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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#891

Post by cbsmith »

a_bonobo wrote: post #34
RyanShook wrote: post #20

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think the longest lasting legacy of covid will be the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

I think Covid (and all the anti-vax grift around it) was the last straw, exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system. It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow: >We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go o…

We're over-indexing on institutional failures and failing to consider non-institutional failure rates.

Institutions fail, and when they do, it's a huge disaster. Absent institutions, the general public also fails, and when they do, it's a huge disaster.

Now, compare the failure rates.

When individuals fail, we seem to think, either "well, they'll get smarter for the next time" or "well, I'm smart, so that won't happen to me" (the famous last words of every mark that walked the earth), yet when institutions fail, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, "institutions always fail"... this despite institutions effectively being composed of individuals, but with systemic checks and balances in place that attempt to mitigate for the failings of both individuals and institutions.

There's a long line of con men, fraudsters, quacks, etc. (let alone strategic/systemic adversaries) cheering in the bleachers, hoping that the public will decide that institutions cannot help and that "doing your own research" is the path to success.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#892

Post by cbsmith »

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…

> 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.

That's not what they said, which kind of highlights just how much misinformation was indeed being spewed well before then.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#893

Post by 20after4 »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #879
denton-scratch wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 micro…

Wow...I'd never heard such before.

I saw a few studies that seemed to point to evidence that smoking reduces the risk of contracting COVID. It was too late as I already quit smoking thinking that the opposite would be true.

I haven't started smoking again, despite the potential health benefits associated with smoking.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#894

Post by cbsmith »

code_runner wrote: post #706
themitigating wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID." Can you provide the source for this?

I have personally had discussions with people about this. I’m about as liberal as they come, but a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo. It’s still weird that I feel the need to clarify my political stance on an apolitical issue like this. As time went on messaging improved, but the initial confusion was definitely there. Nobody knew what was go…

> "a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo."

I think any reasonable person can acknowledge there's a huge leap between "I was confused by what you said" and "YOU LIED TO ME!!!!"

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#895

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

steeve wrote: post #737
DrThunder wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't draw the line. Some of you have a real problem understanding the entire meaning of free speech. If you just think a few steps ahead you'll understand that if you "draw the line" then someone has to be the arbiter of truth. That arbiter will not always be on your side as we've seen over and over throughout history. If you see someone touting a blatant lie you only need o refute it with actual evidence. Suppr…

"Some of you": nice. You do sound like someone who never had to decide anything in their life and thinks only theoretically, disregarding reality. Absolute free speech is dividing by zero, basically.

why are you moving goalposts?

parent did not say you are free to yell fire in a crowded theater

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#896

Post by cbsmith »

devtul wrote: post #418
yongjik wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in the US, but not worldwide. When you compare, countries where citizens trusted the government and generally followed the government's plans fared better than countries where individuals fought for their rights to choose what they think was best for them. IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together…

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

This would seem to presume an opaque system whose workings are entirely unknowable with divine providence... rather than something constructed, operated, and controlled by humans.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#897

Post by cbsmith »

bigtex wrote: post #569
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…

We knew in March 26, 2020 it was not the Spanish flu because the data from the cruise ship diamond princess came back and the cfr was 1.1%. This was a shipped filled with the most vulnerable, obese people over 65. We should have never closed schools or lockdown in the USA. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w

I think you're missing the aspect of Spanish flu that presents the threat. CFR doesn't define the threat.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#898

Post by SilasX »

ethanbond wrote: post #852
SilasX wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Again, CDC did not say masks aren't effective. They said we don't know if they are. This was and largely remains true. Like I said, it was "true" only in the sense that "we don't know if parachutes work [to save you're life in freefall from an aircraft]", which is to say, it's criminally bad to communicate that as your advice, given the costs and benefits to the user. There was no great shift in evidence that caused…

> In what world is that the less-bad outcome? The completely plausible world in which our healthcare providers wouldn't have been able to get any effective PPE during the initial wave and died, became seriously ill, or refused to work en masse in the first month of the pandemic? Explain why that was not a believable risk in Jan/Feb 2020?

Right, you’re continuing with the assumption that the hoarding problem was noticeably different between the two worlds. But any one hoarder can cancel out the restraint of 10,000 people. The scaling doesn’t work in your favor there. What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply. You’d need to be able to point to healthcare workers who procured masks solely because they didn’t get bought because everyone was thinking “yeah Fauci’s right, masks increase the spread because I’ll touch my face more”.

There was no such spared supply. It was either saved by retail throttling or state pre-emption, not because it was withering unwanted on the shelves.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#899

Post by cbsmith »

t0bia_s wrote: post #495

How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true. The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.

> How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true.

The Darwinian nature of conspiracy theories mean that if they didn't look like the truth, they'd not really establish much of an audience.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#900

Post by Klinky »

ajvs wrote: post #807
Klinky wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ruling party wasn't on my team and was often a source of misinformation during the height of the COVID pandemic. If I got banned for saying Bill Gates conspiracies were bullshit, then it sounds like that social media platform wasn't receptive to what I was saying. Boo hoo. Are you suggesting you'd force social media platforms to carry all voices, no matter what they're saying? How would you achieve that? Would co…

> Are you suggesting you'd force social media platforms to carry all voices, no matter what they're saying? How would you achieve that? Would community & content quality guidelines become illegal? 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 ne…

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

I don't see a problem with private and public sector collaboration, it happens all the time. Not all communications between Twitter and the government resulted in Twitter taking action, and even when Twitter took action it does not mean they did so outside their own community guidelines.

>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.

So which is it? You want regulation or you don't? Stop speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

>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.

No, governments are expected to lead and provide information to their citizens on urgent matters. In a situation like COVID you can't wait 12 - 24 months for comprehensive scientific meta-analysis studies to confirm things. It seems you want a very hands off approach during a national crisis. I assure you this would not go over well, and is just as reprehensible(e.g. lackadaisical responses to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana or Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico), as an overly heavy handed approach(e.g. China welding people's doors shut).

Also my original reply was regarding your claim that it's not possible to disprove misinformation without serious scientific study. That statement in and of itself is misinformation. You do not need exhaustive proof to show an in-vitro study does not mean a drug is a cure for COVID, or to show confounding variables, or that there were zero cited sources for claims being made in a post.

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

You also cannot ignore a million+ dead people, many of whom were likely duped by charlatans into believing something that eventually lead to their demise. As you note later, you're fine with this harm, it's the cost of "freedom", except you don't actually want a private company to do as it pleases it sounds like, yet you also seem to lack any tangible action items or regulations you want applied. It seems like you just want to put your hands in your pockets. I dunno?

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