Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation... Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?
The evidence?
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The media's lab leak fiasco
161–170 of 736 posts
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#162> ... Evidence in favor of leak theory lowers the status of the media and raises the status of Tom Cotton but doesn’t drastically alter the policy landscape. That's a very peculiar statement coming from someone who just admitted to missing the 21st century's biggest story to date. And I suspect he's now being too quick to discount the effect on not only the political landscape, but the journalistic landscape as well.
It's incredible. If the lab leak theory is true, then a virus escaped from a lab in China and caused the deaths of millions of people. And at the time this happened, the Chinese government did everything it could to hide that from the world. And for some reason, a large part of the US media and tech establishments went along with the ruse and were nice enough to censor or attempt to discredit/destroy anyone who sugge…
If it had been a lab in Colorado, under the nominal supervision of some Trump crony, I think it indeed would have been something of “a big deal from a policy perspective”!
I like Yglesias, but it’s pretty blinkered to limit “policy impact” to “what to do about biological threat research”. Maybe this means having unanswerable autocracies around is bad and we should try (however ineffectually) to change that state of affairs?
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#163Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation but this situation surprises me. Lab leak always seemed plausible and non-crazy even if you think the odds are against it. I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
This is a good example of why opponents to actions against misinformation oppose it. Nobody should make these calls because the wrong call will be made eventually, and the power to silently mediate and manipulate discourse is very tempting.
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
They never will, because there is no such intelligence, it was reported as a statement from an unnamed intelligence official. It's garbage.
It is really a shame people fall for this garbage after Iraq.
My favorite over the top intelligence claim from that era was that Saddam had a "human shredder" which he used on his enemies. Turns out it never existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein%27s_alleged_shr...
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…
Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.
On the contrary, actors who are bad at judging what qualifies as a "good" idea should be removed from the filtering process.
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation... Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?
The evidence?
"Evidence" is not a person, and can't make decisions. Decisions are made by people, who we hope are informed by evidence. Who are these people and how are they chosen? What mechanisms exist to evaluate their effectiveness and recall them when they fail? These questions are currently being answered by American corporations, which is not confidence inspiring.
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And guess where else lab leak was suppressed? Here on HN." And maybe is still getting suppressed? This post was #1 on HN one minute, and then, less than an hour later, it's down on page 3, ranked #88. Does the HN ranking algorithm really bury stuff that quickly?
It set off the flamewar detector as well as getting a lot of user flags. I've turned that off now. As for 'suppressed' please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27309238 .
Ok thx for the reply
I was just dismayed to see the story sink so fast (but I get it now) — the article involves an interesting discussion of how scientific consensus is represented in the media and how it relates to social media, which seem like very HN-friendly topics… shame that so many are eager to flag something like this based on (as seems likely) some sort of forbidden-topic litmus test
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#168Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
And today Facebook lifted that ban: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"?
Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mentions "man-made". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#169I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".
Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same."
Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut.
I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.
Re: The media's lab leak fiasco
#170Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…
Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.
I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.