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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#651

Post by ethanbond »

zdragnar wrote: post #646
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.

The CDC may not have said those words, but the surgeon general absolutely did. There was plenty of conflicting messaging around the effectiveness of cloth masks as well.

Yep, already mentioned that USSG said that. Note that he never comes up in these discussions as someone who lied though. No one I know seemed to even note what he said. Everyone seems (correctly) more fixated on CDC/NIH which were dominating the public messaging.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#652

Post by zimpenfish »

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…

> just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach

I admire your optimism but people (en masse) don't work like that.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#653

Post by spikeagally »

at_a_remove wrote: post #581
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's an interesting idea, but it completely falls apart if one remembers the "don't buy masks" phase of the CDC's efforts.

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#654

Post by mistermann »

Herbstluft wrote: post #435
devtul wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To say "trust the system" requires a religious inclination that many don't have

This statement only makes sense on a philosophical level.

Actually, it is incorrect on that level also. Religious faith is only one form of faith, there are many others.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#655

Post by jesusofnazarath »

_cenw wrote: post #638
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…

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.

[dead]

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#656

Post by lettergram »

mrcwinn wrote: post #641
lettergram wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm willing to believe your claim that only N95 masks work, and other options do nothing at all, but what am I to do with seemingly reliable information that states otherwise? https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask... It's just one source, but I'm genuinely curious.

I say go to all large scale peer reviewed research prior to 2020. You’re taking some story from someone who writes for a college publication, not a peer reviewed source. There are researchers from Stanford who said exactly what I did above.

Trillions of dollars were pumped into propaganda and research in 2020. It takes years to go through, receive grants, construct experiments, get approvals, analyze and validate. We are only now starting to see initial results for new masking studies. They still need to be replicated, etc.

Here’s an example of a large scale study from 2015 where cloth masks increase risk of illness (over nothing):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/

Here’s a 2021 study showing masks aren’t really good as well (a randomized control trial) https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

My general point isn’t the specifics, it’s that the jury is out.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#657

Post by ethanbond »

sampo wrote: post #630
ethanbond wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, we still do not really know whether masks at a population level tend to reduce transmission. A big, big part of the problem is that it’s very hard to know how many people are wearing masks, how consistently, whether they change their behavior when they do, etc etc. What we probably know is that if 100% of the population wore masks 100% correctly 100% of the time and kept 100% of their prior behavior, it woul…

> we still do not really know whether masks at a population level tend to reduce transmission We don't know this about condoms, either. https://jech.bmj.com/content/65/2/100

That is fascinating! Science is really difficult :)

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#658

Post by SilasX »

ethanbond wrote: post #649
SilasX wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, agreed with all of this which is why I think when it became the case that the general population wearing masks would not have negative impacts on supply for medical workers, it made sense to default to “wear masks.” When the gen pop wearing masks would have a negative impact on supply, it seems defensible at least to advocate against the population buying masks. Note that what confuses people here is not that th…

But they weren’t advising the public not to wear masks based on genuine skepticism, but on a confused belief that it would have the narrow effect of relieving the supply crunch, with no long term effect on mask compliance in the future, even given the loss of trust from having told the public BS reasons not to wear them. (Like the Fauci quotes and assertions of ineffectiveness.)

That was stupid, and foreseeably so.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#659

Post by astrange »

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…

Do you believe surgical masks work during surgery? There’s “no evidence” they do this.

There’s also no reason that hearing there is “no evidence” for something requires you to adopt the silliest possible assumption for whether it’s actually true, but doctors seem to like doing this anyway.

(The actual answer for whether masks are “effective against covid” is “which covid?” - cause it’s different for 2020 covid and Omicron. Omicron is so infectious that you cannot avoid it using any kind of NPI at all.)

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#660

Post by hstan4 »

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…

Doesn’t sound to you like hindsight is 20/20. Sounds like you’d want to take the exact same approach next time something like this happens
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