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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#221

Post by acdha »

fortran77 wrote: post #189
mhh__ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know. I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of i…

Our government, and the moderators at Twitter, lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types (i.e., people pushing zinc, or colloidal silver, or chiropractic as "cures" for covid). People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth m…

> People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.

Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it.

This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#222

Post by VagueMag »

mindslight wrote: post #202
idgaf4u wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This comment gets a lot up upvotes until it gets "flagged" and deleted This is because your comment is bog standard disinformation. It tickles the groupthink narrative about "lockdowns", even though "lockdowns" did not exist in the US beyond a few counties in California.

That's news to this Washington state resident, who couldn't eat indoors at restaurants or send my kids to in-person school through most of 2020.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#224

Post by jmeister »

hintymad wrote: post #133

I wonder why people believe that CDC must always be right, and therefore any doubt or challenge to CDC’s messages is misinformation that is worth banning. I thought every school in a modern society teaches student not to blindly trust the authority.

Related: there isn’t enough discussion on actual executive decision making. The experts are supposed to give their inputs, but the buck stops with the executives who are tasked with balancing various trade-offs(including the inherent uncertainty in faulty/noisy scientific models).

https://www.slowboring.com/p/fda-cost-benefit

There never is one single “right” decision, the balancing of trade-offs is inherently political.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier

The CDC is just one such expert. Then there are legal experts, economic experts, public opinion experts, foreign policy experts.. in the private sector a CEO(or wall st trader or tech PM) is expected to weigh all of these, decide, and live or die by the consequences of their decisions . Tough job, which is why they get paid so much.

An executive has the authority to completely override the experts after consulting an astrologer, tossing a coin, or washing his hands.

This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci is completely misguided.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#225

Post by idgaf4u »

mindslight wrote: post #202
idgaf4u wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This comment gets a lot up upvotes until it gets "flagged" and deleted This is because your comment is bog standard disinformation. It tickles the groupthink narrative about "lockdowns", even though "lockdowns" did not exist in the US beyond a few counties in California.

.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#226

Post by bmarquez »

acdha wrote: post #183
matheusmoreira wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room. The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medici…

[flagged]

> Nobody is unaware that the vaccines are not perfectly safe

Are you so sure? "Safe and effective" and similar slogans in other languages were repeated like almost like a mantra, especially in lower-income, immigrant areas of less-fluent English proficiency. And it took me personally meeting someone who developed Guillain-Barre syndrome after COVID vaccination to even begin to question the narrative.

I get that the HN viewership tends to be well-educated and English fluent but there are a lot of people who wouldn't be able to parse the results of a clinical trial or waiver form.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#227

Post by VagueMag »

DanHulton wrote: post #219
AustinDev wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ivermectin Saga? You distrusted the 'conspiracy theorists' who took a perfectly safe drug that had been taken in the billions of doses a year prior? It was known as a possible protease inhibitor and was very safe to take. Where was the misinformation in what I just posted?

Or, put another way, people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk, who used trickery to order the medication when it became restricted due to an unprecentedly and unplanned-for low supply, who resorted to using animal versions and mis-dosing themselves, risking needing a spot in the hospital that was already desperately needed for COVID patients. Yes, we distrusted those…

> people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk

How do you come to this conclusion when the vaccine's effectiveness against transmission was never demonstrated in controlled trials, and very highly vaxxed jurisdictions like the Bay Area saw huge and persistent waves of cases?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#228

Post by polygamous_bat »

jhgfjhgfjhfgjhg wrote: post #209
myko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest revelation from the previous dumps were that Joe Biden's team requested Twitter remove posts of Hunter Biden's nude body from the site, and they obliged. This is content moderation and completely reasonable. The latest revelation is that Twitter tried to keep antivax shit off the site. Everyone paying attention knew that was the case already, and was the right thing to do (Hacker News should do that, too)…

[flagged]

I did not know revenge porn counts as criticism now.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#229

Post by 88913527 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #141
mhh__ wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know. I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of i…

> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room. The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medici…

How are you supposed to communicate 1 in 10^7 chance of anything happening versus communicating it's risk-free. The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference. College-educated members of society sure, but what about the rest? Health messaging has to be broadly applicable. Most people won't have an issue, so it's simplest to convey this idea.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#230

Post by SkipperCat »

cbb330 wrote: post #144
SkipperCat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaking social media companies as platforms for speech. The are not. They are for profit companies that must police their content to attain maximum ad revenue. They will curate, filter and edit content solely for that purpose. I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.

The importance is that every free and democratic nation in the world has its’ policies influenced by the loudest voices on Twitter. So if Twitter amplifies an idea it becomes reality.

Does it really do that? Or is it just a distraction? All the noise from the Twitter didn’t stop Trump from giving his speech on Jan 6th. Biden didn’t backtrack on the pull out from Afghanistan because of Twitter. No gun bans. No end of drag show book time.

I’d say it’s just a reflection of us, not our compass.

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