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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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451–460 of 986 posts

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#451

That we’re still debating this stuff is ridiculous, everyone seems to be trying to create a narrative out of actions performed with good intentions and imperfect information. I think Twitter and the press had an almost impossible job attempting to manage public health messaging. There does not need to be a red vs blue debate on this as if it’s some religious war. The way it’s debated verges on conspiracy theory to me…

Maybe, with their imperfect information, they shouldn't have decided they had the right to police information.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#452

That we’re still debating this stuff is ridiculous, everyone seems to be trying to create a narrative out of actions performed with good intentions and imperfect information. I think Twitter and the press had an almost impossible job attempting to manage public health messaging. There does not need to be a red vs blue debate on this as if it’s some religious war. The way it’s debated verges on conspiracy theory to me…

> That we’re still debating this stuff is ridiculous

That people are still using “move along nothing to see here” is ridiculous.

The world just went through an event of a historical significance comparable to a World War. And there are still new books, movies and documentaries being made about World War 1 and 2…

There are a lot more questions to be asked and lessons to be learned about how COVID was handled. For example we’ve yet to have accurate public data on suicide rates during the lockdowns…

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government shouldn't be doing that. Also, it's important to break down what is meant by "the government" here -- it was the FBI attempting to suppress a news story which later turned out to be true about the son of a candidate for president. That sort of thing should not happen. Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they real…

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.

Jim Baker is a double agent for the FBI. Everyone is Quite obvious of why he was there.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#454
post #436

what's wrong with suppressing anti-vaxer views on twitter? elon's guy says twitter rigged the debate. yes so what. why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers? If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.

> what's wrong with suppressing anti-vaxer views on twitter?

there's no such thing as anti-vax views. there's only science/facts and lies.

> twitter rigged the debate. yes so what... (the views that I supported carried the day)

most bizarre argument i've come across on the internet today.

> why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers?

sounds to me here like you want to live in 'La-La land'.

> If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.

covid is such a tragedy that china is loosening [0] some of its zero-covid restrictions. also, there's no shortage of vaccines anywhere as of today. you might want to cross-check that piece of misinformation.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/china-to-end-quarantine-for-...

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times o…

An important consideration that I have not seen mentioned yet is that masks have a 'best before date', this is because they are infused with a static charge that aims to attract particles to the mask material and this charge doesn't last forever. You can 'recharge' masks but that's a lot of work and usually not in the normal path for such supplies. So stockpiles that were present were not going to be effective agains…

Other countries got it right. When the CDC was dithering about whether masks work and whether the virus was airborne (which should have been clear by early February with all the case evidence we had from Asia), their South Korean counterparts ordered Samsung to purchase tons of meltblown fibers, because making the masks themselves is not hard.

Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week.

This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized.

The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#456
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times. Lying to people about their personal health for the greater good of society gets you the Tuskegee Experiment.

Completely different, sorry, and a wildly disingenuous comparison. There was no public health crisis at the time that required this, let alone to run it for 40 years. Let's keep to intellectually honest discourse and avoid hyperbole shall we? This is a contentious enough topic as is.

> wildly disingenuous comparison

No, it is not. The parallels are there so strikingly.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#457

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…

Great points. Moderation is a very hard job, and good moderators understand they will likely be biased and can admit to it. I think moderation fairness problem is equivalent to the "auditing the auditor" problem; for some given events, how do we ensure that the labels given to the event are accurate and unbiased.

One solution might be for n moderators to evaluate and give the label to the reported violation, and ensure n is odd and larger than 1. However, this is tedious (although that is the tradeoff for fairness) and assumes there's an equivalent number of moderators who lean liberal, conservative, and neutral (in addition to assuming there's no biases created by the culture of the social media platform and management).

Perhaps each report should be given a detailed criteria as to why it was labelled as inappropriate, but this too would be subject to bias, emotional response from both parties, and slow down the moderation process which is likely backed up with many events in the queue, without really any direct benefit to the bottom line of the company although one could view this as a quality issue and lack of QA will ultimately produce an inferior product that is heavily QA'd.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#458
post #262
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…

Many people felt they couldn't even question the pharma/big gov narrative without being branded "internet weirdos and agitators" or anti-vax.

This is in part because whackos of all stripes often start with “I’m just asking questions here!” and then proceed to spout their nonsense.

The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#459
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> 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. They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times o…

Misinformation and lying with good intentions is still misinfo and lying.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#460
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…

You do see the difference between Fox and Twitter right? One is an open platform that is supposedly neutral and “follows the Science” and the other is media company that doesn’t pretend to be neutral.
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