific case, the content was shit:
https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/12/22/the-bmj-editors-s...
EDIT - actual link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...
My understanding of the issue is that the content itself was "not shit", but the timing and context in which it was likely to be perceived at the very least, associated it with less palatable implications, which may or may not hold, and are typically borne by counterproductive groups. And there was some evidence that indeed this was how the article was perceived by such groups.
But the article itself, in a completely epistemic sense, was "not shit" at all. It was actually very insightful for anyone interested in the context of the actual science involved.
So this is not as black and white as you suggest, imho, and even if it were in this particular case, the broader issue raised is still important:
If you do science A which is useful for good thing B, but has the potential to be falsely interpreted as bad thing C by bad group D, should we expect an overreaching group E to shadowban/discredit A?
I say no. I would much rather have a proper discussion instead.
Here's one:
> Thacker’s main source was a “whistleblower” named Brook Jackson, who had worked at Ventavia for only two weeks. As I described, the allegations were either big nothingburgers that wouldn’t have affected the quality of the data (e.g., not appropriately using sharps containers to dispose of sharps) or were mainly insinuated and implied without actual evidence (e.g., unblinding or even falsifying clinical trial data). The article follows a familiar format for disinformation. Very definitive and serious accusations are leveled very early in the article, followed much later in the article by “facts” that do not actually substantiate such definitive and serious allegations.
-----
It might actually help if I include a better link, what I posted was actually a follow-up that was the first to come up in my history: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/11/15/wtf-happened-to-t...
So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms?
Ideally, there would be multiple forums. But given how technology scales and how network effects operate, we'd likely wind up with a few enormous entities.
Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?
Previously journalism cleaned itself up because it could be held accountable for outright lies. There is incentive to make outrageous claims because outrage sells. The balance is to create civil and criminal repercussions for provable lies. Lies spread on social media like wildfire because outrage sells and more eyeballs means more money for the platform, so the platform and the authors are incentivized to create and spread misinformation. There is no balance against it, so it will continue to grow.
> If you make money by selling advertising alongside the content [...] you are exposed to libel lawsuits [...] The rest will sort itself out.
By "sort itself out" you mean Facebook would moderate and remove 100x more content? I cannot see how that is not the only outcome if you make platforms liable for the content its users post.
Largely, there is a lot of misinformation spreading on Facebook that has harmful effects. Freedom of speech is tremendously important, but typically the tradeoff is that it comes with some personal responsibility / liability depending on who the speaker, the audience, the intentions of the speaker, and the effects of the speech on the audience. The current platform setup manages to shift that responsibility away from anyone. I think most reasonable people would agree with this, but perhaps many more people than I would think believe in limitless speech without consequences.
If this trend of fact-checking causes too much bad press and hassle for social media platforms, then platforms will simply stop fact checking or people will turn to alternatives. But the internet isn't going to turn into an Orwellian thoughtcrime dystopia nor will it turn entirely into 4chan.
Give me one example
An example of different styles of moderation on the same platform? Reddit. Some subreddits are very loosely moderated, some are strictly moderated. See: /r/politics vs. /r/askhistorians.
An example of people moving to alternative platforms? Plenty of Youtubers are advertising their content on their own domains or services like Nebula because Youtube's own algorithms make monetization unreliable. Whang and Corridor Digital are two examples I can come up with off the top of my head.
An example of multiple points of view being expressed on large forums, despite the existence of fact checking? That should be obvious - discussion about these topics was never actually stopped or even hindered by the presence of fact checks. You can still find plenty of anti-vaxx content on every platform.
Sadly, it seems that instead, the internet is turning entirely into Facebook :(
the classic anecdote of the husband who does a really bad job washing the dishes so his wife won't ask him to do them anymore
The BMJ article, however, was horrible. Poorly sourced (based entirely on someone who was fired and didn't have the technical capabilities they had to judge the claims they were making) and the BMJ editors have basically descended into new age woo instead of real science (I am not sure if this affects the journal, but the specific article was BS).
is the sky blue? depends. maybe it emits a certain spectrum based on gas content on our planet, but color is a perceptual experience.
did trump\biden say X? maybe; is that the whole question - that their mouth made a set of sounds? did they say it, or did they mean it? could they have changed their mind? did they mean it but only tried halfheartedly?
this can be true of hard sciences too. aspects of newtonian physics were known to be true, verifiably by all experimental data, until one day they were proven false. not that physics are so dogmatic, but if facebook can factcheck the bmj, im sure theyd fact check some patent clerk.
i have been pondering the words of the history enthusiast dan carlin[1]. he thinks the most important person in history was JFK because he chose peace and didnt deploy nukes when everyone around him was forcefully recommending WWIII due to the known motives, the "facts" of russia and cuba. i wonder what the fact checkers would have been saying about that.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
[1] https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
EDIT: the due dilligence required to learn about a topic and have the gall to report about its "truth" is called journalism, not fact checking. its not called facebook journalism because that would too obviously be a steaming pile of shit.
I’m perfectly OK with fact checkers getting rid of that level of nonsense while letting most of everything else true.
It doesn't even take long. When they took out Infowars a few years back, people kept saying it was ok because they are so terrible, etc. A couple years later and they are brazenly censoring the New York Post, the oldest newspaper in the US, and one with a very large readership, because it posted a completely and obviously true, newsworthy, and timely story about Hunter Biden during a presidential election.
That anybody defends this paradigm of social media censorship shows how deeply rooted tribalism is in human nature, and how it degrades the capacity in otherwise smart people for critical thinking.
If an article has false assertions, is missing context, or is being used by third parties to promote related falsehoods, then the remedy is for critics to write other pieces that correct the record and let the public sort out truth from falsehood. If the critics can't make their case, then that is on them, not an excuse to set up an unaccountable power structure to quash unfavored ideas.
Whether person X helped group Y do Z is vastly more complex and can be answered on several levels. It’s best left to the public to apply literal common sense. Also, most political debates are on this level of abstraction, making fact-checking a non-starter
True, but if this is so self-evident do we really need to fact check the likes of this? Why is fact-checking the most obviously false things used as a shield to justify slapping true/false labels on far more nuanced and politically motivated information?
Besides controlling the media nearly as a monopoly, they receive favors from government like public money, when they are supposed to be private media. Same for Cadena Ser, for which there are jokes as "the most public private radio ever".
All this, at least in Spain, are the same people and I consider it basically a layer of corruption with the tax payer money. Also, they have been caught several times doing fact-checking by denying some fact, and when it was proved true (there is a video in Internet from Joan Planas where he requested to correct information), they did not correct the information giving excuses about the inability to do it (so they were aware of the "error").
That is the level of confidence I have in fact checking in Spain. In other countries, I do not know, but I see it as a fight for the monopoly of the truth and to control and censor with the excuse of better quality of information, which is not true here. Besides that, fact-checking should not be even a thing, because things are not so clear sometimes. In fact, I have seen some articles from those fact-checking agents with extreme bias loads with the only purpose of shifting people opinions.
Those were not facts, they were merely perspectives and why you should think what they say and why it is not correct according to them to use one term or another. All in all, propaganda.
I loved the time there was a claim that you could spend three days in jail for such and such and they 'fact-checked' it as false because you could be detained for a maximum of 72 hours.
[Edit: I misremembered slightly. It was "a few days" but the point stands. Three days qualify as "a few".]
It's like making a collage. If you put newspapers in a shop window, and sell them, you're a shop. You don't write the newspapers. If you cut out individual letters from newspapers and give them to people, you're not a shop, and you've made the message you create. Facebook is cutting out alternate sentences-to-paragraphs from the tabloids and selling a set of stories it thinks its users like, interspersed with ads. That question of degree is very much the sort of thing that legal brains like to get involved in.
Where they went too far is with their “hoax alert” and their headline that said their article was false without evidence.
English libel law permits individuals and companies to go to court to defend their reputations against the harms caused by false and defamatory publications made by others.
Since the statement that this is misleading, and a 'HOAX CLAIM', it would fall into "A statement is defamatory if its publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to the reputation of the claimant."[1]
> Footnotes
> Provenance and peer review: commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
While it is an article, it has (in theory) been peer reviewed.
Compare that to this article:
> Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally reviewed.
Clinical trials are all about science. Everything is important, including data collection.
Investigative reporting on how a clinical trial was performed requires a different skill set and also a very different attitude.
The article never said that this invalidated all Pfizer trial data or anything. But concern was justified and the article was needed to ensure better oversight.
...but not a "news blog", as claimed by Lead Stories.
"If you mix art and politics, you get propaganda"
Edit: maybe it’s Politics with an uppercase P rather than politics with a lowercase p? That would make more sense.
"If art gets involved with politics, it stops being art and becomes propaganda."
I think it was some kind of retort to the Frankfurt school[0],[1] philosophical movement.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...
Does that actually make any sense to you?
Would you consider Guernica by Picasso[1] propaganda?
If you mix art and politics, you get politics
The real story here is that we have one more item of evidence that Facebook doesn't have an algorithm to deduce truth from the cacophony of opinion. I'm not sure why we need evidence of this, but hopefully the people who thought the censorship teams were a good idea will eventually be persuaded that banning ideas outside the political mainstream leads to stupid results. And persuaded that Facebook should stop attempting the impossible and embarrassing themselves in the attempt.
I don’t know which way the lawsuit would go, but I’d like to see it happen.
Hopefully it will also highlight how this is a political thing, how it has been a political thing since the very beginning. When it comes to politics being a "peer-reviewed scientific article" doesn't count for much if it doesn't serve the purposes of the powers involved.
Do these people meditate deeple and then receive divine inspiration as to what is really true? Do they have transcendent superbrains that work better than everybody else’s? Do they have access to Secret Wikipedia that contains only true and current facts?
The truth of everything we do will be visible only centuries from now, after all strong political feelings we have shifts somewhere else. (Today we look at Ancient Rome and do not care about the Reds and the Greens.)
Also, most human statements cannot be evaluated for truth, including this one. We communicate mostly feelings, sentiments, our sense of something, and the odd number or two.
Bad actors telling simple lies for lol's and/or profit do exist and they will ruin communities.
Inline fact checking is a feature of all successful forums, whether the fact checking is done by the institution or the community is immaterial to the true existence of the need.
If computers with all of their precision require checksums and error correction in data transfer protocols it seems arrogant and perhaps willfully ignorant to think humanity does not also require this for the continued propagation of accurate and useful data.
People often conflate "general existential uncertainty" with the "knowability of truth inside a shared frame of reference", in this case our shared frame of reference is physical reality and propositional statements can be "grounded".
Some people just stop trying because they are tired. Some because they lack the tools to evaluate data and create confidence intervals. Like most nerd skills, talented data analysts can be hard to find.
The very existence of this article and the ensuing discussion shows that the internet continues to surface facts and route around censorship. The efficacy and methodologies forums use will continue to evolve and require refinement, and have evolved from the early BBS days, some forums will also tend to be run in an overly authoritarian/restrictive/harmful way, just like in the old BBS days.
All online community that philosophically and practically reject error correction tend to end up shut down by the state for child pornography or overwhelmed with snake oil salesmen preying on the credulous.
A checksum can be computed and compared. It is simple. A political statement will be higher up the ladder of abstraction and cannot be parsed as precisely or understood out of context. It is complex. It can only be judged by millions of complex brains coming up with their own nuanced opinions.
Wishing for a world where all important statements can be judged as “true” or “mostly true” or some such nonsense is magical thinking.
That headline shocked me, because if you follow the mortality statistics, there is no way COVID's worldwide mortality rate could draw anywhere near the mortality rate of the 1918 flu epidemic, which has been estimated at 1-6% of the entire world population (17-100 million deaths, world pop in 1918 approximately 1.8 billion) [4, 5]. COVID has been estimated at about 7 million deaths so far out of a world population of 7.9 billion [6], for a global mortality rate of around 0.1%. Even looking at total excess deaths, which includes a lot of non-COVID causes, you have 20 million, still at the lower end of the 1918 epidemic's range with a much larger world population [7].
Lead Stories eventually defends their claim by comparing Spanish Flu mortality to peak COVID mortality in New York during the early epidemic - a bizarre case of cherry-picking.
To their credit, Lead Stories did update their headline soon after tweeting that to remove the claim about Spanish Flu, but the lead sentence still reads as follows:
> Is this meme correct in saying COVID-19 is less deadly than what was known as Spanish flu a century ago, or current variants of seasonal flu? No, that is misleading...
This "fact check" raises some useful points but is itself pretty misleading.
Considering this and their significant failures in the BMJ incident, I would hesitate in trusting this fact checker to consistently provide high-quality, unbiased checks.
[1] https://twitter.com/leadstoriescom
[2] https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/01/fact-check-covid-...
[3] https://twitter.com/LeadStoriesCom/status/148358521874124800...
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC3291398/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
[6] https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/covid-19-has-caused-...
One man's cherry-picking is another man's apples-to-apples comparison. If you want to compare the base mortality of two diseases in different times, you do need to correct for differences in lifestyle and healthcare standards, otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
I have no opinion on the merits of the chosen comparison, but if your position is that it is fair to compare the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic that occurred right after a devastating world war with the baseline mortality rate of a pandemic under 21st-century health care and information systems, then I would also accuse you of cherry-picking your statistics: you need to include both the differences in healthcare and the differences in case numbers in your comparison.
The article made an extremely specific comparison - all-time Spanish Flu toll versus COVID toll in a very specific time and place where it was especially bad - did not justify it, and used it to imply a broader claim about the relative deadliness of the pandemics. And the broader claim was explicit before they changed the headline.
I reject the idea that the appropriate comparison is subjective in this context of fact-checking. Lead Stories cannot freely make whatever comparison it feels justified and present the result as a fact about the relative deadliness of the 1918 and COVID pandemics. The most relevant facts prima facie are those presented in my initial post. If someone wishes to argue that COVID is more deadly after controlling for XYZ, the proper forum for that is a peer-reviewed scholarly research article.
Is it though?
I get that if you're talking about how much money something cost in 1918 and how much it cost today you'd want to take inflation into account otherwise everything in 1918 is "free" (or 90%+ discounted) compared to today.
But when you're talking about lives and deaths, well, I mean I don't think a life back then is worth any more or less than a life today. On a population adjusted basis a single death "counts" more insofar as there were fewer people around so a death is a larger percentage of the world population. But it doesn't inherently have less value.
Because I really doubt the thing going through their head is “wow this might be wrong”. Trust in any government, media or institution has already been completely burned for those people and things like “Fact Checks” to them only makes the misinformation seem more legit.
I’d bet if you actually engaged with those people you’d discover this system accelerated misinformation not curbed it.
> “When people saw those warning labels, 95% of the time they did not go on to view the original content,” the company says. Moreover, if an article is rated “false” by their “fact checkers”, the network will “reduce its distribution”. This means that, while an author or poster is not aware that censorship is taking place, the network could be hiding their content so it is not widely disseminated.
The piece above was censored by FB as misinformation, before they apologised for the error. - https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-lea...
That's a different subject, I'm talking about what's happening in the persons head when they see it. Not about if the network actually just shadow-censors it so they never see it in the first place.
> The "Missing Context" label applies to content that (while true or real) might still be misleading because crucial information is missing. Given the enormous engagement the article received and the kinds of reactions it elicited that certainly seems to have been the case here.
“Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial”
> The BMJ.com headline, shown above, fails to make two important distinctions:
> The allegation concerns just three of the 153 sites at which the vaccine was tested on 44,000 participants. It would have been less misleading to say "data integrity issues at 3 of 153 Pfizer trial sites."
Given how many of the social media audience would read just the title, perhaps the missing context label is accurate.
[1] https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...
The FDA audits were at some other sites of those 153 and reportedly did not find any incongruences. Which need not mean there were no issues, but it's certainly a prior.
I'm surprised people can't even recognize the smell of something wrong, even when it's out in the open:
> The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network.
The tone of the very first sentence is off. This is the publication describing itself.
If that's the standard we're going with, 95% of content and 100% of ads on social media should also have big factcheck warnings on them.
Stop fact checking sites, and social media becomes even worse than it is.
Use fact checkers, and you love with false positives and false negatives.
Then narratives form around those errors ( because we are pattern recognition machines, even when there are no patterns).
So what’s the out ?
All fact checking will create some amount of False pod/negative. No amount of money, time or resources can avoid that.
The only people benefiting from "fact checkers" are the big tech companies that can use them as a shield to hide behind.
Am I missing something about American fact checkers ?
The sites I know have limited resources so they spend their time on quality work in the few places they can.
How does fact checking work in the states ? Is there something non obvious about fact checking groups?
> The Lead Stories article, though it failed to identify any errors in The BMJ’s investigation, nevertheless carried the title, “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials.”
> The first paragraph wrongly described The BMJ as a “news blog” and was accompanied by a screenshot of the investigation article with a stamp over it stating “Flaws Reviewed,” despite the Lead Stories article not identifying anything false or inaccurate.
It is _entirely_ possible for a story to be factually correct and still be completely misleading. Just because it doesn't outright lie doesn't mean it's not misleading.
For example, I can point out that "Senator <X> voted, multiple times, against adding funds for the support of military veterans", and that would leave a lot of people with the idea that Senator <X> is specifically trying to prevent funding for veterans. However, it's just as likely that the bills in question were primarily about something that the senator was against, and the veterans part was a tiny "pet addon"; and the senator was voting against the more substantial goal of the bill.
That type of misleading information is used ALL the time, and nothing about it is factually incorrect... but it's still intentionally misleading. It's goal is to make people believe something that isn't true.
Granted, Facebook is supposed to be more open for everyone, but it’s still their platform, their reputation, and they can decide what to filter - and people can decide to take their discussions somewhere else.
Facebook can indeed decide what to filter, but its also permissible for other organizations to make users aware that Facebook may filter and display misleading messages based on inaccurate fact checking and that the fact-checking organization that caused the filtering defamed a reputable publication by falsely alleging that their content is a hoax.
Perhaps Facebook now is a publisher and needs to increase censorship even more.
Or the law can be changed to differentiate based on the scale of contributions and the corresponding complexity of moderation.
In my head, if they do any filtering or ordering of content, they have to be accountable such content, since they are exerting a de facto editorial line.
I don't really understand how a newspaper publishing an incendiary op-ed can accountable for it, whereas the same thing as a viral FB post won't hold FB accountable. The only difference is that an editor picks the former, and an algorithm picks the latter.
Is that it? Does delegating responsibilities to a computer make us any less responsible of the results?
Where has it gone wrong?
“We did not call into question the integrity of The BMJ’s story, only the comprehensiveness of it. That’s the point of a ‘Missing Context’ rating.
The BMJ article is being used as evidence of Vaccine Conspiracy theories, it's not like the warning is on the Article, it's where it's shared on Facebook and the missing context label is relevant in that context. A context where the vast majority of people viewing the facebook posts will not understand the BMJ may cover a sub-topic where the results do not reflect on the outcome of the parent topic...
Where does this logic end? If I screenshotted your post and put it on my blog about how FB can do no wrong, that Zuck should be president, that the government is just out to get FB for being successful, etc. does that mean your post should have included context that clarified that none of this is true?
But if I was, and if I posted a picture of the sea, saying I was performing an experiment to measure the circumference of the earth.. Then yes, missing context label would be relevant. I wouldn't claiming that the Earth is flat, and context outside the picture would account for why 1 data point my suggest otherwise.
> placed under additional scrutiny and not shown on the feed
I'm not sure the 'missing context' label affects visibility like others do.
2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.
This is only shown to Group Admins, you're correct that it's wrong however it's clearly a simple wording mistake with limited impact.
> 2. Quality reporting is being censored by selectively applying a label that belittles its objectiveness.
That's a big stretch, 4,000 - 8,000 thousand articles are published to the BMJ each year, one of them having a label on social media with 'missing context' is not censoring quality reporting.
The problem isn’t the content, but rather the audience, and how they react to said content.
People generally don’t read articles - particularly lengthy articles, particularly articles written by academia for academia - they read the headline, perhaps the lead, and then go post and spread their interpretation of the information.
The BMJ have a reputation as being a reputable source of information.
Take these two together, and you have a wavefront of posts claiming that the BMJ agrees that vaccines are dangerous and poorly tested, and the story isn’t what the article holds, it isn’t nuanced, it isn’t moderate, it’s “look, this proves that bill gates wants a microchip in you, and the BMJ confirms it!”.
So, you have a difficult choice. Do you allow a factual article and the reputation of the BMJ to be used as fodder for anti-vaxxer sentiment, or do you try to dampen the squib and decrease the propagation of the distorted interpretations?
If anything, there should perhaps be a middle road, where in order to share or comment on an article, you have to answer a series of questions about what the article says. This would dampen the network effect, and would hopefully ensure that people are actually forced to read the content they’re sharing, rather than relying on a headline and a strapline interpretation added by the sharer.
FB's narrative is that the problem is the people who post untrue stuff, and fact checking will fix the problem (actually it won't, but it will show FB tried their best).
But the problem is FB's algorithm which promotes and publishes rampant misinformation. FB should be held accountable for what they decide to show people. Not deflect accountability onto their users.
>Alan Duke, editor in chief of Lead Stories, told The BMJ that the “Missing Context” label was created by Facebook specifically “to deal with content that could mislead without additional context but which was otherwise true or real.”
This whole episode is one more piece highlighting the difficulties caused by casual readers attempting to read technical literature. Technical literature covers topics that average readers have little to no experience with and as such non-technical readers are prone to drawing unsupportable conclusions from them. Honestly, any technical article can be slapped with the "Missing Context" flag by default.
The positions in this article are pretty simple. BMJ publishes a report showing that one of the contractors performing studies for Pfizer's covid vaccine had practices that were flawed but did not render the data unusable. As far as I can tell, everyone agrees on these facts. This article was widely shared on Facebook, primarily by anti-vaccine groups. Lead Stories is asked by Facebook to fact check the article and Lead Stories assigns the "Missing Context" flag
Extrapolating from context, I'm going to assume that anti-vaxxers were arguing that this was proof that the vaccine is entirely unreliable and should not be used (this seems like a safe assumption because it's the conclusion that anti-vaxxers always come to no matter the evidence). It's important to note that BMJ and Lead Stories both agree that this conclusion is entirely unsupportable by the article.
The BMJ is intended for a technical audience, so from a technical reader's standpoint, the article is complete as it is. Lead Stories is reading from the viewpoint of a non-technical reader; someone who lacks the skills and experience necessary to understand the article. So Lead Stories points out that readers need more information than is in the article in order to understand it. This is trivially non-controversial from the plain english definition of "technical literature". It's even more true in light of the fact that anti-vaxxers are using the article to build flawed arguments that are resulting in the deaths of thousands. BMJ's response to the situation is unsupportable and, perhaps intentionally, is arguing something completely differently than Lead Stories.
That's not to say BMJ doesn't have a real grievance. They should push back on the wording Facebook provided in their notice. Facebook states that the article is partly false, which Lead Stories does not agree with. Facebook also, ironically, does not provide sufficient context on the meaning of the "Missing Context" label. But none of these problems with Facebook refute the appropriateness of the "Missing Context" label.
The BMJ is not the shining city on the hill here. You can have problems with Facebook policing information, but Thacker is unquestionably an anti-vax conspiracy theorist and the BMJ is allowing him to use their reputation to push that narrative.
I am firmly against this lowest common denominator approach of people not being able to publish any 'hard science' anywhere through fear of it being taken out of context on social media - particularly after the push of recent years to do the exact opposite and make such stuff open access for all.
The BMJ is not the problem in the world of fake/outrage/out of context news online.
- We think the BMJ is too complicated for you to properly understand.
as opposed to
- We had some group independently check and the BMJ is objectively wrong.
The first one seems a little un-pc, so I would say that people sharing stuff online and a loud minority going off on some mad conspiracy is the [acceptable] cost of being open with science and research.
In general, it's incredibly sad that Covid has lead to such politicisation around vaccines and trials. It seems (to me, at least) that most of what people (SBM, the FB fact-checkers) are concerned about is other people using the information "incorrectly".
Like, fundamentally, this is an impossible problem to solve (none of us can control others interpretations of things) and the attempts to solve this "problem" are likely to result in much worse outcomes.
If the headline was "Questions about data integrity in Ventavia-run vaccine trials" or "Allegations of misconduct at three vaccine trial sites" I might be more sympathetic; but as it stands I think classifying this as agenda-based spin is a fair assessment, as on the whole there are no concerns about about the Pfizer vaccine trial, only the three sites administered by Ventavia. The distinction being that the integrity of the Pfizer trial stands on solid ground even without the Ventavia data, which is a small fraction of the total data set.
That the agenda the BMJ is spinning for is anti-vax is deeply disturbing to me, but that's a separate discussion. I hope you can at least see the concern about such a headline, how it might be perceived as spin, even if you personally don't view it as such.
Like, the numbers for hospitalisation were very very small indeed, and while I (personally) don't believe that the entire trial was flawed (the extensive real world evidence would suggest otherwise), clinical trials are super important, and fixing flaws in them and reporting on them is exactly what I want the BMJ to do.
Additionally, the Lead Stories people are engaging in politics over this report, which kinda sickens me, to be honest. Both them and SBM are using ad-hominems to avoid engaging with the detail of this report, and that's concerning (particularly the fact checkers).
More generally, fact checking being done like this is very worrying (like the Cochrane collaboration got banned from IG for a while, which is nuts).
I guess my meta-point here is that standards of discourse are dropping everywhere, it's all explosions of rage in defence of a pre-determined outcome (which I mostly agree with, tbh) and this is very, very sad and bodes badly for humanity's ability to solve the problems in front of us over the next few decades.
Sad.
- https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/11/fact-check-britis...
- https://leadstories.com/analysis/2021/12/lead-stories-respon...
"[the company that did the fact checking] said Jackson was not a “lab-coated scientist” and that her qualifications amounted to a “30-hour certification in auditing techniques.” Jackson has more than 15 years’ experience in clinical research coordination and management and previously held a position as director of operations."
Talk about missing context and misleading statements...
It smacks of "Yes, some sloppy science was done here, but you can't prove it changed the results? Can you? Can you prove it? Huh? No? Well then shut your dirty mouth!"
Yes, this was supposed to be a blind study but participants had pages detailing whether they had the placebo or not in their notes. Did anyone actually read those pages? Nobody knows. Did you read those pages? Did you? I bet they didn't! I bet NOBODY reads the participants notes! Nobody ready them, it's all fine, and they yanked those pages out within a few somethings (We'll gloss over how someone might have found this out, and whether they were likely to be privy to the information already)
Yes, there were a bunch of used needles discarded in normal binbags rather than in a sharps box, but that doesn't PROVE that they were poorly trained! Oh no. It was probably just a bad day. Did it change the outcome? You can't prove it did! Don't tell me about it unless you're sure!
No, there's no evidence that THESE issues were reported, but look! Other issues were reported! The management had previously discussed how bad they were at the science! If they knew they were bad, they wouldn't continue to be bad would they! And if things were reported, and other things weren't, that's not likely is it... that's just confusing... CONFUUUUUUSSIIIIINNNGG
Yes, they had to take corrective action, but at least they took corrective action! There couldn't have been THAT many people affected, could there? Do you know? I don't know. I bet there weren't many. A handful maybe. Probably just an old couple who were discarded early on for licking the other participants faces. It's inconsequential. Definitely not a problem. No problems here! Move on!
It's almost comical.
It also really bugs me that rather than saying "The article says", throughout they say "Thacker says". They've made it a personal vendetta against an evil person making things up, like they're not even trying to be balanced about it.
That said, I love the summary: "In the end, we’re left with a lot of smoke, but no clear fire." Hmm.. if only there was a well known saying about this. No ... something ... without ... oh, I don't know. Seems legit.
A former Ventavia regional director provided internal company documents to Thacker that laid out potential flaws in clinical trials run by the company for Pfizer's vaccine candidate. Thacker's reporting on these documents places noticeable spin towards anti-vax sympathies for example:
> Thacker writes in the introduction, in which he claims that Ventavia unblinded patients, not that “inadvertent unblinding may have occurred”. There’s a huge difference between the two.
Even without Thacker's spin, this is concerning and deserves investigation. However, for the overall safety of the Pfizer vaccine it's not a significant factor. Ventavia ran 3 out of 153 clinical sites, and signed up about 1000 of 44000 subjects who participated in the trial. Even completely disregarding any data that came from Ventavia, there would be overwhelming evidence of the vaccine's efficacy and safety.
The obvious framing here should be that Ventavia is potentially an irresponsible steward of pharmaceutical trials and Pfizer needs to have greater level of oversight over such contractors. The framing Thacker went with is that the Pfizer vaccine's safety and efficacy are in question due to falsified trials. The latter is simply untrue, and reveals an agenda that is concerning from an editor at the BMJ.
> Thacker writes in the introduction, in which he claims that Ventavia unblinded patients, not that “inadvertent unblinding may have occurred”. There’s a huge difference between the two.
The definition of unblinding does not require someone to actually see it.
If a doctor fixes your eyesight, and you refuse to open your eyes afterwards, have you been unblinded?
https://www.noclor.nhs.uk/active-research/unblinding : "Unblinding, sometimes referred to as code-break, is the process by which the treatment/allocation details are made available either purposefully (i.e according to the code-break procedures) or accidently."
If this information was made available - whether or not that information can be proven to be accessed - then an unblinding has occurred.
So to say that they "unblinded" some patients is not wrong. And if the person who found this out should have been blind to the data, then an unblinding access definitely did occur.
And if you're saying that they should have been more precise about this because people in the audience might not be in healthcare and might not know the technical definitions, I'll refer you to the header on the BMJ website: "Intended for healthcare professionals"
> The framing Thacker went with is that the Pfizer vaccine's safety and efficacy are in question due to falsified trials.
That isn't antivax spin. That's just using the correct terminology.
And also, that isn't the framing he went with:
"Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight."
In nice big letters.
Compare that to Gorski's framing:
"Last week, The BMJ published an “exposé” by Paul Thacker alleging patient unblinding, data falsification, and other wrongdoing by a company running three sites for the massive clinical trial of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. It was a highly biased story embraced by antivaxxers, with a deceptively framed narrative and claims not placed into proper context, leading me to look into the broader question: What the heck happened to The BMJ?"
Exposé in quotation marks. "Embraced by antivaxxers" (not that he is claiming Thacker is one, of course, but blaming the article writer for the kind of people who reads it seems perverse at the least)
Then second paragraph of the introduction: "investigative journalist turned anti-GMO muckraking crank Paul Thacker"
Oof.
(Btw, I'm intentionally not looking Thacker up - don't care who he is or what ad-hominems actually contain truth. Seems like a fools game to me)
So given that, what was Gorski's problem with Thacker's framing?
"Notice the framing. Contrary to Bourla’s statement, the narrative goes, “several” (three, actually, as it turns out) sites in Texas run by Ventavia were supposedly flouting clinical trial safety"
Oh, and that he used the word "Whistleblower" to describe the whistleblower. And that can be misleading, because calling them that (aside from giving them all-important legal protection) might be considered positive in people's eyes.
Thacker using the word "several" which means "more than 3" is definitely wrong, unless he has evidence that the bad science is more widespread than just the three institutes he centers his report on.
And maybe there was a little sloppiness in the language, a little exaggeration in the effects or a little lack of detail in the way he amalgamated his data.
But it's still quite a long article that clearly shows "Ventavia is potentially an irresponsible steward of pharmaceutical trials and Pfizer needs to have greater level of oversight over such contractors".
Or, as Thacker _actually_ put it, poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight.
That you view something through a certain binary lens does not make that the only valid lens through which the scientific community and the public will perceive something. An article that purports to be "just the facts" must report just that, the complete facts and context as best they are known. An article that is correctly represented as an editorialized opinion may do whatever it pleases. The BMJ in this instance is purporting to be the former, while carrying out the latter.
I don't have a problem with the opinion Pfizer should be pursued or have "their bell rung" or whatever. I have a problem with willfully ignoring what the BMJ has done here, which is to use their reputation as a factual medical authority to push spin and then have the audacity to express outrage at being called out for that.
"The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying and Ignored Reports of Flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials"
Did the original article claim trial disqualification? It's like pointing out a rotting foundation and someone says "Hey that's not fair! The house is still standing!" Who is doing the editorializing?
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/science-based-medicines-c...
Now, someone post a takedown of Singal so we can keep the chain going ...
Publishing missteps are inevitable. The BMJ is claiming authorial supremacy above its critics, that's the root of the controversy.
Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that
- Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles
- The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug
- It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way
And yet
- You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts
- Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?)
This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them.
If I ran a multimillion dollar company in a highly regulated industry, I’d be taking very careful notes of him how Pfizer is playing this one.
The vaccines also simply work. They worked very well against the wild type where they also prevented infection, and not only drastically reduced death and hospitalisation. They still reduce death and hospitalisation against Omicron. We figured out now that you really want a third dose for best protection, but that is simply something that you can't know if you have to develop a vaccine on such a compressed timescale.
The mRNA vaccines are the best ones against COVID. AZ and J&J have more serious rare side effects, and they are simply less effective. They're still dramatically better than no vaccine, but once the vaccines were not scarce anymore in the developed world, it made sense to focus on the better ones.
This isn't true, and makes one question the rest of your message. What is true is that the vaccine doesn't really stop people from contracting Covid. But it prevents them from being sick, which is what matters. This is verifiable.
> The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug
Links with actual numbers to illustrate the scale of the alleged issue are pretty necessary with this kind of accusation.
One of the nordic countries has 10x more infections than the first wave and 0.5x people in intensive care. While the vaccines have failed to stop the pandemic, I disagree that the contribution is not meaningful.
You can think that as much as you like, but we have actual numbers on hospitalization/death in the two populations, and there's a clear, large difference even in the Omicron surge.
It's almost like a bunch of people got vaccinated, but the US is still losing thousands a day. More than a 9/11's worth every day for the past week.
> It may be that enough of the world is vaccinated at this point (or had covid) that there’s no way to properly compare.
The 10-30% unvaccinated in most developed nations provides plenty of statistically significant population, and we've literally done the comparing. (See charts: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/briefing/omicron-deaths-v...)
> But it definitely doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as previous waves, even in the unvaccinated population.
We know it's less lethal, yes, but extrapolating that to "the vaccine isn't useful" is false.
Facts may be facts. But conclusions vary.
There is something very dangerous about wanting to discuss a serious issue seriously and being squelched because it doesn’t fit some narrative.
I’ve personally had three shots from Pfizer, I’ve had them administered to my children and I want to hear if there are possible issues with them from reputable sources without those reputable sources being shut down by self-appointed information police.