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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#601

Post by lmm »

slg wrote: post #408
caddemon wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYT can also be held liable for things like slander though, right? If social media sites try to claim they are not responsible for any content posted, that does feel a bit like trying to have their cake and eat it too.

I'm not sure the goal here. Do you want increased or decreased moderation? Repealing 230 and making social media companies liable will lead to more moderation and bans not less.

The goal is clear lines of responsibility. If Facebook is responsible for every post, that's ok. If every individual is responsible for their posts, that's also ok. It's when it's blurry that there's a problem.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#602

Post by paganel »

deadalus wrote: post #5

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Twitter users got banned in early February 2020 because they were sharing images and videos from locked-down Wuhan that were deemed as inappropriate.

I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#603

Post by goatinaboat »

deadalus wrote: post #5

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#604

Post by lhnz »

hermitdev wrote: post #581
vosper wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article) https://taibb…

This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.

The other issue is that they fail to categorise their "opponents" arguments into strong and weak claims.

So you often end up with articles arguing against strawmen, where the strawmen is considered to be the only view held by the other side. This isn't really useful.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#605

Post by mike_d »

shaicoleman wrote: post #489
admax88q wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FDA doesn't tell people what to research, it tells the public what existing research confirms is safe to use. If a bunch of scientists think iverwhatever is viable they can do a proper study on it and get it published and peer reviewed. To "drop everything" would be criminally negligent, there's lots of things that can and should be researched in parallel.

Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals. That said, there are published RCT showing Ivermectin effectiveness. In my second link on my first comment, there's a talk about the overwhelming data, censorship and hindrances for publishing. Sharing evidence on Ivermectin - Dr. Tess Lawrie https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=5756

Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains.

The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses.

WHO looked at these facts and data from 16 trials that yielded “very low certainty" of efficacy before recommending against its use, but leaving the door open for further research suggesting additional trials were needed.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#607

Post by textgel »

deadalus wrote: post #5

Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.

And a reminder that the majority of HN supported them in doing that because we needed to "fight disinformation".

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#608

Post by svara »

roca wrote: post #254
svara wrote: post #209

This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion. This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wu…

We haven't found an animal host for SARS-CoV-2 yet, after more than 12 months. It took six months to find an animal host for SARS and less than a year for MERS. The incentive for the Chinese government to find a SARS-CoV-2 animal host is much much higher than for either of those viruses. Failure to find the host is not proof of lab origin, but the longer the search goes on unsuccessfully, the more the probabilities s…

> No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.

Wuhan is in China, and the government there is relatively unfazed by social media excitement in other countries. It would not have changed a thing.

In early 2020, literally the only thing the story had going for it was that it was more exciting than the alternative, and that it made China look bad. That absolutely is the kind of story you ignore. I'm sure you remember those were heady times, and there was a lot of bullshit to sift through. Some of that bullshit we still have to deal with today.

Based on what we know now, we shouldn't discount the possibility of some involvment of the lab, but that is absolutely not the same thing as believing that it was responsible, or even that the virus was made in some research programme.

I really wish we would see a little bit more of the cool professionalism that you often see in air crash investigations, where everybody understands that assigning blame before the facts are known is quite likely to make you look like a fool later on, and will hurt people for no reason.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#609

Post by codeflow2202 »

mike_d wrote: post #605
shaicoleman wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem that there is censorship on publishing in the big journals. That said, there are published RCT showing Ivermectin effectiveness. In my second link on my first comment, there's a talk about the overwhelming data, censorship and hindrances for publishing. Sharing evidence on Ivermectin - Dr. Tess Lawrie https://player.vimeo.com/video/554350476?autoplay=1#t=5756

Effectiveness is not the only criteria that experts need to evaluate for treatments. Ivermectin is fairly easy to overdose on, and people started self-treating prophylactically because it was easy to find from veterinary supply chains. The majority of available Ivermectin also contained inactive ingredients that had no been safety tested on humans, again because of its primary veterinary uses. WHO looked at these fac…

This is exactly what is being put into discussion. This “very low certainty" doesn't stand against the amount of research that is being released on a daily basis. It's also weird that so many people can selectively blindly trust the WHO on this topic, while at the same time, commenting on how the whole scientific apparatus can be so wrong on a related subject.

Also I'm not buying into this theory that we shouldn't allow an effective treatment, just because someone is supposedly overdosing the veterinary version of the drug. It might be partially true for addicting drugs I suppose, but even in this case, that's why we have doctors and prescriptions.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#610

Post by thaumasiotes »

Animats wrote: post #417
neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.

You reminded me of this piece by Glenn Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so...

> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.

> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.

> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.

> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.

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