Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some Covid-19 content
apnews.com
apnews.com
In this case, the government was saying: “Hey we have no problem in general with you driving people insane, but in this particular topic, having a bunch of antivax lunatics ain’t helping with the pandemic.”
IMO the problem is not the content per se, it’s the massive psychological manipulation. It’s incompatible with a free, functioning democracy.
Yes. This is exactly what Elon is doing with X at the moment.
Also interesting that the AP article doesn't mention the hunter biden story censorhip that zuck mentions in the same letter.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41365868
Then it was *two* neighbors a day...
The hospital beds were filling up so fast, they were building tent hospitals in Central Park. So many bodies were piling up in morgues that there was serious talk about having mass burials.
It is very easy to armchair quarterback how this should have played out--5 years later, with the benefit of hindsight. Yes, lots of things could have been handled better. Yes, we should do postmortems to find out what could be done better next time.
But FFS, both the government and corporate leaders had to make decisions in real time--decisions they knew would have real consequences, and decisions they knew had the possibility of being wrong. They didn't have the luxury of perfection. It was a once-in-a-century pandemic, and they had to act in the face of partial information.
All things considered, they did a pretty good job.
While I was in NYC, my sister was living in a rural town, population of around 100. She was mystified why our governor was making us wash our hands and wear masks. Why, they weren't doing any of that in her town, and nobody died at all!! How could we just let our civil liberties be violated like that!!!
Friend, I'm only telling you what I saw with my own eyes. NYC was one of the first hit, because it one of the most connected cities with the rest of the world, and it was one of the hardest hit, because of the very high population density.
There was no one-size-fits-all policy--some policies were more apropos for rural places, some were more apropos for dense urban centers. But that doesn't mean that the policies apropos to a farmhouse in a 1,000-acre cornfield would have had better results in NYC.
But you're justifying the opposite, of applying policies perhaps suited for NYC for a brief period in early 2020 to elsewhere.
Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. (42% of US COVID19 deaths in 2020 occurred in old age homes!) b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is an example. (This article from April 2020 <https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...> was completely vindicated in retrospect.) Neither happened after the first few months.
And no, none of those field hospitals built in parking lots and stadiums everywhere—including the ones you mentioned in Central Park—was used. In Wales, for example, Millennium Stadium was converted into a temporary field hospital with 300 beds and capacity to expand to 2000 beds. It was such a big deal that a public contest was held to name it Dragon's Heart Hospital <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Heart_Hospital>. However, said hospital never had more than 46 patients at one time, and was closed in six weeks for lack of use! Similarly, USNS Comfort treated a total of 179 patients in NYC. USNS Mercy treated a total of 77 patients in LA.
Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.
EDIT: surprisingly aggressive downvoting on this, seems reasonable to make the point that a lot of owners of social media sites have billions of dollars in taxes riding on a Trump win if this policy happens.
say what? If that's the case, then we can expect many wealthy individuals with significant influence to speak out, such as Jeff Bezos with his ownership of The Washington Post.
What we should do is re-think the capital gains tax, especially when using securities in lieu of personal income. That's how the C-suite has been avoiding a lot of income tax, and it's not just people having $100M in assets.
Also, the top tax rate should be increased, especially for incomes above $10M.
Likewise, the FICA cap should be increased.
Those few tweaks put us in really good shape, without resorting to taxing unrealised gains.
I'm sure it's not the now proven cover-up of the lab leak hypothesis that was considered conspiracy theory that is proved to just simply be a conspiracy.
And then what I saw was media personalities intentionally fanning the flames (e.g. Rogan) because they understood creating cultural rift us-them war out of a nothingburger was a way to maximize engagement.
Ideally we'd all be so rational we would have no us-versus-them instincts at all, and could be completely objective and form independent opinions on every issue based on data. But it's very clear that culture has a bit of a mob-mentality, and it's an open question whether we'd be better off with more or less coordination/restriction on our communication.
I believe how Zuckerberg handled a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world was wrong. At some point in time, we have to admit to ourselves that misinformation, including misinformation masquerading as "satire", is deadly and we're going to have to come to terms whether spreading deadly misinformation is a constitutionally protected right.
That anyone cared if it was or wasn't, continues to surprise me.
Either way, the lab is in China and you can't do anything about it.
Either way, the virus came from China and you can't do anything about it.
Either way, China tried to suppress news initially and this allowed it to spread faster and sooner than it might otherwise have done.
Either way, wet markets were and remain a known breeding ground for novel zoonotic diseases that we'd like to not be like that, but we can't do anything about them because they're in China and we have no say in the matter.
Either way, the response to it has to be the same — it was out of control and killing people just the same, regardless of origin.
b) there's two ways of censoring info: 1) to ban the truth and 2) to bury it under a pile of distractions; IMO during in a medical emergency such as this, allowing people to distract from "this is a deadly pandemic" with "it really matters which of two things we have no control over caused this" is just as deadly as China banning reporting of the fact that people were getting ill.
"You can sort out which thing you frenemies did wrong later, right now you need to buck up and resist the disease itself", kinda thing.
The former is reasonable, the latter is not (assuming the theory is unproven either way at the time).
For the people saying that it is a protected right, then how come you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater when there isn't a fire?
I'm not trying to argue one side or the other - because I don't have a good answer. But it's not as one sided as some people make it out to be - free speech isn't totally free.
That's a terrible example, not only because the ruling where it's used was overturned, but it was also used to justify imprisoning anti-draft activists.
"it's worth examining what legitimate purpose giving due process to criminals serve, and how that is beneficial to society"
Nobody is for spreading misinformation. The trouble is determining what "misinformation" is, and who has the power to determine that.
I think a good place to start is treating the falsification of data in research studies like fraud, potentially with criminal penalties.
Another avenue is requiring social media businesses to make reasonable efforts to flag health misinformation. If Facebook et al are making billions in revenue off false information, they should have a responsibility to combat it, at the risk of penalties.
You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded public space as a prank nor can you yell "Bomb!" at an airport as a prank. We have determined that's NOT protected speech. Neither is slander nor libel.
You're going to have to work a little harder at convincing me why spreading misinformation that can kill people should be regarded as protected speech.
You're going to say Trust the Scientist, I will point you to the replicability crisis...
Maybe Zuckerberg should be an adult and recognize the power his platform has to misinform, and kill, people. So far, he appears to be content in keeping his head firmly planted up his posterior so long as he's making money. I define that as evil; others may disagree.