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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

This isn't a case where people thought the wrong things and it made them vote wrong. It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.

I'm honestly shocked that people think this is a case where the government should not step in. I think they should have been much more aggressive.

This judgment and the comments here just baffle me. The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying. And this isn't like a seatbelt issue where people just put themselves at risk.

The fact that people are defending the spread of false information that contributed to people literally dying in favor of a hypothetical tyranny problem just leaves me feeling completely lost.

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It's not the governments job to decide what speech is "correct" in the US at least under the current judicial regimes interpretation of the laws. There are some very narrow exceptions but this is not one of those.

That people honestly think this is a bad thing is depressing. The government simply cannot be trusted in the wider picture to make these decisions about good vs bad speech.

> It's not the governments job to decide what speech is "correct" in the US at least under the current judicial regimes interpretation of the laws. There are some very narrow exceptions but this is not one of those.

I mean, the court seems to agree with this statement but it makes absolutely no sense to me. The classic example is yelling "fire!" in a movie theater because people might get hurt.

This seems like the same kind of thing but much, much more harmful.

EDIT: ok the "yelling fire" thing is not a great example, here are some others to jog your intuition that maybe your understanding of the concept of free speech needs to be fleshed out a bit:

What about telling someone that a loaded gun is just an inert replica and giving it to them to use as a prop?

What about telling someone that your company has a bunch of clients and tons of revenue when you are raising money as an investor?

What about if you put the wrong ingredients on your food product and it kills someone with an allergy?

> The classic example is yelling "fire!" in a movie theater because people might get hurt.

This is legal [0], and is a misunderstanding. The case where this came up was overturned as yelling fire falsely is crime depending on the circumstances. And yelling fire truthfully is never a crime.

If there’s a fire in a crowded theater, you definitely want people yelling fire. And trying to limit them will lead to more deaths, not less.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

This case almost seems more like there is an actual fire in the movie theater and the firemen run in, but now they are banned from telling the theater operator to shout "FIRE" over the public address system?

> The classic example is yelling "fire!" in a movie theater because people might get hurt.

This commonly brought up example is a complete garbage. It was first brought into American jurisprudence during WWI

In fact, this case illustrates exactly why we ought not to criminalize speech. The phrase first entered American jurisprudence in Eugene v Debs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs), in which the government tried to prosecute an anti-war protester. Do you think the anti-war guy was popular in his time? Do you understand now why the government has no business policing speech?

In the United States, short of direct threats, you can always say whatever you want. It's a fundamental human right, and frankly, no government has a moral right to take that away. This idea is foundational to American democracy. FFS, civil rights group will defend your right to proclaim 'hate speech' in

> In the United States, short of direct threats, you can always say whatever you want.

This isn't the case. There are many exceptions to the 1st Amendment's protection of speech, beyond just true threats.

Fraud and intent to kill are all reasonable things for the government to fight. Forcing consensus on all speech surrounding a new and unknown virus doesn’t seem to fall into those categories. There’s plenty of gray area, and probably some intentionally harmful misinformation was disseminated, but on the whole, I’d prefer to err on the side of liberty when dealing with gray areas.

>The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying

This isn't the consensus at all; the data shows that overwhelmingly lockdowns etc. had no positive effect on overall mortality or even a slightly net negative one. That's why New York had a higher fatality rate than Florida even though Florida had an older (and hence more vulnerable) population. They also had a devastating effect on childhood education/development outcomes.

> That's why New York had a higher fatality rate than Florida even though Florida had an older (and hence more vulnerable) population.

New York had a higher fatality rate for the first 2 months, when COVID was new and nobody knew how to treat it. After that Florida had a higher rate. The overall fatality rate in Florida passed that of New York about a year ago.

Here is a graph of the overall COVID deaths per 100k for Florida and New York from the start of the pandemic through the first quarter of this year [1]. I've also included a couple of other large population states (California and Texas), and Washington.

I included Washington because I'm in Washington and my cookies make that site default to including Washington in all the graphs and I was too lazy too remove it. :-)

Note the "Show" drop down below the graph. You can use that to add the numbers for regions, top 10 or top 25, bottom 10 or bottom 25, greater or lass than 5 million population, and others, to get a better idea of how various states did.

Use the "Data" drop down to switch to cases instead of deaths, or to show weekly or daily rates instead of cumulative.

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...

It's very common for discussions on this topic to only look at one particular factor and use it to fit some narrative one believes to be correct. Mentioning the difference in population age while ignoring things like population density or different climates is a good example of this.

To this day it seems most people are misinformed about the WHO's statements regarding lockdowns.

The WHO's position was that the total closure of businesses and public areas was a tool that could be effective early on in a wave of infections, but governments should recognize that it came with a terrible cost in terms of increasing poverty and other social problems.

They also repeatedly stated that the half-assed "lockdowns" implemented by most jurisdictions (hey guys let's close the pool but we'll reopen it on Wednesdays and Fridays, also restaurants are delivery only for nine months) were next to useless.

Basically, they said you had to go all-in, do it early on, and make it brief or it wasn't worth it.

Not once have I ever seen the nuance of their position accurately reflected in the media or in statements by politicians and governments. It was all 100% left vs right tribe wars / oh look libs are stealing our freedoms / here's another dunk on Trump / Americans of all stripes hating and blaming each other. Millions are poor or dead because we all failed.

"When is it OK to take a wrong/bad action in order to prevent some really wrong/bad event?"

"How wrong was this action?"

"How bad does the event have to be to justify the wrong action?"

"Who is responsible for making the judgment call?"

"If that party shirks, does it fall to anyone next?"

"Who is morally accountable for the bad event given that it could be avoided via certain actions?"

The scientific consensus you refer to gives important and helpful facts that inform this discussion by characterizing the bad event in detail. But the scientific facts cannot answer the foregoing questions, as you hope, because it provides no insight on any of the other facets. That's why there's debate and discussion rather than an open and shut case.

Yes! I totally agree. The conversation is really important.

But in this case the costs (people dying, or in many cases losing months of their lives to extreme fatigue, other health problems, the overloading of medical infrastructure causing many other problems, etc) far, far outweigh the costs of a hypothetical tyranny situation.

> people dying, or in many cases losing months of their lives to extreme fatigue, other health problems, the overloading of medical infrastructure causing many other problems, etc

Except none of these "experts" had any clue if their costly measures would work at all. And to this day you can't look at a chart and see a major difference between anywhere. Virus is gonna virus. You cannot control it.

Simply put, you were lied to. Break out of your echo chamber and listen to people calling you out. They are right, you are not.

There is more to life than a myopic focus on exactly one form of illness.

What causal evidence is there that people posting on social media caused deaths and "losing months of their lives to extreme fatigue"?

Are you based in the US? Freedom of speech is deeply ingrained in American culture as one of our founding principles. It's very common to believe that the threshold must be extraordinarily high before suppression is valid.

Actually calling for specific individuals or groups of individuals to be lynched crosses a line with most people, but not all. Spreading sincerely held beliefs that are unintentionally harmful is below that line for many if not most.

This is so thoroughly ingrained in our legal system and culture that only Alito (who is on the conservative wing) dissented in Snyder v. Phelps [0]—all four liberal justices concurred that hate speech against gay people outside of a funeral could not be punished (in the circumstances in the case).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyder_v._Phelps

> This isn't a case where people thought the wrong things and it made them vote wrong. It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.

The government was pushing an entirely incorrect assessment of how Covid spread.

They shut down domain experts who correctly asserted that Covid was fully airborne.

> The evidence that Covid-19 spreads through the air has been there since early in the pandemic - in a Seattle choir, a Chinese restaurant, an Arkansas prison. And “Covid is Airborne” scientists have from around the globe have been pleading with authorities to tell the world, holding symposiums and writing editorial after editorial.

They wrote an open letter in June of 2020 signed by hundreds of fellow scientists appealing to “national and international bodies to recognize the potential for airborne spread” of COVID-19. They have shown that 85% of viral load is in the air. They have explicitly laid out how respiratory viruses hitchhike on aerosols to penetrate the lungs and infect people.

And yet despite all this, and even as the Delta wave - as contagious as (the known-to-be-airborne) chickenpox - rages, there has been no clear guidance from the most prominent public health authorities that Covid is indeed airborne, in plain language that regular people and businesses can use to modify their own behavior and prevent airborne transmission.

https://theair.substack.com/p/why-covid-is-airborne-history

It took two years for those in charge to accept the truth about how Covid spreads.

> Two years of COVID: The battle to accept airborne transmission

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...

> Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

> I'm honestly shocked that people think this is a case where the government should not step in. I think they should have been much more aggressive.

The United States government lacks the right to do this in essentially all cases because it's a right retained by the people. It's a pretty nice right and ought to be protected, which it -- usually -- eventually is.

> The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying. And this isn't like a seatbelt issue where people just put themselves at risk.

Human rights are not -- and should not be -- subject to scientific consensus.

what should they be based on?

One way in america we've always defined free speech is this:

"your right to swing your fist ends when it lands on my face."

I don't think people have a right to free speech when that speech is purposely, and I do mean purposely because it was done on purpose, designed to spread misinformation in such a way that others are harmed by it.

There are limits to free speech, and the conversation ends with Popper's paradox.

There's no carve out for "a really good reason". The Government may not "abridge the freedom of speech".

It can make educational posters, it can distribute information, but it can't use it's authority to limit the speech of others.

One of my videogame youtubers, the GameGrumps, couldn't say "We have covid" on youtube. Not fake health advice or anything, just explaining they got it and couldn't record for a few days.

The real world is not like physics, where you can describe things with an equation and they pretty much hold up absolutely.

There is always an edge case, a grey area, a situation where you have to use your judgment.

Also "There's no carve out for "a really good reason"" is simply incorrect. Fraud? Child pornography?

What about if you put the wrong ingredients on your food product and it kills someone with an allergy?

You're confusing a prohibiton on speech with behavior you can get in trouble for.

Let's say you put out a fraudulant ad selling a bridge. You can be sued, the FTC can sue you, and there could (unlikely) be jail time for you.

What the Government can't do is say you're prohibited to take out an ad until they approve it - which is exactly what happened with covid. The Whitehouse abused it's power to prohibit speech being made - it didn't sue someone for eg selling a false cure.

Part of the problem is the process. When I sue you for fraud, we go in front of a judge. I have to prove you're engaged in fraud - the burden is on me. If we prevent any unapproved ad from being posted by Government power, there is no due process and the burden of proof shifts to you that you aren't breaking the law. That's not how our justice system works.

Really? What was the mechanism by which this was enforced that was fundamentally different from, say, the police coming to someone's house and arresting them for the possession of child pornography?

The ability to go in front of a judge and that the burden of proof is on your accuser, for one.

Second, there are defenses to CSAM - it's not whatever the government feels is CSAM. The material has to actually be exploitative of children and for obscene purposes, it can't be a medical photo or a Nirvana album cover.

Do you really not see a difference between a probibition on any speech not preapproved by the Whitehouse versus charging people for CSAM posession?

This wasn't the Whitehouse post-hoc suing someone for hawking false covid cures. This was the Whitehouse saying unapproved messages could not be even discussed by private citizens on platforms.

> The ability to go in front of a judge

We're commenting on the judgment. Made by judges.

I'm going to stop responding here, this strategy of basing arguments in imagined alternative worlds of facts is not interesting.

This only went in front of a judge because the Whitehouse was sued by Missouri and Louisiana.

The Whitehouse is a defendant, not a plaintiff.

None of the people censored have standing or were able to go in front of the judge.

A society has to manage many, many interests and preventing early death is only one of them.

> a case where the government should not step in

There are limits to government mandate, it's not allowed to cross, no matter what.

In addition to this case, there are several cases (in Germany, in Israel etc.) where the court pointed out the limits were crossed.

There is a possibility to change the limits through democratic process for a following government.

Americans are a peculiar people. You might save a few lives in the short term by censoring ideas that cause harm (which are usually legally protected even if they're false). The problem arises once people get wind of the fact that there is centralized government influence on what they're allowed to say or hear. Americans generally don't believe their governments to do this fairly or competently.

So a lot of people fall into conspiratorial thinking about what they're not being allowed to hear. They also lose trust in a government that doesn't trust them in return (or allow them to make their own decisions). So there are very negative second-order effects to going down the route of paternalistic censorship here.

I think what you're feeling is a lack of control. Mask, lockdowns, for those who support them it was a way to control and force the population towards your goals. Your ideals cannot easily be attained without government force.

The masks and lockdowns didn't work, they were just tools one political ideology used to oppress the others despite evidence to the contrary. That behavior has been found to be unconstitutional.

Deciding what constitutes "misinformation" is highly subjective and can lead to censorship of diverse opinions. A government empowered to regulate speech based on content risks suppressing valid dissenting voices. While misinformation can be dangerous, attempting to police speech can lead to unintended consequences and threaten democratic principles. Instead, a better approach is to provide accurate information, promote critical thinking, and foster open debate. Maintaining individual freedom for everyone across the country is more important than the lives of a few people who choose to follow misinformation.

I think the concern is less about a small handful steeping themselves in misinformation and more about what to do when a large chunk of public discourse starts to veer in a tabloid-like direction because such ideas are more captivating and viral than reality, especially with narratives specifically designed to do that being spun ever more frequently by a growing array of parties. Hoping that people think for themselves and practice due diligence only goes so far, particularly when there’s a shocking number adhering to a culture of ignorance and taking pride in not critically thinking or scrutinizing sources.

With that in mind, I can see why a government might want tools to help keep yellow-journalism-like discourse from dominating public forums, but as noted there’s dangers that come with that. It’s a thorny issue.

Restricting speech can lead to censorship and the suppression of dissenting voices, potentially undermining democratic principles. Determining what content should be restricted is subjective and can be susceptible to abuse, causing bias and political manipulation. History shows that limitations will expand beyond their original intent, stifling legitimate criticism (examples include McCarthyism, Patriot Act, Great Firewall of China). Instead of relying solely on government intervention, promoting media literacy, fact-checking, and responsible journalism can be more effective in combating misinformation while preserving essential democratic values. The temptation for authority figures to abuse their authority is too great.

> Instead of relying solely on government intervention, promoting media literacy, fact-checking, and responsible journalism can be more effective in combating misinformation while preserving essential democratic values.

Sure I agree in principal, but what is to be done when mentioned advocacy largely falls on deaf ears and ultimately fails? It doesn’t seem like there’s any last line of defense in this situation, making a “game over” frighteningly easy.

At the end of the day, I think that you must respect a person's autonomy to listen to what they choose and to make up their own minds, even if they don't come to the conclusions that you want them to. Advocacy and change are ongoing processes. The real game over scenario comes with the government legally stifling dissent

The problem isn't hypothetical. It's literally happening in front of your eyes and you cheer it on.

> The fact that people are defending the spread of false information that contributed to people literally dying in favor of a hypothetical tyranny problem just leaves me feeling completely lost.

Except a lot of that "false information" turned out to be true. You don't get to decide what constitutes "misinformation".

> It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.

This is absolutely not true at all.

My issue is that I think while a Ministry of Truth may have good intentions, it will do more harm than good.

Based on the principle that the counter to misinformation is better information, not less misinformation.

> The scientific consensus

The issue is that this isn’t a fixed thing and changes in real time. So it’s challenging to know what the “consensus” is now, especially if your goal is to filter out wrong or anti-consensus, what method do you use to decide what is allowed and what isn’t?

Finally, while Covid is serious and millions of people died. Diabetes and drug overdoses kill as well. We would be better served by limiting the misinformation that is ads for pharmaceuticals and coca cola.

I think people buying sugary drinks over the past 50 years killed more than many diseases. [0]

So I feel like the harm caused by trying to filter social media messages by the government is greater than any potential benefit.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/diabetes.htm 100k diabetes deaths per year in the US alone

There is no such thing as absolutes in social policy. Every situation has an edge case, a grey area. Something will always come up where you will have to balance an interpretation of a rule.

The US has the most extreme version of freedom of speech of any country in the world. There are quite a few versions that are perfectly reasonable and implemented successfully without sliding down a slippery slope into a "ministry of truth".

So the slippery slope is a fallacy in this case.

The issue of sugary drinks is a false dichotomy. Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke. They get sick and die from drinking tons of it all the time. If you want to draw a line for what kind of speech puts people in imminent danger, sugary drinks are definitively not over that line, while spreading a potentially lethal disease is clearly over that line.

> So I feel like the harm caused by trying to filter social media messages by the government is greater than any potential benefit.

What evidence are you basing that on? In the past the government granted licenses to broadcast networks on TV, and had strict requirements on the kinds of things they could say on air. Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen?

> Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke.

They get sick and die from drinking 100k cokes over their life due to watching lots of ads.

No one gets sick from just one exposure to misinformation either. They sick from thousands and thousands that change their behavior.

Ads for coke impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death.

Ads for opioid painkillers impact behavior negatively and result in poor health

outcomes and death.

Much more so than any Covid misinformation. That’s why I compared them.

If the goal is to protect people, then we should restrict ads of “unhealthy” things. Right? Have that ministry of truth review what products are healthy or unhealthy.

And just have them review all ads for if they are healthy or unhealthy.

It’s exactly a slippery slope argument. I think applied correctly because if the government does this for some topics they will do them for more. Especially if they apply your logic of whether they should reduce harm.

> Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen?

This is an unprovable statement. But other countries had better outcomes. Perhaps the government’s actions resulted in more deaths than otherwise. Maybe only 900k would have died instead of 1.1M if government hadn’t restricted information flow.

This comparison is verging on hyperbole. I can't recall any soda ad that implied any health claims or encouraged drinking in excess. There's nothing unhealthy about sugar in moderation. What danger that exists is only expressed after years of heavy abuse. Even then, we have treatments for diabetes and heart disease. Unhealthy diets are not communicable diseases! Soda isn't forcing doctors to use garbage bags as PPE or fashion ventilators out of surplus hardware. Soda isn't cutting down young athletes after a single exposure. If there is to be any censorship or just fact-checking alongside misinformation, it's clear which occasion deserves it.

I am not claiming that Covid and sugar are the same. They are different.

But sugar is bad for you. Ads for sugar aren’t intended to convince people to drink it in moderation. Just like ads for cigarettes aren’t intended to make people smoke one per day.

My point is that if we wanted to limit misinformation that causes harm, limiting ads for coke that result in sugar consumption that contributes to diabetes deaths. Lots and lots. Hopefully Covid won’t keep causing hundreds of thousands of deaths per year (1.1M so far in 3.5 years) but diabetes is just getting worse.

Obviously government can do both and doesn’t have to choose. But it seems like limiting free speech for a minor benefit isn’t worth it when there’s a much clearer line to take. Preventing drug advertising is pretty simple and was already illegal until 1998.

That is not true. Face masks at the start of the pandemic we're Forbidden and only many months later became mandatory. The amount of misinformation that came from official sources is ridiculous.

It was so funny to suddenly see the Surgeon General in the USA saying that face masks and coverings are useless, to creating a YouTube video showing how to make one yourself using a rubber band...

https://youtu.be/PI1GxNjAjlw?feature=shared

We know Today that face masks are useless, because it's not the first time we have a large scale virus. Sars and Mers a decade ago gave valuable information which official sources ignored.

One of many sources:

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

Maybe you’re “completely lost” because you believed false information early on and cling to it. You are willfully pretending as though Covid-19 was anything more than a particularly contagious flu. Only 7 million died to Covid-19, compared to the 50-100 million of the 1918 Spanish Flu, a number exacerbated by government payouts for false reporting and willfully infecting those who are at-risk for all respiratory diseases.

As someone who had knowledge of Covid-19 before the mainstream AND got sick from it before it was widely reported, (they were still denying it was in the US at this time), I knew that it wasn’t anything major for the majority of the population. Yet the government and corporations used this as an excuse to force us inside for no logical reason. Masks assist the spread, yet we were told the opposite[0]. Vaccines were first said to “prevent”[1], and then they moved the wording to being “less likely to spread”[2]. Social distancing only prolonged the pandemic and put more at risk, as the only way to reasonably mitigate a non-deadly and contagious disease for which we have no real vaccine against is to create herd immunity, just like we do with the flu every single year. Yet the government used social media to continue to spread the misinformation that you crave, creating propaganda and draconian rules in order to worsen the long-term impacts.

[0] - https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfL2sespLnY

[2] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/covid-19-vaccination-...

A lot of countries did not have much restrictions and seemed to get through without a catastrophic population decline. Are there any countries that saw more than 10% of their country perish? Keeping in mind that the policies included human rights violations such as the right to travel, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to speech.

Not that it happened but the fact that you consider up to 10% population loss acceptable is truly astounding.

Human rights are really important to me, and it was quite shocking to see what are supposed to be inalienable rights violated for something that’s much less than catastrophic.

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