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

571–580 of 986 posts

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#571

Post by cf141q5325 »

insanitybit wrote: post #374
cf141q5325 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You no longer have the means to determine what is obvious if you mess with which parts of your worldview are up for verification. You just have a story you dont want to question for believing what you want to belief. This is an incredibly bad idea.

To take the moon example, congratulations for figuring out its not made from actual Swiss cheese. Its a great first step. Unfortunately there isnt complete knowledge about everything you ever need to know about the moon attached to not believing it to be cheese. You having wrong or incomplete knowledge of the moon doesnt mean the moon is made from cheese. And people trying to communicate to you an angle you are missing can extremely easy be framed to sound like "moon is made up of Swiss cheese". Its using strawmen arguments to figure out reality instead of trying to steelmen people to figure out what they are looking at where they maybe overshot to deal with a problem you are unaware of.

You didnt just finish thinking by having determined some stuff to be stupid. You are not done. I get that you think this needs some means of simplification but reality doesnt care about what you think should or needs to be possible.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#572

Post by ethanbond »

causi wrote: post #543
ethanbond wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole part of the narrative is, unfortunately, a story about how people cannot be delivered nuanced messages even while screaming that they deserve nuance. The CDC did not say that makes do not work. They said we do not know if masks work, which was (and mostly still remains) true. Only person who said we have positive knowledge that masks don’t work was USSG Jerome Adams, and that was pretty late in the ordeal.

February 29th 2020 was "pretty late in the ordeal"?

It did seem pretty late to me at the time, but admittedly that was deep in COVID time warp era. Regardless of your assessment, USSG isn’t CDC. CDC nor FDA nor NIH ever said “masks don’t work.”

They said what was true: we don’t know if they do work.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#573

Post by ethanbond »

newsclues wrote: post #552
ethanbond wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole part of the narrative is, unfortunately, a story about how people cannot be delivered nuanced messages even while screaming that they deserve nuance. The CDC did not say that makes do not work. They said we do not know if masks work, which was (and mostly still remains) true. Only person who said we have positive knowledge that masks don’t work was USSG Jerome Adams, and that was pretty late in the ordeal.

As someone that has been trained by one of the few organizations that develops leadership (military)... The communications and advise from the medical establishment and media, were so terrible that that I question incompetence and lean towards corruption. The flip flopping, the political and idealogical justifications, the theatre of everything without substance. The People can handle nuanced messaging, what they can…

Yeah see people say all this but the actual example they use is a thing that didn’t happen. The nuanced, correct message was that we don’t know if masks work. That’s what they said. What you heard was “masks don’t work.” So what we actually learned is that people are not capable of receiving nuanced messages, at least among the people who are pissed off about not having received a nuanced message (which they did).

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#574

Post by acdha »

brigandish wrote: post #335
acdha wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for que…

> the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]: > In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits…

He’s a common one and it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease and pushing myths about herd immunity, he was never deplatformed. Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#575

Post by steeve »

sfusato wrote: post #3

Some seem to be okay with the government and intelligence agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to make sure we only get to learn and discuss corporate sponsored healthcare advice now.

Do you think saying "vaccines cause cancer" is fair game then? Where do you draw the line?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#576

Post by jefftk »

arcticbull wrote: post #432
causi wrote: 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…

> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders

But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#577

Post by ModernMech »

autoexec wrote: post #529
philjohn wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The solution to the toilet paper problem wasn't lying to everyone by telling them that toilet paper was ineffective at removing shit from our asses. It was ultimately handled at the retail end where stores limited the number that people could buy and/or held back inventory. Masks could have been handled in the same way: from the manufacturer/retailer end. Masks could have been pulled off shelves and diverted to healt…

> It was ultimately handled at the retail end

To be clear “handling” here meant that there were extensive and pervasive country-wide shortages, and many people went without toilet paper for weeks, including myself. People who needed toilet paper went without, while others hoarded more than they’d need for a year.

That’s the problem people were trying to avoid with masks. First responders and doctors needed them most, but we had people out there literally willing to buy as many as they could for their own personal supply. You can’t wait for the invisible hand of the market to just sort this kind of thing out.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#578

Post by concordDance »

slg wrote: post #482
arcticbull wrote: post #432

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…

>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…

Telling suppliers that masks are reserved for first responders etc and getting Walmart etc to take them off their shelves would have been far less damaging.

Lying losing credibility permanently! There is no going back, that trust is lost. Just letting covid rip though those nursing homes would be way less damaging in the long term.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#579

Post by notahacker »

finikytou wrote: post #558
yosame wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is about UV light, not bleach?

because the parent video never mentionned bleach. He asked if we could have something that could disinfect from the inside. CNN translated that as bleach. just like they translated the hunter biden story as russian propaganda. that is US media so its nothing special. what is special is that educated people are talking about bleach while they have access to the source material and can tell there is not once mention of…

Trump responded to a point from one of his actually-qualified officials which specifically mentioned the efficacy of household bleach in killing the virus outside the body by speculating about "doing something inside" and "injections" of "that disinfectant"

Most people's key takeaway from this is that highly-influential public figures with no scientific background probably shouldn't start inarticulately positing their own ideas for cures in public health briefings, not that the real problem is the media just didn't acknowledge he was talking about injecting (or "maybe not injecting") a different type of disinfectant...

Trump, incidentally, announced shortly after his biggest fans had mined the internet for evidence of Trump's awareness of cutting-edge research that his comments were actually "sarcasm", which would of course have been worse still.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#580

Post by maskil »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #564

Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu. We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds? Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing. It wasn’t abo…

That may have been the case in the very beginning, but it certainly evolved into let's scare the crap out of people to achieve whatever outcome we want.
Post reply on HN