How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

That kind of logic also invalidates this conversation because you don't know if your suggested approach would be better because we didn't try it either. I guess there is no point discussing any hypotheticals because it is all unknown.

>You seem to think that we've been living in a dystopia where governments have been lying to us forever, there's none you can trust, and everyone everywhere believes and knows this as if it were fact. I don't think that was anywhere close to true before the pandemic but I'm more likely to believe it today because of how many more people distrust their governments and the WHO because of their lies.

No, I do not think we live in a dystopia because I don't think "the government lied to us" is enough to merit this type of hyperbole. I also don't see how something like "the CDC lied to us in an attempt to save lives" is somehow more threatening than "the government lied about WMDs to start a war with Iraq" or "the government is not telling us about their borderline unconstitutional mass surveillance of American citizens". I just don't see how this is the lie that caused anyone distrust the US government. There are countless more nefarious examples of the government lying. This one at least has a very easy to understand altruistic motivation behind it.

In these circumstances capitalism directs us to the cheapest solution. Not the most robust solution. The solution is basically government as a guaranteed buyer. Yet this factory never had that and went out of business and even in Covid times didn’t come back afaik.

Finally remember that mask-nationalism was popping up in 2020. China was restricting exports of masks and so was the U.S. and Europe. The difficulty of acquiring masks was not to be underestimated. There were additional sordid details of government sponsored programs being used to personally enrich certain (relatives of potus) people.

And during the alpha strain of Covid it turns out the relatively low infectiveness combined with droplet control via cloth masks actually did the trick and reduced spread. Pediatric flu deaths went from ~150 to 1 in the 2020 season. One! All thanks to distancing and masks. We literally made a strain of the flu extinct via masks.

We've also had the CDC telling us the vaccines are safe and effective, when neither are strictly true. They may be less dangerous than getting a severe case of COVID, but they don't confer immunity, and they don't stop you from spreading it, in direct contradiction to other statements they've made.

Is it any wonder that people misremember who exactly told them that masks did or don't work, and when they heard it?

No, my OP and this thread's link is about government intervention, which then lead to social media action.

Whilst I do think social media platforms should have additional regulation once they are big enough to become the new public square, there's no need to go that far yet and I'm uncertain of the appropriate balance.

However when it comes to the government's own response, they should have higher bar for taking action due to the oppressive influence it can have backed by it's monopoly on force. And again I state that this should be serious scientific study as the minimum prerequisite for this bar.

> in times when there's a national crisis occurring & you have people continually posting about how to take off-label drugs causing shortages for people who actually need it & injury to those taking it incorrectly, you run into misinformation causing real tangible harm to people. You cannot just ignore that.

Just like you cannot ignore the horror of slipping into a tyrannical police state like China.

Instead of shadowbanning and actual banning I was previously in favour of fact checking and warning labels under legitimately harmful information. Unfortunately even this tool has been abused by being misapplied to factual information, as well as non-harmful opinions. I have yet to see an intervention method since COVID that hasn't been corrupted to oppress the population, so I'm inclined to think that some harm is an inevitable tradeoff for living in a free society.

Personally I think the platform is better today. The most "journalist" scream about it being unsafe the more I believe Elon is doing a great job, because I do not trust anyone at Washington Post, NyTimes, NBC, CBS, CNN, or any other major main stream propaganda source, and I trust even less their politically baised "research" non-profits.

>but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room.

No they were not, the most recent one fired was literally former FBI. Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". they are for "free speech" the same way the modern ACLU is, only if you have the "correct" speech

>>They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.

Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.

>>Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.

If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM, instead were more worried about suppressing political speech and carrying the water for one political party.