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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#631

Post by richardhod »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #479
lamontcg wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic is most likely simple, elegant and wrong.

Welp, I'm open to clarification. Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.

Where you went wrong is getting it backwards. The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.

So it's about not focusing on the wrong things

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#632

Post by SilasX »

ethanbond wrote: post #573
newsclues wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Correct, we don’t know if masks work … in the same sense that we “don’t know” if parachutes work[1]. That is, we don’t (and can’t) do the level of randomized controlled trials that would precisely mimic real-world application.

Nevertheless, we’re capable of appropriate risk based inference. We can verify that masks slow down the spread of airborne particles and we know SARS-type viruses spread that way. Combined with the low cost of mask wearing and the huge impacts of a pandemic, a good risk analysis weighs heavily in favor of using them.

Even accepting the over-skeptical view you’ve given, official statements were still overconfident. Fauci was saying in February 2020 that “there’s no reason for anyone to be wearing a mask”, which you can’t justify by these claims of ignorance. “A small chance of slowing a SARS-type virus” is a great reason to wear a mask!

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p...

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#633

Post by Jotra7 »

lettergram wrote: post #621
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…

> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. All studies done at scale, in peer reviewed journals before and since the pandemic have shown that not to be the case. N95s work, if used properly, that’s it. If you work / have worked with people in biosafety labs they’ll tell you. What we did during the pandemic was effectively role play. Cloth masks, surgical mask…

[dead]

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#634

Post by notahacker »

hintymad wrote: post #133

I wonder why people believe that CDC must always be right, and therefore any doubt or challenge to CDC’s messages is misinformation that is worth banning. I thought every school in a modern society teaches student not to blindly trust the authority.

The question wasn't whether the CDC was "always right", the question was whether - given that Twitter already actively moderated content for other reasons - Twitter executives thought that the CDC had better arguments and evidence that certain statements were false and harmful than the people making them, and that "public health" was at least as good a reason for blocking/labelling tweets as those other reasons. (Most of the better criticisms of Twitter policy focuses on the complete lack of authority of most of the algorithms and individuals actually implementing the moderation to judge whether certain claims were new evidence or nonsense). It's not like there was ever any shortage of criticism of the CDC as an organization on Twitter.

My school didn't teach me to treat statements from practitioners of evidence-based medicine and vendors of colloidal silver as equally likely to be true or that people should pick recommendations based on which got the most social media upvotes either

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#635

Post by kevinmrose »

ethanbond wrote: post #600
kevinmrose wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it have just been easier to explain it than to lie to the public and then continue to deny and defend the lying after it's already been exposed?

What lying? CDC et al never said masks don’t work. I don’t know how many times I need to repeat this.

I don't know if we can call it outright lying, but going from "you don't need a mask" to basically saying you shouldn't be allowed in public without one seems like either incompetence or corruption on the CDC's part. You can argue semantics all you want to try to justify their behavior, but that is what people see and it doesn't increase trust or confidence in them as an organization.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#636

Post by ethanbond »

kevinmrose wrote: post #635
ethanbond wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What lying? CDC et al never said masks don’t work. I don’t know how many times I need to repeat this.

I don't know if we can call it outright lying, but going from "you don't need a mask" to basically saying you shouldn't be allowed in public without one seems like either incompetence or corruption on the CDC's part. You can argue semantics all you want to try to justify their behavior, but that is what people see and it doesn't increase trust or confidence in them as an organization.

Yes, people see that because they think authority figures have some Magic Answer Box that they’re pulling or withholding answers from, rather than the reality which is that our understanding of the situation was shifting day by day.

The Magic Answer Box people are demanding that they be trusted with nuance and detail and yet continuously demonstrate Magic Answer Box thinking in the face of nuanced and detailed information.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#637

Post by denton-scratch »

ilyt wrote: post #488
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. 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 feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don…

> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people

So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana.

I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#638

Post by _cenw »

causi wrote: post #423
andreyk wrote: post #377

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…

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…

I find this not very credible as the biggest contributor to the anti-masker anti-vaxer movement, especially because that movement exists in places where most people don't even know what the CDC is.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#639

Post by mindslight »

arcticbull wrote: post #445
stormking wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it. Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really…

> 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…

This is precisely the closed-world solution that authoritarian governments lean on, with the exact same results.

The open-world answer is to tell people the correct information, use government mandates to mitigate the immediate shortages for healthcare workers, and use government economic power to spin up production asafp, and make politicians actually do their job of leading people through the crisis.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#640

Post by nonethewiser »

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…

Not just hindsight. Many people came to the same conclusion in the moment.
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