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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#491

Post by int_19h »

leereeves wrote: post #413
andreyk wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy?" There are people within the government whose job it was to respond to the covid pandemic. Part of that response involved educating the public about the disease and best practices related to it, which therefore included fighting misinformation. Misinformation is spread on platforms such as Twitter, so it made sens…

Who gave them the mandate to control information about Covid? Trump was president at the time and he certainly didn't. And even granting, for the sake of argument, that someone within the government had that job, suppressing disagreement and debate is not the right way to do it.

From the article:

"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.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods. "

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#492

Post by yehosef »

Any discussion of this that ignores the role of vaccine manufacturers in this process are simply lacking. The government had no real incentive to push a policy against science except financial interests (and the influence of people with financial influence.)

Case it point - the demonization of ivermectin - one of the safest drugs ever created that saved so many people's lives (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34466270/). It's also inexpensive. The entire case was that people are promoting something that has not validated as being effective. Not, that its dangerous or that it's stealing people's money - it's not been proven to be an effective treatment. And doctors lost their licenses (many more threatened) over this.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#493

Post by slg »

int_19h wrote: post #487
slg wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role. I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? D…

The proper approach would have been to pass emergency legislation establishing mask rationing and distribution. If need be, confiscate the entire existing supply and direct it to the hospitals. But don't lie about it.

Is confiscating privately owned safety equipment the more democratic and libertarian approach than trying to convince people they shouldn't buy that equipment in the first place? That seems way more dystopian to me.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#494

Post by stonogo »

brigandish wrote: post #486
andy_ppp wrote: post #441

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…

> we have loads of evidence the societies with more locking down and more extreme interventions saved more lives Japan had no lockdowns (because current law prevents such government overreach). Would you like to compare death figures between the more populace and much older and therefore, on the face of it, much higher risk Japan, with Germany?

Japan, famously possessed of a masking tradition which long predates COVID-19 and equally famously possessed of hundreds of thousands of shut-ins pre-pandemic ('Hikikomori'). Not a useful comparator to a nation that had neither.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#495

Post by t0bia_s »

How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true.

The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#496

Post by jacquesm »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #455
jacquesm wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

I wonder how much of the damage to South Korea was due to that one group of people that went around infecting others on purpose, if not for that they may well have done much better still.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#497

Post by Nursie »

Karsteski wrote: post #490
Nursie wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how conspiracy-theorists self-congratulate on things that totally haven’t happened. There’s been no “oh yeah we totally did that” about vaccine safety, lockdowns, covid severity or much else, yet here you are claiming to have been right all along in some nebulous way. It’s very funny to watch.

I feel like you completely ignored the point of the person you replied to...

The point seemed to be “conspiracy theorists are proven right in the end, it’s the only rational approach”, but then it claimed as evidence a bunch of stuff that hasn’t actually come true.

Conspiracy theorists are not driven by facts or evidence, as a community they have a scatter-gun approach, and then retcon in “see, we were right all along” by claiming a tiny portion of their collective predictions came true, neatly forgetting the rest that didn’t. Often even those they do claim have come to pass have not, and rely on a misinterpretation or exaggeration.

It’s quite funny to watch, a combination of survivorship bias, confirmation bias, wishful thinking and at times downright disingenuousness.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#498

Post by SkipperCat »

spritefs wrote: post #356
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.

Parent wasn't making a legal argument. A bunch of the comments in this thread are about trust. Do you think it's good for trust to have "for profit companies policing their content to attain maximum ad revenue"? Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?

Do I think it’s good? I do not. That’s one of the reasons I dislike the crux of the argument about free speech on Twitter. Social media doesn’t care about those things. They may say they do when they are flush with money (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”), but when push comes to shove, they’ll do anything to make a buck.

There is a place for social media in our world, I just don’t want to hold it up to such lofty aspirations that it will never achieve.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#499

Post by chadcmulligan »

thinking4real wrote: post #481

It was pretty amazing to witness the final erosion of public trust that was the covid/Trump era. From hereon out we have two factions of humanity - those who will believe anything said by authority and those who know knowledge can only be ascertained through deduction and reason. I’d never have thought that once information became ubiquitous that we would lose any ability to rely on it, but the worlds more complicate…

My Dad used to say "Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.", which is from Poe "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." [1]. Nothing much has changed.

[1] https://poemuseum.org/did-poe-really-say-that/

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#500

Post by int_19h »

walrus01 wrote: post #69
AustinDev wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read the thread or listen to the discussions surrounding it. The point of the evidence supplied in the thread is that leading virologists and epidemiologists were actively suppressed by non-experts.

[flagged]

The part that you should be concerned about is that factual reporting (and it is clearly factual - it cites specific emails and specific tweets) on this subject had to be published on a fringe site like this, because a mainstream outlet wouldn't pick it up for ideological reasons.
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