Turkey adopts media law jailing for spreading ‘disinformation’
tvpworld.com
tvpworld.com
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Similarly see Alex Jones, I disagree entirely with his politics and virtually everything he's ever said, but ultimately he was just fined approximately $1 billion USD for no more than speaking. Honestly seeing that happen to a private entity is more concerning than it happening to a demographic that already requires government approval to legally operate (medical professional, in this case).
Instead he didn't participate in the lawsuit and the other party that did is assumed to be correct.
> [1] In both the Texas and Connecticut lawsuits, judges found the company liable for damages by default after Jones failed to cooperate with court rules on sharing evidence, including failing to turn over records that might have showed whether Infowars had profited from knowingly spreading misinformation about mass killings.
> Because he was already found liable, Jones was barred from mentioning free speech rights and other topics during his testimony.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/shootings-school-connecticut-cons...
The basis of the lawsuit was "This man said things that made me upset". And yeah, they were rightfully upset, but it's something that I think any court in a country that values freedom would throw out in a heart beat.
The lawsuit literally claims they (Alex Jones) encouraged the harassment.
[1]: https://infowarslawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018-...
Why did Jones take this approach? I see four possibilities, and they're all bad.
1. He didn't think the rules applied to him.
2. He thought the court system was corrupt enough that he couldn't get a fair trial.
3. He knew he was likely to lose on the facts anyway.
4. He thought that the publicity of "not cooperating with the system" (or whatever) would be more valuable than the cost of losing the case.
Whatever the reason, he did this to himself. He threw away his chance to refute the claims against him, and the result is that the claims against him are regarded as true.
Don't treat the courts as a show. They're not. There are real consequences for the kind of game Jones played.
Sounds like he won. I can entertain a thought that given he's not going to pay it anyway, he actually wanted the fine to be as high as possible.
> Whatever the reason, he did this to himself
I don't think folks are pitying Alex Jones here. If he exploited judicial system to gain more publicity, this undermines the system. If judge/jury got emotional and gave him a "fuck you" fine, we shouldn't celebrate it, even if the guy is a total asshole.
> Don't treat the courts as a show. They're not. There are real consequences
It's not a show, and yet he got one. I'm not so sure about "real" consequences. Most folks seem to think that there isn't a difference between $500M and $1B fine.
Using a media empire to sustain a campaign of harassment against innocent people is not the same thing as e.g. broadcasting lies about the safety of vaccines.
> speaking your incorrect opinion should not make you liable for the actions
It should when the target of your "incorrect opinion" is a private citizen being attacked because of your misinformation. Your flippant dismissal as "a few deranged individuals" does not match up with reality.
I have yet to see what tangible damages Alex Jones caused the parents of the Sandy Hook incident. Emotional damages to be sure, but I don't believe fining someone because they hurt another's feelings is a good precedent to set.
Other parents were compelled to hire full time security[2], which can't be cheap.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/parents-of-jewish-sandy-hook-v...
[2] https://www.mediaite.com/news/alex-jones-false-claims-forced...
A lot of the legal documents can be found here [1] but I already know you aren't going to both yourself with the specifics of the case.
The short version is, if somebody sues you, you need to go through the legal motions otherwise you lose by default and then their side is considered factual when determining damages regardless of if it actually was. My personal opinion is that he knew he'd lose under Texas's defamation law and so decided the optics looked better not to fight.
For some reason, I had thought that there were certain lawsuits that wouldn't even be entertained by the court, regardless of whether the defendant chose to actually defend themselves. If that is the case, I think this should have been one of those. If that's not the case, I still don't see how a fine of $1b, or even $100k, could ever be considered reasonable in this situation.
On the defamation part, someone else responded similar so I'll copy and paste my response here:
> I'm not a lawyer so I could be wrong, but aren't those cases only held up and prosecuted when the victim(s) suffered real financial damages? E.g. lost their job, company went under, etc. I have yet to see what tangible damages Alex Jones caused the parents of the Sandy Hook incident. Emotional damages to be sure, but I don't believe fining someone because they hurt another's feelings is a good precedent to set.
Then expect people to drip-feed them basic legal education.
I guess doing some basic research on libel, defamation, punitive damages, and IDK.., the case at hand?, isn't contentious enough. Hard to get into an argument with Wikipedia.
Parent was not claiming you need to be an expert on something to talk about it. parent is claiming you should do at least a bare minimum of research (i.e. read the lawsuit) before making claims about what the lawsuit contains.
You also initially made the claim "[Alex Jones] was just fined approximately $1 billion USD for no more than speaking" which is also (as far as the courts are now concerned) demonstrably false. He was fined $1 billion for encouraging and paying for the harassment of multiple individuals in addition to speaking and other offenses assumed to be true as he did not defend himself through the courts. I mean what information lead you to make this point? This is the problem that the Parent is talking about, any sort of cursory reading of the case would show you why Alex Jones is in trouble.
("Guilty" may be the wrong word, because it's not a criminal offense, but I'm not sure what the right one is here.)
Defamation is a crime in many jurisdictions, including the US (not federally, but in over 20 states). Prosecutions and convictions are rare-but not non-existent. At least in the US, punishments are light (Wikipedia cites a study saying that the average custodial sentence for criminal libel in the US is just under six months). In free countries, prosecutions are generally reserved for particularly egregious cases (e.g. suppose A does some trivial thing to offend B, so as payback B plasters posters all over town accusing A of sex crimes, with the allegation being completely invented). Given this, the vast majority of defamation cases are civil not criminal.
I'm encouraged in seeing the turnout of Alex Jones ordeal and am anxiously waiting to see how Dominion vs Fox News unfolds. I am hoping that the aftermath of all this is that journalists/people-pretending-to-be-journalists/anyone-with-a-sizable-platform will be more careful about their reporting and statements. Of course this is all a murky area because many times it's hard to decide what is true and even harder to decide who gets to do the deciding but for getting the obvious things wrong and when signs of bad faith are clearly there the hammer should get dropped more often, I think such an environment would reduce chaos and extremism that we are seeing more and more of.
Regardless of how justified this feels, I nevertheless worry that using the civil court system in this manner sets a dangerous precedent.
Firstly, because this is a civil matter and not a criminal one, there is no protection against double jeopardy. He can keep getting sued over and over for the same thing. Indeed, it really looks like these parents/their attorneys are out to destroy Alex Jones through lawsuit after lawsuit.
Second, fining someone a billion dollars is just ludicrous. Yes, I know he is not worth that much and will ultimately end up paying far less. But the mere idea that such a large fine was issued undermines confidence that the restitution is in any way reasonable. Not just because the number is so detached from reality, but because such sums look like the financial equivalent of the death penalty.
I am very worried about how civil suits can be used to go after people. To me at least, there need to be additional protections along the lines of what we have in the Eighth Amendment. What I’m seeing with these Sandy Hook cases feels like cruel and unusual punishment. Also keep in mind that you do not have a right to an attorney in suits like these and you have to pay out of pocket.
It is not unreasonable to think lawfare like this will be used against other people in the future.
Not by the same people, though. If he damaged ten people, he might owe damages to each of those ten people. That doesn't sound like a problem to me.
> Second, fining someone a billion dollars is just ludicrous.
It seems like your argument is that the sum is simply too large, and that the specifics of the case are irrelevant.
This seems dangerous to me. If someone does actually cause that amount of damage, why should they not be civilly liable? Surely it depends on the specifics of the case to determine if they did cause that much damage or not?
Otherwise, does everyone just get to cause as much damage as they like but have a cap on what they are held responsible for? That doesn't seem right to me. If someone wants to get involved in a course of conduct which can cause terrible damages to others, then they should also be responsible for that.
I'd love to see an itemized bill demonstrating that. If he actually did cause that much real damage, sure, it would be fair. But I can't possibly conceive how he would have caused even $100k in real damages, much less a billion. It's equally, if not more dangerous, to fine people ludicrously large, arbitrary amounts of money because they spoke something that went against public opinion.
I do not see why a real free speech advocate would protect he "right to harass/defame others for profit".
Juries can award w/e they want but the judge still has discretion in reducing the damages (ex. one of McDonalds hot coffee incidents [1]).
Not a foreman, but I believe juries don't get instructed as to what the maximum amount they can legally award is and so the judge to then reduce it. (ex. Depp vs Heard [2])
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depp_v._Heard
Wanting to reform an aspect of the jury system does not invalidate it as a whole.
Because there were 14 individual people, with each getting an individual settlement amount, it added up quickly.
The alternative is that the fine is just "cost of doing business". Rich people park any old place, any old time, and just pay their parking fines. OK for city government revenue, but bad for public safety, and worse for fairness and civic life.
I urge you to read up on Alex's conduct before, during, and after the trial(s). He spent most of his time mocking the process, attacking the judge, and continuing to defame the parents while failing to comply with basic discovery in a timely way. He also hired incompetent legal representation[1] - probably because they shared his worldview.
I think if Alex had taken the lawsuit seriously and treated it with the gravitas most people would assign to a lawsuit like this, the judgement would be nowhere near $1B. He's his own worst enemy on this one.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-jones-lawyers-acci...
If the defendant fucks around instead of actually mounting a defence, of course the result is going to be a massive win for the plaintiffs. Do you expect the judge to step in and represent the interests of the defendant when the defendant seems uninterested in doing so himself? Alex had the money, connections, and profile to get a very good legal defence. He chose not to. I'm not really sure what you want the courts to do here.
What do you think it would have been?
I don't mind the "asshole tax" in courts, but I feel like it should be limited. The guy is an idiot, but all the more reason to judge him fairly.
$1B fine looks like a political decision (especially to his audience), and will probably give even more power to him.
> I urge you to read up on Alex's conduct before, during, and after the trial(s).
Solid point. Fairness and objective inquiries into damages be damned, if you don't kiss the ring, you deserve the worst.
"Hacker" News endorsing outrageous punishments for not bending over far enough. I, too, recall the portion of the Hacker Manifesto, which read:
We are loyal subjects of the system, and we shall abide by
every rule of decorum which the King hath proclaimed. God
praise our rulers, who are wiser than all of us!
We seek neither freedom, nor fairness. If someone wearing
black robes decrees something, you must bow down and
kiss their feet. It is thus written by St. Ignucious. Amen.
Irreverence for Institute Authorities shall not be permitted.
They are our betters, and we shall exclude anyone whosoever
shall trespass against their Virtuous Rules.
Hack The Planet*!
[*: Provided the hacking is done in accordance with the dictates of our betters.]
I'm not saying that emotional damage isn't very real and devastating, but it's certainly not something on which our courts should base their outcomes. It's too subjective, not provable, and very difficult to quantify.
You get a jury together and they decide. You (and Alex Jones) may not like it, but it's a well established system at this point.
I am not a lawyer, but I suspect if you asked one about your plan to go on YouTube and insult people, they'd advise against it. For one thing, YouTube might see it as a violation of their terms of service, and for another thing, you might be opening yourself up to litigation, which even if you won, could still be expensive.
As for your second point, it is indeed true that I don’t think Alex Jones caused a billion dollars worth of damage.
I simply cannot envision the specifics of this case warranting a billion dollars of restitution. If this was a case about an environmental disaster it wouldn’t be an unreasonable sum. So, I’m not advocating for a hard cap on damages for all civil suits. But something does seem wrong when a judge can arrive at such an outlandishly large sum for punitive damages in a case like this.
Edit: Alex Jones caused harm to the parents and their families, but even convicted murderers are not ordered to pay such large sums of restitution. And that’s direct incontrovertible harm.
If the damages were something like $10-20 million I wouldn’t be making these posts.
If it makes you feel any better, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family was fined SIX TIMES more than Alex Jones. 800k people dead for $6B versus a dozen families' feelings hurt for $1B.
Our court system recognizes that the value of a human life is $7.5K, but the value of precious feelings is $83MM.
This seems pretty fair to me.
The good news is that punitive damages haven't been awarded yet. Hoping that the cost for hurt feelings rises north of $100M. Looking forward to suing everyone who said false statements about me in public. It's going to be an incredible payday, and I can parlay the winnings into running a drug operation and killing rural Americans with opioids and only pay a rounding error for everyone I murder.
Can't wait.
Edit: Apologies, HackerNews, are my numbers off? Am I factually incorrect? Are we seriously supporting the position that the Allies should have just hit Hitler with a $45B fine for the whole "Holocaust Thing" and called it even? I know addressing downvotes is frowned upon, but I'm genuinely curious why HN thinks feelings are worth eleven thousand times more than lives.
Edit 2: Understood. Feelings really are worth four orders of magnitude more than lives, on this forum. Got it.
My optimistic belief is the high judgement was due to those extra factors, but maybe a lawyer can correct me.
Of course I think the Sandy Hook shooting was real, but if someone said it wasn't I'd just think they're an idiot - not a criminal that should be tried in any court.
Perhaps the problem is that the fine accrues only to him and his production company; really there were a lot of people involved in spreading lies about Sandy Hook, and their production and distribution. Or that US lawsuits can produce spectacular punitive damages numbers on flimsy justification.
But winning libel suits is really unusual in the US! Here's Sarah Palin losing a lawsuit this year: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60396231
> 270. (a) It shall constitute unprofessional conduct for a physician and surgeon to disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.
> (3) “Disseminate” means the conveyance of information from the licensee to a patient under the licensee’s care in the form of treatment or advice.
This only applies to a Doctor advising their patients. If you don't think professional conduct means accurately representing a course of treatment and it's risk I don't know what to say to you.
Sure, there could be a slippery slope to where disseminate doesn't mean only between a Licensee but that was always true.
Let that sink in.
My second point is that professionals should already accurately tell the truth to their patients.
Professionals should be sticking to positive statements [1] though. So saying something like, the covid vaccine will give you austim I think should be grounds for losing your license.
On the other hand, saying something like, there's a high change you'll have flu like symptoms if you get the vaccine would not be grounds (the symptoms are disclosed as part of the vaccine trials).
But saying something like, I would like to try X treatment that isn't typically done but I've done it a few times recently and had good results I think should also be fine.
The law makes the claim of "contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care" which I think is a very reasonable statement. In general, you want people to recommend treatments that historically have worked for a condition. And for experimental type situations all the Licensee needs to do is to make it clear that the treatment isn't backed up by existing studies.
One thing I have observed - a lot of what people call “scientific consensus” is not the consensus of the research literature, rather it is the “consensus” of position statements put out by professional bodies. The later often lack much of the tentative and provisional nature of the former, with doubts and uncertainties being hidden rather than highlighted. While even peer-reviewed research is not immune to political pressures, these kinds of “position statements” are much more susceptible to political influence than the actual research literature is.
What if, you know, accurately representing a course of treatment required contradicting CDC/FDA? Say, suppose you’re a medical researcher, doing science, and you find that CDC/FDA are completely wrong on some count (as they have been many, many times in the past). Are they supposed to just repeat CDC-blessed falsehoods that they know to be false? Do you want to institute an office of the arbiters of truth, such that it is legally forbidden to disagree with them?
With ai and surveillance / mass-manipulation tech, it will be extremely hard to come back from authoritarianism soon.
It's honestly terrifying how fast the media whipped up the craziness a year or two ago. It makes me wonder how much harder they shilled to shame people into the military during wartime. I remember reading Céline's Journey to the End of the Night and getting disgusted at how the state and media managed to screw that many people into literal suicide. It reminded me of how the Aztecs normalized human sacrifice to the point where people actually wanted to be sacrificed. There's something inherently violent about mass society
The next time the people around me suddenly start insisting on the same idea and foaming at the mouth, I'm dropping everything and moving somewhere where mass psychosis isn't the norm
The only thing keeping our society from totalitarianism is a benevolent media that's decided it isn't time yet. If they fire on all cylinders again and for a long enough period it's entirely possible
Exactly. If it wasn't for those cop shows, the government would be more critical of them. Media and pop culture seems to be the driver for any societal change. Even for Covid vaccine obligation the idea came from the media first (i'm not antivax or anything, i am also pro vaccinal obligation for public schools to be clear, i'm not even against mRNA vaccine, it is just that i understand that people can be shy to test brand new vaccines).
I am forever wary of any mass media privately owned.
Not only this, but the sort of sadistic, authoritarian tendency that this brings out in people. I can only imagine how much more extreme this is when a country is trying to send people off to war.
I don't think the problem is private ownership, I think it's herd mentality. For some reason whenever people get into groups they get way more aggressive. I remember reading Freud's little book on group dynamics and minus the Oedipal BS it rings entirely true to how people are
Just look at past historical examples, e.g. the Salem witch trials, slavery, the Holocaust, any genocide period. If people are capable of doing this, who's to say they won't do it again? We're just supposed to assume that today's society has moved passed all of this and give the status quo the benefit of the doubt? I'd rather not
The toothpaste is out of the bottle for the media, unfortunately, and I'm not sure it's going back in.
https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation...
For the record, I think non medical exemptions for mandatory vaccines are nonsense.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Let's say you want to enshrine the rights to free speech so you put it into the constitution. Any future government can just take it out, just completely ignore its existence, say it doesn't apply in this situation, or work around it but requiring some civil agreement.
---
To put things more concretely with a different example. US Democrats never modified the filibuster to allow supreme court judges to be confirmed by 50/50+1 votes. One may think that they didn't want their political opponents to have this power (IIRC they enabled it for non-supreme court judges so this seems like a valid argument to make). However, if that was the case then it was pointless as their political opponents enabled that power.
That’s true but not the whole story. The parties had filibustered (or threatened to filibuster) each other’s judicial appointments for decades. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/estrada-caught-in-poisono.... That’s how we got Kennedy among others.
But Democrats, under Harry Reid, eliminated the filibuster for all federal judgeships below the Supreme Court back in 2013. That was back in the euphoria of Obama’s 2012 reelection, when Democrats became convinced that they were favored by “demographic destiny” and republicans would never win another national election.
Specifically the constitution, they not only put it in the constitution, they also made the constitution hard to change. The other side can't just change it with a 51% majority. (A future government can ignore it or say it doesn't apply, of course. But the Supreme Court may disagree... several years later.)
More generally, here's a door. It's closed. You'd like to open it and walk through it. The other side would, too. But neither side has, so far.
If you leave the door closed, the other side may open it and walk through it the next time they're in power. But if you open it and walk through it, the other side definitely will walk through it when they're in power. So think carefully about whether you want to open that door.
That only addresses one of the four ways I listed though.
(1) Any future government can just take it out - I believe you addressed this point
(2) just completely ignore its existence - The government can pass other laws such as the Espionage Act [1] that restricts free speech without needing to go through the effort of an amendment.
(3) say it doesn't apply in this situation - Espionage Act [1] again applies here. There's also a lot of discussion about if say the USG asks twitter to do something does it apply or because the actual restriction came from a private entity does it not?
(4) work around it - Twitter again applies here (as does just buying 3rd party data to get around the other amendments). - Some argue that Snowden has a free speech right to tell/show people what he did. This doesn't apply as Snowden has a separate civil agreement (NDA) with the government.
> So think carefully about whether you want to open that door.
Very much agreed.
I suppose we'll disagree on what amounts to being oppressed. Non-extremists Muslims in Turkey weren't suppressed, and they won't be if Erdogan goes peacefully. The liberals and leftist parties had just as much to fear from the military.
Control of information by a crew of rich guys is bad. Control by the vast mob of malleable munchkins is worse.
I actually think that, on the whole-society scale, less control is the desirable course here. Let individuals do their own filtering. Or not.
Give chaos a chance.
The problem in both cases is obvious.
When people can take actions that benefit themselves despite (and often because of) negative repercussions to others, many people are not going to “filter” themselves
First, our understanding of what constitutes physical violence is relatively reliable. Whereas our understanding of what constitutes misinformation is relatively unreliable. Therefore any comprehensive dictatorship of information would be relatively extremely more disastrous.
Second, misinformation is self-limiting in its effects. If it is misinformation then those who consume and communicate it will be relatively weak and disorganized. Whereas those who consume and communicate good information will be relatively strong and organized.
The present state of the mob versus the corporation is a clear example of that. The mob has the numbers but nevertheless, the corporation wins. Because the corporation is organized and the mob is disorganized.
But while there are more gray areas in misinformation or harmful coordination or reinforcement of bad behavior (bullying, racism, fraud, libel, etc), relative to violence, that is far from a case where large quantities of harmful speech can’t be identified with openly discussed principles.
Wisdom is never perfect, but it can be openly discussed and codified. That is a huge improvement over simply throwing up hands and watching people be crushed by underserved social persecution and manipulation.
Also, any behavior that extracts value can expend resources for its own self-preservation. So fraud and rabble rousing, etc do not weed themselves out. Parasitical strategies work.
Finally, I agree that organization of corporations and other close knit groups trumps the disorganized. Removing a judicial component would only make those powerful organizations more effective at bending society to their will.
The answer is an organized government with publically created and adapted laws, with norms that reduce opportunities for corruption
It’s far from perfect. Our systems could be “easily” improved by simple anti-corruption improvements - if entrenched interests could be overcome.
But despite obvious flaws, they are vastly better than the mafia power structures that a vacuum of open legal systems reining in harmful dishonest or malevolent communication would ensure
Except that we find out that many things were disinformation every day. My family is increasingly paranoid after the Pfizer executive said they never tested whether their vaccine prevented transmission to the EU a few days ago. Apparently that is not new information technically speaking, but it is so counter-narrative it boggles the mind (what the hell was “protect Grandma” then? A hopeful wish?). Would I have risked jail for saying that in Turkey, had this law been in place, a year ago?
If it is against a government narrative, sure.
The public elections are around the corner, the governing party is losing votes. The economy is in ruins. Corruption scandals pop up everywhere.
For example just last week we heard that the address registration system used for voting somehow added unknown foreign persons as residences to people's homes. Or there are tweets of people that they somehow got registered to the governing party as members against their will without any application. This is only visible if you login to e-government and check.
The governing party does everything in its power to win the elections. In the last election, they even counted votes without seals to win. In the election before that the opposition won, Erdogan lost. Guess what happened, bombs went off, chaos insued, there was a re-election and Erdogan was elected again.
It is a mess really. Wish us luck.
This is an example of censorship being bad because the actual censors won’t be who anyone should want deciding those things.
Possibly the better outcome would be for individuals to learn to take the internet with a massive grain of salt.
However, what the big social media sites really need (instead of laws against disinformation) is downvotes. If the metric is only engagement then enragement is good, but actually it shouldnt (necessarily) be.
It’s especially ugly when so many media stories have “brought to you by Pfizer” on them. I’m not into conspiracy theories but I increasingly get the paranoia. I have no doubt that I would have been prosecuted in Turkey, or possibly even Australia, a year ago.
This is false historical revisionism. Biden[1], Fauci[2], and the media sold the public on the vaccine and justified mandates by saying it would stop the spread. Early skeptics were labeled as misinformed conspiracy theorists. It later became self-evident that the vaccine was less effective than originally thought (e.g. everyone I know who got vaccinated, including myself, still got infected). Only then did the goalposts move to "it makes infections less bad". But that is not how it was originally presented.
[1]: https://www.whio.com/news/local/exclusive-news-center-7-sits...
[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/553773-fauci-...
Pfizer's original press release [0] used both "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19", distinguishing between the virus and the disease. The effectiveness they gave was about preventing illness, and they made no claims at all about infection/transmission.
This was fairly well known for a month or two, with many articles bringing up that infection/transmission was an unknown [1][2][3]. It was only a month or two into 2021 that the narrative shifted sharply and this original information was memory-holed remarkably hard. The politicians and media were the ones claiming it would stop infection/transmission, but they started that without any new data.
They could have had ulterior motives, they could have just been parroting others, or it could have just been plain stupidity - with how often the terms "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID-19" are used interchangeably, it's hard to rule out that they just didn't understand the press release.
[0] https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
[1] https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/02/covid-19-vaccines...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
[3] https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2020/12/covid-...
It was an accurate assessment of the benefits of the vaccine, which prevents the worst effects and dramatically reduces the risk of death from infection. The vaccine was never intended to prevent initial infection, so they had no reason to delay it's introduction testing for that.
My wife's parents are in their late 70s with many health problems and got Pfizer here in the UK in the first wave of vaccinations. They both later got the virus and had barely noticeable symptoms. Sure it's possible that might have happened anyway, but I am confident the chances they would have died or been severely ill were dramatically higher if they hadn't been vaccinated.
Still of course even if you had spread disinformation about the virus, misrepresented the facts, claimed that it was supposed to do things it wasn't, falsely implied that it had no value even if you actually knew perfectly well what it was intended to do and that it did it. Even if you knew that spreading such misinformation would be likely to cost lives. Even then, no matter of how low my personal opinion would be of you, no you shouldn't go to jail for that. People listening to such claims have an obligation to educate themselves and come to their own conclusions as adults.
I was referring to pressure on young people to get the vaccine to avoid harming the elderly. If we never tested transmission… what was that about? Why not just let the elderly get it and the young risk it if they wanted? What was behind “by getting the vaccine you are protecting others” when all we actually know is that it protects yourself?
There’s probably a good answer - but I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.”
>I’m increasingly understanding why some folks are “paranoid.”
I really don't, all of this information has been available all the way through. That Pfizer executive was simply being honest, what the vaccines do and how they work and the benefits they offer has been accurately communicated right back from the trials phases. I know this because all through those times I kept myself well informed and followed the literature. It helps that my wife is a Nurse, and also that I'm in the UK where the whole issue was far, far less politicised and the accuracy and consistency of information from the media was actually pretty good.
The problem is there was an awful lot of disinformation going around in the US from people either getting partial information and making wild unfounded assumptions, or deliberately fomenting opposition to various policies on political grounds. Nevertheless as I said in my previous post, we're all adults. It's our responsibility to inform ourselves, we can't blame disinformation, some of which is genuinely simply mistaken.
They were in a situation where thousands, at times tens of thousands of people were dying every day. If you know a policy is very safe (not perfectly safe, not completely risk free, but known to be very low risk), and you know that the highly likely benefits are very high and are expected to save many many thousands of lives, why should I be scared of them implementing it? Genuinely, I just don't understand that attitude at all. It makes no sense to me. You look at the evidence and the risks and you make a decision. In this case I think it was a very easy one and huge numbers of people all over the world are alive now because of it.
Meanwhile a lot of people are dead because they believed partial, misrepresented or incorrect information about the vaccines. Doesn't it scare you that people were spreading so much disinformation that was responsible for so many deaths? That excessive skepticism and distrust, based on simple lack of careful evaluation of widely available facts, was so incredibly destructive?
I wonder if they wonder if substantially (the memeplex is...complex) describing it otherwise was to their advantage, in retrospect.
Tautologically, and objectively: those who said such things (intentionally or otherwise, and (from a causality perspective, which is contrary to the far more popular "justified" perspective) it is also subject to imperfect perception on the other end of the wire, if one is able to be comfortable with being extremely "scientific"). This is kinda what I was getting at by "the memeplex is...complex".
> It was to our advantage because it saved a lot of lives, and it was to the advantage of the public health services promoting the policy because it reduced demand on health services (and saved lives).
I do not substantially disagree. However, it may also be to our advantage to consider (or at least, try to consider) whether the degree to which we do such things is highly optimal in an absolute sense. Unfortunately, Western culture seems to have somehow ended up in a situation where speculative, and relative, representations of reality are considered (and taught, constantly) to be synonymous with reality itself....and, there is no shortage of thought terminating memes out there to keep us permanently at this stage (perhaps some of them will even emerge in response to this comment).
Pardon if this is a bit excessively negative/pessimistic, but I am losing patience with the state of affairs on this planet. I gave you an upvote as a counterbalance, for what that's worth.
Shouldn't they have at least tried to study this if that was the expectation?
This assumption relies on it being solely droplet spread, which we already knew was wrong months (at least) before the vaccines were announced.
Vaccines fully preventing transmission is also technically not true, personally I never watched the news and only skimmed the actual studies so I knew it but a lot of the population would probably feel duped. However they do reduce transmission and in fact "protect grandma"---if you don't fall sick you don't cough as much so they reduce the number of infected droplets you fire, though of course this implies you also take other precautions like following the isolation guidelines and not being near your grandma in an enclosed space without a mask while talking a lot. Further if you fall sick and occupy medical facilities during a wave of COVID this may directly affect the ability of your grandma to get any treatment (not just for COVID).
I wish we could expect public messaging to convey all this nuance!
Mistakes were inevitable, I remember having a conversation with my brother back in March 2020 where we came to the conclusion that given the lack of data mistakes would be made, and these would be used by conspiracy theorists and be politicised to spread dangerous and even deadly propaganda that would get a lot of people killed. I dearly wish we had been wrong, but here we are.
Can you explain? I have no idea why this is something you or your family would be paranoid about.
If you had told someone, who had gotten the vaccine, that Pfizer did not know whether you could still pass the virus on to your unvaccinated grandmother, you would have been laughed at. But here we are.
- You won't get Covid.
- You won't transmit Covid to anybody else.
- Covid vaccine is / will be super effective against variants.
None of those were true after-all.
If you're talking about Pfizer fair enough, they didn't outright lie, they lied by omission - as I did not see them coming out to correct those misconceptions. They were more than happy with demand on the vaccine being inflated because of those very misconceptions and raking the profits in.
While true, it's even weirder than that: their press release in 2020 was pretty explicit about the effectiveness only being about illness, and news articles at the time regularly mentioned infection/transmission effectiveness was unknown. It took a few months before the mainstream decided it does work on infection/transmission, and they did so without any new studies or evidence.
On this post's topic, would what they did now be considered desinformation? What if the politial party in power changed, would they be be able to persecute the other party for desinformation? Crazy times.
Also, only three years? Isn't that very soft thinking how destructive fake news can be?
In the worst case, people conflate the two to rationalize tolerance for having no repercussions for promoting damaging lies
And there can be wide gray areas where people’s perspectives, literacy of facts, or motives are too different to make a clear judgement between disagreement and reckless or intentional faslehoods.
But they are not the same
Was the Steele Report disinformation? Depends if ask you Donald Trump or the FBI. Was the Hunter biden laptop disinformation? Depends who you ask. Was "vaccines don't prevent covid" disinformation? Depends on when you ask the CDC.
You could avoid a slippery slope by drawing the line at intentionally and knowingly telling a mistruth--that's essentially where US defamation laws draw the line. But that is almost never where the line is drawn. Under that definition of lying, Anti-vaxers aren't lying--they are just wrong.
And on the slip side, when the government intentionally lies--masks don't work--its not disinformation--its a messaging technique.
I can't honestly believe you don't think there are a lot of people who want that. They've been very up front about it.
Michelle Carter convinced her boyfriend to commit suicide over text messages and was convicted for it. I don’t know if I disagree that trying to use speech to convince a sick person into suicide shouldn’t be legal.
But at the same time I’m generally a free speech proponent and find jailing people for speech abhorrent. But I struggle to believe all speech should be legal if it knowingly ruins lives or causes death.
There's really no justification for extreme measures to deal with this problem, especially when the potential side-effects largely outweigh any potential gains.
People try to say that things are different now with tech, that conspiracies are spreading faster. But what is also spreading faster and is 10x more popular than conspiracy theories is alarmist news and pearl clutching that society won't be able to deal with it without widespread censorship.
People need to step away from Twitter and take a deep breath. We can handle it.
Many do want something like this--as long as someone with their viewpoint is the one deciding what is true or false.
>asking leading questions that create the illusion that you're making a point?
It's called a rhetorical question.
A rhetorical question usually has an answer too obvious for any need to answer
A leading question creates a discussion on some topic, using the question instead of some new information or rational argument, to move the baseline assumptions of the discussion
To this day, if you have an opinion that is against mainstream regarding Covid, you risk getting banned. So health and political themes are moderately moderated for deviance. And by moderately I mean lots gets through just because their tools are imperfect not because that's what they want.
What is a good example of non-mainstream COVID speech that has gotten someone banned? (Not saying it doesn’t exist, I’m just wondering what’s a good example you have in mind)
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
"Policed around" doesn't sound like a pleasant feeling but I can at least assure you it's nothing personal. We moderate HN when people break the site guidelines.
- The argument against Free Speech and shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Is this Turkey's justification too?
It would also likely be a much quieter place, in that some of these entities would not be able to produce so much content due to the need to corroborate before posting, printing or opening their mouths. Some would be silent, because a lot of these people are truly ignorant about a wide range of subjects and are in the business of disseminating outrage for clicks and eyeballs rather than informing their audience.
In the US in particular, freedom of speech and freedom of the press have devolved into being able to go as far as mounting massive campaigns, based on lies, used to destroy people. This has happened to people from all walks of life, from politicians to random people targeted by the mobs. The media, politicians and people with enough followers on social media have done this; examples abound.
This is objectively wrong.
I cannot imagine anyone with a modicum of decency and moral standards actually believing it is OK to have these elements in society behave in such ways. This is objectively detrimental for society.
Of course, the difficulties come in when we try to define truth. In some cases there is no such thing as an absolute truth. Do we not speak about such matters? Or do we require a strong disclaimer to be issued with as much visibility and impact as the statements being made? De we add an "open source" requirement for news organizations? In other words, they would be legally required to publish the research and sources used in order to confirm the veracity of a story. Is that sensible? I don't know.
In the US politicians are legally protected when they lie to the masses. A politician can say anything they want about the economy, crime, education, war and peace and their opponents, lie about all of it and have no legal exposure to the consequences of such lies. A politician can say that a proposed bill is about X when, in reality, it is about Y. This, again, is objectively wrong, and yet we don't seem interested in doing anything about it.
It goes without saying that social media is a deep dark hole full of lies and manipulative content. Again, objectively terrible for society.
Sadly, fixing this problem is nearly impossible. As easy as it might be to state what kinds of behaviors are objectively wrong, designing an equitable solution that protects the important aspects of free speech isn't as easy as it may sound.
When it comes to the press, it is my opinion that they should not be allowed to print anything that they have not confirmed to be truthful within a reasonable margin of error. As an example everyone would be familiar with, if a news organization is going to, day after day, claim that the US president is a foreign agent, they would have to be able to corroborate this with solid evidence and research or suffer severe consequences. If they are going to point to an individual and claim them to be racist or a member of a cult, etc., same thing.
There ought to be a reasonable threshold --which can be somewhat fuzzy-- for mass media organizations to engage in some of the carpet bombing campaigns that have become all too familiar these days. The latest one is against Tulsi Gabbard, who, after announcing she is leaving her political party, is now the target of all manner of attacks from multiple angles, including such things as saying she is a member of a cult. I use this example because it is very fresh, quite literally the last few days.
However one might feel about her and her political views, here's what reveals this event as a politically-motivated smear campaign: If the things being said about her were true and the motivation behind the dissemination was an honest effort to inform the public, these stories would have been newsworthy before she left her political party. If she is, in fact, a member of a cult, this would have been important for voters to know two years ago. Yet, that's not the case. The attacks are politically motivated and likely lies and fabrications. They are deployed en-masse when a person goes from being silent or a member of the club to being viewed as a political enemy. That, in a nutshell, is what's wrong. These things are legally-protected smear and destruction campaign. They should not be allowed by law. Which is, of course, easier said than done.
It's present as far back as Plato's Republic; the idea that an accurate communication of truth is not ideal for the preservation of a society. Rather, he advocated for the guardians and rulers of the city - and, let us not forget, therefore the conscious mind in his allegory - be taught untruth. That their nature is such-and-such, and therefore society is the way that it is. Obviously to modern sensibilities, the actual content of the lie that he proposes, and the society he describes, are abhorrent, but the idea that falsehood is more useful in binding a group together than truth remains poignant.
The Noble Lie underpins our ideas of the values of myths, legends, and even shared culture ("If you want to build a boat, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."). In modern times, in comes in the form of the American Dream, of the idea that a superorganism like a government or non-profit or corporation could "stand" for any values conceivable or desirable by the mere humans that make them up. It is the grease in the gears that allow modern developed societies to function as efficiently as they do. For example, to believe that it is abnormal, unusual, even evil to be corrupt is to bind oneself tightly to more proper behavior. As one learns more of widespread and open corruption, it becomes easier to justify taking part oneself, until one's pulchritude turns from admirable moral steadfastness to comical adherence to obsoleted ideals. The breakdown of social order begins with the dissolution of the lies that bind people together past Dunbar's Number, into a collective that believes, even if faintly and insincerely, that each other member is as deserving of happiness and success as they.
I propose that if people believe that their society is fair, just, and truthful, they will act as if it were so, and the good among them make it so. Those inclined to their own good above the good of their kin and kindred will, of course, be able to abuse such trust to great advantage, requiring controls as you've pointed out to identify such proclivities and deter the individuals or contain their damage. Mark that; it is a failing of a high-trust society (such as America's) that they are vulnerable to psychopaths.
In this, we find the argument for allowing leaders to lie to their people. To tell the unvarnished truth rips away the polite lie that society works for their benefit and in so doing makes the most extreme failures of that mode possible. It makes fools of honest people by exposing how foolish honesty can be. Lie, and say that soldiers will never be forgotten, their sacrifices necessary. Lie, and say that your vote and voice matter, that your citizenship carries sacred duties. Lie, and say that the moral arc of your culture is righteous, and that in the end all shall receive their just rewards. Lie, and allow the world to spin one day longer. And I can see the counterargument that this is equivalent to dealing with a rotting foundation by painting over the cracks and the mold and claiming that everything is fine, of standing in the burning room and denying the heat. I disagree with that assessment.
Humans have the ability to become as they aspire to be. Surround a man with fools and it will not take long for him to begin to act foolishly to fit in with his peers. Take that same man and give him the company of the wise, and he will strive to become like them. The same is true for societies. Humans take more notice of their losses than their gains. They pay more attention to threats and insults than gifts and compliments. Tell a man of his 99 admirable qualities and one deficiency, and see which statement he remembers better! By this failure we see the problem of the strict truth; the quickest, surest path to individual success is, most often, one that betrays the ideals of your society. Unable to disguise that fact, the intelligent soon realize that honor, justice, equality, and all other good and noble things your society strives for are chains that bind them to failure. When all realize this, society is lost.
I'm at work. I'll have to come back later to actually reply to your comment. The quality and content of your reply required that I tack a moment to at least acknowledge it. I like it. Thanks for taking the time to post it.
Gabbard was a weak link in her own party, she's been deliberately contrarian solely for the sake of being contrarian. I'm fine with journalists being contrarian, but this "dissident politician" phenomenon just gets in the way and encourages more sensationalism
The only thing I am pointing out is that the carpet bombing against her did not start until she decided to not be a part of that group. If she was the horrible human being she is being made out to be it should have been news many years ago, not now. Put a different way: If the motivation was to ensure quality human beings become our leaders and questionable candidates are expunged, the carpet bombing about her would have happened a long time ago. It is happening now because she is now the enemy and factions of the media are in such alignment with the party she is leaving behind that they engage in open warfare against anyone opposing them. Regardless of party affiliation, this is not what our press should be about. Again, objectively not good for society.
Is NATO the global democracy enforcer?
Nato, in its webpage, does in fact state it has political purpose too
If they attacked another NATO country then obviously it would mean Article 5 gets invoked. The "political purpose" of NATO, as written, has to do with cooperating on defense related matters. I don't know where one would get the idea that it gives NATO the authority to tell other members how to run their internal domestic affairs.
People will say that “there is no provision in the NATO Charter to expel a member”-but that doesn’t actually matter. If all the other member states agree on it, the secretary-general will implement the decision. If the expelled state wants to claim that is illegal-there is no court with jurisdiction to hear their claim.
To give an extreme hypothetical, if Turkey commenced an invasion of Greece, they’d be expelled from NATO within hours. Nobody would care about the legal niceties-they’d leave that to international law professors to debate for decades to come.
The ICJ has jurisdiction to hear treaty violation cases between states, but no one to rely on to enforce their decisions.
For NATO, (1) is not applicable-there is no clause in the North Atlantic Treaty granting the ICJ jurisdiction. (3) is very unlikely-if NATO member states decided to expel a member, why would they voluntarily agree to let the expellee challenge the decision in court?
For (2), several NATO states - the US is one - have withdrawn their general acceptance of ICJ jurisdiction (or never accepted it to begin with). Even for those who do accept it, the ICJ’s case law says that it cannot hear a case unless all involved states are either subject to, or voluntarily accept, its jurisdiction. It would consider all NATO member states to be involved states, so it could only hear the case if they all consented to it-not happening.
No, this isn’t a thing, because it would destroy NATO.
Erdogan knows that very well, hence he tried to play double face with NATO/Russia (BRICS)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
The coup failed without having to jail people for arbitrary wrongthink and I doubt this will be useful for anything but crushing domestic opposition and silencing whistleblowers.
The "one sided" mindset in the west is tasteless and boring
If you read the talmud, that'll help you have a better understanding of the current situation with Iran, Turkey and Russia
I can't make a summary of that book since it's way too big; quoting it could lead to misinterpretations so it's better if you just read it by yourself
And if you have more free time, you should read about the French Revolution and how Europe came to be
Deterrence is a good thing.
But having no laws are worse.
I agree that disinformation, real disinformation, is being used as a tool to spread authoritarianism and we need better means to combat it. This law, I am afraid, is double speak. It purports to oppose disinformation but in fact strengthens it, and this is by design.
We steer clear of laws that are dubious and ambiguous because they can be leveraged whimsically or loopholed.
But ignoring threats to full democracy (disinformation) is just as dangerous, if not more dangerous.
In Russia today you can go to jail for up to 15 years for stating that Russia is at war. Why? According to the ruling powers this is disinformation. It doesn't matter that they are lying and you are telling the truth. What matters is that they decide.
My point isn't that there can be no law combatting disinformation but that you cannot take the authorities' claims about their law at face value.