Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

thefp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 986 posts

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#421

Post by jboy55 »

cryptonector wrote: post #410
tootie wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least HN doesn't filter COVID disinformation. Your first paragraph is all incorrect. Patent-free treatments were extensively tested and some (notably dexamethasone) were put into treatment regimens for a while but none proven effective. "Corporate" vaccines were very effective and I'm not sure what alternative you're thinking of (artisanal vaccines? Maybe Sinovac?) but either way it's irrelevant. Twitter is just a…

> What if the executive starts censoring politically incompatible thoughts? Trump certainly tried or at least threatened to do so many times but it's nowhere near reality. Is that a reference to his comments about libel laws?

Did you forget he was pushing the US Post office to redo Amazon's contract to pressure Bezos to lean the Washington Post's editorials to his direction? Amazon's stock dropped 4-5% the day he announced he wanted the Post office to look into it, back when the public thought this might mean something.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#422

Post by nraynaud »

andreyk wrote: post #404
danShumway wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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]". ---- These debates…

Definitely agree wrt the last point. It's bizarre that one of the one hand as far as I know Twitter is still committed to moderating a wide range of content (hate speech, violent media, etc.) but on the other hand Musk has doubled down on bots and calling the shots in a top down manner (exactly what this article called out).

And the “on the fly” policy changes at twitter probably have way less internal debate now than at the time.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#423

Post by causi »

andreyk wrote: post #377

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 pr…

There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm.

Quite true. Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID. It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. That irrevocably shattered a whole lot of people's faith in the CDC and the government in general. People saw that the agency tasked with protecting their lives had lied to them, and once the truth was revealed discovered those lies had done nothing but open the door for price gougers to buy up the entire mask supply. What the CDC had told them not to buy for a dime a piece they now told them to buy for ten dollars a piece, and the new law now required them to have it. Once they threw their own credibility on the fire, people had to go looking for something else to believe in. For many of them it was crazy conspiracy theories and demagogues.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#424

Post by bgro »

There’s apparently a lot of people upset about Twitter for trying to manage misinformation. I’d like to see equal information leaked from Fox for comparison, who should have journalistic integrity since they’re a news company.

It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.

Given that extreme level of ridiculous harmful misinformation being presented, it seems obvious to me that any reasonably ethical link in the communication chain should attempt to speak up.

Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#425

Post by actually_a_dog »

twblalock wrote: post #405
andreyk wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowhere in this piece is the FBI mentioned... And it's fine to make an argument against moderation in general. But that's not what this article is doing.

The FBI comes up in plenty of the other Twitter censorship stories. Covid is not a one-off, and this article exists in that broader context, or it would not be interesting. It was part of a sustained, illiberal, counterproductive, and overall pretty stupid pattern of behavior from both the government and Twitter.

Have you tried discussing these points on the submission page for those other Twitter stories?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#426

Post by danShumway »

refurb wrote: post #322
petmon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if what were Trump? Per the article, the Trump administration sought "help from the tech companies to combat misinformation."

That's dishonest, look at most of the interactions highlighted in the article, they were from the Biden administration.

It's not at all dishonest, the article itself highlights that Trump's administration was also concerned about misinformation, especially early on in the pandemic in regards to things like economic stability and availability of goods.

> The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

> At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.”

It goes on to talk mostly about the Biden administration, but that's an editorial decision. The author in no way claims that Trump's administration wasn't sending moderation requests to social media companies. This is not a Republican vs Democrat thing; every government under every administration coordinates with social media companies.

If you're going to approach censorship through a purely partisan lens, you're not going to get very far.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#427

Post by jboy55 »

JeremyNT wrote: post #337
jacquesm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop. Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome. Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccinatio…

I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles. This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the…

This is just my story, but I had a situation where a close friend's mother died from COVID. Someone else from the social circle, who knew that person well but was antivax, their first response to hearing them pass from COVID was, "but she had diabetes right? And wasn't she overweight? So it wasn't just COVID?".

So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#428

Post by kbelder »

BryantD wrote: post #325
jmyeet wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Anti-vax movements have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. The only thing that "solves" this problem is a new disease and vaccines that completely displaces the old. Think about it: when was the last time, since the pandemic began, that you heard about autism and the MMR vaccine? that began in the late 90s (with no scientific basis I might add) and persisted for decades. Now no one talks…

It’s the same people, though. RFK Jr. pivoted and incorporated anti-Covid vax rhetoric into the rest of his platform, and that’s bringing the anti-Covid vax conspiracists into the autism myth fold. And the existing anti-vax community fed into QAnon, as well documented by Marc-André Argentino[1]. This is the tricky problem. Trusting the marketplace of ideas works if everyone who participates is interested in spending…

It's not all the same people, though. Anti-vax nutjobs were primarily fringe leftists, through 2019. For a few reasons, Covid policy drew a ton of fringe right-wing nutjobs into the movement.

In my experience, possibly the worst thing that was done was labeling people who argued against forced vaccination as anti-vaxxers, no matter whether they were against vaccines or not. That made a large number of reasonable people very hostile, and reasonably so; they were being declared an enemy.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#429

Post by arcticbull »

bgro wrote: post #424

There’s apparently a lot of people upset about Twitter for trying to manage misinformation. I’d like to see equal information leaked from Fox for comparison, who should have journalistic integrity since they’re a news company. It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consumi…

He also suggested UV lights applied from the inside of the human body could cure COVID. It remains unclear which orifice was recommended, but one was heavily implied. [1]

What a weird time that was.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG0ciGfJ1xY

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#430

Post by kbelder »

kodyo wrote: post #81
myko wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will anyone even go to prison or lose their job? Why would they? This is another nothingburger, Musk is just seeking attention for the sake of attention. If that means echoing antivax bullshit, or trying to make sure Hunter Biden's penis is available for all to see on the internet, that's what he will do.

People who use the phrase “nothingburger” aren’t persuadable.

Well, when you see it, you know the person isn't really saying something; they're repeating a slogan.
Post reply on HN