How Twitter moderated the Covid debate
thefp.com
thefp.com
"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
...
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?
Quite true. Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID. It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. That irrevocably shattered a whole lot of people's faith in the CDC and the government in general. People saw that the agency tasked with protecting their lives had lied to them, and once the truth was revealed discovered those lies had done nothing but open the door for price gougers to buy up the entire mask supply. What the CDC had told them not to buy for a dime a piece they now told them to buy for ten dollars a piece, and the new law now required them to have it. Once they threw their own credibility on the fire, people had to go looking for something else to believe in. For many of them it was crazy conspiracy theories and demagogues.
You don’t have to assume the CDC was full of lies if you remember that they were working from an inaccurate hypothesis at a time when reducing transmission rates seemed like it might be the most important thing in the world.
Dr Fauci feared the rising costs of masks and whether the medical system would have enough. That wasn't his decision to make, but he made it. He later started using a new line, which is that they weren't aware that 40-50% of people were asymptomatic which was irrelevant for the problem at hand.
If Covid was only transmissible by people with symptoms, you could control spread by asking those people to stay home and everyone else is clear — no masks needed. If it’s impossible to know if you’re infectious without testing, masks make more of a difference. More effective ones are obviously better.
I certainly knew at the time that I was triaging masks because health care workers were more important than me. I still have a note on my fridge from February thanking me for donating some N95s I had from wildfire season. The trade off was pretty clear.
the CDC was initially correct in assessing that (the way we wear) masks would not be a panacea for covid, but that was politically unpalatable which is why it was walked backed so haphazardly. masks, and all the CDC outrage around them, was effectively mediopolitical redirection of our anger toward each other rather than toward our corporatocratic institutions to quickly and correctly assess the threat and then appropriately deploy (only) effective measures.
While this is true, at least in the early pandemic when social circles were pretty tight (often just your household, but even if not quite a bit smaller than during normal times), the virus has to be introduced to that social circle, it won't just manifest itself out of nothing in one of it's members. Masking when not interacting with that circle will help keep the virus out of that circle of people in the first place.
This is a very hard thing to maintain for long periods of time, but in the context of 2020 it's a reasonable approach to take.
as i see it, masks make sense in 2 general cases:
1) when uncertainty about transmission and lethality is high, as was the case in nov/dec 2019, until population risk is more closely bounded
2) when situational risk is measurably elevated over baseline, like having comorbidities, surgery, packed mass transit, etc.
by april 2020, we (in the US at least) had enough information that masking wasn't going to be that panacea, when taking human behavior into account (trust channels, weariness, etc.). yet, it was still weaponized by the media and politicians.
i know this because i was making these very same points back in april 2020. to be effective, a mask has to be worn at the right times (like being face-to-face with another human) and correctly (creating a tight seal around the nose and mouth using an effective filtering material). most people weren't doing either of these most of the time.
That's not what they said, which kind of highlights just how much misinformation was indeed being spewed well before then.
Can you provide the source for this?
Nobody knew what was going on, I read as much about covid as I could (including HN comments about something to do with quinine that was popular for a day or two)
This is the source I found https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...
I think there is a big time Mandela effect here. I remember “don’t buy masks” as being about preserving masks for essential workers and medical professionals, I don’t necessarily recall the portion where they said it didn’t help infection rates, but yet there it is.
I think any reasonable person can acknowledge there's a huge leap between "I was confused by what you said" and "YOU LIED TO ME!!!!"
And comparatively, they are way more critical for medical personnel. They should have just communicated it that way rather than trying to downplay effectiveness. Shortages abounded anyway.
Assuming you were alive and paying any attention the past two years, the source would be your own eyes and ears, consuming the (US) CDC’s official communications. I wasn’t even in the US and encountered them! In fact, I once even repeated one of their false claims about masks very early last year during a recorded zoom call with a friend. Then after looking at the very different claims from my local CDC, I realized the US one was wrong.
This specific messaging has been a rallying point for people who don’t even believe covid exists. At least that was the case in the US
They've used two different narratives at two far apart times that CNN highlights quite well.
1. A severe shortage of masks which were considered to be particularly effective, specifically N-95 masks capable of filtering viral particles. Such masks as were available were being preferentially directed to healthcare providers and first-responders.
2. A concern that the general public would not wear or use masks appropriately, and might take additional compensatory risks on the premise that masks, often utilised suboptimally, provided strong protection. Note too that at the time vented masks, which had a flap that opened on exhale (and hence transmitted any viral particles to the environment) were fairly popular and widely-utilised.
3. A thought that COVID-19 was not as subject to airborne transmission as it turned out to be --- fomite-based transmission (particles on surfaces generally transferred by hand) was thought to be significant. Subsequent evidence has shown this to be far less the case than thought at the time.
4. A general lack of hard knowledge of specifics of the novel coronavirus, resulting in recommendations based on general principles of vector reduction drawn from other diseases.
5. A decidedly muddled, politicised, and anti-scientific response from the US administration at the time. For those keeping score, that was not the present Administration, though from discussion in this thread, that might not be clear.
6. In an epistemic environment in which trust in media, government, and expertise had been under prolonged attack.
All of this was discussed at the time, and in particular Zeynep Tufekci was discussing most of these factors as early as 17 March 2020 in New York Times opinion pieces and elsewhere. Example:
"Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired"
Subtitle reveals much: "To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy."
... First, many health experts, including the surgeon general of the United States, told the public simultaneously that masks weren’t necessary for protecting the general public and that health care workers needed the dwindling supply. This contradiction confuses an ordinary listener. How do these masks magically protect the wearers only and only if they work in a particular field?
Second, there were attempts to bolster the first message, that ordinary people didn’t need masks, by telling people that masks, especially medical-grade respirator masks (such as the N95 masks), needed proper fitting and that ordinary people without such fitting wouldn’t benefit. This message was also deeply counterproductive. ...
It is of course true that masks don’t work perfectly, that they don’t replace hand-washing and social distancing, and that they work better if they fit properly. And of course, surgical masks (the disposable type that surgeons wear) don’t filter out small viral particles the way medical-grade respirator masks rated N95 and above do. ...
[P]roviding top-down guidance with such obvious contradictions backfires exactly because lack of trust is what fuels hoarding and misinformation.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...>
There's much more, the piece is well worth revisiting and should be a key document in future studies of the pandemic and its senselessly botched response.
Failures to accurately describe the circumstances and context of the CDC advice, or to acknowledge that the CDC rapidly reversed course once this became evident are themselves harmful.
Science is that which adapts to new knowledge and understanding. Dogma is that which clings to articles of faith despite evidence, in the interest of advancing a specific ideological agenda.
For all its faults, the CDC followed science. Incorrectly initially as it turns out, but ultimately correcting itself rather than insisting on dogma.
That point is made in another comment on this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34150615>
The further complication is in crafting effective, credible, useful, and actionable messaging in a time of crisis. Here too the CDC failed, but in large part because significant other actors were strongly intent (and remain strongly intent) in seeing it fail.
They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.
We also knew a lot less about what was going on at that time, and once again, that means we need to extend some degree of leniency to folks making conservative if difficult choices like this. If it came down to it yeah of course we need to secure the supply for first responders first.
Now we never should have been in that position in the first place but that was the fault of past administrations, not the CDC in the moment and didn't change what needed to be done.
> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections.
Some masks, but not all masks. Single layer cloth masks do nothing. [1] N95s sure, but even at peak COVID most people weren't wearing N95s, they were wearing non-medical surgical-style masks, which only block between 30 and 70% of particles.
Even still while less effective than N95s, those surgical masks do help. [2]
[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8460528/masks-effectiveness-omicr...
That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.
Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?
I'm no American but it was the exactly the same here in Germany, with exactly the same consequences. It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times.
> ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.
No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk.
If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk.
You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong.
> Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?
Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done.
I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance.
> It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.
It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew.
[edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.
I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.
That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth.
Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful.
These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage.
"The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.
I feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach than "lie and hope idiots believe it", thus producing whole swathes of idiots repeating the lie
I admire your optimism but people (en masse) don't work like that.
So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana.
I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.
People were fighting each other over toilet paper.
But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.
I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? Did we forget how hospitals and retirement homes were using garbage bags and scuba equipment as PPE? Sometimes all the choices are bad. The choice to put the safety of medical professionals fighting the pandemic head on above the safety of the general citizenry seems like the least bad option. Because if the medical system collapsed, which seemed like a real possibility at the time, that would put the general citizenry in even more danger.
Tell us the truth. "N95s should be reserved for medical personnel but surgical masks provide nominal protection for yourself and significant protection for others you might infect."
People realizing the CDC can and will lie to them has already been and will be far into the future responsible for countless deaths. Not only that, it makes us question what else the CDC has just decided is worth lying to us about. Do they manipulate statistics to "save people"? Do they falsify treatment data? If they'll lie to us about one thing they'll lie to us about another. Every single effort they make for the next decade or more is irreversibly tainted.
Lying losing credibility permanently! There is no going back, that trust is lost. Just letting covid rip though those nursing homes would be way less damaging in the long term.
Tough decisions? Yes, lies - with a straight face? No. Now what? How can you do public health without public trust?* How can you govern effectively when the record showed you lied?
The irony? I still see people wearing masks; the kind of mask that are proven to be ineffective.
* On top of it we were assured these people were "the experts." However, this wasn't our first respiratory pandemic. Yet we were completely unprepared? What is their area of expertise? Lies?
Publib health and government based on lies isn't sustainable. Yet anyone who questioned that was marginalized? It get worse and worse.
Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week.
This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized.
The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.
Partly..
There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
“There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical?
In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
> A better option, he says? Start with a two-layered cloth mask that has been washed, which gives it the capacity to filter better. If you want to go one step further in protection, use a KN95 mask, he says.
So it isn’t like the suggested option is some esoteric thing that you need a 3M factory to make. “Single layers cloth masks don’t work” isn’t technically a lie but it omits that there was an alternative solution that was within the means of like… anybody with a sewing machine and a washing machine to make.
I hear this a lot. Do you have a citation?
My impression is that nobody knew what was going on, underprepared officials jumped the gun with premature statements, and after the fact some people tried to rationalize the incompetence.
The CDC did not say that makes do not work. They said we do not know if masks work, which was (and mostly still remains) true.
Only person who said we have positive knowledge that masks don’t work was USSG Jerome Adams, and that was pretty late in the ordeal.
Could it possibly be the case that these statements are all true?:
1) We don’t know if masks donned by untrained people in normal public settings impacts transmission
2) We do know that masks donned by medical professionals in a medical context impacts transmission
3) We know there are not enough masks available for both the general population and medical professionals
And if those three statements are all true, couldn’t it make sense to arrive at the position: the public should not get masks until medical professionals are equipped with what they need?
The communications and advise from the medical establishment and media, were so terrible that that I question incompetence and lean towards corruption.
The flip flopping, the political and idealogical justifications, the theatre of everything without substance.
The People can handle nuanced messaging, what they can't handle is lies, obfuscation, and leaders who refuse to admit they are wrong.
They said what was true: we don’t know if they do work.
All studies done at scale, in peer reviewed journals before and since the pandemic have shown that not to be the case. N95s work, if used properly, that’s it.
If you work / have worked with people in biosafety labs they’ll tell you. What we did during the pandemic was effectively role play. Cloth masks, surgical masks, kN95s, all do approximately nothing. Only thing you could maybe argue is people avoided each other a bit more and spit didn’t travel… but the virus was airborne and that was considered highly likely even in Jan 2020.
Fauci’s FOIA requested private emails cover a lot of this; as does many many of the top epidemiologist (who were censored).
*Addendum*: It’s the same with the companies, CDC and FDA who suppressed ivermectin research
https://twitter.com/rwmalonemd/status/1607710183022628864
IMO the real reason they claimed “masks didn’t work”, “alternative drugs don’t work”, etc is because they needed the EUA. The companies producing the vaccines lobbied to get everything else suppressed so they could role out mRNA tech. That tech will allow them to offer pretty much any genetic therapy. Government had every incentive as well, more centralization and no liability. Pushing alternatives would pose more risks, with no upside.
Imo this was inevitable. It was only preventable with an open market of ideas, which Twitter, Facebook and others suppressed.
There’s also no reason that hearing there is “no evidence” for something requires you to adopt the silliest possible assumption for whether it’s actually true, but doctors seem to like doing this anyway.
(The actual answer for whether masks are “effective against covid” is “which covid?” - cause it’s different for 2020 covid and Omicron. Omicron is so infectious that you cannot avoid it using any kind of NPI at all.)
Studies show that surgical masks are only marginally effective at their goal of reducing transmission, and then only if they are worn properly. Of course, one can rely upon medical staff for that. Not so much the general population.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...
It's just one source, but I'm genuinely curious.
Trillions of dollars were pumped into propaganda and research in 2020. It takes years to go through, receive grants, construct experiments, get approvals, analyze and validate. We are only now starting to see initial results for new masking studies. They still need to be replicated, etc.
Here’s an example of a large scale study from 2015 where cloth masks increase risk of illness (over nothing):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/
Here’s a 2021 study showing masks aren’t really good as well (a randomized control trial) https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
My general point isn’t the specifics, it’s that the jury is out.
Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they really are being suppressed by "the man" or "the Feds" or whatever. Also, no matter how much stuff gets moderated, the left will never be happy.
End result: everyone is mad at Twitter, nobody trusts anything, conspiracy theorists get to make true claims about suppression, and more people are attracted to misinformation because it was suppressed -- e.g. "the government doesn't want you to know this!" or "see what the government is trying to hide from you!"
And it's fine to make an argument against moderation in general. But that's not what this article is doing.
Geopolitical hat on.
Elon Musk is getting close to the Saudis (Twitter), China (Gigafactory Shanghai), and Russians (necessary industrial inputs). In the past few months he's casually suggested a handover of Ukraine and Taiwan. Now he's turning on the Democrats and the FBI, or at least certain members of those organizations.
My mind wonders if the DoD will sour on his role at SpaceX. We've recently seen lawmakers impact the valuation of Tesla vis a vis tax incentives. Are Musk's foreign ties and obligations a risk to a defense company that services classified national interests?
Perhaps he or the company he keeps have enough friends within the DoD chain of command that there won't be any issues. Or maybe none of this matters. But I am half expecting to see sparks fly.
(I'm 100% reading between the lines here, and I don't have any evidence for any of my suspicions. Feel free to dismiss outright, though I would appreciate additional commentary if anyone has anything interesting to add.)
No, it wasn't. It was Bidens presidential campaign asking to remove revenge porn.
Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy? Not able to "mandate" is total bs, see the Pentagon-related leaks where there wasn't any need of any "mandating". If anything, this shows how hypocritical the whole industry has become, including many of its workers.
Hopefully this will scare away all potential future Aaron Swartz-es from this industry, or from the main parts of it at least, and hence bring it all down a peg or too.
There are people within the government whose job it was to respond to the covid pandemic. Part of that response involved educating the public about the disease and best practices related to it, which therefore included fighting misinformation. Misinformation is spread on platforms such as Twitter, so it made sense for the government to communicate with Twitter and let them know what it considered to be a good course of action. Do you disagree with this explanation?
This part I disagree with, because what is misinformation is unknownable before serious scientific study is done. It just makes the government look untrustworthy if they flip-flop from "masks are pointless" to "masks are essential" and back simply all because these policies were not based on any real science.
Similarly debate of other aspects like COVID origin, vaccine health effects etc was stifled when the real answers were unknown to science, and by steering the conversation in any particular direction before that it's done irreparable harm to the reputation of government, science and tech.
A lot of the mis/disinformation about COVID passed this bar (i.e. serious study had been done, and there was direct evidence that countered their claims).
On top of that, if you're going to make a positive claim about something, "unknowable before serious scientific study is done" means that you shouldn't make that claim, not that anyone can say anything they want because the truth is unknowable. If no one has studied the effects of drinking bleach to cure COVID, it's not appropriate to say "drinking bleach cures COVID".
I fail to see how this conclusion is automatic or helpful in action. Educating people and providing best practices is harmed by taking direct action to shut down criticism and debate.
And even granting, for the sake of argument, that someone within the government had that job, suppressing disagreement and debate is not the right way to do it.
"Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods. "
It's a nice way to explain the consequence without resorting to accident or malice.
Nevertheless, in the end, they way overstepped what was needed or helpful.
One solution might be for n moderators to evaluate and give the label to the reported violation, and ensure n is odd and larger than 1. However, this is tedious (although that is the tradeoff for fairness) and assumes there's an equivalent number of moderators who lean liberal, conservative, and neutral (in addition to assuming there's no biases created by the culture of the social media platform and management).
Perhaps each report should be given a detailed criteria as to why it was labelled as inappropriate, but this too would be subject to bias, emotional response from both parties, and slow down the moderation process which is likely backed up with many events in the queue, without really any direct benefit to the bottom line of the company although one could view this as a quality issue and lack of QA will ultimately produce an inferior product that is heavily QA'd.
Moderated implies it's unbiased while it's clearly not.
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These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong.
Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account.
And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems.
But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation.
Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s
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The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution.
There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things.
You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.
Seems like a large percentage of that team was former employees of the government, former FBI agents, former DOJ, etc. or have close familial ties to active government agents
If that is who you hire to "push" back against the government then you are not going to get much push back, it seems to me (and many others) Twitter was not forming teams to resist government influence but to deepen it.
I think gutting the teams was the correct move
If you don't trust the previous teams, then fire them and hire new people. Firing these teams and leaving them gutted was definitely not the correct move. If you're worried about the effectiveness of your current fire department, the solution is not to stop having a fire department, it's to get a better one.
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Going after the legal team in particular is a little strange, because you can call out Twitter's upper management, moderation teams, and policy stakeholders as lacking nuance/neutrality, but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room. They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.
If there was any team you were going to keep to help you push back against government requests, it probably would have been the lawyers.
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But it goes back to -- it doesn't seem like Musk is actually interested in building effective structures to support free speech, it seems like his interest begins and ends with complaining about the existing structures. Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.
Personally I think the platform is better today. The most "journalist" scream about it being unsafe the more I believe Elon is doing a great job, because I do not trust anyone at Washington Post, NyTimes, NBC, CBS, CNN, or any other major main stream propaganda source, and I trust even less their politically baised "research" non-profits.
>but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room.
No they were not, the most recent one fired was literally former FBI. Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". they are for "free speech" the same way the modern ACLU is, only if you have the "correct" speech
>>They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.
Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.
>>Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.
If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM, instead were more worried about suppressing political speech and carrying the water for one political party.
How about: you don’t. It’s not up to twitter moderation to determine what is fact in real-time.
Misinformation - False information that is spread regardless of intent to mislead.
Disinformation - False information that is spread with intent to mislead.
Misinformation can fall in the category of "Bullshit" quite often. There's no regard for the truth. Rather only a care that individuals are persuaded. This lack of respect I believe is the core problem these articles are trying to discuss.
This is the post-truth politics world we live in. Encouraged truth-telling, fact checking, not reopening settled debates, pressure big tech to combat disinformation(note the word used here, not misinformation), etc.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” - Unknown
If big tech has to combat disinformation. Big media should be held accountable to correct earlier misinformation. Rather than the "all or nothing" approach we see today until the next developing story makes headlines years later.
100% yes. The process used by multi-billion dollar global communication platforms for fact-checking should not be this sloppy, where they themselves become purveyors of misinformation in marking accurate information as misleading.
It's one thing for some regular Joe Blow to post misinformation. It's another for the party with the full weight/authority of being the platform provider, and all of the credibility that comes with that, to post misinformation.
We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?
Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.
It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.
The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. .... I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]
That sort of condemnation of the news would have been, at the minimum, quite hyperbolic during the time we grew up in. But now? It seems like a scathing, yet completely reasonable, criticism of the current state of media. And this goes on endlessly far back. Read the classics (Plato's "The Republic" feels effectively prophetic at this point) and it goes from sounding alien, during our bubble, to sounding like something oddly familiar.
It's quite comforting in a way. We're not stepping into some great new unknown, but merely returning to the endless cycling of history.
[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
The Darwinian nature of conspiracy theories mean that if they didn't look like the truth, they'd not really establish much of an audience.
Consensus building is looking for ways to persuade people who aren't predisposed to an idea to come around to it (and because it's bidirectional, simultaneously being open to ideas one isn't predisposed to). Conspiracy theories are looking for ways to become something that fits people's predispositions.
Case it point - the demonization of ivermectin - one of the safest drugs ever created that saved so many people's lives (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34466270/). It's also inexpensive. The entire case was that people are promoting something that has not validated as being effective. Not, that its dangerous or that it's stealing people's money - it's not been proven to be an effective treatment. And doctors lost their licenses (many more threatened) over this.
As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.
“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”
As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/inmates-sue-arka...
If the inmates had too much, they had too much. And experimenting or giving a treatment without proper disclosure is wrong and the doctor should lose their license for that - if nothing else. But thanks for bringing that example because it shows the evil of experimenting on people without full disclosure.
Now if you want to talk about the incidence of heart-attacks and myocarditis after vaccines and the experiments that were run on the public without proper notification of their risks, we'd have an interesting discussion. As the twitter files show, any such discussion was suppressed because "the vaccines are safe" and anyone that say otherwise is "promoting misinformation".
Also, I would like to point out that prisoners in the land of the free are still humans.
Be careful because this the playbook of how these influencers draw people into the echo chamber. Slowly breed mistrust in anything and everything mainstream, encouraging you to think critically. Once there is a level of mistrust in everything, they feed you sources they want you to believe, "don't believe these guys, I've shown you the light, now believe me"
It also serves to alienate the person from friends/family/casual discussion, driving them further towards the chat groups and sites
I can try and attribute the "masks don't work" narrative to incompetence (they were trying to save the masks, and that backfired), but it isn't hard to argue that that was also dishonest.
The same applies to the "you MUSTstay indoors" messages followed a few days later by "you should go and take part in a protest with hundreds of other people" because, suddenly, racism is a health emergency bigger than covid (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/12/racism-publi...).
I am not in the "ivermectin cures Covid" camp. I don't think it does based on the available research. But the campaign to paint it as a "horse dewormer" was as far from honest as possible and I very much doubt that it was organic (Ivermectin is a drug that is prescribed to 150 000 people in the US every year, it's also commonly used to deworm dogs, and cats, and yet somehow each news outlet focused on horses).
I could go on, but the fact of the matter is that I simply don't trust the mainstream media anymore and totally understand why many people do not either. I don't care what you think about that, from my perspective "don't believe these guys, I've shown you the light, now believe me" has been employed time and time again to smear people who had heterodox opinions during the pandemic (and way before it) too.
This subversion of rights and erosion of trust with government actors directly pushing for censorship, no matter what the intentions, will cast doubt on the system as a whole and any purpose it might have in the short term is far outweighed by the damage it causes in the long term.
I highly recommend reading the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, specifically articles 51 through 55.
Myself I prefer having all the facts and drawing my own conclusions, being able to ask questions and consider all options. I'm capable of it, and people in power are seldom there based on competence.
Edit: I see I fell for Poe's law. Thank god.
Could you elaborate into what is noble about censoring the discussion about the safety of covid-related mitigations by official, recognised scientists?
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992121/pdf/406...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) initially declined to endorse wearing of ‘medical masks’ as a non-pharmaceutical intervention to prevent or reduce the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and strongly opposed using other forms of masks. In the second version of the WHO’s advice in March 2020 (WHO, 2020a) it stated that:
A medical mask is not required for people who are not sick as there is no evidence of its usefulness in protecting them.
Cloth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circum- stances.
However, by December 2020, the WHO recommended wearing of non-medical masks of various kind in certain community settings—subject to recommendations on how this is done. It did so, “Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings” (WHO, 2020b). Various public health experts and epidemiologists have gone further, asserting that community use of non-medical masks is crucial for slowing transmission and attributing better outcomes in some countries to early adoption of widespread mask usage. Some countries that were initially reticent to even recommend mask use have made a comparable about-turn, making mask wearing mandatory and failure to do so subject to criminal penalty.
Under the currently-dominant hierarchy in evidence-based medicine, credible evidence on mask usage must come from randomized control trials; it was the absence of significant positive effects from RCTs prior to the pandemic that informed the WHO’s initial stance.
~1600 people under the age of 18 have died of covid since it began ~3 years ago. Since it began though its a very different virus, Omicron is far less deadly. Kids that are constantly masked will have long term social and learning issues. I think we have reached the point in the pandemic where the harm from constant masking out weighs the benefits. The vast majority of people agree with that. Even the 80+ year old president is rarely masked these days. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just saying from a risk / reward perspective, masking kids likely does not deliver unless those children are ill to begin with.
Regarding vaccination, I agree social media led to many people that should have been vaccinated (overweight, lung conditions, etc.) not getting vaccinated and they died where they likely did not have to. I knew 2 of them. I'm not an anti-vaxxer and was vaccinated and received a booster shot. I am not getting anymore of them as I had covid and it was not a big deal so I know longer think the risk is worth the reward. My kids are not vaccinated and unless there is a major mutation in the virus will not be. They have all had covid without issue.
The best example I can remember was a fact-check by Reuters on the claim that clinical trials were not completed. Their debunk started by rephrasing the claim to a straw-man that "trials had another year to finish", to debunking with: "No according to Pfizer source X it will be done by Y".
I did the math, and from article publication to date Y it was 10 months, so sure, technically correct, not a year. But does the straw-man of a specific date debunk the claim that the "trials are not completed"?
Tragic but that was the state of the discourse and it's ridiculous, what did they expect? This is going to take a long time to repair and how global it was makes me draw the most sinister conclusions. I don't want to but it's the only explanation I see.
Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize that half of them are stupider than that.
--George Carlin (I think)
And they're right in the sense that the "other side" is doing the same thing.
For example, every news headline about the pandemic had one of two policy subtexts: Democrat subtext (we need to mask up, lock down, vaccinate), or Republican subtext (we need to open up, drop mask rules, etc). Any media article, when reporting on news, statistics, or scientific studies, would always present it in one of those two contexts. So any new piece of information would be evaluated and presented by the media and by Twitter, not on a basis of how it contributed to our knowledge and evidence-based decisionmaking process, but on a basis of which policy position it seemed to support.
And of course, humans love to form political factions and fight each other ("my" group versus "theirs"), and powerful/rich people gain lots of power/money from this process by leading or feeding one side, so the media and political ecosystem encourage this dynamic.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/fda-cost-benefit
There never is one single “right” decision, the balancing of trade-offs is inherently political.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier
The CDC is just one such expert. Then there are legal experts, economic experts, public opinion experts, foreign policy experts.. in the private sector a CEO(or wall st trader or tech PM) is expected to weigh all of these, decide, and live or die by the consequences of their decisions . Tough job, which is why they get paid so much.
An executive has the authority to completely override the experts after consulting an astrologer, tossing a coin, or washing his hands.
This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci is completely misguided.
Fair point. Doesn’t mean that people who pointed out inconsistencies in CDC’s data or referred papers of different opinions should be banned or villainfied, either
My school didn't teach me to treat statements from practitioners of evidence-based medicine and vendors of colloidal silver as equally likely to be true or that people should pick recommendations based on which got the most social media upvotes either
We're not all medical experts. And, we can't survive without trusting others.
The biggest problem with the so called "experts" is that they seem to think that they are automatically owned our trust. But there does not seem to be any penalty for getting things wrong (don't mask, mask with cloth mask, mask with n95).
It's also quite interesting that even the ancient people knew about different modes of persuasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion
There was Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The appeal to authority, to emotions, and to the logical truth of the claim. You need all of them to convince someone to something. Somehow modern experts think that the only thing they need is Ethos and enough legal might to enforce compliance.
If people are able to share ideas, some people will share bad ideas. This problem goes back to Gutenberg.
Some will argue that the powers that be owe it to the less intelligent and less powerful masses to make sure to remove bad ideas, and/or to promote good ideas.
Others will point to history and note that banning books, or forcing people to read the “good ideas” has rarely been a successful long term strategy.
I side with those who reference history. History tends to be cyclical. Most thoughts have been thought before. Students of history have learned that manipulating what people think by engineering the free flow of ideas may work great in the short term, but longer term it’s doomed to failure.
I'm not at all excusing anything that happened at Twitter or elsewhere. There's plenty to criticize, but these breathless accusations of ultimate evil are not only silly but hypocritical. If we're going to be harsh judges, let's not be one-sided about it. Plenty of the "opposition" deserve some pretty strong condemnation too, having made their own contributions to the death toll. I see way too many people here refusing even to talk about those failures, because of their own political leanings. Is this a site for curious inquiry, or pure political piling-on?
Actually that makes it worse. It means people overreacted because of short-term thinking.
That kind of overreaction and general freaking out has done a lot of damage and it's going to be what our Covid policy is remembered for in the history books.
Good question. It seems that curious inquiry was not an important consideration during the height of a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen. We all paid the price for that, sadly. Some of us would like a word or two.
I'm sorry if that's inconvenient for some people, particularly decision makers who were not only in power, but who abused that power to censor dissent.
Hopefully some people had better healthcare outcomes because of what twitter showed them and decided not to show them. Hopefully some people stayed on the platform because they felt it was less spammy or full of disinformation (on whichever side/topic).
The same thing was said about those who opposed the Iraq War.
It's amazing how quickly the supposed "liberals" forgot this lesson and beclowned themselves.
At Twitter, this technology was trained to parrot the U.S. CDC, over the legitimate objections and disagreements from their counterparts in the EU and WHO. As well as many others.
It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:
>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...
I don't much care for his politics but David Cameron has some interesting ideas on how we can do better: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-shows-new-global-virus-... .
IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together to maintain, they tend to come out better. Even after their governments did make many bad decisions.
It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.
I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.
As told in my Middle Eastern history class, "it's reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist when you've been the subject of countless governments conspiring against you and/or your people -- in fact it would be unreasonable not to be one".
Iranians who claimed the US Government had orchestrated their elections were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 47 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Americans who claimed the US Government had lied to them about mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, vaccine safety, lockdown durations, COVID severity, dangers of remote schooling, etc. were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 2 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.
No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.
They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.
Then rinse and repeat.
Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.
The basis of my argument is counter example countries such as Denmark. In Denmark, we all got vaccinated, and as soon as a second booster (3rd jab) was available, the government coordinated the distribution with pharmacies to allow administration. The response of the people was so immediate that within a week or so > 80% had at least 2 jabs plus booster. This meant that we could open up immediately, and covid became a thing of the past.
Denmark had a peak at the time, with far far far lower deaths per infection than other countries and previous peaks.
The difference is in communication. The Danish government and the responsible department communicated everything and monitored the situation in a way that allowed quick and nimble responses.
We had free jabs, nobody forced us to get vaccinated, we all did so willingly, we had free testing, and if we didn’t want a jab, we could wear masks and what have you.
[1]: The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which claims the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...)
People will always swallow a magic pill that fixes all their problems. What changes is the form the pill takes and who's selling it.
Anti-vax movements have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. The only thing that "solves" this problem is a new disease and vaccines that completely displaces the old.
Think about it: when was the last time, since the pandemic began, that you heard about autism and the MMR vaccine? that began in the late 90s (with no scientific basis I might add) and persisted for decades. Now no one talks about, thinks about or cares about it anymore. It's completely off the radar.
Covid anti-vax movements will meet the exact same fate come the next major vaccine.
It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.
Given that extreme level of ridiculous harmful misinformation being presented, it seems obvious to me that any reasonably ethical link in the communication chain should attempt to speak up.
Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.
They're the only one releasing internal files. If others did, like Facebook or Youtube, or Fox if you really want (but that would be a strange choice) do you think we'd only be up in arms about Twitter or do you think you might hear "Now it's Twitter and Facebook!" Regardless, I've seen plenty of people pointing out that this probably went on in many places, it's just harder to get worked up about a negative, implausible as it is.
> Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.
That's simply not true and makes it seem like you haven't read the article or the associated Twitter thread. I'm not going to provide the quotes because you should've read the article instead of providing an untrue anecdote, and you can click the link above.
It's also not relevant whether they blocked "most things", what matters is that they blocked true things, things provided by notable experts, and that they were blocked because they inconvenienced the powers that be or dissented from the official line.
It still seems weird to me to give digital services a free pass on ethical matters
That's not what he did: https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"
He continued.
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
This is a lie and you should not be propagating it in the current year. It’s honestly embarrassing you can’t do primary research at all and still talk with authority.
What a weird time that was.
Trust will continue to deteriorate.
Why would they? This is another nothingburger, Musk is just seeking attention for the sake of attention. If that means echoing antivax bullshit, or trying to make sure Hunter Biden's penis is available for all to see on the internet, that's what he will do.
i, a non-lawyer, think you probably have no recourse
https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.am...
Can you explain what is actually misleading about it, or, more broadly, how is it anti-vax?
there's no such thing as anti-vax views. there's only science/facts and lies.
> twitter rigged the debate. yes so what... (the views that I supported carried the day)
most bizarre argument i've come across on the internet today.
> why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers?
sounds to me here like you want to live in 'La-La land'.
> If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.
covid is such a tragedy that china is loosening [0] some of its zero-covid restrictions. also, there's no shortage of vaccines anywhere as of today. you might want to cross-check that piece of misinformation.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/china-to-end-quarantine-for-...
The author of the article wrote for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired. Are those not real publications?
What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?
You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0].
I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming.
[0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...
What a world we live in where this is a reasonable statement to many.
Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities.
This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.
We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by making the conspiracy theories about censorship become true!
Besides, even if you wanted corporations to police speech and decide what is true, would Twitter and Facebook really be the ones you would want to do it?
It’s been very sad to see Westerners, especially Americans, and especially American liberals be so fearful and weak that they discarded the single most important principle of freedom, liberty, and human rights: freedom of speech.
That sacrifice got us nothing. Misinformation still spreads and it is more attractive than ever to the conspiracy-minded precisely because they can see the attempts to suppress it! Forbidden knowledge is always more attractive. It wasn’t worth it!
The only way out of this is to stop asking corporations and governments to censor things. Just stop.
I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.
if they are gonna to have all that, which i think they need to survive as a business, then the next best thing would be to empower users to have more control over the content they see ala email filtering
Just because the ticket has finally come in for censorship that offends your sensibilities, does not change the fact that this dynamic has existed for the past two decades. The pot has been slowly boiling, and you are now realizing it. Good - jump out!
The only way out of this is decentralized platforms running on Free software, period.
As expected, the folks doing the policing of "disinformation" were entirely unqualified for the role (I love the banning of the Harvard School of Medicine epidemiologist who said "vaccines are for people at risk" - apparently the folks at Twitter know more about this than he does) and ended up making decisions that were "politically expedient" rather than focusing on the truth.
Or the attempt by Jim Baker (Twitter general counsel, former FBI) to ban a tweet by Trump about his own Covid illness and Twitter's Roth saying "optimism isn't a ban-able offense".
This article perfectly proves why campaigns against "disinformation" are bound to fail - inevitably factual and important information gets censored because it's inconvenient to the people in power.
After reading this article I'm reminded of Rand Paul's quote "Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government."
Amazingly this news goes over like a wet rag at HN. Which is shocking considering the "hacker ethos" about not bowing down to authority.
there is so much absolute garbage bad faith BS on social media that is poison to a civilized society and a democracy, that there is no choice but to do the best we can to try to spread less of it. you don't get to throw up your hands and say, there is no perfect arbiter of truth and decency so let's say, anything goes. of course that's what all the worst burn-it-down extremists would like to see.
A lot of US institutions were exposed as unfit for purpose by the pandemic and we have to do better. But I'm not sure Twitter would be near the top of the list.
And somehow, the new regime seems able to make everything worse.
Sounds like how Stackoverflow works. 5 people have no clue about the technical question decides to close it entirely.
Much like social media generally, disinformation is now one of the chief scapegoats across the aisle for all that’s wrong in the world.
Would be interesting to see what, if any, automated tools they use.
We would see two impeachments, wall to wall news coverage, protests by employees at Facebook, Apple and Google, all asking for deplatforming everyone associated and so much more.
Its ridiculous that we're unable as a society to separate actions from political affiliation.
Go to reddit. Find an emotionally charged subreddit, become a member, and then offer to help moderate.
There are FAR too many people discussing things, people with real experience making things, talking about moderation without doing their homework.
Test your assumptions. See if it can work. Doing this while helping communities is not a bad way to go.
Obviously, Twitter should not have followed CDC guidelines. They should have created their own healthcare group in charge of evaluating which CDC guidelines coming out of the Trump and Biden administrations were correct and which were not, based on blue-check user surveys.
Just because the CDC said something does not automatically make it true. It's a valuable authority but it's not the Ministry of Truth. People are allowed to question and contradict it.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Hell at this rate I’d hear somebody out if they said the moon is made of cheese.
What a time to be alive.
Right. That's the problem.
It deeply confuses me how some people, some who are obviously very smart, value censorship and government-enforced-truth over freedom of speech and expression.
Where did it go wrong? How did we get here? IMHO this isn't about "culture war" or "left v right" anymore, but instead about how did a large number of people so casually abandon fundamental human rights.
From hereon out we have two factions of humanity - those who will believe anything said by authority and those who know knowledge can only be ascertained through deduction and reason.
I’d never have thought that once information became ubiquitous that we would lose any ability to rely on it, but the worlds more complicated than I assumed.
Here in the US (and likely other places), you have a pharma industry shoving amphetamines and antidepressants in people's faces. You have a complacent government that's too lazy, corrupt, and incompetent to address this obvious wrong (among many others)
So because of this, people already don't trust the pharma industry or govt. Can I blame them? Not really. At the same time, you have elderly refusing vaccination and dying because of this lack of trust. You have parents refusing to vaccinate children for things like measles
So tl;dr you have a system that has systematically eroded trust over the years and has been unable to self correct, and people on some level know that they're getting screwed. And you have an incompetent government that refuses to take responsibility for this lack of trust and only knows how to redirect blame elsewhere. What could possibly go wrong here?
edit: I'm not saying that the government is irredeemably bad, I'm saying that as of right now the current generation of politicians have failed to do their due diligence regarding pharma screwing people over (e.g. price of insulin)
I’m vaccinated and boosted but I don’t know how I’d feel about people asking me to trust the Big Pharma if the life of my sibling or parent was pharmaceutically destroyed.
I can’t believe how well Germany did with masking, testing and vaccination mandates to be able to take part in society again and consequently they have 1/3 fewer deaths than the comparably more open UK. A lot of people’s parents would still be with us if the UK and US weren’t divided and arguing about pointless stuff when we have loads of evidence the societies with more locking down and more extreme interventions saved more lives.
That people are still using “move along nothing to see here” is ridiculous.
The world just went through an event of a historical significance comparable to a World War. And there are still new books, movies and documentaries being made about World War 1 and 2…
There are a lot more questions to be asked and lessons to be learned about how COVID was handled. For example we’ve yet to have accurate public data on suicide rates during the lockdowns…
Some people felt it wasn't worth the slightest bit of sacrifice to save other's lives.
Some people felt all human life was sacred and we should've done everything possible to save every last day of every person's life.
The vast majority of people were in the messy middle, and the debate centered around how much we should give up to save lives - especially when it might have long-term negative consequences.
A lot of people were willing to isolate and wear masks - and the debate centered around whether the government has the right (or should) force people to do those things.
A lot of people thought if you can't force everyone - it's a suckers game. Why should I isolate when other people aren't, and the effects are minimized - etc.
It's not as simple as "mask and isolation good", even if there is good evidence it worked for the initial strains of Covid.
Japan had no lockdowns (because current law prevents such government overreach). Would you like to compare death figures between the more populace and much older and therefore, on the face of it, much higher risk Japan, with Germany?
To counter that, the UK is almost certainly much more governmentally corrupt and incompetent than Germany which lead to most of the issues dealing with the pandemic.