"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
...
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted.
...
There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?
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 faith in the CDC and the government in general. People saw that the agency tasked with protecting their lives had lied to them, and once the truth was revealed discovered those lies had done nothing but open the door for price gougers to buy up the entire mask supply. What the CDC had told them not to buy for a dime a piece they now told them to buy for ten dollars a piece, and the new law now required them to have it. Once they threw their own credibility on the fire, people had to go looking for something else to believe in. For many of them it was crazy conspiracy theories and demagogues.
The government shouldn't be doing that. Also, it's important to break down what is meant by "the government" here -- it was the FBI attempting to suppress a news story which later turned out to be true about the son of a candidate for president. That sort of thing should not happen.
Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they really are being suppressed by "the man" or "the Feds" or whatever. Also, no matter how much stuff gets moderated, the left will never be happy.
End result: everyone is mad at Twitter, nobody trusts anything, conspiracy theorists get to make true claims about suppression, and more people are attracted to misinformation because it was suppressed -- e.g. "the government doesn't want you to know this!" or "see what the government is trying to hide from you!"
> it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it,
Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy? Not able to "mandate" is total bs, see the Pentagon-related leaks where there wasn't any need of any "mandating". If anything, this shows how hypocritical the whole industry has become, including many of its workers.
Hopefully this will scare away all potential future Aaron Swartz-es from this industry, or from the main parts of it at least, and hence bring it all down a peg or too.
Great points. Moderation is a very hard job, and good moderators understand they will likely be biased and can admit to it. I think moderation fairness problem is equivalent to the "auditing the auditor" problem; for some given events, how do we ensure that the labels given to the event are accurate and unbiased.
One solution might be for n moderators to evaluate and give the label to the reported violation, and ensure n is odd and larger than 1. However, this is tedious (although that is the tradeoff for fairness) and assumes there's an equivalent number of moderators who lean liberal, conservative, and neutral (in addition to assuming there's no biases created by the culture of the social media platform and management).
Perhaps each report should be given a detailed criteria as to why it was labelled as inappropriate, but this too would be subject to bias, emotional response from both parties, and slow down the moderation process which is likely backed up with many events in the queue, without really any direct benefit to the bottom line of the company although one could view this as a quality issue and lack of QA will ultimately produce an inferior product that is heavily QA'd.
Sounds like you’re trying to spin it to make this seem like innocent moderation when it was internal employees and the government forcing their views via moderation rather than letting the discourse happen
How is the title misleading? Facts from the CDC itself was suppressed when it didn't fit the narrative. Even here on HN where titles are supposed to be the original unless clickbait the word "rigged" is changed to "moderated".
Moderated implies it's unbiased while it's clearly not.
> But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
----
These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong.
Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account.
And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems.
But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation.
Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s
----
The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution.
There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things.
You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.
There is definitely a difference of the types of information shared.
Misinformation - False information that is spread regardless of intent to mislead.
Disinformation - False information that is spread with intent to mislead.
Misinformation can fall in the category of "Bullshit" quite often. There's no regard for the truth. Rather only a care that individuals are persuaded. This lack of respect I believe is the core problem these articles are trying to discuss.
This is the post-truth politics world we live in. Encouraged truth-telling, fact checking, not reopening settled debates, pressure big tech to combat disinformation(note the word used here, not misinformation), etc.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” - Unknown
If big tech has to combat disinformation. Big media should be held accountable to correct earlier misinformation. Rather than the "all or nothing" approach we see today until the next developing story makes headlines years later.
>>But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
100% yes. The process used by multi-billion dollar global communication platforms for fact-checking should not be this sloppy, where they themselves become purveyors of misinformation in marking accurate information as misleading.
It's one thing for some regular Joe Blow to post misinformation. It's another for the party with the full weight/authority of being the platform provider, and all of the credibility that comes with that, to post misinformation.
Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu.
We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?
Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.
It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.
We knew in March 26, 2020 it was not the Spanish flu because the data from the cruise ship diamond princess came back and the cfr was 1.1%. This was a shipped filled with the most vulnerable, obese people over 65. We should have never closed schools or lockdown in the USA.
I'm sorry but this is nonsense. No clarity of hindsight is required to realize that the conversations regarding COVID were not good faith explorations of the facts or the risks. Decisions were made very crudely in order to determine the proper course of action, and virtually all necessary mechanisms for continuously evaluating what we knew or were doing were forcefully marginalized. If you were somebody genuinely interested in understanding the pandemic, you immediately found that virtually all the sane conversations you were looking for were taking place in the same fringes as the places where lunatic conspiracy theorists were, because they were the only places that tolerated any discussion whatsoever.
That may have been the case in the very beginning, but it certainly evolved into let's scare the crap out of people to achieve whatever outcome we want.
I don't think the key is to blame CDC or Fauci or the government. The key is that people should be able to examine their numbers, critique their analysis, and challenge their policies, just like people should do to any doctrine. Yet Twitter staff, at least some of them, turned such normal debates into political issues, and tried every way to ban the people or villainize them.
How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true.
The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.
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/34466270/). It's also inexpensive. The entire case was that people are promoting something that has not validated as being effective. Not, that its dangerous or that it's stealing people's money - it's not been proven to be an effective treatment. And doctors lost their licenses (many more threatened) over this.
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 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.
An older person I know created twitter just to follow pandemic news and is now in the antivax and homeopathy echo chamber through replies and suggested tweets under the 2 people he follows
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.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) initially declined to endorse wearing of ‘medical masks’ as a non-pharmaceutical intervention to prevent or reduce the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and strongly opposed using other forms of masks. In the second version of the WHO’s advice in March 2020 (WHO, 2020a) it stated that:
A medical mask is not required for people who are not sick as there is no evidence of its usefulness in protecting them.
Cloth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circum- stances.
However, by December 2020, the WHO recommended wearing of non-medical masks of various kind in certain community settings—subject to recommendations on how this is done. It did so, “Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings” (WHO, 2020b). Various public health experts and epidemiologists have gone further, asserting that community use of non-medical masks is crucial for slowing transmission and attributing better outcomes in some countries to early adoption of widespread mask usage. Some countries that were initially reticent to even recommend mask use have made a comparable about-turn, making mask wearing mandatory and failure to do so subject to criminal penalty.
Under the currently-dominant hierarchy in evidence-based medicine, credible evidence on mask usage must come from randomized control trials; it was the absence of significant positive effects from RCTs prior to the pandemic that informed the WHO’s initial stance.
Some seem to be okay with the government and intelligence agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to make sure we only get to learn and discuss corporate sponsored healthcare advice now.
I wonder how many of the "my kids and I are masking forever" crowd is due to the Twitter echo chamber. If anything contradicting the most dire of COVID effects is stifled then it's no surprise that some of the population became extreme. Their beliefs are even now reinforced by the Twitter/ social media echo chamber of the people they follow. It's sad and I feel for these people and especially for their kids
What _should_ Twitter have done? I see plenty of "nothing", so that's not interesting. But if there was a Blue, and surveys where you could see the opinions aggregated by, say, doctors with ivy league degrees, would that be useful? It would allow for dissenting voices but (maybe?) less likelihood of those voices overwhelming the majority? Any other opinions?
I wonder why people believe that CDC must always be right, and therefore any doubt or challenge to CDC’s messages is misinformation that is worth banning. I thought every school in a modern society teaches student not to blindly trust the authority.
If people are able to share ideas, some people will share bad ideas. This problem goes back to Gutenberg.
Some will argue that the powers that be owe it to the less intelligent and less powerful masses to make sure to remove bad ideas, and/or to promote good ideas.
Others will point to history and note that banning books, or forcing people to read the “good ideas” has rarely been a successful long term strategy.
I side with those who reference history. History tends to be cyclical. Most thoughts have been thought before. Students of history have learned that manipulating what people think by engineering the free flow of ideas may work great in the short term, but longer term it’s doomed to failure.
It sounds a lot less nefarious when you consider that the "suppressed" views were believed at the time - and not without reason - to be both incorrect and harmful. The passage of time and 20/20 hindsight has revealed that some of the mainstream views were themselves incorrect, but if we're counting the hits for alternatives then we have to count the misses as well. Many claims about methods of transmission, dangers of vaccines, or efficacy of alternative treatments do not look any better in hindsight, and should not be forgotten. Being a "contrarian" or "devil's advocate" or whatever has still meant being wrong - and harmfully wrong - most of the time.
I'm not at all excusing anything that happened at Twitter or elsewhere. There's plenty to criticize, but these breathless accusations of ultimate evil are not only silly but hypocritical. If we're going to be harsh judges, let's not be one-sided about it. Plenty of the "opposition" deserve some pretty strong condemnation too, having made their own contributions to the death toll. I see way too many people here refusing even to talk about those failures, because of their own political leanings. Is this a site for curious inquiry, or pure political piling-on?
I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think the longest lasting legacy of covid will be the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.
I think Covid (and all the anti-vax grift around it) was the last straw, exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system.
It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:
>We’ve had massive institutional
failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on
the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe
anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on
opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was
conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I
have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare
decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like
this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist either but I do have considerably less respect for the WHO than I did before the pandemic. They seem more interested in playing politics and appeasing authoritarian regimes than putting out concrete policy on things which might actually help. Their back and forth on masking was an utter shambles, their stance on Taiwan a disgrace, their "fact finding" missions to China pointless and their Secretary General would often behave like an unhinged lunatic during press conferences.
Maybe in the US, but not worldwide. When you compare, countries where citizens trusted the government and generally followed the government's plans fared better than countries where individuals fought for their rights to choose what they think was best for them.
IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together to maintain, they tend to come out better. Even after their governments did make many bad decisions.
It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.
I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.
As told in my Middle Eastern history class, "it's reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist when you've been the subject of countless governments conspiring against you and/or your people -- in fact it would be unreasonable not to be one".
Iranians who claimed the US Government had orchestrated their elections were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 47 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Americans who claimed the US Government had lied to them about mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, vaccine safety, lockdown durations, COVID severity, dangers of remote schooling, etc. were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 2 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.
> the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.
No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.
They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.
Weird take imo, if anything I think trust in big pharmacy among the mainstream has increased, although maybe the fringe moved a bit more, most people still got vaccinated etc.,
Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.
I am fairly certain this is an American thing, or more broadly an issue in countries with lower levels of education and overall mistrust in their governments which clearly don’t work for them.
The basis of my argument is counter example countries such as Denmark. In Denmark, we all got vaccinated, and as soon as a second booster (3rd jab) was available, the government coordinated the distribution with pharmacies to allow administration. The response of the people was so immediate that within a week or so > 80% had at least 2 jabs plus booster. This meant that we could open up immediately, and covid became a thing of the past.
Denmark had a peak at the time, with far far far lower deaths per infection than other countries and previous peaks.
The difference is in communication. The Danish government and the responsible department communicated everything and monitored the situation in a way that allowed quick and nimble responses.
We had free jabs, nobody forced us to get vaccinated, we all did so willingly, we had free testing, and if we didn’t want a jab, we could wear masks and what have you.
There’s apparently a lot of people upset about Twitter for trying to manage misinformation. I’d like to see equal information leaked from Fox for comparison, who should have journalistic integrity since they’re a news company.
It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.
Given that extreme level of ridiculous harmful misinformation being presented, it seems obvious to me that any reasonably ethical link in the communication chain should attempt to speak up.
Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.
What is the realistic legal recourse for those who were censored from pressure by the US government? Sue the relevant agencies or executive branch? Will anyone even go to prison or lose their job?
"This one health professional was off once so here are the opinions of random handles created a few days ago with two followers that you should take medical advice from".
what's wrong with suppressing anti-vaxer views on twitter? elon's guy says twitter rigged the debate. yes so what. why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers? If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.
[+] [-] andreyk|3 years ago|reply
"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.
...
But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".
This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.
That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
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 faith in the CDC and the government in general. People saw that the agency tasked with protecting their lives had lied to them, and once the truth was revealed discovered those lies had done nothing but open the door for price gougers to buy up the entire mask supply. What the CDC had told them not to buy for a dime a piece they now told them to buy for ten dollars a piece, and the new law now required them to have it. Once they threw their own credibility on the fire, people had to go looking for something else to believe in. For many of them it was crazy conspiracy theories and demagogues.
[+] [-] twblalock|3 years ago|reply
Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they really are being suppressed by "the man" or "the Feds" or whatever. Also, no matter how much stuff gets moderated, the left will never be happy.
End result: everyone is mad at Twitter, nobody trusts anything, conspiracy theorists get to make true claims about suppression, and more people are attracted to misinformation because it was suppressed -- e.g. "the government doesn't want you to know this!" or "see what the government is trying to hide from you!"
[+] [-] paganel|3 years ago|reply
Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy? Not able to "mandate" is total bs, see the Pentagon-related leaks where there wasn't any need of any "mandating". If anything, this shows how hypocritical the whole industry has become, including many of its workers.
Hopefully this will scare away all potential future Aaron Swartz-es from this industry, or from the main parts of it at least, and hence bring it all down a peg or too.
[+] [-] ablatt89|3 years ago|reply
One solution might be for n moderators to evaluate and give the label to the reported violation, and ensure n is odd and larger than 1. However, this is tedious (although that is the tradeoff for fairness) and assumes there's an equivalent number of moderators who lean liberal, conservative, and neutral (in addition to assuming there's no biases created by the culture of the social media platform and management).
Perhaps each report should be given a detailed criteria as to why it was labelled as inappropriate, but this too would be subject to bias, emotional response from both parties, and slow down the moderation process which is likely backed up with many events in the queue, without really any direct benefit to the bottom line of the company although one could view this as a quality issue and lack of QA will ultimately produce an inferior product that is heavily QA'd.
[+] [-] imrane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worksonmine|3 years ago|reply
Moderated implies it's unbiased while it's clearly not.
[+] [-] danShumway|3 years ago|reply
----
These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong.
Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account.
And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems.
But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation.
Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s
----
The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution.
There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things.
You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.
[+] [-] eric_cc|3 years ago|reply
How about: you don’t. It’s not up to twitter moderation to determine what is fact in real-time.
[+] [-] thenerdhead|3 years ago|reply
Misinformation - False information that is spread regardless of intent to mislead.
Disinformation - False information that is spread with intent to mislead.
Misinformation can fall in the category of "Bullshit" quite often. There's no regard for the truth. Rather only a care that individuals are persuaded. This lack of respect I believe is the core problem these articles are trying to discuss.
This is the post-truth politics world we live in. Encouraged truth-telling, fact checking, not reopening settled debates, pressure big tech to combat disinformation(note the word used here, not misinformation), etc.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” - Unknown
If big tech has to combat disinformation. Big media should be held accountable to correct earlier misinformation. Rather than the "all or nothing" approach we see today until the next developing story makes headlines years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
[+] [-] ETH_start|3 years ago|reply
100% yes. The process used by multi-billion dollar global communication platforms for fact-checking should not be this sloppy, where they themselves become purveyors of misinformation in marking accurate information as misleading.
It's one thing for some regular Joe Blow to post misinformation. It's another for the party with the full weight/authority of being the platform provider, and all of the credibility that comes with that, to post misinformation.
[+] [-] afpx|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ChicagoDave|3 years ago|reply
We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?
Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.
It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.
[+] [-] bigtex|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w
[+] [-] ralusek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maskil|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hstan4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at_a_remove|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t0bia_s|3 years ago|reply
The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.
[+] [-] yehosef|3 years ago|reply
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/34466270/). It's also inexpensive. The entire case was that people are promoting something that has not validated as being effective. Not, that its dangerous or that it's stealing people's money - it's not been proven to be an effective treatment. And doctors lost their licenses (many more threatened) over this.
[+] [-] the_why_of_y|3 years ago|reply
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/inmates-sue-arka...
[+] [-] Rastonbury|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Khaine|3 years ago|reply
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992121/pdf/406...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) initially declined to endorse wearing of ‘medical masks’ as a non-pharmaceutical intervention to prevent or reduce the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and strongly opposed using other forms of masks. In the second version of the WHO’s advice in March 2020 (WHO, 2020a) it stated that:
A medical mask is not required for people who are not sick as there is no evidence of its usefulness in protecting them.
Cloth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circum- stances.
However, by December 2020, the WHO recommended wearing of non-medical masks of various kind in certain community settings—subject to recommendations on how this is done. It did so, “Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings” (WHO, 2020b). Various public health experts and epidemiologists have gone further, asserting that community use of non-medical masks is crucial for slowing transmission and attributing better outcomes in some countries to early adoption of widespread mask usage. Some countries that were initially reticent to even recommend mask use have made a comparable about-turn, making mask wearing mandatory and failure to do so subject to criminal penalty.
Under the currently-dominant hierarchy in evidence-based medicine, credible evidence on mask usage must come from randomized control trials; it was the absence of significant positive effects from RCTs prior to the pandemic that informed the WHO’s initial stance.
[+] [-] sfusato|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wonderwonder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxfohl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hintymad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2devnull|3 years ago|reply
If people are able to share ideas, some people will share bad ideas. This problem goes back to Gutenberg.
Some will argue that the powers that be owe it to the less intelligent and less powerful masses to make sure to remove bad ideas, and/or to promote good ideas.
Others will point to history and note that banning books, or forcing people to read the “good ideas” has rarely been a successful long term strategy.
I side with those who reference history. History tends to be cyclical. Most thoughts have been thought before. Students of history have learned that manipulating what people think by engineering the free flow of ideas may work great in the short term, but longer term it’s doomed to failure.
[+] [-] notacoward|3 years ago|reply
I'm not at all excusing anything that happened at Twitter or elsewhere. There's plenty to criticize, but these breathless accusations of ultimate evil are not only silly but hypocritical. If we're going to be harsh judges, let's not be one-sided about it. Plenty of the "opposition" deserve some pretty strong condemnation too, having made their own contributions to the death toll. I see way too many people here refusing even to talk about those failures, because of their own political leanings. Is this a site for curious inquiry, or pure political piling-on?
[+] [-] RyanShook|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_bonobo|3 years ago|reply
It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:
>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply
I don't much care for his politics but David Cameron has some interesting ideas on how we can do better: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-shows-new-global-virus-... .
[+] [-] yongjik|3 years ago|reply
IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together to maintain, they tend to come out better. Even after their governments did make many bad decisions.
[+] [-] mhh__|3 years ago|reply
It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.
I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.
[+] [-] jakear|3 years ago|reply
As told in my Middle Eastern history class, "it's reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist when you've been the subject of countless governments conspiring against you and/or your people -- in fact it would be unreasonable not to be one".
Iranians who claimed the US Government had orchestrated their elections were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 47 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Americans who claimed the US Government had lied to them about mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, vaccine safety, lockdown durations, COVID severity, dangers of remote schooling, etc. were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 2 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".
Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.
[+] [-] unity1001|3 years ago|reply
No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.
They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.
Then rinse and repeat.
[+] [-] foota|3 years ago|reply
Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.
[+] [-] PartiallyTyped|3 years ago|reply
The basis of my argument is counter example countries such as Denmark. In Denmark, we all got vaccinated, and as soon as a second booster (3rd jab) was available, the government coordinated the distribution with pharmacies to allow administration. The response of the people was so immediate that within a week or so > 80% had at least 2 jabs plus booster. This meant that we could open up immediately, and covid became a thing of the past.
Denmark had a peak at the time, with far far far lower deaths per infection than other countries and previous peaks.
The difference is in communication. The Danish government and the responsible department communicated everything and monitored the situation in a way that allowed quick and nimble responses.
We had free jabs, nobody forced us to get vaccinated, we all did so willingly, we had free testing, and if we didn’t want a jab, we could wear masks and what have you.
[+] [-] Fordec|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bgro|3 years ago|reply
It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.
Given that extreme level of ridiculous harmful misinformation being presented, it seems obvious to me that any reasonably ethical link in the communication chain should attempt to speak up.
Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.
[+] [-] xqcgrek2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greendestiny_re|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] papito|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aglasgow000|3 years ago|reply