Personally I'm not sure where the line between "public announcement" and "government censorship" lays or should lay, but "the government can do whatever it wants as long as its opponents are shitty people" is not a good outcome.
The saddest part is that the stated goal of the GBD is exactly the same as the stated goal behind our lockdowns, to minimize the death toll while things settle. Framing this as opposing parties with opposing goals is more about tribal politics than about the facts of the debate or about free speech.
The Constitution makes clear that Freedom of Speech is not absolute, and does not extend to some kinds of speech that can be harmful to society. This is a case where this speech might turn out to be a False Statement of Fact that is not protected and should not be spread, because of the ramifications it has on people’s lives. The merits of the argument are very relevant to the question of whether there is a constitutional responsibility, according to the constitution!
Even deliberate lies are protected by the first amendment unless they fall under the category of defamation. "Harm to society" is an irrelevant distinction under American law.
The Supreme Court has already recognized False Statements of Fact concerning “issues of public concern.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact#Issue...
Wrong again. Yes they are, generally speaking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
(But it’s a good point that the GBD’s goals and the WHO’s are the same, which is a good reason to ask why the debate has veered away from science and facts and is devolving into attacks and bad faith arguments.)
Certainly not. I'm just saying the government should not be directly leaning on you to deamplify it. If you want to deamplify it on your own, fine. If the government wants to make a public announcement that "social networks allowing this sort of thing is bad" that is also fine.
Exactly.
Or if the billionaire is the head of an enemy state.
... and also as long as the speaker isn’t being paid, isn’t speaking for the government, isn’t employing people, isn’t in prison, isn’t a regulator of the bar, the airwaves, the military, or immigration, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Some of those exceptions may be relevant to this particular article.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht...
In effect, that was what was still proposed in the Barrington Declaration in October.
While I disagreed with the proposal (just as I did with flatting the curve in March/April), I don't think it was disinformation. Rather, I think the declaration represents a value systems (liberitarianism) where liberty is seen as more important than safety, and where harming one group (children and young people) to help another (sick and elderly) is seen as unethical.
My main objection was that I didn't think it would be realistic with our current population to be able to stomach such an approach to the end, with the number of deaths that would be likely to follow, and that starting lockdowns late might cause roughly as much harm from the lockdowns as starting them early. (Even Sweden did partically pivot, eventually.)
Basically, though, I think the view presented in the declartion simply represents a political view, not disinformation. And I'm not a big fan of sensoring political views.
There are a couple of reasons I think this particular political view does cross the threshold and amount to mild disinformation, which are that the stakes are far higher than most political debates. This isn’t a tax or budget discussion, it’s an ongoing pandemic with an outcome of millions of premature deaths so far. The GBD did speculate on both the unknown future harm of lockdowns and the safety of herd immunity. It also attacks and contradicts the conclusions of many many fellow scientists and epidemiologists based on speculation and not established facts.
Part of the issue for me is that free market policies tend to externalize damage caused by deregulation, here for example by comparing human death today to unknown amount of human suffering, and (as in this case) they make a sort of unfounded social Darwinism argument that presumes pure economic policy can and should be applied to everything non-monetary. This has been especially true for the last century when it comes to the environment; we’re just starting to pay the real costs and asses the real damage from 100+ years of failure to take enough action and properly regulate pollution, a time during which it was argued constantly that the free market would minimize the total harm.
I don’t know how history will look upon the lockdowns in 10 or 100 years, and I feel like lockdowns suck just as much as everyone else does. But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes. Without evidence to back it up though, it’s hard to say yes we should let more people die because we think in the long term it might be less “total harm” if we do.
This picture is from 99 years ago in Ukraine. It shows the effect of inefficient agriculture and the harm done by dogmatic socialism in the most fertile part of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_Uk...
Millions were starving to death, and Ukraine was not an exception. In most of the world, periods of hunger and starvation was quite normal.
This graph shows the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty, from 1820 to 2015:
https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-extre...
The graph starts at around 90% of the world living in extreme poverty, and is down to less than 10% by 2015.
To a large extent, this development was made possible by fossil fuels.
> But people dying sucks hard, we’re all fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes.
True, and I was all for lockdowns during the early stages, and later on still happy about them for more personal reasons (I'm obese, and I like working from home).
But for some groups, the costs were really high, not just economically. For children, students and many single young people, 1-3 years of isoloation can carry a huge toll socially, psychologically and academically. When I mentioned that to elderly people I know around that time (that were afraid for their lives), they did not show much empathy for those young people who were forced into isolation for the protection of the elderly and obese.
The cooperation of the population is a valid concern when planning a response to an emergency
To color the situation a bit without presuming too much. Should the whole country shut down because DC, NY, and LA are reaching dangerous levels of hospital burden? I suspect the whole country took on the measures needed in denser areas, but I speculate that it looked draconian there since the spread was delayed by a year before it really hit a quorum in some central states[0]. It's a political argument because they can contend it would have been handled better by local, county, state officials.
For example, pro choice vs pro life is about values, not facts.
Scientific misinformation is when someone someone makes statements that are in disagreement with established scientific facts.
For example, the theory of evolution is established enough to be considered a fact. Rejecting it is either misinformation, delusional or both.
Now, it is possible that there were elements in the Barrington Declaration that was also presenting alternative ways of looking at the data, maybe opinions that would be fringe at the time (but definitely mainstream just months before). But part of this is also how you quantify deaths.
Either you can count all lives equally, especially when including those who would have died roughly at the same time, even if they did not have covid.
On the other hand, if you look at number of potential years of life lost, the numbers become quite different, such as in this study:
https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-los...
If you look at the US (which was one of the highest), the OECD study above shows that 7700 years of life were lost per 100000 people, for the sample in time and age groups that were used. That is about 4 weeks for the average citizen. If you use a time window that includes 2021 and 2022, that could perhaps increase to 8-10 weeks per inhabitant.
Maybe this would have been 2-4 weeks higher, if lockdowns had only lasted half as long, who knows. Anyway, I think average number of life-years lost per capita is a relevant metric to compare to the sacrifices involved in long-lasting lockdowns.
Now, if you look at the main risk factor for dying from covid, namely obesity, the obesity in itself carries a cost in terms of expected years of life lost of 2-5 YEARS (not weeks as for covid), depending on the level of obesity.
https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-lif....).
In other words, if instead of mandating lockdowns, the government would spend a similar effort in schools, collages and workplaces to stimulate exercise, one could quite probably have have reduced years of life lost more than the lockdowns achieved, especially during the later stages of the pandemic.
Oh, btw, I'm obese myself, which probably contributed to me being happy about lockdowns for selfish reasons, especially before vaccines were available.
Its assertion is that the government was meeting with companies in an effort to get them to suppress the Great Barrington Declaration and other views that didn't support the government's plan of action. This is both illegal and bad for public discourse and truth-seeking.
When the government gets to rule on truth and falsehood we then become unable to pick apart government-approved facts. Galileo's heresy trials, nearly 400 years ago, illustrate this problem.
Calling this notion "fringe" is just incorrect. The citations for that sentence say it may be hard to achieve. Sure, lots of things are hard to achieve but some of them are worth it. It seems plausible that avoiding the current economic disruptions that are significantly harming the world's poor might have made it worth it.
Yes it does, that is the explicitly stated assumption of the GBD.
“As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e. the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity.”
The argument isn’t over whether there is a total harm reduction goal, the argument is over which of several strategies actually leads to total harm reduction. The stated goal of lockdowns was exactly the same, to reduce total harm.
I disagree. Lockdowns were targeted, "naive" harm reduction: the harm directly caused by the virus itself. It just implicitly assumed that the harm from the virus simply had to outweigh any other possible sources of harm, and/or that other sources of harm could just be mitigated, but we had literally no reason to be certain of that at the time, and in retrospect that seems to be false.
The GBD was specifically couched in terms of total harm reduction, calling for us to account for economic, mental health, delayed treatment, and other harms caused by "naive" harm reduction policies, like lockdowns. This is the argument that doesn't really change even if herd immunity is taken off of the table. This exact argument is the opening sentences of the GBD, so that's the central thesis, and removing herd immunity doesn't change this argument.
Edit: to be clear, obviously removing herd immunity changes the threshold where harms prevented by oppressive policies are outweighed by the harms caused by those policies, but it doesn't change the existence of this threshold. Infection still provides protection, even if it doesn't convey immunity, so the GBD could still be true even if you remove all references to herd immunity.
So were the lockdown, mask mandate, and social distancing policies. We had far less severe lockdown than China in explicit recognition of the potential harm of more severe lockdowns. Again, the idea to reduce total harm is not unique to either side here, you can disagree all you want, but almost everyone is interested in reducing total harm, the debate is over how to do that, not whether.
BTW who are you quoting with “naive”, and why do you believe taking some action to reduce death during a pandemic is naive compared to a Libertarian backed idea to do nothing and let nature sort itself out? With hindsight, we actually know now that the GBD’s suggestion was naive because immunity rates after contracting Covid are not as good as they hoped for.
>Climate Science Denial Network Behind Great Barrington Declaration
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/10/09/climate-science-denial-ne...
You are asking why is violating the First Amendment illegal? Because that's how laws work here. The constitution is literally called 'the law of the land', hence violating it would be illegal
> Where is that stated?
Where is what stated? That this was a violation of the First Amendment? I mean, it's literally in the subheading of the article: "Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at the behest of the government is government censorship, which violates the First Amendment". I am not arguing it was or wasn't, I was just letting the OP know what the real issue is
They don’t have evidence that the govt compelled the censorship. And the NIH generally doesn’t have this authority, and I doubt most companies believe that it does. Don’t forget this happened during the previous administration, which officially supported the GBD.
They also don’t have evidence that anything was illegal, since preventing misinformation & speculation isn’t illegal and might not be protected by the First Amendment. See the side discussion on freedom of speech exceptions nearby. Whether the GBD is misinformation is totally relevant, freedom of speech depends on the content of the speech.
IANAL (and I'm sure you aren't either), but if you actually read the wikipedia article you linked to, that specific area of constitutional law is vague and far from settled:
> The basis for this ruling was the Court's fear that "a rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee the truth of all his factual assertions" would lead to "self-censorship".[15] This determination altered the theory of the 'false statements' free speech exception. Even if a false statement generally would be harmful for public discourse, the Court quoted John Stuart Mill in arguing a false statement in this context would bring "the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error".[16]
> Issues "of public concern"
The leading case on what an issue "of public concern" is Dun & Bradstreet v. Greenmoss Builders (1985). In Dun & Bradstreet, the Supreme Court considered whether a credit reporting service which distributed fliers to their only five subscribers qualified as an action of "public concern". As it was "hardly and unlikely to be deterred by incidental state regulation", the Court concluded it did not qualify.[5] This decision did not provide strong guidance on the issue.[20]
This vague area of law in regards to false statements of fact can lead to a variety of arguments over what is relevant or has public importance.[20][21]
(emphasis is mine^)
Anyway, I'm not arguing it was or was not illegal, since that is a matter for the courts to decide. You could be right, but I'm skeptical
If a random cop stops by your house and tells you to take down the sign on your lawn, the government has violated your rights.
The allegations in the article are of that sort, that government agents were giving direction to private companies on what speech they ought to permit on their platforms.
Sweden also famously avoided lockdowns and later regretted it.
China had severe lockdowns, and to the best of our knowledge it worked.