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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#371

Post by tayo42 »

jakear wrote: post #320
tayo42 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where was the government involved? > Internal records showed that a bot had flagged the tweet, Which then was reviewed by some support staff. This is actually all in the article What you read is misinformation designed to muddy the water and get you riled up by making this look partisan. You and others are falling for it. This article is intentially being emotional like this.

Do you think that bot magically sprung itself into existence? Or is it more likely that it was written by a human, as ordered by a human, in response to well-documented (also in the article) pressure from the White House to prohibit the spread of what they considered "misinformation"? Do you think the "support staff" were acting of their own volition, or did they have orders from above about how content should be han…

dont make me quote the whole article back to you

> Internal records showed that a bot had flagged the tweet, and that it received many “tattles” (what the system amusingly called reports from users). That triggered a manual review by a human who—despite the tweet showing actual CDC data—nevertheless labeled it “misleading.”

The language this article uses is inflammatory. There's a few points to make here, that its highly emotional on purpose. The use of the word tattles, the '—despite the tweet showing actual CDC data—nevertheless' phrasing adding in biased commentary.

Its also not totally clear, I think because its trying to create outrage, the review was triggered from the reports received. Which then just had some support staff label it. The initial reporting has nothing to do with government. And we don't know how the labeling works. This article makes a lot of leaps and dumps information.

Im done with this now, I really think you should step back and ask your self, if you are getting caught up in partisan articles like this, how can you really cut through the information being thrown around about more complex topics.

Apparently Kulldorff from this article went on to work in right wing politics after becoming a vocal anti lockdown and vaccine guy. I dont think he is an unbiased source.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#372

Post by twblalock »

ytpete wrote: post #364
twblalock wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the purpose of the NYT and WSJ is also profit. They also publish a lot of total dreck. You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.

Right, but you don't expect NYT or WSJ to be required to print every "letter to the editor" submitted by anyone in the world. They are for-profit, non-government, and they print what they want. Twitter is also for-profit and not the government – so why is it different if they also choose not to broadcast some things? Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their c…

> I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#373

Post by MisterBastahrd »

AustinDev wrote: post #91
cma wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it gave a big distrust of conspiracy theorists and reflexive contrarians, due to things like the ivermectin saga.

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?

People were given billions of doses a year under supervision of doctors for actual cases where it made sense to take ivermectin. They weren't self-medicating with horse paste from agricultural feed stores like the idiots in the US.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#374

Post by insanitybit »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #152
insanitybit wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hell at this rate I’d hear somebody out if they said the moon is made of cheese. Right. That's the problem.

It only starts to become a problem if you cant explain why its wrong. Having parts of your worldview that you told yourself are not up for verification is exactly how being wrong looks like from the perspective of somebody who is. And once you no longer have a means of verifying reality, you have no way to comprehend what you actually ignore and what the consequences are. You just blinded yourself because you felt sm…

Or the moon isn't made out of cheese and if someone tries to tell you that it is you should walk away, not spend time trying to argue with them.

No one owes explanations for the obvious.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#375

Post by [deleted] »

yongjik wrote: post #367
spritefs wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people don't trust a system that raised them, there are inherent flaws with the system that it is either unable or unwilling to address

Sure, but a major flaw of the American system is that it's deliberately pushing its people into being distrustful of the system (and each other). Not trusting the government, or wanting to make it less effective, is considered a virtue in many parts of America. (And it's not just the conservatives.)

[deleted]

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#376

Post by andreareina »

lmm wrote: post #102
tootie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Yeah, I can hardly tell the difference between the Pfizer vaccine and the control here.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#377

Post by andreyk »

OK, so here's the key bit:

"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.

...

But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".

This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.

That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#379

Post by shingle »

Yhippa wrote: post #292
dannyw wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine Curious, did this happen to you?

It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#380

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

giardini wrote: post #285

Original title is "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate". Why the change from "Rigged" to "Moderated"?

that's not okay. the title should be preserved. it's not hn's job to decide how a text and its title relate to upvotes and discussion. that is really questionable.
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