Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”
i.postimg.cc
i.postimg.cc
But is everyone that easily manipulated? More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated, or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray?
And at what point does the censorship to protect me from manipulation become manipulation itself?
Facebook is fighting a losing battle if they think they will survive a battle with their own users. This is way past censoring Alex Jones. You can't possibly censor every crackpot conspiracy theorist. Actually, we're probably all crackpot conspiracy theorists in some way. We probably all believe some conspiracy about 9/11 or the NSA or elections or vaccines or masks or aliens or royal families or whatever.
The rate of censoring is almost certainly accelerating faster than facebook's growth, and once you've been censored once, you're likely to radically curb your use of that platform. I can't imagine that FB doesn't have stats on how many people keep using FB after they've been censored just once.
FB only works when you and 99% of your social group are on there.
And the network effect works in reverse, too.
The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform.
The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.
I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.
They could do a chronological timeline. They could choose to not do any editorializing. They chose instead to get into the content promotion business.
Their active choices lead to this result
Yes, Facebook has found itself wielding power that it could have never imagined. Nobody is prepared or qualified for that kind of power. That's why it took 700 years from the Magna Carta until the US Constitution to formulate a reasonable contract to limit such power.
Now you have the most dangerous combination of all. The two ingredients which when combined has resulted in horrific atrocities.
The paradox of tyranny 1) The desire to make the world a better place 2) The power and means to actually do so
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...
I'm not sure, but it might have once been that way, before I used it.
There is a string you can append to the URL (?sk=h_chr) to get a chrono view, but it doesn't seem to work well; for instance it doesn't go very far back and it's not clear to me that it's complete.
If my friends were posting lots of "spam, porn, and shock videos", I think I'd rather know it, whether or not I could tolerate it.
Nobody wants censoring that is not in your control.
Unfriending is easy. You see what you want to see.
Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
What we see now is a knee-jerk reaction to reestablish order by the establishment.
This happened too with the creation of the gutenberg printing press. New tech disrupted established information sources.
Approx 60 years after the printing press creation, a relatively minor religious squabble ended up in a huge conflict that engulfed most major powers in europe.
Truth is power. The institutions that that control the truth will fight to maintain their power.
When Guttenberg made the press, access to it's output had a strong filter: most people couldn't read, and anyone who could read was highly educated for the times. Social media doesn't have a filter like that, and higher levels of education generally correlate to lower levels of belief in things like conspiracy theories.
Also keep in mind that the T+60 years conflict you're referencing, while greatly assisted by the printing press, was also greatly pushed along by the masses being told what to think by their preachers or by powerful elite looking to destabilize the status quo to their own benefit. The peasants of the peasant revolution weren't reading criticisms of the Catholic Church and coming to their own country conclusions, they were given emotional polemics by people like Storch sparking extreme levels of fanaticism.
So, yes, there is a lot in both situations about power struggles with the established order, but most people are being influenced more by emotionally charged arguments and tribal loyalties than they are by increased access to level-headed rational presentations of an issue.
The world isn't necessarily controlled by some illuminati-like organization. That belief comes from a cognitive bias called "Agent-detection bias" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection
It may simply be that free information created a bit of a power vacuum (perhaps the same as with the printing press?) so there's a scramble for power by all the people engaged in the culture war, not just existing powerful people but anyone who sees an opportunity.
Propaganda used to only be achievable by nation states. Now anyone with money can play.
They aren't democratizing access to truth because search costs for finding accurate information are higher.
Dying inherited institutions are grasping to stay relevant with appeals to authoritarianism. Free speech is now a hinderance and a liability to their existence. As their relevance dwindles, tyranny becomes their only tool.
No, but mindless post-modernist drivel is annoying.
“Vaccines work” happens to be true. It’s not “the establishment” being afraid to lose power, it’s sane people taking an interest in others’ survival.
We can only hope they win, else the Alex Jones', Tucker Carlsons', and Robert F Kennedys of the world will take us straight to climate destruction.
How do you measure and track it? What trends in the measurement have you noticed over time that makes you says it's increasing?
Also, can you say more about which groups think they are the single source of truth?
Virtual signaling and safetyism. Hilarious how the virtue signaling elite regularly close their conference calls with "everyone stay safe". Oh, I know you (don't) care about me.
Labeling something “virtue signaling” implies acceptance that the action in question is beneficial. So you agree that getting vaccinated is a good idea, but somehow manage to still take issue with people saying as much in a slightly more direct manner?
Yes, the group of unvaccinated people, making up 99.5% of recent US deaths even though they only represent about 40% of the population is, almost tautologically, in need of protection. Considering the US has, once again, managed to neatly divide into the same ideological camps as on any other issue, there is no obvious selfish motive for people of the one group to care for the other. This leaves the latter group stumped, because they can’t think of any non-selfish motives, forcing them come up with I’ll-defined terms such as “safetyism”.
The term you’re grasping for is “altruism”, by the way. Although I’ll freely admit, limited to me, personally, that it’s supply is running low and I mostly want people to get vaccinated to finally get this over with.
It's not common sense, it's mass brainwashing. If you'd asked people two years ago what they thought about the idea of locking the whole country down indefinitely for a virus with a 99% survival rate (and over 99.9% for people under 50), the vast majority would have said it's a crazy idea.
20 years ago at a national park with signs "don't feed the wildlife" with a parent teaching her 3 year old to feed the wild life within 3 feet of such a sign. I said "do you see the sign? why are you doing this?" She scoffed, pouted, and ran with her child to her car and drove away.
We treat her like a child because so many adults act like children. They seek what their parents never gave them, and unfortunately keep barking up the wrong tree, but you can't just refrain from sugggesting they not feed wildlife or it leads to mayhem.
Today we have so many humans defecating in the lakes near Maroon Bells that the park might close. For at least a decade that park has a "pack it out" policy, including your own poop. There are that many people pooping in the woods, and it's not good enough to dig holes. People so infantilized they lack the emotional coping skill to poop in a sack and pack it out, so they swim out in a lake with numerous "do not swim" signs and take a dump.
People are fucking stupid. If you don't tell them this, they think it isn't true, and the rules for for someone else.
Tragedy of the commons isn't caused by stupidity but by selfishness. It's different.
But people can also be very smart. I'm sure the people blatantly ignoring signs are the minority. There's so many people in the world that even a minority can cause issues (e.g. defecating in the woods), but it's still a minority.
It's different people, and moreover, different situations involving the same person. There are so many things considered "common sense" that basically everyone will miss at least one thing considered common sense.
So yes, you have to accommodate and prepare for the stupid people. You have to patrol the national parks to yell at people for doing things the signs right in front of them say not to. But you also have to accommodate and prepare for the smart people, and realize that you'll sometimes be stupid.
In Facebook's case, they think they're smarter than everyone else by choosing what content everyone can see. Flagging "vaccines are 5G microchips" was fine. But flagging official CDC guidelines implies Facebook is smarter than the CDC, which is probably not true.
Just show me a time descending list of posts filtered by whatever set of friends I am viewing.
Don't recommend groups or friends or content from people or groups I haven't subscribed to. Let me search for groups or friends instead.
I'm clearly against the HN grain here but I actually think these companies do have a civic duty to actively dampen viral spread of information; there are plenty of clear cases where it is leading to Pizzarias being shot up, and almost no cases where I've seen viral information rapidly propagating on these networks is valuable.
I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely (at least in the context of this thread -- algorithmic feeds are a separate problem.)
> The title of this thread is 'Facebook is now claiming official CDC.gov links are “False Information”'.
> I don't believe the problem is facebook recommending anything -- the problem is facebook trying to ban certain content entirely
You say you don't believe (a), and you state that the problem is (b). I'm seeing "belief" without substantiation in both of those sentences. I'm also actively not taking username "gunapologist" as related to the merits of beliefs or statements in any way.
Finally, it's not clear to me that Facebook is a censor. I hold they have a right to promote or not promote whatever they want. Give someone a megaphone, suddenly anyone not handed a megaphone cries censor. No, just not amplified. Commercially, choosing not to promote a thing is much like a TV channel choosing not to run an ad or sponsor an event, something they choose to not do all the time.
I'd rather FB promote nothing, go back to a timeline of posts from my connections, and seems like "a problem" (one of many) is solved.
If you post porn to Facebook they'll delete it from your album, even if you've chosen for it to skip the newsfeed altogether, or if it's only flagged long after it appeared in anyone's newsfeed.
Nobody believes that something showing up in their newsfeed somehow implies approval by Facebook. Nor would some time-ordered newsfeed convince anyone that it's impossible for Facebook to remove individual items and get them off the hook when they don't act on harmful content.
The idea that any form of "curation" or "ordering" somehow creates full liability for content is some entirely arbitrary brainworm that's infecting people. Do you take full responsibility for all incoming e-mails that your spam filter doesn't flag? Is Google responsible for every single website that appears in any SERP? Is the firewall you configured reason enough to sue you if anyone gets past it and into the network?
No, none of these would make any sense. And in those cases it is, I presume, obvious that these are "best efforts" that can be useful without being 100% right, all the time. And that demanding perfection is tantamount to just outlawing the practice altogether.
Why factual information gets censored though is a genuine question. It is a legitimate "who watches the watchmen" issue seeing as they literally get to enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy that moment.
The truth is they have outsourced fact checking to the "International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter" who has to uphold standards not just freely enforce whatever ideology tickles their fancy.
Knowing one low-level employee of one of the subcontractors involved; it works something like this:
1. An article is posted to Facebook/Twitter/etc and is automatically flagged based on keywords or manually flagged based on user reports of misinformation.
2. Fact checking organizations take up fact-checking of the article for a small fee.
3. In this case for the organization I am personally aware of, the fact checking company has a large number of independent contractors who can research a "batch" of claims/articles.
4. Usually the jobs are broken up into simple questions.
5. You along with many others provide answers and must provide pertinent factual sources supporting the veracity of your assessment that this is either true, partly false, or false along with other categories such as if it is clearly and obviously satire.
6. Your answers are judged vs the final determination. Those who consistently skew in any direction are dismissed from eligibility to participate in the future.
7. The fact checking organization once it has enough answers for confidence has higher-level employees double-check the answer and source information.
8. The fact checking organization submits it's formal assessment on the article/opinion to the IFCN.
9. Companies like Facebook use multiple IFCN assessments and perhaps other fact check assessments to provide pertinent information that corrects misinformation that has spread rampantly over the last year like "Joe Biden wants to defund police departments across the US" with corrections like "After being asked if "We can reduce the responsibilities assigned to the police and redirect some of the funding for police into social services, mental health counselling, and affordable housing." Mr Biden has answered "Yes" to a question about whether he agrees with this redirecting of funding.
I may be slightly off in how this works but the overall program is the same for most social networks that care about misinformation. There is more information in the sources below: Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=6...
You can choose whatever social group you want on social media. The days of physical presence and limited supply of peers are over.
Your IRL friends don't believe that the government is made up of lizard people? Go find yourself a Facebook, Telegram, Discord, etc. group, you will find plenty of like-minded people and "proof" there. People can and do survive on online contacts alone, so being shunned is not a problem for them. At least not in the medium term.
What social group you want is guided by what social groups are recommended to you
Unfortunately, I think this is true but not realized.
I found out that my brother was "going to do his own research" on the COVID-19 vaccines, which really is just code for, "I'm going to look online at sources in my echo chamber." (Because how many people really do their own research by talking with virologists, epidemiologists, etc.?)
It wasn't until he had some social pressure and the death of two acquaintances that he decided it was important to go get vaccinated.
edit: So since they don't have any overarching philosophy about what to censor, some of the choices they make are overzealous or bizarre.
What cruel irony that the medium that would bring us knowledge might get us oblivion.
Welcome to the society in chains.
Censoring Alex Jones gives far too much credit to Alex Jones because of the reasons you explained.
It might not feel like a loss, but it was clear from the beginning that it won't stop there. I thought this was a lesson already learned to be honest.
I mean, having watched family members descend into raving about the Pope and George Soros harvesting children for adrenochrome despite no previous interest in current events, yeah, I think people can be manipulated by obviously bogus information. You can decide for yourself what you think should or shouldn't be done about it but I don't think that point should be in doubt anymore.
Plus its not “people” will believe whatever bits of misinformation is out there.
Take it this way from marketing speak:
—————-
Content is being made and iterated upon rapidly, over social media to find new and innovative ways of winning “mindshare” among consumers.
With new technology we can cluster user groups and tailor make perfect user experiences after extensively a/b testing content to most closely match user preferences.
All of this can be done cheaply and at scale, for increasingly new types of content and complexity levels.
————
That is the problem. It’s not whether people will believe misinformation, its that content creation is faster at changing and sounds plausible enough to slip past your typical bullshit filter.
Immediately. Everyone has biases.
Censorship is...
A STRANGE GAME.
THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS
NOT TO PLAY.
Yes
> More importantly, does everyone actually believe that they can be easily manipulated,
No
> or do they just think that everyone else is so easily manipulated, but somehow they're above the fray?
Yes
Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.
But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public.
And so they go out and get information from other sources.
Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.
Then half the population is mentally ill. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of issues we are dealing with...
But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tribal urges. The same thing caused an attack on the US seat of government, and a very large percentage of the population thinks that's ok.
I don't know the solution, short of us declaring that the internet and cable tv was a bad idea and we need to go back to simpler times of unconnected computers and 3 TV networks. But I'd agree that facebook, Twitter, etc has to do something.
>They
>us
How do you know “your side” is right?
Read your comment again, but consider a hypothesis that you are entirely wrong about most things - how would you know? Everyone seems to lack a consideration that there is even a possibility they could be wrong.
If they are exposed two sides, and you one, how do you know you are right? You probably are. But… it’s the absolutism that is starting to become obvious to me.
With this set of tools, it is in fact possible to determine that some ideas are meritless bull. We see a proliferation of the latter right now.
Regarding things like the covid vaccine, you can look at the 96% vaccination rate of doctors or you can listen to basically every single immunology or virology expert. It is quite telling that pretty much the only doctors making the media rounds fear mongering about the vaccine are gastroenterologists, opthalmologists, or other unrelated fields.
So no, nothing is certain, but some things are pretty close to certain.
Enough to elect a President, so... yes.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-facebook-covid...
After the 2016 election all of the big social media CEOs were dragged in front of Congress to testify about fake news, Russian propaganda, etc. They were directly threatened by lawmakers that if they didn't shape up by censoring us that lawmakers would bring the hammer down.
What we are experiencing now is 5 years of development on that threat. The social media CEOs are in a position where if the media manages to make a big fuss about some sort of "misinformation" then Congress will respond by dragging their butts back to testify and/or regulation.
This has turned the social media CEOs into slaves of the corporate press. All it takes is a few tweets from the right people asking Zuck why he's platforming "Nazis" or whatever they are calling moderate Republicans and anti-war leftists these days and these companies will jump.
This is the censorship that the government demanded, and they can't escape. I'm not sure what the answer is, because if we all jump ship from FB/Twitter/etc onto a "new" platform, it won't be long until that new CEO gets dragged before Congress and is given the same threats.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinform...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/02/01/censorship-co...
> “Republicans, or more broadly conservatives, have been spreading a form of disinformation on how they're treated on social media. They complain they’re censored and suppressed but, not only is there not evidence to support that, what evidence exists actually cuts in the other direction,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, which released the report Monday.
Out of curiosity, when I said "anti-war leftists" did you perceive that to mean something negative/radical about them relative to when I said "moderate Republicans"? Also, what gave you the impression that I meant one of those was getting censored more than the other?
It also wouldn't make sense to post any dis- or -information on Facebook. And it wouldn't make any difference if Facebook deleted anything or not, so people could stop complaining about "censorship" for exactly the same reason you want people to stop demanding action from Facebook.
The fact that the latter two aren't happening seems to suggest nobody–you included–believes it's all quite as meaningless.
As far as the business analysis, I'm sure there are some number-crunchers at Facebook who looked at lockdown usage of the platform, the lockdown's effect on ad revenue, declining use due to deaths, how much marking misinformation changed a poster's beliefs, how much marking misinformation changes a poster's usage, and figured out whether marking misinformation made financial sense. I don't think they care at all about what you might think is freedom or what someone else might think is moral, and the idea that some other commenters have put forth that marking misinformation would affect antitrust litigation seems just as wacky as some of the Facebook posts I've seen about vaccines and 5g.
Not sure if it's still happening, but you can test it if you make the post visible to only you and you wait ~5 minutes for that misinformation message to show up.
Even if the fact checker had some kind of point, I don't know how labeling an authoritative source as "false information" helps anyone understand anything just because part of the information might be outdated.
Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment.
> Nevertheless, the level of carelessness upon which this mechanism seems to have been built upon is an embarrassment.
Same mechanism would flag and ban folks who argued that the lab leak hypothesis was a possibility and was worth investigating... Interesting how the media changed their narrative on this one.
Example: 1.usa.gov/abc would redirct to the same place as bit.ly/abc
With no authorization or whitelist or anything.
Right!
Except that never happened at all and you are spreading BS / fakenews / “misinformation”.
At no point did anyone suggest drinking bleach. During a press conference of possible treatments he asked about developing an ingestible solution along with experimental internal UV lung treatments. The media quickly turned that “OMG Trump said drink bleach!”, the nonsense you are happy to repeat.
EDIT: I’m anticipating a link I’ve never seen before. Can’t wait.
I researched this extensively. That never happened and people still spreading this shows the damage media and politicians have done.
He said "disinfectant", not bleach.
If you watch the press briefing in context, Bill Bryan, Under Secretary for Science and Technology at DHS was saying right prior to Trump: “Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus, both surfaces and in the air. We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well, where increasing the temperature and humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus. The virus dies the quickest in the presence of direct sunlight under these conditions. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids, and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes,” Bryan said. “Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just bring it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster.” Bryan talked about the half-life of the coronavirus on surfaces like door handles and stainless steel surfaces, saying that when they “inject” UV rays into the mix along with high temperatures and increased humidity that the virus dies quickly.
After this, Trump said: "So, I’m going to ask Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing when we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful." Trump then clarified his remarks: “It wouldn’t be through injections, you’re talking about almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big affect if it’s on a stationary object.” “If they’re outside, right, and their hands are exposed to the sun, will that kill it as though it were a piece of metal or something else?” Trump asked.
In that context Trump was talking about this technology of using UV lights which got patented the same week he mentioned cleaning inside:
Disinfectant to clean lungs: “Injecting light” could be referring to Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation.
Methylene blue photochemical and another light therapy studies which came out that week:
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-17718/v1
Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/aytu-bioscience-signs-exclusi...
https://apnews.com/b44f4531071e6204023f7b8e16f59d4b
SEC filed 4 days ago before:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1385818/000165495420...
> Led by Mark Pimentel, MD, the research team of the Medically Associated Science and Technology (MAST) Program at Cedars-Sinai has been developing the patent-pending Healight platform since 2016 and has produced a growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating pre-clinical safety and effectiveness of the technology as an antiviral and antibacterial treatment.
Possibility of Disinfection of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) in Human Respiratory Tract by Controlled Ethanol Vapor Inhalation by Tsumoru Shintake:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12444
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2qsNqD...
UV light to treat disease in the blood: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4783265/?fbclid...
Columbia researcher David Brenner believes far-UVC light—safe for humans, but lethal for viruses—could be a ‘game changer.’:
https://news.columbia.edu/ultraviolet-technology-virus-covid...
A disinfectant does not need to be a harsh chemical or bleach. A disinfectant can be heat, radiation, UV light, etc. Many people consider a lung lavage a method of disinfecting the lung by “washing” it out.
They’ve released technology that is using UV light to sterilize N95 masks due to the shortage. It’s now officially FDA approved. They have been putting babies under ultraviolet light for jaundice, for as long as I can remember. It is not new. They’re also using UV light to sterilize ambulances between runs because of the virus.
No reasonable person would take this to claim Trump was telling people to inject bleach. Media and politician ideologues destroyed their credibility when they spread misinformation while claiming to be against it.
GOP.gov
While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.
It's more nuanced than that because ATT doesn't repeat a phone call it has deemed interesting to millions of other people.
The claim is that this algorithms are neutral. But we know many contain ways for the owner to artificially boost preferred content. And algorithms tend to have the biases of their creators in them.
Controlling what people see is an important power and one that should be regulated.
There are two (or more) feeds of information on facebook:
- The main one, which only shows posts sent to the "recommend this to people queue" based on facebooks recommendation algorithms.
- Messenger, which directly sends messages to people in a FIFO fashion, which I assume facebook doesn't censor as heavily (though I can't say I've tested).
The fact that the recommendation based stream is more popular is a reflection that facebooks curation is actually useful, but it doesn't mean messenger doesn't exist.
Nor do I see that messenger must exist, facebook isn't morally obligated to provide a "non recommend feed" to you if that isn't the product they want to sell you. Perfectly good alternatives even exist, in the form of "blogs" (say, substack).
I guess when you engage in price-fixing in the open and call it "setting a standard", then anti-trust rules don't apply..
FB is a content platform who is about making ad revenue. They are crafted around that and how to make that the most profitable possible.
Another nuance is that due to Facebook post privacy settings, an individual post can be restricted to a limited friend list, and not viewable by the general public. However the "fact checking" appears to apply to both private and public posts.
>but it's a private company!
No, the executive branch has come out and said that they're the ones organizing this censorship.
True, it doesn't. Instead, AT&T repeats millions of phone calls it carries to a party deemed interested.
If there's some kind of algorithm putting the content in front of people who didn't ask for it (e.g. not followers/friends/subscribers/whatever), then you have a point.
If two people want to have a conversation or exchange a letter, or one person wants to speak to everyone within earshot or post a sign for people walking by to read, that's one thing. Maybe you say something dumb, and it gets shot down, or maybe it gets propagated, but it needs to have an R0 greater than 1 to endure. If you need some level of capital and agreement to have a publisher run a thousand pamphlets with your idea, that's another, you can leverage previous efforts to amplify weak ideas, but more people are involved and able to provide some sort of sanity filter. On the Internet, the cost to promote an idea is near zero, and algorithms can amplify something dumb but catchy to millions of people in a heartbeat.
It used to require a few seconds of talking per person you wanted to reach, now it costs a few seconds to post a message that might be seen by millions. The difference is minuscule in absolute value (perhaps a monetary value of a few cents) but huge in relative terms (how many percent less than a few cents is zero cents?).
Maintaining policy on censorship while ignoring this massive change in the landscape is shortsighted. Yes, a physical public venue ought not censor someone who wants to talk to other people there, but a digital platform with an audience of millions should think carefully about the effects of messages that their technology amplifies.
Those entities aren't comparable. Internet and telecom operators, much like the post, is a carrier in a legal sense. Not sure about your jurisdiction, but in many countries this is an actual law, secrecy of correspondence.
Facebook however, is operating a publishing service on the web, much like Nature or NY Times. Nature isn't obliged to publish your article just because you upload it, and they certainly do a fair amount of fact checking.
To continue the parable you started, while AT&T isn't allowed to snoop the article you upload to NY Times, the latter is allowed to refrain from publishing it on their web. Stretching the definition of carrier to encompass Facebook and Twitter would have wide reaching consequences and risk making it much more difficult to operate a web page.
Carriers do not have any staff monitoring the content being posted, nevermind the largest such staff in the world
Carriers do not have algorithms seeking out what content on what phone call creates the most 'engagement' (which is probably inversely correlated with truth value) and then actively interrupting your other calls to pushing that content into your stream. Again, nevermind that FB has the largest such feed-selecting algorithm on the planet.
Carriers do not select and push one news source over another, based on the level of times it gets mentioned on the calls.
These are all editorial functions, far more selective and influential than any newsroom editor.
The idea that they should be treated as carriers may have been originally true when the feeds were absolute literal timelines of items posted by 'friends' you selected, in strict chronological order.
But once they (FB, Twitter, etc.) started tracking "likes" and activity, and favoring one bit of content over another to surface and emphasize/de-emphazise in your feed, they became editors.
That point was decades ago, and it is time to stop treating them with that old trope. The fact that they fail at their fact checking is no reason to say that they shouldn't do it (and yes, if they would go back to strict chronological feeds fully selected by us, with no algorithmic prioritizing, I'd agree that we should again treat them as carriers).
They should not be able to have it both ways -- being the largest editors in the world = all the power, but treated as innocent carriers = none of the responsibility.
It seems a straightforward choice:
1) Go forward as a Carrier and delete ALL features with a hint of editing, promotion, or recommendation, i.e., a simple straight chronological feed of other members' posts/feed specifically selected by each user, and maybe a search function.
2) Go forward as a Publisher and select, edit, recommend, promote, annotate etc. as much as they want.
With Option-1 they can avoid all responsibility for content, merely doing takedowns on items for which they get notices. With Option-2, they have the same responsibility of any publisher for their content (e.g., newspapers are still responsible for the 'Letters to The Editor' that they choose to publish, and I'm sure edit out profanities, etc.)
I expect that users would actually strongly prefer Option-1, although actual "engagement" numbers could decline, it might actually be a better advert platform.
It also seems that viral content would still exist, but be more 'natural', i.e., not enhanced by algorithms, since you Alan could see something from Bob and repost it, which would be seen by Chris, who is subscribed to Alan but not Bob, and Chris could repost it to be seen by Debbie, who subscribes to neither Alan nor Bob...
So, I'm curious how you see that this would this kill/outlaw social media?
Eh, I'm pretty sure see random posts from political Facebook groups that were commented on by a Facebook friend I added in like 2006 when that sort of "content proliferation" didn't exist yet (or at least wasn't anywhere near as prominent). I explicitly added that friend, yes, but I definitely didn't explicitly consent to receiving every single piece of Internet content that that friend ever interacts with.
I think this is an unhelpful framing of the situation, because as you imply Facebook is of course not wrong.
If you have one friend and your feed is entirely full of their posts, Facebook is off the hook. But, for most users, the situation is far more complex. People have many friends, they may also be in groups. They probably will not be on facebook long enough for them to see all of the posts and, if they are, their attention levels will differ over the entire corpus.
In this situation facebook begins to have agency - which is different from being wrong. They didn't make the content, they didn't create the link that brought the content to you, but of all the content they could show they did show you this and not that. It's a relatively new kind of agency, one that we didn't have a lot of practical experience with before very recently, so they can be forgiven somewhat for their difficulty grappling with it. However, they're an important part of the chain of information organization and it would be foolish to pretend they have no responsibility.
With people having enough sources to feed their newsfeed, facebook decides the order and cherry picks what posts are shown.
> Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?
I do agree with this. Coming to a solution to this would be hard problem. Users will have to give finer information about types of posts people like from a creator. I doubt there are any real work incentives for a big company to build a system like this.
> While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
The Internet was fine without Facebook, it was largely self-governing and people could choose to browse others self-hosted content. Their decision to create the platform and use algorithms to direct peoples attention was totally self made, clearly problematic and now they have to workout how to cope with the fallout.
It amazes me.
Would you be ok with FB promoting glorification of white supremacy? Because, as a neutral carrier, it is not supposed to look at the content.
Would you support it promoting a content piece that is a fluff of falsehoods resting on a thin layer or truth (They are making all the frogs gay !) ?
FB could always argue that it is not responsible for content on its servers and can always argue that the counter point is also allowed.
What if corporations, with their infinite marketing budgets start using FB to start promoting that climate change is actually good for the world?
Well… I’d answer, but how many downvotes do you want me to get?
If fact checkers are operating with political bias, the people that call it out will be the ones who feel they’re targeted for their beliefs. They aren’t going to police themselves.
Top of my factchecker wtf is Hunter Biden’s laptop which was agreed to be Russian fakenews before the election, and after the election we have… https://en-volve.com/2021/07/26/watch-hunter-biden-accidenta...
It’s literally the service Google provides.
If they could decouple the information store from the display, and allow third parties to algorithmically filter and sort, then we could designate them as common carries for the first half. Maybe.
Sometimes there is objective truth and sometimes there isn't.
Within a fact checking entity you essentially have the same issue as regulatory capture.
So sure we can suppose that there is an objective truth (ironically this point is also debated), but who do you trust to be its arbiter?
There is great danger in giving one group of people the power to choose what is "objective truth"
For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.
And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.
In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.
It's why you probably deactivated your spam filters the first time some signup email accidentally got caught in it.
They are not "carriers" nor are they "publishers" because those concepts aren't legal terms, outside a very narrow field of law and the imagination of the tech community.
Besides, "carriers" aren't as free from intervention as you make it out to be. AT&T can and does, and sometimes is required to, block spam or fraudulent calls, for example/
-Facebook isn't legally required to fact check. -The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker. -AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages -Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
> After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.
> Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page.
> In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses. Such assays can facilitate continued testing for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 and can save both time and resources as we head into influenza season. Laboratories and testing sites should validate and verify their selected assay within their facility before beginning clinical testing.
I'm personally not sure what to make of all this, the cdc link doesn't seem controversial, and perhaps flagging this as false information was done in error? But screen shots are lame so I figured I'd repost as a link and the text for convenience.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
What's the underlying problem? How are we dealing with it? As someone who does not and has never had a facebook account, I have very little context to understand what you are talking about.
> CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses
Used to claim that many positive test results were not covid cases, but were flu cases.
This _isn’t_ the case — the CDC is now recommending tests that can check for multiple infections rather than just one.
But the wording does leave it open to being a possibility, on first reading that may even be a sensible assumption.
So the problem is complicated —
1) this is an official and authoritative source posting wording that’s explaining what’s changing with ambiguity about what the status quo is.
2) Amid that ambiguity, people are posting information that is not true, using this as a source.
3) Facebook’s response is the “Fake News” label, when while the source has its faults it is not Fake or News, it’s just having meaning attributed to it that’s not there
Huge chunks of the American public are refusing to take a vaccine that could end the pandemic and save tens-to-hundreds of thousands of lives because people are lying to them on forums like Facebook (also right here on HN) and telling them it's dangerous.
Is that the standard to determine whether to censor the speech?
If that’s true, then, how can we be sure that flu hasn’t been misdiagnosed?
What percentage of Covid cases were classified using PCR tests?
> Isn’t implying that the test can’t tell the difference between flu and covid?
they are strongly convinced that this is the case, quoting papers or research showing that in some rare cases with some methods you could have tests which could sometimes confuse Covid with other Corona Viruses (not flu, completely ignoring that this might not apply to the tests they are speaking about or that the probabilities are negligible.)
I had to realize that the majority of people (which haven't studied something where they had to learn it) do not understand stochastic at all, but believe they have some basic understanding of probabilities (which they don't have).
Furthermore it's not uncommon for people to reject truth which do not fit into their world view.
Not to long ago I realized that a relative of mine does not understand the difference between false positives and false negatives and that they are not equally likely. They knew the (fast, non PCR) test can be wrong and as such believed it can be equally wrong in all directions including false positives. So because it was confirmed that the test have many false negative they believed that they also must have many false positives and as such the increase in cases must be because of this false positives...
I tried to reach out to them and explain them that false positives and false negatives are not the same and just because something can likely fail in one way it doesn't mean it will also fail likely in another way. But I completely failed to reach them, they insisted on their opinion being correct and went very fast into a defensive mode where it's impossible to reach them no matter what how reasonable and convincing your arguments are.
The original could not detect, so therefore differentiation is a moot point.
Also, the test for flu was a separate test. So it would have had no effect on the lower flu incidence assuming we didn't test for flu at a lesser rate.
Because I haven't seen anything on Facebook, or self-censoring HN for that matter, validating those claims. So they must be but only false but really out-there wacky conspiracy theories.
The current PCR test from the CDC does not detect flu at all, or other coronaviruses. The test is very specific. See pages 40 on in the Instructions for Use[1] if you are interested. The test sequences were compared (by computer) to hundreds of thousands of genomes of flu, the human genome, and other organisms, as well as tested on physical specimens.
[1] https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download#page=41
Here is a sample of messages that were shared on Reddit:
> The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. The FRAUDULENT PCR Test has finally been ruled a Class I Recall. This is the most serious type of recall. All measurements based on PCR Testing should come to an end ASAP:
> CDC retracts PCR test as it can't differentiate between COVID and the flu. It was all a Lie.
> CDC pulls PCR tests because they can’t distinguish Covid from the flu. We finally caught the SOBs who have lied to us about the coronavirus numbers the last year.
> The Pandemic narrative is unravelling... The FDA announced today that the CDC PCR test for COVID-19 has failed its full review. Emergency Use Authorization has been REVOKED. It is a Class I recall. The most serious type of recall. Too many false POSITIVES. This is the test that started the pandemic!
> CDC to Withdraw Emergency Use Authorization for PCR Test Because It Cannot Distinguish Between SARS-CoV-2 and the Flu.
> Watch the panicked minority bombard the comments with establishment talking points to try and refute this tweet.. PCR is being rescinded as a test, vaccinated people are filling hospitals, and our government officials are still urging us to get tested using PCR and get jabbed with the Covid vaccines. Alrighty then.
Thanks for that collection.
One method often used is to take some "official" article, paper, etc. which is not targeting a general-public audience but a audience of people with specialized knowledge and then twist what it supposedly says and spread it to people which in general do not have this specialized knowledge but where they know that with the given combination of pre-feed misinformation and non-understanding of the content and complex language/terminology their targets will see it as proof for the false information. Even if it might proof the exact opposite.
Examples include:
- this link
- a case where two very different statistics of the CDC (from different sources) used the same "label name" for a graph with similar but very different data
- cases of studies showing that e.g. some vaccine is not perfect in some very specific situations being taking as proof that it's not working at all
- same for tests etc.
- court cases won due to formalities being taken as proof that vaccines don't work (e.g. anti-vaccer creating a bounty for a proof of them being wrong but intentionally formulating the requirement for the bounty submissions subtle in a way that no submission is ever valid for submission and as such they won the court case about not paying out the money, even through the submission proofed them wrong)
A commonly used fallacy of the mind is that people jump from "this solution is not perfect" to "this solution MUST be replaced" to "a solution which is perceived to be the opposite is therefore true".
Like "this test has wrong results in rare cases" => "this test can not be trusted at all" => "all tests of this kind are untranslatable" => "there is no need to test because all tests are fake anyway" => "covid doesn't exists".
As a side not I have seen that kind of thinking to often in IT too like: "this library turned out imperfect once we knew more about it" => "we must replace this library" => "this other library which used the imperfection of the first library in it's advertisements but of which we don't know anything about is correct and must be used".
I believe it's of upmost importance to improve science to general-public communications and argument all kinds of reports, articles and papers with a section targeting the general public. As well as rehabilitating state organs which are focused on providing easy understandable content and explanations, while being vowed (by law required) to objectivity and transparency and making it highly punished for politicians, other state organs or well any kind of institution trying to influence it.
On the other hand I think this shows the absurdity especially of labeling things as inaccurate without saying what specifically you are actually calling inaccurate because how would you know if the fact check is valid or not.
If they aren't in some privileged position of truth holding all you've got is facebook applying its narrative layer on top of everyone else's narrative layer. You're exactly where you started.
I guess a better way to say this is that I think the idea that Facebook is capable of arbitrating the truth is at its core, philosophically, a nonsense proposition.
She was immediately blocked from Facebook. She appealed and gave her proof of age. Still, Facebook wouldn’t budge.
Facebook’s automated mechanisms suck. If they can’t tell that someone who has been on the platform for over a decade with photos showing she is a middle aged women, married with two kids, is not, in fact, several days old, then they have no business fact checking posts from the CDC!
The simple fact is, I have massively decreased my use of Facebook in the last 6 months. I really feel that for the health and safety of everyone it might be a good idea for others to do so also.
Another irony is that the White House said that it was flagging comments for Facebook fact-checkers just last week:
“We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”
Apparently this now includes posts from another part of the executive branch.
> "This is what they’re — what the information — some of this misinformation is doing — and misleads the public by falsely alleging that mRNA vaccines are untested and, thus, risky, even though many of them are approved and have gone through the gold standard of the FDA approval process."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...
The people who talk about misinformation are often the biggest source of misinformation.
None of the vaccines have gone through "the gold standard" of the full vaccine approval process. They have only received FDA approval for emergency use and have not received full approval.
Biden is planning to push through full approval this fall:
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/biden-predicts-full-fda-vaccin... [video]
https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/biden-admin-signals-int...
My rating: True
* FB is a company, not a government, so they can more or less do what they want.
* It's concerning that one company has so much influence. "Just go somewhere else" is tough with the network effects that a system like theirs has.
* FB is responsible for tons of misinformation spreading and is very toxic in a lot of ways.
I'm not really sure what, if anything we should do, but it'd be nice to read a bit more elevated discussions about the problems with social media.
My guess is also that the link got flagged because of who shared it, but that's just a guess.
This is the CDC post in question: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert...
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-viral-posts-misre...
From the article:
In explaining the CDC’s decision to end the use of its own PCR test at the end of 2021, Kristen Nordlund, an agency spokeswoman, in an email to us cited “the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed (discussed here) and high-throughput options” — referring to technologies that use an automated process to administer hundreds of tests per day.
“Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019 nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” Nordlund said.
She continued: “CDC is encouraging public health laboratories (PHL) to adopt the CDC Influenza SARS-CoV-2 (Flu SC2) Multiplex Assay to enable continued surveillance for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2, which will save both time and resources for PHL.”
Given that they were withdrawing it with several months' advance notice, I doubt there was anything massively wrong with it.
These feeds are optimized for "engagement" first. That's business.
So, now, trying to fix the problem of false information, the arsonists have joined the fire brigade.
Their pivot into a news aggregator / news feed is what is slowly eroding trust because of easy manipulation by nefarious actors.
The links to CDC forwarded on Facebook contain the misinformation in the description, very few actually click on the link and read it.
Facebook simply used their system to add clarification.
The misinformation that is spread says that CDC, banned RT-PCR, because it confused flu with covid. When in reality FDA approved new tests that test for both to save time and resources as the flu season is approaching.
This is all so unbelievably ridiculous. I no longer trust the authorities and fact checking is just making it worse.
When you do this, this is what happens.
Hey FB: Two checkboxes, problem solved. You’re welcome.
It's too bad nobody posted (that I could find) that too.
Seems like at minimum the opposite should never happen, and that's negatively flagging .gov domains.
Edit: why the downvotes? If you disagree, please post a comment so we can have a healthy dialogue.
If this pun was intentional, well done.
1. People post CDC link out of context, and claim how all the numbers of infections from previous year are inaccurate. How testing is useless, covid doesn't exist etc.
2. Facebook fact-checks this, and marks the content as "False information"
3. The link gets marked as false information in the system, and regardless of the context that popup shows up, as they can not check every single comment written around this link and even if they could it would delay marking it as false information substantially.
1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with...
2. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction
3. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs. All this because they went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov...
4. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. He first proposed that a giant flood raked Eastern Washington in prehistoric times, and who suffered ridicule and skepticism until decades of further research proved his thesis. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal.
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-floo...
5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed. His personal diaries indicate that he had made several important mathematical discoveries years or decades before his contemporaries published them. Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personali...
6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén
7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor
8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy
9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_receptio...
10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_...
11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted. All this because he went against consensus science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_th...
if true, that is maximum irony and exposes the folly of Facebook's positioning as an arbiter, or exposes the power of their positioning
Just because some info appears on a the CDC page doesn't mean it can't be erroneous.
It is not as though health authorities have always been correct on every thing, have they?