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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#31

Post by tayo42 »

bmarquez wrote: post #18
tayo42 wrote: post #14

There's no debate happening on Twitter. It's just for people to make a scene and try to get clout. Why are these random people not participating in actual research?or writers for real publications? Instead they're posting hot take one liners with no repercussion if they are incorrect. It's misleading to make it appear like there are two equal sides like this thing is trying to make it look like.

> Why are these random people not participating in actual research?or writers for real publications? The author of the article wrote for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired. Are those not real publications?

I mean the people on Twitter the article is writing about

> KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker

> Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician,

This article is just trying to get people outraged by making it an us vs them trying to make this look like it wasn't a fringe view at the time.

> American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.

Political outrage porn pretending random people are a persecuted

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#32

Post by tootie »

sfusato wrote: post #3

Some seem to be okay with the government and intelligence agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to make sure we only get to learn and discuss corporate sponsored healthcare advice now.

Who was enforcing corporate healthcare? You just made that part up. And also, Twitter is a corporation itself. Government is supposed to regulate. They exchanged information. They were told when laws were being broken. Deleting content was entirely Twitter's discretion. And they did what they deemed most beneficial to their operations and their shareholders.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#33

Post by dannyw »

stevebmark wrote: post #22

I don't really care about a private company making reasonable decisions and learning about their internal debate process. Up until Musk, I was impressed to see Twitter grow a backbone and not fall to the cowardly cries of "free speech." What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive g…

There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine.

Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities.

This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#34

Post by a_bonobo »

RyanShook wrote: post #20

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think the longest lasting legacy of covid will be the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

I think Covid (and all the anti-vax grift around it) was the last straw, exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system.

It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:

>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.

Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#35

Post by foota »

RyanShook wrote: post #20

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think the longest lasting legacy of covid will be the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

Weird take imo, if anything I think trust in big pharmacy among the mainstream has increased, although maybe the fringe moved a bit more, most people still got vaccinated etc.,

Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#37

Post by RockyMcNuts »

refurb wrote: post #7

Great article to read if you want to know how the "sausage was made" at Twitter. I think most people knew it was an absolute dumpster fire, but it's even worse than that. As expected, the folks doing the policing of "disinformation" were entirely unqualified for the role (I love the banning of the Harvard School of Medicine epidemiologist who said "vaccines are for people at risk" - apparently the folks at Twitter kn…

it's a hard tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. it's like being a soccer referee or a judge, you can be almost perfect but the screwups are all anyone remembers. short of putting everyone away for life, some convict is going to get out and do something, and some tabloid is going to question why this person was on the street. You do the best you can subject to the Constitution, the laws, and common sense.

there is so much absolute garbage bad faith BS on social media that is poison to a civilized society and a democracy, that there is no choice but to do the best we can to try to spread less of it. you don't get to throw up your hands and say, there is no perfect arbiter of truth and decency so let's say, anything goes. of course that's what all the worst burn-it-down extremists would like to see.

A lot of US institutions were exposed as unfit for purpose by the pandemic and we have to do better. But I'm not sure Twitter would be near the top of the list.

And somehow, the new regime seems able to make everything worse.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#38

Post by CharlesW »

jklm wrote: post #23

Relevant context - this was written by a member of the team who released the Twitter files, alongside Matt Tabibi.

Also, readers should know that The Free Press is Bari Weiss¹. Vanity Fair described her as "a provocateur", which is the kindest-possible interpretation of her editorial philosophy.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#40

Post by avs733 »

jakear wrote: post #30
CharlesW wrote: post #17

> "Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines." Obviously, Twitter should not have followed CDC guidelines. They should have created their own healthcare group in charge of evaluating which CDC guidelines coming out of the Trump and Biden administrations were correct and which were not, based on blue-check user surveys.

Downvoted because it completely misses the point, which is that a private company should not be told by the government to restrict speech, even if ( especially if) that speech is in conflict with the "official policy" the government has decreed. > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the ri…

Shouldn’t it be up to the company? Congress made no law, no on forced Twitter from what I’m reading, they made a choice. That is their right.

Demanding that people hold an antagonistic or untrusting view of government speech is no different than any other sort of speech code demand.

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