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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#771

Post by maxerickson »

Karsteski wrote: post #484
jacquesm wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid was never dangerous to In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50. And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.

Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments

The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never".

If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#772

Post by peter422 »

at_a_remove wrote: post #145
peter422 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, prov…

This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for u…

The initial safety trials for the vaccines involved tens of thousands and by the time you had the chance to get the vaccine it had been given to millions of people (with any adverse effects tracked). One of the vaccines was pulled off the market for super rare side effects!

And at the same time, it was obviously, provably known that the vaccine was better than covid. Did you know covid causes myocarditis too? More often than the vaccine does?

If your standard for informed consent is more information that was available for the covid vaccines then I assure you the other health decisions you are making in your life are not meeting that standard. You also aren't the best at evaluating risk. It's very much like being against seatbelt mandates because they sometimes cause injuries in car crashes.

Now it is a separate question of whether the current vaccine policy makes any sense, but its a much less impactful question because the policies from 2021 mostly did the job of protecting people.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#773

Post by BryantD »

kodah wrote: post #766
BryantD wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s wild how we’ve completely forgotten the fomite hypothesis that was assumed for the first couple of months of the pandemic. Remember the guy who wanted us to bleach our vegetables? Remember all the distilleries making hand sanitizer because touch was the only thing that mattered? You don’t have to assume the CDC was full of lies if you remember that they were working from an inaccurate hypothesis at a time when r…

It wasn't a bad thesis, that would be giving them credit they don't deserve: https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8... Dr Fauci feared the rising costs of masks and whether the medical system would have enough. That wasn't his decision to make, but he made it. He later started using a new line, which is that they weren't aware that 40-50% of people were asymptomatic which was irrelevant for the…

That’s a great read! Fauci explains what facts he didn’t have at the time and why learning those facts changed his mind.

If Covid was only transmissible by people with symptoms, you could control spread by asking those people to stay home and everyone else is clear — no masks needed. If it’s impossible to know if you’re infectious without testing, masks make more of a difference. More effective ones are obviously better.

I certainly knew at the time that I was triaging masks because health care workers were more important than me. I still have a note on my fridge from February thanking me for donating some N95s I had from wildfire season. The trade off was pretty clear.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#774

Post by wizofaus »

Klinky wrote: post #700
ajvs wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Misinformation is spread on platforms such as Twitter, so it made sense for the government to communicate with Twitter and let them know what it considered to be a good course of action This part I disagree with, because what is misinformation is unknownable before serious scientific study is done. It just makes the government look untrustworthy if they flip-flop from "masks are pointless" to "masks are essential"…

Com'on, someone linking to a poorly done study claiming it proves "drug x cures COVID" isn't misinformation? Someone posting about 5G or Bill Gates being the source of the infection isn't misinformation? Someone going on some racist tirade about Chinese people isn't misinformed hate speech? You think we should just allow every crackpot theory or idea until scientifically proven inaccurate? Plenty of people were tryin…

Well if nothing else, blocking such posts has the real possibility of making the posters even more certain they've uncovered some conspiracy, and driving them to less well-monitored corners of the interwebs, where misinformation breeds like a virus. I'd agree posts containing suggestions that directly contravene expert medical advice should be tagged with warnings though.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#775

Post by indoclay »

yehosef wrote: post #722
wonderwonder wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he is being sarcastic. I think...

yes - search "noble lie" covid and you'll understand the reference.

Looking at the results disparity for "noble lie" and +covid both in the news and search tabs in Google is really eye opening given everything that has been released with twitter's moderation tooling with regards to deboosting and view filtering.

It seems only conservative and libertarian sources are covering the recent deposition in which he confessed that he knowingly made false public health statements in the early days of the pandemic. Both moderation and policy decisions were based on these statements.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#776

Post by clairity »

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…

yet, masks did nothing other than stoke fears and division, as you're doing here. our masking behavior was, and continues to be, irrational, in that it was done at the wrong times with ill-conceived intent. people worried about masking against strangers, when most transmission happened from someone you knew and trusted (probably 95+%). they were generally ineffective by design (the CDC was initially correct in assessing that (the way we wear) masks would not be a panacea for covid, but that was politically unpalatable which is why it was walked backed so haphazardly. masks, and all the CDC outrage around them, was effectively mediopolitical redirection of our anger toward each other rather than toward our corporatocratic institutions to quickly and correctly assess the threat and then appropriately deploy (only) effective measures.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#778

Post by newsclues »

sampo wrote: post #622
kevinmrose wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they still don't know if masks work? Can we get a concrete answer on this at some point? It seems like this type of back and forth messaging is the problem. Maybe we should all apologize to people who questioned the need to wear masks if we still don't know whether or not they're effective.

> So they still don't know if masks work? It took decades to get medical doctors to start washing their hands [1]. It took decades to get people to use seat belts in cars [2]. It took decades to accept that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer [3]. Masks work [4], but it will take decades before this is accepted through the chain of command in the medical profession, and not only by front line science. [1] https://en.w…

Fluid mechanics are well understood.

There are people who understand how air moves, and have a good understanding of how viruses travel.

Masks have been hailed as a silver bullet (so that people don't have to get active and eat well and be healthy, and government and businesses don't have to upgrade HVAC systems), to the point where people think they work outside!

Are there masks that work? Yes. Is that cheap surgical mask or a cotton one really effective? No.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#779

Post by wizofaus »

indoclay wrote: post #775
yehosef wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes - search "noble lie" covid and you'll understand the reference.

Looking at the results disparity for "noble lie" and +covid both in the news and search tabs in Google is really eye opening given everything that has been released with twitter's moderation tooling with regards to deboosting and view filtering. It seems only conservative and libertarian sources are covering the recent deposition in which he confessed that he knowingly made false public health statements in the early…

The first article google returns is on slate.com which hardly qualifies as conservative/ libertarian. And it was fairly critical of Fauci for his suggestion mask usage was not recommended which he supposedly made in order to prevent a run on them.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#780

Post by denton-scratch »

wrycoder wrote: post #670
denton-scratch wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

If you can blow visible smoke through the mask, then it’s ineffective against SARS2. In either direction. If you remove an N95 in a smokey environment, you’ll immediately smell the smoke, while you didn’t before you removed it. Exception: if someone is close enough to hit you with droplets when they speak (a foot or so), then a procedure mask is better than nothing.

well, I'm a heavy smoker; I'm not troubled by other people's smoke, and I usually don't wear a mask while smoking :-)

The last time I "gave up" smoking, I said to the doctor that I was expecting to get less winter colds. She said I was completely wrong, and that I should expect to get everything that was going around; that tobacco smokers maintain a lung environment that is hostile to anything living, including microbes, and that quitters can expect to catch everything that's going.

I have no idea whether that was true. But I'm still standing - yeah, yeah, yeah.

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