[HN Gopher] Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. gov...
___________________________________________________________________
Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?
Author : dilap
Score : 316 points
Date : 2022-09-22 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tabletmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tabletmag.com)
| darawk wrote:
| 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.
| brightball wrote:
| darawk wrote:
| It's not quite that straightforward. What happened according
| to Zuck (on the JRE podcast) was that the FBI came to FB and
| said "We believe some kind of Russian disinformation is about
| to drop in the next couple of weeks, be on the lookout for
| that".
|
| When the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, FB reasonably
| concluded this was what the FBI warned them about, and
| suppressed it. It's now clear that this story was not
| "disinformation" in any normal sense, and FB should not have
| censored it.
|
| Whether or not this rises to the level of a first amendment
| violation is a tricky question though. It seems to me that in
| this particular case, both parties simply made a mistake. The
| FBI was too quick to characterize it as misinformation, and
| FB was too credulous of the FBI, and didn't do their own
| investigation.
|
| My opinion is that this isn't quite a first amendment
| violation, but just an unfortunate series of mistakes. Some
| of the CDC stuff seems closer to true government coercion
| though, at least, if you take what the Tablet piece is saying
| at face value.
| musicale wrote:
| My eyes keep confusing FB and FBI.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| Or it's cleverly done so everyone has plausible
| deniability, when in reality everyone involved knew it was
| basically election interference and first amendment
| violation. It doesn't take an IQ of 200 to do that without
| leaving direct evidence.
| darawk wrote:
| Ya, that's a real possibility, and some of these cases
| will probably turn on the judge's perception of whether
| that is what was happening. It seems very hard to prove
| in a case like that one though.
| banannaise wrote:
| I would hesitate to even call it a mistake. A true story,
| timed so as to maximize the effectiveness of
| sensationalism, speculation, and disinformation around that
| story, is itself a form of disinformation.
| [deleted]
| UncleMeat wrote:
| No.
|
| He said that the FBI informed Facebook that there were likely
| to be fraudulent stories regarding the election pushed by
| foreign influence. Facebook concluded that the laptop story
| matched this general theme and decided on their own what to
| do.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| It seems like #2 is what had happened to Alex Berenson. Kicked
| off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how he's back on
| Twitter!
| lesuorac wrote:
| > Kicked off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how
| he's back on Twitter!
|
| Where do you read this stuff?
|
| It says "v Twitter" in the title of the lawsuit [1].
|
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-
| v-t...
| bgentry wrote:
| They may have been confused by the fact that Berenson
| recently announced his _intention_ to sue the US government
| following the revelations from his Twitter suit, but to my
| knowledge he hasn't yet done that.
|
| So he sued _Twitter_ and won and was then reinstated on the
| platform.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > So he sued Twitter and won and was then reinstated on
| the platform.
|
| I'm not sure I'd call an out of court settlement a win
| but to each their own I guess.
|
| I'm not too sure he really got what he wanted since the
| 1st amendment argument was thrown out in court.
|
| ----
|
| For those of you who aren't going to bother to read the
| court document. His strongest point was a "Breach of
| Contract" which revolved around Twitter directly telling
| him he wasn't going to get kicked off for what he was
| posting and then they kicked him off.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| He sued and got the outcome he wanted, his platform to be
| reinstated, thus he "won".
| honksillet wrote:
| Either way these requests should be PUBLIC
| themitigating wrote:
| When did number two happen?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If you were a landlord that wanted to evict non-paying
| tenants the CDC directly punished you during covid.
|
| Directly. Massively outside of their scope of authority.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Not to mention the 5th Ammendment violation.
| smt88 wrote:
| That issue has absolutely nothing to do with the First
| Amendment and seems completely off-topic for this thread.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Throughout the last 2 years.
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/internal-documents-
| rev...
| naasking wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > 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,
| smt88 wrote:
| > _statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General
| Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas
| threatening them with regulatory or other legal action_
|
| As far as I can tell, this is a straight-up lie. The Tablet
| article links to two other articles[1][2] that don't
| support this at all. All of the language used to describe
| the Biden Administration's actions is "request" and
| "advise".
|
| I can't find any direct quotes from any of the above people
| threatening anyone with legal action. The NY Times article
| even says that Facebook completed ignored basic requests
| from the administration without any consequences or
| threats.
|
| 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/us/politics/biden-
| faceboo...
|
| 2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-
| briefings/202...
| naasking wrote:
| Biden straight up said that social media companies are
| killing people by not censoring certain content. The
| article goes into this in some detail if you want more
| context, but if the President is saying that you are
| killing people, that's a pretty clear threat that they
| are looking to regulate you if you don't get in line.
| smt88 wrote:
| It's not a clear threat at all because it _isn 't a
| threat_. They talk about things that are killing people
| all the time without putting forward any unconstitutional
| legislation.
|
| Provide a direct quote. If it's true, it will be easy for
| you to do.
| naasking wrote:
| > They talk about things that are killing people all the
| time without putting forward any unconstitutional
| legislation.
|
| Oh give me a break. COVID was declared a national
| emergency and plenty of legislation was put forward to
| combat it, mitigate it or otherwise reduce harm. The
| president specifically saying social media companies are
| killing people in the context of a national emergency is
| a not so subtle veiled threat.
|
| I'm not sure what direct quote you want, this was all
| over the news and if you just Google it you'll find
| hundreds of articles:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/biden-social-media-
| platf...
| ineptech wrote:
| The rest of that quote is, "...[according to judges] still
| did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs were
| censored on social media due to government action." Pretty
| misleading to cut that out.
|
| Edit: TFA goes on to contrast those cases with a different
| case, Missouri v. Biden, which I didn't mention because
| it's the entire topic of the article I'm charitably
| assuming we've all at least skimmed before coming here to
| argue about, but I'm adding it now due to naasking's uno
| reverse card.
| naasking wrote:
| > The rest of that quote is, "...[according to judges]
| still did not suffice to establish that the plaintiffs
| were censored on social media due to government action."
| Pretty misleading to cut that out.
|
| That's not relevant to the question I was answering,
| which was about what/when threats allegedly happened.
| Furthermore, the article goes on to describe judges that
| _did_ find it sufficient. Is it misleading of you to
| leave that out?
| fallingknife wrote:
| So the judges said that the government ordering private
| companies to censor, and threatening them with
| consequences if they don't comply is not a 1st amendment
| violation? Sounds like we need some new judges.
| ineptech wrote:
| That's not a fair summary of what happened in those
| cases. The article doesn't even argue those judges were
| wrong! It just says, in essence, "Here's a list of cases
| where judges said this didn't happen, as opposed to
| Missouri v Biden where a judge said it did, which we will
| spend the rest of the article discussing." And the person
| I'm responding to for some reason listed the former
| rather than the latter in responding to someone looking
| for examples, and somehow I'm the one getting downvoted.
|
| Dammit, there's a reasonable discussion to have over
| this. Biden said, "Misinformation on Facebook is killing
| people." Facebook said, "Oh crap, the president is
| calling us out, that looks bad so let's block stuff." Is
| that censorship? Maybe! It kinda is, and it kinda isn't!
| We could argue about it! But not while we're arguing over
| semantic crap like this. It felt like a good and useful
| thing to do, to point out when something is taken
| egregiously out of context like that, but now I really
| regret even wading in.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It is absolutely a fair summary:
|
| > According to those judges, 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, still did not suffice to establish that the
| plaintiffs were censored on social media due to
| government action. Put another way, the judges declined
| to take the government at its word.
| ineptech wrote:
| _sigh_
|
| Here's why the the two linked cases were dismissed:
|
| > "Plaintiffs lack standing. And even if that were not
| the case, the content of their claims-- and the sources
| those claims cite and depend upon--does not plausibly
| suggest they are entitled to the relief they seek."
|
| > "[The plaintiff] has not plausibly pleaded that any
| action by President Biden or Surgeon General Murthy was
| causally related to Facebook and Twitter's decisions to
| enforce their misinformation policies against [him]"
|
| Summarizing that as the courts finding that "the Biden
| administration was ordering social media companies to
| censor certain posts" is not even misleading, it's just
| false. And it's not particularly relevant to the actual
| subject of the article, which is the Missouri v Biden
| case brought by the three people named in the first
| sentence.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
| jimmydorry wrote:
| What is the point of linking to the law and how it is
| interpreted as a reply to people that think the law is bad,
| harmful, or needs updating?
|
| Your link makes reference to a similar kind of article about
| the First Ammendment, which is also bandied about as if it's
| some kind of rebuttal to people that think platforms are
| defacto government arms.
| krapp wrote:
| The point is to not have to waste time pissing into the
| wind of constant misinformation and propaganda about both
| the First Amendment and Section 230, rather than just doing
| the internet version of tapping at a sign on the wall.
|
| _taps furiously_
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| If you're too lazy to participate in the discussion then
| don't.
| jacooper wrote:
| But OP is asking for a modification of Section 230.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| This is trite and misses my point. I'm saying explicitly the
| law should change. Not just for Meta, Youtube, etc., but
| _everyone_ using any kind of logic beyond "most recent" or
| "most liked".
|
| If anything, my suggestions would remove protections from
| companies that are inherently trying to drive "interaction"
| and who do not moderate sufficiently. If sites had to worry
| that leaving comments from users up that will get them sued,
| they would be more proactive in removing comments. Instead,
| currently, they choose to highlight and elevate those
| comments to groups that they believe will find them abrasive,
| in search of interactions. I am pretty clearly arguing that
| their choice to spotlight certain content over others using
| some decision-making beyond "most recent" or "most liked"
| should be considered their own editorial content, which is
| _already_ part of s.230. From your own link:
| If you said "Section 230 is a get out of jail card for
| websites!" You're wrong. Again, websites are still
| 100% liable for any content that they themselves create.
|
| My argument is that the editorial decision to shove a comment
| from some rando I don't follow in front of me by Twitter
| should fall under the above, and that s.230 should be changed
| to specifically exempt based on the rules above.
| krapp wrote:
| >My argument is that the editorial decision to shove a
| comment from some rando I don't follow in front of me by
| Twitter should fall under the above, and that s.230 should
| be changed to specifically exempt based on the rules above.
|
| Except the use of an algorithm to determine where content
| is placed is not "editorializing" in any meaningful sense,
| nor is it equivalent to the platform "creating" that
| content, and thus making themselves, rather than the
| author, liable for it. Do you believe comments on Hacker
| News are "editorialized" by being upvoted or downvoted? Is
| Hacker News responsible for poorly written or false
| articles that gain traction on the site?
|
| It's an absurd argument, based on the misconception that
| platforms _should_ be completely neutral in regards to
| content in order to receive Section 230 protection, when
| the entire purpose of the law is to protect exactly the
| kind of "editorializing" you're talking about. If you want
| the law to be repealed, just say that.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Losing the Youtube algorithm to a most-liked system or
| most-recent system would ruin it for me and I think most
| users. Also guessing that the only way they'd be able to
| operate an algorithm with no 230 protections would be 1000x
| more censorship.
| galdosdi wrote:
| I could not agree more. These companies who use algorithms to
| choose what user content to display should be held to the same
| standard as a publisher where a human chooses what letters to
| the editor to print in the newspaper.
|
| Fools think of social media as similar to a telephone and thus
| just a neutral platform, because you can communicate with each
| other. For hypothetical social media without an algorithmic
| feed (like Facebook at its inception, or phpbb forums, or IRC
| or Slack or email etc) this would be true.
|
| But modern social media does not just neutrally show what has
| been posted without favor to any. It is a machine that is
| carefully built by a large team to choose the posts that will
| most optimize the company's goals (mainly profit).
|
| Thus it's much more like a print newspaper's letter to the
| editors section, because out of a large number of submitted
| user posts, the company (using their algorithms to save
| themselves labor costs) they choose just a few to promote
| highly. Fundamentally, algorithmic recommendation is speech and
| endorsement by the algorithm operator, and if they have a
| problem with that, they can always put a human in the loop.
|
| It is crazy (and represents huge wealth transfer from society
| to these companies-- and moreover from the poorer to the
| richer) that they get away with having less responsiblity for
| doing something just because they automated it.
|
| By the same logic, it's bad for me to shoot people with a gun
| but becomes fine as long as it's not me doing it, but some Rube
| Goldberg contraption that automatically fires at people near my
| house.
|
| By the same logic, it may be illegal to knowingly sell
| cigarettes to minors, but you can just make a vending machine
| with no access control and then it's fine.
|
| Absolutely insane that they get away with less responsibility
| despite making the same editorial decisions, with the same
| benefits accruing to themselves, as a traditional publisher
| that picks and chooses what to display.
|
| And our whole society has absorbed this stupid paradigm. You
| hear people conflating the right to free speech with the right
| to have your speech amplified above other speech, which
| obviously makes no sense since it's a zero sum game. But you
| have people pretending the algorithms are invisible natural
| things.
|
| By the way, I am pessimistic. We are in too deep. An entire
| generation of school children is being raised on this stuff,
| and has been for almost a decade, creating a deep generational
| cycle of dependence. And ad tech has taken over the S&P500,
| making the wealthy elite dependent on the profits. It's just
| far too valuable a means of social control for it to just be
| given up without some countervailing force to incentivize it.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Yea I agree - once they are highly tailoring the algo to show
| content they want then they are now actively participating in
| that content. It may be user generated originally but they are
| the ones that are choosing (through the algo) to show it to
| more and more people. I like this.
|
| Also we should probably just ban certain types of algorithms
| completely.....
| 8note wrote:
| Why 230 protections though? It's still user submitted data, the
| recommendations are controlling links to it.
|
| Should companies be responsible for content on the other side
| of a link? What's to stop Facebook from splitting off the
| content host to be a different company, and then still having
| everything else be the same?
| [deleted]
| nradov wrote:
| No thanks. I don't want the federal government micromanaging
| social media product features. That should be left open to
| innovation and competition.
|
| If feeds default to ordering by recency then some accounts are
| going to post _constantly_ just to always appear at the top.
| This will hide more valuable content.
|
| From a public policy standpoint, Supreme Court Justice Clarence
| Thomas has proposed extending Common Carrier legislation to
| cover social media. It's an interesting idea but I'm not sure
| whether it would be a net improvement.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Out of curiosity where would you put Reddit's sorting algorithm
| in these carve-outs? Because while there are some hidden anti-
| spam stuff they use, it is overall still a fairly braindead
| date-adjusted vote system, and I'm willing to bet their anti-
| spam stuff could still be clearly explained on a single page if
| any governments come knocking
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| This completely ignores that Reddit admin's are also
| moderators that the moderators have extreme power in
| censorship, including to the topic, automated tools and
| algorithms.
| themitigating wrote:
| Then won't they just censor more?
| maxfurman wrote:
| If I'm reading this right, there would be more censorship _in
| the algorithmic feed_ (no one will get Alex Jones
| recommended) but the chronological feed will have less
| censorship (Alex Jones will still be on the platform and you
| can follow him if that's your cup of tea)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I wish we could eliminate algorithmic feeds altogether.
| themitigating wrote:
| So he his posts wouldn't be displayed, censored, to users
| who don't subscribe/follow to him.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| No, what I'm proposing is that once you create an account
| you see nothing until you start following people via the
| "exploration" or whatever, then your default view is
| essentially "you see what you followed/subscribed to".
|
| No banning Alex Jones (unless he does one of the bannable
| things). Advertisers are free to say they don't want to
| do business with his channels, etc. Some are free to say
| they do.
|
| You start exploring and see his stuff but don't want to?
| Block it / say "I don't wanna see this" and it should
| prevent his videos showing up on your feeds (and maybe
| reactions to it?). Those controls _must_ work, not like
| the current versions.[1]
|
| I'm also suggesting that the idea of highlighting these
| tailored content views in this way as a default should
| count as editorializing, and should then open them to
| punishment for that content the way a newspaper
| publishing an editorial is.
|
| It won't fully solve the problem of "engagement-chasing"
| that currently has taken hold of social media (and really
| the Internet) but I don't see a better way. At the end of
| the day engagement = impressions = advertiser $ and I
| don't see a way to change that formula so there's less
|
| But IMO this makes the speech freer, the platforms more
| open (and gives them an out with advertisers "hey, we're
| required by law to do it this way"), and puts the users
| in the driver's seat when it comes to what they see.
|
| [1]:
| https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/research/library/user-
| cont...
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > No banning Alex Jones (unless he does one of the
| bannable things).
|
| Alex Jones aside.
|
| There is the intentional ambiguity. The TOS, Terms Of
| Service, at these companies are left loose and
| manipulated to the companies benefit all the time.
|
| They can ban you saying, you broke the terms of service,
| and that's all you have no recourse they do not need to
| define what role you broke, end of story.
| nova22033 wrote:
| The title ends in a question mark
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
|
| Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any
| headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word
| no."
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| dahart wrote:
| Accusing people of censorship when you're trying to spread
| speculation and misinformation is a political debate strategy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration
|
| The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in
| October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and
| lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be
| avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which
| those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society
| otherwise continued functioning normally.[3][4] The envisaged
| result was herd immunity in three months as SARS-CoV-2 swept
| through.[1][2][3] Authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of
| Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin
| Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was drafted at the American
| Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington,
| Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5
| October.[2][5] The document presumed without evidence that the
| disease burden of mass infection could be tolerated, that any
| infection would confer long term sterilizing immunity, and it
| made no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact
| tracing,[6] or long COVID, which has left patients with
| debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.[7][8]
|
| The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and
| public-health bodies have stated that the strategy is dangerous
| and lacks a sound scientific basis.[9][10] They say that it would
| be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable,
| leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older
| people and younger people with pre-existing health
| conditions.[11][12] As of October 2020, they warn that the long-
| term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[10][13]
| Moreover, the WHO said that the herd immunity component of the
| proposed strategy is undermined by the unknown duration of post-
| infection immunity.[10][13] They say that the more likely outcome
| would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous
| infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[12] The
| American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health
| groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that
| the "Great Barrington Declaration is not grounded in science and
| is dangerous".[9] The Great Barrington Declaration received
| support from some scientists, the Donald Trump administration,
| British Conservative politicians, and from The Wall Street
| Journal's editorial board.
|
| The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American
| Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think
| tank associated with climate change denial.[14][15][16]
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| The declaration may very well be 'misinformation', but that is
| a non-issue. The question being asked here is "Did the US govt
| violate the First amendment by _illegally_ compelling tech
| companies to censor certain viewpoints? "
| themitigating wrote:
| Why is it illegal? Where is that stated?
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > Why is it illegal?
|
| You are asking why is violating the First Amendment
| illegal? Because that's how laws work here. The
| constitution is literally called 'the law of the land',
| hence violating it would be illegal
|
| > Where is that stated?
|
| Where is what stated? That this was a violation of the
| First Amendment? I mean, it's literally in the subheading
| of the article: "Censorship of wrongthink by Big Tech at
| the behest of the government is government censorship,
| which violates the First Amendment". I am not arguing it
| was or wasn't, I was just letting the OP know what the real
| issue is
| dahart wrote:
| > It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and Kulldorff
| will be able to show that Fauci and Collins explicitly
| ordered tech companies to censor them and their Great
| Barrington Declaration.
|
| They don't have evidence that the govt compelled the
| censorship. And the NIH generally doesn't have this
| authority, and I doubt most companies believe that it does.
| Don't forget this happened during the previous
| administration, which officially supported the GBD.
|
| They also don't have evidence that anything was illegal,
| since preventing misinformation & speculation isn't illegal
| and might not be protected by the First Amendment. See the
| side discussion on freedom of speech exceptions nearby.
| Whether the GBD is misinformation is totally relevant,
| freedom of speech depends on the content of the speech.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > They also don't have evidence that anything was illegal,
| since preventing misinformation & speculation isn't illegal
| and might not be protected by the First Amendment.
|
| IANAL (and I'm sure you aren't either), but if you actually
| read the wikipedia article you linked to, that specific
| area of constitutional law is vague and far from settled:
|
| > The basis for this ruling was the Court's fear that "a
| rule compelling the critic of official conduct to guarantee
| the truth of all his factual assertions" would lead to
| "self-censorship".[15] This determination altered the
| theory of the 'false statements' free speech exception.
| _Even if a false statement generally would be harmful for
| public discourse, the Court quoted John Stuart Mill in
| arguing a false statement in this context would bring "the
| clearer perception and livelier impression of truth,
| produced by its collision with error".[16]_
|
| > Issues "of public concern"
|
| The leading case on what an issue "of public concern" is
| Dun & Bradstreet v. Greenmoss Builders (1985). In Dun &
| Bradstreet, the Supreme Court considered whether a credit
| reporting service which distributed fliers to their only
| five subscribers qualified as an action of "public
| concern". As it was "hardly and unlikely to be deterred by
| incidental state regulation", the Court concluded it did
| not qualify.[5] This decision did not provide strong
| guidance on the issue.[20]
|
| _This vague area of law in regards to false statements of
| fact can lead to a variety of arguments over what is
| relevant or has public importance.[20][21]_
|
| (emphasis is mine^)
|
| Anyway, I'm not arguing it was or was not illegal, since
| that is a matter for the courts to decide. You could be
| right, but I'm skeptical
| trashtester wrote:
| During the first weeks of covid, the strategy proposed by most
| of the medical establishment was to "flatten the curve", which
| basically is to allow everyone to be exposed, but at a pace
| that is gradual enough that the healthcare system isn't
| overwhelmed. (Sweden continued this approach for months.)
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht...
|
| In effect, that was what was still proposed in the Barrington
| Declaration in October.
|
| While I disagreed with the proposal (just as I did with
| flatting the curve in March/April), I don't think it was
| disinformation. Rather, I think the declaration represents a
| value systems (liberitarianism) where liberty is seen as more
| important than safety, and where harming one group (children
| and young people) to help another (sick and elderly) is seen as
| unethical.
|
| My main objection was that I didn't think it would be realistic
| with our current population to be able to stomach such an
| approach to the end, with the number of deaths that would be
| likely to follow, and that starting lockdowns late might cause
| roughly as much harm from the lockdowns as starting them early.
| (Even Sweden did partically pivot, eventually.)
|
| Basically, though, I think the view presented in the declartion
| simply represents a political view, not disinformation. And I'm
| not a big fan of sensoring political views.
| themitigating wrote:
| What makes it a political view?
|
| The cooperation of the population is a valid concern when
| planning a response to an emergency
| meltyness wrote:
| Federalism.
|
| To color the situation a bit without presuming too much.
| Should the whole country shut down because DC, NY, and LA
| are reaching dangerous levels of hospital burden? I suspect
| the whole country took on the measures needed in denser
| areas, but I speculate that it looked draconian there since
| the spread was delayed by a year before it really hit a
| quorum in some central states[0]. It's a political argument
| because they can contend it would have been handled better
| by local, county, state officials.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kQKvnpyHXM
| trashtester wrote:
| Politics is when there is a disagreement about values.
|
| For example, pro choice vs pro life is about values, not
| facts.
|
| Scientific misinformation is when someone someone makes
| statements that are in disagreement with established
| scientific facts.
|
| For example, the theory of evolution is established enough
| to be considered a fact. Rejecting it is either
| misinformation, delusional or both.
|
| Now, it is possible that there were elements in the
| Barrington Declaration that was also presenting alternative
| ways of looking at the data, maybe opinions that would be
| fringe at the time (but definitely mainstream just months
| before). But part of this is also how you quantify deaths.
|
| Either you can count all lives equally, especially when
| including those who would have died roughly at the same
| time, even if they did not have covid.
|
| On the other hand, if you look at number of potential years
| of life lost, the numbers become quite different, such as
| in this study:
|
| https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/potential-years-of-life-
| los...
|
| If you look at the US (which was one of the highest), the
| OECD study above shows that 7700 years of life were lost
| per 100000 people, for the sample in time and age groups
| that were used. That is about 4 weeks for the average
| citizen. If you use a time window that includes 2021 and
| 2022, that could perhaps increase to 8-10 weeks per
| inhabitant.
|
| Maybe this would have been 2-4 weeks higher, if lockdowns
| had only lasted half as long, who knows. Anyway, I think
| average number of life-years lost per capita is a relevant
| metric to compare to the sacrifices involved in long-
| lasting lockdowns.
|
| Now, if you look at the main risk factor for dying from
| covid, namely obesity, the obesity in itself carries a cost
| in terms of expected years of life lost of 2-5 YEARS (not
| weeks as for covid), depending on the level of obesity.
|
| https://www.hopkinsarthritis.org/arthritis-news/years-of-
| lif....).
|
| In other words, if instead of mandating lockdowns, the
| government would spend a similar effort in schools,
| collages and workplaces to stimulate exercise, one could
| quite probably have have reduced years of life lost more
| than the lockdowns achieved, especially during the later
| stages of the pandemic.
|
| Oh, btw, I'm obese myself, which probably contributed to me
| being happy about lockdowns for selfish reasons, especially
| before vaccines were available.
| dahart wrote:
| I actually agree almost entirely with this, and I further
| appreciate your positive glass-half-full take on the debate
| and the motivations behind it, that it's political. Generally
| speaking I'm also not a fan of the government censoring
| political views. (I'm not sure that happened here. The
| article is making accusations of coordinated government
| censorship, but admitted the accusation lacks evidence. It's
| possible many people independently decided against hosting
| the GBD because of it's political bias.)
|
| There are a couple of reasons I think this particular
| political view does cross the threshold and amount to mild
| disinformation, which are that the stakes are far higher than
| most political debates. This isn't a tax or budget
| discussion, it's an ongoing pandemic with an outcome of
| millions of premature deaths so far. The GBD _did_ speculate
| on both the unknown future harm of lockdowns and the safety
| of herd immunity. It also attacks and contradicts the
| conclusions of many many fellow scientists and
| epidemiologists based on speculation and not established
| facts.
|
| Part of the issue for me is that free market policies tend to
| externalize damage caused by deregulation, here for example
| by comparing human death today to unknown amount of human
| suffering, and (as in this case) they make a sort of
| unfounded social Darwinism argument that presumes pure
| economic policy can and should be applied to everything non-
| monetary. This has been especially true for the last century
| when it comes to the environment; we're just starting to pay
| the real costs and asses the real damage from 100+ years of
| failure to take enough action and properly regulate
| pollution, a time during which it was argued constantly that
| the free market would minimize the total harm.
|
| I don't know how history will look upon the lockdowns in 10
| or 100 years, and I feel like lockdowns suck just as much as
| everyone else does. But people dying sucks hard, we're all
| fighting fiercely over what is the lesser of two bad
| outcomes. Without evidence to back it up though, it's hard to
| say yes we should let more people die because we think in the
| long term it might be less "total harm" if we do.
| trashtester wrote:
| > This has been especially true for the last century when
| it comes to the environment
|
| This picture is from 99 years ago in Ukraine. It shows the
| effect of inefficient agriculture and the harm done by
| dogmatic socialism in the most fertile part of Europe:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921%E2%80%931923_famine_in_U
| k...
|
| Millions were starving to death, and Ukraine was not an
| exception. In most of the world, periods of hunger and
| starvation was quite normal.
|
| This graph shows the percentage of the world population
| living in extreme poverty, from 1820 to 2015:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/exports/world-population-in-
| extre...
|
| The graph starts at around 90% of the world living in
| extreme poverty, and is down to less than 10% by 2015.
|
| To a large extent, this development was made possible by
| fossil fuels.
|
| > But people dying sucks hard, we're all fighting fiercely
| over what is the lesser of two bad outcomes.
|
| True, and I was all for lockdowns during the early stages,
| and later on still happy about them for more personal
| reasons (I'm obese, and I like working from home).
|
| But for some groups, the costs were really high, not just
| economically. For children, students and many single young
| people, 1-3 years of isoloation can carry a huge toll
| socially, psychologically and academically. When I
| mentioned that to elderly people I know around that time
| (that were afraid for their lives), they did not show much
| empathy for those young people who were forced into
| isolation for the protection of the elderly and obese.
| naasking wrote:
| > It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via
| the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most
| at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise
| continued functioning normally.
|
| Calling this notion "fringe" is just incorrect. The citations
| for that sentence say it may be hard to achieve. Sure, lots of
| things are hard to achieve but some of them are worth it. It
| seems plausible that avoiding the current economic disruptions
| that are significantly harming the world's poor might have made
| it worth it.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The real trouble with the approach is the fact that one
| infection doesn't provide long-term immunity, as we are
| doubtless all aware now.
| themitigating wrote:
| Who said it would?
| dahart wrote:
| This was the fundamental base assumption of the GBD. It
| _depends_ on herd immunity for its argument to be true
| and effective.
| naasking wrote:
| It doesn't really, it just depends on the harms caused by
| stronger measures, like total lockdowns, to exceed the
| harms caused by allowing the infection to spread.
| dahart wrote:
| > It doesn't really
|
| Yes it does, that is the explicitly stated assumption of
| the GBD.
|
| "As immunity builds in the population, the risk of
| infection to all - including the vulnerable - falls. We
| know that all populations will eventually reach herd
| immunity - i.e. the point at which the rate of new
| infections is stable - and that this can be assisted by
| (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should
| therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until
| we reach herd immunity."
|
| https://gbdeclaration.org/
| naasking wrote:
| Yes the argument was initially couched in terms of herd
| immunity, but the _argument doesn 't change_ without it.
| The same logic of total harm reduction still holds.
| dahart wrote:
| Of course the argument changes if herd immunity can't be
| achieved, it directly and explicitly changes the
| speculative calculation of how much harm is caused by
| allowing Covid to spread quickly and how much relative
| harm is caused by lockdowns.
|
| The argument isn't over whether there is a total harm
| reduction goal, the argument is over which of several
| strategies actually leads to total harm reduction. The
| stated goal of lockdowns was exactly the same, to reduce
| total harm.
| naasking wrote:
| > The stated goal of lockdowns was exactly the same, to
| reduce total harm.
|
| I disagree. Lockdowns were _targeted_ , "naive" harm
| reduction: the harm directly caused by the virus itself.
| It just implicitly assumed that the harm from the virus
| simply had to outweigh any other possible sources of
| harm, and/or that other sources of harm could just be
| mitigated, but we had literally no reason to be certain
| of that at the time, and in retrospect that seems to be
| false.
|
| The GBD was specifically couched in terms of _total harm
| reduction_ , calling for us to account for economic,
| mental health, delayed treatment, and other harms caused
| by "naive" harm reduction policies, like lockdowns. This
| is the argument that doesn't really change even if herd
| immunity is taken off of the table. This exact argument
| is the opening sentences of the GBD, so that's the
| central thesis, and removing herd immunity doesn't change
| this argument.
|
| Edit: to be clear, obviously removing herd immunity
| changes the threshold where harms prevented by oppressive
| policies are outweighed by the harms caused by those
| policies, but it doesn't change the existence of this
| threshold. Infection still provides _protection_ , even
| if it doesn't convey immunity, so the GBD could still be
| true even if you remove all references to herd immunity.
| dahart wrote:
| > The GBD was specifically couched in terms of total harm
| reduction
|
| So were the lockdown, mask mandate, and social distancing
| policies. We had far less severe lockdown than China in
| explicit recognition of the potential harm of more severe
| lockdowns. Again, the idea to reduce total harm is not
| unique to either side here, you can disagree all you
| want, but almost _everyone_ is interested in reducing
| total harm, the debate is over how to do that, not
| whether.
|
| BTW who are you quoting with "naive", and why do you
| believe taking some action to reduce death during a
| pandemic is naive compared to a Libertarian backed idea
| to do nothing and let nature sort itself out? With
| hindsight, we actually know now that the GBD's suggestion
| was naive because immunity rates after contracting Covid
| are not as good as they hoped for.
| naasking wrote:
| That definitely makes it less effective, no doubt. There
| are indications that real infection does provide better
| long-term protection against reinfection and serious
| disease on reinfection. Given long-COVID and complications
| from infection, that makes this option less attractive
| though. Then again, the suffering caused by the economic
| disruptions are still ongoing too, and likely will continue
| for years, so it's too early to say what hindsight will
| show was the right balance.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, long Covid probs not changing by number of
| infections would make this a really risky strategy, even
| if it could be done in practical terms (which I'm pretty
| sceptical about, tbh).
| caterpi11ar wrote:
| I predicted this comment as soon as I saw the post. I knew
| there'd be someone saying 'but those scientists really were
| doodoo heads!' as if that were the point of the article.
| dahart wrote:
| That's not at all what I said, but the article does in fact
| spend considerable time trying to establish the authors of
| the GDB as authorities and leaders of a legitimate and widely
| supported movement, right? It doesn't really talk about how
| many legitimate and widely supported scientists disagree with
| the GBD and who point out correctly that it's trying to trade
| real death today for speculative harm in the indeterminate
| future. The article seems one-sided and biased, and the GDB
| is speculation, whether it's right or not. Debate over the
| right way to handle things is healthy, but people who cry
| censorship when their risky view is not adopted without
| question, and when real lives are on the line, are trying to
| sway public opinion using debate tactics. This doesn't need
| to be an us-vs-them argument, attacks and hyperbole just add
| confusion to what is an actual hard to answer question that
| nobody knows yet.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| The article isn't about the harm caused by failing to adopt
| the Great Barrington Declaration.
|
| Its assertion is that the government was meeting with
| companies in an effort to get them to suppress the Great
| Barrington Declaration and other views that didn't support
| the government's plan of action. This is both illegal and
| bad for public discourse and truth-seeking.
|
| When the government gets to rule on truth and falsehood we
| then become unable to pick apart government-approved facts.
| Galileo's heresy trials, nearly 400 years ago, illustrate
| this problem.
| jtbayly wrote:
| The censorship happened. That's not debatable. The only
| question is why.
| themitigating wrote:
| The question is who censorsed the information and was legal.
| Why do you think the question is why?
| jtbayly wrote:
| We know who. The social media companies did. The question
| is whether they were doing so at the behest of the
| government.
| themitigating wrote:
| Because of a law congress made? If not then how is it a
| violation of the 1st amendment?
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Laws are not the only way that government can violate
| your rights.
|
| If a random cop stops by your house and tells you to take
| down the sign on your lawn, the government has violated
| your rights.
|
| The allegations in the article are of that sort, that
| government agents were giving direction to private
| companies on what speech they ought to permit on their
| platforms.
| themitigating wrote:
| The first amendment only says congress shall make no law.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| and the second says well regulated militia. The courts
| care about what their interpretation of the intent of the
| clause is, not the actual words in the clause.
| blast wrote:
| The entire second half of the OP explains in detail why
| there may be a First Amendment case here, including some
| interesting precedents.
| r721 wrote:
| This article is worth reading (link [14] in the above quote):
|
| >Climate Science Denial Network Behind Great Barrington
| Declaration
|
| https://bylinetimes.com/2020/10/09/climate-science-denial-ne...
| [deleted]
| TeeMassive wrote:
| This is pretty much the strategy adopted by Florida and they
| didn't have worse results adjusted for age while everyone was
| calling for Desantis to be tried for genocide.
| dahart wrote:
| Florida's death rate is quite a bit worse than
| California's...
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
| covi...
|
| Sweden also famously avoided lockdowns and later regretted
| it.
|
| China had severe lockdowns, and to the best of our knowledge
| it worked.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Worked is a funny way of describing China's situation.
| Sure, they have low death rates, but their economy is
| absolutely fucked by continuing lockdowns that they can't
| end because no one has immunity.
| themitigating wrote:
| Didn't he change the law to punish Disney because of their
| political opinion?
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| He removed special privileges granted by Florida to Disney
| for their political opinion. Removing preferential
| treatment for a global corporation that is actively working
| against your stated goals is a good thing and what a
| governor should be doing. Implementing new laws to punish
| Disney would be a step too far. Disney must be allowed to
| do as they wish within the bounds of the law but Florida
| doesn't have to continue letting them run their own
| fiefdom.
| causi wrote:
| The relative merits of terrible advice aren't particularly
| relevant to the question of whether the US government has a
| constitutional responsibility to not goad private companies
| into pushing or being hostile toward any specific viewpoint or
| communication. This is a bit like the "nobody deserves
| encryption because child pornography exists" court cases in
| that the specific details of someone being horrible are masking
| the much larger legal principle that's at stake.
|
| Personally I'm not sure where the line between "public
| announcement" and "government censorship" lays or should lay,
| but "the government can do whatever it wants as long as its
| opponents are shitty people" is not a good outcome.
| themitigating wrote:
| They don't because the first amendment says congess shall
| make no laws suppressing ...speech
| dahart wrote:
| ... as long as that speech isn't (including, but not
| limited to) fighting words, sedition, incitement,
| obscenity, pornography, false statements of fact,
| counterfeit currency, commercial speech, speech owned by
| others, threats, slander, libel, defamation, and more.
|
| ... and also as long as the speaker isn't being paid, isn't
| speaking for the government, isn't employing people, isn't
| in prison, isn't a regulator of the bar, the airwaves, the
| military, or immigration, and more.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exc
| e...
|
| Some of those exceptions may be relevant to this particular
| article.
| dahart wrote:
| The article didn't even consider the possibility that tech
| companies just happen to disagree with the Great Barrington
| Declaration and saw it as speculation and misinformation,
| which it is to some degree. It also doesn't discuss the
| possibility that this Declaration was signed by a small
| minority of scientists. Instead, it spends all it's time
| trying to frame this as a conspiracy, a large group being
| silenced by a small group of powerful people.
|
| The saddest part is that the stated goal of the GBD is
| _exactly_ the same as the stated goal behind our lockdowns,
| to minimize the death toll while things settle. Framing this
| as opposing parties with opposing goals is more about tribal
| politics than about the facts of the debate or about free
| speech.
|
| The Constitution makes clear that Freedom of Speech is not
| absolute, and does not extend to some kinds of speech that
| can be harmful to society. This is a case where this speech
| might turn out to be a False Statement of Fact that is not
| protected and should not be spread, because of the
| ramifications it has on people's lives. The merits of the
| argument are _very_ relevant to the question of whether there
| is a constitutional responsibility, according to the
| constitution!
| causi wrote:
| _False Statement of Fact_
|
| Even deliberate lies are protected by the first amendment
| unless they fall under the category of defamation. "Harm to
| society" is an irrelevant distinction under American law.
| dahart wrote:
| That's absolutely not true. The reasoning behind free
| speech exceptions like fighting words, sedition,
| pornography and others all hinge on harm to society.
|
| The Supreme Court has already recognized False Statements
| of Fact concerning "issues of public concern."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact#Is
| sue...
| causi wrote:
| Fighting words is not an exemption to free speech; it is
| an exemption to laws against assault and battery.
| Speaking fighting words does not break the law.
| Responding to fighting words by punching the speaker
| doesn't either. If the listener chooses not to respond to
| fighting words with violence and your fighting words did
| not include over criminal acts such as making a true
| threat, you will not be arrested.
| dahart wrote:
| > Fighting words is not an exemption to free speech
|
| Wrong again. Yes they are, generally speaking. https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
| peteradio wrote:
| The GBD was basically a recitation of the WHO Pandemic
| Influenza Preparedness and Response. How could you
| trivially classify it as harmful to society?
| dahart wrote:
| I didn't. The WHO did.
|
| (But it's a good point that the GBD's goals and the WHO's
| are the same, which is a good reason to ask why the
| debate has veered away from science and facts and is
| devolving into attacks and bad faith arguments.)
| r721 wrote:
| What if a billionaire pays a network of his agents of
| influence (and bots) to push and amplify that specific
| viewpoint on your social network? Is that a bad thing to
| deamplify it a bit?
| mvc wrote:
| > What if a billionaire pays a network of his agents of
| influence
|
| Exactly.
|
| Or if the billionaire is the head of an enemy state.
| causi wrote:
| _Is that a bad thing to deamplify it a bit?_
|
| Certainly not. I'm just saying the _government_ should not
| be directly leaning on you to deamplify it. If you want to
| deamplify it on your own, fine. If the government wants to
| make a public announcement that "social networks allowing
| this sort of thing is bad" that is also fine.
| jtbayly wrote:
| The heart of the issue:
|
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| I've replaced the baity headline with somewhat more neutral
| language from the subtitle, in keeping with the HN guidelines ("
| _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait_ "). If someone can suggest a better--more accurate and
| neutral--title, preferably using a representative phrase from the
| article text, we can change it again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: I also added a question mark since the claim is obviously a
| divisive one.
| adamsb6 wrote:
| I think the original title, "The U.S. Government's Vast New
| Privatized Censorship Regime," is more accurate and no more
| link-baity than yours. The article is about traditional media
| as well as tech companies and social media.
| dang wrote:
| Adding the words 'vast' and 'regime' to the already-divisive
| word 'censorship' seems pretty baity to me - that's clearly
| political rhetoric. The current title is a bit, too (that's
| why I asked for alternatives) but at least it's less so.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Dan... you think divisive to call out censorship by its
| name? Interesting viewpoint coming from a moderator of a
| news aggregator website with a built in echo chamber
| mechanism.
| dang wrote:
| I'm making a boring empirical observation that people
| disagree about how to apply that word. You need only look
| at the current thread for proof of this.
|
| If that's not obvious to you, it may be because you
| happen to agree with one interpretation rather than
| another; in that case I assure you that other people
| agree with their interpretation rather than yours. Hence
| the word "divisive".
| huimang wrote:
| 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?".
|
| Social media was a mistake.
| hackerlight wrote:
| It's the local optima.
|
| Government censorship is worse, and everything becoming 8chan
| is worse, so we're here.
|
| Maybe there's some new paradigm out there where users can self-
| select into their desired open source filters or something. But
| that's a while away at best.
| evandale wrote:
| > I don't know how letting social media companies dictate
| political discourse became acceptable.
|
| I don't either. I shake my head when I read people making the
| rebuttal that it's not the government censoring you so it's
| kosher.
|
| So, to get this straight, do people actually think that a
| profit driven corporation being more powerful than the
| government is a good thing?
|
| I don't get it AT ALL.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Do you think you have the right to go into a newspaper's
| office and force them to print speech that supports your
| point of view?
|
| That's what you're arguing for. The government regulating
| speech is a violation of the first amendment, period. That
| includes forcing speech.
|
| The problem isn't corporations having the right to moderate.
| The problem is corporations have become so large and powerful
| that meaningful competition can't exist.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Are the social media companies doing the printing?
|
| If I am a phone company and I detect that people are
| talking about anti-vax stuff, can I disconnect the call?
| What if it is a party line?
|
| Generally, newspapers print content they write. Not content
| written by Joe Q. Public, they often change the content of
| their writers using editors or don't run stories to push a
| narrative. In doing so, they are responsible for the
| content and stories they create.
|
| Social media companies seem to want to be telephone
| companies with no responsibility when it suits them but
| also have the power of editor when it suits them.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Phone companies are a pipe - the content isn't broadcast
| publicly like it is on social networks, so that argument
| isn't logically consistent. Phone companies have no need
| to moderate content.
|
| Social media is akin to paying for a storefront
| advertisement, or sending a letter to the editor. You buy
| access to a display window and can put your content
| there, under conditions. This is no different than that.
| If that content violates the rules, it can be removed. I
| wouldn't get mad if a shop owner agreed to put my sign
| up. I also wouldn't be mad if he said no. It's his
| property. I can buy my own property and do my own thing.
| Twitter is a private corporation. If they decided
| tomorrow that they'll only allow posts about bitcoin and
| delete everything else, that is their right. The
| government should not be telling people, or private
| corporations, what they can, and can't, post on their
| platforms.
|
| Do you think HN moderation should be removed? Do you want
| more cesspools online? That's what you're arguing for.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| > I don't either. I shake my head when I read people making
| the rebuttal that it's not the government censoring you so
| it's kosher.
|
| The typical rebuttal that I hear is not that it's kosher, but
| that it doesn't have anything to do with the first amendment.
|
| Choices are:
|
| - government tells social media what to do (controversial)
|
| - government doesn't tell social media what to do
| (controversial)
|
| People can be upset forever, but it's a stalemate that will
| never get resolved in this political climate. Not
| coincidentally, a lot of money is made on unresolved
| problems.
| Garvi wrote:
| Also important to realize that social media is the main traffic
| acquisition point for most news websites. Imagine the economic
| pressures they are under if they lose that resource even for a
| short time. No mainstream media outlet can afford that.
|
| Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with civilians
| (war is hell, right?). If your news organization reports on
| such an unpopular story, high chances are the untrained
| working-for-free facebook/reddit/social media moderator will
| flag you for propaganda and you will lose out on days of
| revenue. So you self censor on sensitive topics. Or perish.
|
| Social media moderators are the new gatekeepers of information
| and that terrifies me.
| huimang wrote:
| Then they should perish. We don't need 24/7 news coverage.
| trasz wrote:
| >Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with
| civilians (war is hell, right?).
|
| If your organization reports this without any kind of
| verification - given the common Russian trope of hitting
| civilians, including civilian buses, and then blaming Ukraine
| - then it's going to be correctly flagged as propaganda.
| [deleted]
| meltyness wrote:
| This article is misleading because the author fails to define
| "censor." The article repeatedly claims "censorship", where
| apparently none occurred.
|
| If you don't believe me, ask yourself this question:
|
| Does this comment itself "censor" the article in any meaningful
| way?
| deweller wrote:
| 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.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Who was de-platformed?
| SamPatt wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yeah, and same if you discussed it on HN.
| tremon wrote:
| That's not true in my experience, I have been able to
| discuss those things many times they came up and usually
| received upvotes (or at least more upvotes than downvotes).
|
| Yes, that's anecdata, so make of it what you will.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I was downvoted several times on HN for pointing out that
| reputable scientists were being censored on YouTube and
| other platforms for their dissident views on COVID.
|
| It happened here fairly often. Though less frequently
| here than most other places online during that time.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Unfortunately, there is a strong element of groupthink
| present on HN that downvotes according to party line.
| marvin wrote:
| Oh, the intense discussions just _pointing out_ the
| Norwegian health authorities' rationale for abandoning the
| AstraZeneca vaccine. The loud and certain statements that
| it was all based on selection bias.
|
| It was a very interesting time to practice independent-
| mindedness, and get vivid demonstrations on how rare it is.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| What do you suppose this thread is, other than groupthink
| in a slightly different direction?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| This sounds extreme to say and I know it is uncouth and might
| invoke Godwin's law, but bear with me here...
|
| Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and
| respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit like
| the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you or me
| can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that they
| willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise with a
| smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that things
| didn't escalate to violence.
|
| I mean for Christ sake, we have phone numbers people could
| call to rat out their neighbors family birthday party. We had
| police kicking kids and arresting people for using a
| playground. All it would have taken was some "expert" or
| politician to give permission to harm those "selfish grandma
| killers" and it would have been a whole different thing.
| People I thought I knew and respected completely lost their
| damn minds. Many have yet to recover.
|
| What these "experts" did to society is beyond the pale.
| Humans may have fancy shiny tools and "science" but we are
| fundamentally the same superstitious creatures as those who
| came before us 10's of thousands of years ago.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Based on the reactions I got from people I knew and
| respected, the last two years showed me exactly how shit
| like the holocaust went down. How ordinary people like you
| or me can be filled with so much fear and propaganda that
| they willingly sent their fellow humans to their demise
| with a smile on their face. We got incredibly lucky that
| things didn't escalate to violence....
|
| > All it would have taken was some "expert" or politician
| to give permission to harm those "selfish grandma killers"
| and it would have been a whole different thing.
|
| That's _quite_ the leap, and frankly reads as self-
| affirming speculation (e.g. I was right, and the proof is
| in this fantasy).
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > showed me exactly how shit like the holocaust went down
|
| Gina Carano was fired from Star Wars for making that same
| comparison - not even denying COVID, just saying, "the
| holocaust happened because people turned against their
| neighbors".
| iepathos wrote:
| She also mocked mask wearing among other unsavory
| political tweets. Being a public figure in a Disney
| production does require some restraint on your public
| commentary. Disney does not like negative publicity from
| their actors and actresses.
| raydev wrote:
| She was fired for comparing conservatives to the Jews in
| Hitler's Germany, which is, at best, absurd.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Thereby demonstrating, unfortunately, that everyone who
| said the education about the Holocaust could help make it
| never happen again was completely self-deluded.
| Apparently we _can_ just keep repeating history anyways.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| We only teach holocaust history at a very surface level.
| Not enough to prevent similar things happening again. Not
| even close.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Yeah, America only has three of four years of mandatory
| Holocaust education right now, not nearly enough. We need
| 3 or 4 times as much at least. Why don't we have a
| mandatory Holocaust class every day of the week from 1st
| to 12th grade? We just don't take this issue seriously
| enough.
|
| A few hours of lecture about the Cambodian genocide
| should be sufficient though. We need to focus more on the
| Holocaust specifically; that's the important genocide and
| the rest can safely be treated as footnotes in history.
|
| /s
| nights192 wrote:
| I don't think that epicureanideal was asserting that the
| Holocaust and the Nazi party in general was overlooked--
| merely that its coverage is perfunctory, glancing at
| immediate cause and effect rather than the deeper
| patterns behind it. I, too, am leary of over-emphasizing
| German atrocities surrounding WII--heinous though they
| may have been, there is no paucity of savagery in world
| history; however, I feel as though your reply is,
| frankly, a very bad faith reading of what bombcar posted.
|
| He appears to be surmising that we're becoming very
| impulsive in quashing whatever thought appears to impede
| our immediate policy goals--not that it is the Holocaust
| in and of itself that is special. (He even goes through
| the effort of explicitly highlighting it as entirely
| feasible for a populace to fall to!)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Beyond the pale is if we started over with Covid XL right
| now, it would go almost the exact same way again.
|
| Everyone would take up the exact same position they had,
| there will be a little attrition either side. Rabble on the
| internet all day long.
|
| FEAR was made into a VIRTUE. The good people were afraid
| and did what they were supposed to do. The bad people vote
| wrong and we don't listen to them anyhow. Same thing if we
| play it back.
| LanceH wrote:
| There have been numerous statements along the lines of
| "we didn't crack down hard enough". Which would likely
| translate to more restrictions requiring less evidence.
| I'm sure the opposite side would aim for greater
| defiance.
|
| The problem with both is we're talking "sides" and not
| "what should we do based on what we know?" There were far
| too many politicians involved, and they were all more
| concerned with appearing to be doing something on our
| behalf than actually acting in our best interests.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Don't mistake that those are my opinions on how things
| should, just what was observed.
|
| Consider why fear was made into a virtue. You said it,
| "our best interests", then look at the lens of Covid, and
| define that. Who got to say with that exactly was? Can
| you see any scenario where _"Considering who the virus
| effects, doing nothing special is our best long term
| approach"_ would have come out of the government and
| media?
| bombcar wrote:
| Depending on who said it and how it was said, it could
| certainly have happened. It's basically what we did with
| the bird flu years before, and somewhat with SARS.
|
| There may be an argument that if Covid was either _more_
| deadly or _less_ deadly it would have had less of an
| effect.
| nradov wrote:
| Disagreements between opposing sides regarding the
| appropriate pandemic response wouldn't have been resolved
| by focusing on what we know. Outside of a few fringe
| groups, most people agreed on what we knew. The
| disagreements stemmed more from differing values and
| priorities. And that's not even a problem which needs to
| be solved, it's just a reality of life in open societies.
| jesusofnazarath wrote:
| SamPatt wrote:
| Social ostracism and censorship is harm. Shutting down
| businesses and arresting business owners who refused to
| comply was harm. Wrecking supply chains and printing
| egregious amounts of money was harm.
|
| Yes, violence was largely avoided. But it was still an
| extremely harmful period of time.
| bombcar wrote:
| People seem to think that Germany went from sunshine and
| flowers to turbo-Hitler overnight; there was a gradual
| descent and it very definitely went through many of those
| states.
|
| It should be a constant reminder to each of us that _we
| are not special and we are not different_ - we could _and
| very well may_ be whipped into a similar frenzy someday.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| 'Gradual descents' can lead many directions, including
| into rebounds and revivals. Virtually all countries and
| political systems have suffered declines at times. Since
| periods of decline is a nearly universal experience, the
| leap from gradual decline to nazis is only moderately
| less tenuous than the leap from 'drinks water' to nazis.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I try to keep that in mind when I read responses with
| which I personally degree.
|
| Behind every comment is an actual person with a valid
| opinion. I may not agree with it, but perspective is key.
|
| Some have said you learn the most listening to a
| critic/skeptic
| bombcar wrote:
| Even if the opinion is _highly_ invalid, wrong, maybe
| arguably dangerous; the key that there is a person behind
| it is quite important. It 's very easy to forget online,
| where you often only encounter one aspect of the person
| in one area.
| nradov wrote:
| We can see the exact same process repeating in Russia
| _right now_. This could lead to consequences far worse
| than the recent pandemic.
| bombcar wrote:
| The amount of rabid "let's go to nuclear war, it can't be
| that bad" immediately after the beginning was probably
| one of the scariest things I've personally witnessed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think this thread is looking back at 2020 with
| seriously tinted glasses. There we were dealing with a
| deadly highly-contagious airborne pandemic with cases and
| deaths growing exponentially, which would have been hard
| enough to deal with without politicization. But it became
| politicized and all efforts to stop it suddenly faced a
| massive, deliberate, sustained political attack.
| Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration, victim
| complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was pulled
| out, every tactic was tried. There wasn't even a goal, as
| far as I could tell--it was just contrariness for the
| sake of contrariness: "My political enemies are FOR
| sensible public health guidance, therefore I must be
| against it!"
|
| The scariest thing I learned during the last two years is
| how many people are willing to throw me, you, and
| everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order
| to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience, or to simply
| virtue-signal their contrariness to their clan.
|
| And the US treated these attackers with kid gloves. There
| were pretty much no enforcement of any of the things the
| complainers were complaining about: No consequences for
| ignoring stay-at-home mandates. Few localities actually
| enforced business closures. Masking was up to individual
| businesses to enforce, resulting in little compliance.
| Throughout the pandemic, I could drive 50 miles in any
| direction from my city and find people out and about,
| maskless, businesses open, no measures being taken at
| all. The only thing that was actually enforced were
| school closures, and that's only because schools are run
| by the government.
|
| Those two years ushered in this new era of consequence-
| free mass civil disobedience. And it wasn't even in
| service of anything--just performative contrariness.
|
| I guess intelligence agencies also learned the sad answer
| to the question "If there were a grave threat to society,
| is it possible to use PsyOps to get society to ignore or
| even prolong it?" But then again, I suppose our reaction
| to Climate Change has already answered that question.
| landemva wrote:
| > I learned during the last two years is how many people
| are willing to throw me ... under the bus in order to
| avoid even
|
| Cloth masks and social distancing did not seem to slow
| the spread. Some people who got fully vaxed and boosted
| got sick and are still getting sick. None of that stuff
| effectively protected people, and it caused harms. Those
| with at-risk medical conditions (maybe you) should take
| care of themselves by isolating to avoid those busses.
| orangecat wrote:
| Yes, you are noble and altruistic and people who disagree
| with you are stupid and evil. Come on.
|
| _Downplaying, denial, misinformation, exaggeration,
| victim complexes, persecution complexes, every stop was
| pulled out, every tactic was tried._
|
| Like when Ron DeSantis was called a murderer for opening
| Florida's beaches (when it was well established that
| outside activities were extremely safe), or when parents
| advocating for schools to open were called white
| supremacists (when the predictable result of closing
| schools was that poor and minority students suffered
| most)?
|
| _The scariest thing I learned during the last two years
| is how many people are willing to throw me, you, and
| everyone (including themselves!) under the bus in order
| to avoid even mild, temporary inconvenience_
|
| Meanwhile, I learned how many people are willing to have
| governments literally lock everyone in their homes
| because of their inability to do any sort of rational
| risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > 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.
|
| My example would be one of the scientists on President
| Biden's Covid advisory council being interviewed on PBS and
| pointing out that cloth face masks were not effective against
| an airborne virus, but n95 masks offered some real
| protection.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/do-
| masks...
|
| I, personally, saw people demand that links to that interview
| be removed as "disinformation".
| raydev wrote:
| Just watched the portion you're referring to, and based on
| what he actually said, that cloth masks are "ineffective"
| with zero qualification, is disinformation.
|
| I see the concerns. He did qualify a few sentences earlier
| about the effectiveness of cloth masks is that there is
| some protection but it's small. Fine, but he was imprecise
| with his language later on.
|
| People want to (and did) latch on to the quotable portion
| that they are not effective (read: zero difference from no
| mask), which is demonstrably false.
| nradov wrote:
| Are there any randomized controlled trials which show
| that _cloth_ masks have a clinically significant effect
| in preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2? I haven 't seen
| any such studies which would meet evidence-based medicine
| criteria, but if you know of any I would be interested to
| read them.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Cloth masks are effective against a virus with a droplet
| based spread, like the flu. When an infected person
| sneezes or coughs, cloth face masks can contain those
| droplets as they spray out.
|
| With an airborne virus you have to be able to filter the
| air people are breathing and a cloth face mask that isn't
| even fitted tightly to the face just cannot do that. This
| is why you need an n95 mask or better fitted tightly
| enough to your face to create an air seal.
|
| For example, the Measles also has an airborne spread and
| the OSHA requirements for medical professionals mandate
| gloves, eye and face protection, and respiratory
| protection.
|
| https://www.osha.gov/measles/control-prevention
|
| Note that Flu levels hit record lows globally while Covid
| continued to spread like wildfire.
|
| >CDC says seasonal flu cases hit record lows around the
| world
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/health/cold-and-flu/cdc-says-
| seasona...
| musicale wrote:
| The Washington Post[1] did seem to engage in a a bit of
| introspection eventually:
|
| "The Post originally described Cotton's remarks as "debunked"
| and a "conspiracy theory" in a February 2020 article. But
| last week, The Post rewrote the article's headline, softening
| "conspiracy theory" to "fringe theory" and noting that
| scientists have "disputed" it rather than "debunked" it."
|
| [1]"The media called the 'lab leak' story a 'conspiracy
| theory.' Now it's prompted corrections -- and serious new
| reporting." Washington Post, 6/10/21
| jasonlotito wrote:
| This misrepresents what happened and what was said. Which
| is easy to do.
|
| From April 2: "The prime suspect is 'natural' transmission
| from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets.
| But scientists don't rule out that an accident at a
| research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat
| virus that had been collected for scientific study.""
|
| Couple that with the admission from Cotton: "Now, we don't
| have evidence that this disease originated [from the lab]"
|
| Numerous experts in the field backed up the idea that the
| virus was engineered or came from a lab.
|
| Even Cotton followed up with further clarification of his
| original tweets.
|
| "I am pleased to hear you now distinguish between
| possibility virus was engineered bioweapon (which can be
| dismissed) and possibility virus entered human population
| through lab accident (which cannot--and should not--be
| dismissed)" - From Feb 16, 2020 (referenced in Feb 17, 2020
| in Washington Post.
|
| This timeline covers it well: https://www.washingtonpost.co
| m/politics/2021/05/25/timeline-...
|
| Is it bad that people update their thinking when new
| evidence presents itself? No.
|
| But that doesn't mean people who pushed an idea without
| evidence should be lauded. A broken clock is right twice a
| day, after all.
| nradov wrote:
| And a couple months later the US federal government
| published an official report stating that a lab leak was a
| possible source of the virus.
|
| https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-
| publications/...
| SamPatt wrote:
| A very small bit.
|
| Readers aren't parsing sentences this closely and comparing
| to previous statements.
|
| Unless they come out with an editorial statement
| apologizing then they aren't really serious about their own
| involvement in censorship on behalf of those in power.
| carvking wrote:
| More of these are in order,
|
| https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-
| apologiz...
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >The Washington Post[1] did seem to engage in a a bit of
| introspection eventually
|
| Unfortunately, this is a common tactic. Walking back a
| previous wrong assertion allows one to frame it as a
| virtue--"we corrected ourselves!"--in order to avoid
| talking about the original vice of being a copy-and-paste
| propaganda organ for the state.
|
| There seems to be a very tight integration between the
| government and the major media, and this is a real problem.
| It's not surprising, as a journalist that is a burr in the
| saddle of government power soon finds it difficult to talk
| to government entities. But it is a problem if there really
| is no journalistic independence. In recent years,
| journalists seem to be little more than Twitter
| researchers. Complete randos from the Internet, some of
| whom were clearly a little bit mad, got closer to the
| actual truth than the "trusted experts."
| [deleted]
| jxramos wrote:
| that's a solid distinction, dispute vs debunk. That's a
| keeper.
| Canada wrote:
| What do you mean by rewrote? Are you saying the Washingtgon
| Post published article calling a position a "fringe theory"
| which a previous, entirely different, article they
| published referred to as a "conspiracy theory"? Or are you
| saying they edited a single article, changing the text
| "conspiracy theory" to "fringe theory"?
| musicale wrote:
| In case it wasn't clear, it is a quote from a Washington
| Post article, which in turn describes how this (previous)
| article was edited/corrected:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-
| cotto...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > In an article published Thursday, economist Jeffrey
| Sachs called for an independent investigation of
| information held by U.S.-based institutions that could
| shed light on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
| Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
| Sciences, Sachs and his co-author, Neil Harrison, a
| Columbia University professor of molecular pharmacology
| and therapeutics, said that federal agencies and
| universities possess evidence that has not been
| adequately reviewed, including virus databases,
| biological samples, viral sequences, email
| communications, and laboratory notebooks. Sachs and
| Harrison also highlighted a tantalizing scientific detail
| that may be an indication that SARS-CoV-2, the
| coronavirus that causes Covid-19, originated in a
| laboratory: a sequence of eight amino acids on a critical
| part of the virus's spike protein that is identical to an
| amino acid sequence found in cells that line human
| airways [1]
|
| If the Lancet Covid Commission is now claiming it is one
| of the foremost theories, then it is not fringe.
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com/2022/05/19/covid-lab-leak-
| evidence-...
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The issue was that the Post's conclusions was an inevitable
| result of treating what public health authorities say as
| the truth and any heterodox voices as dangers to be
| silence. Introspection is meaningless if the post
| fundamentally doesn't see anything wrong with that model
| and I think there is actually something to be said about
| treating mainstream medicine as authoritative truth.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > 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.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| A bold claim.
| notch656a wrote:
| I don't understand the evil-capitalist rationale for that. I
| would think reddit, like facebook, gets much of its revenue
| (or viewership, that turns into revenue) from people
| squabbling over the topic of the day/month/year and thus
| benefits from outrage at skeptics. Why not keep them around?
|
| Anecdotally I've found if I just say something relatively
| unbacked or 'stupid sounding' that the mainstream can easily
| attack to make my argument sound dumb, I don't get the
| ban/removal. It's only when you present a factual argument,
| _and especially if you start winning people over_ , that
| reddit is especially quick to ban you.
|
| I've noticed this same progression on HN. If I lose the
| debate due to not enough facts/persuasion, then people tend
| to leave it at that and rest satisfied they put an idiot in
| their place -- why would they want that comment removed when
| it can stay there as a head on a spike. If I introduce facts
| but they are unpopular, it will get downvoted to hell and
| people seem satisfied with that. However, if I actually start
| _winning people over_ then my comment gets flagged, because
| we can 't allow the wrong view to 'win.'
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >I don't understand the evil-capitalist rationale for that.
|
| Reddit's anti-evil team is not evil-capitalism, it's AI
| wokeness run amok: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comm
| ents/u374pf/reddits_...
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Truly religious people value their religion and its values
| over the pursuit of profit.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Relevant C. S. Lewis: "It would be better
| to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral
| busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes
| sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but
| those who torment us for our own good will torment us
| without end for they do so with the approval of their own
| conscience."
| flenserboy wrote:
| It helps the understanding when it is recognized that
| Reddit, as with other, similar sites, is a
| propaganda/opinion-reinforcement platform and not primarily
| aimed at advertising or making money.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| spookthesunset wrote:
| For kids the vaccine almost certainly _is_ more harmful than
| Covid. That's why many countries don't push kids to get
| vaccinated.
|
| As for the "horse dewormer"... don't you find it at all
| curious why none of the "experts" ever suggested any kind of
| treatments for Covid beyond vaccines and paxlovid. No "eat
| healthy, take your vitamins, exercise, get fresh air". Nope.
| Just hunker down in your home and wait for salvation. Any
| attempt to find other treatments for Covid were immediately
| shot down and roundly mocked.
|
| Weird, eh? Like what kind of assholes shoot down doctors and
| basically cancel them trying to find treatments for Covid?
| Who does that? In what world is that normal?
|
| Even more odd is none of them bat an eye when they push some
| omicron specific booster that was only tested on like 8 mice
| before being deemed legit.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Have you read any of Robert Kennedy Jr's book, "The Real
| Anthony Fauci"?
| adamrezich wrote:
| there was tons of weird stuff that only memetically lasted
| for a couple of days before fizzling out--remember
| "deltacron"? whatever happened to that? pretty sure it
| "existed" for about two days, then everyone silently agreed
| that name was ridiculous and nobody would take it seriously
| and it kind of just, uh, disappeared...
| ok123456 wrote:
| "Deltacron" turned out to be a lab error.
| adamrezich wrote:
| where were the front-page retractions, telling citizens,
| "hey, we know you're in a heightened emotional state of
| fear because of everything that (we told you) has
| happened, and we just told you to be more afraid of yet
| another new thing, but, guys, guess what, it was an
| honest mistake, just a lab error, sorry about that, we'll
| be better going forward when it comes to getting people
| who have been in basically a nonstop state of panic for
| months now riled up about yet another thing, when it
| turned out to be nothing. again, sorry!"
|
| no, nothing, it was just quietly phased out of headlines
| and trending topics, with zero remorse or reflection. and
| this is just one of many examples of this happening in
| the past few years.
|
| when are people going to realize that mass-scale
| emotional manipulation of the populace for political
| and/or financial gain for an elite few is not only
| totally viable in this world where everyone has the
| Internet in their pockets, but actually, _provably_ what
| has been going on for quite awhile now?
|
| that contemporary politician you were taught, at one
| point (which point exactly? you've long since forgotten),
| to have endless simultaneous fear of _and_ hatred for?
| maybe all of that was kind of overblown. maybe you can
| still dislike him and even be politically opposed to him
| and everything he stands for, yet still intellectually
| recognize that you were actively, consciously, willfully
| gaslit into perceiving him as Mecha-Hitler.
|
| or maybe you say to yourself, that was never me, I was
| never like that. okay, maybe you were one of the lucky
| ones who saw through at least some portion of the
| charade, but it is _irrefutable_ that the constant
| nonstop plural-year top-down entrenched government
| propaganda has conditioned _millions of people_ to have
| an entirely irrational set of emotions deliberately
| programmed into them that trigger upon mere mention of
| this person 's surname.
|
| once you understand how conditioned emotional responses
| are fully capable of _entirely_ overriding the logical
| faculties of even the smartest people you know or know
| of, you start to see the scope of what is at play here.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| New York Times continually claimed covid had a "4% death
| rate" for like a year after it was shown that the IFR of
| covid is somewhere down in the 0.6% (which itself is
| highly age stratified). Not once have these "experts"
| ever told people to calm down. Not once have they
| celebrated that covid is nowhere near as bad as some of
| the original computer models suggested.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| NYTImes lied to us
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Don't forget Covid toes. Or double masking.
|
| Crazy stuff...
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Because none of those things will stop you getting a virus.
|
| It's really quite simple.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Virus is gonna virus. You can't stop it and you can't
| contain it.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| You can, however, vaccinate against it.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Sadly the covid vaccines don't seem to slow the spread in
| any meaningful way.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Mmmm, yes and no. They definitely tamed the symptoms in
| anyone that got it, and they made it rather less likely
| that you'd get it anyway. Consider that before the
| vaccine and even with masks and everything else it was
| going through the population of every country where it
| appeared like prunes through a short grandmother.
|
| As for the symptoms, let me put it this way - I only know
| four people who refused to get vaccinated, and they died
| of COVID, or an existing condition made drastically worse
| by COVID.
| chrisan wrote:
| > 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.
| tsol wrote:
| 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.
| colpabar wrote:
| I think fauci declaring himself to be science incarnate did
| more damage to science as a whole than any of the bad-faith
| actors people complain about.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The personality cult that started to crystalize around
| Fauci was incredibly disturbing. For a few weeks it felt
| like I was being bombarded on all sides by "viral" videos
| of weirdos singing love songs to Fauci, getting tattoos of
| Fauci, all kinds of absurd celebrity worship shit. Why
| would anything like that be recommended to me in the first
| place, I never watch any content like that.
| axpy906 wrote:
| Really convenient how his role as the lead public
| official pushing AZT during the AIDs epidemic got memory-
| holed too.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I must have missed that press conference.
| hosteur wrote:
| Might be this
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09
| /fa...
| nradov wrote:
| It was an interview on MSNBC's Chuck Todd show, not a
| press conference.
|
| "attacks on me are, quite frankly, attacks on science"
|
| - Dr. Anthony Fauci, 2021
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/09/fauci-blasts-
| preposterous-co...
|
| In context his statement was a bit more nuanced. But I
| don't think it's healthy for a bureaucrat to try to
| personify a process. Taking political opposition
| personally is seldom productive.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| The biggest problem with Dr. Fauci's statements are
| different than from what is being discussed.
|
| I believe in the scientific method, and I also know there
| is a distinct possibility that a statement I make today,
| based on what we know today, may be incredibly wrong. Dr.
| Fauci's statements are frightening because they lack
| intellectual humility, and they remind me of a comic book
| phrase, rather than a statement by a leading physician or
| researcher.
|
| Would we expect anything different from Judge Dredd? [1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/miVoe7U6Lx4?t=30
| PostOnce wrote:
| Sometimes, really thorough science has to wait, and we have to
| go with the best science we have _right now_.
|
| A pandemic is one of those times.
|
| We fucked around and millions died, a million in America alone.
|
| Most of those "doctors" were saying shit to A] make money or B]
| get on TV; it seemed very few had any legitimate scientific
| interest. For example, this guy[0] who was deferred to by a lot
| of people who I would have thought would know better.
|
| "But Mr. Commenter, they died _with_ COVID, not _of_ COVID! "
| (I have heard this from people in several countries) ... that's
| irrelevant, we know how many more people died than normal, we
| know how many people die in an average year[1].
|
| [0] https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-
| reports/exclusives/9393...
|
| [0.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_A._McCullough
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/B2Xs4uk.png
| Lochleg wrote:
| Your simplistic theory for silencing certain scientists falls
| apart when you need to examine Africa or other countries that
| had the virus but not the excess death you would expect.
| Also, there is new excess death data that is not explained by
| the virus.
| calculatte wrote:
| This is the kind of fear propaganda that got innumerable
| people killed over the past two years.
|
| No, you don't just do whatever big pharma in cahoots with
| government "regulatory" agencies say and call that "science".
| The latest "booster" was tested on 8 mice before it was
| spread widely for use.
|
| The dissenting doctors were the ones making money? Have you
| seen how much Phizer is profiting off their untested,
| unapproved solution which is proven to be more dangerous than
| the disease?
|
| Time after time these pharmaceutical companies have lied and
| cheated in order to make money at the expense of thousands
| and millions of human lives. Somehow scared people are
| willing to forget history and go with whatever an authority
| figure tells them.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Are you saying Dr. McCullough, who came out with the
| McCullough protocol, closely related to the Zelenko protocol
| for firstline non-vaccine therapeutic treatment of Covid was
| a shyster?
|
| He was years ahead of CDC & NIH on coming up with something
| close to standard of care, and he published it openly [1] yet
| NIH was 2 years behind him [2] despite greater resourcing...
| Look at the publishing dates!
|
| You were saying?
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33387997/
|
| [2] https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/man
| age...
| gilded-lilly wrote:
| No, that's not how this works. You don't restrict scientific
| debate or prevent people from speaking. We're better than
| that.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Demon sperm doctor lady is still out there speaking to
| large audiences. I feel zero guilt about the fact that
| she's been sidelined from mainstream discourse.
| PostOnce wrote:
| There's a difference between doing science, and going on a
| press tour to push a viewpoint, though. I don't think
| actual science was ever being suppressed.
|
| If covid was killing 40% of people instead of 1% of people,
| would we still want to spend 3 years figuring out, on
| spreadsheets, whether it was really merited based on long-
| term scientific studies?
|
| And if we decided that we should do some things for public
| health in the very short term, should we humor every
| crackpot who wants us to wait?
| warmwaffles wrote:
| > And if we decided that we should do some things for
| public health in the very short term, should we humor
| every crackpot who wants us to wait?
|
| That's a very short sighted view. Expanding the power of
| government is not always the answer.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I don't think actual science was ever being suppressed.
|
| Don't be ridiculous.
|
| We knew very early on that the passengers on the cruise
| ship Diamond Princess continued to spread Covid from
| cabin to cabin despite being locked down in their cabins.
| Yet the scientists who pointed out that this was very
| good evidence for airborne spread of Covid were shouted
| down.
|
| Why is this important? The mitigations we put in place
| were based on the theory that Covid had a droplet based
| spread, like the flu.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| > There have to be checks and balances.
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| alexb_ wrote:
| You actually can, there's just a gigantic mountain of
| evidence showing that you are wrong. So there's not really an
| argument to be made there.
| [deleted]
| rglover wrote:
| The evidence is all based on models, controlled by the very
| people who have incentive for those models to support their
| claims (scientists receiving grants, corporate kickbacks,
| etc and NGOs/politicians doing the same).
|
| For decades, the very people who support these models have
| been telling people we're just a few short years away from
| the demise of the species...only for nothing to happen (and
| for the very things they claim to be getting worse,
| actually getting better). Again, and again, and again.
| First it was global warming, then it was "climate change"
| (hint: the climate always changes--the real subtext here is
| Malthusian discontent for humanity, not a desire to protect
| nature).
|
| Those very same people, too, go out of their way to dismiss
| technology like nuclear energy and carbon capture which can
| solve the problem they claim to wish to solve (reducing
| and/or eliminating emissions). Why? Because if they solve
| the problem, they can't milk subsidies from the government
| and will actually have to find real work to do. Not just
| parading around (in f*cking private jets pouring out
| emissions) and self-flagellating at conferences and
| "summits."
|
| The whole thing is a gigantic self-defeating farce, that,
| when looked at through the lens of objectivity makes about
| as much sense as Scientology (the comparison to a religion,
| here, being purposeful). The parallels to the COVID
| groupthink are apt, correct, and the exact same candy bar
| in a different wrapper.
| praxulus wrote:
| The evidence includes the actual record of rising
| temperatures, rising CO2 levels, and laboratory
| experiments that confirm that the greenhouse effect
| exists. None of those are just models.
|
| I'm extremely surprised that even a single scientific
| paper predicted the demise of the species due to climate
| change within a few years. Could you point me to such a
| thing?
| rglover wrote:
| > The evidence includes the actual record of rising
| temperatures, rising CO2 levels, and laboratory
| experiments that confirm that the greenhouse effect
| exists. None of those are just models.
|
| No, but the things actually being cited--namely, the IPCC
| annual reports--as the pretext for a lot of the foolish
| policy we're seeing, are based on models.
|
| > I'm extremely surprised that even a single scientific
| paper predicted the demise of the species due to climate
| change within a few years. Could you point me to such a
| thing?
|
| No, that rhetoric often comes from
| misinterpretations/misrepresentations of scientific
| papers and statistics (by politicians, the media, and
| leaders of NGOs) which is then used to justify the
| aforementioned foolish policy.
|
| Which is frustrating as the papers often denote a problem
| existing, but not as one without remedy. And this is the
| crux of the problem: the argument is framed as being
| whether or not climate change exists (anyone who doesn't
| swallow the narrative whole is automatically a "climate
| denier") and not "given that it exists--and we know the
| cause--why are we ignoring viable solutions to those
| causes in favor of less-viable half-solutions that
| exacerbate the problem?"
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Some time back there was definitely a loud "denier" voice,
| but I think this is gone from all but the fringe.
|
| The disagreement today isn't about the science, but about
| policy - what should be done about it, what's the
| cost/benefit analysis, and so forth. There's a sizable
| faction that wants to avoid this conversation by yelling
| about "Science(tm)!", which cuts off the actual policy
| discussion before it can get started.
|
| edit: typo
| alexb_ wrote:
| I definitely do agree with this. This is a very important
| issue that quite obviously can have many different
| viewpoints.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I think the disagreement is about the extent to which
| these events will be damaging first and foremost, and
| policy discussions stem from that. I know plenty of
| people who concur "carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas"
| and all that comes with that, but don't believe that
| humans are going to destroy the planet within 8 years or
| whatever the doomsday date is nowadays. That's the big
| driver for climate change denial, not science skepticism,
| but over the top fearmongering rhetoric by the public
| figures championing climate change. The people actually
| trying to solve this problem are doing a disservice with
| their dramaticism. They discredit themselves with it, and
| unfortunately their cause will suffer because of it.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Strawman. What if a scientist finds real evidence that goes
| against the zeitgeist. They'd have a hard time doing
| anything on today's climate tolatitarianism, no journal
| would publish them, they'd be outsed by the academic group
| think.
|
| Your argument is dismissive and similar to flat earthers
| and hoaxers. I am not referring to climate deniers. I just
| want people to feel that there is room for questioning
| climate science _with_ science.
|
| The litmus test is this: It would be remarkably easy to
| publish fake climate science if a scientist want to, say
| due to ideological reasons, since we've completely silenced
| the criticism machinery in this area.
|
| Strangely, the issue is similar to COVID.
| beej71 wrote:
| This is science, though, isn't it? There's a mountain of
| evidence for X, and someone finds a little evidence for
| Y. No one accepts it, naturally, since there's relatively
| little evidence for it. But over decades, perhaps the
| evidence grows and Y reaches acceptance parity, and then
| maybe goes on to exceed X and be the dominant theory.
| E.g. plate tectonics and continental drift.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Strangely, the issue is similar to COVID.
|
| It would have been career suicide to go against the
| narrative with covid. Witness what happens to any paper
| published that suggests things in covid-land might not be
| as bad as claimed. They first get discredited as "not
| peer reviewed" and their authors get thrown to the
| wolves. Same with anything that shows masks don't really
| work very well. Or lockdowns don't work well. "Not peer
| reviewed" and "authors are bozos".
|
| These same people have absolutely no problem accepting
| papers that are based on crazy computer models using
| garbage data or "studies" that don't mimic anything real
| with very small sample sizes.
|
| Anything that goes with the narrative that covid is the
| worst thing ever and that masks are awesome was cheered
| on. It didn't matter how flimsy the research was. As long
| as it supported the cause it was golden.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > What if a scientist finds real evidence that goes
| against the zeitgeist
|
| They'd be _a fucking hero_. I know a few atmospheric
| science faculty. They are hyper distraught at the data.
| They 'd love nothing more than to find out that actually
| we are going to be fine. Being able to keep burning coal
| for centuries would be a huge boon for reducing poverty
| worldwide. It'd be amazing. This hypothetical researcher
| would have among the most positive influences on human
| prosperity of any human to ever live.
|
| Journals select for novel results that upend prior work.
| Strong analysis that demonstrated that the existing
| research is wrong would be _front page cover of Science
| or Nature shit_.
|
| By declaring that there is a cabal that will silence
| quality research it allows people to dismiss the entire
| professional community without actually doing any work
| whatsoever.
|
| > The litmus test is this: It would be remarkably easy to
| publish fake climate science if a scientist want to, say
| due to ideological reasons, since we've completely
| silenced the criticism machinery in this area.
|
| What do you mean by fake? Could you throw together a
| bunch of fake numbers that match existing expectations
| and get that published? Sure, so long as it didn't get
| rejected for lack of novelty. But this is true for
| everything. I could read that falling objects accelerate
| at 9.8m/s2 in a book and decide to make up some
| observations that match this and submit that to a
| journal. This doesn't demonstrate that gravity is hokey.
| It just demonstrates that paper reviewers aren't
| especially well equipped to identify fraudulent
| observations.
|
| Also, the number of grad students working their ass off
| trying to get their research published and getting their
| work rejected demonstrates pretty clearly that it is not
| "remarkably easy" to publish whatever you want as long as
| it aligns with the existing best thinking.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Have you heard about Ignaz Semmelweis? He went against
| the medical establishment to demonstrate that surgeons
| hand-washing between operation is a disease prevention
| system.
|
| tl;dr he died alone and poor in an insane asylum for
| being a science "heretic". Same freaking story as all the
| doctors who were silenced during this "pandemic". [1]
|
| >Despite various publications of results where hand-
| washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's
| observations conflicted with the established scientific
| and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were
| rejected by the medical community. He could offer no
| theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced
| mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were
| offended at the suggestion that they should wash their
| hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly
| outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous
| breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his
| colleagues. In the asylum he was beaten by the guards. He
| died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right
| hand that may have been caused by the beating. His
| findings earned widespread acceptance only years after
| his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory,
| giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical
| explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's
| research, practised and operated using hygienic methods,
| with great success.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yes. Everybody has heard of this story. It comes from a
| time when the way that scientific research was
| identified, shared, and evaluated was entirely different
| both at a structural and individual level. It is also
| _famous as shit_ in part because the story is so dramatic
| and unusual. I do not believe that it is in any way
| indicative that revolutionary research which demonstrated
| that CO2 emissions can be massively increased without
| generating meaningful planet-scale warming would be made
| inaccessible.
|
| ExxonMobil would be shouting it from the tops of the
| hills at every second of every day. The GOP would hold
| nonstop hearings for these researchers to present their
| work over and over and over. And I'm telling you that
| existing atmospheric science faculty would _weep with joy
| over this news_.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I don't think they'd be a fucking hero. They'd be hung by
| the media, strangled by the academic peers and rejected
| by the society.
|
| Most science works fine, this is one area where it is
| quite deranged.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >I don't think they'd be a fucking hero. They'd be hung
| by the media, strangled by the academic peers and
| rejected by the society.
|
| I agree completely.
|
| >Most science works fine, this is one area where it is
| quite deranged.
|
| I disagree completely. The old saying, "science advances
| one funeral at a time" is still as true today as when it
| was coined.
| pstuart wrote:
| If what climate scientists are saying _is_ true, then
| there 's every reason to be deranged about it.
|
| The bonus is that there's so many other wins from
| transitioning away from fossil fuels.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Who have you spoken to who is deranged?
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Also, the number of grad students working their ass off
| trying to get their research published and getting their
| work rejected demonstrates pretty clearly that it is not
| "remarkably easy" to publish whatever you want as long as
| it aligns with the existing best thinking.
|
| While it isn't "remarkably easy" to publish what you
| want, even when it aligns with the establishment
| position, it is always infinitely harder to get what you
| want published when it conflicts with the establishment
| position (when it comes to "mainstream" publications).
| calculatte wrote:
| With enough funding, you can find evidence for anything.
| With climate change's funding of $632B anually, I could
| provide you with a mountain of evidence that Cheez Wiz
| effectively fights lung cancer.
|
| Show me the research grants available for disproving man-
| made climate change. If researchers want to make a
| paycheck, they find evidence for what they are paid to find
| or next year they find a new job.
|
| There is a real crisis. But it starts with the crisis of
| science and the rise of scientism.
| greedo wrote:
| Considering that the energy companies have been funding
| counter-research against climate change for most of my
| life, I think you're looking in the wrong direction.
| calculatte wrote:
| This is a fear-based issue that has only proven to be a
| infinite source of money for those involved. The only
| incentive is to spread more fear to keep increasing their
| payday. One needs only to look at the "solutions"
| provided to combat it.
|
| A carbon tax? Do what you like, push any additional costs
| onto the customer. As long as we get our money, climate
| change is solved!
|
| Grossly simplified, but still accurate.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| This is _exactly_ what people said about covid. You
| completely missed the point.
| naasking wrote:
| > This is exactly what people said about covid. You
| completely missed the point.
|
| But such evidence _didn 't_ exist for COVID.
| Effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates is still
| hotly contested, for instance.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Effectiveness of lockdowns and mask mandates is still
| hotly contested, for instance
|
| The fact their effectiveness is still being questioned
| suggests that we never should have done them in the first
| place. You don't get to make broad, highly disruptive
| mandates with almost zero evidence they would even work.
|
| For the mandates to actually be worth it, you should be
| able to show the data to any reasonable person and they'd
| immediately see an order of magnitude difference between
| test & control. The fact you can barely tell florida
| apart from california is pretty damning. If you need
| fancy math to see a difference, it wasn't worth it.
| naasking wrote:
| > The fact their effectiveness is still being questioned
| suggests that we never should have done them in the first
| place.
|
| Not necessarily. Precautionary principle and all when we
| didn't know much. Mask mandates aren't that disruptive.
| Lockdowns obviously more disruptive, and definitely
| justified at the very beginning when we didn't know
| anything.
| calculatte wrote:
| naasking wrote:
| In principle, HCQ can be effective against some
| coronaviruses and not others. Ditto for masks. So I'm not
| convinced we knew anything specific about COVID-19 just
| due to prior research, but the precautionary principle
| suggests being overly conservative in most assumptions.
|
| Fauci actually did mislead the public about masks, but he
| actually believed they _were_ effective, so he lied to
| the public claiming their ineffectiveness at first due to
| fears of shortages.
| banannaise wrote:
| There's a very large difference in that COVID science was
| weeks to months old and extremely urgent, which caused a
| lot of wacky behaviors due to organizations panicking.
|
| Climate science has been churning for decades. Would
| disagreeing conclusions be laughed off at first? Sure,
| probably. When most disagreement has been junk science by
| quacks, it's natural to reflexively make that assumption
| of new disagreement. But there's ample time and space for
| new studies to be analyzed, expanded on, replicated.
| tomp wrote:
| But as COVID science got clearer, the spreaders of fake
| news ("vaccines prevent virus" "masks work" "kids are
| endangered") didn't bear any responsibility nor suffer
| any consequences.
|
| Same as with climate science. When predictions turn wrong
| (glaciers still existing in 2020, Great Barrier Reef
| recovering) everyone just moves on to new fear-mongering.
| chrisan wrote:
| What kind of consequences do you want those people to
| suffer?
|
| Surely you aren't going to argue the the vaccines did
| more harm than good?
|
| Or that wearing a mask caused someone personal harm?
|
| Or that trying to keep kids safe was a bad idea? My wife
| personally took care of many sick covid kids. They had
| all kinds of weird ailments no one was used to pre-
| pandemic.
|
| Not sure why you are citing glaciers still existing as
| something to stand on, they are clearly and measurably
| disappearing.
| tomp wrote:
| At the very least they should lose their jobs/positions,
| never again be in position of power or consequential
| decision making, and the institutions that promoted them,
| should internally review their policies so the lies don't
| happen again.
| banannaise wrote:
| And this is the exact kind of uncited quack climate
| denialism that causes climate denialists to be dismissed
| as quacks out of hand. Thanks for playing.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I was shocked, as was my Doctor wife, that the government
| appeared to deliberately withhold firstline treatment
| options, and non-vaccine therapeutics
|
| Her response, "What is the standard of care for Covid
| patients first presenting?"
|
| There were none for years, the Govt conspired with
| BigTech to characterize doctors like Zelenko (RIP) and
| McCullough as loony quacks when they came up with their
| own protocols for treatment.
|
| Yet, later on the govt did come out with protocols that
| strangely, mimicked Zelenko & McCullough's material.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| > Yet, later on the govt did come out with protocols that
| strangely, mimicked Zelenko & McCullough's material.
|
| No no no this is disinformation! A protocol which
| includes *checks notes* Pfizermectin is totally different
| than a protocol which includes ivermectin. You can't
| compare the two!
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I was always onboard with the climate change agenda until
| 2020. Now I understand that this is "political science"
| (the application of "science" as interpreted by people in
| power) as opposed to pure "science". See the current
| Dutch farmer protests and those in Sri Lanka, and soon to
| come in Canada.
| hellojesus wrote:
| Are you discussing the cause and effect chain or the policy
| solution?
|
| From what I've seen, the data is compelling: burning coal is
| contributing to climate change.
|
| The policy solution, however, is much more challenging, and
| that's where I see the most groupthink occurring.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I find data compelling as well. That's not my argument at
| all.
|
| I am just saying that there is no room for dissent both in
| academia, but as you said it is even more insane in the
| policy sphere.
|
| I find any area in science that's strongly guarded in
| combination with media, corporations, governments and group
| think extremely problematic, no matter how uncomfortable it
| makes me.
| babypuncher wrote:
| There comes a point where the evidence and consensus are
| so strong that dissenting opinions are no longer worth
| considering. If someone in acadamia tries to say the
| Earth is flat, would you expect them to be taken
| seriously, or laughed out of their profession?
| origin_path wrote:
| Yeah people said that point had been reached for COVID
| too - within weeks. It hadn't and tons of stuff with
| "strong consensus" turned out to be wrong or worse,
| deliberate lies.
|
| Climatology is nowhere near as certain as the shape of
| the earth. It's filled with modelling projections, and
| dubious or outright manipulated evidence. Just look at
| the way they edit historical temperature data. It's so
| heavily edited that large swathes of scientific papers
| from the 40s 50s and 60s are now in open contradiction
| with current temperature graphs of the 20th century. Then
| it happened again in the first decade of the century -
| there was famously a "pause" in global warming that later
| they decided had never happened at all. Once again, at a
| stroke huge piles of research were invalidated.
|
| To compare a field that routinely invalidates decades of
| its own research by rewriting historical temperature
| measurements, to the shape of the earth, is not
| intellectually honest. The gap between these things is
| vast.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| pstuart wrote:
| If you're going on the "science is corrupted because they
| have an agenda" route, then perhaps include the fact that
| the fossil fuel industry is highly incentivized to
| subvert science to protect their profits.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| While I agree _in the general sense_ that climate science
| is worthy of scrutiny (as any other science is),
| anthropogenic contributions to climate change have been
| proven to 5s certainly via satellite data for some time
| now. It 's not as certain as the radius of the earth at a
| given point in time, but it is as certain as the
| existence of the Higgs boson. At this point, any contrary
| assessment would requires an extraordinarily robust
| rebuttal.
| coding123 wrote:
| I think and hope we all agree here now about flat earth
| not being true. But most science debate is politicized.
| At every turn we optimize what we already believe is
| true. Thus what studies get funded? The ones where the
| main researcher already said coal/gas/etc. is causing
| climate change. The ones that don't? Sunspot activity
| researchers.
|
| The WAY this post will be replied to and downvoted IS the
| thing we're talking about. If you don't want to repeat
| history as has been for a 10000 years of human history,
| start listening to dissenting opinion more. At least
| more.
| coding123 wrote:
| It's still not clear.
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/031
| 3....
|
| Now don't get me wrong, I would rather our energy come from
| clean sources, but as a principal of healthy lungs not
| changing climate. There's much much much stronger evidence
| that the actual sun is affecting our climate more than
| anything right now.
|
| When things don't fit the narrative, all funding and
| direction is cut off.
| pstuart wrote:
| Your link has a disclaimer at the top stating it is out
| of date.
| coding123 wrote:
| At some point in time it stopped fitting some left
| narrative.
| tomp wrote:
| And building green unstable energy sources is contributing
| to burning coal.
|
| But anyone opposing solar power is branded as "climate
| denier".
| anon84873628 wrote:
| 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.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Your comment is actually a perfect illustration of the
| problem the OP described.
|
| "I think this is incorrect" is answered with "how prestigious
| are your credentials?" instead of "what are your reasons?".
|
| Prestigious credentials should rest on the foundation of good
| reasoning, not the other way around.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| That only applies for things that are relatively easy to
| reason around, with little domain knowledge necessary.
| mike_d wrote:
| You are making it out as some sort of gatekeeping. A
| veterinary tech has absolutely no business publicly
| contradicting an epidemiologist during a pandemic.
|
| When the building is on fire and the firefighters are
| yelling at you to get out, but Bill from the copy room is
| like "wait nooooo smoke is good for your personal aura," it
| is perfectly fine to question someone based on credentials
| alone.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| They absolutely do. Especially now that two years later
| the veterinary was right and the epidemiologist wasn't.
|
| A short video that sums up that last three years of
| scientism by the establishment:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZMtSPX3iE
| eldenwrong wrote:
| Even people like John P. A. Ioannidis were being
| throttled and dismissed.
|
| Can you distinguish between political and scientific
| epidemiologists?
| calculatte wrote:
| "When you're scared pay no attention to your own lying
| eyes, just do whatever an authority figure tells you"
|
| You may want to rethink that one.
| peatmoss wrote:
| Assessment of what constitutes good reasoning is somewhat
| dependent on having a lot of prerequisite knowledge. It's
| hard, because I think public debate is healthy generally,
| and I think that some valid discussion was quashed. At the
| same time, there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense
| that did have tangible impacts.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > there were loonies spouting dangerous nonsense that did
| have tangible impacts
|
| The loonies were a very small set of people. They were
| used to tarnish the reputation of _anybody_ who was even
| a wee bit skeptical of what society was doing. Just
| because somebody thinks closing schools for more than a
| year and a half is a bad idea doesn 't make them a loony
| conspiracy theorist. Just because somebody thinks the
| harms of the mandates were worse than any benefit they
| provided doesn't make them a loony. 99% of all people
| were in the "non-loony" bucket. 1% were actual loonies,
| but according to "the experts" the whole set of skeptics
| are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous
| nonsense".
|
| By the way, multiple times I've been accused of spreading
| "dangerous nonsense" by linking to state dashboards that
| clearly demonstrate how age-stratified covid is.
| Apparently linking to public datasets is now
| "misinformation".
|
| Crazy crazy crazy...
| ModernMech wrote:
| > but according to "the experts" the whole set of
| skeptics are grandma killing loonies spreading "dangerous
| nonsense".
|
| You're doing the exact thing you decry in your post by
| painting "the experts" with a broad brush and scare
| quotes as being unreasonable and hyperinflammatory in
| their rhetoric. Not everyone who was for school closings
| and lockdowns was calling their opponents "grandma
| killing loonies". People need to stop arguing from the
| extreme.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I've been literally called a grandma killer by a person I
| know in real life for wanting my kid to go school. I've
| been called a grandma killer for wanting a normal
| thanksgiving with my extended family.
|
| The people doing this might be the minority, but they
| were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5
| years. Nobody else got a voice.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > The people doing this might be the minority, but they
| were the ones holding the microphone for the last 2.5
| years. Nobody else got a voice.
|
| So in other words, 99% of the people were in the non-
| loony bucket, and you're focused on the 1% that yelled at
| you?
|
| I could turn your statement around. As a teacher, I've
| been called a child abuser by a person I know in real
| life for wanting teachers to have a safe working
| environment. The people doing this may be the minority,
| but they were the ones holding the microphone.
|
| So I really fail to see how what you're doing now in your
| second post is different from what you decry in your
| first.
| nradov wrote:
| It was horrible how government officials in collaboration
| with teacher's unions inflicted collective punishment on
| our children by closing schools and then imposing mask
| mandates. There was never any high-quality scientific
| evidence to justify such policies. And we clearly see in
| retrospect that they were unnecessary: Sweden kept
| schools open without mask mandates and they ended up with
| a lower death rate than the USA.
|
| In most cases the actual classroom teachers that I talked
| with didn't even support those policies. It was the
| teacher's _unions_ which did most of the damage.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Thanks for proving my point. "Inflict[ing] collective
| punishment" is not what anyone was trying to do. Being an
| actual teacher and knowing and talking to many actual
| teachers, I can tell you that your assertion that
| teachers didn't support those policies is uninformed.
| What teachers wanted was for the safety of students and
| teachers as well. The issues faced were that schools were
| very short staffed, and it's difficult to keep children
| safe and to maintain an effective learning environment
| when half the faculty and staff are out sick.
|
| The "keep schools open" crowd often floated a false
| dichotomy where the option was between schooling as
| normal or closed schools. Schooling as normal was never a
| realistic option for many districts with missing faculty
| and staff. They would say "kids are not susceptible to
| covid, therefore schools are safe" without any concern
| about _teachers_ who in fact died due to covid, as
| happened in my district.
|
| Today we're facing a national teacher shortage where
| those who would have thought about teaching are steering
| clear of the field, and those currently in it are looking
| to get out asap. The rhetoric you're displaying here is a
| large part of the reason why.
| ghoward wrote:
| > Thanks for proving my point. "Inflict[ing] collective
| punishment" is not what anyone was trying to do.
|
| Maybe not, but it's what they _did_ do.
|
| For some reason, people mix up intentions and
| consequences all the time. The intentions may have been
| good; the consequences were not.
| ModernMech wrote:
| You're presenting a counterfactual, that if schools were
| opened, everything would have been fine and it would have
| been business as usual. The point is that when teachers
| are dying and out sick, and the school is running on a
| skeleton crew, schooling by definition _couldn 't_ be
| business as usual. Who teaches the classes when teachers
| are out and there are no subs? Who drives the kids to
| school when there is a shortage of bus drivers? Who keeps
| them safe when there aren't enough eyes to supervise?
| These issues were completely sidestepped by the "open
| schools" advocates, as if they were just minor
| implementation details and not showstopping
| complications.
|
| I've found that people who are not teachers and who have
| no idea what it's like to run a school are _very_ quick
| to pass judgement when it comes to this issue. Usually
| digging a little deeper it 's very easy to find this
| quickness to blame stems from various political
| viewpoints rather than any expertise or knowledge about
| the situation on the ground. Most people I've found
| blaming teachers like this don't even have any kids in
| school.
|
| Anyway, teachers are the ones on the front line _right
| now_ trying to fix the problems that children face today
| due to the pandemic, so please spare me your moralizing
| about how teachers are abusers and conspired to inflict
| collective punishment on children. What are _you_ doing
| to fix the problems?
| notch656a wrote:
| >You're presenting a counterfactual, that if schools were
| opened, everything would have been fine and it would have
| been business as usua
|
| Person you replied to never said that. Could have been
| like my kid's school, where the kid/teacher missed a
| couple weeks but other than that the teachers that didn't
| die or whatever eventually came back and taught the kids
| in class in person.
|
| >showstopping complications.
|
| Well somehow they weren't as my county got hit worst than
| most and yet somehow my kid still got schooled, just
| through a private school. Didn't stop the show for those
| willing to keep the show going.
|
| >Most people I've found blaming teachers
|
| I definitely don't blame teachers in general. My kids
| teachers were great. Awesome people. The ones that gave
| up, and said well thinsg are challenging and I might die
| or whatever, well that's fine I don't blame them either.
| Go on and find another profession or whatever, you're not
| a slave. But I salute the ones who stuck around like my
| kid's teacher who was willing to adapt and overcome to
| keep things going so my child didn't get so far behind.
|
| >abusers
|
| The person you replied to never said teachers are
| "abusers."
|
| It almost sounds like you're arguing against some other
| person you have beef with, rather than the person who
| replied to you. Either way I don't know what to tell you.
| My kid, and her teacher kept going on through COVID in
| person somehow, so I guess they proved the impossible can
| actually happen. We lived in our alternate reality where
| it is possible, and you lived in one where it was a
| 'showstopper.'
| nradov wrote:
| You're presenting a counterfactual. Sweden kept schools
| open. Very few people died. Why are you not acknowledging
| that reality?
| ghoward wrote:
| I'm referring to the unions, not teachers.
|
| And when I have a kid, I will be homeschooling.
|
| Please don't assume.
|
| Also, I was briefly a bus driver for a school district
| during COVID. I was disgusted by how the school buses
| were run, refusing to allow students to board without
| masks, requiring masks on the drivers when that affected
| the amount of oxygen to the brain. It was a mess.
|
| People in my district tried to protest, including me, but
| the police refused to let them into school board
| meetings, which is illegal in my state.
|
| If anything, what you're saying feels like you telling me
| to believe you and not my "lying" eyes.
| Jiro wrote:
| The 1% have far more than 1% of the influence.
| justanorherhack wrote:
| This.
|
| As an under the age of 30 person, Covid is a small
| threat. But asking questions about a government mandated
| vaccine that was rushed through testing in an
| unprecedented manner labels you a loony. Questions like
| who is going to be liable for the inevitable even if
| small bad reactions? Not big pharma, they were absolved
| in the contract of all liability. If they were so
| confident and if this is so safe that I don't have to
| worry about it as a citizen why did the lawyers ensure
| that they wouldn't be liable?
|
| What about the precedence of liberty this sets? In a
| series of _weeks_ the government removed nearly all
| agency overnight and everyone complied. There was no real
| debate on pros and cons of the total lockdown.
|
| The ineffectiveness of masks other than n95 when changed
| out daily. Which nobody had.
|
| I have friends that still won't consider the vanity fair
| article or lab leak theory as anything other than
| conspiracy.
|
| Oh yea and the ever falling efficacy of the vaccine
| itself.
|
| But let's check cress to make sure I'm a dr.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I heard the criticism would skip between a few variables
|
| Do you have a PhD in virology?
|
| Are you a medical doctor?
|
| Are you a biomedical engineer?
|
| The worst types of credentialism!
| mbesto wrote:
| > As an under the age of 30 person, Covid is a small
| threat.
|
| How did you know this? What information did you use to
| determine that a 30 year old? How did you know to trust
| it? Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March
| 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > How did you know this?
|
| The JHU site provided metrics and details of fatality
| rates for ages based on comorbidities and weight, among
| other variables
|
| > What information did you use to determine that a 30
| year old?
|
| I referenced the JHU site
|
| > How did you know to trust it?
|
| The JHU data was based on the best available data at the
| time, and was regularly updated.
|
| > Did your view on this change in March 2020 vs March
| 2022 as more data and studies were introduced?
|
| I've heard various things about whether or not the JHU
| data was negative enough or positive enough, but as far
| as a top line for mortality, it seemed accurate given the
| data at the time.
|
| In retrospect, the fatality numbers may have been too
| high, but, that may also have been as a result of
| improving therapeutics, and recognition that some of the
| early responses such as putting patients on higher
| pressure ventilators was contraindicated.
|
| This is further complicated by variant types which have
| different amounts of lethality.
| SamPatt wrote:
| >What about the precedence of liberty this sets? In a
| series of weeks the government removed nearly all agency
| overnight and everyone complied. There was no real debate
| on pros and cons of the total lockdown.
|
| Not only was there no debate, but even _dissent_ was
| discouraged or even outlawed. No gatherings larger than
| 10 people allowed. Hard to rally against losing your
| freedom of movement when you can 't leave your house.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's not true, large assemblies for BLM were encouraged
| because the dozen wrongful murders a year constitute a
| bigger public health emergency than COVID.
|
| The standards were political from the start.
| vkou wrote:
| Yes, BLM protests in my city were encouraged by regular
| application of police batons, rubber-coated bullets, and
| flooding the streets with tear gas.
|
| The anti-lockdown protests, on the other hand were
| encouraged by... A few cops looking bored. Which is
| strange, because COVID has been the #1 killer of police
| officers since the pandemic started.
| endominus wrote:
| That's not entirely fair; I distinctly remember my feeds
| filled with the medical establishment speaking in
| approval for the BLM protests that occurred during 2020.
| The argument, I recall, was that those protests were
| necessary to improve the health outcomes of the black
| community, since police fatalities were more dangerous
| than COVID. And speaking of the medical establishment, in
| my favorite anecdote from the entire year, I also
| remember the CDC specifically recommending a
| prioritization of vaccines[0] that would kill thousands
| more Americans than the alternative for ideological and
| extremely racist reasons. Literally, the reasoning they
| gave was that vaccinating over-65s first was less than
| ideal because, quote, "Racial and ethnic minority groups
| [are] under-represented among adults >65". In fact, the
| plan they ended up recommending would have killed more
| minorities too, simply because it was more deadly
| overall. These are the people we should never question.
|
| [0]: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-im-losing-
| trust-in-th... - the original report is at https://www.cd
| c.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... with
| the quote on slide 31
| shkkmo wrote:
| The people "in positions to make policy decisions" should
| absolutely not have the exclusive right to discuss and debate
| those decisions. If they do, you are describing a
| dictatorship.
|
| The blame lies with those doing the censoring, not with
| wackos. The wackos are just a way for those in power to shift
| the blame for their decisions.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| On the other hand, of very good friend of mine, a prestigious
| doctor in Monaco, was adament the vaccine caused no major
| heatlth problem.
|
| This month, I had weird health problem that sent me to the
| hospital, and asked again if anything could be related to the
| vaccine. This time, he said it was a possibility because has
| has seen some similar cases in the past.
|
| The problem here is not changing your mind using fact. That's
| how you should do it.
|
| The problem here is stating at first he was sure it could not
| cause any grave problem (at least not worse than covid).
| Because this was not rooted in fact, we didn't have remotely
| enough data to know this.
|
| But this is what a lot of the medical and political elite
| claimed during the pandemics, and questioning it would get us
| the rethoric you just used in your comment. This is what a
| lot of comments on HN, twitter and the whole internet
| agressively screamed, with disdain toward people that were
| raising pragmatic worries.
|
| This is not a sane way of approaching science. This is
| arrogant, and creates distrusts in a world where we
| desperatly need humility and bonding together.
|
| In fact, you know your position is not in the best light
| because you are using a throwaway account to state your
| position, in a thread that has been very cordial.
| eitland wrote:
| I took my vaccines and listened to the doctors and to
| authorities.
|
| I still think the way media attacked everyone who wasn't
| exactly in line with the current ideas is a shame for
| everyone in media who participated.
|
| And the way social media companies prevented public
| discussion between licensed medical doctors with decades of
| experience and fantastic track records, that is another clear
| signal that they have way too much power.
|
| Saying we needed to shut down everyone because some of them
| did or could do something wrong is really backwards.
|
| The only social media company that I know of that didn't make
| a fool out of themselves was Telegram, who, as usual, focused
| on the interests of its users.
| maxk42 wrote:
| This article is about highly credentialed and respected
| scientific exists who were being deplatformed: not whackos.
| How can you judge anyone as "whacko" when you're prevented
| from even hearing opposing data? That's not how science
| works.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I asked a highly credentialed, very aged, pediatrician why
| I should get my toddler with no comorbidities vaccinated
| with a novel type of vaccine having significant known side
| effects, for a disease having a fatality rate something
| like 1 in 5 or 10 million.
|
| His answer of "get it to protect everyone else" was the
| worst non-answer I have ever heard.
|
| Nothing in my life has shook my trust in so called
| "Authority Figures" like the debacle that is the Covid
| Response and Mandate drive.
| mike_d wrote:
| Before my mom died of cancer, she had a compromised
| immune system. As a perfectly healthy 30-something guy
| who can totally handle a case of the sniffles, I got a
| flu shot anyway.
|
| COVID vaccination resistance has a direct correlation
| with a lack of empathy.
| [deleted]
| rmah wrote:
| "To protect everyone else" is not a non-answer, it's the
| actual real answer. You may not like it but that doesn't
| change the fact that that's how vaccines (at a societal
| level) work.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > You may not like it but that doesn't change the fact
| that that's how vaccines (at a societal level) work.
|
| That may be true for virtually all of the common things
| we are vaccinated for but it sure ain't true for covid.
| The covid vaccinations did very little to stop
| transmission or even infection. I mean, if they did then
| why the hell did so many states bring back mask mandates
| even after 80% of their state got fully vaccinated?
| origin_path wrote:
| Uh but this vaccine didn't stop or even reduce
| transmission. The idea that you had to do it for other
| people never made any sense even to begin with. If the
| vaccine worked it wouldn't matter what other people did,
| because you'd be protected by it, right? And don't talk
| about people who can't take it for some reason because
| mysteriously, getting medical exemptions turned out to be
| impossible throughout the vaccine mandate period even for
| people who had severe reactions to their first shot.
|
| The whole thing was just illogical nonsense forced
| through by people who knew perfectly well that if it was
| phrased as an individual choice, huge numbers would
| choose not to have it. Yet for collectivists (and public
| health is overrun with them) that's anathema. Everyone
| has to do it regardless of need otherwise they feel all
| icky.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Define "many". I saw a handful of high profile cases but how
| widespread was this sort of censorship in quantitative terms?
| _djo_ wrote:
| A huge amount of supposed 'questioning' during the pandemic was
| exactly the same type of bad faith Merchants of Doubt-style
| misdirection that we've seen with tobacco, climate change,
| sugar, and so many other areas where large corporations had the
| incentive to prevent a certain type of government action. It's
| a big part of the reason we've taken so little substantive
| action on climate change, and we're now reaping the
| consequences.
|
| There's no other way to see those types of efforts as anything
| other than attacks against science itself, and an attempt to
| discredit its use for any serious public policy. It's a form of
| weaponised scepticism based on lies and an ability to exploit
| social media.
|
| Note: That doesn't mean that every single scientist voicing
| scepticism or opposition was doing so in bad faith. I'm
| referring specifically to those who did it _knowing_ that it
| was false, in the same way that tobacco companies paid
| scientists to cast doubt on research showing that tobacco was
| bad for you, or the way big energy companies have cast doubt on
| climate change.
|
| We still don't have a good way to handle this. Shutting out the
| bad faith actors is necessary to ensure science and public
| policy informed by it can continue to be effective and useful,
| but it's really difficult to do so at scale in a way that
| doesn't occasionally also catch legitimate sceptics along the
| way. Doing that, though also reduces overall trust in the
| system.
|
| You can't discuss this problem without acknowledging the role
| of bad actors in the system.
| andreilys wrote:
| _There's no other way to see those types of efforts as
| anything other than attacks against science itself_
|
| The funny thing is most of what you call bad faith
| questioning ended up being approved by "Science" (cloth masks
| being ineffective, how the virus transmitted, covid origins,
| etc.)
|
| Unfortunately it seems like for you and many others, science
| has turned into a religion conducted by a priestly class that
| cannot be questioned.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| > Shutting out the bad faith actors is necessary to ensure
| science and public policy informed by it can continue to be
| effective and useful
|
| Did we shut down people saying smoking is good for you?
|
| No.
|
| So I'm not sure how your argument holds up.
| imustbeevil wrote:
| > Did we shut down people saying smoking is good for you?
|
| Yes, 53 years ago.
|
| https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1089/public-
| hea...
| _djo_ wrote:
| Ultimately, yes. It's impossible to keep this sort of thing
| up indefinitely, and over the decades the evidence became
| overwhelming enough that it was impossible to ignore.
| Researchers who were co-opted were shunned, losing career
| opportunities, and universities stopped accepting funding
| from tobacco companies.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Will you change your stance on our response to Covid when
| the evidence of its harms (and lack of positive effects)
| become so large as to be unavoidable? Because it will.
|
| History will not look fondly upon those who pushed these
| highly destructive mandates. It will be seen as one of
| the greatest public health fuckups of all time.
| ioslipstream wrote:
| "You can't discuss this problem without acknowledging the
| role of bad actors in the system."
|
| On both sides. The government, pharmaceutical companies, and
| big tech were definitely bad actors. We do not live in a
| nanny state nor do we want to. What happened during the
| pandemic was disgraceful. Discussion was effectively shut
| down and science as well as treatment was negatively affected
| by the actions of censorship.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| That's really not true. It just conveniently played into an
| existing narrative that the liberal media was trying to
| shut down other views.
|
| The fact that we are so well aware of all the disagreement
| and skepticism - the fact that many people still have
| erroneous beliefs about the virus - is a great sign that
| censorship wasn't effective.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Imagine the Internet didn't exist. Would there have been
| more of a discussion of fringe views or less? What would
| the outcome have been on COVID deaths?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If your response to disagreeing with someone is to censor
| them, you are not doing science but instead engaging in
| faith.
|
| "Hey, lockdowns may be worse than the disease" is not some
| evil chain smoking climate skeptic position.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| In isolation that's true. If it's strongly correlated with
| other assertions like 'it's just a cold', 'only people with
| unhealthy lifestyles are at risk', 'it's a bioweapon' etc.
| then people may justifiably suspect it's part of a broad-
| spectrum attack on public health messaging.
| musicale wrote:
| > large corporations had the incentive to prevent a certain
| type of government action
|
| I can see how lockdowns opposed corporate interests, and I'd
| be interested in hearing more about how corporations
| influenced anti-lockdown.
|
| I don't see how lab leak theory is connected to corporate
| interests one way or the other.
|
| Anti-vax doesn't seem to align with corporate interests and
| in fact seems to be opposed to it.
| _djo_ wrote:
| When you have an interest in creating distrust in using
| science for policy, anything goes.
|
| One of the key anti-lockdown advocacy groups, PANDA,
| started out fairly sane-sounding and was packed full of
| hedge fund and other finance people. But once vaccines were
| widely available they inexplicably turned strongly anti-
| vaccine too.
| evilpotatoes wrote:
| Since when is anti-mandatory vaccination anti-vaccine ?
| Especially since it demonstrably has zero impact on
| infection or likelihood of communication. Which the data
| showed as obvious since about July of 2021 from Israel.
| prottog wrote:
| I'm repeating an idea I read somewhere else, but we
| should just stop calling it the "Covid vaccine", since it
| doesn't seem to make you any less likely to catch the
| disease or spread it once you have it. The word "vaccine"
| should be reserved for things that we traditionally
| understand to be such.
|
| Let's call it a "Covid preventative" or literally
| anything else, and stop mandating it, so that we avoid
| the bigger public health issue of a generalized distrust
| against existing, effective vaccines arising from this.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| You're redefining the word vaccine. A vaccine is a drug
| that works by stimulating the immune system. It always
| has been. The fact that you think it means something else
| is a result of you being an easy mark for people
| spreading misinformation.
| nradov wrote:
| I actually agree with you but the CDC changed their
| definition of the word "vaccine" several times, most
| recently in 2021. The latest revision is now more
| scientifically accurate. But it's understandable how the
| changes caused confusion among some members of the
| public.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-976069264061
| coding123 wrote:
| Lab leak is HUGE for corporate interests. It's China. If
| China has culpability in using dangerous things and let
| this loose then China is going to be blamed, in large part,
| by a large number of people around the world. Since China
| is basically the lynch pin of all commerce in the world
| [1], there are massive interests to make sure it's "from
| china" but not maliciously or because of some future war
| they are planning. If it truly was from a market or just a
| bat in a cave - no one is really going to blame China
| beyond just minor shaming on them having wet markets.
|
| 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u000_n3LG9U
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I'd be interested in hearing more about how corporations
| influenced anti-lockdown
|
| About a year ago in my city, in a period of relative
| stability during the pandemic, the previous mayor made the
| mistake of saying he would lock down again if necessary.
| Business owners more or less told all their employees
| they'd lose their jobs if there was another lockdown. The
| result was someone else was elected.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Ballots are secret, people generally don't vote the way
| their boss tells them to unless their boss is making some
| persuasive arguments. In this case, _" lockdowns will
| shut down businesses"_ is a common sense argument that
| was proven true numerous times around the world to
| anybody who cared to pay attention to their own
| neighborhoods. If people decided to vote out a mayor who
| was promising more of that, who's fault is it? The mayor,
| who suggested such a destructive and unpopular plan, or
| business owners who had the audacity to voice their
| opinions against it?
|
| When politicians announce unpopular plans, causing people
| to voice their disagreement and vote the asshole out of
| office, that's democracy functioning as intended. Only
| authoritarian asshats looks at a situation like this and
| conclude that dissent is the problem.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I agree with you. I think lockdowns destroyed the
| economy, such measures put a lot of people out of
| business. My story was just an example of how businesses
| influenced politics. The grandparent poster wanted to
| hear more about how it happens.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Lockdowns caused a big slump in industries like retail and
| transport. In the UK, airline bosses in particular were
| outspoken about their desire to lift lockdown restrictions
| as soon as possible.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Are you claiming this is what happened in this specific case?
| That the Great Barrington Declaration was promulgated by bad
| actors due to support from large companies?
|
| If that's not your claim, then why are you bringing this up?
| Are you supportive of government censorship as the article
| describes:
|
| >At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government
| officials, have been explicitly directing social media
| companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts that
| violate the government's own preferences and guidelines for
| coverage on topics ranging from COVID restrictions, to the
| 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Ironically it was fauci and friends who wanted to discredit
| the GBD. That declaration was written and signed by actual
| scientists, doctors and "experts"... it wasn't a book of
| facts. It contained no "misinformation". It was an
| alternate viewpoint on our reaction to Covid--nothing more
| and nothing less. It just happened to be one that went
| against the narrative pushed by those in power.
| [deleted]
| slibhb wrote:
| Calling an argument "bad faith" means that argument's
| proponent doesn't believe it's true. I highly doubt that was
| the case with various people -- some of them doctors --
| questioning the party line on the pandemic. Being wrong is
| not the same as arguing in bad faith.
|
| Your attitude is sadly very common. Everyone who disagrees
| with you is a bad faith actor, engaged in knowing lies to
| further some shadowy agenda. I think you underestimate how
| little consensus there actually is, even among the educated.
| autokad wrote:
| > Everyone who disagrees with you is a bad faith actor,
| engaged in knowing lies to further some shadowy agenda
|
| And what's funny is they call people who disagree with them
| conspiracy theory people, which is weird because their
| statements show no evidence of conspiracy nor does the fact
| they are alluding to a conspiracy have any impact on the
| truth of their argument.
| musicale wrote:
| > Everyone who disagrees with you is a bad faith actor,
| engaged in knowing lies to further some shadowy agenda
|
| This crystallizes the current discourse of unrelenting
| demonization. It isn't appropriate in most cases.
| viridian wrote:
| I personally tell anyone who agree me of arguing in bad
| faith that they shouldn't have started talking with me in
| the first place if they thought I was a bad faith actor,
| and then I stop talking to them.
|
| Nothing productive can be said once the accusation is
| made.
| _djo_ wrote:
| colpabar wrote:
| I think it's pretty naive to think that everyone who
| didn't agree with "the science" that the government (and
| pfizer) decided was the "real science" were flat out
| wrong. Science is about proving hypothesis with
| experiments, _publicly_ , so that others can
| independently verify the results. That's not what
| happened with anything related to covid though. The
| government said one thing, and declared everything else
| to be misinformation that wasn't even worthy of a
| rebuttal. I get that it'd be a fool's errand to respond
| to every single disagreement, because yeah of course some
| of then will be ridiculous. But writing off credentialed
| and respected doctors and scientists because they don't
| 100% agree with anthony fauci (aka Science itself) seems
|
| And why does no one question motives of pfizer? Didn't
| they just make an insane amount of money selling
| vaccines? Didn't they also just (in 2009) get charged
| with the largest case of medical fraud in history?
| Remember when people had a healthy distrust of massive
| pharmaceutical companies that profit off sickness? What
| happened?
|
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-
| announces-...
| nradov wrote:
| The problem is that during the pandemic, many scientists
| used their positions to advocate for particular policies
| rather than sticking to the science. There's nothing
| wrong in principle with a person being both a scientist
| and an advocate, but ethically they should make it clear
| which role they are playing at any given time. The actual
| science was mostly very weak, and couldn't reasonably be
| used as justification for any particular public policy.
| autokad wrote:
| No, the problem is people who use to ruin religion have
| now joined politics and science (which are now also one
| in the same). Science is not supposed to have society
| 'relying off it'.
|
| science is just a tool to help you prove if a hypothesis
| is backed by evidence, or is not. NOTHING ELSE. it does
| not tell you if you should go outside, it does not even
| tell you if something is true or false. In fact, our
| universe may not even be one that is built on a
| 'fundamental truth'.
|
| > It was not designed to handle deliberate attacks
| designed to sow doubt for ulterior motives.
|
| Then you dont understand science, not even a little
| because that's exactly what it was designed for. attacks
| makes science stronger, not weaker. an argument hat has
| been given no attack is a weak argument. the strange
| notion that science has a fundamental truth that people
| are supposed to just believe because a subset of
| individuals says so is troubling.
| darawk wrote:
| > I meant it in that sense, that those pushing it knew
| full well that it wasn't true but had ulterior motives.
|
| Who is an example of that in this context?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| What, exactly, is "not true" about the great barrington
| declaration? What is "not true" about the fact that
| lockdowns were not in any pandemic playbook prior to
| 2020? What is "not true" about the fact the median age of
| Covid death is like 5 years higher than the average human
| lifespan? What is "not true" about the fact you still
| cannot reliably differentiate between "died of" and "died
| with" Covid?
|
| In your case, I suspect "not true" simply means "I don't
| agree". You should really question why you believe the
| "facts" you do and examine why somebody else might think
| different. Who knows, maybe they have very valid points?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| That would surprise me if lockdowns didn't appear in any
| pandemic playbook since they've been practiced since
| antiquity and until the 20th century where the only way
| to prevent spread of contagious disease.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| The only way lock downs were even remotely possible was
| zoom. Without zoom, none of this would have been
| possible. One has to be incredibly privileged to think
| lockdowns can work in any place but very advanced "first
| world" societies. Getting villagers living in the 12th
| century to lockdown would mean they'd all starve to
| death. Same with getting some favella in Brazil to lock
| down. It just doesn't work.
|
| It requires an immense, huge amount of privilege to
| support virtually any of our response to covid. Anybody
| but a select group of wealth upper class people get
| absolutely fucked over by lockdowns. Fucked over far
| worse than covid ever would have.
| crote wrote:
| 12th century farmers were practicing subsistence
| agriculture. Locking the entire village off from the
| outer world was _absolutely_ possible.
|
| The cities are the big problem. During the Black Death,
| people coming to cities were quarantined before they were
| allowed to enter. Even then, many cities saw _half_ their
| population die. A very significant number of settlements
| was wiped out altogether.
|
| Ironically, it was actually quite beneficial to the
| regular villager - provided you survived. The Black Death
| has been directly linked to the collapse of feudalism in
| Europe, among with many other sociological developments.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I don't think the people stocking shelves in grocery
| stores, making deliveries, picking up garbage, driving
| busses, and tending the sick were able to work over zoom
| even today.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| See the "died with" thing is where you lost me. It was
| obvious that there was an illness killing lots of people.
| But then you had people who didn't want to admit it,
| blamed co-morbidities, said doctors were deliberately
| inflating the numbers to make money, etc. Those people
| poisoned the well of discourse.
|
| "Died with" was not a meaningful distinction at the time
| and falls under the "bad faith" category for me.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| It's a huge distinction. There is a massive difference
| between dying because of Covid vs. dying from something
| else and happening to test positive. By combining them
| together, Covid looks worse than it is. Then politicians
| use that faulty data to make bad decisions and the media
| publishes that bad data and freaks the shit out of
| people.
|
| One cannot claim to be on team "science and data" when
| their data is a garbage heap. Being able to tell between
| "hospitalized because of Covid" and "died because of
| Covid" vs "hospitalized and tested positive" and "died
| and tested positive" is an incredibly important thing.
|
| I have no idea why people continue to dismiss this other
| than fears of people "not taking Covid serious"
| because... well it might not be as serious as the trash
| data suggests. It's completely manipulative, a common
| theme from "the experts"
|
| You cannot in good faith claim to be "following the data"
| and accept commingling "from" and "with".
| SamPatt wrote:
| >poisoned the well of discourse
|
| Please find me a single topic which impacts more than a
| roomful of people where someone isn't engaging in this
| type of discourse.
|
| This sounds like you justifying your former false beliefs
| (or at least lack of willingness to investigate
| alternative beliefs) by blaming it on other people who
| were also wrong.
| nradov wrote:
| The reported death numbers absolutely were inflated in
| many areas, at least early in the pandemic. This is a
| proven fact not open to dispute. For example, Santa Clara
| County had to revise their death toll down by 22% because
| they were using invalid criteria.
|
| https://sanjosespotlight.com/santa-clara-county-revises-
| tota...
|
| Whether such classification errors were _deliberate_ is a
| separate issue. In most cases I suspect it was more due
| to lack of resources and /or incompetence rather than a
| deliberate attempt to mislead.
|
| Medicare did pay hospitals more to care for COVID-19
| patients. That is also a fact not open to dispute.
| Whether doctors or hospitals deliberately inflated
| numbers to make money is unknown.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/
| fac...
|
| About half of the COVID-19 positive hospital patients
| were admitted for unrelated reasons, and only tested
| positive as part of admission screening.
|
| https://gothamist.com/news/new-preliminary-state-data-
| shows-...
| puffoflogic wrote:
| It's not true because it dissents from government
| approved science. That's the only definition of "not
| true" which matters for culture warriors.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Speaking out against all the harms and negatives of some
| highly disruptive non pharmaceutical interventions with
| unproven efficacy is absolutely _not_ bad faith arguments.
| It's the cornerstone of science and democracy.
|
| Anybody in a position of power or knowledge who dared to even
| hint at asking questions got absolutely steamrollered by a
| very vocal group of "experts". They were called alt-right
| selfish grandma killers who watched to much fox (and sorry, I
| never watched fox but it isn't my fault they might actually
| be right sometimes, I've also been a solid democrat my entire
| life until this nonsense started...).
|
| What we did the last two and a half years is so incredibly
| shameful. It was the opposite of science and opposite of
| "following the data". It was appeals to authority all the way
| down. We were all told to shut up, "stay in our lane" and
| listen to a handful of cherry picked "experts".
|
| The last two and a half years changed my opinion about "fact
| checkers" and "misinformation" completely. Both of those are
| nothing more than ways to bully people into submission.
| musicale wrote:
| I found dang's response[1] to the question "Is fact
| checking that difficult?" to be insightful:
|
| > It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems
| incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which
| supports my view", at least when the emotions are
| activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact
| checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions
| are activated. There may be exceptions--i.e. people whose
| minds don't work this way--but if they exist, they're so
| rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that
| there are really exceptions.)
|
| > That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker
| whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major
| ideological partitions.
|
| > Another way of putting this is that the question, "what
| are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the
| entire political and ideological contest. It's
| understandable that people would like to reduce that
| contest to a simpler subset of factual questions--but you
| can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset
| reduces to it.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29597867
| hotpotamus wrote:
| That seems like the long way around of saying there is no
| such thing as objective truth, which I'm also beginning
| to suspect is correct.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| dang may be the only fact checker in the world I would
| trust to actually check facts.
| coding123 wrote:
| This can't be more true. I see a new section in Google
| news now for "fact checks". I am guessing it's never had
| a post on the hunter laptop. It's not "fact checking
| section" it's a "daily left affirmation section".
| hotpotamus wrote:
| What questions do you have about the hunter laptop?
| bombcar wrote:
| The _only_ "fact checkers" I have found to be useful are
| domain experts who get a burr up their ass and go
| incredibly deep-dive on whatever it is. And whatever they
| come up with usually pisses everyone off relatively
| equally, for some reason.
| [deleted]
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I 100% agree with you. Once I learned about the "Trusted
| News Initiative" and the cooperation between Reuters,
| Pfizer, major media organs, and watched how Fauci
| previoulsy described the mRNA shots as 95%-100% effective,
| and later saw that number dwindle down to the low 50s, the
| Canadian trucker protests against absurd mandates and the
| shockingly draconian response from the _Canadian_
| government, the despicable Australian and New Zealand
| policies in which citizens can not (and still can't)
| legally leave their country without getting mRNA shots,
| listening to Rachel Maddow and Joe Biden telling my poor,
| miserable father that "if you get the shot, you won't get
| sick and you won't spread it" which is probably one of the
| most destructive lies the ruling class perpetuated among
| fearful, isolated humans in my lifetime...
|
| ...I knew I could never vote for any Democratic politician
| ever again who supported this.
|
| I couldn't visit my aunt in the nursing home before she
| died of a non-covid cause. I couldn't visit my father when
| he was in the hospital for a heart attack, EVEN THOUGH I
| was masked and vaxxed. It's simply disgusting how
| administrative law was weaponized against the common man.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| And yet here you are getting grey'd out. What humans
| inflicted upon each other over the last 2.5 years is
| absolutely disgusting. These few years have shown the
| _worst_ of humanity. Society lost its collective shit and
| basically did the exact opposite of what it should have
| done every step of the way.
|
| All I take heart in is knowing your view and mine will be
| the the correct one. History will not look fondly upon
| what society did to itself. All these "experts" and
| politicians who supported this will be viewed as
| crackpots, charlatans and rain dancers.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It's the black-and-white condemnation of preventative
| measure as ineffective, the conflation of "it's not
| perfect for each person but valuable in the population"
| with "it's worthless and a violation of my rights" that
| gets the downvotes.
|
| I'd say that history will have a lot to say about
| everyone.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Can you prove those mitigations were worth their
| incredible cost to society? Can you prove they were, in
| fact, valuable for the population?
|
| The fact we still debate the effect of these mandates
| means it wasn't worth it. The fact we jumped into all
| these crazy mandates with nary a shred of evidence they'd
| even work is batshit insane.
|
| And last I checked, humans have quite a few inalienable
| rights. We violated many of them and then mocked people
| who objected. Apparently not as inalienable as we thought
| if the masses demand it.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| 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.
| braingenious wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm??
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I'm not familiar with Tablet Magazine_
|
| It's a conservative[1] publication. It is not an unbiased news
| source.
|
| 1. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/
| [deleted]
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| I recently got terminated for objecting to a company mass
| gathering next month where attendees fly in en made, socialize
| for 24 hours (with a 5k fun run in there) and fly back the next
| day because it sounds like a body stressing plan and while I'm
| vaxxed and boosted my underlying health condition could make long
| COVID really severe. Not a gamble I want to take.
|
| The fact I questioned leadership and asserted it was exclusionary
| to those with health concerns by not having a virtual
| alternative, well, this is Texas and it would've been smarter for
| them to fire me for no reason. Have an appointment for a legal
| consult to figure out if name and shame is the next step.
|
| As long as UTSW's update last slide shows R anywhere near 1 I'm
| going to use caution. I haven't survived this lifetime disability
| and flourished by taking medical advice or alternative advice too
| stringently. There's quacks in both.
| peteradio wrote:
| Is that different (or worse) than excluding people from company
| events without having been vaccinated despite having a prior
| infection?
| hbn wrote:
| What? Why didn't you just not go? What would the virtual
| alternative of that be, a video call? Why do you need your
| company to organize that? If you and a few other coworkers are
| too scared to go to the in-person event, setup a video call
| yourselves. Sounds like you made a big scene over nothing.
| RichardCNormos wrote:
| patchtopic wrote:
| BeefWellington wrote:
| I don't believe the narrative was ever "You will not get
| COVID if you get these vaccines" given the CDC's own study
| said it was 90% effective against SARS-COV-2 infections.[1]
|
| Omicron and (to a lesser extent) Delta variants changed the
| game on transmission. They event provided the receipts in
| April 2021 of a study showing 90% decrease in virus
| transmission.
|
| You can choose to believe this is narrative but it was backed
| by evidence.
|
| The broader question about controlling misinformation is a
| tricky one and government pressuring social media companies
| into banning people isn't the ideal situation.
|
| However, framing it as people being banned for "Any
| suggestion to the contrary" is at the best disingenuous. What
| I saw were people advocating all manner of alternative to the
| vaccines and spreading disinformation getting banned. A
| specific instance: Remember all those yarns about how people
| would now be sterile because of the vaccine? Well, birth
| rates are now back up to where they were[2] and nobody's
| shown to have been sterilized because of it. It's one example
| of just outright misinformation that deserved a ban.
|
| This is the "fire in a crowded theatre" debate in different
| clothes, and it's a hard argument. If you think of this in
| terms of pure capitalist viewpoint, maybe instead of the
| government pressuring social media companies the alternative
| is that drug companies sue Meta et. al (and users) for
| defamation and libel. I'm not sure how that's a better system
| and wouldn't lead to the very same thing happening but it's
| the only alternative that seems immediately obvious.
|
| [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_ci
| d=mm...
|
| [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-
| va/2022/01/10/covid-pan...
| somenameforme wrote:
| If you'll excuse the sidetrack, I just want to hit on the
| "fire in a crowded theater" comment you made. It's
| frequently cited by people supportive of censorship, but
| it's quite an ironic choice once one learns the history of
| said quote. It was a comment quoted from Chief Justice
| Oliver Wendell Holmes (the same individual who also set
| legal precedent for state-driven eugenics with another oft
| referenced quote) in the case Schenck v. United States.
|
| And what was that case about? What was this "screaming fire
| in a crowded theater"? It was the analog that the
| government chose to use for being the same as them
| arresting people, under the Espionage Act, for the vile
| crime of handing out pamphlets encouraging people to resist
| the military draft. Shenck himself faced up to 30 years in
| prison. There could scarcely ever be a better argument
| _against_ ever allowing the government the right to censor.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| Biden and Fauci both said that the vaccine will prevent
| infection.
| themitigating wrote:
| Can you provide a source?
| itbeho wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32941155
| themitigating wrote:
| I was wrong for Biden, I wouldn't expect a politican to
| make a absolute statement.
|
| What about Fauci?
| [deleted]
| themitigating wrote:
| "There was a time when the official narrative said "You will
| not get COVID if you get these vaccines""
|
| Do you have a source?
| djkivi wrote:
| While President Biden may not be a Dr, but his wife is:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNyZm6A0OfQ
| mandmandam wrote:
| There are many, and they are easy to find.
|
| Here's an AP News 'fact check' "debunking" a video which
| claimed Fauci said they _weren 't_ effective:
| https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-
| afs:Content:9996141...
|
| I honestly have no idea how one can claim in good faith not
| to remember that this was the narrative. It was
| _everywhere_.
| themitigating wrote:
| Maybe I'm not seeing this in the ap article.
|
| Where does say "You will not get COVID if you get these
| vaccines" which you said was the official narrative?
|
| Could you paste the quote here?
|
| Edit or a similar statement that you won't get covid if
| you get the vaccine
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > There was a time when the official narrative said "You will
| not get COVID if you get these vaccines"
|
| I've seen this claim, but don't recall "you won't get it _at
| all_ if you have the vaccine " being the narrative when I got
| mine, which was pretty damn early. I've seen a couple
| articles posted on here by people making this claim, in
| support of it, but when I read the articles they end up
| failing to support it (though a poor or motivated-to-
| misunderstand reader might think they do)
|
| When was this? Was it for such a brief time that I might have
| missed it?
| itbeho wrote:
| "You're not going to get COVID if you have these
| vaccinations." - Joe Biden
|
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/22/joe-
| biden/...
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Read your link. Solidified my view that people pushing
| this are relying on deliberately-uncharitable or outright
| bad readings to support their position. Is this the best
| there is?
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Please reread. Politifact editorialized and downplayed
| what was said.
|
| Politifact: >President Joe Biden exaggerated when he
| spoke about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine
| during a CNN town hall. "You're not going to get COVID if
| you have these vaccinations," Biden said.
|
| President Transcript: >But again, one last thing. I -- we
| don't talk enough to you about this, I don't think. One
| last thing that's really important is: We're not in a
| position where we think that any virus -- including the
| Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more
| deadly in terms of non -- unvaccinated people -- the vi-
| -- the various shots that people are getting now cover
| that. They're -- you're okay. You're not going to --
| you're not going to get COVID if you have these
| vaccinations.
|
| >MR. LEMON: Yeah. I want to stay on the subject. I want
| to get to Dr. Nicole Baldwin. She's a pediatrician and a
| Republican.
|
| >Dr. Baldwin, go ahead.
|
| Where did Politifact get "President Joe Biden
| exaggerated" from? I see no attempt by the president to
| walk back or clarify what he said.
|
| Do we want to excuse people when they make bad statements
| because they are on our side?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The claim's _not_ that a few over-broad statements were
| made with colloquial application of absolutes during
| conversations or interviews, which they _definitely were_
| , but that this was the official line and that claiming
| you _could_ contract the virus was suppressed--yet every
| time I see examples provided, the exaggerated statements
| are accompanied shortly before or after by prepared,
| official communication that _in fact_ the vaccines are
| extremely effective at preventing severe disease and
| hospitalization, but not _perfectly_ so, and that
| infection is still possible. If the original claim were
| true, those statements should either have been different,
| or should have been censored.
|
| So sure, it'd be nice if politicians were more precise
| when answering questions (though it's not gonna happen,
| for one thing because people don't talk like that) but
| that's not what I've seen claimed in these cases--it's
| that these few over-broad statements _were_ the official
| line, and that dissent from it was smacked down. This
| runs contrary both to my recollection of events, and to
| evidence I 've seen the few times I've seen the topic
| come up on here, including this link.
| [deleted]
| notch656a wrote:
| This reminds me of the question: if a jailer asks an inmate to
| have sex, and they do, has a crime been committed? Perhaps not,
| but when the government "asks" for something it's hard to
| interpret it as anything other than "bad things are going to
| happen to me if I don't." Unlike some tech company, you can't
| really run away from the government.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that is already illegal for those specific
| reasons.
| notch656a wrote:
| Which brings me back. Why isn't a practically all-powerful
| government asking you to abridge otherwise protected speech
| not considered illegal for the same reason?
|
| I've been "asked" by police/regulatory agencies on multiple
| occasions to do something. Every time I refused I was met
| with hell, up to including officers lying to a judge to
| obtain federal search warrant.
| treeman79 wrote:
| A movie was made about the whole laptop scandal.
|
| 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
| tarakat wrote:
| Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop story
| got that scares me the _least_. Brazen, obvious, and now widely
| known about.
|
| What's really scary is the silent implicit algorithmic ranking
| that decides which stories, channels, websites get traffic.
| Invisible and much more effective, leaving no big "banned from
| Facebook" banner a victim can point to. Just a mysterious,
| gradual dwindling of traffic. It could be for legitimate
| reasons, or because someone has their thumb on the scale, for
| political or economic reasons.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I get what you are saying... but let's consider for a fact
| that if the media had run the Biden Laptop story AS IF it was
| the Trump Laptop story - the election for leader of the free
| world would have gone the other way.
|
| You can be happy or sad about the ends - but should be
| terrified of the means.
|
| It wasn't an award show snub, or a gender bathroom debate, it
| was the entire direction of the USA with the largest military
| on Earth.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It's generally because someone pushed a new model which
| changed the distribution of content. We're pretty bad (as a
| species) at understanding what heaps of matrix
| multiplications net out to on an individual source basis.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >Ironically it's the kind of censorship the Biden laptop
| story got that scares me the least. Brazen, obvious, and now
| widely known about.
|
| We know about it now. The problem is a large number of people
| when polled said they would not have voted for Biden if they
| had known about the laptop before the election. It may have
| been enough to swing the election.
| musicale wrote:
| > "Depending on what side of the political spectrum [you're
| on], you either think we didn't censor it enough or we censored
| it way too much."
|
| An interesting take, Mr. Zuckerberg.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Not really. It's pretty much just a fact.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| "a movie was made" isn't exactly a gotcha or any sort of
| validation, anyone can make a movie. In this case the "anyone"
| is Breitbart.
|
| If you want an idea of Breitbart's motives... they specifically
| cast an actress due to her controversial statements, for
| example. Earlier this year she claimed the war in Ukraine was a
| fake plot because "they lost control of the COVID narrative."
| colpabar wrote:
| blast wrote:
| What does that have to do with allegations of government
| censorship pressure?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| the movie? it has nothing to do with it - which is why I
| was responding to the comment about it with "anyone can
| make a movie" - it proves nothing one way or another and
| the fact that it was made by breitbart has a whole series
| of red flags anyway - it was engineered to be controversial
| themitigating wrote:
| It goes to the character of Breitbart.
| s_ting765 wrote:
| Social media apps are, for the most part, a cancer to humanity.
| This article is just one more proof of it.
|
| And the majority of people who, for the most part, demand for
| more censorship on these public platforms whenever an arbitrary
| content moderation issue arises... deserve all the propaganda
| coming their way from these corporate behemoths tag teaming with
| the government.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and
| do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who
| should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech
| banned the previous US president, while he was still in office,
| with no such fears.
|
| What am I missing?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president
|
| Honestly that makes it worse - they appear to be following
| orders given by a specific political party but ignore those
| given by the other.
| dilap wrote:
| As Bob Dylan sang, "You don't need a weatherman to know which
| way the wind blows."
|
| They banned Trump when he was on the way out, and an
| administration still very hostile to him and his supporters was
| on the way in.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The wind was obviously blowing in a different direction on
| Dec 11 when all 50 states had certified their elections. Why
| wasn't he banned then?
| dilap wrote:
| Even if in your heart-of-hearts you wanted to ban Trump, I
| don't think you'd do it then -- seems like bad strategy w/
| the various legal challenges to the election still in play.
| ModernMech wrote:
| All legal challenges to the election were over on Dec 11.
| The last of the last ditch, hail Mary efforts was the
| Texas case, which was rejected by SCOTUS on Dec 11. With
| that rejection and the certification from all 50 states,
| that was _the_ key day that the winds changed
| definitively. Instead of banning him on that day, Twitter
| banned him on Jan 8, after he had used Twitter to
| organize a violent coup attempt on Jan 6. I think Occam
| 's razor tells us we should accept that Twitter banned
| Trump for the obvious and proximal cause, rather than
| some hypothetical effort to curry political favor that
| predates the inauguration of the new administration, but
| postdates the new administration's certainty.
| dilap wrote:
| Ah, my bad on the timing. Thanks for the correction.
|
| Still, I think my logic still holds; if they banned him
| out of the blue right as the winds changed, it would be
| obviously political; by waiting for a casus belli (as it
| were), they can credibly claim non-political reasons.
| traviswt wrote:
| It would be wild if we find out he was also banned in a similar
| manner to this Berenson guy.
|
| As for what you're missing, maybe that Trump was too anti-
| establishment, like his "drain the swamp" rhetoric? Based on
| the article this seems like it would be a systemic issue.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Nothing. These companies are about making a profit. Anarchy and
| excess deaths both reduce profits. This explains their actions
| very easily.
| peteradio wrote:
| > What am I missing?
|
| Prior political allegiances of said companies.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| > What am missing?
|
| The article isn't about big tech or why they comply. It is
| about the US Government employing a proxy (wittingly or not) to
| violate The Constitution of The United States of America and
| conceal that activity.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president,
| while he was still in office, with no such fears.
|
| No it didn't. It tolerated all types of behavior from and
| around him (that wasn't tolerated from other people) until the
| last possible second that he could have a say about anything,
| then it immediately banned him to please the new regime. Trump
| literally assassinated an Iranian general I believe largely
| because that general would humiliate Trump in twitter fights,
| not banned. New regime? Banned.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| No, he was banned before the new regime, but immediately
| after he was implicated in an attempted coup.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "Coup" over the introduction of a new regime. If your
| beliefs rely on Trump being powerful enough in the last
| days of his term to be a threat to a FAANG company in good
| stead with the incoming regime, your beliefs are fragile.
| naasking wrote:
| > On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the
| previous US president, while he was still in office, with no
| such fears.
|
| Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could no
| longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his opponents
| were coming into power. I'm not sure why you would neglect
| that. Maybe they would banned him anyway, or maybe not. We
| can't evaluate that counterfactual, but what actually happened
| is consistent with the narrative.
| krapp wrote:
| >Sure, they banned him after he lost the election and could
| no longer retaliate meaningfully against them, while his
| opponents were coming into power.
|
| What means of retaliation do you believe Trump would have had
| against social media platforms while in office? A President
| doesn't have the legal authority to simply outlaw companies
| they disagree with, nor do they have a right to a social
| media account, or to force businesses to accept them as a
| customer, or carte blanche to violate contracts or terms of
| service. Sign an executive order making it illegal to ban his
| accounts? Executive orders aren't laws, and Presidents aren't
| monarchs.
|
| Meanwhile, as a billionaire celebrity even out of office,
| Trump remains perfectly capable of suing over his social
| media bans, which he is currently doing.
| naasking wrote:
| He can direct the justice department to investigate all
| sorts of possible infractions, costing them considerable
| money in legal fees, disrupting business activities, and
| causing negative PR. Trying to do any of this as the
| election loser it just comes across as sour grapes, and the
| justice department wouldn't follow any directions of this
| sort. And this is just scratching the surface.
| themitigating wrote:
| Texas has been doing this to big tech
|
| https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-
| media-...
| krapp wrote:
| That still doesn't make him unable to meaningfully
| retaliate, just unable to abuse Justice Department
| resources while doing so.
| naasking wrote:
| If your quibble is on what I specifically meant by
| "meaningfully retaliate", I think everyone understands
| that the threat of the full weight of the US government
| is "meaningful", where lawsuits from individuals are
| fairly routine for these companies and so I wouldn't
| count those as particularly meaningful _by comparison_.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why couldn't he retaliate after he lost the election?
| naasking wrote:
| I said "meaningfully retaliate", not just "retaliate". I
| address this further below:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939850
| themitigating wrote:
| Either one, why wouldn't he be able to? Nothing changes
| post election until jan 20th
| naasking wrote:
| For one example, the justice department is not going to
| act on directives from a President that will simply be
| overruled in two weeks when the next President comes into
| power, it's just a waste of resources. They'll take the
| paperwork but they'll just sit on it.
| [deleted]
| themitigating wrote:
| Is that a guarantee or is it possible they would follow
| his orders?
|
| Also it's 6 weeks and the executive doesn't control the
| justic department how would it be overruled?
| waffleiron wrote:
| The previous president was banned after he no longer had
| political power.
| woodruffw wrote:
| While literally true, this doesn't accurately reflect the
| _immediate_ circumstances that led him to be banned. In other
| words: it's not true that his lack of political power was the
| thing that got him banned.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Also to say he lacks political power is objectively false.
| While he's no longer in office, for sure, he still wields
| tremendous political power.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| He was a) the current president and b) politically powerful
| enough to trigger an attack on Congress. It's a little silly
| to pretend he was somehow a powerless private citizen on Jan
| 6. The man remains politically powerful _today_ ; see his
| impact on the current Republican primaries as an example.
| pessimizer wrote:
| woodruffw wrote:
| This is not a sensible response: the Capitol riot was the
| closest the US has come to open, widespread political
| violence in a century and a half. The fact that it was
| largely ineffective doesn't detract from it any more than
| the Beer Hall Putsch's failure detracts from, well, you
| know.
| dmix wrote:
| A single gun shot was enough to stop an entire group of
| unarmed rioters, but they still posed the greatest risk
| of political violence in 150 years?
|
| If the capitol police had properly prepared for the event
| as if it was a normal DC protest instead of a speaking
| event then none of it would have happened. The thin line
| of cops was obviously insufficient. The police response
| just took some time to organize but it was never under
| any serious threat of being overwhelmed.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Yes. The fact that it was ultimately impotent doesn't
| change that fact. Characterizing the riot as being ended
| by a "single gunshot" is misleading, at best: there is no
| evidence that the majority of rioters were aware that
| someone had been shot, much less killed, until hours or
| days after the Capitol had been cleared.
|
| "Insufficient" means a little bit of scuffling outside of
| our nation's legislature. It doesn't mean breaking into
| the windows and doors, rifling through the offices of
| legislators and stealing documents, and forcing an
| emergency evacuation of both chambers.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Characterizing the riot as being ended by a "single
| gunshot" is misleading, at best: there is no evidence
| that the majority of rioters were aware that someone had
| been shot, much less killed, until hours or days after
| the Capitol had been cleared.
|
| That makes it even less dangerous if most of them were
| disbursed with even less intense measures.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Democrat aligned rioters brought rifles to central
| Seattle, and then staged an insurrection where they drove
| police out of a station, set up their own guards, and
| executed Antonio Mays Jr for joyriding on their turf.
|
| That's just one of several dozen violent attacks the US
| faced in 2020, "The Summer of Love".
|
| Just yesterday, a Republican teenager was murdered by a
| Democrat over political differences. [1]
|
| Pretending a rowdy protest at the Capitol is anything
| like that sustained political violence is deeply
| dishonest.
|
| [1] https://news.yahoo.com/north-dakota-man-ran-
| down-005221620.h...
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Pretending a rowdy protest at the Capitol is anything
| like that sustained political violence is deeply
| dishonest.
|
| I'm not. You'll note that any violence that occurred
| during the 2020 protests was not intended to prevent the
| peaceful transition of power in this country.
|
| Some it, like the Seattle courthouse riots, was clearly
| political violence. But the overwhelming majority of
| violence that did occur was not _political_ violence --
| most of it was opportunistic, and did not correspond in
| either personage or physical location to where the
| political protests were.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Hot topic but I have seen no reason to believe it was
| close to widespread political violence.
|
| It was an unruly riot but no politician was hurt.
|
| I would consider the many assassinations of presidents
| and politicians over that time point much closer.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Just as a point of clarification: "political violence"
| doesn't mean "doing violence against politicians." It
| means "using violence to achieve political ends."
|
| Storming the Capitol is an intrinsically violent act, one
| with clear political ends. I'd argue that it's a more
| serious act of political violence than any assassination
| has ever been in the US, given that no US political
| assassination has ever come close to threatening the
| smooth transition of power.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Does killing a first term president not disrupt the
| smooth transition of power?
|
| How close do you think the storming was to actually
| preventing Biden from taking office?
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Does killing a first term president not disrupt the
| smooth transition of power?
|
| It's not _good_ , but so far no presidential
| assassination has led to a crisis of authority in the US:
| the VP has always successfully assumed power, and has
| yielded it if and when they've lost the subsequent
| election. The closest thing among assassinations would
| probably be Lincoln's, but that's not exactly a
| contemporary precedent.
|
| It's hard to say how "close" it was. What's easy to say
| is that it was a naked _attempt_ to subvert the smooth
| and peaceful transition of power, one that 's
| unprecedented in the modern history of the US.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| Anything he could have done at that moment would simply
| have been undone by the incoming administration.
| woodruffw wrote:
| You can't "undo" political violence or political pardons,
| which are among the numerous things he did in his final
| days in power.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| With the current lobbying and campaign funding rules,
| government is more or less a consortium of big businesses. What
| exactly does business have to fear, when all the branches of
| government are full of their own representatives?
|
| You can't both assert that the government doesn't serve the
| people AND government doesn't serve businesses. I agree that it
| is an unreasonable premise.
| [deleted]
| towaway15463 wrote:
| What would be the point of influencing government if it had
| no power over you?
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| The reverse is true as well. What would be the point of
| influencing government if it gave you no power over it?
| [deleted]
| woodruffw wrote:
| Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is
| _required_ to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US
| government 's positions and re-derive every public policy
| position for itself.
|
| It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest
| traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up
| whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit.
| Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the
| companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated
| for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?
| peyton wrote:
| I mean, you can skim the emails here [1].
|
| Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together
| it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The
| inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad.
|
| [1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-
| State...
| woodruffw wrote:
| Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad?
|
| I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page
| 147), and so far I see:
|
| * A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports
| ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe
| there's some question about propriety, but that isn't
| itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is
| entirely private-to-public.
|
| * Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them
| for sending those media reports (p. 164).
|
| * Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to
| (about 30 pages of just that).
|
| * Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public
| information about vaccines: that they don't contain
| microchips, etc.
|
| Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great
| Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went
| beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of
| companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this
| 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.
| peyton wrote:
| I wasn't referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so
| unclear to me why that is critical.
|
| For ex: p516 is a request from a redacted sender in which
| the sender shares an elections-related post and then asks
| to know how it was handled. The message footer references
| CISA policy. I think the tone is a little strange and
| could be reasonably construed as a way to work around the
| policy of not seeking action laid out in the message
| footer.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > I wasn't referring to Great Barrington Declaration, so
| unclear to me why that is critical.
|
| Because it's the crux of TFA. Without evidence that the
| Federal Government _pressured_ companies to spike
| information they considered unfavorable, this is just a
| big pile of emails between bureaucrats and office
| workers.
|
| The email on p. 516 exemplifies this: someone in USG is
| asking Meta how they responded to a local government
| report. They're not asking for _any_ specific action from
| Meta, and there 's no evidence in the replies that Meta's
| employees construed the request as a demand to do
| _anything_.
| drummer wrote:
| The whole plandemic was nothing but a scam.
| scohesc wrote:
| The only entity that is able to commit acts of violence upon
| anybody they wish with almost full impunity is not the
| individual, not these massive silicon valley companies, but your
| very own government.
|
| "Do what we tell you to do or we'll regulate your poo-chute into
| the dirt."
|
| "If you don't agree with a tax we're instituting, too damn bad,
| you're paying it."
|
| "If you disagree with our policy, you can just vote come next
| election! Your vote has power!" - sure.
|
| Very interesting the author pokes at the Hunter Biden laptop
| debacle. It was shocking to see in real time the information
| suppressed and hidden from the general public like that. It's
| obvious that the removal of the content was a political decision
| just based on the speed it was suppressed by most mainstream
| media outlets, either encouraged by Twitter's (potential)
| internal staff bias or from the article-mentioned government
| agency interference.
|
| I'm ignorant regarding Covid because I've never studied in that
| field in my life. - the virus, the vaccines, the fatality, etc.
| etc. etc. However, to see other professionals with related
| credentials under their belt with conflicting opinions shut down
| and relegated to the "naughty corner" of the internet by their
| own governments in cahoots with politically-funded thinktank
| organizations behind "misinformation" or "fact-checker" warnings
| on social media is abhorrent. The media outlets and talk-show
| representatives making entire segments to laugh at the "fake
| scientists", creating musical bits to promote vaccination, it's
| all very lame and stupid.
|
| Reminds me of Copernicus trying to prove the de-facto government
| (the church) that their teachings were wrong about geocentric
| model of the solar system - the church did their best to
| suppress, launch smear campaigns and even threatened with
| imprisonment for someone's opinion. I swear, some bastardized
| version of science is being corrupted into the new religion for
| scared/hopeless people.
|
| I wonder - who holds the government accountable for their
| actions, _really_?
|
| I think the answer is nobody - society in general has lost their
| cohesiveness and ability to collectively "rise up" and express
| their dissatisfaction, instead choosing to delineate themselves
| between arbitrary political lines of beliefs that honestly don't
| have as much of an effect on the individual as they'd like to
| think.
|
| Nobody feels a sense of responsibility for taking care of their
| nation, because their nation isn't taking care of them. It's
| treating them as a common cattle - work every day, forced to give
| up large parts of your income to powerful people you'll never see
| in your life so they can shuffle the deck of cards and make
| decisions that will nine times out of ten negatively affect you.
|
| It's intentional - the US as a nation is slowly collapsing from
| this - it's only a matter of time before the US is able to create
| their "ministry of truth" and have their own "great firewalls" -
| it won't be rack-mount equipment and direct access to carrier
| infrastructure like China they'll say - but it'll be through
| back-room regulation threats and shady hand-shake deals behind
| smoke and mirrors.
| bgentry wrote:
| > 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Both can be true. Your point that internally these companies
| decided to start censoring, and later the Biden Admin started
| asking for the same. These is no exclusivity there. If
| anything, a Trump or Biden Admin might not have had the idea to
| ask for censorship had the Tech companies not introduced it
| themselves first?
| zaroth wrote:
| 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.
| isx726552 wrote:
| > the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to
| Facebook to get it suppressed
|
| 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
| pstuart wrote:
| The Hunter Biden laptop story is as meta as it gets. The
| whole point of the story is that it's a story, and that bad
| people aren't letting the story be told.
|
| Every freaking complaint about the story is about the story
| itself. It is Buttery Males v2. Same thing -- they didn't
| care about the emails, they cared about the story.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some
| folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you
| should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of
| Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice
| that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's
| similar to that'."
|
| "There's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to
| that" gives a pretty clear hint. The mob boss never says to
| his hitman "I think Fat Tony is a snitch, please kill him for
| me" but he still ordered the hit.
| pstuart wrote:
| Seriously? Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics?
|
| Is this the branch that operates out of the basement at
| Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria?
|
| You wanna know this one weird trick about this story? It
| only matters that it exists and can be further weaponized
| by crying foul over its suppression.
|
| You don't care about what the story is about, just the
| story itself (and the story about the story).
| fallingknife wrote:
| > Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics?
|
| Not _now_. For a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
| [deleted]
| pfisherman wrote:
| The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated
| forum. The rule of BBS, forums, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc has
| always been and will always be that quality is proportional to
| the willingness of the mods to wield that ban hammer.
|
| As for the free speech absolutists they are perfectly free to go
| post whatever nonsense they want on 4chan, 8kun, or Truth Social
| (heh). The rest of us are free to not go visit those places, and
| advertisers are free to not run ads there and have their ads
| associated with content that will tarnish their brand image.
| peteradio wrote:
| > The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated
| forum.
|
| How is that ironic? Irony would be this post getting flagged
| and removed.
| refurb wrote:
| Are you saying HN is moderating content on this website at the
| direction of the government?
|
| Because that's what the article is about.
| [deleted]
| jonhohle wrote:
| The issue linked isn't about mods enforcing community rules -
| it's about the government pressuring (under cover of law)
| communities to censor content that the government doesn't like.
|
| Regarding COVID, we know that much of what the government was
| disseminating was as much misinformation as that coming from
| Drs. that were saying the opposite. They were not trying to
| suppress information because they had any scientific authority,
| but because it ran counter to their strategy. Having a
| government attempt to squash public scientific debate is very
| concerning and completely different from mods booting
| belligerent or abrasive users.
| naasking wrote:
| Talk about missing the point.
| RichardCNormos wrote:
| Freedom to moderate one's platform is not freedom from
| consequences for doing so. There will be regulatory, legal, and
| investigative punishment for Big Tech within the next 10 years,
| as a direct consequence of their style of moderation.
|
| It would be more understandable if social media, for example,
| advertised "only opinions consistent with current left-wing
| ideology are welcome here", then proceeded to ban anyone
| presenting right-wing content. But they don't do this. There
| was a time when Twitter called itself "the free speech wing of
| the free speech party". In less than ten years, they became a
| mouthpiece for the government, banning any countervailing
| thought.
|
| People like me will gleefully vote for any politician who
| promises to punish Big Tech for this doublespeak. And there are
| way more of me than you would like to believe.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| And ironically, such punishment may chip away at the First
| Amendment also, because the power to punish Big Tech for how
| it mediates communication is more power in the government's
| hands to curtail private rights. This is not necessarily a
| bad thing, but such power has unintended consequences and
| must be ceded very thoughtfully.
|
| We are forever charting a course between a Brave New World
| and a 1984 future.
| staticman2 wrote:
| The previous president called the news media the enemies of
| the people and said he wanted to open up libel laws so he
| can sue the news media and win.
|
| A plan to "increase free speech" which actually reduces it
| would not necessarily be an _unintended_ consequence.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| This is the same copy-pasta posted to every submission about
| big tech censorship.
|
| > The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated
| forum.
|
| Unless you're implying that the U.S. government is involved in
| moderating legal speech on this forum - I do believe you are
| missing the point.
| crisdux wrote:
| I don't think moderation automatically means censorship. In my
| opinion, HN mainly tries to enforce a productive decorum, which
| makes this board better than others.
|
| Most people who are concerned about government censorship are
| not free speech absolutists. You are invoking the logical
| fallacy of appeal to extremes.
| zaroth wrote:
| The issue here actually has nothing to do with private
| moderation.
|
| It has to do with the USG lying to platforms that unflattering
| stories are "Russian disinformation" to get them taken down, or
| telling platforms they are responsible for killing people for
| carrying informed scientific debate that goes against the USG
| approved viewpoint.
|
| The platforms did not want to censor these accounts, they even
| told the owners they would not be.
|
| But then the Whitehouse came in and said they needed to do more
| about these specific people, and Biden went on TV and said
| socials were killing people by carrying these messages.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| But in this case we're not talking about shutting down trolls -
| we're talking about excluding political opponents, by actual
| elected politicians.
| Covzire wrote:
| And the completely psychopathic decision to prevent and de-
| platform medical doctors from even discussing a pandemic and
| early treatment options amongst themselves. I'll never
| forgive SV firms for that decision, they ended up killing a
| lot more people than they saved.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > they ended up killing a lot more people than they saved.
|
| That's a strong claim in need of support.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| Some of us were already apprehensive about going to the
| doctor before the pandemic.
| socialismisok wrote:
| Which intervention did they shut down discussion of, and
| how many lives would have been saved if the public had
| heard about it?
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _we 're not talking about shutting down trolls - we're
| talking about excluding political opponents, by actual
| elected politicians._
|
| "shutting down trolls" is precisely the language used when
| shutting down wrongthink, though. Everyone is a "paid Russian
| troll" or a "paid shortseller troll".
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated
| forum."
|
| I don't think there's any irony in this. The moderation
| decision has traditionally been up to those mods. What is
| fundamentally different with this (edit: "this" as in topic of
| the government forcing moderation through proposed legislation)
| is how it is now government mandated.
|
| Personally, I feel that government mandates of censorship
| actually compells "speech" on the part of the mods/platform.
| This violates free speech principles, albeit from a different
| part than most talk about (suppressing speech vs compelling
| it).
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| "What is fundamentally different with this is how it is now
| _government mandated_ [emphasis added]. "
|
| {{Citation needed}}
|
| I can't find any government mandates of censorship that your
| comment complains about. This article is about how the
| administration said that Facebook was killing people by
| spreading misinformation, and the company felt shamed into
| changing what posts it promotes and how it tags them,
| realizing that doing so would also be more profitable long
| term. The government has said bad things about a lot of
| companies and has done so since its formation.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My comment is not specific to the narrow focus of the
| article, but rather the larger conversation on this topic
| which which likely spurred this article. I'm referring to
| various proposed legislation that would mandate specific
| moderation, not something that has already occurred.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| What proposed legislation?
| giantg2 wrote:
| There are multiple state level bills. The Journalism
| Competition and Preservation Act has content moderation
| provisions. There are also some international bills/laws
| that will affect the platforms too.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| That bill has nothing to do with mandated moderation and
| only modifies the rights of content creators (for
| collective bargaining), not content aggregators. Full
| text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-
| congress/senate-bill/673....
|
| If there are multiple state level bills mandating
| moderation, please point to at least one. I know of
| several that restrict moderation.
| https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/01/social-media-
| sweeps...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Ah, yeah i see the content issues in that bill go the
| other ways (amendment technically).
|
| CA has a law that requires reports on social media
| moderation policies as well as compliance reports. It's
| thought this will open up liability if they fail to
| enforce their moderation to a reasonable level.
|
| Many of these indirectly mandate moderation through the
| repeal or modification of section 230. You can already
| see how that would work by looking a Craigslist personals
| shutting down. Also note that intermediaries are not
| protected by section 230 for DMCA infractions (see how
| police and others use protected music to censor, which
| takes advantage of the automated censorship tools that
| were created to comply with the legal mandates).
|
| https://www.ourcivicgenius.org/learn/all-the-bills-on-
| sectio...
|
| There are international laws which may affect the
| platforms too, like in France and Germany. It seems that
| sentiment may be spreading too.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Is it government _mandated_? Because everything turns on
| that. Politicians and government officials are allowed to
| have opinions, and even state those opinions: that 's not a
| mandate. TFA clearly seems to want to cast these opinions as
| a mandate enforced by the power of law, but when you squint
| and try to find the evidence it's troublingly absent.
| towaway15463 wrote:
| As if back channels or threats of unfavourable treatment
| don't exist. Just because the government doesn't put it in
| writing on the public record doesn't mean they aren't
| exerting other forms of power. In this case they did make
| statements both public and private and also engaged other
| parties to put pressure on.
|
| Asserting that this is "like just their opinion, man" is
| like saying the thugs that come into your store and admire
| it while saying "nice place, it'd be a shame if anything
| happened to it" are just expressing an opinion.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My comment is not specific to the narrow focus of the
| article, but rather the larger conversation on this topic
| which which likely spurred this article. I'm referring to
| various proposed legislation that would mandate specific
| moderation, not something that has already occurred.
| evandale wrote:
| What's the difference between a recommendation and a mandate
| when the government is delivering it through a private
| channel?
| socialismisok wrote:
| Was it government _mandated_? I could see someone making the
| case that the government "sure would appreciate if someone
| removed this meddlesome priest", but I don't see a mandate
| anywhere.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| The article covers this and precedent.
| socialismisok wrote:
| The article does not suggest there was a mandate. It
| implies there was maybe a mandate but mostly just Biden
| saying things and the companies listening.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| > As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice
| Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year,
| "[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of
| adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits
| it from doing directly."
|
| > In 1963, the Supreme Court, deciding Bantam Books v.
| Sullivan, held that "public officers' thinly veiled
| threats to institute criminal proceedings against"
| booksellers who carried materials containing obscenity
| could constitute a First Amendment violation. The same
| reasoning should apply to the Biden administration
| campaign to pressure tech companies into enforcing its
| preferred viewpoints.
|
| > It remains to be seen whether Bhattacharya and
| Kulldorff will be able to show that Fauci and Collins
| explicitly ordered tech companies to censor them and
| their Great Barrington Declaration.
|
| Fair - I'm overstating.
| peyton wrote:
| I think the article is about jawboning. Any thoughts there?
| zug_zug wrote:
| 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?
| peteradio wrote:
| I think the assertion is that both things happened. Accusations
| of American discussions being wholly Russian fabrications AND
| backchannel threats against media companies if they didn't fall
| in line.
| blast wrote:
| It may be not be a huge difference in the context of this case,
| though, since the plaintiffs' First Amendment argument would
| apply just as much to the government "filtering out or
| demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to
| misinform".
| musicale wrote:
| Was this it?
|
| https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-s...
| Natsu wrote:
| As near as I can tell they're talking about emails from this
| set:
|
| https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up
| kodah wrote:
| 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.
|
| Latest on Lab Leak:
| https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
| themitigating wrote:
| Has it been partially proven? Because I think saying "fully
| proving" implies there is some proof when there is none
| kodah wrote:
| The Intercept does a better job of explaining that. The
| problem with Lab Leak is that because it was suppressed for
| so long there's been a lot of time to destroy evidence. At
| that point the "smoking guns" are pretty few and far between
| though they mention at least one in that article. There's
| plenty of evidence in the article, saying that there is none
| is incorrect. I don't know why you'd be saying that.
| themitigating wrote:
| Wouldn't there also be no evidence if it wasn't true?
| kodah wrote:
| Did you read the article or are you intentionally asking
| me questions that The Intercept has already asked notable
| scientists? Lab Leak theory isn't unfounded, it comes
| from a fact-based position that already went through
| numerous layers of questioning because Peter Daszak
| declared the general question it was trying to answer
| (eg: Is it possible that gain of function experiments
| escaped the lab) racist.
|
| Even if you don't buy Lab Leak theory the various tidbits
| about EcoHealth are quite alarming. At a bseline they
| accepted a DARPA contract to do gain of function
| research. Is that a way that we want our government
| functioning? An NGO with very little oversight that does
| very little oversight taking government money and giving
| it to institutions in other countries. All of this the
| Intercept article _also_ talks about.
|
| Edit:
|
| Based on this users comments I now understand they're not
| asking questions in good faith.
|
| Their profile:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=themitigating
|
| Other comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=themitigating
| Mindwipe wrote:
| If anyone involved in this piece had ever mentioned Operation
| Choke Point during the last fifteen years this might have been
| better argued.
| trasz wrote:
| For background: "The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored
| by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian
| free-market think tank associated with climate change denial."
| superkuh wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > 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?
| houstonn wrote:
| Not along a particular channel, but right to hear is an
| important principle.
|
| As Frederick Douglass, a former slave and writer, wisely
| stated, "To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates
| the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is
| just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as
| it would be to rob him of his money."
| themitigating wrote:
| It doesn't matter what his opinion is the first amendment
| only deals the government supressing speech
| SamPatt wrote:
| >At least 11 federal agencies, and around 80 government
| officials, have been explicitly directing social media
| companies to take down posts and remove certain accounts
| that violate the government's own preferences and
| guidelines for coverage on topics ranging from COVID
| restrictions, to the 2020 election, to the Hunter Biden
| laptop scandal.
|
| Doesn't that apply here?
| themaninthedark wrote:
| No no no, see that was still action taken by private
| business. In order for the government to be doing that,
| you need a government agent to walk into the companies,
| sign log into the system and delete the posts. And they
| have to carry a signed order from their supervisor and
| saying "I'm doing this for the government" while doing
| so.
|
| Otherwise it might just be a random government employee
| gone rogue.
| anon291 wrote:
| Not in California, where the constitution guarantees free
| speech on privately owned land and property that is
| publicly accessible.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Frederick Douglas was not claiming that he had entitlement to
| use someone's printing press without permission.
| alexb_ wrote:
| If his permission was revoked due to the government
| threatening to regulate the printing press to death if they
| didn't stop printing Frederick Douglas, that is suppression
| of free speech from the government.
| staticman2 wrote:
| The democratic president incapable of passing non budget
| related laws due to the senate filibuster rules and has
| an adversarial Supreme Court controlled by the opposing
| party reducing his executive authority is threatening to
| regulate social media to death? That doesn't seem very
| likely.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| All government mandates were implemented using executive
| agency rules not laws. Thus far we have treated agency
| rules as acceptable despite being essentially laws that
| can be created by the executive.
|
| With executive agencies the executive does not need to
| pass a law or even ask permission to implement any number
| of rights violating policies.
| [deleted]
| darawk wrote:
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Is it different if it's a government demand vs a government
| recommendation?
| evandale wrote:
| What's the difference between a government demand and
| recommendation delivered over a private channel? Sounds
| kind of like when the mafia recommends that a business buys
| their brand of insurance to protect them in the off-chance
| somebody comes along and smashes all their windows.
|
| Sure the business doesn't need the insurance but they might
| rethink their position the first time all their windows get
| smashed.
| anon291 wrote:
| Given that the government has already (pre-COVID) been
| wanting to enact anti-trust legislation against Facebook
| and Meta, one can argue that not following a recommendation
| is perceived by these companies to be a risk for their
| existence. At the end of the day, the government needs to
| be extremely careful here.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It depends on the details of the case -- I am not familiar
| with this one. There is Supreme Court precedent for the
| position that any government "recommendation" that has
| direct and material financial consequences based on whether
| that recommendation is followed is _de facto_ coercive and
| therefore illegal if used to circumvent Constitutional
| restrictions on the government. The historical context is
| abusing regulatory or tax power to force acquiescence on an
| unrelated policy issue that would otherwise be
| unconstitutional if done directly.
|
| The limits of coercion that fall below the threshold of
| "material" are still not well-defined AFAIK.
| jtbayly wrote:
| It depends on what the consequences are (or are assumed to
| be) of not acceding to the "recommendation."
| darawk wrote:
| That seems to be what the case will turn on: The difference
| between the government providing "advice" or "helpful
| recommendations" and implicit/explicit coercion. I don't
| know enough about the details here to have a strong opinion
| of which view is right in this case, but that seems like
| the central issue.
| t-3 wrote:
| I'm no lawyer, but I can't imagine such a "recommendation"
| would be a valid legal shield for any entity that _didn 't_
| control the courts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The Executive branch doesn't control the courts.
| notch656a wrote:
| No but it does control the FBI and other agencies that
| can make your life extremely unpleasant if they like, and
| once that happens even if the courts rule entirely in
| your favor it won't be a fun ride.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Who said the censorship pressure came from the executive
| branch and not the other branches as well?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The lawsuits in question never alleged any pressure other
| than Executive as far as I've seen
| maxk42 wrote:
| You seem to misunderstand: The government's position is not
| at question here. Their use of influence to suppress free
| speech is.
| somenameforme wrote:
| "Recommendation" doesn't mean what you're implying when its
| coming from an entity who is responsible for tens of
| billions of dollars in revenue for you and for whom losing
| the favor of could easily result in the collapse of your
| business.
|
| It also doesn't mean the same thing when, in many cases,
| the governments and the huge corporations are intermingled
| so heavily that public or private is more a matter of
| semantics than reality.
| jtbayly wrote:
| IANAL, but I don't think they have to prove it's hard or easy
| to find and read it.
|
| The crux of the case is whether the government was seeking to
| censor it, and if they did to any extent succeed in it. As I
| posted elsewhere, I think this is the heart of the lawsuit:
|
| > 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
|
| That right there is clearly a First Amendment Violation if the
| result was one less person seeing and reading it.
| themitigating wrote:
| It's not because the first amendment says congress shall make
| no law ...
|
| Nothing about the executive branch or threats
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| That is because constitutionally the executive doesn't have
| any authority that would allow that branch to implement any
| policy that could infringe on rights. However, Congress has
| given the Executive a vast amount of unconstitutional
| authority through executive agencies.
|
| We are now being taught the lesson of why the Executive has
| no authority to make laws.
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| alexb_ wrote:
| >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.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Over-classification is a free speech issue. There's a moral
| difference between information being classified to protect
| the country, and information being classified to protect
| inept politicians and government officials from having to
| face the accountability of the public.
|
| For instance, the CIA spent the equivalent of several billion
| dollars trying to lift an obsolete Soviet submarine from the
| ocean floor, against the recommendations of the US Navy which
| thought they could recover the relevant materials using deep
| sea remote control 'drones' from a spy submarine, rather than
| using a surface ship to lift the whole sub, which they said
| would fail and risked discovery. Well it did fail, and they
| did get discovered and the US Government was forced to
| explain itself to the Soviet government. But in the aftermath
| of this boondoggle, the US government was more candid with
| the Soviets than with the American public. The rational for
| sharing information with the Soviets but not with the
| American public can only be to protect the CIA/etc from
| public accountability. They continue to use the ambiguity
| created by their secrecy to lead people to believe they were
| more successful than they actually were. The Soviets/Russians
| can get _ground truth_ about this incident by sending their
| own drones down there to see what was left of the submarine.
| The CIA 's classification of the incident serves to obscure
| the truth from the American public, not the Russians.
| falcrist wrote:
| How is this not a limitation on freedom of speech? You have a
| piece of information that you aren't allowed to talk about.
|
| I think this is just a limitation that we're all mostly ok
| with.
| fallingknife wrote:
| No it isn't. But OP is talking more about government
| suppressing public information. Like when the FBI told
| Zuckerberg to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story because it
| was Russian disinformation.
| themitigating wrote:
| It's possible that national security to be more important than
| free speech. Doesn't this happen all the time?
| anon291 wrote:
| If you define national security as preserving the American
| system of government, then no national security cannot be
| more important than free speech. There is no American system
| of government without free speech. Attempts to 'secure' the
| government by limiting free speech indicate the government we
| sought to protect no longer exists.
| linuxftw wrote:
| > It's possible that national security to be more important
| than free speech.
|
| There is no national security without free speech. There
| might be oligarch security, but not security for the people.
| themitigating wrote:
| So troop movements should be public?
| linuxftw wrote:
| Definitely. If you're not fighting an unpopular war far
| overseas somewhere it's not really a problem.
| themitigating wrote:
| What about a popular war where a country invaded the US.
|
| What about the locations of nuclear weapons?
| bombcar wrote:
| If the government can't keep its locations secret, that
| should be on them.
|
| Limiting their employees/military from blabbing the
| secrets is a separate issue.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Who's going to invade the US? Much easier to buy the
| politicians like how it currently works. This would also
| require several years of naval and long range
| bombardments to even be a possibility. Just a non-factor
| if the planet looks anything like it does today.
|
| > What about the locations of nuclear weapons?
|
| Security through obscurity. I'm sure some of the US's
| adversaries know where at least some nuclear weapons are
| located, and it seems to have not been a problem so far.
|
| What's everybody so scared of? The US could cut its
| military by 75% overnight and little would change for the
| US itself. So-call 'allies' overseas might have to start
| footing their own bill for defense or attempt to make
| peace with their neighbors, but for the US nothing
| changes.
| themitigating wrote:
| Why are you picking apart my hypothetical examples ?
|
| Is it your argument there is no reason ever for the
| government to censor information?
| linuxftw wrote:
| I don't believe the government has any legitimate power
| that an individual does not have.
| notch656a wrote:
| If everyone (or no one) has legitimate power of violent
| aggression, it's pretty much impossible to run a
| democracy as the minority would either have legitimate
| use of force to stop the majority, or the majority would
| have no legitimate use of force to impose their vote on
| the minority.
|
| Now I'm in agreement with you.... but the logical
| conclusion is basically some form of anarchism.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| well said.
| anon291 wrote:
| You should not be prosecuted for announcing troop
| movement data that you've lawfully acquired.
|
| If you burglarized an American government facility or
| hacked into a computer system or committed fraud to trick
| someone or drugged/tortured a government agent, you
| should be prosecuted for that.
|
| But if an agent leaves information somewhere, you read
| it, and publish it? No, you should not.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| And that in fact is how the law works, with of course a
| couple of fringe cases [0]. If you're walking down the
| street and stumble over a folder of TS/SCI/SAP material,
| you can publish it all you want. The only time you have a
| duty to protect classified material is if you signed a
| non-disclosure agreement.
|
| [0] exceptions: nuclear secrets as outlined in the Atomic
| Energy Act of 1954, and the identities of intelligence
| officers acting clandestinely. The former is a wreck of a
| law (how would Grandma Smith know a document marked S/RD
| is special, plus there's the whole 'Born Secret' bit),
| and the latter hasn't been tried out that much in court.
| [deleted]
| themitigating wrote:
| But you are now limiting your original argument
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Would you post here if people were allowed to say whatever they
| wanted?
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| This question seems disingenuous. Your comment equates the
| U.S. Government attempting to suppress speech critical of
| their own decisions with dang moderating an internet forum.
| These are not the same.
|
| The first amendment protects speech in the United States for
| good reason. There are bad people in the world. Those bad
| people can end up in government. The government wields
| incredible power. The three branches are meant to keep each
| other in check - but so are the citizens. The ability to vote
| in/out candidates is a balancing force. The humans in power
| being able to distort speech in the country to favor keeping
| them in power breaks that balancing force.
|
| This article is asking "did the government attempt to
| suppress speech." That has nothing to do with moderation on
| HN.
|
| dang is not a representative of a government. It's entirely
| reasonable (IMO) for the mods here to suppress speech
| critical of decisions a government is making - it's their
| site. It is entirely unreasonable for a government to
| suppress speech critical of decisions the government is
| making. Blurring that line is how you do a fascism.
| catiopatio wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| I post here now because the locally-enforced Overton window
| is much larger than alternative platforms, which makes
| conversations much more interesting, challenging, and
| productive.
|
| If people could say whatever they wanted here, I'd expect to
| see a lot more comments I wouldn't bother engaging with at
| all, but that's okay.
|
| I'm not a horse -- I don't need blinders to prevent me from
| getting spooked.
| plaguepilled wrote:
| pessimizer wrote:
| Whataboutism from Tablet, the famous soviet magazine.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-09-22 23:01 UTC)