621–630 of 736 posts
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That assumes a binary situation, but it can be a sliding scale. A system that prevents only Holocaust denial and flat earth theories is unlikely to ban anything that is actually true.
The current situation was justified with examples like yours. A year ago, most people in favor of banning misinformation would have classed the lab leak hypothesis in the same obviously-false bucket with your examples.
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The problem is that "evidence" is pretty easy to find. Even the wildest conspiracy theories has pages and pages of links to their evidence. Who should evaluate the evidence for its credibility?
I don’t have an answer to that but it most certainly should NOT be New York Times, Business Insider, WAPO, FactCheckXYZ, etc style publications.
Don't do this. It's hand-waving and people can read all kinds of things into it.
Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments. They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals. We can provincially argue about who c…
Social media companies just want to make money. It's people who want social media companies to act like government. Originally, Facebook was pro free speech because in a vacuum that's what would make the most money. Facebook only started censoring when people started complaining about it.
Being a government is definitely the best and easiest way to make money.
That same Marc Lipsitch was one of the scientists that signed a letter in May that asked for a deeper and objective investigation about the origins of Covid-19: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
He explained his motivation for the letter in an interview: https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2021/05/16/scientists-inve... In this interview he also expressed his regret that the discussion about the COVID origin had become so polarized. The man was right in 2017 but sadly most people didn't hear him ..
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How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.
https://twitter.com/sentomcotton/status/1229202139232292866 He speculated that it could have been a bioweapon that was accidentally or deliberately released. You and I can speculate on twitter but a US senator should keep his trap shut on social media.
I mean, he lists four options, and identifies natural release as the most likely and intentional release as very unlikely. And it's expressed clearly, in full sentences.
By the standards of republican politicians on twitter, that's actually pretty good.
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Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own. I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of…
I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is u…
Call me cynical...but... What would any government do about it if it was proven to be a lab leak? They could declare it an accident (probably this would be true) and that would be the end of the story. No country would dare to impose sanctions or engage beyond diplomacy. I do not think that the Chinese governments reaction or handling of the case is suspect, they likely want to shut down potential fake news. To label…
Exactly what was done when Chernobyl was proven to be caused by humans: show the world how reckless and callous the USSR's government really was.
Chernobyl was a huge factor in the eventual collapse of the soviet government. They played a very risky game and it had existential consequences for the power structure that caused it.
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I've had COVID, and this is why I will not get vaccinated, despite CDC recommendations. It's very creepy how they've buried treatments and promoted experimental vaccines.
Why won’t you get a vaccine?
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A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low. https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
If you'll look carefully, you'll see that's a non peer-reviewed opinion piece. That's a prime example of disinformation, and indeed the most reputable journals unfortunately play a role in it. Just to rebut the first thing random thing I saw: "An important controversial point to consider in any rationale is the 5 µM required concentration to reach the anti-SARS-CoV-2 action of ivermectin observed in vitro,17 which is…
I'm going to trust an opinion in the BMJ over:
> There are over 50 studies showing that Ivermectin is effective
There have been a vast number of junk studies produced during the pandemic and rolling out 50 of them means very little. How many of them are pre-registered RCTs? How many of them are in low-quality journals?
The BMJ article actually refers to that https://c19ivermectin.com/ site:
"Different websites (such as https://ivmmeta.com/, https://c19ivermectin.com/, https://tratamientotemprano.org/estudios-ivermectina/, among others) have conducted meta-analyses with ivermectin studies, showing unpublished colourful forest plots which rapidly gained public acknowledgement and were disseminated via social media, without following any methodological or report guidelines. These websites do not include protocol registration with methods, search strategies, inclusion criteria, quality assessment of the included studies nor the certainty of the evidence of the pooled estimates. Prospective registration of systematic reviews with or without meta-analysis protocols is a key feature for providing transparency in the review process and ensuring protection against reporting biases, by revealing differences between the methods or outcomes reported in the published review and those planned in the registered protocol."
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Insane How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?
I mean if a benign intervention doesn't actually work and it causes people to avoid a real intervention that is problematic. There's definitely plenty of alternative medicine misinformation out there that makes similar arguments about safety and history. That said, it is wrong for YouTube to be removing these videos IMO. First of all, who at YouTube reviewed the material? Do they actually have the expertise necessary…
How about lawsuits? People who followed advice on YouTube (or their relatives) could sue YouTube. YouTube already has the technical means to remove video's (e.g. porn), so they will have to defend why they did not do that in this case. There have been a large number of people in the U.S. that died or were infected, so the number of potential litigants is also large.