Twitter is no longer enforcing the Covid-19 misleading information policy
transparency.twitter.com
transparency.twitter.com
A lot of people seem to be taking a very naive perspective, thinking that censoring something means fewer people will believe it. In the case of COVID-19 misinformation in particular, I believe this is wrong.
At the start of the pandemic, all the major public health organizations told blatant lies about key facts: airborne transmission, surface transmission, whether it was present in US at all, the secondary attack rate, the effectiveness of masks, the infection-fatality rate, and whether it could have been a lab leak. This completely set fire to their credibility. Then they pivoted from attacking pro-maskers to attacking hydroxychloroquine advocates. These attacks consisted of highly ineffectual attempts at censorship: censored enough that everyone can see that censorship is being attempted, not censored enough to stop anyone from seeing it.
People are neither geniuses nor idiots. When the public health establishment turned on a dime from attacking masks to attacking hydroxychloroquine, many people inferred from that fact alone that hydroxychloroquine must be effective. It isn't, but the alternate world in which hydroxychloroquine was effective would have looked the same, so the reasoning was valid.
Given that history, and especially given how recent that history was, continuing to censor "COVID-19 misleading information" would be utterly insane.
I disagree slightly with your statement about the reasoning that hydroxychloroquine being effective was correct. The correct conclusion to draw from an authority with no-better-than-chance at being correct changing their recommendation is exactly the same no-better-than-chance at being correct. It wasn't quite that bad; hand washing is a general good practice and had a chance at being helpful given no other information. The health agencies issued recommendations with no error bars and wrote themselves into a corner where they couldn't update to more reliable information without continually contradicting themselves, so as a result I still see signs left in stores asking people to 6-foot distance (even though masks are optional).
I also realize the underlying problem is that people are terrible at reasoning under uncertainty and also very unfamiliar with trying to do so, and so won't take announcements with error bars in a very useful way. Presented with uncertainty most people default to their status quo as if having less than perfect information is the same as no information. So the CDC's battle was to try to influence public behavior in ways that were ultimately beneficial, while probably knowing they had a limited number of tries before people noticed the uncertainty and reverted to status quo. A very unenviable position.
Twitter censoring misinformation may have delayed the build-up to useless uncertainty, or it may have come too late to help much. I don't have evidence either way. One part of the status quo is buying quack medicine, so there was never any hope for preventing some of the population from doing that regardless of messaging or censorship.
The guy is an intellectual lightweight making intellectual lightweight mistakes. Free speech isn't axiomatically important but only insofar as it increases your chances of survival, which is axiomatically important. That's a common mistake made by "muh freedoms" absolutists.
Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
Because if so, good riddance to a piece of junk. All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice. Shame on anyone who thought that silencing decent was the best way to handle it.
It doesn't seem so. From https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/covid-19 , one of the examples of a tweet to remove is: “now that it’s summertime, you don’t need a mask anymore, so don’t wear your mask!”
I don't see a time where Twitter's policy said otherwise.
> Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
As I understand the policy, not per se. There were three factors:
1. it must be an assertion of fact (not an opinion), expressed definitively, and intended to influence others’ behavior.
2. Is the claim demonstrably false or misleading?
3. Would belief in this information, as presented, lead to harm?
Someone writing that there's a very rare (as in 0.0022% chance) of mydiocarditis in young people, then that appears to be within policy. If someone says young people shouldn't get the vaccine because of the increased chance of mydiocarditis, then that that likely falls under #1.
My "0.0022% chance" comes from Myocarditis or Pericarditis Following the COVID-19 Vaccination in Adolescents: A Systematic Review, M Li, X Wang, J Feng, Z Feng, W Li, B Ya - Vaccines, 2022
] Conclusions: Our study showed that myocarditis/pericarditis occurred after vaccination with the BNT162b2 or Comirnaty vaccine, especially after the second vaccination in male adolescents, but the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis after vaccination with the above vaccines was very rare (0.0022%). Therefore, it is recommended that adolescents should be vaccinated with the COVID-19 universal vaccine as soon as possible and closely monitored for subsequent adverse reactions, which can be treated promptly.
also, quoting Evaluating the relationship between myocarditis and mRNA vaccination, Charlotte Switzer & Mark Loeb (2022) - Expert Review of Vaccines, 21:1, 83-89,
] Myocarditis may be associated with vaccination, through several biological mechanisms. Studies have shown that live viral vaccinations can act as a trigger for hypersensitivity inflammatory reactions, but further work is required to examine how the mRNA formulation may induce these autoimmune responses. Given that the risk of these adverse events is low, and the benefit of protection against disease is so great, the receipt of mRNA vaccines is recommended. ...
] Consistently, all patients hospitalized with mRNA-associated myocarditis have been discharged in stable condition and responded well to clinical management, resolving the episode [15–27].
> All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice.
Some of the other things covered on the policy were:
“5G causes coronavirus — go destroy the cell towers in your neighborhood!".
"Tweets offering the sale or facilitation of non-prescription treatments/cures for COVID-19, or those which advertise cures or treatments for COVID-19 that require a prescription or physician consultation."
"Specific and unverified claims made by people impersonating a government or health official or organization such as a parody account of official public health advisors claiming that hydroxychloroquine will prevent COVID-19."
"Claims that specific groups or nationalities are never susceptible to COVID-19, such as “people with dark skin are immune to COVID-19 due to melanin production” or are more susceptible, such as “avoid businesses owned by Chinese people as they are more likely to have COVID-19.”"
“Coronavirus is vulnerable to UV radiation - walking outside in bright sunlight will prevent COVID-19.”
“drinking bleach and ingesting colloidal silver will cure COVID-19.”
“COVID-19 does not infect children because we haven’t seen any cases of children being sick.”
“If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you don’t have coronavirus.”
But as a matter of policy effectiveness, it would be useful to have examples of true statements which were banned, to see how effective the policy was, and see the types of misclassifications.
Did Twitter "originally [say] that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth"?
If so, when did it change, and why?
If not, then the answer to Khaine's question is "no".
Aren't all corporate policies self-serving?
I'm not asking about a change in invisible internal policies that didn't affect Twitter users.
I'm asking about examples fitting Khaine's claim that Twitter's policy was that "to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth".
That's an external observable. And it can change over time.
Show me the list of statements that twitter bans, with change history, and I can get you this info.
Until then, we are talking about an opaque censorship team that was coordinating with the government to (unlawfully) create mechanisms for the government to censor speech in the name of public health. There are plenty of examples of false statements being made by everyone from Biden on down to heads of CDC, mostly about vaccine effectiveness, but also about aspects of the virus itself. Claims that if you get the vaccine, you wont get the virus, then claims that if you get the vaccine, you might get the virus, but you are less likely to spread it, etc.
But as Twitter never published its official list of banable statements, you are asking for evidence that doesn't exist. If someone were to say "Twitter banned users for making statement X", you can respond with "prove to me that's why they were banned", and again Twitter has kept this information secret.
The idea of government agencies secretly censoring the public via twitter should be very concerning, and it certainly isn't justified by appealing to the needs of public health. Public health never requires censorship - if you think it does, you are doing public health the wrong way. Public health should work by earning people's trust and then publishing official recommendations that have a track record of accuracy and effectiveness, and thus are trusted by the public. Then, you don't need to censor people. Blaming the public for not trusting government pronouncements is exactly what you want to avoid, as now you are engaging in authoritarian behavior. The government exists to serve and listen to the public, not the other way around.
I agree that evidence is important. Khaine made a specific claim. I don't believe it's supported. I want to see the evidence too. Otherwise I don't believe the claim is correct.
> to (unlawfully) create mechanisms for the government to censor speech in the name of public health.
What do you have against the First Amendment's right of free association?
There is nothing inherently illegal about a company applying a moderation policy. There is nothing inherently illegal about a company voluntarily coordinating with the government.
The Comics Code of The Comics Code Authority was not unconstitutional.
> you are asking for evidence that doesn't exist.
Quite the opposite. Khaine says there is evidence that Twitter used to ban statements saying "wear[ing] a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth."
I want evidence that that specific event existed.
> The idea of government agencies secretly censoring the public
While the idea of a company voluntarily exercising its right of free association, with a public description of the policy guidelines, is much less concerning.
You come to a programming conference I'm organizing and start presenting public health BS and I will ask you to stop speaking, under threat of expelling you from the conference. That is my Constitutional right.
Just because the BS topic happens to be public health (vs. another sorts of expellable BS) doesn't give the BS presenter special privileges.
This continued in February when the numbers in the U.S. were just starting to go up, and COVID-19 was no longer just a problem in Asia and Europe. Using the words of Dr. Fauci, The US News and World Report[3] stated on February 17: “skip the masks unless you are contagious.”
Twitter's policy was not in place when the pandemic started, but after masks were mandated it came into effect. You would be blocked on twitter for repeating what was dogma only months before, that masks were not effective.
In the short history of the pandemic, Americans were never clearly told what Science[4] reported on March 28: That the benefit of the mask “comes not from shielding the mouths of the healthy but from covering the mouths of people already infected.” The unambiguous scientific message of communal responsibility never comes front and center in the media agenda.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/health/coronavirus-surgic...
[2]https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/coronavirus-spurs-...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-di...
[4] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/would-everyone-weari...
Which is exactly my point.
This is NOT "the policy that originally said that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth" because Twitter never did that.
You are free to conjecture hypotheticals, but it would be just that - conjecture.
Some example statements that are controversial would include:
- Covid is not airborne - cloth masks are ineffective - covid originated in a lab in wuhan - omicron is mild
How do you deal with statements like that without pissing off a government group? It’s better to ignore it and some associated conspiracy stuff.
Which public health authority objects to this statement?
> FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898
Now they say it is:
Once again, it's not that the scientists got it wrong, it's that the disease changed!
The WHO disagreed until December 2021.
There is a significant overlap between all these parties of when airborne transmission was misinformation.
Honestly, I’m a bit amazed that isn’t something we can easily test. I’m no biologist but couldn’t we just take people sick with COVID in a room and have them breathe/talk/whatever with the equivalent of Petri dishes at differing distances?
What is the single source of truth here? People were banned and deplatformed from social media for "spreading misinformation about COVID".
Thank you for sharing.
I won't defend the WHO (because they clearly did spread some misinformation at times), but the scientific community at large only changed its messaging because their information got better, not because they got "found out" as liars.
It is good that science ultimately won out, but I think it will be a long time before institutional credibility is restored.
Why is it inherently bad that the early pandemic guidance had a political valence? Obviously, no one likes to be misled, but the CDC and WHO were making decisions that would affect billions of people in the absence of any US leadership.
Many choices are political and should be. For example, The tradeoff of how many deaths is it worth to keep open schools has no scientific answer.
The problem is when lies are used to misrepresent the science to achieve a desirable policy outcome.
The ultimate reason not to lie is that it undermines social trust and democracy.
These sorts of lies by people claiming to "trust the science" were then used to silence & censor people who challenged statements like this, and who challenged the idea that there was no potential long term harm despite all of the evidence showing young males in particular were more likely to develop myocarditis from the vaccine than from Covid.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-data-vaccinated...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/22/politics/fact-check-biden-cnn...
It’s super concerning that you’ve basically given legitimate ammo to the most paranoid of society. This shouldn’t be the case. But now it’s going to be twice as hard to convince the fringes of anything coming from authority of anything.
So it’s all politics. Yet they call it science.
As you said, this has caused immense trust loss institutions worldwide. For good reason. It’s a tragedy.
Great success, everybody's fired.
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned" -Richard Feynman
The situation changed, science recognizes this. This is not a case of the original results not being reproduceable!
Covid has turned into a pandemic because it has the unexpected property of most infection being before symptoms show.
No one has a monopoly on scientific thinking. The people whose tweets were "fact-checked" or removed, and who sometimes even had their accounts banned, could say exactly the same thing about those statements they made that ended up being proven wrong.
We shouldn't apply a hyper-critical lens to the statements of every one, except those deemed scientific experts by the established power structure.
Second is the public health aspects of this. They had to say "Do U, V, and W" before the science was clear that those were the correct things to do. (Why "had to"? Because if they said "We can't tell you what to do", first there would have been panic, and second they would have missed a chance to get ahead of it if they guessed right. So they went with their best guess, which is not an unreasonable thing to do.)
But the third thing is politics and reputation. They went with their best guess, but they didn't admit that it was a guess. They wanted everyone to do it, and so they talked like they were certain, even though they didn't have the data to be certain. When some of their guesses were wrong, they took a reputational hit, because they had sounded like they were certain. Then, compounding the problem, even after the evidence started to come in they stuck to their original advice to try to avoid taking the damage to their reputation, and just wound up making themselves look like buffoons. They damaged the reputation of public health for decades by how they handled this.
Like at least with drugs ("decriminalization") its because "no longer enforcing" the policy means people immediately won't be arrested/etc while repealing the law can take a long time. Presumably twitter has the authority to remove their own policies at will. (unless of course there's nobody still there that knows how to do that ...)
But SREs including former Twitter employees have said severe outages will become increasingly likely as the weeks go by, and that in the meantime we’d see an increasing number of unresolved glitches. So far that second part is proving quite true.
Money talks and advertisers don't want to have Parler/Social Truth unless they are into gold coins, MRE's or pillows.
So, a win for the free flow of scientific information, even if some idiots get to say things that aren't true also.
Sorry if you feel like your, (assumed) lay opinion, supersedes theirs. Even if you are a health professional, you have no monopoly on the right to express opinions.
Wanting to silence other professionals in your field is a quack / scammer viewpoint in and of itself.
This is not political; it is Bayes’ theorem.
Disinformation campaigns are generally self-serving, so there is another conditional distribution on profit, or perhaps more measurably, resource expenditure.
So if you see somebody spending money to censor a belief that profits nobody, and promote a belief that profits themselves, it warrants heavy suspicion.
1. 15 days to slow the spread
2. Masks work
3. Lockdowns work
4. Natural immunity is a myth
5. mRNA shots are vaccines, not inoculants
6. Covid shots stop transmission
7. '100% safe & effective'
Spam Blocking = you can't say X more than Y (>> 1) times
While technically censorship, there is a big difference, I think. Obviously in practice spam blocking could maliciously or accidentally be used for censorship.
My belief is that illegal speech is also still a form of censorship, just one that we are OK with. And that spam is more like a denial of service attack. Blocking spam is not about blocking the expression of an idea, but making sure that a communication channel is not abused as to make the channel ineffective.
'Remove all censorship' means not just 'free speech I want other people to have to deal with regardless of context' but also 'free speech that annoys the fuck out of me regardless of context', which very much includes spam.
By 'any conditions you place on it are arbitrary' I am referring specifically to 'if y is greater than x then spam else not spam'. That is arbitrary; you made that up. There is no 'if repeated more than once' appended to the end of "to suppress or delete as objectionable" in merriam webster under 'censor'. If you make up a rule to suite your convenience it is arbitrary.
Read the first sentence again of my last post. I am responding to a sentiment, not to you individually.
I only dislike censorship when they don't ask me first.