How Twitter moderated the Covid debate • Hacker News Board

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#681

Post by BryantD » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 2:59 PM UTC

thinking4real wrote: post #477

bgro wrote: post #424

There’s apparently a lot of people upset about Twitter for trying to manage misinformation. I’d like to see equal information leaked from Fox for comparison, who should have journalistic integrity since they’re a news company. It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consumi…

“the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.” This is a lie and you should not be propagating it in the current year. It’s honestly embarrassing you can’t do primary research at all and still talk with authority.

Immediately prior to Trump’s remarks, Bill Bryan said:

“‘We tested bleach,’ he said at one point. ‘I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.’”

Trump followed this with:

“And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.”

So to be completely fair, Trump suggested that injecting bleach could cure covid. Much better.

It’s embarrassing that there are people in this thread claiming he wasn’t talking about bleach.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#682

Post by finikytou » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #579

finikytou wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

you know saying that trump is right on a few topics doesn't mean we are fan. most of the immigration policies and china policies that biden is running right now are from the trump era. Biden was saying then that trump was racist for doing it.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#683

Post by bprieto » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:01 PM UTC

Nursie wrote: post #507

mns wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional: locked into our houses not being allowed to get out, curfews afterwards at night and so on (and of course all these rules were set in place by politicians that never respected any of them - and worse, a lot of them made money by importing and selling back to the state masks and other PPE equipment). Most of the people, even i…

“Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution? I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone was saying about covid was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it. I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here…

In Spain the lockdown was deemed unconstitutional by the Tribunal Constitucional, our equivalent of the Supreme Court.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#684

Post by samhuk » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:02 PM UTC

yehosef wrote: post #650

wonderwonder wrote: post #642

Main thing this article seems to illustrate is that the federal government was blatantly violating the 1st amendment to silence viewpoints counter to it's own. I really don't care what a private platform does, the actions of the government far outweigh anything Twitter did in this case.

but it was a "noble lie" for the interest of the public. I think those are allowed.

Candidate for worst take in 2022?

Could you elaborate into what is noble about censoring the discussion about the safety of covid-related mitigations by official, recognised scientists?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#685

Post by jltsiren » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:03 PM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #554

jltsiren wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inl…

And yet Japan still experienced large waves of infection of every variant, prior to reopening the borders to tourists and after reopening the borders (which only happened properly in the last couple of months). Possibly because the borders weren't really closed as "essential" travel by Japanese nationals among others occurred, and of course, trade. Much to the chagrin of far too many nationalists the sakoku [1] is a…

The details matter.

Japan did not experience a major wave before the borders were reopened. The peaks were lower than in Europe and the US, and contact tracing never failed as badly.

Contact tracing was the key tool, at least before omicron. If there were sufficient resources for it and compliance was high enough, local outbreaks could be kept under control.

Contact tracing was also where international border closures helped. If somebody crosses a jurisdictional border with an infection, the first sign of trouble is usually when they test positive. By that time, they have often had plenty of time to infect other people. On the other hand, if the infection came from within the same jurisdiction, contact tracing may reach that person several days earlier.

And regarding essential travel and international trade, land borders make everything worse. When the goods travel by trucks, there are many people who cross borders and interact with the general population. With planes and ships, it's much easier to isolate the people who cross borders from everyone else. And with ships, the long journey acts as a natural quarantine, while the cargo volume per crewmember is much higher than with other forms of transport.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#686

Post by AlchemistCamp » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:04 PM UTC

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…

> Single layer cloth masks do nothing.

Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical?

In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#687

Post by ModernMech » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #511

jacquesm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Musk is the one who controls what is being released, so he’s shaping the entire narrative. This has been the case since the first of the so-called Twitter Files, which focused on Twitter responding to requests from the Biden campaign to remove Tweets. The context Musk had but didn’t release was that the tweets in question were nude photographs. Obviously that context changes the narrative considerably.

The other issue from that initial post was that requests from the actual government at the time, the Trump administration, were completely glossed over.

What’s the most telling is that despite having access to the information that would prove the strong claims surrounding these Files (government censorship! FBI paying Twitter! Twitter tilted for Democrats!), Musk withholds that information and instead tries to prove his case through innuendo and suggestion. Like you said, the meat is the e-mails. So why are we only getting to see a portion of them filtered through narrative spinning journalists? To me that says the strong information that would prove the Files doesn’t exist at all, so the strong claims of the Files are likely false.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#688

Post by BryantD » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:06 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #333

BryantD wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same people, though. RFK Jr. pivoted and incorporated anti-Covid vax rhetoric into the rest of his platform, and that’s bringing the anti-Covid vax conspiracists into the autism myth fold. And the existing anti-vax community fed into QAnon, as well documented by Marc-André Argentino[1]. This is the tricky problem. Trusting the marketplace of ideas works if everyone who participates is interested in spending…

And if they are acting with good intent. But some people really would like to see the world burn and there are enough of them that they can do real damage. All those conspiracies originate somewhere and quite a few of those people are well aware of the fact that what they are doing will cause damage.

I couldn’t agree more. In some cases the anti-vax movement is simply being used as a tool for power.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#689

Post by Nursie » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:07 PM UTC

bprieto wrote: post #683

Nursie wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution? I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone was saying about covid was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it. I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here…

In Spain the lockdown was deemed unconstitutional by the Tribunal Constitucional, our equivalent of the Supreme Court.

Interesting, thanks.

In the UK there barely is a constitution, and as much as it does exist, it really only governs how the different parts of the government interact with each other, and how they operate. As such 'unconstitutional' isn't really a thing there, which is one of the reasons I asked.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#690

Post by tristor » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:09 PM UTC

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…

> Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks

As a bit of a prepper, being a prepper is about being prepared. Being prepared means you don’t need to buy essential PPE in the midst of a crisis.

What I observed were people hoarding to intentionally cause supply shortages so they could price gouge on the secondary market. Scalpers in other words. Preppers and Scalpers are not the same thing and the continuous insinuations that they are is as offensive as it is stupid.

Preppers are the only reason many communities had PPE for medical staff. I donated respirators and P95 masks to my local hospital during COVID, exactly zero of which were purchased during the pandemic. In fact I didn’t buy any masks during the pandemic except a cloth mask later on.

Given that a situation like COVID was pretty much bound to happen sooner rather than later, most preppers consider biohazards as one of the primary things they prepare for.