It's unfortunate that they were loud with the misinformation and very quiet with the correction.
No company should have unfettered control over the metaphorical "town square" to control population-level discourse.
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
It's fine because you didn't intend to harm anyone, but now that you know it's dangerous, if you kept spreading that public data, we would know you intended harm and your behaviour would be rightly considered malinformation. That would be double plus bad.
Perspective changes over time, and I have no doubt that the "town squares" will adapt into forms unrecognizable to those of us alive now, but to simply throw our hands up in the air a cede all control of public discourse to unaccountable entities is an abhorent thought.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri
Except instead of there being only seven, Sauron mass-produced them and now everyone has one, maybe two. Hardly nobody even meets at the Prancing Pony anymore, at least without a palantíri call first.
Is it though? If someone makes an unfounded guess and states it as fact isn't it fair to call that misinformation even if that turns out to be correct?
What would be your preferred approach?
You made a category error by somehow replacing "opinions which are obvious nonsense" with "any dissenting opinion whatsoever".
Nobody but you suggested that. The claim was that you cannot say anything at all about any "dissenting opinion" unless you are 100% sure you are correct. That is nonsense. You can obviously say something about some of them, while not being confident enough to rule out some others.
That's perfectly right, if you yourself aren't making guesses.
What we got? People without a full understanding of the subject matter themselves acting as if they were the ultimate authority on SARS-CoV-2, and a cadre of sympathetic globalist-oriented corporations uncritically deferring to them in the extreme. It’s like some of the supposedly smartest people in the world just have their brains leak out their ears simply because a three-letter agency with such apparently big words such as “world” and “health” in the full name make some pronouncements and broker no argument.
The appropriate approach would be to state "given current arguments, we are not sure whether it is airborne or not" instead of doubling down on their assumption/guess.
To the best of their knowledge , at the time, that was what the evidence pointed to. Then, as more evidence surfaced they realized that those assumptions didn't hold (and that could change again in the future with new research).
- A claim is made with apparently uncontested evidence like a video, picture, quote, article, or endorsement.
- Knowledgeable viewers see the story and realize something is wrong.
- Meanwhile, the original claim starts to get spread by the "credible" media such as newspapers, TV, and online publications.
- Critics then mock and complain on social media about the claim.
- The regular news eventually catches up and makes new stories over the corrected claim without a reference to their original claims.
Hold these people accountable and don't give them your attention. Journalism has lost much of it's integrity.