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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#511

Post by int_19h »

jacquesm wrote: post #196
ryandrake wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time poster here. It was shocking to witness the last few years here. We have an absolutely remarkable and effective moderation system here and tireless, under-thanked mods doing the work. Looking at showdead, they are so good at moderating away the spam, nazis, trolls, and other various off topic troublemakers. I’m so grateful for having them here. They walk the line making difficult judgment calls, and have co…

And many of those same accounts are now pushing the current 'Twitter Files' narrative as though they were right all along. People seem to forget that Elon Musk was willing to throw his employees under the bus for his personal gain, and yet they now trust a selective reading of history driven by that very same person.

The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

I don't care much for anything Musk says, or even what the reporters who publish this stuff say. The meat is the emails themselves, and the referenced tweets. And none of that has anything to do with Musk.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#512

Post by philjohn »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #502
arcticbull wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, ... Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times. > ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the firs…

What about telling people the truth, that there were no masks for everyone and they had to prioritize first responders? Treat people like adults and they will behave like adults. Treat them like kids and they'll behave like kids. Also, once you know you have been lied to, the trust is shattered, whatever the excuses. How people is going to trust again the CDC, knowing that it lied before?

Because large groups of people have shown, time and again, they don't act rationally.

Look at toilet paper - one rumour that it would run out, despite shops, the government, everyone, saying there is more than enough and the rabble went out and hoarded.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#513

Post by echelon »

eddhead wrote: post #453
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.

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

> Jim Baker is a double agent for the FBI.

Geopolitical hat on.

Elon Musk is getting close to the Saudis (Twitter), China (Gigafactory Shanghai), and Russians (necessary industrial inputs). In the past few months he's casually suggested a handover of Ukraine and Taiwan. Now he's turning on the Democrats and the FBI, or at least certain members of those organizations.

My mind wonders if the DoD will sour on his role at SpaceX. We've recently seen lawmakers impact the valuation of Tesla vis a vis tax incentives. Are Musk's foreign ties and obligations a risk to a defense company that services classified national interests?

Perhaps he or the company he keeps have enough friends within the DoD chain of command that there won't be any issues. Or maybe none of this matters. But I am half expecting to see sparks fly.

(I'm 100% reading between the lines here, and I don't have any evidence for any of my suspicions. Feel free to dismiss outright, though I would appreciate additional commentary if anyone has anything interesting to add.)

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#514

Post by int_19h »

robot wrote: 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.

Here's one of the tweets mentioned in the article that was labeled as "misleading":

https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.am...

Can you explain what is actually misleading about it, or, more broadly, how is it anti-vax?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#515

Post by philjohn »

stonogo wrote: post #494
brigandish wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And a highly evolved contact tracing operation because they learned the lessons from SARS.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#516

Post by Nursie »

jakear wrote: post #506
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.

[flagged]

You’re doing exactly what I said, exaggerating and twisting to claim victories where there are none.

That Fauci email says that masks are primarily to prevent infected people from spreading disease, and a lot of crappy masks are unlikely to do much but prevent some droplets. This was before a lot of the studies were in that showed there was some effect. People can be wrong early on, this is expected.

Later on when the pandemic was really ripping through populations it was all a numbers game, to try to reduce spread by percentage. A lot of people seemed to miss that, and would say stupid things like ‘masks aren’t 100% effective” or “they don’t even protect you! They protect other people”, as if that was smart or meaningful.

> Remember "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick"?

Nope, I’m not American, and it appears neither does your source, because the link that should take you to the original claim goes to some other story.

> vaccine safety

Yeah so you have nothing there either. Anything can affect women’s menstrual cycles. Aircraft travel, dietary changes, stress, all sorts. It's not really surprising and it's not necessarily serious.

> Two weeks to flatten the curve

Was too little too late and a symptom of fucked up, broken American politics.

> remember when it was faux pas to suggest COVID was "just another cold"?

It’s still a really stupid thing to say, sorry bub, excess deaths should show you just how dumb.

> dangers of remote schooling

It’s not exactly surprising that remote schooling is less effective. However saying “dangers of remote schooling” is unnecessarily hyperbolic, and this is a great example of “throwing enough shit at the wall to see if something sticks”

So like I said, you’re claiming a bunch of things that no, the powers that be have not “admitted” to being true, and the rest of the world has not, actually, come to understand, and some things that were just bleeding obvious (remote schooling is less good, we should only rely on it when there are reasons to do so. Like, I don’t know, a pandemic that’s killed about 7 million people worldwide.)

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#517

Post by int_19h »

slg wrote: post #493
int_19h wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Trying to convince people" implies a good faith approach - i.e. being open about what you want and why. Lying to people that masks are no good is not "convincing" them to not buy masks - it's misleading them to do so.

And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domain, for which there's explicit provisions in constitution and/or laws of most (all?) democratic countries. And since it's done openly, if citizens are unhappy about it, they can always punish the politicians who did so in the next elections; but you can't do that to unelected bureaucrats and private actors, and especially not if they conceal what they're doing.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#518

Post by jltsiren »

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 managed to secure its national borders tightly. Once you were inside the "lockdown facility", which was effectively the entire country, you could continue living more or less as before.

Other countries had to resort to internal lockdowns, because land borders are harder to secure. Cross-border truck traffic was particularly problematic, as it involves a large number of people crossing borders and continuing inland without any quarantine. Legal issues also made the borders more porous, for example by not having sufficient testing and quarantine requirements for returning citizens. And widespread individualism made voluntary measures less effective, because people were less likely to follow the self-isolation and testing recommendations.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#519

Post by jacquesm »

echelon wrote: post #513
eddhead wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Jim Baker is a double agent for the FBI. Geopolitical hat on. Elon Musk is getting close to the Saudis (Twitter), China (Gigafactory Shanghai), and Russians (necessary industrial inputs). In the past few months he's casually suggested a handover of Ukraine and Taiwan. Now he's turning on the Democrats and the FBI, or at least certain members of those organizations. My mind wonders if the DoD will sour on his role a…

I'm pretty sure that conversations along those lines have already taken place. This is no trifle matter and Musk may think that he can shitpost himself out of any hole he digs himself into but that may well be an illusion on his part.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#520

Post by zimpenfish »

finikytou wrote: post #510
zimpenfish wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first link says (my emphasis): > The investigators emphasized the preliminary nature of their research, noting that they did not demonstrate a causal link between the improvement in patient conditions and the reduced viral loads.

I don't know why people did make fun of him suggesting using UV. CNNing of the mind works well in the distopia that has became the western world. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101113442...

But that paper is specifically not about COVID-19 - "it is reasonable to suggest a human Coronavirus HCoV-OC43 as a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2" - and is only tested in-vitro - "For each irradiation experiment 50 μl of virus suspension [...] was placed in each well of a black 24-well plate".

It might encourage people to give grant money for further research but it is 100% not evidence for the efficacy of "sticking a UV light inside the body will kill COVID-19".

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