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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#811

Post by int_19h »

slg wrote: post #526
int_19h wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trying to convince people" implies a good faith approach - i.e. being open about what you want and why. Lying to people that masks are no good is not "convincing" them to not buy masks - it's misleading them to do so. And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domai…

I don't know, I think eminent domain is in the Constitution because the founders knew that was an extremely dangerous power of the government to just take things by force from the populous. There is no Constitutional requirement that our leaders, elected or not, have to be truthful with us 100% of the time. It is the difference between action and speech. Action is generally more dangerous. It is a little weird to me…

Yes, it is an extremely dangerous power. It is also, unfortunately, sometimes necessary, especially in emergencies. I'm generally strongly opposed to eminent domain when it's used for "economic development" and other such goals, but COVID was a textbook example where it was warranted.

And as for the difference between "speech" and "action", what the released emails show is that the government didn't stop at speech - it used Twitter as a proxy for censorship, and censorship is an action.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#812

Post by int_19h »

slg wrote: post #770
evandale wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, confiscating privately owned equipment and telling people you need them in hospitals is better than lying to people and telling them their equipment doesn't work because secretly they need them for hospitals. I don't know why you think that's more dystopian.

The government coming to my home and demanding I hand over my private property that the government tells me is vital for protecting my health during a pandemic is pretty dystopian. If you believe that the government lying to us is dystopian, then we have always lived in a dystopia.

Nobody suggested that the government come to your home. If somebody already has a stash of masks, let them have it. I was talking about the masks that were in the warehouses (or en route to them).

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#813

Post by hintymad »

bo1024 wrote: post #434
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.

Easy answer: people care about policy, not facts. They will grab onto facts that support the policy they want, and push away facts that don't. The more politicized the issue, as with COVID, the more fearful they become that any doubt or nuance will cede ground to the "other side". And they're right in the sense that the "other side" is doing the same thing. For example, every news headline about the pandemic had one…

This is really sad. Facts matter, especially for issues of life and death. Heck, facts matter, even for politics.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#814

Post by cf141q5325 »

insanitybit wrote: post #797
jdthedisciple wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you didn't understand parent comment.

I did.

I dont think its possible to can answer this with the amount of certainty you have. At least i truly hope it. Because if you actually did understand it and still answer this way, you just acknowledged that you are way past wanting to figure out reality.

My point is that you dont have the competence to determine what not to verify because doing so robs you of the ability to determine the implications. Which is commonly caused by a lack of emotional maturity to deal with this inherent problem of stupidity humans have. By still not wanting to think about it you accept all the problems you apparently now know exist and just ignore it in favor of a better self image. This is not an attack on personal shortcommings but something every human has to deal with.

And you didnt just make this decision personally, but think its a good idea to push this onto other people. That means "the problem" from your initial point is people trying to deal with a difficult problem you prefer to ignore and offer no substitute solution to while knowing how horrible the consequences will be. Put over the top, its people having the audacity to think about stuff that runs the risk of poking holes in your delusion once you hear about it.

I dont believe you actually mean to say this. This would be malice. Its screw reality and its consequences in favor of your feelings. It would be conscious solopsism.

Please tell me how i am wrong instead of coming up with stories about how you get to do it regardless. I truly want there to be a cooperative solution and i am really confident that it should be possible. We should be able to agree that figuring out reality is something we all have incentives to do that outweigh wanting to feel right.

I am very sorry that the posts are this long, but the shorter this gets, the more confrontational this sounds and the less likely useful progress is.

edit: I also wrote such a lengthy response so you hopefully realize what you just told the entire world with your personal details in your account info. Because this could qualify as consent for getting "patched" for a lack of a better term. Having you do that was not my intent.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#815

Post by autoexec »

Scoundreller wrote: post #619
autoexec wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been w…

In Canada, it was partly a coverup for the government destroying the N95 & PPE stockpile it put together after SARS1, because it expired before another pandemic happened. At the federal and provincial levels. And no, they didn’t replace the stock. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p... https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081

Our stockpile wasn't maintained and replenished either. I don't think anyone got in trouble for that failure, but I hope they did and I just didn't hear about it.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#816

Post by autoexec »

bee_rider wrote: post #736
code_runner wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the government quietly convinced all major retailers to stop selling masks that would’ve been 10000x more detrimental than the mixed messaging early on. If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.

It would have had worse short term political consequences because it would have been an unpopular decision. But it wouldn’t have reinforced the worldview of conspiracy theorists. They screwed up a bunch of things during COVID, but not many really trustworthy organizations actually just straight-up lied. Having something concrete to point to can’t help.

I don't think it would have even been unpopular. Most people understand that the masks needed to go to first responders.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#817

Post by ethanbond »

zdragnar wrote: post #805
ethanbond wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The officials are bad/idiots/corrupt/evil because I didn't get nuanced messaging" You did get nuanced messaging "Yeah well... Mandela effect!"

We got mixed messages . Some didn't offer nuance, others did. The conflation of messages boiled down to the simplest, and misattributed. 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 statemen…

"Vaccine is safe" does not and has never meant "has zero possible adverse events."

"Vaccine is effective" does not and has never meant "confers 100% protection from infection."

The vaccines remain both safe and effective in the same way that e.g. Tylenol is safe and effective. If you want the fully nuanced definition of these statements mean in the Tylenol case or the vaccine case, you can literally look up the data from the clinical trials and see it. Of course your rebuttal to this will be, "well, I can find X dataset with real world evidence of Y claim" and I'll say: well, there's a reason real world evidence is (counterintuitively, given the name) not considered to be very good evidence in pharma world. That's because it's incredibly hard to isolate variables in analysis of real world data, even assuming the data exists in an analyzable format (which it generally doesn't - also contrary to most people's expectations).

Hmm no, it's no wonder that people misremember who exactly told them what. We have a shitshow of a media ecosystem and you have "contrarians" like yourself who are pumping nonstop garbage like "CDC said X" into it when CDC did not, in fact, say X.

Mistakes were certainly made and everyone was learning as we went, but your line of inquiry actually points pretty solidly away from the solutions we actually need: 1) there should NEVER be PPE shortages in the richest country on earth, 2) there should RARELY be testing capacity shortages and sitting presidents should NEVER deliberately slow down pathogen testing, and 3) there should be much better data infrastructure that allows us to understand all of these things in real time.

Some blame for each of these lays at CDC feet, some at FDA, some at NIH, and so on, but fixing these requires an entirely different conversation than the one we're having.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#818

Post by nh23423fefe »

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.

new account spamming lies and snark

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#819

Post by foota »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #763
foota wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about censored, but from what I remember there was a bit of an about face on masking. This timeline seems to mesh with what I remember: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd... And I think some platforms (specifically, I believe YouTube and Twitter, but maybe others) prevented or de-funded etc., content that was contradictory to CDC guidelines.

Some lies are necessary. Put yourself in the shoes of a public health official. You just got home from shopping for groceries, and the whole toilet paper aisle was empty. You know very well that the same thing will happen with masks and other PPE needed by medical personnel if you tell the truth, and that this will likely result in an even-higher death toll. What do you do?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I was responding factually to the assertion. I didn't state whether I thought it was right or speculate on the motive. On that though:

I agree that medical workers should have received priority for supplies they need, both because they obviously need to be kept healthy to help everyone, and because it seems fair to do so.

I doubt the CDC would base their guidance on that though, although it does say that medical workers need them more, their statements imply that normal people didn't need to wear them to prevent the spread of the disease, which is what the CDC was after, not necessarily stating that it wouldn't help people to wear them, although I think the assertion was also somewhat that it wouldn't help people to wear them. Of course, this changed as they learned more. Even today, I believe this is the state of things, masking helps you somewhat, but it's even more beneficial for the people around you.

That said, I wouldn't approve of the CDC giving false guidance about masks to protect medical workers. Even if medical workers should get priority, and the government had to enforce that, the CDC should be trustworthy, and shouldn't lie, even if it's beneficial.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#820

Post by concordDance »

timerol wrote: post #680
concordDance wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon seems vulnerable to ideological splitting where you get two parallel worlds that don't talk to each other. E.g. one that believes that transwomen aren't women and that Africans are less intelligent and one that doesn't.

"Vulnerable" is an odd word to use there. "Ideological splitting" is the way humans have interacted since the Tower of Babel. Forcing everyone into the same conversation is a guaranteed way to produce conflict. I would say "Mastodon facilitates ideological splitting as a way to have more pleasant conversations and less absurd arguments."

Prolonged non hostile exposure is what prevents conflict. Otherwise you get radicalization.
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