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Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

bmj.com

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Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#541

Post by stjohnswarts »

clusterfish wrote: post #438
ninkendo wrote: post #32

It seems to me that if you have a whistleblower account of some poor research practices for a vaccine trial, spreading it around Facebook to be commented on by random people who have no idea how to interpret it, probably isn't the best place for it. I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... b…

You don't give a shit because you're happy to see Facebook silence opinions you don't want to hear. What, you think a tech monopoly will always be on your side? Or that someone will care when news that YOU care about will be censored / defeated / fake fact checked? You're just a propaganda cog with such an attitude, no better than dumb antivaxers who don't care about facts either.

I'm fine with facebook doing what they want on their platform including hiring "fact checkers" if it cuts down on the garbage like covid and global warming deniers. If they don't like my posts and "cancel" me well then I'll just quit using the platform. Social media is not really important in my life, I would rather individuals and companies be able to do what they want with their "lives" without the government regulating everything or picking winners.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#542

Post by stjohnswarts »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #59
ninkendo wrote: post #32

It seems to me that if you have a whistleblower account of some poor research practices for a vaccine trial, spreading it around Facebook to be commented on by random people who have no idea how to interpret it, probably isn't the best place for it. I know that means publications like these which may have something important to add to the vaccine conversation, won't be able to have millions of "likes and shares"... b…

My concern is that I don't think that is the endgame. I think the endgame is a world where Facebook still seems to have a variety of news information, but it's heavily censored under the hood, and your parents/grandparents think you're talking nonsense if you bring up one of the topics Facebook fact checks don't allow.

I would like to hear about facebook cancelling out a major news source or even medical journal for forever for anything short of lying through their teeth. Do you have any? I will be happy to research it, but I have not seen anything of the sort. Banning Trump was a godsend in my opinion.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#543

Post by stjohnswarts »

j_m_b wrote: post #23

> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.

This is a one off mistake isn't it? I'd rather 1 good article get cancelled by accident if it mean 100-1000 disinformation memes or troll accounts get cancelled.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#544

Post by stjohnswarts »

dionian wrote: post #89
teachrdan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd normally agree with you. But in the case of Covid, some political actors are launching coordinated efforts to deliberately misinform millions of Americans in regards to a virus that has, so far, killed over 800,000 people here. How do we deal with this challenge without censoring some information that ought not be censored?

How do we know the misinformation from the authorities is not similarly a problem? CDC and FDA flip flopped so many times over the last few years. WHO and CDC were telling us not to worry about pandemics, and instead worry about "stigma" instead as late as March 2020. https://twitter.com/DrTedros/status/1229137314074505216?s=20 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1224734993966096387?s=20 Censorship is not the answer. It a…

CDC didn't flip flop. They used the information they had on hand. If you don't like it then don't listen to it but they weren't "wrong" given the information they had at the time. We haven't actually ever been through this sort of thing in over 100 years. I trust them more than Fox, Trump, and Breitbart news. The secret is they are willing to change their interpretation rather than stick to their guns when the evidence says otherwise; unlike right wing media who continue to say it's just a bad flu and that we should just get over 800,000 dead people and quit being "wimps".

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#545

Post by PixyMisa »

CSSer wrote: post #530
spaniard89277 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know in your country, but in Spain most fact-checkers have very evident ties with two political parties, and they handle info in an agenda-setting style. They even have very personal links to politicians. Of course they really polish their communication and websites, and they know how to sound scientific-y throwing in some graphs and stuff. The problem is not only that, but that the same people who works in t…

> most of them are journalists, AKA experts in nothing that pretend to become experts with a few calls and some google-fu. Isn’t this a bit much? This seems very baited and/or flame-war inducing. It’s denigrating towards an entire profession/discipline. I’d almost go so far as to say that this misunderstanding about journalism is at the root of a lot of problems in modern media for both practicing journalists (which…

> Isn’t this a bit much?

Given the state of American journalism, it is if anything overly kind.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#546

Post by stjohnswarts »

linuxhansl wrote: post #322

Let's please not throw out the baby with the bathwater and dismiss all fact checking as political, biases, or agenda-driven. Not agreeing on basic facts in the prime problem in our current political discourse. Disagreement is usually a good problem to have and leads to testing the complete problem space. What we are seeing now, though, is the absence of the problem space exploration. Instead any discussion is just di…

I want statistics rather than "oh no they were wrongs once so let's just stop the entire effort" which is precisely what a lot of HN people are saying.

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#547

Post by srcreigh »

quadrangle wrote: post #532
hcrean wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are: The provable lack of regulatory oversight and demonstration of the existence of poor practices at the company. The argument that just because one of a company's trials are unsound doesn't mean that the rest aren't is not a good one, when the whole objective is to provide assurance in proving the safety of a product.

I get that it's hard to find the best balance in a headline let alone in a summary article. Yes, evidence of a problem in a portion of a trial is indeed evidence of problems in the trial. I can see room for misunderstanding no matter what. Emphasize the portion of sites where the problem was observed and it wrongly can be inferred that the other sites are fine even if they have no evidence either way. Emphasize the p…

Your argument is basically that this article may be largely speculation, assuming that no information was withheld (even though the article contradicts itself in its own communication about FDA review of the trial)... and that this speculation is the same as minimal conclusions based on available evidence.

I disagree. One bad study doesn't mean all scientific conclusions are bad. One bad study doesn't mean Pfizer's trials are bad. Ignorance doesn't prove anything...

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#548

Post by mitigating »

philovivero wrote: post #464
dekhn wrote: post #3

Both Facebook (now Meta) and Youtube bungled their fact checking by disabling posts and videos that were counter to some narrative, but not factually incorrect. That places them in a bad position, and they need to be called out publicly, as no other mechanism so far has pushed them towards more accurate fact checking.

I note how your comment has been largely ignored by... the massive numbers of Facebook and Google employees reading this site. If there was an ounce of integrity in Tech these days, this would have been called out, front-and-centre, and remedies to it would have been enacted. Instead, here we are almost two years later, and we're pretending that never happened. In some cases it's even being memory-holed. I predict wi…

". You cannot trust mainstream newspapers. " Which newspapers can you trust?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#549

Post by mitigating »

j_m_b wrote: post #23

> We are aware that The BMJ is not the only high quality information provider to have been affected by the incompetence of Meta’s fact checking regime. It is not an acceptable tradeoff that some high quality information is censored in order that bad information is policed.

How would it be possible for a system like that to be accurate all the time?

Re: Open letter from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg

#550

Post by smsm42 »

It is hilarious to me that some random people with no relevant credentials to speak of declare an article in a professional journal a "hoax", get their word taken as "fact" by Facebook and wide-ranging censorship decisions performed on the basis of that, and they also get paid handsomely for that (AFAIK selling services to Facebook and alikes is their whole business model). To make it even more hilarious, looks like one of the founder worked for CNN before as entertainment reporter - and we know entertainment reporting is the most scientific and fact-based of all reporting venues, and CNN is the most hoax-free of all networks!

By this point, anybody who relies on Facebook and their "fact checkers" as a source of relevant information on any topic is a doofus.

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