https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
So OPs argument that it’s both parties doing it falls flat on its face.
Both science and democracy require active conversation that permits dissenting viewpoints and challenges to the accepted wisdom. Once we have an organization deciding what "the truth" is, we're doomed to stagnation and extremely vulnerable to organizational capture by self-motivated people.
In other words, once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted by people with anti-social intents.
Not by the government. This was by companies that wanted their customers not to die, so they could make money.
> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies
If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated? Or is there possible an implied message there?
A mafioso will never tell you straight-up that they're threatening and extorting you. But if you look between the lines even a little bit you can discern the message.
(Sometimes the person delivering that message isn't even aware of the threat they're sending; afaik it's entirely possible that Lina Khan was completely genuine with her push.)
> and none were levied.
Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked', didn't they. Meta alone removed or suppressed well over a hundred million posts.
None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest. You're grasping at straws.
> Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked
Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
> You're grasping at straws.
Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.
There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
> Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not, which makes it difficult for you to advance your nonsensical "both sides" narrative.
You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
> You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not
You certainly did not. You showed that you don't even know what happened, couldn't be bothered looking into it, and yet are happy to pronounce 'the truth' as if it didn't contradict well known and documented reality.
That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
I do know that, and what's more, I assert that you know that too. Hence, why you wrote "mostly" and why you have so far been unable to show any punishment for the "some" who didn't "cave" to the suggestions given without any threat of punishment.
The Twitter files also did not show any threat of punishment. The letters of regret came from Zuckerberg, who, as we have already seen, did not claim any punishment was threatened or meted when he did not agree with some claimed recommendations.
> That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
Pot calling the silverware black.
Indeed, my original post ("Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views") was simply about censorship being bad no matter which political party does it. I hate that the current administration is doing it. I hated it when the prior administration did it. If we can't acknowledge that both parties did it, then when the parties switch again, there will still be secret soft censorship happening. It's a moral hazard to reflexively discount when a side I may agree with does something wrong.
It's getting increasingly harder to point out when both parties are wrong without people assuming it's a back-handed defense of the other party.
Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.
What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."
As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".
I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!
https://undark.org/2024/01/08/covid-misinformation-censorshi...
How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate
It turns out that when you have millions of doctors (or scientists) in the world, at least some of them are going to say things that go against scientific consensus. This does not mean they're correct.
Here are 2 more examples of people saying things:
> [Kulldorff's] declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Francis S. Collins, NIH director, called him a "fringe epidemiologist". [0]
The lesson here is, if you're cherry picking individuals, rather than going with peer-reviewed scientific consensus, you're liable to be blown way off-course at some point. Personality cults are bad no matter who it is.