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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#611

Post by ethbr0 »

joenot443 wrote: post #535
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…

> 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. I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its c…

> There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.

That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth.

Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful.

These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#612

Post by phpisthebest »

ethanbond wrote: post #534
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…

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.

Nice revisionist history, but the CDC and other government actors where absolutely telling people not to use masks, buy masks and were in fact confiscating privately owned masks from people early in the pandemic.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#613

Post by RockyMcNuts »

int_19h wrote: post #509
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a hard tradeoff between false positives and false negatives. it's like being a soccer referee or a judge, you can be almost perfect but the screwups are all anyone remembers. short of putting everyone away for life, some convict is going to get out and do something, and some tabloid is going to question why this person was on the street. You do the best you can subject to the Constitution, the laws, and common s…

Speaking of making everything worse... I'm far left politically. I found COVID very concerning, I'm fully vaccinated, and I still wear a mask indoors. And yet, after seeing some of the tweets that were labelled as "misleading", I believe that the way the govt and Twitter moderators handled this was a disaster that makes me extremely unlikely to trust anything that either will have to say on any contentious topics in…

Someone saying, this looks misleading, here's why, if there is room for good-faith argument about it, it helps me trust them.

Certainly more than suspending journalists on trumped-up pretexts.

I'm less worried about a possibly incorrect 'misleading' tag than I am about weirdo elected officials who make false claims about things I can see with my own eyes, say everyone else is lying, say anyone who disagrees is un-American or a traitor, push divisive conspiracy theories and call for imprisoning our own medical professionals. And given all their other claims and agitprop, it's hard to take seriously a claim that the label violates their First Amendment rights or is a breach of trust.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#614

Post by ethbr0 »

philliphaydon wrote: post #609
ethbr0 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased. The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat. All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice. In contrast, a pan…

Just do stock rotation. Bring stock in, release old stock to hospitals and such where it will be used right away.

Think in quantities. Hospitals in normal times don't consume the number of masks you'd need to stockpile for a pandemic situation.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#615

Post by whodidntante »

jacquesm wrote: post #301
tjpnz wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist either but I do have considerably less respect for the WHO than I did before the pandemic. They seem more interested in playing politics and appeasing authoritarian regimes than putting out concrete policy on things which might actually help. Their back and forth on masking was an utter shambles, their stance on Taiwan a disgrace, their "fact finding" missions to China pointless and thei…

Large institution makes mistakes in face of unprecedented crisis, news at 11. All those standing by the sidelines and criticizing those in the hot seat would no doubt have done a much better job at managing this. I'm all for learning the lessons (such as the link you posted) but I'm categorically against assigning blame against those that worked their asses off to help mitigate this, as long as the lessons stay learn…

"Large institution makes mistakes in face of unprecedented crisis, news at 11. "

There are different categories of "mistakes".

In the face of an unprecedented crisis it is understandable that there will be uncertainty in what courses of actions to take, and mistakes will be made.

However, how Taiwan was treated, or declarations by people who have a clear self-interest that the virus could not possibly be a lab leak when it was simply impossible at that time to have done the necessary due diligence one way or abnother were clearly pre-meditated and political in nature and should make any thinking person think twice about what comes out of the WHO/CDC.

These are two of the many CYA and/or turf protecting situations that happened that have significanlty wekend trust in these organizations.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#616

Post by heartbreak »

dang wrote: post #406
giardini wrote: post #285

Original title is "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate". Why the change from "Rigged" to "Moderated"?

We changed it to be less linkbaity, as the site guidelines ask: " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think the misleading or linkbait titles on HN are a useful signal when deciding whether or not to read (or read the comments on) a submission.

I would have been less, not more, likely to interact with this submission if the original title was used, because it demonstrates that the source is willing to mislead or clickbait.

Maybe it’s time to revisit this policy?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#617

Post by philliphaydon »

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…

> and whether the virus was airborne

The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be.

The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda.

(We knew it was airborne in December 2019)

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#618

Post by impute »

twblalock wrote: post #62

This is what we get when we expect corporations to police speech, and when governments pressure them to do it. We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by maki…

This is incredibly naive. Popular platforms receive a lot of horrific stuff being posted. Some things need to be censored. Without moderation every platform would dissolve into a race to the bottom. For an example of this see this article https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#619

Post by Scoundreller »

autoexec wrote: post #525
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…

> Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been w…

In Canada, it was partly a coverup for the government destroying the N95 & PPE stockpile it put together after SARS1, because it expired before another pandemic happened.

At the federal and provincial levels.

And no, they didn’t replace the stock.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p...

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#620

Post by chitowneats »

notacoward wrote: post #607
chitowneats wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very least, GP, consider that you are not an epidemiologist or an MD, and that Twitter should not have censored such qualified individuals with unreliable and inconsistent "AI". At Twitter, this technology was trained to parrot the U.S. CDC, over the legitimate objections and disagreements from their counterparts in the EU and WHO. As well as many others.

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