It was deeply disturbing to me that throughout the COVID epidemic many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID.
Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances.
I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.
The fear and groupthink was so strong at the time that even pointing out the existence of dissenting voices was enough to get you labeled as a selfish grandma killer conspiracy theorist.
I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.
> Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances.
The problem was a lot of these people that came on TV/radio weren't actually doing anything but being the same thing as Tucker Carlson in just "asking questions" in a provocative way but not actually testing hypotheses or doing research.
If you watched something like the UCSF Grand Rounds of Covid you would have seen all the research/questions/hypotheses presented and discussed regularly. They are all on youtube.
There will be no "chilling effect" in the scientific community for a long time because the actual practicing scientists/doctors acted as they should have and did the things you claimed to not have been done.
The worst thing is, that you could point out the wrong stuff, and both the platform and some very loud users would attack you even for pointing out the conflicting positions from the same source.
From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
I'm not that old or fat to be in any risk groups, so I got vaccinated to protect my (old) parents... and back then it was "get vaccinated and you won't get it, not spread it" (plus herd immunity), and not long after: "yes, you can get it, you can spread it, but chances of death are marginally lower"
Then one discusson on /r/conspiracy about something unrelated, and bam, banned from most of the from page subreddits.
My reddit account was permanently suspended for upvoting COVID lockdown skepticism. I'm in Texas, too - I'm half tempted to use the recent 5th circuit decision to force them to reinstate my account purely out of spite.
There are multiple issues on which asking questions can get you deplatformed, or even threaten your career. I think there were always things that were considered too important to question in society, but those were traditionally relegated to the religious sphere. They were religious facts that are too sacred to question. Now there are scientific facts that are too sacred to question, and that's dangerous.
Even now, very little to no science based decision are being made and reporting of test data has all but stopped; would not even be surprised to learn that the reporting of other data, for example deaths, is intentionally being “shaped” to fit the desired narrative.
Also, governments are just about the last organization on earth who should be trusted to be the sole arbiters and deciders of what The Science™ is, and who may and may not question it and in what manner.
Truth (and therefore science) is the most powerful tools we have to hold corrupt tyrants and authoritarians who would rule us to account. It's not ta all disturbing or surprising to me to see the ruling government/corporate power structure censor and bully and attack anybody questioning their authority. This is what these people do, it's their nature.
What was disturbing to me was how many self-proclaimed people of science, brave resisters of government and corporate abuse, and fighters for rights and freedom immediately turned into government apologists and bullies.
Correct, but those checks and balances don't come from reaching your hand into the fringe theory hat, grabbing whichever one is most convenient, and proudly demanding that policy should give it equal weight to consensus science.
> many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID
Blame the administration at the time. Judging by comments here, it seems like the current government is a bit more open about things.
Because there were lots of uncredentialed or poorly credentialed "doctors" and "researchers" making destructive claims. Society's meme regulating function is not that nuanced.
I blame the whackos for poisoning the well. (Let's also include well-meaning MDs and bio-related fields who don't actually know about epidemiology)
And even if you were an appropriately credentialed expert, if you weren't in a position to make policy decisions before the pandemic, then why would you suddenly expect to have influence during a crisis? That only happens in movies.
To me the core of this issue is that sometimes government officials truly believe their missions are more important than free speech. They may think that their job is actually to suppress free speech unfortunately.
Especially common is for national security to override free speech in the minds of government officials. They can easily convince themselves that they need to suppress certain viewpoints in order to save many lives. It just coincidentally also saves their own jobs.
I think unfortunately that young people would prefer less free speech and for the government to enforce more confirming perspectives.
One other core issue for people who want the tech companies to stop listening to government to consider is the fact that the government has police, guns, prisons, and legal sanctions available to enforce it's policy decisions.
>Especially common is for national security to override free speech in the minds of government officials. They can easily convince themselves that they need to suppress certain viewpoints in order to save many lives. It just coincidentally also saves their own jobs.
Non-disclosure of secret information that you willingly make yourself privy to is not suppression of free speech.
basically agree as a US Citizen - let's think about the psychology of public policy just for a minute. When given an "order", upon hearing information that directs behavior that is not your choice or is new in some way, combined with restriction, inconvenience or most directly, feels threatening.. then a common personal reaction is to deny, disclaim, reject or attack the messenger and/or the message.
Public policy is much older than the USA.. people with skills and methods in this area are not new to this reaction.. So the playing field is set.
The age of Monarchy saw many obviously awful abuses of mono- or unilateral messaging.. "By decree of the King .. this that or the other"
Certain religious groups in association with Monarchy did so even more.. into the private lives of people. So a founding principle of the purposefully diverse USA was.. free speech. You cannot be sent to prison for making fun of the King nor publicly defending prostitution .. for example. But here it gets difficult.. Obviously strong minds and wills have strong reactions. The social upheaval politically in 20th Century Europe had a high cost socially.
But now, in the USA, we have credentialed experts in Science being silenced, not refuted. This is a new modern "low" and the use of technology to de-platform harkens directly back to ANATHEMA or ex-communication reaction.. it is very, very dark days for speech in the USA.
The central issue in these cases are the difference between the following two scenarios:
1. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will".
2. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way".
The former is perfectly legitimate, and exactly what e.g. public health agencies ought to be doing: offering opinions and advice to the private sector and public. The latter is a first amendment violation.
Presumably, some of these cases will also turn on whether there was an implicit regulatory threat in the "recommendations" given. In some cases, according to this article, the threats seem to have been fairly explicit.
My personal take on this is that s.230 protections should not extend to companies using any kind of specialized "algorithm" to dictate what appears in a user's default feed on the website.
A feed or timeline view should be simply that: a scrollable list of the most recent visible things from people you have shown a specific interest in (follow/subscribe/whatever), and it should be the default view for the platform. Anyone deviating from that to add their cool special sauce should be excluded from those protections because that's editorializing their content.
If they want to have some "explore" section that does the algorithmic magic, sure, but it should be opt-in.
Carve out specific rules for users not logged in that can show the basic stuff (e.g.: "most interacted" -- likes and/or comments, "Latest from most subscribed"), perhaps a carve-out by region.
Disallow banning people except specifically for extreme ToS violations, harassment, and other criminal activity. Apps must provide robust anti-harassment features (block lists, inability to tag users who have blocked you, those don't show up in search, etc.), reporting mechanisms, etc.
If you deviate from these you lose s.230 and are open to being sued the same way newspapers are for their editorial content.
This is a good summary of some of the recent revelations into how far the USG has been pushing into strong-arming online and traditional media outlets alike into suppressing critical speech.
I think it’s interesting how the author tip-toed into tying in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed.
It’s a hot potato, but it’s exactly where these efforts lead, from ostensibly “well-meaning and necessary” public health efforts into brazen political coverups.
I encourage all those who care about this but do not work in medical research to join the government or get a PhD or MD and be prepared to solve the next problem that crops up. Then, you will have some more context on the challenges faced during public health emergencies.
In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.
> In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved,
I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet.
Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed.
That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
> The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then
Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now.
Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data.
We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).
I don't know how letting social media companies dictate political discourse became acceptable.
It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?".
> All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff...
I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?
There is no right to hear a message from a particular channel, but there is a right not to have the government intervene to suppress that channel. If the private actor decides of their own accord to censor you, that's perfectly legal. If they do so at the behest of government, that is a first amendment issue, and that's what's being asserted here.
> public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so
This is what was so infuriating about all the dim-whited "It's a private company, they can do what they want" posts.
Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.
It’s always funny to see that somebody’s thesis contains the word “wrongthink.”
Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1])
I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods.
It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades.
The government has been shaping public opinion though traditional news media for some time, look at all the "ex" government employees employed as "analysts" at MSCBC, CNN, etc. Since they can't inject talentless talking heads directly into social media's newsfeeds to push their agenda they exert pressure in a different way. It's not surprising at all.
> The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one.
I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration.
The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.
So one thing really should be cleared up - the 2nd paragraph of this article talks about incorrect criticisms (i.e. misinformation) of an article
>> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain.
It then says
>> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials
The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue.
There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?
I think regardless of the contents or topic of this write-up the conclusion is easy: stop using corporate social media exclusively (... I say on HN). The key to a healthy web is POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
This doesn't mean just POSSE in isolation though. It means going out of your way to establish/participate in non-corporate controlled communities.
Just before election. It Was quite shocking when I tried messaging links to news articles on Facebook and they were being blocked.
Then to find out that FBI asked Facebook to do this.
Uh... how can it be OK to organize to communicate an anti-lockdown message, but not OK to organize a rebuttal... by the people tasked with communicating national health policy?
Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020?
Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.
I could care less what's "legal" or not in this instance, this isn't the kind of society I want to live in with regard to speech rights—public OR private.
The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government.
If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.
I have no opinions on the article itself, but I am interested in whether the same actors also acted in coordination to suppress Lab Leak given that they were also implicated.
> Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved.
[+] [-] deweller|3 years ago|reply
Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances.
I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.
[+] [-] SamPatt|3 years ago|reply
I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.
[+] [-] chrisan|3 years ago|reply
The problem was a lot of these people that came on TV/radio weren't actually doing anything but being the same thing as Tucker Carlson in just "asking questions" in a provocative way but not actually testing hypotheses or doing research.
If you watched something like the UCSF Grand Rounds of Covid you would have seen all the research/questions/hypotheses presented and discussed regularly. They are all on youtube.
There will be no "chilling effect" in the scientific community for a long time because the actual practicing scientists/doctors acted as they should have and did the things you claimed to not have been done.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
I'm not that old or fat to be in any risk groups, so I got vaccinated to protect my (old) parents... and back then it was "get vaccinated and you won't get it, not spread it" (plus herd immunity), and not long after: "yes, you can get it, you can spread it, but chances of death are marginally lower"
Then one discusson on /r/conspiracy about something unrelated, and bam, banned from most of the from page subreddits.
[+] [-] commandlinefan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsol|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] O__________O|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaylinux|3 years ago|reply
Truth (and therefore science) is the most powerful tools we have to hold corrupt tyrants and authoritarians who would rule us to account. It's not ta all disturbing or surprising to me to see the ruling government/corporate power structure censor and bully and attack anybody questioning their authority. This is what these people do, it's their nature.
What was disturbing to me was how many self-proclaimed people of science, brave resisters of government and corporate abuse, and fighters for rights and freedom immediately turned into government apologists and bullies.
[+] [-] vkou|3 years ago|reply
Correct, but those checks and balances don't come from reaching your hand into the fringe theory hat, grabbing whichever one is most convenient, and proudly demanding that policy should give it equal weight to consensus science.
[+] [-] faeriechangling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|3 years ago|reply
Blame the administration at the time. Judging by comments here, it seems like the current government is a bit more open about things.
[+] [-] Smoosh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon84873628|3 years ago|reply
I blame the whackos for poisoning the well. (Let's also include well-meaning MDs and bio-related fields who don't actually know about epidemiology)
And even if you were an appropriately credentialed expert, if you weren't in a position to make policy decisions before the pandemic, then why would you suddenly expect to have influence during a crisis? That only happens in movies.
[+] [-] jimcalvel888|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] PostOnce|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] _djo_|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|3 years ago|reply
Especially common is for national security to override free speech in the minds of government officials. They can easily convince themselves that they need to suppress certain viewpoints in order to save many lives. It just coincidentally also saves their own jobs.
I think unfortunately that young people would prefer less free speech and for the government to enforce more confirming perspectives.
One other core issue for people who want the tech companies to stop listening to government to consider is the fact that the government has police, guns, prisons, and legal sanctions available to enforce it's policy decisions.
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
Non-disclosure of secret information that you willingly make yourself privy to is not suppression of free speech.
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
Public policy is much older than the USA.. people with skills and methods in this area are not new to this reaction.. So the playing field is set.
The age of Monarchy saw many obviously awful abuses of mono- or unilateral messaging.. "By decree of the King .. this that or the other"
Certain religious groups in association with Monarchy did so even more.. into the private lives of people. So a founding principle of the purposefully diverse USA was.. free speech. You cannot be sent to prison for making fun of the King nor publicly defending prostitution .. for example. But here it gets difficult.. Obviously strong minds and wills have strong reactions. The social upheaval politically in 20th Century Europe had a high cost socially.
But now, in the USA, we have credentialed experts in Science being silenced, not refuted. This is a new modern "low" and the use of technology to de-platform harkens directly back to ANATHEMA or ex-communication reaction.. it is very, very dark days for speech in the USA.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themitigating|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darawk|3 years ago|reply
1. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will".
2. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way".
The former is perfectly legitimate, and exactly what e.g. public health agencies ought to be doing: offering opinions and advice to the private sector and public. The latter is a first amendment violation.
Presumably, some of these cases will also turn on whether there was an implicit regulatory threat in the "recommendations" given. In some cases, according to this article, the threats seem to have been fairly explicit.
[+] [-] BeefWellington|3 years ago|reply
A feed or timeline view should be simply that: a scrollable list of the most recent visible things from people you have shown a specific interest in (follow/subscribe/whatever), and it should be the default view for the platform. Anyone deviating from that to add their cool special sauce should be excluded from those protections because that's editorializing their content.
If they want to have some "explore" section that does the algorithmic magic, sure, but it should be opt-in.
Carve out specific rules for users not logged in that can show the basic stuff (e.g.: "most interacted" -- likes and/or comments, "Latest from most subscribed"), perhaps a carve-out by region.
Disallow banning people except specifically for extreme ToS violations, harassment, and other criminal activity. Apps must provide robust anti-harassment features (block lists, inability to tag users who have blocked you, those don't show up in search, etc.), reporting mechanisms, etc.
If you deviate from these you lose s.230 and are open to being sued the same way newspapers are for their editorial content.
[+] [-] zaroth|3 years ago|reply
I think it’s interesting how the author tip-toed into tying in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed.
It’s a hot potato, but it’s exactly where these efforts lead, from ostensibly “well-meaning and necessary” public health efforts into brazen political coverups.
[+] [-] isx726552|3 years ago|reply
According to this, the FBI didn’t even mention the laptop story when they talked to Facebook:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dekhn|3 years ago|reply
In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.
[+] [-] drivebycomment|3 years ago|reply
I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet.
Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed. That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
[+] [-] throwaway22032|3 years ago|reply
Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now.
Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data.
We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).
[+] [-] huimang|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?".
Social media was a mistake.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|3 years ago|reply
I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?
[+] [-] darawk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtbayly|3 years ago|reply
> public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|3 years ago|reply
Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.
[+] [-] braingenious|3 years ago|reply
Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1])
I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods.
It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades.
1. http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm??
[+] [-] smt88|3 years ago|reply
It's a conservative[1] publication. It is not an unbiased news source.
1. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/
[+] [-] muaytimbo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bgentry|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration.
The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.
[+] [-] zug_zug|3 years ago|reply
>> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain.
It then says
>> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials
The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue.
There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?
[+] [-] superkuh|3 years ago|reply
This doesn't mean just POSSE in isolation though. It means going out of your way to establish/participate in non-corporate controlled communities.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] treeman79|3 years ago|reply
Just before election. It Was quite shocking when I tried messaging links to news articles on Facebook and they were being blocked. Then to find out that FBI asked Facebook to do this.
Movie. https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/09/20/13-true-f...
Facebook admitting. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp
[+] [-] jmull|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020?
Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.
[+] [-] Mindwipe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erichocean|3 years ago|reply
The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government.
If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
> Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved.
Latest on Lab Leak: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
[+] [-] themitigating|3 years ago|reply