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How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

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Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#641

Post by mrcwinn »

lettergram wrote: post #621
causi wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. All studies done at scale, in peer reviewed journals before and since the pandemic have shown that not to be the case. N95s work, if used properly, that’s it. If you work / have worked with people in biosafety labs they’ll tell you. What we did during the pandemic was effectively role play. Cloth masks, surgical mask…

I'm willing to believe your claim that only N95 masks work, and other options do nothing at all, but what am I to do with seemingly reliable information that states otherwise?

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

It's just one source, but I'm genuinely curious.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#642

Post by wonderwonder »

Main thing this article seems to illustrate is that the federal government was blatantly violating the 1st amendment to silence viewpoints counter to it's own. I really don't care what a private platform does, the actions of the government far outweigh anything Twitter did in this case.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#643

Post by pnf »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #551
yehosef wrote: post #492

Any discussion of this that ignores the role of vaccine manufacturers in this process are simply lacking. The government had no real incentive to push a policy against science except financial interests (and the influence of people with financial influence.) Case it point - the demonization of ivermectin - one of the safest drugs ever created that saved so many people's lives ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3446627…

You mean doctors like this Dr. Karas here one lost their license? As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer. “At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the…

Yes, definitely citing an arstechnica piece citing a lawsuit's claims by very credible inmates is the winning argument.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#644

Post by astrange »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #560
slg wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, there was already hoarding. This would have led to even more hoarding which would have led to even more deaths. Maybe it is just that I started this ordeal in a more cynical place than others, but this one example of the CDC not telling the full truth is not some earth-shattering revelation to me. The government has lied to us countless times. I assume they will continue to lie to us in the future. At lea…

The government lies, yes. The government shouldn't be upset that people think they are lying about big things if they are willing to lie about small things. Prior to COVID, the CDC and vaccination programs in general had a sterling reputation for helping you a an individual. So much so that Amish and Hassidic communities would sometimes get vaccines at their recommendation. That reputation is now out the window, at t…

The CDC has always “lied” in that it always gave advice no reasonable person would follow. That’s because that’s not their job - their job is to give you the risks without counting benefits or reasonableness.

For instance, absolutely nobody follows the CDC’s cooking recommendations and they say women should never drink alcohol because they might be unknowingly pregnant.

https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1414390050008276994

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#645

Post by themaninthedark »

arcticbull wrote: post #448
causi wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times. Lying to people about their personal health for the greater good of society gets you the Tuskegee Experiment.

Completely different, sorry, and a wildly disingenuous comparison. There was no public health crisis at the time that required this, let alone to run it for 40 years. Let's keep to intellectually honest discourse and avoid hyperbole shall we? This is a contentious enough topic as is.

Further down thread, we acknowledge that certain doctors were dosing people with medicine and lying to them about it.

>As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.

>“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

>As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.

Since this was in the middle of a public heath crisis, that behavior is acceptable and the doctor in question should not have lost his license, right?

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#646

Post by zdragnar »

ethanbond wrote: post #600
kevinmrose wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it have just been easier to explain it than to lie to the public and then continue to deny and defend the lying after it's already been exposed?

What lying? CDC et al never said masks don’t work. I don’t know how many times I need to repeat this.

The CDC may not have said those words, but the surgeon general absolutely did. There was plenty of conflicting messaging around the effectiveness of cloth masks as well.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#647

Post by astrange »

causi wrote: post #523
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…

Indeed. How many people saw the CDC lied about masks and then poisoned themselves because they thought the CDC was lying about ivermectin or hydrochloroquine? After she caught covid it took me days to convince my grandmother to stop taking ivermectin.

That might’ve worked if she had a worm infection. People who take ivermectin to treat worm infections have better health outcomes for covid, the cause being that worms are bad for you.

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#648

Post by yehosef »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #551
yehosef wrote: post #492

Any discussion of this that ignores the role of vaccine manufacturers in this process are simply lacking. The government had no real incentive to push a policy against science except financial interests (and the influence of people with financial influence.) Case it point - the demonization of ivermectin - one of the safest drugs ever created that saved so many people's lives ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3446627…

You mean doctors like this Dr. Karas here one lost their license? As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer. “At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the…

no, I mean other doctors that prescribe a safe drug.

If the inmates had too much, they had too much. And experimenting or giving a treatment without proper disclosure is wrong and the doctor should lose their license for that - if nothing else. But thanks for bringing that example because it shows the evil of experimenting on people without full disclosure.

Now if you want to talk about the incidence of heart-attacks and myocarditis after vaccines and the experiments that were run on the public without proper notification of their risks, we'd have an interesting discussion. As the twitter files show, any such discussion was suppressed because "the vaccines are safe" and anyone that say otherwise is "promoting misinformation".

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#649

Post by ethanbond »

SilasX wrote: post #632
ethanbond wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah see people say all this but the actual example they use is a thing that didn’t happen. The nuanced, correct message was that we don’t know if masks work. That’s what they said. What you heard was “masks don’t work.” So what we actually learned is that people are not capable of receiving nuanced messages, at least among the people who are pissed off about not having received a nuanced message (which they did).

Correct, we don’t know if masks work … in the same sense that we “don’t know” if parachutes work[1]. That is, we don’t (and can’t) do the level of randomized controlled trials that would precisely mimic real-world application. Nevertheless, we’re capable of appropriate risk based inference. We can verify that masks slow down the spread of airborne particles and we know SARS-type viruses spread that way. Combined with…

Yep, agreed with all of this which is why I think when it became the case that the general population wearing masks would not have negative impacts on supply for medical workers, it made sense to default to “wear masks.” When the gen pop wearing masks would have a negative impact on supply, it seems defensible at least to advocate against the population buying masks.

Note that what confuses people here is not that the consensus on whether masks work or not changed, but that it didn’t change. “We don’t know if masks work, don’t get them” turned to “we don’t know if masks work, start wearing them.”

I agree it would’ve helped the credibility issue a lot if they were more open about the supply calculus behind the scenes, but I’m personally pretty confident this would’ve yielded worse outcomes. No chance that the population wouldn’t have scrambled for masks and therefore no chance that the people who did actually in reality need them most would’ve gotten them.

Of course there’s a lot, a lot of room for criticism of the mask/PPE shortage existing at all, but obviously the solution to that looks different than the solution to “CDC said masks don’t work.”

Re: How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

#650

Post by yehosef »

wonderwonder wrote: post #642

Main thing this article seems to illustrate is that the federal government was blatantly violating the 1st amendment to silence viewpoints counter to it's own. I really don't care what a private platform does, the actions of the government far outweigh anything Twitter did in this case.

but it was a "noble lie" for the interest of the public. I think those are allowed.
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