Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

Frankly, if I were the BMJ I would start contacting lawyers and issuing writs. I'm unsure of exactly what or where or how, but the principle that peer-reviewed scientific articles are being shadowbanned as "false" and unshareable by a for-profit, unqualified US organisation is...deeply offensive. A large lawsuit by an organisation such as the BMJ (an impact factor 40 journal first published in its current form in about 1840) would, at the very least, highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see.

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.

Just to clarify, the article in question is not a scientific paper in BMJ. It's a feature, so pretty much like a regular news article.

On the article in question:

> 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.

Interesting, but really hard to interpret what that means in this case. Peer review is for scientific content, and there is no science in this article. It's investigative reporting, so this would require an entirely different kind of review, and probably not one by scientists.

Nothing prevents to peer review an investigative article. Clinical trials are complicated and reviewers were probably professionals who have at least some experience in clinical trials.

Clinical trials are all about science. Everything is important, including data collection.

For scientific papers I have a reasonably good idea what a competent reviewer would do. It's a lot less than what many non-scientists seem to think when they read "peer review", you can't rely entirely on it but it's a useful indicator.

Investigative reporting on how a clinical trial was performed requires a different skill set and also a very different attitude.

In any case, the point of the article to raise a concern, not prove something. FDA is responsible for overseeing this. So far, it appears that were some irregularities with Ventavia and now they might be resolved.

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.

> pretty much like a regular news article.

...but not a "news blog", as claimed by Lead Stories.

Deeply offensive doesn't mean illegal. Unless there's a law that you can point at which bans this, there's no point in hiring lawyers because any challenge will be immediately thrown out. The real issue here in my view is that Facebook - a private company with no legal requirement to keep publishing anything that people post - is becoming the de facto news source for vast numbers of people. And, God help me, I have some sympathy for Facebook here if, as another commenter says, this study is being taken out of context and being used to push anti-vax conspiracy theories. It's such a complex issue.

If they are actually being labelled as false as part of the justification , there is at least an arguable case of defamation, stronger in a jurisdiction like Britain where truth of the damaging published characterization is a defense that the defendant must prove rather than falsity of the claim being an element that the plaintiff must prove.

Defamation by... censoring?

I think from a legal standpoint, they’re on firm ground with simply censoring them under the “missing context” category. Everything under the sun could arguably be said to be missing context.

Where they went too far is with their “hoax alert” and their headline that said their article was false without evidence.

Defamation by claiming that the authors of the article in question were lying, or perpetrating a hoax.

in the UK, where the journal is based, I think the libel laws would more than cover 'a law which bans this'.

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]

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26

"If you mix science and politics, you get politics"

In the same vein:

"If you mix art and politics, you get propaganda"

May I ask where this quote came from? It seems utterly nonsensical to me.

Edit: maybe it’s Politics with an uppercase P rather than politics with a lowercase p? That would make more sense.

Sorry, I have no source and also I think the actual quote goes something like this (I just tried to follow the template from the parent comment):

"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...

> If art gets involved with politics, it stops being art and becomes propaganda.

Does that actually make any sense to you?

Would you consider Guernica by Picasso[1] propaganda?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)

I'd lean "if you mix art and power, you get propaganda"

If you mix art and politics, you get politics

> highlight how Facebook rapidly has become a publisher and its algorithms shape what people see.

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.

That seems excessively litigious. And very questionable on a fundamentals level - nobody except Facebook and idiots will believe that Facebook's fact checkers have a better grasp of reasonable medical opinion than the BMJ editorial team.

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’d personally like to see FB sued for this, as it is clear that your proposed solution has been tried and is not working. FB is not stopping this, but getting worse, as we see here.

I don’t know which way the lawsuit would go, but I’d like to see it happen.

Facebook is working as intended, a weapon to capture the audience and control the narrative and overthrow governments. No one would want Facebook to change.

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