It was deeply disturbing to me that throughout the COVID epidemic many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID.
Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances.
I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.
The fear and groupthink was so strong at the time that even pointing out the existence of dissenting voices was enough to get you labeled as a selfish grandma killer conspiracy theorist.
I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.
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
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.
>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."
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"?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew.
Mine Safety Health Administration advice was to stay home when sick and then business as usual. I was on mine sites when others were locked at home double-masked with fear. Nobody was masked on mine sites because it restricts visibility and is unsafe. Do you think MSHA is a fringe group?
OSHA tried to mandate masks and shots. It was ridiculous to watch the disparity in responses and fear.
MSHA sites are dangerous yet are safe. The OSHA approach was incorrect.
In my observations, the people who are most afraid of Covid and most likely to “take it serious” are those who are white collar and privileged enough to not have to do hard labor. People who do shit for a living that can get them mailed or killed wrote Covid off a long time ago.
It takes an incredible amount of privilege to support the Covid mitigations. Consider that not a single person who enacted them missed a single paycheck because of the mandates. I imagine that holds true to most of the people cheering those mandates on or calling them “minor inconveniences”. A lot of privilege needs to be checked here.
"Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew". It’s not my opinion, we "know" very little. We think we know because we read things on internet, we discuss with friends/etc but most of it is b.llsh.t as when we thought lobotomy and electrical shocks were sane and efficient treatments.
What fatality rate would a pandemic have to have in order for you to agree to the kinds of public health measures that were taken for COVID-19? 10% ? 20% ? 60% ?
What kinds of unknowns would justify, in your mind, those sorts of policies?
Fatality rate is the wrong point. Fatality rate among specific groups is what matters. In effect young people are at virtually no risk of covid, there is no reason to lock down kids for 2 years. Experts and authorities are running an ongoing farce.
You're dodging their question. You don't have to agree with a number they picked at random, but is there any fatality rate where you would believe that the actions taken by the government in response to covid were justified?
How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do? Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.
Absolutely disgusting how many so-called “smart rational” people dismissed it… as if Covid was literally the only thing that mattered and anybody who pointed it out was nothing more than a Fox News watching selfish asshole.
To this day people will defend letting people die alone in a hospital or nursing home with only some crappy video conference as a substitute for real human contact.
It takes a special kind of monster to support the crap we did to the elderly. There are a worryingly large set of people I used to respect that turned out to be monsters.
While I agree it's horrific, I would urge you to reconsider whether or not people who supported such policies were monsters.
That's exactly the dehumanizing language that was used about people who were skeptical of lockdowns and other dissidents.
I think they were normal people who were overcome with fear and placed too much trust in authority. Weak-minded, perhaps, but that doesn't make them monsters.
> How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do?
So I ask again, what would the circumstances have to be for "letting the at risk people decide for themselves" to be an unacceptable policy? What fatality level, transmission mechanism or whatever would have to be present for you to accept that some sort of centralized public health policy was required?
I’m not sure there should be a threshold. If the threat is real, like ebola, people will naturally adjust their behavior. If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable (covid lives saved), to the detriment of all other important considerations. This slippery slope should not be underestimated.
1M americans died of COVID-19. That's a real threat, too. So the difference with Ebola is not really to do with the "reality" of the threat, but the manner and rapidity of death, along with the fatality rate.
> If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable
> Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.
I agree with you, but we did worse actually.
Some states actually sequestered covid positive patients, and covid suspected cases at nursing homes with highly at risk populations.
We know who covid kills: People with advanced age and multiple comorbidities. The same type of folks you find at nursing homes.
Those governors that did that - in my mind they are guilty of murder.
For those of you that want to fact check this, I will save you the trouble.
Precisely which groups would be isolated from "young people", and which would not, and on what basis? Do you judge the 44k deaths in the 40-49 cohort (likely parents of older children, along with teachers of many children) to be acceptable? Do you believe that an increase in their death count due to leaving children unrestricted would also be acceptable? Just how would not locking down kids work?
You can start comparing with _serious_ threats like Rabies (100%), aids (90%), smallpox (95%), tetanus (50%)
Bubonic plague (40–60%). Yes in _that_ case I think maybe drastic policies would be justified.
So what do you think your threshold is? If a new airborne transmitted disease with a 30% kill rate showed up, would centralized public health policies be OK?
> 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".
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.
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.
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!)
> 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 have watched many films on the holocaust, and they were quite sad, and tragic.
However, I did not truly understand some of the why until I happened across the German Revolution of 1918–1919 [1] ; organizations, and elites, that played significant roles in the Revolution were the very same that were proscribed with the rise of the Nazis.
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.
You're right everyone should be forced to continue to do business with people openly stating that they believe in a value system you disagree with. Any sort of action in response to someone's beliefs beyond a firm "tut tut" is directly on the path to events like the holocaust
Wait, are you trying to get fired now? Because that is an absurd escalation. It's almost like you know firing someone for saying something silly is wrong, and so you have to pretend it's a complete civilisational crisis to abstract away from that.
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.
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.
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.
When I was a boy in the 1980’s I used to hear the phrase, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I haven’t heard it said in decades. As such, I find your comment extremely uplifting.
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.
And then there was this plan from 2019:
"Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...
'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.
The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.
> But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague
I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
>The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.
I will one up your anecdata with another anecdata. I was at a work retreat in the bay area about two months ago. Employees flew in from all across the country for the event. No one checked the vaccine cards and masks were optional. Single digit percentage of people were wearing them, including indoors. And my entire friend network is reporting similar experiences. These are all companies with "left leaning" work force, as one would expect in the bay area. So no, these are not outliers.
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
Except people near you not doing covid theatre doesn't disprove the notion that some people treat covid as much worse than it is, while the continued masking requirements and other shit do disprove the notion that nobody is treating it as worse than it is.
You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.
> Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.
"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.
But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"
That's because the political arena is supposed to have limits. Those limits in America are clearly expressed in restrictions on the state's power, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.
That's a good way of putting it, even though I disagree with your implication that implementing public health guidance was the political "line" was crossed.
My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."
The movie "Don't Look Up" really nailed how we now seem to respond politically to factual, observable crises, and how non-political facts become "politicized."
The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.
Of course, democracy should never infringe on the inalienable rights of man, and any proper republic has mechanisms to limit the passions of the mob. I simply find it amusing that the same political movement that so often claims to want to "defend democracy" everywhere (voting rights for felons, making courts more "accountable" through court-packing, eliminating the Electoral College, etc) is also the one that does the most complaining about issues being "politicized" whenever the democratic process disagrees with the unprinicpled, unaccountable expert class consensus.
Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.
The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.
What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.
Yes, some of these comments are talking like it's all in the rear-view mirror now. The consequences are still unfolding, and it's still a strong possiblility that they could lead to something very unpleasant.
Weimar Germany went down pretty fast, actually. Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Reichstag Fire Decree was issued on February 28. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was opened for business on March 22, specifically for political prisoners.
There's no question that any course of action (or courses of action) taken in response to a new airborne pandemic is going to involve harm. That's not the question.
The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?
The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.
> 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).
Superstition is exactly how I would describe some of these people driving around with masks on in their car with their windows rolled up... (and at this point pretty much anywhere really). I guess this is how superstitions start.
I used to do that. I did it at a time when we did not understand how limited surface transmission was. I didn't want to remove my mask after the weekly shopping expedition because there was some possibility that viral contamination of the mask surface could be a vector. In addition, I wanted to avoid wiping my hands near my mouth or nose, and simply leaving my mask on until I got home and could wash my hands thoroughly seemed like a good way to ensure that.
I believe that these type of disease are un-avoidable unless you live 24/24 in plastic suits. The trade-off is too high. I often see comments talking about mild inconvenience. Go tell that to people in china who are locked down and force tested, isolated, masked etc. To me it’s 1984-ish nightmare
Nobody disputed that over time almost everyone would be exposed to COVID-19. The issue was how rapidly that happened, because if it happened too fast, public health systems would be overwhelmed, and then completely treatable injuries and conditions (under normal circumstances) would become potentially fatal.
In the beginning they had no idea how bad things would get. And keeping the hospitals from being overburdened was a big reason as well. Did they err on the side of safety, yes and thankfully it wasn't a worse virus. I have no doubt even if it had been deadlier people still would of done whatever.
I know right, can you imagine how many tigers I would have in my yard if not for all of my anti tiger rocks? I would probably be drowning in them. I just wish my neighbours had the humility to thank me for it.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Except that it's not downvoted now. Jumping to conclusions about early voting behavior on HN causes (mild) embarrasment to many, and so it is once again.
I’ve arrived at my conclusions all on my own. I’d love to be part of the “take this serious” crowd because it would have made my life a lot easier (but also wasted). Unfortunately the facts and data combined with my values just don’t align with the idea that Covid was ever something we should have shut it all down for.
There is an alternate universe where they didn’t test everybody that breathed and don’t publish daily death counts. The only way you’d know there was a pandemic was an uptick in “wash your hands” signs in the restroom. Otherwise it would have been “just that thing going around”.
The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock. No shutdowns. No masks. No hysterical blowhards tweeting about the end of the world on twitter. People just got on with life.
Does this make me a selfish asshole? Perhaps. But I personally think the people screaming to mask up and shut it all down are the true selfish ones. The expect everybody to massively disrupt their lives in order to appease their fear and anxiety. Especially when those mitigations had no prior evidence they’d work and not even a whiff of a stated off-ramp or end goal.
Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers.
Then account for the fact they test for everybody and anybody for Covid. Not so for the earlier pandemics. Totally different measurements. Imagine if they did the same test protocol back then like they did today. Only then can you compare.
The use and abuse of raw data has been a hallmark of the last 2.5 years. Whatever number makes Covid sound worse is the number that gets published and spread. Anything suggesting it isn’t as bad as predicted is buried as a conspiracy or “not peer reviewed”.
Exactly, in reality we don’t know much about these diseases, the way they spread, the effects. But there has been some mass hysteria that made them appear much more serious than they are. It could just have made few lines in the media and everyone would have continued their lives peacefully. Instead we had borderline totalitarian policies, cops arresting people taking a walk alone in forest, ridiculous absurd policies (in France) banning non-essential goods to be sold in markets. I’ve never seen such a collective nightmare but now I perfectly understand past nightmare I learned in history books…
> Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers.
World population has grown by a factor of 2.3 since 1968. That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 230,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 1/4 of COVID-19's US numbers.
US population has grown by a factor of 1.65 since 1968.That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 165,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 17% of COVID-19's US numbers
Oh my! You were labelled as a selfish grandma killer! Heavens to Betsy! The sheer force of censorship! The utter horror of government-mandated labelling on social media!
Seriously. What do you think is going to happen when there's a worldwide pandemic and people with (in some cases) utterly opposing views on what is safe and advisable as public health policy?
> 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.
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.
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.
But the truly comical part, of course, was that Covid was not acknowledged to be widely airborne until a year and a half later. At the same time that cloth masks were widely dismissed as ineffective.
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.
How would you design a controlled trial involving live virus transmission with a virus that is known to have long term health effects and can even be lethal?
There was one trial, which apparently later censored, that measured how mist with similar particle size behaves when it hits a cloth or other non-FFP2 or higher mask. Non surprisingly, they do not stop airborne particles that are much smaller than the "holes" in the fabric. The masks captured droplets, but later the droplets dried, split up and became airborne with very small particles.
If that's the case, be demonstrable then. Given the physical size of the virus vs the size of holes in say, a cotton mask, combined with the infection rates for the strictest masking areas, I would say your statement is demonstrably false.
Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.
City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack
The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.
If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.
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.
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.'
"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."
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.
I have a feeling that I'll also find this fact to be true within very specific contexts which are missing from the claim above.
One could interpret it as 'I got permabanned and made to feel bad afterwards for upvoting an unpopular opinion one time' or 'I got permabanned after upvoting an unpopular opinion for the 1000th time during an ongoing raid feud.' I presume the truth lies somewhere between those extremes.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.'
So did Florida and plenty of other non-coastal states. So did most of all industrialized nations. Dunno what makes Covid so special in these blue states that they had to close schools.
Honestly I think a lot of the issue here is problem with incentives.
When these teachers signed up, many didn't sign up for the risks of COVID (however large... or small they may actually be). They didn't sign up for the psychological stress that put on them either. For that, I feel bad for them, and I'll explain why.
They were offered virtually nothing in exchange for "changing up the game." They weren't compensated for these new conditions. Some, not all, but some rather than just saying out loud "fuck you not worth it" came up with faux-philosophical reasons for why they rejected this, such as scientifically unproven conjecture that the children would be better off remote. But had they been properly incentivized, I think their reasoning (as it usually does) will chase what benefits them.
We wasted tons of money pumping it into low-interest asset accumulation and 'free' business loans. I would have spent some of that money instead DOUBLING teacher pay as a reward for 'risk' (whether it be mostly purely psychological, or not, or whatever) of enduring COVID.
I would then offer the teachers this doubled wage as compensation for this risk. Teachers that can get with the program (doing in-person, or remote, as desired by the families) would stay on. Everyone else would be fired with a 1 year severance to find a new job, and the doubled wages being used incentivize replacements.
IMO elevated adult risk, and even some elevated child risk, is justified in the name of education. We seem to intuitively understand this as many of us may engage in dangerous trades or risks to help our children, but then again a stranger should be fairly compensated for such risk. I think had we compensated these teachers in a way they were fattening their bones for staying in class we would have been flooded with (for self-serving reasons) "facts" from teachers about how great in-person learning is and how everybody should be doing it.
I'm not presenting a counterfactual, I'm presenting my experience that we had issues finding teachers and finding methods for transporting children. I don't know anything about Sweden, but I do know that we had people screaming at us about how we were anti-American child abusers when we couldn't even find teachers to fill classrooms due to illnesses and several deaths that occurred in my district.
> Very few people died.
It takes very few deaths to throw a school and even a district into disarray. In my post history I post about 40 teachers dying in Georgia during a short period of time, whose median age was 46. What kind of effect do you think that has on other teachers, the students, and the district? Outsiders who want to argue from political positions don't want to talk about those realities. Instead they fall back to aggregate statistics like "very few died" that minimize the sheer tragedy of the situation.
How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children? I really don't know, although as you say every death is indeed a tragedy. Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach, that teachers previously died of other communicable disease, that some died during freak workplace accidents. Many will die during their travels. 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood -- surely our children are worth at least 1/3 as much as logs of wood (although of course we don't like anyone to die doing either). And we also have to remember we don't know the marginal contribution of the profession to which of these 40 may or may not have otherwise died -- we can't simply say they all would have lived had schools been shut down.
IMO society could tolerate an extremely high number of deaths if it means putting their children on the best foot. Hell we tolerate a pretty high death rate just to put crabs on the table for people in a seafood restaurant. Our kids are definitely worth more than crabs. But teachers need to be compensated for this risk, and fully informed of the risks ahead of time so that they won't become upset later that they're getting into something they didn't bargain for. And it needs to be fully consensual, so teachers who want to walk away from the job should not be penalized for ending their contract. Lets bring in the risk takers who are willing to be there in person with our children, and like crab fisherman lets reward them handsomely for this risk. For those not up to the task, there is no shame in walking away.
> How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children?
This is what I'm talking about when I said "false dichotomy".
Teachers were educating children during the pandemic. I was educating children. They actually did learn remotely. Sure, it wasn't the best learning environment for all students, and it certainly affected lower income students disproportionately. But students did learn, as indicated by my final exams. But to say the choice was between educating and not educating is false. It was a choice between different modes of suboptimal learning with different risk profiles for different demographics.
I can accept that society must take some risks to educate children. I cannot accept others screaming that teachers must take inflated risks beyond what they signed up for, otherwise they are child abusers.
The other part of it is the idea that learning in the classroom during the pandemic would have been fully optimal for students. This view seems to miss the point. What happens when Mrs. Jones the history teacher dies suddenly in the middle of the semester? Do you just find someone to replace her during the pandemic? Is there a competent substitute waiting to take their place (hint: there isn't)? And even if you do find one, what happens when they get sick and they need to miss 3 weeks of class? Do you have a second substitute ready to take their place? Is math teacher or the gym teacher going to have to sub in to teach history? Do they even know the curriculum? What happens when half your class gets sick and has to learn from home anyway? Does the teacher deliver two modes of instruction (when they're already worked to the max)? What do you think happens to student outcomes when their favorite teacher dies suddenly, and following her is a parade of adults of unknown competency, each who have no idea who you are as a student? Is that what we call "educating children"? And before anyone accuses me of speaking in hypotheticals or counterfactuals again, this is a real scenario that happened in our district.
> Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach
A teacher dying during the semester is a very rare thing. It's a scramble for the district to handle that scenario in the best of times. 40 teachers with a median age of 46 dying over the span of 6 months never happens. Not because of traffic, not because of freak accidents, not because of other communicable diseases. Except Covid.
> 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood
This is what I mean by people who are unfamiliar with the way things work framing their arguments in aggregate statistics. It blurs everything in with the effect of removing all meaning from the deaths, which I appreciate you note are tragic. But this kind of comparison of aggregate statistics removes the deaths from the context in which they occur, effectively sanitizing them.
Logging is regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, so that's pretty shocking that the rate of death of teachers in Georgia over 6 months was as high as 1/3 that rate. Moreover, deaths of loggers don't completely shut down the logging operation because it has no impact whatsoever on the ability of the trees to be cut down. There's no need to set up grief counseling for the trees. There's no need for the replacement logger to spend weeks getting acquainted with the trees. You're not giving a paper salesman on-the-job-training to replace the logger. Fewer loggers doesn't impact the safety of the trees.
> But teachers need to be compensated for this risk
This was never offered an as option by society writ large, who I guess don't agree with you and I that educating children is more valuable than crabs. So while I agree with you and appreciate your sentiment that educating children is an important function of society and teachers should be compensated well for their efforts, it was never on the table.
Instead, what was offered was an unending stream of abuse that continues to this day, as teachers were called Nazis, unamerican, traitors, abusers, and the worst of all groomers. Compensating teachers in proportion to the risk they were taking was never proffered as an option by the crowd who wanted to open schools. I actually appreciate you saying this. But what ended up happening was that endless abuse ensued, and so people just decided it wasn't worth it to face the abuse and a life-threatening disease. People retired early, people decided against joining the profession, people died, and it left a lot of very bad options. The worst part is that even today on this thread, those very bad options are collectively boxed up as "inflicting intentional punishment" by posters even here on this site, which is probably the most polite opinion in that genre I've heard.
Remind me again how most of the rest of the industrialized world managed to keep their school open with kids unmasked? I don’t ever recall seeing stacks of dead teachers…
The problem children face today aren’t because of the pandemic. They are entirely the fault of peoples reaction to Covid. Covid didn’t close schools in blue states and then force them to wear masks. Humans did.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
You mean of the cops who died the majority tested positive. Very different than saying more cops were killed because of Covid than anything else. It’s entirely plausible that lots of cops would test positive for Covid… they interact with the public just like service workers, nurses and teachers…
Vaccination rates among LEOs were much lower than those other professions, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in substantially more serious illnesses and deaths.
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.
In the alternate space time dimension at mine sites, the regulator is MSHA. MSHA said to stay home if sick and follow normal procedures at work. Getting to mines was smooth because the roads were empty. On mine sets was, in my experience, business as usual without masks (masks limit visual range and cause accidents). At one site they had a tent and invited me to the party with employees and families who proceeded to have a pig roast without any social distancing or masks or wash stations. It was glorious. Then i drove back to the big city and went to buy groceries and everyone was masked and shying away from others. Some shoppers were wearing gloves and the aisles had designated travel directions. Bizarre.
> 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?
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.
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.
Ioannidis wrote some obviously absolute trash in March 2020. I can’t find the worst paper (google deindex?) but I copied a quote[1]: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”. His analysis in that paper was some of the most biased bullshit I have read: the low range estimate was boldly incorrect. I absolutely love his previous papers on the replication crisis. Here[2] is a different paper of his from March 2020 showing his bias. He is a solid scientist, but he went off the deep end for a while there.
Ioannidis was obviously way off on the number of people to be infected, but his estimate on the fatality rate was actually fairly close. The CDC later calculated it as 0.6%.
100% difference in rate is fairly close? I get that these are small rates to begin with, but if your margin of error includes the entire range between 0 and your predication in the first place, does your prediction have any value?
Being within a factor of 2 is fairly close for being early in the pandemic with very limited data. At the time, some other researchers had estimated a fatality rate in the 2% range which was even farther off.
The numbers he found were completely inconsistent with other well known numbers at the time. He didn’t shit-test his analysis against reality, instead he published bullshit science, ironically enough given his most cited paper.
I recall he ignored conflicting information from other sources[1], he was jumping to conclusions based on the thin Diamond Princess information, and I felt he was politically advocating for more scientific delay. Resulting in articles like: https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...
He doubled down. Was badly wrong. Unfortunately it is still a political topic, especially in the US, so it is hard to have a sensible conversation about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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?
It is true for vaccine that have been long tested and are really effective for certain set of _serious_ diseases. It’s not true for Covid were those vaccines are new, not effective (because no vaccine is effective for those kind of diseases), do not prevent people for catching and spreading the disease, and we are talking about a disease with a very low mortality rate.
That's almost the same type of response the actual Typhoid Mary had to being told to quarantine and stop preparing food for people. It didn't affect her so it couldn't be real and fuck everyone else. If you think taking any step that has a marginal effect on you in protection of society will count as the "worst non-answer" then you should be afraid of authority figures because you are engaging in the type of society damaging behavior they are charged with mitigating
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.
> 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.
People like Tucker Carson?
What about "people" like the CNN saying that Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer? Like, why? Why can't skepticism over ivermectin be expressed in a normal way?
Partly because of the lack of acknowledgment about what was already fairly certain about ivermectin, which was dismissed by a bunch of quacks (including the then POTUS), who were absolutely not interested in any kind of "normal" scientific discussion.
> 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.
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.
The worst thing is, that you could point out the wrong stuff, and both the platform and some very loud users would attack you even for pointing out the conflicting positions from the same source.
From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
I'm not that old or fat to be in any risk groups, so I got vaccinated to protect my (old) parents... and back then it was "get vaccinated and you won't get it, not spread it" (plus herd immunity), and not long after: "yes, you can get it, you can spread it, but chances of death are marginally lower"
Then one discusson on /r/conspiracy about something unrelated, and bam, banned from most of the from page subreddits.
>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
The fact that people keep citing this ridiculous claim is evidence of why this "contradiction" was necessary. People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any". That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.
This was a rational and intentional decision, not a contradiction.
>That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.
Well I'm glad they're lying to my face for good reason
You really don't see an issue with "science" (=people representing groups of scientists on tv) lying to people? "for the greater good"?
But we should still ban people who say otherwise? The first "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists telling you to wear a mask, no matter what fauci says) or the second "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists saying that masks are useless)? Which ones should we ban then?
I mean... doing what a youtubeing prepper nutjob said and did, has proven to be safer for you, than following what Fauci (and other local equivalents) say... or you'd atleast have masks, disinfectant and a basement full of toiletpaper and MREs at home, while those listening to Fauci wouldn't.
How can we "trust the science", when "the science" has clearly lied to us? What else is "science" lying about right now?
> I mean... doing what a youtubeing prepper nutjob said and did, has proven to be safer for you, than following what Fauci (and other local equivalents) say... or you'd atleast have masks, disinfectant and a basement full of toiletpaper and MREs at home, while those listening to Fauci wouldn't.
When the pandemic happened, and I had multiple P100 masks from asbestos removal, I felt pretty comfortable.
....Until I tried to wear them in everyday life. It is even worse than being at a construction site, wearing one of those monstrosities all day
> People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any".
It was a shortsighted error that will forever cost them credibility. Not worth it. They should have just contacted the handful of major retailers that could have delivered N95 masks into the hands of most Americans and asked (or even ordered) them to pull the stock. That's it. Problem solved.
All they did in the end was demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth and that's not what you want if you're trying to manage a pandemic or any public health crisis. Outright lying because they didn't want to risk treating the American public like adults was such a massive failure I don't think they will ever recover fully from it.
Actually, the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. That precludes lying to the people, even if it's "definitely justified because this is a special case and reasons." https://www.palladiummag.com//2021/07/15/the-myth-of-panic/
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” - The U.S. Surgeon General
>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.
Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed.
Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...
The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.
I don't expect them to know everything. I do expect them to acknowledge when they don't know everything, rather than bouncing from one end of unwarranted certainty to the other.
( > CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky is interviewed )
> our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
> get vaccinated and you won't get it, no[r] spread it
When and where was this the message? I'm not doubting you, I just got most of my covid info from going to blogs then reading the abstracts of papers they linked to, and I remember the efficacy being in the 80% to 90% range for the initial strain. Even smallpox vaccines only had around 95% efficacy. There's no good reason for a journalist to report that any vaccine is 100% effective.
> "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Biden said in the full interview. "The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated. That’s the problem. Everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, *so you do not spread the disease to anyone else."* (*emphasis mine*)
> The vaccines that we have against COVID are incredibly effective vaccines. And people have seen the results from the clinical trials of, you know, anywhere in the 80 percent range, 90 percent range of efficacy. But that doesn't mean that 100 percent of people, 100 percent of the time are going to be protected against disease. There is no vaccine that provides that level of protection for any disease. So we do expect in any vaccine program that there will be rare, but there will be cases of disease among people who were fully vaccinated and certainly among some people who were partially vaccinated. This doesn't mean that the vaccines aren't working. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the vaccines. What it does mean is that not everybody who receives vaccines has 100 percent protection
To me, that means that chances of not getting covid are 80-90%, so out of 100 vaccinated people, only 10-20 will get covid... which was a "good enough" risk reduction for me.
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
Also, governments are just about the last organization on earth who should be trusted to be the sole arbiters and deciders of what The Science™ is, and who may and may not question it and in what manner.
Truth (and therefore science) is the most powerful tools we have to hold corrupt tyrants and authoritarians who would rule us to account. It's not ta all disturbing or surprising to me to see the ruling government/corporate power structure censor and bully and attack anybody questioning their authority. This is what these people do, it's their nature.
What was disturbing to me was how many self-proclaimed people of science, brave resisters of government and corporate abuse, and fighters for rights and freedom immediately turned into government apologists and bullies.
Even now, very little to no science based decision are being made and reporting of test data has all but stopped; would not even be surprised to learn that the reporting of other data, for example deaths, is intentionally being “shaped” to fit the desired narrative.
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.
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.
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.
You mean Montana and North and South Dakota? You can't really hide a silo location from satellites. This was the impetus behind the MX missile program back in the 80's or whenever, it was going to create a huge chain of silos that missiles were constantly shifted around between so the Soviets couldn't know where they were and couldn't target them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot there, but you know, I'm just tired of seeing people die from what are almost certainly (vaccine) preventable illnesses. I've stood in enough funeral processions. I wonder if there is any way for the government to try and prevent that? It seems like they attempted to work with private companies (and passed no laws to coerce them into it). And what about the companies? Perhaps they agreed with those in government they were in contact with and worked to police their platforms. Would that look much different from coercion?
“Terrorists” and child pornographers are bad. A three letter agency without the 4th amendment is worse.
Racists on Twitter telling you vaccines cause autism and that you can fix your phone’s water damage by microwaving it are bad. A U.S. President without the 1st amendment is worse.
We intentionally limit what government is able to do with broad strokes - it has a high risk for abuse.
Anything you yield today is going to live through multiple regime changes. You aren’t just trusting the current government with this power - you’re trusting everyone that will inherit it. The seeds of fascism are sowed through good intentions.
Was there a violation of the 1st or 4th amendments here? It would seem that the charitable interpretation of the big tech companies' actions is that they are willingly working with the government to provide the best information to their citizens in order to promote the general welfare.
This may be one of the most asinine things I have read on this website. Child pornography is worse than a corrupt government. I would rather have my rights stripped from me and be sent to a concentration camp than for someone to force a child to have sex.
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.
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.
> 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.
He also got a whole bunch of discovery and the right to release much of that publicly, which is a pretty huge win given that those docs revealed explicit US Govt censorship pressure direct from the White House.
> 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,
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
That's an incorrect summary, again neglecting the relevant information provided by the article. Those cases were dismissed due to lack of standing because the judges surmised that the evidence presented was insufficient, and so they couldn't move on to discovery to really prove those claims. However, the other cases, like Missouri, have moved forward and the evidence they uncovered through discovery does substantiate some of the claims in the dismissed cases, namely that government officials were directing social media companies to censor certain content. Per the article:
> But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage. The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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:
Edit: consider if the US was at war with a serious enemy and the president was making comparable claims about social media companies allowing treasonous misinformation to spread that's endangering the nation and try and tell me with a straight face that that's not a veiled threat.
You seem to be saying that if the government characterizes X as misinformation that is killing people, that is a "pretty clear threat that they are looking to regulate you". If that's accurate, how is the framing of "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will" versus "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way" valid at all? Wouldn't the first statement always be equivalent to the second one?
"Killing people" is a pretty important distinction don't you think? Is the government not in the business of protecting the public? If there's a threat to the public, doesn't the government typically intervene?
So no, those two statements are not equivalent, but if you add that additional qualifier that the misinformation is killing people, that becomes a much more serious charge which then implies intervention is a likely outcome.
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.
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.
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.
Except the sign has been put up in the wrong area and is not at all relevant to the discussion at all. Keep tapping on this "Quiet in the library sign" while the rest of us continue on our daily commute at this train station.
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.
>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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Reddit already allows you to sort by "new," which is pretty much what GP is asking for. r/popular might take a hit under this theoretical regime though
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?
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.....
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.
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.
Bill Clinton was a sexual predator -- there's a reason why he is not the public statesman he could have been.
But for some reason his sexual proclivities were fair game when his predecessor's were not (it was an open secret he had a mistress for decades).
But it apparently didn't matter that the other president liked about paying of the porn star he screwed while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to his son.
You know, the case where he broke the law but his attorney went to jail for being the bag man?
It's crazy-making how selective the "morality" of the right is.
> "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.
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).
What does Clinton have to do with this? And you just don't seem to get it. The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story. The FBI trying to suppress the spread of news is.
If the vice president was really taking money in exchange for influence peddling to foreign oligarchs, then that is a truly staggering level of corruption.
And that report shows that Hunter Biden was a corrupt piece of shit -- nothing compelling to show that his father was for sale as suggested.
But for some reason you only care when it's about your political enemies, so I find your concern insincere at best. Shame on you for putting party before country.
And do you feel the same way about corruption when it comes to his predecessor? I'm guessing you're good with that. Because it's your team and that's ok.
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server?
Does that ring a bell? You know, the thing they made a big deal about before the election because back then Republicans supposedly cared about national security? That impacted the election.
>The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story.
Oh, do tell. Then why was it so important to tell the story? Why the fuss other than to have a fuss?
Yes, the FBI was doing their job and investigating the Clinton server. The media was doing its job and reporting on it. People were posting about it openly on social media without any FBI interference. Nobody was lying and calling it Russian disinformation. It's not the FBI's job to worry about whether or not its investigations impact the election. In fact, it's specifically the FBI's job not to worry about this.
What does this have to do with the FBI trying to suppress the Hunter Biden story on social media?
Because the laptop is likely a Russian campaign. The content appears to be genuine but the provenance is questionable (very convenient that the recipient was blind, no?).
Because the story itself is toxic -- it exists only to insinuate that Biden Sr. is corrupt. The GOP itself investigated and could find no such thing.
This is Buttery Males v2 and if you can't see it then that's by your choice.
I encourage all those who care about this but do not work in medical research to join the government or get a PhD or MD and be prepared to solve the next problem that crops up. Then, you will have some more context on the challenges faced during public health emergencies.
In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.
> In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved,
I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet.
Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed.
That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
> The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then
Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now.
Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data.
We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).
I don't know how letting social media companies dictate political discourse became acceptable.
It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?".
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff...
I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?
There is no right to hear a message from a particular channel, but there is a right not to have the government intervene to suppress that channel. If the private actor decides of their own accord to censor you, that's perfectly legal. If they do so at the behest of government, that is a first amendment issue, and that's what's being asserted here.
What makes it especially interesting is Facebook's legal troubles in this context. It hasn't occurred to me before, but a monopoly with the threat of anti-trust hanging over it is any government's best friend.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so
This is what was so infuriating about all the dim-whited "It's a private company, they can do what they want" posts.
Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.
It’s always funny to see that somebody’s thesis contains the word “wrongthink.”
Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1])
I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods.
It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades.
The government has been shaping public opinion though traditional news media for some time, look at all the "ex" government employees employed as "analysts" at MSCBC, CNN, etc. Since they can't inject talentless talking heads directly into social media's newsfeeds to push their agenda they exert pressure in a different way. It's not surprising at all.
> The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one.
I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration.
The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.
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?
So one thing really should be cleared up - the 2nd paragraph of this article talks about incorrect criticisms (i.e. misinformation) of an article
>> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain.
It then says
>> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials
The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue.
There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?
I think 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.
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".
I think regardless of the contents or topic of this write-up the conclusion is easy: stop using corporate social media exclusively (... I say on HN). The key to a healthy web is POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
This doesn't mean just POSSE in isolation though. It means going out of your way to establish/participate in non-corporate controlled communities.
Just before election. It Was quite shocking when I tried messaging links to news articles on Facebook and they were being blocked.
Then to find out that FBI asked Facebook to do this.
"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.”
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
But that's just it - the silent re-ranking of stories, algorithmic or editorial, can also flip elections. Not just elections, it can entirely change the direction a culture is headed.
And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.
Don’t take it that I don’t agree, just that it doesn’t need to be subtle. We already had the FBI and bureaucracy cover up a scandal because they were invested in someone else winning the presidential election.
Let’s worry about the thing that already happened instead of the hypothetical.
Uh... how can it be OK to organize to communicate an anti-lockdown message, but not OK to organize a rebuttal... by the people tasked with communicating national health policy?
Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020?
Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.
I could care less what's "legal" or not in this instance, this isn't the kind of society I want to live in with regard to speech rights—public OR private.
The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government.
If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.
I have no opinions on the article itself, but I am interested in whether the same actors also acted in coordination to suppress Lab Leak given that they were also implicated.
> Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved.
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.
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.
Apparently Biden did all this stuff during the 2020 election.
The bastard must have a time machine now.
Not saying it didn't happen, or isn't concerning; just pointing out that calling the case Missouri vs Biden is a tiny bit... revisionist?
Also, the article is needlessly partisan. According to its timeline, thd bad behavior started under Trump and persisted under the Biden administration, but somehow only the Biden administration is being called out.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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; if so, I assure you that other people agree with their interpretation rather than yours. Hence the word "divisive".
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.
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.
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.
>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".
"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).
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
The California law does not mandate moderation either or provide"compliant reports." It simply requires companies to explain how they moderate and provide statistics on how much they did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
If you read TFA, you'd know that the headline on the link isn't the headline of the article itself, which has no question mark. Presumably the mark was added here to assuage blue-tribe people.
It was deeply disturbing to me that throughout the COVID epidemic many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID.
Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances.
I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.
The fear and groupthink was so strong at the time that even pointing out the existence of dissenting voices was enough to get you labeled as a selfish grandma killer conspiracy theorist.
I'm glad in hindsight more people are willing to see the problems of groupthink in this period, but I do hope they look inward and hold themselves responsible too, and maybe next time not defer to authority and demonize others so willingly.
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
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.
i think a retraction or minor edit after 99.9% of the readerbase has consumed the content, is too little, too late.
Damage done.
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/...
More of these are in order,
https://fee.org/articles/we-failed-danish-newspaper-apologiz...
that's a solid distinction, dispute vs debunk. That's a keeper.
>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."
One has to trust that the original intent was not malicious, otherwise the whole system falls apart. The leverage being used is tremendous.
One doesn't have to trust that at all. One would be a fool to. If this is what the system is than it should fall apart.
The trust is not deserved, the original intent was malicious, and the whole system is a rotting corpse.
Journalists without agenda barely exist anymore. You should assume malicious intent by default.
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"?
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...
> 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-...
Looks like they made the edit clear with a correction note, however they have left that undated.
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.com/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.
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.
Corrections get much less visibility than original accusations.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew.
Mine Safety Health Administration advice was to stay home when sick and then business as usual. I was on mine sites when others were locked at home double-masked with fear. Nobody was masked on mine sites because it restricts visibility and is unsafe. Do you think MSHA is a fringe group?
OSHA tried to mandate masks and shots. It was ridiculous to watch the disparity in responses and fear.
MSHA sites are dangerous yet are safe. The OSHA approach was incorrect.
In my observations, the people who are most afraid of Covid and most likely to “take it serious” are those who are white collar and privileged enough to not have to do hard labor. People who do shit for a living that can get them mailed or killed wrote Covid off a long time ago.
It takes an incredible amount of privilege to support the Covid mitigations. Consider that not a single person who enacted them missed a single paycheck because of the mandates. I imagine that holds true to most of the people cheering those mandates on or calling them “minor inconveniences”. A lot of privilege needs to be checked here.
Reminds me that “there are no starving people in Africa with gluten disorders”.
"Outside of a few fringe groups, most people agreed on what we knew". It’s not my opinion, we "know" very little. We think we know because we read things on internet, we discuss with friends/etc but most of it is b.llsh.t as when we thought lobotomy and electrical shocks were sane and efficient treatments.
What fatality rate would a pandemic have to have in order for you to agree to the kinds of public health measures that were taken for COVID-19? 10% ? 20% ? 60% ?
What kinds of unknowns would justify, in your mind, those sorts of policies?
Fatality rate is the wrong point. Fatality rate among specific groups is what matters. In effect young people are at virtually no risk of covid, there is no reason to lock down kids for 2 years. Experts and authorities are running an ongoing farce.
You're dodging their question. You don't have to agree with a number they picked at random, but is there any fatality rate where you would believe that the actions taken by the government in response to covid were justified?
In that scenario, the alternative is locking up the at-risk population, which would once again require a trade off of costs vs. benefits.
How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do? Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.
Absolutely disgusting how many so-called “smart rational” people dismissed it… as if Covid was literally the only thing that mattered and anybody who pointed it out was nothing more than a Fox News watching selfish asshole.
To this day people will defend letting people die alone in a hospital or nursing home with only some crappy video conference as a substitute for real human contact.
It takes a special kind of monster to support the crap we did to the elderly. There are a worryingly large set of people I used to respect that turned out to be monsters.
While I agree it's horrific, I would urge you to reconsider whether or not people who supported such policies were monsters.
That's exactly the dehumanizing language that was used about people who were skeptical of lockdowns and other dissidents.
I think they were normal people who were overcome with fear and placed too much trust in authority. Weak-minded, perhaps, but that doesn't make them monsters.
It’s called the banality of evil. Monsters don’t have green fur and big teeth. They are ordinary people carrying out devastating policies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
> How about letting the at risk people decide for themselves what to do?
So I ask again, what would the circumstances have to be for "letting the at risk people decide for themselves" to be an unacceptable policy? What fatality level, transmission mechanism or whatever would have to be present for you to accept that some sort of centralized public health policy was required?
I’m not sure there should be a threshold. If the threat is real, like ebola, people will naturally adjust their behavior. If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable (covid lives saved), to the detriment of all other important considerations. This slippery slope should not be underestimated.
> If the threat is real, like ebola,
1M americans died of COVID-19. That's a real threat, too. So the difference with Ebola is not really to do with the "reality" of the threat, but the manner and rapidity of death, along with the fatality rate.
> If policy makers have to artificially restrict individual rights, it indicates that policies are being implemented based on a single variable
I do not see how you can draw this conclusion.
> Not a lot of old people want to die alone isolated in a nursing home with no visitation…. Which is exactly what we did. Let we tried to saved grandma only to (literally) kill her from loneliness and isolation.
I agree with you, but we did worse actually.
Some states actually sequestered covid positive patients, and covid suspected cases at nursing homes with highly at risk populations.
We know who covid kills: People with advanced age and multiple comorbidities. The same type of folks you find at nursing homes.
Those governors that did that - in my mind they are guilty of murder.
For those of you that want to fact check this, I will save you the trouble.
https://nypost.com/2020/07/08/cuomo-sent-6300-covid-19-patie...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/9000-covid-patie...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/five-governors-cuomo...
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2020/06/16/michiga...
https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2020/04/whitmer-orders...
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/murphy-administration-ign...
Also, here are the cumulative deaths by age group in the USA so far:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Precisely which groups would be isolated from "young people", and which would not, and on what basis? Do you judge the 44k deaths in the 40-49 cohort (likely parents of older children, along with teachers of many children) to be acceptable? Do you believe that an increase in their death count due to leaving children unrestricted would also be acceptable? Just how would not locking down kids work?
You can start comparing with _serious_ threats like Rabies (100%), aids (90%), smallpox (95%), tetanus (50%) Bubonic plague (40–60%). Yes in _that_ case I think maybe drastic policies would be justified.
Thanks for actually answering the question.
So what do you think your threshold is? If a new airborne transmitted disease with a 30% kill rate showed up, would centralized public health policies be OK?
What would you accept?
I'm inclined to side with the 1-3% mortality rate that came with COVID-19.
> 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".
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.
We only teach holocaust history at a very surface level. Not enough to prevent similar things happening again. Not even close.
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
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!)
> 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 have watched many films on the holocaust, and they were quite sad, and tragic.
However, I did not truly understand some of the why until I happened across the German Revolution of 1918–1919 [1] ; organizations, and elites, that played significant roles in the Revolution were the very same that were proscribed with the rise of the Nazis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...
No, actually human nature is just a constant, no amount of education is going to improve it by the tiniest bit.
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.
Unless you're James Gunn?
She was fired for comparing conservatives to the Jews in Hitler's Germany, which is, at best, absurd.
Absurd it was; but firing for an absurd comment is, well, part of how people are conditioned to invite things like the holocaust to happen
You're right everyone should be forced to continue to do business with people openly stating that they believe in a value system you disagree with. Any sort of action in response to someone's beliefs beyond a firm "tut tut" is directly on the path to events like the holocaust
Wait, are you trying to get fired now? Because that is an absurd escalation. It's almost like you know firing someone for saying something silly is wrong, and so you have to pretend it's a complete civilisational crisis to abstract away from that.
You act like the other side doesn't compare everything to Hitler and the Nazis constantly though lol
Much more absurd were the news outlets and blue checkmarks calling her comments "anti-Semitic."
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.
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.
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
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.
When I was a boy in the 1980’s I used to hear the phrase, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I haven’t heard it said in decades. As such, I find your comment extremely uplifting.
We can see the exact same process repeating in Russia right now. This could lead to consequences far worse than the recent pandemic.
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.
A lot of it was also people calling for things while seemingly intentionally bot following them to their logical conclusions, i.e.:
1) "We need a no fly zone over Ukraine
and somehow not connecting the dots to that meaning
2) NATO jets shooting down Russian jets
which in turn leads to
3) A hot war with between nuclear powers
something that hasn't happened outside of a few border skirmishes between India and Pakistan
And the military was running pysops on that too: https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-social-media-psyop-military-rus...
And then there was this plan from 2019: "Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in U.S. military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages." - Overextending and Unbalancing Russia https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.rand...
'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Faulty modeling thought Covid was a super deadly highly contagious disease that would kill 4% of those who caught it. It only took a month or so before real world data proved that model to be wildly wrong. But did we celebrate Covid wasn’t as bad as we thought? Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
Nope. Instead our “experts” never mentioned the “strong flu”-like IFR and the very steep age stratification of Covid and doubled down on the stupidity.
The models were wrong. Covid wasn’t nearly as horrific as what was predicated. But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague. The experts, whose job it is to clearly convey the actual risks of Covid, failed absolutely miserably at their most important job.
> But here we are 2.5 years later and a ton of people still believe Covid is the modern Black Plague
I live in the Bay Area which was the epicenter for "covid caution". I have not worn a mask in months. We have not had anything resembling a lock down in well over a year. The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
>The fact that you are being obtuse about the current state of affairs to support your partisan narrative is all I need to know about your motivations.
I'm traveling for work next week. My work requires me to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask anytime I am around others.
I will one up your anecdata with another anecdata. I was at a work retreat in the bay area about two months ago. Employees flew in from all across the country for the event. No one checked the vaccine cards and masks were optional. Single digit percentage of people were wearing them, including indoors. And my entire friend network is reporting similar experiences. These are all companies with "left leaning" work force, as one would expect in the bay area. So no, these are not outliers.
> No one checked the vaccine cards
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
Thanks for your story, but you should know: comparing Covid authorities to the Nazis could get you in trouble
Except people near you not doing covid theatre doesn't disprove the notion that some people treat covid as much worse than it is, while the continued masking requirements and other shit do disprove the notion that nobody is treating it as worse than it is.
You should also note that if restrictions remain in place when your area - the bay area - is free of them, that perhaps the bay area wasn't the place most caught up in the hysteria. If you are assuming the bay area is as bad as it got you need to recalibrate.
> Did we end the destructive mandates because hospitals weren’t flooded with people on respirators in the hallway?
I’ve said this here before, but my elderly father couldn’t get a bed at a hospital when he broke his hip because they were out of beds. Our medical system was under a massive strain. We’ll be paying the price for a long time because people got burned out, I expect.
> it became politicized
"Politicized" is a funny word. When people talk about "democratizing" something, it is all "everyone's voices must be heard!" and "we all come together!" and sunshine and rainbows.
But when ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives try to use the political process to effect policy—supposedly the essence of "democracy," as I was taught in grade school… "How dare you politicize this issue! Stupid peasants, don't you know you are supposed to blindly follow every diktat of our unelected expert class! The nerve, to think government is supposed to be responsive to your desires"
That's because the political arena is supposed to have limits. Those limits in America are clearly expressed in restrictions on the state's power, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
If ordinary citizens and their duly elected representatives are all clambering to remove those limits during times of turmoil, we absolutely have a right to decry politics crossing a line it was never meant to cross.
That's a good way of putting it, even though I disagree with your implication that implementing public health guidance was the political "line" was crossed.
My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:
The movie "Don't Look Up" really nailed how we now seem to respond politically to factual, observable crises, and how non-political facts become "politicized."
> fight the messengers of that reality
The "public health experts" are not angels of God, infallible messengers of Reality itself come down from Heaven to deliver the Gospel Of The Science to an unworthy populace. They are fallible human beings, they made many mistakes and their priorities don't always align with everyone else's. The inalienable rights of man, as re-affirmed in the First Amendment, give everyone the right to worship whomever they wish however they wish; I am therefore free to deny Saint Anthony of Bethesda's divinity as loudly and publicly as I desire.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this review of it: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look...
Of course, democracy should never infringe on the inalienable rights of man, and any proper republic has mechanisms to limit the passions of the mob. I simply find it amusing that the same political movement that so often claims to want to "defend democracy" everywhere (voting rights for felons, making courts more "accountable" through court-packing, eliminating the Electoral College, etc) is also the one that does the most complaining about issues being "politicized" whenever the democratic process disagrees with the unprinicpled, unaccountable expert class consensus.
> There we were dealing with a deadly highly-contagious airborne pandemic with cases and deaths growing exponentiall
Since day 1 this thing was 99% killing older people or people with 3 or 4 comorbidities. Dont try to turn it into the black plague now.
>all efforts to stop it faced an attack
Lockdowns, and the labeling of society into "essential" and "non-essential", occurred nearly everywhere with no debate at all.
The most basic freedoms guaranteed to us - the freedom of movement, association, free speech - were taken away from hundreds of millions of people who had literally no say in the matter.
What world were you living in where these restrictions were only nominal? They literally roped off certain sections of businesses preventing people from buying non-essential products. It was everywhere.
Yes, some of these comments are talking like it's all in the rear-view mirror now. The consequences are still unfolding, and it's still a strong possiblility that they could lead to something very unpleasant.
Weimar Germany went down pretty fast, actually. Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Reichstag Fire Decree was issued on February 28. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was opened for business on March 22, specifically for political prisoners.
There's no question that any course of action (or courses of action) taken in response to a new airborne pandemic is going to involve harm. That's not the question.
The question is: what public health policies will minimize harm according to some set of metrics, and what will those metrics be?
The harms you describe are real. But you offer no way to quantify these harms against the harms that may have occured without the policies you are objecting to.
Check what happened in other countries where such shit did not go down and you will have your answer. It was about the same.
Which countries are you thinking of? The lockdowns, mask mandates etc. in the USA were fairly mild compared to most countries.
> 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).
Superstition is exactly how I would describe some of these people driving around with masks on in their car with their windows rolled up... (and at this point pretty much anywhere really). I guess this is how superstitions start.
I used to do that. I did it at a time when we did not understand how limited surface transmission was. I didn't want to remove my mask after the weekly shopping expedition because there was some possibility that viral contamination of the mask surface could be a vector. In addition, I wanted to avoid wiping my hands near my mouth or nose, and simply leaving my mask on until I got home and could wash my hands thoroughly seemed like a good way to ensure that.
I believe that these type of disease are un-avoidable unless you live 24/24 in plastic suits. The trade-off is too high. I often see comments talking about mild inconvenience. Go tell that to people in china who are locked down and force tested, isolated, masked etc. To me it’s 1984-ish nightmare
Does it really have to be said again:
Nobody disputed that over time almost everyone would be exposed to COVID-19. The issue was how rapidly that happened, because if it happened too fast, public health systems would be overwhelmed, and then completely treatable injuries and conditions (under normal circumstances) would become potentially fatal.
In the beginning they had no idea how bad things would get. And keeping the hospitals from being overburdened was a big reason as well. Did they err on the side of safety, yes and thankfully it wasn't a worse virus. I have no doubt even if it had been deadlier people still would of done whatever.
I know right, can you imagine how many tigers I would have in my yard if not for all of my anti tiger rocks? I would probably be drowning in them. I just wish my neighbours had the humility to thank me for it.
I am reminded of this character study from 1941 about who goes nazi. https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, there is a strong element of groupthink present on HN that downvotes according to party line.
The irony of this comment being downvoted is palpable. Way to prove them right y'all.
Except that it's not downvoted now. Jumping to conclusions about early voting behavior on HN causes (mild) embarrasment to many, and so it is once again.
"Things change over time" is hardly a profound observation.
It wasn't meant to be profound. It was meant to be correct. And it wasn't "things change over time".
What do you suppose this thread is, other than groupthink in a slightly different direction?
I’ve arrived at my conclusions all on my own. I’d love to be part of the “take this serious” crowd because it would have made my life a lot easier (but also wasted). Unfortunately the facts and data combined with my values just don’t align with the idea that Covid was ever something we should have shut it all down for.
There is an alternate universe where they didn’t test everybody that breathed and don’t publish daily death counts. The only way you’d know there was a pandemic was an uptick in “wash your hands” signs in the restroom. Otherwise it would have been “just that thing going around”.
The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock. No shutdowns. No masks. No hysterical blowhards tweeting about the end of the world on twitter. People just got on with life.
Does this make me a selfish asshole? Perhaps. But I personally think the people screaming to mask up and shut it all down are the true selfish ones. The expect everybody to massively disrupt their lives in order to appease their fear and anxiety. Especially when those mitigations had no prior evidence they’d work and not even a whiff of a stated off-ramp or end goal.
> The last time we had an equivalent pandemic they held Woodstock.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm...
> The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.
Uh, "equivalent pandemic". I don't think so.
[ EDIT: Oh, and also: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-woodstock-pande... ]
Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers. Then account for the fact they test for everybody and anybody for Covid. Not so for the earlier pandemics. Totally different measurements. Imagine if they did the same test protocol back then like they did today. Only then can you compare.
The use and abuse of raw data has been a hallmark of the last 2.5 years. Whatever number makes Covid sound worse is the number that gets published and spread. Anything suggesting it isn’t as bad as predicted is buried as a conspiracy or “not peer reviewed”.
Exactly, in reality we don’t know much about these diseases, the way they spread, the effects. But there has been some mass hysteria that made them appear much more serious than they are. It could just have made few lines in the media and everyone would have continued their lives peacefully. Instead we had borderline totalitarian policies, cops arresting people taking a walk alone in forest, ridiculous absurd policies (in France) banning non-essential goods to be sold in markets. I’ve never seen such a collective nightmare but now I perfectly understand past nightmare I learned in history books…
> Try adjusting for population instead of using raw numbers.
World population has grown by a factor of 2.3 since 1968. That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 230,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 1/4 of COVID-19's US numbers.
US population has grown by a factor of 1.65 since 1968.That would suggest a "population adjusted" death count of 165,000 for the 1968 "equivalent pandemic", a number less than 17% of COVID-19's US numbers
Oh my! You were labelled as a selfish grandma killer! Heavens to Betsy! The sheer force of censorship! The utter horror of government-mandated labelling on social media!
Seriously. What do you think is going to happen when there's a worldwide pandemic and people with (in some cases) utterly opposing views on what is safe and advisable as public health policy?
Censorship of dissident medical views - many of which were later proven correct - during this period doesn't concern you?
I pointed out the existence of differing viewpoints being silenced, was shouted down, and you follow this up with mockery?
1. I don't believe there was "censorship of dissident views" - this is a framing I reject
2. I followed up the mockery with a serious point that you have not responded to.
> 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".
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.
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...
But the truly comical part, of course, was that Covid was not acknowledged to be widely airborne until a year and a half later. At the same time that cloth masks were widely dismissed as ineffective.
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.
Crickets.
It's a good placebo though.
How would you design a controlled trial involving live virus transmission with a virus that is known to have long term health effects and can even be lethal?
There was one trial, which apparently later censored, that measured how mist with similar particle size behaves when it hits a cloth or other non-FFP2 or higher mask. Non surprisingly, they do not stop airborne particles that are much smaller than the "holes" in the fabric. The masks captured droplets, but later the droplets dried, split up and became airborne with very small particles.
> Which is demonstrably false.
If that's the case, be demonstrable then. Given the physical size of the virus vs the size of holes in say, a cotton mask, combined with the infection rates for the strictest masking areas, I would say your statement is demonstrably false.
Fear and group think have not gone anywhere.
Society is “group think”. Try paying rent in bottle caps, and telling your boss to go fuck themselves when they ask for something. Fear of unemployment and homelessness make that unlikely.
City to city, coast to coast, group think and fear keep us from having serious conversations about consumerisms impact on the environment; don’t touch my capitalism click clack
The difference is that’s group think you’ve been conditioned since birth to believe is as immutable as the orbit of the planets.
If we all “group thought” more bicycles and fewer cars were more appropriate that’s what we’d produce. It’s unjustifiable belief to make it sound as if you’re a truly free agent unaffected by group think and fear of alternatives.
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.
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.'
Truly religious people value their religion and its values over the pursuit of profit.
Relevant C. S. Lewis:
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.
>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/comments/u374pf/reddits_...
A bold claim.
If you take a few seconds to do the requisite googling, you'll find out that this is actually a thing that Reddit does and has admitted to doing.
I have a feeling that I'll also find this fact to be true within very specific contexts which are missing from the claim above.
One could interpret it as 'I got permabanned and made to feel bad afterwards for upvoting an unpopular opinion one time' or 'I got permabanned after upvoting an unpopular opinion for the 1000th time during an ongoing raid feud.' I presume the truth lies somewhere between those extremes.
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.
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.
I must have missed that press conference.
Might be this
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/06/09/fa...
Oof, yeah fair enough.
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.
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
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.
Really convenient how his role as the lead public official pushing AZT during the AIDs epidemic got memory-holed too.
Edit: Adding sources to spite the Dow voter for merely stating a fact.
Him saying: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fKWwEkBZjhM
An article: “ Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was now pushing to expand prescription.”
https://www.spin.com/2015/10/aids-and-the-azt-scandal-spin-1...
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
>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.'
You're presenting a counterfactual. Sweden kept schools open. Very few people died. Why are you not acknowledging that reality?
So did Florida and plenty of other non-coastal states. So did most of all industrialized nations. Dunno what makes Covid so special in these blue states that they had to close schools.
Honestly I think a lot of the issue here is problem with incentives.
When these teachers signed up, many didn't sign up for the risks of COVID (however large... or small they may actually be). They didn't sign up for the psychological stress that put on them either. For that, I feel bad for them, and I'll explain why.
They were offered virtually nothing in exchange for "changing up the game." They weren't compensated for these new conditions. Some, not all, but some rather than just saying out loud "fuck you not worth it" came up with faux-philosophical reasons for why they rejected this, such as scientifically unproven conjecture that the children would be better off remote. But had they been properly incentivized, I think their reasoning (as it usually does) will chase what benefits them.
We wasted tons of money pumping it into low-interest asset accumulation and 'free' business loans. I would have spent some of that money instead DOUBLING teacher pay as a reward for 'risk' (whether it be mostly purely psychological, or not, or whatever) of enduring COVID.
I would then offer the teachers this doubled wage as compensation for this risk. Teachers that can get with the program (doing in-person, or remote, as desired by the families) would stay on. Everyone else would be fired with a 1 year severance to find a new job, and the doubled wages being used incentivize replacements.
IMO elevated adult risk, and even some elevated child risk, is justified in the name of education. We seem to intuitively understand this as many of us may engage in dangerous trades or risks to help our children, but then again a stranger should be fairly compensated for such risk. I think had we compensated these teachers in a way they were fattening their bones for staying in class we would have been flooded with (for self-serving reasons) "facts" from teachers about how great in-person learning is and how everybody should be doing it.
I'm not presenting a counterfactual, I'm presenting my experience that we had issues finding teachers and finding methods for transporting children. I don't know anything about Sweden, but I do know that we had people screaming at us about how we were anti-American child abusers when we couldn't even find teachers to fill classrooms due to illnesses and several deaths that occurred in my district.
> Very few people died.
It takes very few deaths to throw a school and even a district into disarray. In my post history I post about 40 teachers dying in Georgia during a short period of time, whose median age was 46. What kind of effect do you think that has on other teachers, the students, and the district? Outsiders who want to argue from political positions don't want to talk about those realities. Instead they fall back to aggregate statistics like "very few died" that minimize the sheer tragedy of the situation.
How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children? I really don't know, although as you say every death is indeed a tragedy. Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach, that teachers previously died of other communicable disease, that some died during freak workplace accidents. Many will die during their travels. 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood -- surely our children are worth at least 1/3 as much as logs of wood (although of course we don't like anyone to die doing either). And we also have to remember we don't know the marginal contribution of the profession to which of these 40 may or may not have otherwise died -- we can't simply say they all would have lived had schools been shut down.
IMO society could tolerate an extremely high number of deaths if it means putting their children on the best foot. Hell we tolerate a pretty high death rate just to put crabs on the table for people in a seafood restaurant. Our kids are definitely worth more than crabs. But teachers need to be compensated for this risk, and fully informed of the risks ahead of time so that they won't become upset later that they're getting into something they didn't bargain for. And it needs to be fully consensual, so teachers who want to walk away from the job should not be penalized for ending their contract. Lets bring in the risk takers who are willing to be there in person with our children, and like crab fisherman lets reward them handsomely for this risk. For those not up to the task, there is no shame in walking away.
> How many teacher deaths are justifiable in the name of educating children?
This is what I'm talking about when I said "false dichotomy".
Teachers were educating children during the pandemic. I was educating children. They actually did learn remotely. Sure, it wasn't the best learning environment for all students, and it certainly affected lower income students disproportionately. But students did learn, as indicated by my final exams. But to say the choice was between educating and not educating is false. It was a choice between different modes of suboptimal learning with different risk profiles for different demographics.
I can accept that society must take some risks to educate children. I cannot accept others screaming that teachers must take inflated risks beyond what they signed up for, otherwise they are child abusers.
The other part of it is the idea that learning in the classroom during the pandemic would have been fully optimal for students. This view seems to miss the point. What happens when Mrs. Jones the history teacher dies suddenly in the middle of the semester? Do you just find someone to replace her during the pandemic? Is there a competent substitute waiting to take their place (hint: there isn't)? And even if you do find one, what happens when they get sick and they need to miss 3 weeks of class? Do you have a second substitute ready to take their place? Is math teacher or the gym teacher going to have to sub in to teach history? Do they even know the curriculum? What happens when half your class gets sick and has to learn from home anyway? Does the teacher deliver two modes of instruction (when they're already worked to the max)? What do you think happens to student outcomes when their favorite teacher dies suddenly, and following her is a parade of adults of unknown competency, each who have no idea who you are as a student? Is that what we call "educating children"? And before anyone accuses me of speaking in hypotheticals or counterfactuals again, this is a real scenario that happened in our district.
> Obviously it is non-zero, because we accept the risk of teachers having to travel to school to teach
A teacher dying during the semester is a very rare thing. It's a scramble for the district to handle that scenario in the best of times. 40 teachers with a median age of 46 dying over the span of 6 months never happens. Not because of traffic, not because of freak accidents, not because of other communicable diseases. Except Covid.
> 40 out of the 100,000+ teachers in Georgia is roughly 1/3 of the annual death rate of people that die logging wood
This is what I mean by people who are unfamiliar with the way things work framing their arguments in aggregate statistics. It blurs everything in with the effect of removing all meaning from the deaths, which I appreciate you note are tragic. But this kind of comparison of aggregate statistics removes the deaths from the context in which they occur, effectively sanitizing them.
Logging is regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, so that's pretty shocking that the rate of death of teachers in Georgia over 6 months was as high as 1/3 that rate. Moreover, deaths of loggers don't completely shut down the logging operation because it has no impact whatsoever on the ability of the trees to be cut down. There's no need to set up grief counseling for the trees. There's no need for the replacement logger to spend weeks getting acquainted with the trees. You're not giving a paper salesman on-the-job-training to replace the logger. Fewer loggers doesn't impact the safety of the trees.
> But teachers need to be compensated for this risk
This was never offered an as option by society writ large, who I guess don't agree with you and I that educating children is more valuable than crabs. So while I agree with you and appreciate your sentiment that educating children is an important function of society and teachers should be compensated well for their efforts, it was never on the table.
Instead, what was offered was an unending stream of abuse that continues to this day, as teachers were called Nazis, unamerican, traitors, abusers, and the worst of all groomers. Compensating teachers in proportion to the risk they were taking was never proffered as an option by the crowd who wanted to open schools. I actually appreciate you saying this. But what ended up happening was that endless abuse ensued, and so people just decided it wasn't worth it to face the abuse and a life-threatening disease. People retired early, people decided against joining the profession, people died, and it left a lot of very bad options. The worst part is that even today on this thread, those very bad options are collectively boxed up as "inflicting intentional punishment" by posters even here on this site, which is probably the most polite opinion in that genre I've heard.
Remind me again how most of the rest of the industrialized world managed to keep their school open with kids unmasked? I don’t ever recall seeing stacks of dead teachers…
The problem children face today aren’t because of the pandemic. They are entirely the fault of peoples reaction to Covid. Covid didn’t close schools in blue states and then force them to wear masks. Humans did.
I don’t recall of any teacher dying from covid …
The 1% have far more than 1% of the influence.
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.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
You mean of the cops who died the majority tested positive. Very different than saying more cops were killed because of Covid than anything else. It’s entirely plausible that lots of cops would test positive for Covid… they interact with the public just like service workers, nurses and teachers…
No, I meant what I said.
https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatal...
Vaccination rates among LEOs were much lower than those other professions, which, unsurprisingly, resulted in substantially more serious illnesses and deaths.
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.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-... with the quote on slide 31
In the alternate space time dimension at mine sites, the regulator is MSHA. MSHA said to stay home if sick and follow normal procedures at work. Getting to mines was smooth because the roads were empty. On mine sets was, in my experience, business as usual without masks (masks limit visual range and cause accidents). At one site they had a tent and invited me to the party with employees and families who proceeded to have a pig roast without any social distancing or masks or wash stations. It was glorious. Then i drove back to the big city and went to buy groceries and everyone was masked and shying away from others. Some shoppers were wearing gloves and the aisles had designated travel directions. Bizarre.
> 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?
> 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.
> The JHU data was based on the best available data at the time, and was regularly updated.
But how did you decide that JHU was presenting accurate data?
That only applies for things that are relatively easy to reason around, with little domain knowledge necessary.
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.
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
Even people like John P. A. Ioannidis were being throttled and dismissed.
Can you distinguish between political and scientific epidemiologists?
Ioannidis wrote some obviously absolute trash in March 2020. I can’t find the worst paper (google deindex?) but I copied a quote[1]: “If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths.”. His analysis in that paper was some of the most biased bullshit I have read: the low range estimate was boldly incorrect. I absolutely love his previous papers on the replication crisis. Here[2] is a different paper of his from March 2020 showing his bias. He is a solid scientist, but he went off the deep end for a while there.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671660
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eci.13222
Ioannidis was obviously way off on the number of people to be infected, but his estimate on the fatality rate was actually fairly close. The CDC later calculated it as 0.6%.
https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyab010
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
100% difference in rate is fairly close? I get that these are small rates to begin with, but if your margin of error includes the entire range between 0 and your predication in the first place, does your prediction have any value?
Being within a factor of 2 is fairly close for being early in the pandemic with very limited data. At the time, some other researchers had estimated a fatality rate in the 2% range which was even farther off.
Versus the actual trash used by the Imperial College that was used to justify draconian measures?? Early in the pandemic as well? Hmm
Remind me again what were the deaths predicted?
I’m not sure what your point is. Does that somehow justify Ioannidis writing influential science papers that are bullshit science?
Here is a proper 20-20 hindsight analysis: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j... mostly about this paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...
The numbers he found were completely inconsistent with other well known numbers at the time. He didn’t shit-test his analysis against reality, instead he published bullshit science, ironically enough given his most cited paper.
This is the analysis I previously referred to that was shit: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
I recall he ignored conflicting information from other sources[1], he was jumping to conclusions based on the thin Diamond Princess information, and I felt he was politically advocating for more scientific delay. Resulting in articles like: https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...
He doubled down. Was badly wrong. Unfortunately it is still a political topic, especially in the US, so it is hard to have a sensible conversation about it.
[1] his article was on the 17th March and the WaPo article I referenced talked about Berano on the 23rd March - I haven’t checked whether he should have known the Berano facts publically. https://archive.ph/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/euro...
The point is that Ioannidis had a pattern of behaviour of writing obviously biased rubbish during that time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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?
It is true for vaccine that have been long tested and are really effective for certain set of _serious_ diseases. It’s not true for Covid were those vaccines are new, not effective (because no vaccine is effective for those kind of diseases), do not prevent people for catching and spreading the disease, and we are talking about a disease with a very low mortality rate.
Unless mass vaccination lowers R0 below 1 (hint: it doesn't) thet merely slow the spread, not prevent it. "Everyone else" is still going to get it.
That's almost the same type of response the actual Typhoid Mary had to being told to quarantine and stop preparing food for people. It didn't affect her so it couldn't be real and fuck everyone else. If you think taking any step that has a marginal effect on you in protection of society will count as the "worst non-answer" then you should be afraid of authority figures because you are engaging in the type of society damaging behavior they are charged with mitigating
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.
> 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.
People like Tucker Carson? What about "people" like the CNN saying that Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer? Like, why? Why can't skepticism over ivermectin be expressed in a normal way?
> Why can't skepticism over ivermectin be expressed in a normal way?
because of the business model of TV channels. outrage sells.
Partly because of the lack of acknowledgment about what was already fairly certain about ivermectin, which was dismissed by a bunch of quacks (including the then POTUS), who were absolutely not interested in any kind of "normal" scientific discussion.
Who was de-platformed?
> 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.
Define “many”. I saw a handful of high profile cases but how widespread was this sort of censorship in quantitative terms?
> 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.
The worst thing is, that you could point out the wrong stuff, and both the platform and some very loud users would attack you even for pointing out the conflicting positions from the same source.
From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
I'm not that old or fat to be in any risk groups, so I got vaccinated to protect my (old) parents... and back then it was "get vaccinated and you won't get it, not spread it" (plus herd immunity), and not long after: "yes, you can get it, you can spread it, but chances of death are marginally lower"
Then one discusson on /r/conspiracy about something unrelated, and bam, banned from most of the from page subreddits.
>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
The fact that people keep citing this ridiculous claim is evidence of why this "contradiction" was necessary. People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any". That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.
This was a rational and intentional decision, not a contradiction.
>That message is 4 times as long as the attention span of the average American. As such, it got consolidated into the much more brief (but not strictly accurate) "you don't need to wear masks" until such time as the supply chain could cope.
Well I'm glad they're lying to my face for good reason
You can't lie to people and then expect them to trust you, just because the lie was supposedly in their interest.
You really don't see an issue with "science" (=people representing groups of scientists on tv) lying to people? "for the greater good"?
But we should still ban people who say otherwise? The first "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists telling you to wear a mask, no matter what fauci says) or the second "otherwise" (nutjob conspiracy theorists saying that masks are useless)? Which ones should we ban then?
I mean... doing what a youtubeing prepper nutjob said and did, has proven to be safer for you, than following what Fauci (and other local equivalents) say... or you'd atleast have masks, disinfectant and a basement full of toiletpaper and MREs at home, while those listening to Fauci wouldn't.
How can we "trust the science", when "the science" has clearly lied to us? What else is "science" lying about right now?
> I mean... doing what a youtubeing prepper nutjob said and did, has proven to be safer for you, than following what Fauci (and other local equivalents) say... or you'd atleast have masks, disinfectant and a basement full of toiletpaper and MREs at home, while those listening to Fauci wouldn't.
When the pandemic happened, and I had multiple P100 masks from asbestos removal, I felt pretty comfortable.
....Until I tried to wear them in everyday life. It is even worse than being at a construction site, wearing one of those monstrosities all day
> This was a rational and intentional decision, not a contradiction.
This was a rational and intentional decision to lie, not a contradiction.
> People are too selfish and panicky to respond rationally to "although masks are useful, we need current masks for healthcare workers, so please don't go buy any".
It was a shortsighted error that will forever cost them credibility. Not worth it. They should have just contacted the handful of major retailers that could have delivered N95 masks into the hands of most Americans and asked (or even ordered) them to pull the stock. That's it. Problem solved.
All they did in the end was demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth and that's not what you want if you're trying to manage a pandemic or any public health crisis. Outright lying because they didn't want to risk treating the American public like adults was such a massive failure I don't think they will ever recover fully from it.
Actually, the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. That precludes lying to the people, even if it's "definitely justified because this is a special case and reasons." https://www.palladiummag.com//2021/07/15/the-myth-of-panic/
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” - The U.S. Surgeon General
>From "hug a chinese" to "masks don't help" one day, and "mandatory masks" the next.
Which is exactly what you would expect to happen as we get new data on anything new. The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.
Side note, but just a reminder that Fauci NEVER said "masks don't work", as much as this gets repeated on social media. He said that they prevent infected people from spreading it to others and did not recommend that everyone wear them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
And when further data came out about asymptomatic transmission, the recommendations changed.
Side note 2: "hug a chinese" and "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians, not the medical or scientific communities. I found plenty of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels from actual epidemiologists and virologists (such as "this week in virology") who did not say such things. Unfortunately Americans don't really care enough to distinguish between "science communicated by politicians" and "science communicated by scientists". After 2020 and watching as people working in relevant fields - like the podcast above, or "your local epidemiologist" - just got straight-up ignored by COVID deniers, I'm not even sure most of the public even knows how to look up "communication by scientists"...
The fact that people were excepting the medical community to have prophetic knowledge about a novel virus barely a month after it had been confirmed speaks more to the American public's poor understanding of the scientific process.
I don't expect them to know everything. I do expect them to acknowledge when they don't know everything, rather than bouncing from one end of unwarranted certainty to the other.
> "vaccinated people don't spread COVID" were both from politicians
I mean sure... but a CDC director is a "scientific" authority, not just some local redneck mayor of a hick town
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s...
( > CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky is interviewed )
> our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
> get vaccinated and you won't get it, no[r] spread it
When and where was this the message? I'm not doubting you, I just got most of my covid info from going to blogs then reading the abstracts of papers they linked to, and I remember the efficacy being in the 80% to 90% range for the initial strain. Even smallpox vaccines only had around 95% efficacy. There's no good reason for a journalist to report that any vaccine is 100% effective.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/22/joe-biden/...
> "This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated," Biden said in the full interview. "The unvaccinated. Not the vaccinated, the unvaccinated. That’s the problem. Everybody talks about freedom and not to have a shot or have a test. Well guess what? How about patriotism? How about making sure that you’re vaccinated, *so you do not spread the disease to anyone else."* (*emphasis mine*)
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> The vaccines that we have against COVID are incredibly effective vaccines. And people have seen the results from the clinical trials of, you know, anywhere in the 80 percent range, 90 percent range of efficacy. But that doesn't mean that 100 percent of people, 100 percent of the time are going to be protected against disease. There is no vaccine that provides that level of protection for any disease. So we do expect in any vaccine program that there will be rare, but there will be cases of disease among people who were fully vaccinated and certainly among some people who were partially vaccinated. This doesn't mean that the vaccines aren't working. It doesn't mean that there's something wrong with the vaccines. What it does mean is that not everybody who receives vaccines has 100 percent protection
To me, that means that chances of not getting covid are 80-90%, so out of 100 vaccinated people, only 10-20 will get covid... which was a "good enough" risk reduction for me.
also
https://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/transcript-rachel-maddow-s... (interview with CDC Director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky )
> And we have -- we can kind of almost see the end. We`re vaccinating so very fast, our data from the CDC today suggests, you know, that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don`t get sick, and that it`s not just in the clinical trials but it`s also in real world data.
Also, governments are just about the last organization on earth who should be trusted to be the sole arbiters and deciders of what The Science™ is, and who may and may not question it and in what manner.
Truth (and therefore science) is the most powerful tools we have to hold corrupt tyrants and authoritarians who would rule us to account. It's not ta all disturbing or surprising to me to see the ruling government/corporate power structure censor and bully and attack anybody questioning their authority. This is what these people do, it's their nature.
What was disturbing to me was how many self-proclaimed people of science, brave resisters of government and corporate abuse, and fighters for rights and freedom immediately turned into government apologists and bullies.
Science is not conducted on social media.
Even now, very little to no science based decision are being made and reporting of test data has all but stopped; would not even be surprised to learn that the reporting of other data, for example deaths, is intentionally being “shaped” to fit the desired narrative.
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.
It's possible that national security to be more important than free speech. Doesn't this happen all the time?
> 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.
So troop movements should be public?
Definitely. If you're not fighting an unpopular war far overseas somewhere it's not really a problem.
What about a popular war where a country invaded the US.
What about the locations of nuclear weapons?
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.
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.
Why are you picking apart my hypothetical examples ?
Is it your argument there is no reason ever for the government to censor information?
I don't believe the government has any legitimate power that an individual does not have.
well said.
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.
>What about the locations of nuclear weapons?
You mean Montana and North and South Dakota? You can't really hide a silo location from satellites. This was the impetus behind the MX missile program back in the 80's or whenever, it was going to create a huge chain of silos that missiles were constantly shifted around between so the Soviets couldn't know where they were and couldn't target them.
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.
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.
But you are now limiting your original argument
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you post here if people were allowed to say whatever they wanted?
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.
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.
There's a lot there, but you know, I'm just tired of seeing people die from what are almost certainly (vaccine) preventable illnesses. I've stood in enough funeral processions. I wonder if there is any way for the government to try and prevent that? It seems like they attempted to work with private companies (and passed no laws to coerce them into it). And what about the companies? Perhaps they agreed with those in government they were in contact with and worked to police their platforms. Would that look much different from coercion?
“Terrorists” and child pornographers are bad. A three letter agency without the 4th amendment is worse.
Racists on Twitter telling you vaccines cause autism and that you can fix your phone’s water damage by microwaving it are bad. A U.S. President without the 1st amendment is worse.
We intentionally limit what government is able to do with broad strokes - it has a high risk for abuse.
Anything you yield today is going to live through multiple regime changes. You aren’t just trusting the current government with this power - you’re trusting everyone that will inherit it. The seeds of fascism are sowed through good intentions.
Was there a violation of the 1st or 4th amendments here? It would seem that the charitable interpretation of the big tech companies' actions is that they are willingly working with the government to provide the best information to their citizens in order to promote the general welfare.
This may be one of the most asinine things I have read on this website. Child pornography is worse than a corrupt government. I would rather have my rights stripped from me and be sent to a concentration camp than for someone to force a child to have sex.
You know a lot of children would be raped in those concentration camps, right?
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.
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!
> 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...
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.
> 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.
He sued and got the outcome he wanted, his platform to be reinstated, thus he "won".
He also got a whole bunch of discovery and the right to release much of that publicly, which is a pretty huge win given that those docs revealed explicit US Govt censorship pressure direct from the White House.
Either way these requests should be PUBLIC
When did number two happen?
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,
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's an incorrect summary, again neglecting the relevant information provided by the article. Those cases were dismissed due to lack of standing because the judges surmised that the evidence presented was insufficient, and so they couldn't move on to discovery to really prove those claims. However, the other cases, like Missouri, have moved forward and the evidence they uncovered through discovery does substantiate some of the claims in the dismissed cases, namely that government officials were directing social media companies to censor certain content. Per the article:
> But the Missouri judge reached a different conclusion, determining there was enough evidence in the record to infer that the government was involved in social media censorship, granting the plaintiffs’ request for discovery at the preliminary injunction stage. The Missouri documents, along with some obtained through discovery in Berenson v. Twitter and a FOIA request by America First Legal, expose the extent of the administration’s appropriation of big tech to effect a vast and unprecedented regime of viewpoint-based censorship on the information that most Americans see, hear and otherwise consume. 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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> 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...
Edit: consider if the US was at war with a serious enemy and the president was making comparable claims about social media companies allowing treasonous misinformation to spread that's endangering the nation and try and tell me with a straight face that that's not a veiled threat.
You seem to be saying that if the government characterizes X as misinformation that is killing people, that is a "pretty clear threat that they are looking to regulate you". If that's accurate, how is the framing of "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will" versus "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way" valid at all? Wouldn't the first statement always be equivalent to the second one?
"Killing people" is a pretty important distinction don't you think? Is the government not in the business of protecting the public? If there's a threat to the public, doesn't the government typically intervene?
So no, those two statements are not equivalent, but if you add that additional qualifier that the misinformation is killing people, that becomes a much more serious charge which then implies intervention is a likely outcome.
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.
Not to mention the 5th Ammendment violation.
That issue has absolutely nothing to do with the First Amendment and seems completely off-topic for this thread.
Throughout the last 2 years.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/internal-documents-rev...
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.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
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.
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
If you’re too lazy to participate in the discussion then don’t.
Except the sign has been put up in the wrong area and is not at all relevant to the discussion at all. Keep tapping on this "Quiet in the library sign" while the rest of us continue on our daily commute at this train station.
But OP is asking for a modification of Section 230.
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:
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.
>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.
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.
Then won't they just censor more?
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)
So he his posts wouldn't be displayed, censored, to users who don't subscribe/follow to him.
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...
> 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.
I wish we could eliminate algorithmic feeds altogether.
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.
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...
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
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.
Reddit already allows you to sort by "new," which is pretty much what GP is asking for. r/popular might take a hit under this theoretical regime though
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?
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.....
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.
> 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
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.
Yes it turns out people care about being lied to.
No they don't. They only care when people they don't like lie to them (at least when we're talking about an audience that ostensibly includes you).
Selective outrage can only be sincere via ignorance. Tribal/partisan politics such as this is an betrayal of allegiance to one's country.
Parallels to President Clinton; it didn’t really matter what he actually did, but it turned out to matter very much that he lied about what he did.
OK, if Democrats collectively admit the Biden administration covered up the laptop whatever scandal from 2019 to 2020 can we stop hearing about it?
If not, is there an individual opt out browser setting or something?
These people are zombies! "hunter's laptop..... hunter's laptop....."
They're literally beyond reason - it's so sad and frustrating.
Bill Clinton was a sexual predator -- there's a reason why he is not the public statesman he could have been.
But for some reason his sexual proclivities were fair game when his predecessor's were not (it was an open secret he had a mistress for decades).
But it apparently didn't matter that the other president liked about paying of the porn star he screwed while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to his son.
You know, the case where he broke the law but his attorney went to jail for being the bag man?
It's crazy-making how selective the "morality" of the right is.
> "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.
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).
> 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...
But they weren't when they investigated Clinton? There's plenty of sordid history there but your claims are still ludicrous.
I dare you to discuss the Hunter Biden case in the context of what it ostensibly represents: government corruption.
Your circular logic goes nowhere: the Biden laptop story is about the Biden laptop story not being told.
Again: tell me why this story should be told? What is the real substance of your concern?
What does Clinton have to do with this? And you just don't seem to get it. The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story. The FBI trying to suppress the spread of news is.
"10% to the big guy"
If the vice president was really taking money in exchange for influence peddling to foreign oligarchs, then that is a truly staggering level of corruption.
Yes indeed. Let's investigate shall we? Wait, we did? Oh here is the report: https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC%20-%20Fin...
And that report shows that Hunter Biden was a corrupt piece of shit -- nothing compelling to show that his father was for sale as suggested.
But for some reason you only care when it's about your political enemies, so I find your concern insincere at best. Shame on you for putting party before country.
If. And if it's not, what is it?
And do you feel the same way about corruption when it comes to his predecessor? I'm guessing you're good with that. Because it's your team and that's ok.
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server?
Does that ring a bell? You know, the thing they made a big deal about before the election because back then Republicans supposedly cared about national security? That impacted the election.
>The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story.
Oh, do tell. Then why was it so important to tell the story? Why the fuss other than to have a fuss?
Yes, the FBI was doing their job and investigating the Clinton server. The media was doing its job and reporting on it. People were posting about it openly on social media without any FBI interference. Nobody was lying and calling it Russian disinformation. It's not the FBI's job to worry about whether or not its investigations impact the election. In fact, it's specifically the FBI's job not to worry about this.
What does this have to do with the FBI trying to suppress the Hunter Biden story on social media?
Because the laptop is likely a Russian campaign. The content appears to be genuine but the provenance is questionable (very convenient that the recipient was blind, no?).
Because the story itself is toxic -- it exists only to insinuate that Biden Sr. is corrupt. The GOP itself investigated and could find no such thing.
This is Buttery Males v2 and if you can't see it then that's by your choice.
I encourage all those who care about this but do not work in medical research to join the government or get a PhD or MD and be prepared to solve the next problem that crops up. Then, you will have some more context on the challenges faced during public health emergencies.
In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.
> In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved,
I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet.
Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed. That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
> The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then
Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now.
Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data.
We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).
I don't know how letting social media companies dictate political discourse became acceptable.
It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?".
Social media was a mistake.
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.
Then they should perish. We don't need 24/7 news coverage.
>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.
It's very clear the OP implicit assumption is that the report is verified to be true.
Do you know that since about two days ago Russian propaganda has been pushing exactly this scenario? See https://youtu.be/EoyNGHkjeyM for details.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff...
I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?
There is no right to hear a message from a particular channel, but there is a right not to have the government intervene to suppress that channel. If the private actor decides of their own accord to censor you, that's perfectly legal. If they do so at the behest of government, that is a first amendment issue, and that's what's being asserted here.
Is it different if it's a government demand vs a government recommendation?
It depends on what the consequences are (or are assumed to be) of not acceding to the "recommendation."
What makes it especially interesting is Facebook's legal troubles in this context. It hasn't occurred to me before, but a monopoly with the threat of anti-trust hanging over it is any government's best friend.
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.
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.
The Executive branch doesn't control the courts.
Who said the censorship pressure came from the executive branch and not the other branches as well?
The lawsuits in question never alleged any pressure other than Executive as far as I've seen
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.
"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.
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.
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.
You seem to misunderstand: The government's position is not at question here. Their use of influence to suppress free speech is.
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.
The school bully highly recommends that I give him my lunch money
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.
It's not because the first amendment says congress shall make no law ...
Nothing about the executive branch or threats
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.
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.”
It doesn't matter what his opinion is the first amendment only deals the government supressing speech
>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?
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.
Not in California, where the constitution guarantees free speech on privately owned land and property that is publicly accessible.
Frederick Douglas was not claiming that he had entitlement to use someone's printing press without permission.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is what was so infuriating about all the dim-whited "It's a private company, they can do what they want" posts.
Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.
It’s always funny to see that somebody’s thesis contains the word “wrongthink.”
Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1])
I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods.
It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades.
1. http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm??
> 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/
The government has been shaping public opinion though traditional news media for some time, look at all the "ex" government employees employed as "analysts" at MSCBC, CNN, etc. Since they can't inject talentless talking heads directly into social media's newsfeeds to push their agenda they exert pressure in a different way. It's not surprising at all.
> The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one.
I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration.
The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.
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?
So one thing really should be cleared up - the 2nd paragraph of this article talks about incorrect criticisms (i.e. misinformation) of an article
>> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain.
It then says
>> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials
The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue.
There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?
I think 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.
Was this it?
https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-s...
As near as I can tell they're talking about emails from this set:
https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up
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".
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.
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
"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.”
What does that have to do with allegations of government censorship pressure?
It goes to the character of Breitbart.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
But that's just it - the silent re-ranking of stories, algorithmic or editorial, can also flip elections. Not just elections, it can entirely change the direction a culture is headed.
And it causes no backlash - you wouldn't even know it was happening, unless you laboriously compared statistics with how much exposure stories (not just news stories, films and books shape our perception of the world just as much) get, for the few sufficiently objective categories where a meaningful comparison can be made.
Don’t take it that I don’t agree, just that it doesn’t need to be subtle. We already had the FBI and bureaucracy cover up a scandal because they were invested in someone else winning the presidential election.
Let’s worry about the thing that already happened instead of the hypothetical.
> "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.
Not really. It's pretty much just a fact.
Uh... how can it be OK to organize to communicate an anti-lockdown message, but not OK to organize a rebuttal... by the people tasked with communicating national health policy?
Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020?
Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.
If anyone involved in this piece had ever mentioned Operation Choke Point during the last fifteen years this might have been better argued.
I could care less what's "legal" or not in this instance, this isn't the kind of society I want to live in with regard to speech rights—public OR private.
The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government.
If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.
I have no opinions on the article itself, but I am interested in whether the same actors also acted in coordination to suppress Lab Leak given that they were also implicated.
> Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.
I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved.
Latest on Lab Leak: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
Has it been partially proven? Because I think saying "fully proving" implies there is some proof when there is none
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.
Wouldn't there also be no evidence if it wasn't true?
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
Apparently Biden did all this stuff during the 2020 election.
The bastard must have a time machine now.
Not saying it didn't happen, or isn't concerning; just pointing out that calling the case Missouri vs Biden is a tiny bit... revisionist?
Also, the article is needlessly partisan. According to its timeline, thd bad behavior started under Trump and persisted under the Biden administration, but somehow only the Biden administration is being called out.
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.
I'm pretty sure that is already illegal for those specific reasons.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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; if so, I assure you that other people agree with their interpretation rather than yours. Hence the word "divisive".
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.
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.
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.
But in this case we're not talking about shutting down trolls - we're talking about excluding political opponents, by actual elected politicians.
>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".
"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).
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.
The article covers this and precedent.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
What proposed legislation?
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.
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...
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.
The California law does not mandate moderation either or provide"compliant reports." It simply requires companies to explain how they moderate and provide statistics on how much they did.
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.
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.
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.
>This is a lovely company you have, it would be a shame if we had to regulate it.
What's the difference between a recommendation and a mandate when the government is delivering it through a private channel?
I think the article is about jawboning. Any thoughts there?
> 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.
Are you saying HN is moderating content on this website at the direction of the government?
Because that’s what the article is about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Talk about missing the point.
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.
Is that different (or worse) than excluding people from company events without having been vaccinated despite having a prior infection?
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.
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?
The previous president was banned after he no longer had political power.
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.
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.
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.
Anything he could have done at that moment would simply have been undone by the incoming administration.
You can't "undo" political violence or political pardons, which are among the numerous things he did in his final days in power.
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?
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> What am I missing?
Prior political allegiances of said companies.
> 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.
> 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.
No, he was banned before the new regime, but immediately after he was implicated in an attempted coup.
"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.
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.
What would be the point of influencing government if it had no power over you?
The reverse is true as well. What would be the point of influencing government if it gave you no power over it?
It’s rather circular, I imagine.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Nothing. These companies are about making a profit. Anarchy and excess deaths both reduce profits. This explains their actions very easily.
> 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.
>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.
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.
Texas has been doing this to big tech
https://gizmodo.com/texas-big-tech-google-meta-social-media-...
That still doesn't make him unable to meaningfully retaliate, just unable to abuse Justice Department resources while doing so.
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.
Why couldn't he retaliate after he lost the election?
I said "meaningfully retaliate", not just "retaliate". I address this further below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32939850
Either one, why wouldn't he be able to? Nothing changes post election until jan 20th
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.
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?
> 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.
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?
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."
You could always ask the opposite question as the headline. Does it also mean "no" ?
If you read TFA, you'd know that the headline on the link isn't the headline of the article itself, which has no question mark. Presumably the mark was added here to assuage blue-tribe people.