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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#251

Post by tayo42 »

jakear wrote: post #186
tayo42 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your missing the point. The people posting on Twitter are just riling up, a virtual riot. You want to discuss it, do it calmy and write soemthing well thought out with sources.

Like here, where someone posting a literal screenshot of the CDC's own data was deemed "misleading" and prohibited from being interacted with? https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Like you said to me, make a clear point. This is a screen shot without any context. How am I supposed to respond?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#252

Post by matheusmoreira »

88913527 wrote: post #229
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…

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.

> 1 in 10^7 chance

I'm not sure I believe that.

> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.

The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.

In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.

I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#253

Post by laserdancepony »

dannyw wrote: post #33
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 re…

And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#254

Post by VagueMag »

acdha wrote: post #240
VagueMag wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> far less dangerous than getting COVID Since the risk of COVID varies wildly by demographics, this leaves open the possibility that the vaccines are a poor risk/reward tradeoff for large numbers of the people it's being recommended to (essentially, everyone over 6 months old). And since they don't prevent COVID infection, "risk of vaccination" vs "risk of a COVID infection" is the wrong comparison to make in the fir…

They do prevent infection - not as effectively against the later variants but still notably - and the side effects which the right-wing media is stoking are indeed more common and more severe from an unvaccinated case of COVID than getting vaccinated: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36419861/

It's so odd that Israel found no significant increased risk of myocarditis from SARS-CoV-2 infection in a very large study conducted before vaccines were in widespread use: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35456309/

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#255

Post by acdha »

_-david-_ wrote: post #207
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s change the roles, dude distributes Ivanka’s nudes, for all intents and purposes it’s revenge porn. Which social media would not block the distribution? NONE. There are very clear laws around revenge porn. Now, what makes Hunter’s penis special besides the Republican obsession is beyond me.

The biggest issue isn't the dick pics, but him smoking crack and potentially having sex with an underaged woman. He just happened to be naked while doing/potentially doing those things.

He also was not the candidate, did not have a chance of getting a government position like his predecessor’s children, and there was no public interest in seeing his acts. It would have been newsworthy if they’d tried to hide the story of Hunter’s addiction but it was public knowledge already along with Joe’s desire to help his son get treatment.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#256

Post by mindslight »

VagueMag wrote: post #248
mindslight wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business and school closures are not lockdowns. The abuse of terminology for political purposes is at the heart of this inability to communicate (and both political machines are guilty). If you could legally leave your home (ie you were not subject to a stay at home order with the force of law), you were not "locked down".

This is a bizarre definition completely at odds with the commonly understood meaning of "lockdowns" in the U.S.

"Commonly understood" by one political camp, which has hyperbolically defined terms to shore up the ranks. See my previous point.

"Lockdown" evokes an idea of being uniformly unable to go out at all, which was most certainly not the case. Rather, the business and institutions that were closed were closed for specific reasons. For each venue we can debate those specific reasons - some were certainly ridiculously overbearing [0] - but grouping it all into "lockdowns" accomplishes nothing besides encouraging people talk past one another.

[0] Non-controversial example: open air parks that were closed.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#257

Post by VagueMag »

dibt wrote: post #233
VagueMag wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from a few urban hospitals which were turned into COVID case dumping grounds in the early weeks, no, they weren't. Hospital employment tanked at the beginning of lockdowns and has only just recovered to pre-Covid levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562200001

It doesn't seem like you've said anything backed by facts. The number of employees in hospitals dropping at the start of the pandemic supports that hospitals were under extra stress. Also, it's logical to assume that a crowded and understaffed hospital is a bad place to be when there's an airborne disease spreading. Hard to argue against suggesting people do everything can to stay home for two weeks to not get a new…

If these measures had actually lasted for only two weeks we'd hardly still be discussing them in the waning days of 2022.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#258

Post by seneca »

88913527 wrote: post #229
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…

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.

Sorry, are you suggesting that people without a college education are too ignorant to make judgements about their own health and that it's therefore ok to lie to them?

This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#259

Post by _gabe_ »

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…

> 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 government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?

You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0].

I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming.

[0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#260

Post by timcavel »

40amxn40 wrote: post #232
AustinDev wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a conspiracy theorist[1], and this was all well known since before we even did '2 weeks to slow the spread'. I'm just glad some of the mainstream folks are figuring it out now. [1]: The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which claims the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them…

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