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Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

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Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#571
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are humans not part of nature? What evidence do we have that nature is ever at any time "in balance?" This is a common trope that is deeply rooted in the western mind. Perhaps it is connected to old ideas like geocentrism. Here is another way of looking at things: the world is constantly changing. Do I advocate pooping on a crowded beach? No. Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No. It…

>Are humans not part of nature? No. Humans are supranatural when it comes to our influence on the planet. While this power is not absolute, it's significant enough to make humans an edge case in nature. >Is the ocassional defacation of a back country backpacker a problem? No. In the example given, it's not occasional, but occurs a significant minority of the time that nature can't cope with the volume of human feces.

So plants are supranatural then too? Their influence far exceeds ours.

Humans are part of nature. Nature is never in balance. Change is the only constant. As pre-Socratic Heralcitus said you "never step in the same river twice."

If humans exceed the carrying capacity of their ecosystem, the system will reduce the number of humans.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attacking a strawman here. Nothing that was marked as misinformation was about the economic effects of lockdowns. If those effects concern you, you should be concerned with vaccine misinformation prolonging lockdowns, whether those lockdowns are government-enforced or due to individuals concerned about risk.

>If you'd asked people two years ago what they thought about the idea of locking the whole country down indefinitely for a virus with a 99% survival rate (and over 99.9% for people under 50), the vast majority would have said it's a crazy idea. >Calling getting vaccines and wearing masks indoors "locking the whole country down indefinitely" is definitely hyperbolic. You can say that not everything is still locked dow…

Once again, don't pretend that lockdowns is what the argument is about. That is a straw man. It is about whether companies should be obligated to spread misinformation about vaccines and diseases without getting to mark that as misinformation — they aren't. It is about whether that "infantilization" of the users of the platform is new — it isn't.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#573
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services. I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recogni…

Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions. No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow…

The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviously Facebook isn't going to do anything that puts advertising revenue at risk.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#574
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions. No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow…

The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviou…

That's a rather fundamental flaw in their whole business model, isn't it? Advertisers who don't want their ads appearing next to user generated content, on a social network, have missed something rather important.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#575
Report them it's an AI goof. It's the only way they really have. They can't hire enough people to possibly go through all the crap that the antivaxx contingencies pump out so they have to depend on trainable AI. I'm facebook daily and I see that they aren't filtering enough junk that is nothing less than made up lies stuck into meme form. They don't even try to make it look fake now that they know the uninformed and ignorant of the world will sop up everything they get fed as if it were scientific fact.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not illegal to post shock videos. It’s protected by the first amendment. The same is true of porn, for the most part (while “you know it when you see it” is a suggested standard for obscenity the concept differs greatly from one observer to another — see what answers you get from Los Angeles and Karachi about what’s manifestly obscene and I bet the answers are different). I still don’t think most people want to…

Are you really attempting to justify censorship to keep porn off of the site? We’ve had algorithms for years now that can detect nudity. It’s a simple filter that can be added that allows the user to select if they want to see it or not. Much like DDG and Google image search.

There's a difference between nudity and porn. Facebook banned the famous "Napalm Girl" photo, and then later un-banned it. Rules appear to be arbitrary and constantly changing.

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/49...

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody likes to be told what to do. Maybe if those signs where less imperative and more explanatory. Some would care.

So "Stop" signs should say "Stop because there might be another car coming from another direction and you'll be able to avoid it if you stop and see it coming". I'm not sure that type of explanatory thing would work with most signs. Instead, we need: 1) people we trust to determine what the signs should say so that we are willing to listen to the signs. 2) Easy access to more details explanations of why/what the sign…

I'm not saying there's an perfect answer for this. But signs that don't take basics of human psychology into account are flawed by design.

1) The lawmakers problem. People in positions of power tend do be a mix of corrupt, biased and stupid. I'm afraid there's no solution to that either.

But people can be:

- educated about the importance of some things; - involved in the decision-making process.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. Human lives are valuable. Refusal to get vaccinated against things like measles, polio, smallpox, or COVID-19 cause a lot of unnecessary deaths, which destroys a lot of valuable things. Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (…

The thing that really hammers home that there's something to study here is that we basically eliminated polio through vaccination campaigns, and we did this in my lifetime. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988 (one year after I was launched), and since then the number of annual cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful. 2% of the people that contracted polio suffered paralysis, wh…

Vaccine hesitancy is largely irrational, however polio and COVID-19 are hardly comparable. Polio has a 2 - 5% infection fatality rate for children and young adults, whereas the COVID-19 IFR for the same age group is close to 0. We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude difference in relative risk.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not illegal to post shock videos. It’s protected by the first amendment. The same is true of porn, for the most part (while “you know it when you see it” is a suggested standard for obscenity the concept differs greatly from one observer to another — see what answers you get from Los Angeles and Karachi about what’s manifestly obscene and I bet the answers are different). I still don’t think most people want to…

Are you really attempting to justify censorship to keep porn off of the site? We’ve had algorithms for years now that can detect nudity. It’s a simple filter that can be added that allows the user to select if they want to see it or not. Much like DDG and Google image search.

The point of this example is to poke holes in what appears to be an ironclad, simple, and consistent principle by pointing out that few advocates for it actually wish for what it implies.

Re: Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”

#580
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviou…

That's a rather fundamental flaw in their whole business model, isn't it? Advertisers who don't want their ads appearing next to user generated content, on a social network, have missed something rather important.

It's obviously not a flaw. Facebook is highly profitable. The vast majority of user generated content is inoffensive. We're just discussing a small minority of edge cases.
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