Twitter censoring COVID-19-related information made the world worse, and it's good that they've stopped.
A lot of people seem to be taking a very naive perspective, thinking that censoring something means fewer people will believe it. In the case of COVID-19 misinformation in particular, I believe this is wrong.
At the start of the pandemic, all the major public health organizations told blatant lies about key facts: airborne transmission, surface transmission, whether it was present in US at all, the secondary attack rate, the effectiveness of masks, the infection-fatality rate, and whether it could have been a lab leak. This completely set fire to their credibility. Then they pivoted from attacking pro-maskers to attacking hydroxychloroquine advocates. These attacks consisted of highly ineffectual attempts at censorship: censored enough that everyone can see that censorship is being attempted, not censored enough to stop anyone from seeing it.
People are neither geniuses nor idiots. When the public health establishment turned on a dime from attacking masks to attacking hydroxychloroquine, many people inferred from that fact alone that hydroxychloroquine must be effective. It isn't, but the alternate world in which hydroxychloroquine was effective would have looked the same, so the reasoning was valid.
Given that history, and especially given how recent that history was, continuing to censor "COVID-19 misleading information" would be utterly insane.
I can second the annoyance with the CDC throughout most of the pandemic. I had to read WHO publications and individual studies to get an inkling of what might be going on with covid risk where it mattered; to me and the people I care about (since I could personally do nothing about the rest of the public). I am not a virologist or public health expert, but I can see when a study has reasonable error bars and sample sizes for the inferences they are making from it. I'll also take an average educated guess of many virologists over a single small study, but there was nothing close to consensus on covid among experts for several months. During that time it was clear that isolation was the only provable way to combat covid and contact-tracing was virtually the only conceivable way to isolate without shutting down literally everything. So what did CDC do? No contact tracing, but 6-foot distancing, extreme hand washing, etc.
I disagree slightly with your statement about the reasoning that hydroxychloroquine being effective was correct. The correct conclusion to draw from an authority with no-better-than-chance at being correct changing their recommendation is exactly the same no-better-than-chance at being correct. It wasn't quite that bad; hand washing is a general good practice and had a chance at being helpful given no other information. The health agencies issued recommendations with no error bars and wrote themselves into a corner where they couldn't update to more reliable information without continually contradicting themselves, so as a result I still see signs left in stores asking people to 6-foot distance (even though masks are optional).
I also realize the underlying problem is that people are terrible at reasoning under uncertainty and also very unfamiliar with trying to do so, and so won't take announcements with error bars in a very useful way. Presented with uncertainty most people default to their status quo as if having less than perfect information is the same as no information. So the CDC's battle was to try to influence public behavior in ways that were ultimately beneficial, while probably knowing they had a limited number of tries before people noticed the uncertainty and reverted to status quo. A very unenviable position.
Twitter censoring misinformation may have delayed the build-up to useless uncertainty, or it may have come too late to help much. I don't have evidence either way. One part of the status quo is buying quack medicine, so there was never any hope for preventing some of the population from doing that regardless of messaging or censorship.
Let's see how long this policy lasts if people spread COVID-19 misinformation that replaces Bill Gates as the Boogeyman with Elon Musk.
The guy is an intellectual lightweight making intellectual lightweight mistakes. Free speech isn't axiomatically important but only insofar as it increases your chances of survival, which is axiomatically important. That's a common mistake made by "muh freedoms" absolutists.
Is this the policy that originally said that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth, and then saying wearing a mask provides no additional benefit was a mistruth.
Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
Because if so, good riddance to a piece of junk. All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice. Shame on anyone who thought that silencing decent was the best way to handle it.
> Is this the policy that originally said that telling people to wear a mask to protect yourself from COVID was a mistruth, and then saying wearing a mask provides no additional benefit was a mistruth.
I don't see a time where Twitter's policy said otherwise.
> Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
As I understand the policy, not per se. There were three factors:
1. it must be an assertion of fact (not an opinion), expressed definitively, and intended to influence others’ behavior.
2. Is the claim demonstrably false or misleading?
3. Would belief in this information, as presented, lead to harm?
Someone writing that there's a very rare (as in 0.0022% chance) of mydiocarditis in young people, then that appears to be within policy. If someone says young people shouldn't get the vaccine because of the increased chance of mydiocarditis, then that that likely falls under #1.
My "0.0022% chance" comes from Myocarditis or Pericarditis Following the COVID-19 Vaccination in Adolescents: A Systematic Review, M Li, X Wang, J Feng, Z Feng, W Li, B Ya - Vaccines, 2022
] Conclusions: Our study showed that myocarditis/pericarditis occurred after vaccination with the BNT162b2 or Comirnaty vaccine, especially after the second vaccination in male adolescents, but the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis after vaccination with the above vaccines was very rare (0.0022%). Therefore, it is recommended that adolescents should be vaccinated with the COVID-19 universal vaccine as soon as possible and closely monitored for subsequent adverse reactions, which can be treated promptly.
also, quoting Evaluating the relationship between myocarditis and mRNA vaccination, Charlotte Switzer & Mark Loeb (2022) - Expert Review of Vaccines, 21:1, 83-89,
] Myocarditis may be associated with vaccination, through several biological mechanisms. Studies have shown that live viral vaccinations can act as a trigger for hypersensitivity inflammatory reactions, but further work is required to examine how the mRNA formulation may induce these autoimmune responses. Given that the risk of these adverse events is low, and the benefit of protection against disease is so great, the receipt of mRNA vaccines is recommended. ...
] Consistently, all patients hospitalized with mRNA-associated myocarditis have been discharged in stable condition and responded well to clinical management, resolving the episode [15–27].
> All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice.
Some of the other things covered on the policy were:
“5G causes coronavirus — go destroy the cell towers in your neighborhood!".
"Tweets offering the sale or facilitation of non-prescription treatments/cures for COVID-19, or those which advertise cures or treatments for COVID-19 that require a prescription or physician consultation."
"Specific and unverified claims made by people impersonating a government or health official or organization such as a parody account of official public health advisors claiming that hydroxychloroquine will prevent COVID-19."
"Claims that specific groups or nationalities are never susceptible to COVID-19, such as “people with dark skin are immune to COVID-19 due to melanin production” or are more susceptible, such as “avoid businesses owned by Chinese people as they are more likely to have COVID-19.”"
“Coronavirus is vulnerable to UV radiation - walking outside in bright sunlight will prevent COVID-19.”
“drinking bleach and ingesting colloidal silver will cure COVID-19.”
“COVID-19 does not infect children because we haven’t seen any cases of children being sick.”
“If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you don’t have coronavirus.”
It’s probably better to give up on covid “misinformation”. All sorts of official groups like the WHO and CDC themselves have been spreading it so it’s almost impossible to come to a consensus on what is and isn’t true.
Some example statements that are controversial would include:
- Covid is not airborne
- cloth masks are ineffective
- covid originated in a lab in wuhan
- omicron is mild
How do you deal with statements like that without pissing off a government group? It’s better to ignore it and some associated conspiracy stuff.
Science had a better idea of what the virus does after a while, and so the guidance was changed. That doesn't make the initial guidance a lie.
I won't defend the WHO (because they clearly did spread some misinformation at times), but the scientific community at large only changed its messaging because their information got better, not because they got "found out" as liars.
One of the issues with this is not everyone is able to ignore conspiracy stuff, they take misinformation for information, and you get something like "masks don't work". Sort of like saying Fox News is harmless because we recognize it's news entertainment rather than news; there are many who believe it (or other sources) as news.
I think you need to understand that emerging novel viruses take time to understand. We still understand relatively little about covid, and to be upset with Twitter for doing it’s best at a time where emerging information is being blasted around the globe, is misplaced at best. Recommendations evolve as the virus itself does, and as organizations respond to emerging threats.
Why keep the policy then? Like why "no longer enforce" the policy when you can just _remove_ the policy.
Like at least with drugs ("decriminalization") its because "no longer enforcing" the policy means people immediately won't be arrested/etc while repealing the law can take a long time. Presumably twitter has the authority to remove their own policies at will. (unless of course there's nobody still there that knows how to do that ...)
I'm honestly still shocked Twitter didn't go down for good a couple weekends ago. There was so much hype it was going to crash and burn, I feel a bit foolish for believing it.
None of the actual engineers involved in Twitter said it would crash and burn immediately. Nor have other SREs. The belief in an imminent complete collapse was mostly amongst non specialists.
But SREs including former Twitter employees have said severe outages will become increasingly likely as the weeks go by, and that in the meantime we’d see an increasing number of unresolved glitches. So far that second part is proving quite true.
Amnesty for previously banned harassers, unbanning of Trump, and now this all seem like a way to stir even more controversy and ideological keyboard-warrioring on Twitter. Short term it is going to drive "engagement" and produce a few charts with lines going up. Combined with decimation of anti-spam and anti-bot teams, Twitter is going to boast record numbers of posts.
The only people left at twitter seems to be H1B1 visa holders or diehard Musk fans - actually amazing to see how it plays out on a weekly basis and how Elon is making the most stupid decisions possible.
Money talks and advertisers don't want to have Parler/Social Truth unless they are into gold coins, MRE's or pillows.
If they only removed a few hundred to a few thousand Tweets per month, it seems like it must not have been a particularly stringent policy. Surely that's a very small portion of the number of misleading tweets about covid.
Good. They were censoring people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya who were putting out valid scientific viewpoints (not anti vaxxer stuff) while putting out stuff like the nonsensical CDC early press release that you didn't need to wear a mask.
So, a win for the free flow of scientific information, even if some idiots get to say things that aren't true also.
If there were no major disinformation campaigns this would generally be the case. However, these days it will lead you to believe in all disinformation campaigns.
Great news. I think many peoples lives were disrupted because of the dogmatism on this topic. We should always be ready to trash our viewpoints when presented with new facts. It’s also our responsibility to verify facts we’re presented. Most people using the internet are not children and should not be coddled in this regard.
Say whatever you want about effectiveness of Ivermectin, it's still an extremely safe drug used by billions worldwide. No one is going to win the Darwin award for taking it.
On the other hand, I vividly remember being told I would win the Darwin award for not taking an mRNA vaccine. If the vaccines are so great, why do non-covid excess deaths continue to rise while the media ignores it? [1] Until there is a reasonable explanation for these deaths, any novel therapy/treatment/vaccine should be taken off the market.
studies that used it properly as a prophylactic show around a 90% reduction in mortality and around 50% reduction in infection rate. All the studies claiming it didn't work used it post-infection which even the proponents of ivermectin claimed wouldn't work
here's the main study used to claim it doesn't work- note the participants are already confirmed to have covid so the study is already worthless and essentially done in bad faith
This completely made up series of conspiracy-laden comments is what HN is now ... well, that and people getting very confused about what free speech is.
Sounds like you were lead astray. I suppose in a certain way it might seem that they didn't censor it fast enough, to prevent people like you from being misled and then spreading that inaccurate information on other news sites, no?
The whole ball of wax was a humongous fiasco. A farce supported by ideology.
They couldn’t keep their story straight so they resorted to censorship even going so idiotically far as censoring their previous science (actually opinion). (The follow the science mantra wasn’t at all about following science but imposing belief)
[+] [-] jimrandomh|3 years ago|reply
A lot of people seem to be taking a very naive perspective, thinking that censoring something means fewer people will believe it. In the case of COVID-19 misinformation in particular, I believe this is wrong.
At the start of the pandemic, all the major public health organizations told blatant lies about key facts: airborne transmission, surface transmission, whether it was present in US at all, the secondary attack rate, the effectiveness of masks, the infection-fatality rate, and whether it could have been a lab leak. This completely set fire to their credibility. Then they pivoted from attacking pro-maskers to attacking hydroxychloroquine advocates. These attacks consisted of highly ineffectual attempts at censorship: censored enough that everyone can see that censorship is being attempted, not censored enough to stop anyone from seeing it.
People are neither geniuses nor idiots. When the public health establishment turned on a dime from attacking masks to attacking hydroxychloroquine, many people inferred from that fact alone that hydroxychloroquine must be effective. It isn't, but the alternate world in which hydroxychloroquine was effective would have looked the same, so the reasoning was valid.
Given that history, and especially given how recent that history was, continuing to censor "COVID-19 misleading information" would be utterly insane.
[+] [-] benlivengood|3 years ago|reply
I disagree slightly with your statement about the reasoning that hydroxychloroquine being effective was correct. The correct conclusion to draw from an authority with no-better-than-chance at being correct changing their recommendation is exactly the same no-better-than-chance at being correct. It wasn't quite that bad; hand washing is a general good practice and had a chance at being helpful given no other information. The health agencies issued recommendations with no error bars and wrote themselves into a corner where they couldn't update to more reliable information without continually contradicting themselves, so as a result I still see signs left in stores asking people to 6-foot distance (even though masks are optional).
I also realize the underlying problem is that people are terrible at reasoning under uncertainty and also very unfamiliar with trying to do so, and so won't take announcements with error bars in a very useful way. Presented with uncertainty most people default to their status quo as if having less than perfect information is the same as no information. So the CDC's battle was to try to influence public behavior in ways that were ultimately beneficial, while probably knowing they had a limited number of tries before people noticed the uncertainty and reverted to status quo. A very unenviable position.
Twitter censoring misinformation may have delayed the build-up to useless uncertainty, or it may have come too late to help much. I don't have evidence either way. One part of the status quo is buying quack medicine, so there was never any hope for preventing some of the population from doing that regardless of messaging or censorship.
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|3 years ago|reply
The guy is an intellectual lightweight making intellectual lightweight mistakes. Free speech isn't axiomatically important but only insofar as it increases your chances of survival, which is axiomatically important. That's a common mistake made by "muh freedoms" absolutists.
[+] [-] Khaine|3 years ago|reply
Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
Because if so, good riddance to a piece of junk. All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice. Shame on anyone who thought that silencing decent was the best way to handle it.
[+] [-] eesmith|3 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem so. From https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/covid-19 , one of the examples of a tweet to remove is: “now that it’s summertime, you don’t need a mask anymore, so don’t wear your mask!”
I don't see a time where Twitter's policy said otherwise.
> Is this also the policy that said saying COVID vaccines increased the risk of mydiocarditis in young people was a mistruth, and yet its now known to be true?
As I understand the policy, not per se. There were three factors:
1. it must be an assertion of fact (not an opinion), expressed definitively, and intended to influence others’ behavior.
2. Is the claim demonstrably false or misleading?
3. Would belief in this information, as presented, lead to harm?
Someone writing that there's a very rare (as in 0.0022% chance) of mydiocarditis in young people, then that appears to be within policy. If someone says young people shouldn't get the vaccine because of the increased chance of mydiocarditis, then that that likely falls under #1.
My "0.0022% chance" comes from Myocarditis or Pericarditis Following the COVID-19 Vaccination in Adolescents: A Systematic Review, M Li, X Wang, J Feng, Z Feng, W Li, B Ya - Vaccines, 2022
] Conclusions: Our study showed that myocarditis/pericarditis occurred after vaccination with the BNT162b2 or Comirnaty vaccine, especially after the second vaccination in male adolescents, but the incidence of myocarditis/pericarditis after vaccination with the above vaccines was very rare (0.0022%). Therefore, it is recommended that adolescents should be vaccinated with the COVID-19 universal vaccine as soon as possible and closely monitored for subsequent adverse reactions, which can be treated promptly.
also, quoting Evaluating the relationship between myocarditis and mRNA vaccination, Charlotte Switzer & Mark Loeb (2022) - Expert Review of Vaccines, 21:1, 83-89,
] Myocarditis may be associated with vaccination, through several biological mechanisms. Studies have shown that live viral vaccinations can act as a trigger for hypersensitivity inflammatory reactions, but further work is required to examine how the mRNA formulation may induce these autoimmune responses. Given that the risk of these adverse events is low, and the benefit of protection against disease is so great, the receipt of mRNA vaccines is recommended. ...
] Consistently, all patients hospitalized with mRNA-associated myocarditis have been discharged in stable condition and responded well to clinical management, resolving the episode [15–27].
> All it did was fuel conspiracy and discredit government advice.
Some of the other things covered on the policy were:
“5G causes coronavirus — go destroy the cell towers in your neighborhood!".
"Tweets offering the sale or facilitation of non-prescription treatments/cures for COVID-19, or those which advertise cures or treatments for COVID-19 that require a prescription or physician consultation."
"Specific and unverified claims made by people impersonating a government or health official or organization such as a parody account of official public health advisors claiming that hydroxychloroquine will prevent COVID-19."
"Claims that specific groups or nationalities are never susceptible to COVID-19, such as “people with dark skin are immune to COVID-19 due to melanin production” or are more susceptible, such as “avoid businesses owned by Chinese people as they are more likely to have COVID-19.”"
“Coronavirus is vulnerable to UV radiation - walking outside in bright sunlight will prevent COVID-19.”
“drinking bleach and ingesting colloidal silver will cure COVID-19.”
“COVID-19 does not infect children because we haven’t seen any cases of children being sick.”
“If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you don’t have coronavirus.”
[+] [-] rdtwo|3 years ago|reply
Some example statements that are controversial would include:
- Covid is not airborne - cloth masks are ineffective - covid originated in a lab in wuhan - omicron is mild
How do you deal with statements like that without pissing off a government group? It’s better to ignore it and some associated conspiracy stuff.
[+] [-] selfhoster11|3 years ago|reply
I won't defend the WHO (because they clearly did spread some misinformation at times), but the scientific community at large only changed its messaging because their information got better, not because they got "found out" as liars.
[+] [-] okprod|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
Which public health authority objects to this statement?
[+] [-] alexk307|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lesuorac|3 years ago|reply
Like at least with drugs ("decriminalization") its because "no longer enforcing" the policy means people immediately won't be arrested/etc while repealing the law can take a long time. Presumably twitter has the authority to remove their own policies at will. (unless of course there's nobody still there that knows how to do that ...)
[+] [-] stuckinhell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _djo_|3 years ago|reply
But SREs including former Twitter employees have said severe outages will become increasingly likely as the weeks go by, and that in the meantime we’d see an increasing number of unresolved glitches. So far that second part is proving quite true.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] pornel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbydudeza|3 years ago|reply
Money talks and advertisers don't want to have Parler/Social Truth unless they are into gold coins, MRE's or pillows.
[+] [-] Imnimo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount74|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impulser_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anm89|3 years ago|reply
So, a win for the free flow of scientific information, even if some idiots get to say things that aren't true also.
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jl2718|3 years ago|reply
This is not political; it is Bayes’ theorem.
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|3 years ago|reply
1. 15 days to slow the spread
2. Masks work
3. Lockdowns work
4. Natural immunity is a myth
5. mRNA shots are vaccines, not inoculants
6. Covid shots stop transmission
7. '100% safe & effective'
[+] [-] joeman1000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] MrMan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lzooz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eisenstein|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] halfjoking|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I vividly remember being told I would win the Darwin award for not taking an mRNA vaccine. If the vaccines are so great, why do non-covid excess deaths continue to rise while the media ignores it? [1] Until there is a reasonable explanation for these deaths, any novel therapy/treatment/vaccine should be taken off the market.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqKZlDsesL4
[+] [-] ren_engineer|3 years ago|reply
studies that used it properly as a prophylactic show around a 90% reduction in mortality and around 50% reduction in infection rate. All the studies claiming it didn't work used it post-infection which even the proponents of ivermectin claimed wouldn't work
https://www.cureus.com/articles/111851-regular-use-of-iverme...
here's the main study used to claim it doesn't work- note the participants are already confirmed to have covid so the study is already worthless and essentially done in bad faith
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2797483
and here's another doing the same thing
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2115869
not saying Ivermectin is some miracle drug like many, but simply downplaying it as "horse medicine" is just as bad
[+] [-] Georgelemental|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] OnionBlender|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ergvgdvgrd|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] egberts1|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
Source? As of April the CDC “recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, except in clinical trials” [1].
[1] https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/ant...
[+] [-] ManuelKiessling|3 years ago|reply
Ivermectin among drugs that failed avoiding hospitalization for COVID-19 patients - study: https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/articl...
COVID-19 Treatments and Medications: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/treatm...
Effectiveness of N95 Masks against SARS-CoV-2: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chas.1c00016
[+] [-] jddil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zug_zug|3 years ago|reply
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/11/fda-did-not-change-positio...
Sounds like you were lead astray. I suppose in a certain way it might seem that they didn't censor it fast enough, to prevent people like you from being misled and then spreading that inaccurate information on other news sites, no?
[+] [-] mc32|3 years ago|reply
They couldn’t keep their story straight so they resorted to censorship even going so idiotically far as censoring their previous science (actually opinion). (The follow the science mantra wasn’t at all about following science but imposing belief)