Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0]
June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1]
0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac...
Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
Yeah, that was banished to the dark corners of Reddit until Jon Stewart said the obvious, and he was considered too big to censor.
I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc
A broken clock says the right time twice a day, that doesn’t mean much.
ps: I don’t support the bans but you argument seems flawed to me.
Yes.
> If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?
Obviously not. Like I pointed out to the other commenter, if you were to read the comment of mine you replied to, I have a whole paragraph discussing that. Not sure why you're asking again.
Like, we're getting pretty nuanced here pretty fast, it would be nice to discuss this against an actual example of how this was enforced rather than being upset about a hypothetical situation where we have no idea how it was enforced.
1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.
2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.
I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.
A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.
So in response.
It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.
People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
I disagree on numerous levels with this position, not just on ethical grounds, but also on empirical grounds. People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that.
> People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
According to whom? The stated policy makes no such distinction, it says anyone who contradicts WHO positions ought to be censored. There is no nuance, and how exactly is YouTube going to judge who belongs in each category? If they could reliably judge who was bullshitting, they wouldn't need the WHO policy to begin with. The policy is a "cover my ass" blanket so they don't have to deal with the nuance.
I mean how can you censor the WHO?
> WHO initially got wrong
But they don't got something wrong, they, as you put it, were "bullshitting", and it was obvious to any person with a three-digit IQ
Eh, ya kind of, but it seems more like the distinction between parallel and concurrent in this case. She doesn't appear to be wrong in that instance while at the same time the models might have indicated otherwise, being an apparent contradiction and apparently both true within the real scope of what could be said about it at that time.
FYI Taiwan is East Asia, not Southeast Asia. Perhaps you were thinking of Thailand.
Whether they did or not is almost irrelevant: information doesn't reach humans instantaneously, it takes time to propagate through channels with varying latency, it gets amplified/muted depending on media bias, people generally have things going on in life other than staying glued to new sources, etc.
If you take a cross sample you're guaranteed to observe contradictory "parallel" information even if the source is serially consistent.
It's 2020 and suddenly we need research about how well masks work, if at all and what is their exact benefit.
If you posted to YouTube that it is very rare for asymptomatics to spread the disease, would you be banned? What if you posted it on the 9th in the hours between checking their latest guidance and their guidance changing? What if you posted it on the 8th but failed to remove it by the 10th?
What if you disagreed with their guidance they gave on the 8th and posted something explaining your stance? Would you still get banned if your heresy went unnoticed by YouTube's censors until the 10th at which time it now aligns with WHO's new position? Banned not for spreading misinformation, but for daring to question the secular high priests?
It was a novel time and things were changing daily. Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die. I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
Quite likely the WHO directly or by proxy with members who are also part of bureaucracy and governments in member states.
There is no question the WHO loves censorship and take an authoritarian approach to their "authority".
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-world-health-organizatio...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/13/who-drops-cens...
If corporations start adopting policies that censor anything contradicting WHO, there would be a larger onus on a claim that they were not involved in that censorship action, in my opinion.
If it wasn't them and it was all Google's idea to censor this without any influence from governments or these organizations, which is quite laughable to think but let's entertain the idea -- the WHO still should not have responded as it did with these knee jerk reactions, and also it should have been up to Google to ensure the did not use as their "source of truth" an organization that behaved in that way.
> It was a novel time
It wasn't really that novel since there have been centuries to study pandemics and transmissible diseases of all kinds, and there have even been many others of slightly less scale happen.
> and things were changing daily.
Things always change daily. Covid was not particularly "fast moving" at the time. It's not like new data was coming in that suddenly changed things day to day. It just progressed over the course of months and years. It appeared to be wild and fast moving and ever changing mainly because of the headless-chicken response from organizations like this.
> Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die.
People were very scared because of the fear campaign, and the imbecilic and contradictory responses from these organizations.
Not that it was nothing to be afraid of, but people should have calmly been given data and advice and that's it. Automobiles, heart attacks, and cancer kill lots of people too, and should be taken very seriously and measures taken to reduce risk but even so it would be stupid to start screaming about them and cause panic.
> I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
It's not having data that is the problem, it is jumping the gun with analysis and findings and recommendations based on that data, then having to retract it immediately and say the opposite.
We actually has the emails the Biden administration sent to Youtube, here is a quote they sent:
"we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House"
There are hundreds of such emails detailed in this report if you want to read what they sent to the different tech companies to make them so scared that they banned anything related to Covid: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/weaponizati...
They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)
Not they believed it wasn't airborne.
Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.
That it was fact.
In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.
To the people zealously downvoting all of these replies: defend yourselves. What about this is not worthy of conversation?
I'm not saying that I support lab leak. The observation is that anyone that discussed the lab leak hypothesis on social media had content removed and potentially were banned. I am fundamentally against that.
If the observation more generally is that sentiments should be censored that can risk peoples lives by influencing the decisions they make, then let me ask you this:
Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated.
On the other hand, if he were, then whoever censored him might have just as easily become the target of some other crazy, because that appears to be the world we live in now. Something's gotta change. This whole "us vs them" situation is just agitating the most extreme folks right over the edge of sanity into "Crazy Town". Wish we could get back to bein' that whole "One Nation Under God" "Great Melting Pot" "United States" they used to blather on about in grade-school back in the day, but that ship appears to have done sailed and then promptly sunk to the bottom... :(
It was not a bold claim at the time. Not only was there no evidence that it was the wet market at the time, the joint probability of a bat coronavirus outbreak where there were few bat caves but where they were doing research on bat coronaviruses is pretty damning. Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.
I thought it wasn't so much an error as a conflict of interest.
A novel coronavirus outbreak happens at the exact location as a lab performing gain of function research on coronaviruses... but yeah, suggesting a lab leak is outlandish, offensive even, and you should be censored for even mentioning that as a possibility. Got it.
This line of thinking didn't make sense then and still doesn't make sense now.
Plenty of people were able to talk about lab leak conspiracies. That is why we are still debating it today.
I doubt it.
The same country with 1 billion people and 6-8 covid cases per day. Sure.
To be honest I don't even understand why this is a topic anymore. Conspiracy or not, it's plausible that they screwed up. Why are people nitpicking, I don't get it.
Because WHO worked with CPC to bury evidence and give clean chit to wuhan lab. There was some pressure building up then for international teams to visit wuhan lab and examine data transparently. But, with thorough ban of lab leak theory, WHO visited china and gave clean chit without even visiting wuhan lab or having access to lab records. The only place that could prove this definitively buried all records.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...
Even Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/5/24/22451233/coron...
(..February 2023..) The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of 17 U.S. laboratories, concluded with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose from a laboratory incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it favored the laboratory theory with “moderate” confidence. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from natural zoonotic spillover, while two remain undecided.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
WHO says that "While most available and accessible published scientific evidence supports hypothesis #1, zoonotic transmission from animals, possibly from bats or an intermediate host to humans, SAGO is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population."
However "Without information to fully assess the nature of the work on coronaviruses in Wuhan laboratories, nor information about the conditions under which this work was done, it is not possible for SAGO to assess whether the first human infection(s) may have resulted due to a research related event or breach in laboratory biosafety."
https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...
WHO paraphrased: We have no data at all about the Wuhan Laboratory so we can not make a conclusion on that hypothesis. Since we have data relating to natural transmission from animals we can say that situation was possible.
Eventually I started seeing some serious discussion about how it might have been accidentally created through gain of function research.
If it was a lab leak, by far the most likely explanation is that someone pricked themselves or caught a whiff of something.
A friend of mine who lived in China for a while and is familiar with the hustle culture there had his own hypothesis. Some low level techs who were being given these bats and other lab animals to euthanize and incinerate were like “wait… we could get some money for these over at the wet market!”
No, that was just the straw man circulated in your echo chamber to dismiss discussion. To be clear, there were absolutely people who believed that, but the decision to elevate the nonsense over the serious discussion is how partisan echo chambers work.
excuse me I'm sorry what?
Placing absolute trust in these organizations and restricting freedom of speech based on that is a very bootlicking, anti-freedom stance
If we think tylenol might cause autism why doesn't he run/fund a nice clean and large randomized controlled trial? Instead he spreads conjecture based on papers with extremely weak evidence.
It turns out that masks ARE largely ineffective at preventing CoViD infection. It's amazing how many studies have come up with vastly different results.
https://egc.yale.edu/research/largest-study-masks-and-covid-...
(Before you tell me that the story I cited above says the opposite, look at the effectiveness percentages they claim for each case.)
There's also this: https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1970565993169588579
There was scientific basis for N95 masks and similar masks. If you are talking about cloth and paper masks, I mostly agree. Even then there were tests done with using even those surgical masks with 3d printed frames. I remember this as one example of people following this line of thinking.
https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/07/26/surgical-ma...
As for dehumanization, I used to live in Tokyo and spending years riding the train. I think blaming masks for dehumanization when we have entire systems ragebaiting us on a daily basis is like blaming the LED light for your electric bill.
Social Distancing having "no scientific backing" is very difficult to respond to. Do you mean in terms of long term reduction of spread, or as a temporary measure to prevent overwhelming the hospitals (which is what the concern was at the time)?
I do agree that it was fundamentally dishonest to block people from going to church and then telling other people it was OK to protest (because somehow these protests were "socially distanced" and outdoors). They could have applied the same logic to Church groups and helped them find places to congregate, but it was clearly a case of having sympathy for the in-group vs the out-group.
This is false. Even quick search shows multiple papers from pre-covid times that show masks being effective [0][1]. There are many more studies post-covid that show that N95/FFP2/FFP3 masks actually work if you wear them correctly (most people don't know how to do this). Educate yourself before sharing lies.
Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.
> Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research
"of various construction" is... not very specific.
If you just try to cover your face with a piece of cloth it won't work well. But if you'll use a good mask (N95/FFP2/FFP3), with proper fit [0] then you can decrease the chance of being infected (see e.g. [1])
[0] https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protectio...
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-...
But who watches the watchmen?
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.
I spent several hours on one of these only to discover the author of the post had found a subtle way to misrepresent the findings and had done things to the graph to skew it further. You cannot expect a kid (let alone most adults) to come to the same conclusion through lessons on critical thinking.
I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
This is extremely difficult. Many of the people who thrive on disinformation are drawn to it because they are contrarian. They distrust anything from the establishment and automatically trust anything that appears anti-establishment. If you tell them not to trust certain sources that’s actually a cue to them to explore those sources more and assume they’re holding some valuable information that “they” don’t want you to know.
The dynamics of this are very strange. A cluster of younger guys I know can list a dozen different times medical guidance was wrong in history from memory (Thalidomide, etc), but when you fact check Joe Rogan they laugh at you because he’s a comedian so you can’t expect him to be right about everything. “Do your own research” is the key phrase, which is a dog whistle to mean find some info to discount the professionals but then take sources like Joe Rogan and his guests at face value because they’re not the establishment.
You just described a perfectly normal "Civics & Current Events" class in early grade-school back when / where I grew up. We were also taught how to "follow the facts back to the actual sources" and other such proper research skills. This was way back when you had to go to an actual library and look up archived newspapers on microfiche, and encyclopedias were large collections of paper books. Y'know... When dinosaurs still roamed the streets... ;)