How Twitter moderated the Covid debate | Hacker News Reader

How Twitter moderated the Covid debate

thefp.com

357 pointsfortran77899 comments

OK, so here's the key bit:

"Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government.

...

But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".

This seems to be more a story on the complexities of content moderation than anything. There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm. At the scale Twitter operates at, false positives (incorrectly labeling things as misinformation) are impossible to avoid. How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors? Well, you can moderate less. But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.

That is not to say this is article does not share useful information, but the headline is rather misleading. As before with the Twitter files, it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it, and that Twitter had internal debates regarding how to moderate these sorts of things. That seems reasonable?

Sounds like you’re trying to spin it to make this seem like innocent moderation when it was internal employees and the government forcing their views via moderation rather than letting the discourse happen

> it shows that the government leaned on Twitter to do what it wanted but not able to mandate it,

Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy? Not able to "mandate" is total bs, see the Pentagon-related leaks where there wasn't any need of any "mandating". If anything, this shows how hypocritical the whole industry has become, including many of its workers.

Hopefully this will scare away all potential future Aaron Swartz-es from this industry, or from the main parts of it at least, and hence bring it all down a peg or too.

"Why does a government has to "lean" on a private media company in a "democrat" and "liberal" democracy?"

There are people within the government whose job it was to respond to the covid pandemic. Part of that response involved educating the public about the disease and best practices related to it, which therefore included fighting misinformation. Misinformation is spread on platforms such as Twitter, so it made sense for the government to communicate with Twitter and let them know what it considered to be a good course of action. Do you disagree with this explanation?

Who gave them the mandate to control information about Covid? Trump was president at the time and he certainly didn't.

And even granting, for the sake of argument, that someone within the government had that job, suppressing disagreement and debate is not the right way to do it.

From the article:

"Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods. "

And Trump was wrong to do that, but please note that I was replying to:

> There are people within the government whose job it was to respond to the covid pandemic. Part of that response involved educating the public about the disease and best practices related to it, which therefore included fighting misinformation.

It wasn't Trump pushing Twitter to ban anything that disagreed with the CDC's official position, and Trump separately pushing to ban misinformation about panic buying doesn't justify it.

> … which therefore included fighting misinformation.

I fail to see how this conclusion is automatic or helpful in action. Educating people and providing best practices is harmed by taking direct action to shut down criticism and debate.

> Misinformation is spread on platforms such as Twitter, so it made sense for the government to communicate with Twitter and let them know what it considered to be a good course of action

This part I disagree with, because what is misinformation is unknownable before serious scientific study is done. It just makes the government look untrustworthy if they flip-flop from "masks are pointless" to "masks are essential" and back simply all because these policies were not based on any real science.

Similarly debate of other aspects like COVID origin, vaccine health effects etc was stifled when the real answers were unknown to science, and by steering the conversation in any particular direction before that it's done irreparable harm to the reputation of government, science and tech.

Com'on, someone linking to a poorly done study claiming it proves "drug x cures COVID" isn't misinformation? Someone posting about 5G or Bill Gates being the source of the infection isn't misinformation? Someone going on some racist tirade about Chinese people isn't misinformed hate speech? You think we should just allow every crackpot theory or idea until scientifically proven inaccurate? Plenty of people were trying to steer the conversation in specific directions with little regard for the scientific accuracy of what they were stating.

> You think we should just allow every crackpot theory or idea until scientifically proven inaccurate?

Yes, otherwise what happens when the ruling party is no longer your team?

What if everything becomes inverted, so if you tried to say Bill Gates isn't one of the biggest beneficiaries of COVID then you get "visibility filtered" AKA shadowbanned?

Then you make a detailed explanation about how the story of the Wuhan lab having had a virus leak was all just a hoax, but oops that is a final strike and now you're banned?

The bar for censorship shouldn't be so low and arbitrary. Social media platforms should exist to help us change our minds by discussing and debating with others (like we are doing right here), not be all echo chambers and filter bubbles.

The ruling party wasn't on my team and was often a source of misinformation during the height of the COVID pandemic. If I got banned for saying Bill Gates conspiracies were bullshit, then it sounds like that social media platform wasn't receptive to what I was saying. Boo hoo. Are you suggesting you'd force social media platforms to carry all voices, no matter what they're saying? How would you achieve that? Would community & content quality guidelines become illegal?

The bar for censorship shouldn't be so high that you legitimize misinformation by giving it a bigger platform than it merits. Social media can be a good place for discussion & debate, but in times when there's a national crisis occurring & you have people continually posting about how to take off-label drugs causing shortages for people who actually need it & injury to those taking it incorrectly, you run into misinformation causing real tangible harm to people. You cannot just ignore that. It's not just a run-of-the-mill philosophical debate about misinformation & censorship. The stakes are much lower in our discussion here.

> Are you suggesting you'd force social media platforms to carry all voices, no matter what they're saying? How would you achieve that? Would community & content quality guidelines become illegal?

No, my OP and this thread's link is about government intervention, which then lead to social media action.

Whilst I do think social media platforms should have additional regulation once they are big enough to become the new public square, there's no need to go that far yet and I'm uncertain of the appropriate balance.

However when it comes to the government's own response, they should have higher bar for taking action due to the oppressive influence it can have backed by it's monopoly on force. And again I state that this should be serious scientific study as the minimum prerequisite for this bar.

> in times when there's a national crisis occurring & you have people continually posting about how to take off-label drugs causing shortages for people who actually need it & injury to those taking it incorrectly, you run into misinformation causing real tangible harm to people. You cannot just ignore that.

Just like you cannot ignore the horror of slipping into a tyrannical police state like China.

Instead of shadowbanning and actual banning I was previously in favour of fact checking and warning labels under legitimately harmful information. Unfortunately even this tool has been abused by being misapplied to factual information, as well as non-harmful opinions. I have yet to see an intervention method since COVID that hasn't been corrupted to oppress the population, so I'm inclined to think that some harm is an inevitable tradeoff for living in a free society.

>No, my OP and this thread's link is about government intervention, which then lead to social media action.

I don't see a problem with private and public sector collaboration, it happens all the time. Not all communications between Twitter and the government resulted in Twitter taking action, and even when Twitter took action it does not mean they did so outside their own community guidelines.

>Whilst I do think social media platforms should have additional regulation once they are big enough to become the new public square, there's no need to go that far yet and I'm uncertain of the appropriate balance.

So which is it? You want regulation or you don't? Stop speaking out of both sides of your mouth.

>However when it comes to the government's own response, they should have higher bar for taking action due to the oppressive influence it can have backed by it's monopoly on force. And again I state that this should be serious scientific study as the minimum prerequisite for this bar.

No, governments are expected to lead and provide information to their citizens on urgent matters. In a situation like COVID you can't wait 12 - 24 months for comprehensive scientific meta-analysis studies to confirm things. It seems you want a very hands off approach during a national crisis. I assure you this would not go over well, and is just as reprehensible(e.g. lackadaisical responses to Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana or Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico), as an overly heavy handed approach(e.g. China welding people's doors shut).

Also my original reply was regarding your claim that it's not possible to disprove misinformation without serious scientific study. That statement in and of itself is misinformation. You do not need exhaustive proof to show an in-vitro study does not mean a drug is a cure for COVID, or to show confounding variables, or that there were zero cited sources for claims being made in a post.

>Just like you cannot ignore the horror of slipping into a tyrannical police state like China.

You also cannot ignore a million+ dead people, many of whom were likely duped by charlatans into believing something that eventually lead to their demise. As you note later, you're fine with this harm, it's the cost of "freedom", except you don't actually want a private company to do as it pleases it sounds like, yet you also seem to lack any tangible action items or regulations you want applied. It seems like you just want to put your hands in your pockets. I dunno?

Well if nothing else, blocking such posts has the real possibility of making the posters even more certain they've uncovered some conspiracy, and driving them to less well-monitored corners of the interwebs, where misinformation breeds like a virus. I'd agree posts containing suggestions that directly contravene expert medical advice should be tagged with warnings though.

Well if nothing else, allowing such posts to propagate and be reinforced has the side effect of legitimizing them. Tagging posts as misleading is certainly one strategy, but people also complain about that being censorship or a conspiracy against them as well. Also if the argument is we should be moderating less, not more, then you're just arguing to turn mainstream social media platforms into those less well-monitored corners of the internet. Let it stay there.

I wouldn't have an issue with some sort of shadow-blocking/ hiding of posts containing clearly dangerous misinformation. I'm not at all against moderation per se, but I don't think there's a simple one-size-fits-all approach that guarantees the best result for everyone. But I do have an overriding concern that ideas, no matter how crackpot, are best debated in the open rather than left to simmer in dark places.

If we want governmental mandates to regulate social media, let's do it. Make it law that crackpot ideas MUST be shared, and limit exactly how platforms can moderate their platform. The problem with this approach is that in the quest for freedom of speech, we'll have stripped freedom from owners of the platform to moderate their platform how they see fit.

The reality is that truly unfettered free speech & unmoderated discussions/debates devolves into all sorts of distractions from the primary goals of the platform (e.g. spam, hate speech, illegal activity, off-topic discussion). There must always be some level of moderation and censorship, even if that is at a basic level watching for spam bots & illegal activity. Typically that's not enough to ensure decorum, so you end up with additional community guidelines to set the tone for the platform.

My point here is that freedom of speech on online platforms is a mythical unicorn, that never existed, nor will it ever exist. It seems more like a wedge issue certain people like to bring up because they're unhappy with how a platform has acted towards them, and want to claim superiority by championing "free speech", even if they don't actually believe in it. For all the belly aching Musk did about Twitter, he is doing exactly the same things he complained about. That'd be fine, if he wasn't such a hypocrite about it & understood the ramifications and expectations of free speech, and the complexities of competent content moderation.

I'd also disagree that crackpot ideas are best debated in the open on social media. I think in a well moderated forum where people are held accountable, and expected to cite their sources yes. In the firehose that is social media where attention spans are limited, consumption is often on mobile devices which may hamper ability to do in-depth research, it leaves much to be desired as a place to find deeper truth easily. Also with puppet accounts, the moment you debunk one thread, ten more have popped up regurgitating the same talking points.

> unknownable before serious scientific study is done

A lot of the mis/disinformation about COVID passed this bar (i.e. serious study had been done, and there was direct evidence that countered their claims).

On top of that, if you're going to make a positive claim about something, "unknowable before serious scientific study is done" means that you shouldn't make that claim, not that anyone can say anything they want because the truth is unknowable. If no one has studied the effects of drinking bleach to cure COVID, it's not appropriate to say "drinking bleach cures COVID".

You do recall the extreme levels of misinformation that were present during 2020, right? Hospitals running out of medical equipment while people were stocking up and re-selling them? Civil War was a concern, at least in my part of the country. We had police manning the entrances to stores like Walmart and Academy sports because they couldn’t let more than a few people in at a time, and armed idiots were trying to force their way in to prove it was all a scam to control our brains.

That gets closer to a reasonable explanation for things — people executing those "information" campaigns were genuinely trying to make things better for people, perhaps motivated by their belief that, if they didn't do so, all would be lost.

It's a nice way to explain the consequence without resorting to accident or malice.

Nevertheless, in the end, they way overstepped what was needed or helpful.

The government shouldn't be doing that. Also, it's important to break down what is meant by "the government" here -- it was the FBI attempting to suppress a news story which later turned out to be true about the son of a candidate for president. That sort of thing should not happen.

Secondly, this kind of moderation is counterproductive. It gives all the conspiracy theorists a true conspiracy to point to -- they really are being suppressed by "the man" or "the Feds" or whatever. Also, no matter how much stuff gets moderated, the left will never be happy.

End result: everyone is mad at Twitter, nobody trusts anything, conspiracy theorists get to make true claims about suppression, and more people are attracted to misinformation because it was suppressed -- e.g. "the government doesn't want you to know this!" or "see what the government is trying to hide from you!"

Nowhere in this piece is the FBI mentioned...

And it's fine to make an argument against moderation in general. But that's not what this article is doing.

The FBI comes up in plenty of the other Twitter censorship stories. Covid is not a one-off, and this article exists in that broader context, or it would not be interesting. It was part of a sustained, illiberal, counterproductive, and overall pretty stupid pattern of behavior from both the government and Twitter.

Have you tried discussing these points on the submission page for those other Twitter stories?

Jim Baker is a double agent for the FBI. Everyone is Quite obvious of why he was there.

> Jim Baker is a double agent for the FBI.

Geopolitical hat on.

Elon Musk is getting close to the Saudis (Twitter), China (Gigafactory Shanghai), and Russians (necessary industrial inputs). In the past few months he's casually suggested a handover of Ukraine and Taiwan. Now he's turning on the Democrats and the FBI, or at least certain members of those organizations.

My mind wonders if the DoD will sour on his role at SpaceX. We've recently seen lawmakers impact the valuation of Tesla vis a vis tax incentives. Are Musk's foreign ties and obligations a risk to a defense company that services classified national interests?

Perhaps he or the company he keeps have enough friends within the DoD chain of command that there won't be any issues. Or maybe none of this matters. But I am half expecting to see sparks fly.

(I'm 100% reading between the lines here, and I don't have any evidence for any of my suspicions. Feel free to dismiss outright, though I would appreciate additional commentary if anyone has anything interesting to add.)

I'm pretty sure that conversations along those lines have already taken place. This is no trifle matter and Musk may think that he can shitpost himself out of any hole he digs himself into but that may well be an illusion on his part.

Yeah even going so far as replying “Epic thread!!” to Medvedev’s propaganda tweet thread with 2023 predictions like “the US will experience civil war and Musk will win the presidency in states that have been given to (?) the GOP.”

4 hours later he tried to backpedal, which is perhaps the only move more pathetic than having boosted the propaganda in the first place.

I'd bet good money Musk is no more entangled in those countries than any other big Corp or billionaire. Everyone has Chinese suppliers and Saudi investors.

You're forgetting that Elon Musk's SpaceX is providing critical StarLink Internet access to the Ukrainian armed forces.

The much more reasonable explanation for Musk's behavior with respect to the Democrats and FBI is that he does not like the censorship going on with the gradual fusing of the US security sector and US Tech companies.

> it was the FBI attempting to suppress a news story which later turned out to be true about the son of a candidate for president. That sort of thing should not happen.

No, it wasn't. It was Bidens presidential campaign asking to remove revenge porn.

> But Twitter did suppress views—and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. ... There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process [bots, contractors, and biased decision making by top level execs]".

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These debates are always tricky because as things start to get more polarized, people start to expect you to either be fully on board with Twitter as it was or fully on board with Musk's running of the place. Twitter did have moderation issues. And governments do try to weigh in on moderation decisions from companies, sometimes appropriately and sometimes inappropriately. But all of Musk's takeaways about those problems are wrong.

Twitter is a pretty good example of the difficulties of getting moderation to scale and how that can go wrong. They were in an unfortunate position of needing to figure out what medical debate was legitimate and what debate wasn't legitimate. And that was made more difficult because of the top-level executive decisions, because of poorly trained moderators, and because of a reliance on automated moderating that couldn't take tweet context into account.

And those are all real problems! They're not surprising problems, they're not a revelation, they're probably not the biggest issue facing free speech today, but yeah, they're real problems.

But what's Elon's reaction? Musk comes into this situation and slashes the moderation team, leans even more heavily into AI moderation, starts crowdsourcing decisions (because heaven knows random internet crowds definitely won't be vulnerable to group-think during contentious public debate /s), and pushing more moderation decisions to the executive level rather than into independent moderation boards that would be trying to resist personal bias in their decisions. He basically leans into every single decision up above that was problematic about how Twitter handled Covid moderation.

Even where government involvement is concerned -- if you're concerned about government pressure on your moderation team, one thing you could do to combat that pressure is have a strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too. Because hey, who needs a bunch of lawyers who are specifically trained to respond to legal threats to free speech and who have a ton of practical experience arguing for those rights in court? They were probably Democrats or something, better to get rid of them. /s

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The whole thing is just a bunch of people taking somewhat concerning but also relatively unsurprising information and treating it like it's the end of the world and the most important free speech issue of our time; and then... not doing anything to fix the problems. The whole story begins and ends at the outrage and the outrage is all that they're interested in. There's zero followup from Musk about actually solving any of these problems, he's gone in the opposite direction of a solution.

There are real free speech advocates who took issue with how Twitter handled moderation; but my guess is that most of them have probably moved to Mastodon by now because the overall ActivityPub ecosystem is more censorship-resistant than Twitter is and is better positioned to reject government pressure to censor. Meanwhile Musk's strategy is that he'll be very mad about moderation going wrong, and that will somehow fix things.

You literally have the person breaking this story calling out specific problems with Twitter's moderation process, and they're all problems that Musk has been doubling down on. I don't know how to take that response seriously.

Definitely agree wrt the last point. It's bizarre that one of the one hand as far as I know Twitter is still committed to moderating a wide range of content (hate speech, violent media, etc.) but on the other hand Musk has doubled down on bots and calling the shots in a top down manner (exactly what this article called out).

And the “on the fly” policy changes at twitter probably have way less internal debate now than at the time.

Mastodon seems vulnerable to ideological splitting where you get two parallel worlds that don't talk to each other. E.g. one that believes that transwomen aren't women and that Africans are less intelligent and one that doesn't.

"Vulnerable" is an odd word to use there. "Ideological splitting" is the way humans have interacted since the Tower of Babel. Forcing everyone into the same conversation is a guaranteed way to produce conflict. I would say "Mastodon facilitates ideological splitting as a way to have more pleasant conversations and less absurd arguments."

Prolonged non hostile exposure is what prevents conflict. Otherwise you get radicalization.

Isn't this kind of orthogonal to the free speech debate?

There are reasons to be worried about community silos, but my point wasn't that Mastodon is perfect, it was that it's more resistant to censorship than Twitter is (particularly government censorship).

Having large community spaces where everyone interacts might be a worthy goal, but those spaces are often going to require a larger degree of moderation and policing to stay civil. It's a tradeoff that (as far as I can tell) Musk doesn't seem to advocate for -- his policy seems to be that people should block/mute whatever they disagree with, and the platform shouldn't make that decision for them. If that's someone's approach to free speech and they want individual or small-group control rather than platform-wide standards, then Mastodon is a pretty interesting implementation of that idea.

Compare this with something like HN -- there's one feed for everyone and limited blocking tools. That forces everyone to interact with each other, but also means that HN mods and users are both a lot more involved in debating what stories are allowed and how discourse is conducted, and those decisions impact more of the community when they're made.

>>strong legal team that helps respond to these requests. So naturally Elon gutted that team too

Seems like a large percentage of that team was former employees of the government, former FBI agents, former DOJ, etc. or have close familial ties to active government agents

If that is who you hire to "push" back against the government then you are not going to get much push back, it seems to me (and many others) Twitter was not forming teams to resist government influence but to deepen it.

I think gutting the teams was the correct move

> I think gutting the teams was the correct move

If you don't trust the previous teams, then fire them and hire new people. Firing these teams and leaving them gutted was definitely not the correct move. If you're worried about the effectiveness of your current fire department, the solution is not to stop having a fire department, it's to get a better one.

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Going after the legal team in particular is a little strange, because you can call out Twitter's upper management, moderation teams, and policy stakeholders as lacking nuance/neutrality, but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room. They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.

If there was any team you were going to keep to help you push back against government requests, it probably would have been the lawyers.

----

But it goes back to -- it doesn't seem like Musk is actually interested in building effective structures to support free speech, it seems like his interest begins and ends with complaining about the existing structures. Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.

How do you know that did not happen? I know for sure the consolidated and moved around positions. Just because the people salty they got fired from their job due to poor performance, and political basis does not mean they did not put people in those positions.

Personally I think the platform is better today. The most "journalist" scream about it being unsafe the more I believe Elon is doing a great job, because I do not trust anyone at Washington Post, NyTimes, NBC, CBS, CNN, or any other major main stream propaganda source, and I trust even less their politically baised "research" non-profits.

>but Twitter's lawyers were arguably the best free-speech advocates in the room.

No they were not, the most recent one fired was literally former FBI. Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". they are for "free speech" the same way the modern ACLU is, only if you have the "correct" speech

>>They challenged government/police orders to unmask users, went to court on behalf of users during lawsuits. They were good at their jobs.

Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.

>>Hire whoever you want, but having a shoestring moderation/legal team at Twitter will make these problems worse.

If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM, instead were more worried about suppressing political speech and carrying the water for one political party.

> How do you know that did not happen?

Because Twitter's staff numbers are public? What are you talking about, are you going to try and claim that Twitter has the same number of moderators now that it used to? It doesn't.

This is not something that's debatable, Twitter's moderation teams today are smaller than they were before he took over the company.

> Under what basis to you believe Twitters lawyers were the "best free-speech advocates". [...] Sorry that does not make you the best free-speech advocates.

It's a heck of a lot more practical and useful than just complaining about it. They did what lawyers are supposed to do, they showed up in court and defended free speech rights.

Twitter's lawyers took on government cases and challenged police orders that other social media companies would have rolled over and accepted -- in particular around the right to anonymity and parody. This is important foundational stuff that free speech rights online are built on.

But again, if Musk disagrees, more power to him. It's not a problem for Musk to hire different lawyers, the problem is that he hasn't really done that. The most he's done is brought over some lawyers from Tesla that are essentially doing double-duty now, but he doesn't seem to have built a legal team that's centered around specifically defending free speech rights for users or challenging government requests.

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> If you listen to the people that took over from the ones that were fired it seems like the former Management was not providing money and resources for real enforcement for things like CSAM

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Musk makes a big deal about this stuff, but he has literally just gutted these teams. There are way fewer moderators right now on Twitter looking for CSAM, and Musk is leaning into automated/contracted moderation to try and fill in the gaps -- which pretty much everyone dealing with child safety agrees is not a sufficient approach for this kind of moderation. He's dropped CSAM teams for some countries down to the single-digits of workers.

Musk has criticisms about the amount of resources that Twitter was devoting to CSAM. But his response isn't to increase those resources. His policy seems to be that if you say something is important, it just magically gets better because you say you care about it. But it doesn't, you have to actually put work into it and devote resources to making it better.

The CSAM example is just so wild to me, because it's such a clear example of Musk criticizing Twitter for something and then doubling down and doing the same thing to an even greater degree.

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> Personally I think the platform is better today.

Good for you, but this is a wildly simplistic take on free speech. It undermines legitimate conversations about real problems Twitter had with moderation in the past to simplify the issue down to "he banned some journalists I don't like and let some right-wing people back on the platform."

Structurally, he's not really doing anything. He's just gutting teams and complaining about the way they used to run.

>>Because Twitter's staff numbers are public? What are you talking about

Where? that was true when they were a public company and such things were part of the Investor reports, and SEC filings, but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore.

>>This is not something that's debatable

Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue

>Twitter's moderation teams today are smaller than they were before he took over the company.

The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams. I think there was ALOT of babysitting jobs at pre-elon twitter, people not doing a whole lot of actual work, i.e Wine on Tap, meditation rooms, etc like the "day in the life" videos showed

I am sure they were having alot of meetings about doing work, but very little work being done

>>They did what lawyers are supposed to do, they showed up in court

would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers?

>>Twitter's lawyers took on government cases and challenged police orders that other social media companies would have rolled over and accepted

This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team. I will fully admit I am biased agaist them because clearly did not like or want to have people like me speaking on the platform. I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things

to me they were a net negative for free expression, I am sure you disagree simply because the speech you like was not suppressed, and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was.

>but he has literally just gutted these teams

That is actually false, there were separate teams dealing with moderation, CSAM was not under the same team, he infact gutted the other teams and expanded the resources for the people working on CSAM.

> but as a private company I dont think that data is public anymore.

Twitter has publicly laid off about 75% of its staff fairly evenly across the entire company. We don't have exact counts of employees, but we know how many employees the company used to have, and we know roughly how many were fired.

So now look at job postings; has Twitter put out calls to hire thousands of moderators to replace those people? No.

> Everything is debatable, I will debate if the sky is blue

Sure, whatever, you can debate anything you'd like. But you're going to have a hard time getting people to humor you or take you seriously. If your argument is that actually Twitter hasn't slashed its staff and there are tons of moderators and that all of the reports about it are false, then you're not arguing a coherent enough position to take seriously.

> The question is not raw numbers but the effective nature of the teams.

When you are doing human moderation specifically, raw numbers matter. A human being can only physically review a finite number of abuse reports a day, and as they are stretched more and as they are pressured to make faster decisions, their accuracy goes down. This is generally agreed on by pretty much everyone -- which is exactly why Twitter was criticized in the past for its moderation approaches.

Twitter's moderation teams (which were heavily reliant on contractors who didn't get the perks you're talking about in the first place) were understaffed before Elon took over. The article we are talking under directly calls this out as a problem.

So no, you can't fire most of those people and not replace them and expect the remaining people to be better at moderation, it just doesn't work that way. Human moderation means that at some point in the process, a human being needs to physically look at the content being reported and make an informed decision. That requires raw numbers.

> would it surprise you to learn that a good percentage of lawyers never go to court at all? Specifically corporate lawyers?

Twitter's legal team did often show up to court. Why do you think I'm praising them? Yes, I know that many legal teams in corporations don't get involved in actual cases that often, that's why Twitter's legal team deserves some level of praise for being different.

> This is false, other companies have taken objections to government over reach as well, I think you have a rose colored view of their legal team.

Twitter's legal team was not perfect, but they were uncharacteristically aggressive about preserving anonymity compared to other social media companies. I'm not talking about just taking objections to the government, Twitter's legal team has literally sued the government on behalf of individual users before.

Again, not perfect. But noticeably aggressive about this stuff beyond what many of their competitors were doing.

> and the speech you think should be suppressed on the platform was. [...] I wonder if you can recognize you bais in favor of them where by you simply forgive, forget or excuse all their bad behavior because they did a a few small good things

I feel like you're conflating Twitter's legal team with every single other team on the platform? Do you think that Twitter's lawyers were specifically responsible for every bad moderation decision that the company made? Twitter's lawyers were not in charge of hiring moderators or deciding what resources they would get. They weren't in charge of deciding Twitter's overall moderation direction, you are thinking of management and heads of safety.

Once again, you don't have to like Twitter's legal team. Are you able to recognize that regardless of whether or not you like the legal team Twitter used to have, it is still important for free speech that Twitter have a proactive legal team today that isn't jumping between multiple companies? The problem isn't that Musk people fired people, the problem is that he didn't follow that up by hiring.

I don't particularly care if Musk feels good about existing staff. It's just foolish for his followup to firing people not to be to bring in qualified replacements.

----

> That is actually false

It is actually not. Twitter's overall moderation teams are smaller than than they used to be, and that has included the dissolving (and near-dissolving) of specific CSAM teams, and severing ties with a ton of contractors. Now, I'm sure that Musk would argue he's just merged teams together or given people shared responsibilities. But I will point out that doubling up responsibilities for CSAM moderation teams is also stretching them thin.

You can't just say something is false if you don't like it. Who has been hired to replace the heads of child safety that were fired? What contractors have been brought in to replace the contractors that Twitter severed ties with? You don't think Musk would be bragging about those job postings and hires if they existed?

As a piece of history, Twitter tried to launch an OnlyFans competitor in pre-Musk days and the project was scrapped in part because Twitter acknowledged internally at the time that it did not have resources to do CSAM moderating at the scale necessary to support that platform. Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators specifically for handling CSAM, that problem hasn't changed.

Shuffling people around wouldn't be enough to fix that problem even if Musk had the people available to shuffle around. Which to be clear, he literally doesn't, Twitter's employee count across the board including its moderation teams is a fraction of what it used to be.

>You can't just say something is false if you don't like it.

No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over, and previous twitter exec turned a blind eye to the issue ignoring both internal and external sources while they focused on banning wrong think

>>Unless you have a press release somewhere about Twitter hiring thousands and thousands of additional moderators

I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators.

Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin [1], current head of trust and safety where she specifically before Elon "were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding." Or the Account of @elizableu where she as chronicled the rapid improvements Elon has brought to this subject.

it is not a matter of my personal preference, I trust the people on the ground, not the media.

[1] https://twitter.com/ellagirwin/status/1601310614948745216

> No I trust experts in the field who by and large say CSAM is WAY WAY WAY down on the platform since Elon took over

Which experts and how is this being measured? Because I can't find sources that confirm that claim: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexandralevine/2022/11/18/elon...

Do you have ANY actual numbers to back that up, at all? Let alone numbers measured by independent experts and not just filtered through Twitter PR?

> I care about the amount of content, not the number of moderators.

I don't know how to get across to you that human moderation requires humans.

The act of moderation requires a human being to sit down, look at a piece of content, and decide if it's in violation of a policy. Then that process is repeated over and over again for the duration of the workday. Having bodies in the chairs to look at the content is not optional.

Particularly not where CSAM is concerned, which is an area where moderator turnover is astronomical because moderating CSAM is effectively the equivalent of feeding your brain poison every day until you have a breakdown and have to go to therapy. It is a nasty, horrible job and there really isn't a way around the fact that it requires a lot of moderators working in rotations. There's a limit to how often someone can be shown horrifying images in a workweek before they decide that they would rather be doing anything at all other than continuing to show up at work.

That part of the moderation job isn't glamorous, and it usually happens behind the scenes with contractors. It's an awful part of the tech industry that doesn't get much attention because it's unpleasant to talk about and unpleasant to acknowledge how much we rely on underpaid contractors ruining their own lives to keep our platforms safe. But the gist is that an engineer doing "hardcore programming" is not a substitute for having thousands and thousands of moderators actually reviewing images.

----

> Just look at the tweets from Ella Irwin

That Elon's current head of safety is praising him isn't surprising -- one thing we've all learned from the way he's run Twitter is that you don't get to work for Elon at all unless you're pretty proactive about praising him.

But there have been zero independent measurements that confirm these claims, and actual experts in the field (read, not just a current employee and a couple fan/activist accounts) are concerned about the direction the platform is headed and about the lack of investment in moderation teams.

But since those experts are talking to journalists and not just posting to Twitter, maybe it doesn't matter what they think /s.

There WAS a LOT of misinformation about covid, and a lot of it could cause real harm.

Quite true. Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID. It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections. That irrevocably shattered a whole lot of people's faith in the CDC and the government in general. People saw that the agency tasked with protecting their lives had lied to them, and once the truth was revealed discovered those lies had done nothing but open the door for price gougers to buy up the entire mask supply. What the CDC had told them not to buy for a dime a piece they now told them to buy for ten dollars a piece, and the new law now required them to have it. Once they threw their own credibility on the fire, people had to go looking for something else to believe in. For many of them it was crazy conspiracy theories and demagogues.

> Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID.

They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.

We also knew a lot less about what was going on at that time, and once again, that means we need to extend some degree of leniency to folks making conservative if difficult choices like this. If it came down to it yeah of course we need to secure the supply for first responders first.

Now we never should have been in that position in the first place but that was the fault of past administrations, not the CDC in the moment and didn't change what needed to be done.

> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections.

Some masks, but not all masks. Single layer cloth masks do nothing. [1] N95s sure, but even at peak COVID most people weren't wearing N95s, they were wearing non-medical surgical-style masks, which only block between 30 and 70% of particles.

Even still while less effective than N95s, those surgical masks do help. [2]

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/8460528/masks-effectiveness-omicr...

[2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg6296

An important consideration that I have not seen mentioned yet is that masks have a 'best before date', this is because they are infused with a static charge that aims to attract particles to the mask material and this charge doesn't last forever. You can 'recharge' masks but that's a lot of work and usually not in the normal path for such supplies. So stockpiles that were present were not going to be effective against viruses (which are very small particles). Add to that that this was before there was positive confirmation the virus was airborne (though there were plenty of people suggesting that none had proof) to make the chaos complete. I don't think that even with hindsight there was a set of decisions that would not have left something to be disputed.

Other countries got it right. When the CDC was dithering about whether masks work and whether the virus was airborne (which should have been clear by early February with all the case evidence we had from Asia), their South Korean counterparts ordered Samsung to purchase tons of meltblown fibers, because making the masks themselves is not hard.

Then the Korean government instituted limits on exports and rationing of what was on the market. I worked in a hospital in Seoul, and we (non-caregivers) got two N95s per week.

This is what the US government should have done: used the defense production act to provide a guaranteed purchaser with 2 or 3-year contracts for whoever could manufacture masks or mask components domestically ASAP, instead of ruining their credibility to calm panic, and then coordinated the states in temporarily controlling rationing until supplies stabilized.

The idiocy that is a national stockpile is another thing. If the stockpile is of persihables what you really need is a nationally mandated buffer, with the govt paying suppliers to rotate through X days of stock on hand.

I wonder how much of the damage to South Korea was due to that one group of people that went around infecting others on purpose, if not for that they may well have done much better still.

> and whether the virus was airborne

The WHO guidelines are to assume an atypical pneumonia is airborne until it’s proven not to be.

The WHO didn’t follow its guidelines and instead parroted the CCP propaganda.

(We knew it was airborne in December 2019)

Interesting. That's also the route our hospital took for Monkeypox: negative pressure isolation wards until proven not airborne. I'm quite satisfied that Korean public health authorities understand the precautionary principle.

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders.

That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.

Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?

I'm no American but it was the exactly the same here in Germany, with exactly the same consequences. It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.

> That's still lying. They gave you, the individual, false information, ...

Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times.

> ... and not for your own good. Quite the contrary, that misinformation would actually harm you if you believed it.

No, it was for the individual good. Hoarding of masks by randos in the middle of nowhere leading to no supply for the first responders in hospital puts you, the individual, at greater risk.

If all the hospital staff have COVID and no ability to stop transmission within hospital because Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks, yes, that puts you at risk.

You can weigh the trade-offs but your statement that there was no other way of viewing the situation is simply wrong.

> Do you really not see how destructive this was? Do you really expect people to not only forgive but most importantly forget this lie, just because they "made it clear after the fact"? How were you supposed to know they're not lying, again, about the vaccines and their safety?

Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for. It was their job to mitigate to the best of their abilities. Tough times call for tough decisions. We know how groups react, we knew what people would have done.

I'm pissed the stockpiles were allowed to run low, and I'm happy the first-responders were prioritized as I believe this gave everyone the best chance.

> It really baffles me when now government officials whine about people not trusting them, anymore.

It doesn't surprise me, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice at the time given what we knew.

[edit] They had an optimization problem: basically nobody in the population had COVID at the time, but those who did were likely to end up in hospital. Spreading out the limited masks over a population where almost nobody had it put far more people at risk than concentrating the supply in hospitals where far more people had it. This isn't rocket science. People were hoarding pasta at the time, and you think people were going to make good decisions about masks? The first casualty of War is Truth as they say.

Yes it was lying. Yes it was false information. No, that's not outside the scope of their role at times.

Lying to people about their personal health for the greater good of society gets you the Tuskegee Experiment.

Completely different, sorry, and a wildly disingenuous comparison. There was no public health crisis at the time that required this, let alone to run it for 40 years. Let's keep to intellectually honest discourse and avoid hyperbole shall we? This is a contentious enough topic as is.

> wildly disingenuous comparison

No, it is not. The parallels are there so strikingly.

The only similarity is an authority figure said something untrue. By that measure the NORAD Santa tracker is "like Tuskegee."

Shades of grey exist and context matters. The world is not black and white and that isn't comfortable. However the point of delegating authority is to make difficult decisions with imperfect information in challenging circumstances that don't make sense at an individual level.

Not to mention the commenter who even made that comparison seems to have no idea what Tuskegee was actually known for (as they make no mention of the racial animus inherent in the 'study' if you can even call it that). It's wild to me that someone would make that comparison with the benefit of Wikipedia in this the year of our lord 2022.

Both were public health officials lying to citizens about the effectiveness of particular actions in protecting their own health. The Tuskegee Experiment directly damaged the health of 458 people and killed 128 of them. The CDC lying about masks put the health of 330 million people at risk and killed...who knows? Maybe it saved more than it killed, but it did kill people.

And that's the thing. The CDC didn't come out and say "we lied to you but the ends justified the means; killing some of you was worth saving more of you". They just tried to pretend it never happened, or alternatively that nobody could possibly have any idea that face masks could help you not infect your neighbors.

Primum non nocere

Further down thread, we acknowledge that certain doctors were dosing people with medicine and lying to them about it.

>As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.

>“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

>As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.

Since this was in the middle of a public heath crisis, that behavior is acceptable and the doctor in question should not have lost his license, right?

For those not already familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study

What about telling people the truth, that there were no masks for everyone and they had to prioritize first responders? Treat people like adults and they will behave like adults. Treat them like kids and they'll behave like kids.

Also, once you know you have been lied to, the trust is shattered, whatever the excuses. How people is going to trust again the CDC, knowing that it lied before?

Because large groups of people have shown, time and again, they don't act rationally.

Look at toilet paper - one rumour that it would run out, despite shops, the government, everyone, saying there is more than enough and the rabble went out and hoarded.

The solution to the toilet paper problem wasn't lying to everyone by telling them that toilet paper was ineffective at removing shit from our asses. It was ultimately handled at the retail end where stores limited the number that people could buy and/or held back inventory.

Masks could have been handled in the same way: from the manufacturer/retailer end. Masks could have been pulled off shelves and diverted to healthcare workers until they could be sold in limited numbers to consumers.

> It was ultimately handled at the retail end

To be clear “handling” here meant that there were extensive and pervasive country-wide shortages, and many people went without toilet paper for weeks, including myself. People who needed toilet paper went without, while others hoarded more than they’d need for a year.

That’s the problem people were trying to avoid with masks. First responders and doctors needed them most, but we had people out there literally willing to buy as many as they could for their own personal supply. You can’t wait for the invisible hand of the market to just sort this kind of thing out.

I agree, it was miserable for people who couldn't get any and retailers took way too long to respond. It absolutely could have been handled better. I was glad to see stores refuse to allow returns and crack down on price gouging afterwards at least. Even the justice system got involved

https://www.today.com/news/brothers-who-hoarded-17-700-bottl...

> removing shit from our asses.

Get a bidet, and buy a newspaper (no need to read it; it's already covered in shit).

> they don't act rationally.

Buying toilet paper when there is a toilet paper "bank run" is rational just as it is rational to take out your money from a failing bank.

Were I lived we had toilet paper but were all out of yeast. One person could buy all the store's 300 yeast bags for like 30USD. And as soon as people realized the yeast were gone they seemed to always buy yeast when available, making a shortage for a long time.

A way to prevent this is some soft limit on the amount people can buy. But it need to be in place before the shelves are empty.

> Look at toilet paper

So you are saying, the authorities should have send out a public messaging: "Don't buy toilet paper, toilet paper doesn't work", and that would have solved the situation?

Toilet paper doesn't work. It just moves the shit around. Wash your sphincter with water.

I don’t believe toilet paper ran out because of one ‘rumor it would run out’. I think it running out was just an example of how fragile or supply chains and distribution of goods really is. It wasn’t just TP, it was bread, milk, frozen/canned vegetables, and other essential ‘raw materials’. There are other things that cause runs on groceries as well, like a big snow storm for example. It’s not like we’ve never seen it before, but not for the extended amount of time that the fear and panic Covid caused. It should be rude wake up call to all of us that this modern way of living we have created can all come collapsing down in an instant. There isn’t nearly enough grocery stores or supplies to satiate everyone in a time of crisis/ panic. The way they operate is predicated on the assumption that goods will trickle in & out at a mostly constant, slow rate.

And it ran out. Did you go buy toilet paper when there was a run on it? If not, did you run out of toilet paper? Stores around me were empty for weeks. You can argue that they were empty because of the run on toilet paper but that is of small comfort when you are sitting at home and your family is having weekly votes to decide their least favorite of their dwindling paperback novels. I bought a few cases of it as soon as I heard the first rumor of supplies being low. You may call me part of the rabble but my family was taken care of.

Some people are convinced they are being lied to by people in power. Even if it's not true 99% of the time, the 1% will harden their beliefs.

You are coming up against a confirmation bias.

If my doctor lied to me about effectiveness or other aspects of my medication 1% of the time, they would rightly lose their medical license and go to prison if their lies caused any harm.

If your doctor was right 99% of the time, you would listen to them without much critical pushback. If your bar for trusted anyone else in this world is 100% accuracy, you can't ever trust anyone.

Well, it worked so well for the toilet paper, who could think there'd be a negative reaction if everyone thought they'd die from the mystery illness w/o the PPE that needed to be saved for medical professionals. Yeah, totally great point you made there.

Once you realise governments feel justified using the "noble lie", you will never trust them again.

That should be put in the “pro” column when judging the CDC’s actions then?

> Again, a crap situation, but one that the CDC wasn't responsible for.

They simply messed up. All they had to do was say nothing and reach out to the manufacturers making N95 masks and their retailers. Just going to Walmart and Amazon and getting them to pull their stock would have prevented the vast majority of people from getting their hands on them. A non-trivial number of Americans at the time had already been wrongly and loudly bleating about how masks were useless and were really about "controlling the population".

The CDC lying to the public was plain wrong. However well-intentioned, it was a terrible shortsighted error in judgement that cost them all credibility. The CDC is perhaps the one agency we most need people to trust and they proved themselves to be untrustworthy.

The better question is: Knowing we've had a respiratory pandemic in the recent past, and knowing another would happen eventually, why were we so unprepared? And who - naming names - is responsible for that?

Why isn't this being asked and discussed?

No doubt! Even if the CDC hadn't lied they'd still have a lot to answer for.

My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased.

The bigger issue is the sheer cost of preparation against an exponentially-reproducing threat.

All other disasters can be prepared for with state of the art gear because they are, by nature, limited. Ergo, a limit amount of gear can be rapidly transported to location and will suffice.

In contrast, a pandemic requires "multiple for every single person" levels of stock. Which is outside most capitalist supply bounds (i.e. no one can even produce that much stock).

Just do stock rotation. Bring stock in, release old stock to hospitals and such where it will be used right away.

Think in quantities. Hospitals in normal times don't consume the number of masks you'd need to stockpile for a pandemic situation.

Possibly. But either stockpile or product them locally so production can be ramped up for local populous in the time of a pandemic. And make sending masks overseas illegal.

Too many people were buying up shops of marks and sending them back to China. That hurts us even more.

A ton of masks used in the US were assembled in China, because they have the manufacturing capacity and labor cost advantage, even if they were built with meltblown filters produced in the US.

If the goal is pandemic preparedness, it would probably be most efficient to just build and mothball production lines, doing limited runs yearly to exercise the machinery.

The government has more than enough land and warehouse space.

As far as I understand, none of the components (or machinery to produce them) are particularly cutting edge... just limited because they were sized for pre-pandemic sales volume.

At least where I am (Canada) hospitals all buy through a couple of “buying groups”, so it’s not a bad way to get rid of lots of stock quickly.

N95s are used in many industries, and it’s a liquid market. Not hard to call up a big industrial distributor and say “hey, we have these masks that expire in 1yr, want to have a sale?”

We can invent and manufactur a bomber that evades radar. Mask are 5 to 10 orders of magnitude less involved.

The only responsible excuse is incompetence or negligence. We, the USA, were completely unprepared.

incompetence AND negligence

> My understanding is that N95 masks have a shelf life (2-5 years?), so stock would need to be regularly repurchased.

“Shelf-life” on non-perishable goods is highly conservative and often regulated by profit motive. Millions of N95 and P95 respirators were destroyed shortly before the pandemic due to “shelf life” and yet would have been a god send compared to having nothing or treating active COVID cases with a t-shirt or bandana over your face as happened in many US hospitals.

Proper planning could have rotated stock to maintain shelf life, slightly less proper planning could have realized the sheer stupidity of destroying working strategic materials due to an arbitrary and made up number.

We regularly enrich The MIC with over-budget weapons, certainly we can figure out how to manufacture N95 masks and rotate them as necessary.

This is Respiratory Pandemic 101. It's a threshold no expert should be tolerant of and/or should fail. Any other excuse is propaganda.

In Canada, it was partly a coverup for the government destroying the N95 & PPE stockpile it put together after SARS1, because it expired before another pandemic happened.

At the federal and provincial levels.

And no, they didn’t replace the stock.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2020/03/25/p...

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5530081

Our stockpile wasn't maintained and replenished either. I don't think anyone got in trouble for that failure, but I hope they did and I just didn't hear about it.

Of course nobody got in trouble for that. They were rewarded handsomely.

If the government quietly convinced all major retailers to stop selling masks that would’ve been 10000x more detrimental than the mixed messaging early on.

If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.

It would have had worse short term political consequences because it would have been an unpopular decision. But it wouldn’t have reinforced the worldview of conspiracy theorists.

They screwed up a bunch of things during COVID, but not many really trustworthy organizations actually just straight-up lied. Having something concrete to point to can’t help.

I don't think it would have even been unpopular. Most people understand that the masks needed to go to first responders.

My fairly anodyne conspiracy theory is that the government actually just missed the ball completely — didn’t want to admit it was going to be a big deal, etc, so they gave the “masks not necessary” advice. Then as the narrative was developing it became less embarrassing to appear manipulative than wrong and so here we are.

If they really wanted to save PPE for the hospitals, they could have made some calls to Walmart, Home Depot, and friends to pull it from the shelves. If it were an attempt at manipulation it would have been executed more smoothly.

> If someone could produce even one document implying that this was discussed at all it would’ve been catastrophic.

Why? that sounds like a pretty reasonable measure to me. The government has every right to ask companies to limit supply or pull stock off shelves in a crisis. Hell, it could force them to if needed and bring back rationing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States

So, did you know there are no manufacturers in the US that can produce N95 at scale? Even now many masks still come from china and Asia. There was an article about one company in the US that has ceased manufacturing because the hospitals who purchased from them in prior pandemics (eg: h1n1) promised to keep buying but the hospitals fell to cost cutting and moved purchasing back to china.

In these circumstances capitalism directs us to the cheapest solution. Not the most robust solution. The solution is basically government as a guaranteed buyer. Yet this factory never had that and went out of business and even in Covid times didn’t come back afaik.

Finally remember that mask-nationalism was popping up in 2020. China was restricting exports of masks and so was the U.S. and Europe. The difficulty of acquiring masks was not to be underestimated. There were additional sordid details of government sponsored programs being used to personally enrich certain (relatives of potus) people.

And during the alpha strain of Covid it turns out the relatively low infectiveness combined with droplet control via cloth masks actually did the trick and reduced spread. Pediatric flu deaths went from ~150 to 1 in the 2020 season. One! All thanks to distancing and masks. We literally made a strain of the flu extinct via masks.

You can just hand wave away anything with 'at scale'.

https://news.3m.com/3M-Aberdeen-workers-make-1-billion-N95s-...

I guess 95 million a month isn't enough for everyone in the country to put a new one on weekly, but it probably covers a significant portion of institutional need.

> They simply messed up.

It's amazing how quickly human fallibility is forgotten when the motivations align with ideologically.

The achilles heel of every conspiracy is the idea that everything that happens is 100% planned and intended.

This is precisely the closed-world solution that authoritarian governments lean on, with the exact same results.

The open-world answer is to tell people the correct information, use government mandates to mitigate the immediate shortages for healthcare workers, and use government economic power to spin up production asafp, and make politicians actually do their job of leading people through the crisis.

> Bob the Prepper has filled his underground HEPA filtered bunker with masks

As a bit of a prepper, being a prepper is about being prepared. Being prepared means you don’t need to buy essential PPE in the midst of a crisis.

What I observed were people hoarding to intentionally cause supply shortages so they could price gouge on the secondary market. Scalpers in other words. Preppers and Scalpers are not the same thing and the continuous insinuations that they are is as offensive as it is stupid.

Preppers are the only reason many communities had PPE for medical staff. I donated respirators and P95 masks to my local hospital during COVID, exactly zero of which were purchased during the pandemic. In fact I didn’t buy any masks during the pandemic except a cloth mask later on.

Given that a situation like COVID was pretty much bound to happen sooner rather than later, most preppers consider biohazards as one of the primary things they prepare for.

They did the same in Spain. And it is very very hard not to fall for conspiracy theories when essentially all the west governments simultaneously lied about the face masks effectiveness.

Why fall into conspiracies when the pragmatic answer is the more logical one?

No clue, but many people do.

What is the pragmatic and non-conspiracy answer you are imagining? As I understand it, a group of people coordinating in secret to take actions that the public would not let them take if the secrecy were broken is pretty much the definition of a conspiracy.

This abuses the word conspiracy theory, which implies a malevolent plan (at least in the common use of the word) as opposed to a benevolent plan. Your argument is incredibly disingenuous.

A conspiracy whose conspirators believe they are doing a morally good thing is still a conspiracy. In fact, in one or another way this is probably the case for most conspiracies - as they say, nobody is the villain of their own story. Does it make a difference if some people outside of the conspiring circle agree with the conspirators that their cause is righteous? I don't see why, and it's not like everyone or even an overwhelming majority agrees - otherwise there would be no need to conspire.

I didn't speak to their individualized or group subjective motivation, but an objective measure of what was done, so your whole response is completely off.

The pragmatic answer is that the government wanted to secure supplies for social services first.

Word choice. Government officials, primarily unelected, conspired to secure supplies for their agencies first, and we're willing to knowingly lie and politicize to do it.

Was it pragmatic? Sure. Morally right? Probably no, if ends don't justify means.

Doesn't mean the pragmatic answer also wasn't a conspriacy.

Apparently the ends don't ever justify the means according to some.

It's not necessarily about the ends never justifying the means; some of us just have arrived at the impression that the same means of deception and authoritarianism are being justified so often by a variety of ends that perhaps their proponents don't actually believe there is a terrible lot of justification needed for them.

I feel like you are straying from the actual topic at hand. Rationing n-95 masks = "deception and authoritarianism"? I see the deception. The rest of your sentence I don't understand at all.

That multiple government wanted to secure supplies is logical. That multiple governments decided to do so by lying about the effectiveness of the face masks is suspicious.

It reminds me of a time where multiple governments were really sure that Irak had WMDs.

That's not incompatible with it being a conspiracy, though. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

recently conspiracy has been the more pragmatic and logical answer though, that's the point

Such as?

any example at all really, will do

Misinformation and lying with good intentions is still misinfo and lying.

>The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.

I understand how dangerous it is for the government to lie, but what do people think would have been the proper approach here? Do we not remember what it was like during the early pandemic and all the hoarding that was going on? Did we forget how hospitals and retirement homes were using garbage bags and scuba equipment as PPE? Sometimes all the choices are bad. The choice to put the safety of medical professionals fighting the pandemic head on above the safety of the general citizenry seems like the least bad option. Because if the medical system collapsed, which seemed like a real possibility at the time, that would put the general citizenry in even more danger.

The proper approach would have been to pass emergency legislation establishing mask rationing and distribution. If need be, confiscate the entire existing supply and direct it to the hospitals. But don't lie about it.

Is confiscating privately owned safety equipment the more democratic and libertarian approach than trying to convince people they shouldn't buy that equipment in the first place? That seems way more dystopian to me.

"Trying to convince people" implies a good faith approach - i.e. being open about what you want and why. Lying to people that masks are no good is not "convincing" them to not buy masks - it's misleading them to do so.

And yes, I think that between lying to literally everybody, and confiscating the property of some companies, the latter is much preferable from a democratic perspective. Indeed, it's just eminent domain, for which there's explicit provisions in constitution and/or laws of most (all?) democratic countries. And since it's done openly, if citizens are unhappy about it, they can always punish the politicians who did so in the next elections; but you can't do that to unelected bureaucrats and private actors, and especially not if they conceal what they're doing.

Indeed. How many people saw the CDC lied about masks and then poisoned themselves because they thought the CDC was lying about ivermectin or hydrochloroquine? After she caught covid it took me days to convince my grandmother to stop taking ivermectin.

That might’ve worked if she had a worm infection. People who take ivermectin to treat worm infections have better health outcomes for covid, the cause being that worms are bad for you.

Ivermectin is used on billions of people and proven quite safe.

Taking a drug that gave her intense and persistent diarrhea is not safe for an eighty year old who already had trouble staying hydrated.

It's not pleasant but it is generally considered to be safe in normal doses. To give you an idea of how ubiquitous its use is, it is used on 3 day old kittens and they're always fine. Then again, each patient is different and no one knows her better than her family, and if they feel it poses a risk, that's fair enough.

Quality of life is also important, and her experience sounds unpleasant, so your concern is justified regardless.

I don't know, I think eminent domain is in the Constitution because the founders knew that was an extremely dangerous power of the government to just take things by force from the populous. There is no Constitutional requirement that our leaders, elected or not, have to be truthful with us 100% of the time.

It is the difference between action and speech. Action is generally more dangerous. It is a little weird to me that in this discussion of the dangers of the government limiting speech, some people are more fearful of the government's speech than the government's action. It is a lot easier to simply ignore what the government says than try to hold on to my property when the men with guns come knocking at my door.

Yes, it is an extremely dangerous power. It is also, unfortunately, sometimes necessary, especially in emergencies. I'm generally strongly opposed to eminent domain when it's used for "economic development" and other such goals, but COVID was a textbook example where it was warranted.

And as for the difference between "speech" and "action", what the released emails show is that the government didn't stop at speech - it used Twitter as a proxy for censorship, and censorship is an action.

Yes, confiscating privately owned equipment and telling people you need them in hospitals is better than lying to people and telling them their equipment doesn't work because secretly they need them for hospitals.

I don't know why you think that's more dystopian.

The government coming to my home and demanding I hand over my private property that the government tells me is vital for protecting my health during a pandemic is pretty dystopian. If you believe that the government lying to us is dystopian, then we have always lived in a dystopia.

I live in Canada where they do this already based on how scary a gun looks (rather than their functionality) so maybe that's why I find it more palatable than being lied to.

Nobody suggested that the government come to your home. If somebody already has a stash of masks, let them have it. I was talking about the masks that were in the warehouses (or en route to them).

what do people think would have been the proper approach here

Tell us the truth. "N95s should be reserved for medical personnel but surgical masks provide nominal protection for yourself and significant protection for others you might infect."

People realizing the CDC can and will lie to them has already been and will be far into the future responsible for countless deaths. Not only that, it makes us question what else the CDC has just decided is worth lying to us about. Do they manipulate statistics to "save people"? Do they falsify treatment data? If they'll lie to us about one thing they'll lie to us about another. Every single effort they make for the next decade or more is irreversibly tainted.

Once again, there was already hoarding. This would have led to even more hoarding which would have led to even more deaths.

Maybe it is just that I started this ordeal in a more cynical place than others, but this one example of the CDC not telling the full truth is not some earth-shattering revelation to me. The government has lied to us countless times. I assume they will continue to lie to us in the future. At least this example shows that the people at the CDC were trying to think strategically about the best approach to save the most lives. That is their mission and they are probably in a better position to make the right decision on matters like this than either of us.

The government lies, yes. The government shouldn't be upset that people think they are lying about big things if they are willing to lie about small things.

Prior to COVID, the CDC and vaccination programs in general had a sterling reputation for helping you a an individual. So much so that Amish and Hassidic communities would sometimes get vaccines at their recommendation. That reputation is now out the window, at tremendous damage to our public health.

The CDC has always “lied” in that it always gave advice no reasonable person would follow. That’s because that’s not their job - their job is to give you the risks without counting benefits or reasonableness.

For instance, absolutely nobody follows the CDC’s cooking recommendations and they say women should never drink alcohol because they might be unknowingly pregnant.

https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1414390050008276994

You can't say with 100% certainty people would have hoarded if they were told to save N95s for high risk people and use surgical masks for grocery store runs because they provided adequate protection in that environment.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that not everyone was as cynical as yourself, trusted the government, and as a result of these lies will be more cynical than you originally were. The lies did immeasurable damage to people's trust.

Once again I feel like the only one who remembers what it was actually like in the early pandemic. People were already hoarding. That included masks, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, and stuff that wasn't even related to COVID prevention like toilet paper.

I don't understand how you can say hoarding might not have been any worse if the CDC revealed how important masks were to safety unless you believe that no one was listening to the CDC anyway which invalidates your entire point.

> I don't understand how you can say hoarding might not have been any worse if the CDC revealed how important masks were to safety unless you believe that no one was listening to the CDC anyway which invalidates your entire point.

I can say it because it wasn't tried. They went straight to lying and like you said, the hoarding still happened. If it was going to happen anyway why lie!?

I do honestly believe if they made a distinction between N95 and surgical masks, and their appropriateness in each setting, maybe it could have been different because I believe the world is full of good people but we'll never know. When another pandemic comes we still won't know. These lies that were told will never be forgotten and I believe the damage they caused in the long run is far greater than the problems they solved in the short run.

You seem to think that we've been living in a dystopia where governments have been lying to us forever, there's none you can trust, and everyone everywhere believes and knows this as if it were fact. I don't think that was anywhere close to true before the pandemic but I'm more likely to believe it today because of how many more people distrust their governments and the WHO because of their lies.

>I can say it because it wasn't tried.

That kind of logic also invalidates this conversation because you don't know if your suggested approach would be better because we didn't try it either. I guess there is no point discussing any hypotheticals because it is all unknown.

>You seem to think that we've been living in a dystopia where governments have been lying to us forever, there's none you can trust, and everyone everywhere believes and knows this as if it were fact. I don't think that was anywhere close to true before the pandemic but I'm more likely to believe it today because of how many more people distrust their governments and the WHO because of their lies.

No, I do not think we live in a dystopia because I don't think "the government lied to us" is enough to merit this type of hyperbole. I also don't see how something like "the CDC lied to us in an attempt to save lives" is somehow more threatening than "the government lied about WMDs to start a war with Iraq" or "the government is not telling us about their borderline unconstitutional mass surveillance of American citizens". I just don't see how this is the lie that caused anyone distrust the US government. There are countless more nefarious examples of the government lying. This one at least has a very easy to understand altruistic motivation behind it.

Telling suppliers that masks are reserved for first responders etc and getting Walmart etc to take them off their shelves would have been far less damaging.

Lying losing credibility permanently! There is no going back, that trust is lost. Just letting covid rip though those nursing homes would be way less damaging in the long term.

They could have just reached out to Walmart, Amazon, etc. told them that the government is buying all of their stock at a fair market rate via eminent domain laws. By lying to the populace they have set vaccine trust and trust in the CDC back decades. They could have told the truth and still easily gotten what they wanted without causing longterm harm.

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders. The job of the government is to make tough decisions like this in times of crisis. You can agree or disagree but this was neither malicious nor in my opinion outside the scope of the role.

I feel like just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach than "lie and hope idiots believe it", thus producing whole swathes of idiots repeating the lie

Sure, that would have worked.

People were fighting each other over toilet paper.

> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people

So make your own mask. Lots of people did, and there were loads of instructables. Sure, an N95 is better than a surgical mask, which is better than a homemade mask, which is better than a scarf or bank-robber bandana.

I wore a mask to protect others, not myself. I'm not confident that a mask protects me from the effusions of others; but I'm pretty confident that wearing a mask reduces my own effusions.

If you can blow visible smoke through the mask, then it’s ineffective against SARS2. In either direction.

If you remove an N95 in a smokey environment, you’ll immediately smell the smoke, while you didn’t before you removed it.

Exception: if someone is close enough to hit you with droplets when they speak (a foot or so), then a procedure mask is better than nothing.

well, I'm a heavy smoker; I'm not troubled by other people's smoke, and I usually don't wear a mask while smoking :-)

The last time I "gave up" smoking, I said to the doctor that I was expecting to get less winter colds. She said I was completely wrong, and that I should expect to get everything that was going around; that tobacco smokers maintain a lung environment that is hostile to anything living, including microbes, and that quitters can expect to catch everything that's going.

I have no idea whether that was true. But I'm still standing - yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow...I'd never heard such before.

I saw a few studies that seemed to point to evidence that smoking reduces the risk of contracting COVID. It was too late as I already quit smoking thinking that the opposite would be true.

I haven't started smoking again, despite the potential health benefits associated with smoking.

No, no, no. I'm not saying that there are health benefits from smoking!

I have known asthmatics that told me that smoking tobacco relieved their symptoms. But please don't take these remarks as advice to take up (or maintain) smoking! My comments were supposed to be taken as ironic.

I was totally being sarcastic about the health benefits of smoking. There rightfully might be some health benefits but they almost certainly are outweighed by the heart disease and cancer risks.

> just outright telling people "hey, we don't have enough, please give it to most vulnerable people first" would be better approach

I admire your optimism but people (en masse) don't work like that.

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders.

I wouldn't ever be able to trust a govt org again if it was revealed they'd made the decision to deliberately lie to their populace. There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.

> There are few things that a government can do which is unforgivable, and brazenly lying to the faces of its citizens is one of them.

That's a pretty naive position and by its definition one shouldn't trust any government on earth.

Government exists to provide glue for societies when individual motivation is insufficient or harmful.

These situations are generally pretty serious (national health crisis, economic failures, intelligence, war) and thus require triage.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth" isn't actually pointing to an absolute devaluing of truth: it's noting that suddenly there are many other goals that people perceive as more important than truth. E.g. preservation of national sovereignty, prevention of casualties, maintaining civil morale, etc.

> The first casualty when war comes is truth

Most wars would not be fought if governments were trustworthy. And those that remain could be fought with full transparency.

Trust is everything in society. When you start making exceptions everything falls apart.

Trust does create a post-scarcity society, and any government who fought a war with full transparency would lose (osint).

Tough decisions? Yes, lies - with a straight face? No. Now what? How can you do public health without public trust?* How can you govern effectively when the record showed you lied?

The irony? I still see people wearing masks; the kind of mask that are proven to be ineffective.

* On top of it we were assured these people were "the experts." However, this wasn't our first respiratory pandemic. Yet we were completely unprepared? What is their area of expertise? Lies?

Publib health and government based on lies isn't sustainable. Yet anyone who questioned that was marginalized? It get worse and worse.

> there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders

But they didn't do that either. They could have requisitioned the masks from private retailers, or just gone and bought them, but instead retailers continued selling them and the Surgeon General just tweeted at individuals telling them to stop buying them.

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people

Partly..

There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

“There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage,” Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders.

I hear this a lot. Do you have a citation?

My impression is that nobody knew what was going on, underprepared officials jumped the gun with premature statements, and after the fact some people tried to rationalize the incompetence.

The contemporaneous statements often mentioned shortages and preserving masks for healthcare workers.

This Fauci interview in early March has him saying that he thinks masks aren't necessary at the time but also saying that he isn't against people wearing them (both things together at ~1 minute if you are impatient):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

This CDC transcript doesn't talk a lot about PPE, but it talks about directing it to healthcare workers that are at higher risk:

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0303-COVID-19-updat...

I'm sure there's stuff that looks worse if you go back through the 6 weeks previous to that, but early March is when things started to really happen in the US (I remember making a relatively large shopping trip that felt like it put me on the cautious side of things, and then the next week I started working from home).

There's a lot of people saying that the government was saying not to wear masks, which is subtly different from saying that people don't need to wear masks, or that masks won't benefit most people. The surgeon general was out there saying they weren't effective for the general public, which is bad but still different from saying not to wear them. And I'm not sure it's entirely fair to attribute his comms failures to the CDC (they might have had a hand in it, who knows, but they don't control the surgeon general).

Given how well people do with their masks (I still regularly see people wearing low quality masks incorrectly!), it seems true enough that they should be secondary to things like social distancing. I was sort of pleased and surprised a few weeks ago when my hospital was handing out N95s. Of course, it didn't matter much when half the patients had them under their nose (one confused lady had it sideways with the straps around her ears). They started self screening the next week, with only procedure masks available.

I'm not disputing that masks should have been conserved for healthcare professionals. I do dispute that any government official has directly stated that this was reason for the CDC lying. I actually think that would be a huge scandal. That's the source I'm looking for, based on your claim.

What do you mean "my claim".

My push is that people are characterizing statements made by government officials as lies, but they are more or less misunderstanding them to do so. There were a lot of statements that look bad in hindsight, but they were about the limited effectiveness of masks much more than they were about masks not working.

I'm also claiming that talk of the shortages was pretty much from the beginning, there was no attempt to hide the idea that they wanted to prioritize use of masks for healthcare providers.

It's not unreasonable for someone to talk about N95 masks not providing a lot of benefit for naive users when the full benefit of the mask only comes if it is worn properly and fits well. That people choose to a wear a mask when it is voluntary and then do a horrible job of it sort of backs up the reasoning. There's literally no reason to wear a procedure mask over your mouth and not your nose, and yet I regularly see it in my small town (which is probably net anti-mask in sentiment).

> They made it clear after the fact that this was done because there wasn't an adequate supply of masks for 330M people, and they needed to secure a supply for first responders.

That claim is what I've been disagreeing with in all my text above. I don't think there's been any rational explanation, let alone apology, for what were at best unsubstantiated claims early in the pandemic, and at worst, lies to the public. Probably somewhere in between.

Jerome Adams is perhaps the worst culprit, but he was not alone in saying that masks don't work, and the CDC never offered a lucid explanation.

> Single layer cloth masks do nothing.

Really? If an infected person standing in front of you in a crowded room sneezes, you believe the risks would be unaffected by whether or not they were wearing a cloth mask? Whether their sneeze were blocked or droplets of spittle and mucus went spewing throughout the room, your exposure and that of people standing in distant parts of the room would be identical?

In general I hate the “citation needed” forum response, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Into a single layer cloth mask correct it does nothing.

From your article:

> A better option, he says? Start with a two-layered cloth mask that has been washed, which gives it the capacity to filter better. If you want to go one step further in protection, use a KN95 mask, he says.

So it isn’t like the suggested option is some esoteric thing that you need a 3M factory to make. “Single layers cloth masks don’t work” isn’t technically a lie but it omits that there was an alternative solution that was within the means of like… anybody with a sewing machine and a washing machine to make.

There’s a reason I linked the study. I agree they work.

I can see the idea of guiding the public to not wear masks if it really is some zero-sum game where first responders lose if the public wears them. I disagree with this strategy due to the second order effects (reduced trust, later confusion), but it at least makes some sort of sense.

I can’t see the logic of telling the public that masks don’t help, if it is possible for people to actually increase the supply of masks by making them at home. In this case it isn’t a small manipulation that doesn’t hurt anyone, but harmful misinformation.

This whole part of the narrative is, unfortunately, a story about how people cannot be delivered nuanced messages even while screaming that they deserve nuance.

The CDC did not say that makes do not work. They said we do not know if masks work, which was (and mostly still remains) true.

Only person who said we have positive knowledge that masks don’t work was USSG Jerome Adams, and that was pretty late in the ordeal.

February 29th 2020 was "pretty late in the ordeal"?

It did seem pretty late to me at the time, but admittedly that was deep in COVID time warp era. Regardless of your assessment, USSG isn’t CDC. CDC nor FDA nor NIH ever said “masks don’t work.”

They said what was true: we don’t know if they do work.

As someone that has been trained by one of the few organizations that develops leadership (military)...

The communications and advise from the medical establishment and media, were so terrible that that I question incompetence and lean towards corruption.

The flip flopping, the political and idealogical justifications, the theatre of everything without substance.

The People can handle nuanced messaging, what they can't handle is lies, obfuscation, and leaders who refuse to admit they are wrong.

Yeah see people say all this but the actual example they use is a thing that didn’t happen. The nuanced, correct message was that we don’t know if masks work. That’s what they said. What you heard was “masks don’t work.” So what we actually learned is that people are not capable of receiving nuanced messages, at least among the people who are pissed off about not having received a nuanced message (which they did).

So they still don't know if masks work? Can we get a concrete answer on this at some point? It seems like this type of back and forth messaging is the problem. Maybe we should all apologize to people who questioned the need to wear masks if we still don't know whether or not they're effective.

Correct, we still do not really know whether masks at a population level tend to reduce transmission. A big, big part of the problem is that it’s very hard to know how many people are wearing masks, how consistently, whether they change their behavior when they do, etc etc.

What we probably know is that if 100% of the population wore masks 100% correctly 100% of the time and kept 100% of their prior behavior, it would probably reduce transmission more than 0% for some pathogens.

This is another way of saying, “we don’t really know,” and it gives you an idea of why it’s hard to figure it out.

The ambush on “masks don’t work” was because it seems almost certainly the case that masks don’t hurt, and it’s likely the case that if masks have any benefit, that benefit will be proportional to levels of compliance, so if we get to choose between levels of compliance, higher is probably better.

My personal view is that after half the population came to view “no masks” as a part of their political identity, the overall pushiness on masks probably netted out to negative, but this is not blame I can assign to CDC et al.

Wouldn't it have just been easier to explain it than to lie to the public and then continue to deny and defend the lying after it's already been exposed?

What lying? CDC et al never said masks don’t work. I don’t know how many times I need to repeat this.

I don't know if we can call it outright lying, but going from "you don't need a mask" to basically saying you shouldn't be allowed in public without one seems like either incompetence or corruption on the CDC's part. You can argue semantics all you want to try to justify their behavior, but that is what people see and it doesn't increase trust or confidence in them as an organization.

Yes, people see that because they think authority figures have some Magic Answer Box that they’re pulling or withholding answers from, rather than the reality which is that our understanding of the situation was shifting day by day.

The Magic Answer Box people are demanding that they be trusted with nuance and detail and yet continuously demonstrate Magic Answer Box thinking in the face of nuanced and detailed information.

We also went from a few hundred identified cases per day in February to ~25,000 per day identified in late March/April.

The CDC may not have said those words, but the surgeon general absolutely did. There was plenty of conflicting messaging around the effectiveness of cloth masks as well.

Yep, already mentioned that USSG said that. Note that he never comes up in these discussions as someone who lied though. No one I know seemed to even note what he said. Everyone seems (correctly) more fixated on CDC/NIH which were dominating the public messaging.

It's hard to read the nuance in official messaging when the unofficial messaging has none. Welcome to the Mandela effect.

"The officials are bad/idiots/corrupt/evil because I didn't get nuanced messaging"

You did get nuanced messaging

"Yeah well... Mandela effect!"

We got mixed messages. Some didn't offer nuance, others did. The conflation of messages boiled down to the simplest, and misattributed.

We've also had the CDC telling us the vaccines are safe and effective, when neither are strictly true. They may be less dangerous than getting a severe case of COVID, but they don't confer immunity, and they don't stop you from spreading it, in direct contradiction to other statements they've made.

Is it any wonder that people misremember who exactly told them that masks did or don't work, and when they heard it?

"Vaccine is safe" does not and has never meant "has zero possible adverse events."

"Vaccine is effective" does not and has never meant "confers 100% protection from infection."

The vaccines remain both safe and effective in the same way that e.g. Tylenol is safe and effective. If you want the fully nuanced definition of these statements mean in the Tylenol case or the vaccine case, you can literally look up the data from the clinical trials and see it. Of course your rebuttal to this will be, "well, I can find X dataset with real world evidence of Y claim" and I'll say: well, there's a reason real world evidence is (counterintuitively, given the name) not considered to be very good evidence in pharma world. That's because it's incredibly hard to isolate variables in analysis of real world data, even assuming the data exists in an analyzable format (which it generally doesn't - also contrary to most people's expectations).

Hmm no, it's no wonder that people misremember who exactly told them what. We have a shitshow of a media ecosystem and you have "contrarians" like yourself who are pumping nonstop garbage like "CDC said X" into it when CDC did not, in fact, say X.

Mistakes were certainly made and everyone was learning as we went, but your line of inquiry actually points pretty solidly away from the solutions we actually need: 1) there should NEVER be PPE shortages in the richest country on earth, 2) there should RARELY be testing capacity shortages and sitting presidents should NEVER deliberately slow down pathogen testing, and 3) there should be much better data infrastructure that allows us to understand all of these things in real time.

Some blame for each of these lays at CDC feet, some at FDA, some at NIH, and so on, but fixing these requires an entirely different conversation than the one we're having.

> we still do not really know whether masks at a population level tend to reduce transmission

We don't know this about condoms, either.

https://jech.bmj.com/content/65/2/100

That is fascinating! Science is really difficult :)

> So they still don't know if masks work?

It took decades to get medical doctors to start washing their hands [1]. It took decades to get people to use seat belts in cars [2]. It took decades to accept that tobacco smoking causes lung cancer [3].

Masks work [4], but it will take decades before this is accepted through the chain of command in the medical profession, and not only by front line science.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#History

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#Hist...

[4] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-are-a-prove...

Fluid mechanics are well understood.

There are people who understand how air moves, and have a good understanding of how viruses travel.

Masks have been hailed as a silver bullet (so that people don't have to get active and eat well and be healthy, and government and businesses don't have to upgrade HVAC systems), to the point where people think they work outside!

Are there masks that work? Yes. Is that cheap surgical mask or a cotton one really effective? No.

Correct, we don’t know if masks work … in the same sense that we “don’t know” if parachutes work[1]. That is, we don’t (and can’t) do the level of randomized controlled trials that would precisely mimic real-world application.

Nevertheless, we’re capable of appropriate risk based inference. We can verify that masks slow down the spread of airborne particles and we know SARS-type viruses spread that way. Combined with the low cost of mask wearing and the huge impacts of a pandemic, a good risk analysis weighs heavily in favor of using them.

Even accepting the over-skeptical view you’ve given, official statements were still overconfident. Fauci was saying in February 2020 that “there’s no reason for anyone to be wearing a mask”, which you can’t justify by these claims of ignorance. “A small chance of slowing a SARS-type virus” is a great reason to wear a mask!

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p...

Yep, agreed with all of this which is why I think when it became the case that the general population wearing masks would not have negative impacts on supply for medical workers, it made sense to default to “wear masks.” When the gen pop wearing masks would have a negative impact on supply, it seems defensible at least to advocate against the population buying masks.

Note that what confuses people here is not that the consensus on whether masks work or not changed, but that it didn’t change. “We don’t know if masks work, don’t get them” turned to “we don’t know if masks work, start wearing them.”

I agree it would’ve helped the credibility issue a lot if they were more open about the supply calculus behind the scenes, but I’m personally pretty confident this would’ve yielded worse outcomes. No chance that the population wouldn’t have scrambled for masks and therefore no chance that the people who did actually in reality need them most would’ve gotten them.

Of course there’s a lot, a lot of room for criticism of the mask/PPE shortage existing at all, but obviously the solution to that looks different than the solution to “CDC said masks don’t work.”

But they weren’t advising the public not to wear masks based on genuine skepticism, but on a confused belief that it would have the narrow effect of relieving the supply crunch, with no long term effect on mask compliance in the future, even given the loss of trust from having told the public BS reasons not to wear them. (Like the Fauci quotes and assertions of ineffectiveness.)

That was stupid, and foreseeably so.

I think even now it's very hard to establish whether it was stupid, never mind foreseeably so. Do you have evidence to suggest either 1) there was no supply crunch, 2) the supply crunch wasn't alleviated by this guidance, or 3) the supply crunch wouldn't have affected the medical system's capacity?

It's completely believable to me that future mask compliance among the general population is way less valuable than ensuring that medical professionals had N95s in the first half or first quarter of 2020. Also seems believable that that guidance reduced N95 consumption among the general public.

Do you have evidence that the earlier advice wasn’t responsible for mask reluctance later? Because when you tell people masks are ineffective, that’s a very very hard bell to unring, and indeed, many mask rejecters were citing those very same health officials. And why wouldn’t they? Those are the trusted authorities!

Of course there was a mask shortage. But like the others said, the correct way to fight a toilet paper shortage is not to tell people that it’s ineffective at removing feces from your anus. It’s to a) throttle sales at retail, b) give guidance on alternatives (here, how to turn a shirt into a mask), c) coordinate on increased production.

If masking up had been a high status thing to do early on, that would have saved a lot of effort in policing later.

Yes, lying to the public and expecting them to both trust and keep up with the latest lie is foreseeably stupid. I hope you don’t need insurmountable evidence to agree with that part.

Well no I don't have evidence of that. On the contrary I know for a fact it did, but that's not a necessary premise for my position.

Again, CDC did not say masks aren't effective. They said we don't know if they are. This was and largely remains true. For your other solutions, you think instituting a nationwide rationing system was a more accessible solution than saying "we don't know if they work [true] and medical professionals need them more [true], please don't buy them?" And yes, we very obviously should've invoked the Defense Production Act pretty much immediately on testing and PPE. Quite indefensible that we didn't.

"Has foreseeable negative consequences" != "is stupid," especially in emergency scenarios where you're picking between bad options and worse ones.

>Again, CDC did not say masks aren't effective. They said we don't know if they are. This was and largely remains true.

Like I said, it was "true" only in the sense that "we don't know if parachutes work [to save you're life in freefall from an aircraft]", which is to say, it's criminally bad to communicate that as your advice, given the costs and benefits to the user. There was no great shift in evidence that caused the CDC's change in advice, only a change in which way they wanted to clumsily manipulate the public.

>"Has foreseeable negative consequences" != "is stupid," especially in emergency scenarios where you're picking between bad options and worse ones.

Correct, and the path they took foreseeably led to the worse ones rather than the mere bad ones. The few people who correctly saw through the CDC advice still hoarded masks, still made up for the non-buying of those who nobly held back (it only takes a few hoarders to exhaust the supply), and health care providers still saw the very same shortage ... it's just that now, they have to walk back the advice against mask-wearing and suddenly pretend the evidence became ultra-strong overnight, even though half the public has made the earlier statements their hill-to-die-on, and we missed a very large window in which we could have been advising people to make good-enough ad hoc masks.

In what world is that the less-bad outcome? Or somehow not foreseeable that the public might actually believe you when you lie about your position on masks?

> In what world is that the less-bad outcome?

The completely plausible world in which our healthcare providers wouldn't have been able to get any effective PPE during the initial wave and died, became seriously ill, or refused to work en masse in the first month of the pandemic?

Explain why that was not a believable risk in Jan/Feb 2020?

Right, you’re continuing with the assumption that the hoarding problem was noticeably different between the two worlds. But any one hoarder can cancel out the restraint of 10,000 people. The scaling doesn’t work in your favor there. What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply. You’d need to be able to point to healthcare workers who procured masks solely because they didn’t get bought because everyone was thinking “yeah Fauci’s right, masks increase the spread because I’ll touch my face more”.

There was no such spared supply. It was either saved by retail throttling or state pre-emption, not because it was withering unwanted on the shelves.

> What you saw is what it would look like without the restraint, because that’s how hoarders work: they buy out all available supply.

The second part here just doesn't actually substantiate the first part. If this were strictly true then I would've never been able to observe 1) a medical professional purchasing a mask from a retailer and 2) a non-medical professional declining to purchase an available mask from a retailer.

In fact I observed both.

Of course it's an open question as to at what scale this occurred and how it nets out in the end against the credibility hit, it very well could've been minor and not worth it, but that's the thing that remains not obvious even now, never mind in early 2020.

Sorry, I don't think that's right. The CDC were terrible at messaging. It constantly sounded like they flip flopped, came up with absurd requirements. What's worse so many Americans took what they said as dogma, and massively attacked anyone who questioned their nonsense.

From https://reason.com/2022/02/07/that-study-of-face-masks-does-...

"A study[1] published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supposedly shows that wearing a face mask in public places dramatically reduces your risk of catching COVID-19. The CDC summed up the results in a widely shared graphic[2] that says wearing a cloth mask "lowered the odds of testing positive" by 56 percent, while the risk reduction was 66 percent for surgical masks and 83 percent for N95 or KN95 respirators.

If you read the tiny footnotes, you will see that the result for cloth masks was not statistically significant. So even on its face, this study, which was published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, did not validate the protective effect of the most commonly used face coverings—a striking fact that the authors do not mention until the end of the sixth paragraph.

In 2020, the CDC went from dismissing the value of general mask wearing[3] to describing it as "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." In September 2020, then–CDC Director Robert Redfield asserted[4], without any evidence, that masks were more effective at preventing infection than vaccines would prove to be. Even before the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant, Redfield's successor, Rochelle Walensky, implied the same thing, exaggerating[5] the evidence supporting mask use in a way that made vaccination seem inferior."

So even in 2022, they are misleading the public.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7106e1.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/social-media/mm7106e1...

[3] https://reason.com/2020/04/06/the-cdcs-revised-face-mask-adv...

[4] https://reason.com/2020/09/17/suggesting-that-face-masks-are...

[5] https://reason.com/2021/11/09/the-cdcs-director-implies-that...

Nice revisionist history, but the CDC and other government actors where absolutely telling people not to use masks, buy masks and were in fact confiscating privately owned masks from people early in the pandemic.

Correct, they were telling people not to buy masks due to a shortage which is a different claim from “masks don’t work.”

Could it possibly be the case that these statements are all true?:

1) We don’t know if masks donned by untrained people in normal public settings impacts transmission

2) We do know that masks donned by medical professionals in a medical context impacts transmission

3) We know there are not enough masks available for both the general population and medical professionals

And if those three statements are all true, couldn’t it make sense to arrive at the position: the public should not get masks until medical professionals are equipped with what they need?

Having a memory more than a goldfish means I know exactly what was said, and they did more then just say "masks may not work" I vividly remember Facui stating many times on multiple interviews that masks were not effective.

>the public should not get masks until medical professionals are equipped with what they need?

disagree. I think people should be free to acquire any product they want on the market, and I believe it is HIGHLY unethical for government to come in cease medical equipment / masks/ or anything else under the guise they "do not work" for the public so we need to take them from you and give them to these other people that are better than you

Well we can disagree on the ethics for sure. Legally, of course consumers do not have the right to acquire any product they want on the market and of course the government does have the ability to seize most anything for the national interest. Both of these powers are well established and have been used throughout history both for good things and bad things.

Regarding Fauci, are you pointing to his March 8 2020 communication that "there's no reason to be walking around with a mask?"

The full statement is here: "In America, right now, there's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better and it might even block a droplet here or there. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences - people fiddling with their mask and touching their face."

This was both at the time, and currently, an open question as to how these things net out at the population level. This is a pretty nuanced and detailed communication that, unsurprisingly, the "I deserve nuance" crowd has completely eliminated.

>>Well we can disagree on the ethics for sure

From your comments you clearly on the camp of supporting government tyranny, I bet you fully supported lock-downs, mandated masking, mandated vaccinations as well?

let me ask then, are there any limits on government at all in your worldview or can the government exclaim "national emergency" and wipe away any an all limits to their authority?

>>the government does have the ability to seize most anything for the national interest. Both of these powers are well established and have been used throughout history both for good things and bad things.

that is absolutely incorrect, as the Supreme Court has shown more than a few times (see case law around the seizing of guns after Katrina for an example of government exceeding their authority). There has not been much if any adjudication around the ceasing of medical supplies during the pandemic, or the seizing of labor (i.e lockdowns) both of which should clearly be 5th amendment violation and require just compensation. I would love to see some lawsuits over that, if the ACLU was actually about protecting civil liberties they would be at the forefront of those suits.

>>are you pointing to his March 8 2020 communication

No I am pointing to multiple TV interviews

There are a lot of limits on government powers! You can find them in the Constitution and the last 200 years of case law, and of course you're free to challenge any of those powers even today.

"The government has the ability to seize most anything" == there are not classes of items the government cannot seize. Rather there are circumstances under which they can and circumstances under which they cannot. I suspect the reason you're not seeing much adjudication about these circumstances (medical supplies during a pandemic) is that it's not that controversial an application in legal circles.

Ah yes the vague "that thing I remember that I cannot point to."

> It was obvious to everyone and their dog that masks help stop the spread of respiratory infections.

All studies done at scale, in peer reviewed journals before and since the pandemic have shown that not to be the case. N95s work, if used properly, that’s it.

If you work / have worked with people in biosafety labs they’ll tell you. What we did during the pandemic was effectively role play. Cloth masks, surgical masks, kN95s, all do approximately nothing. Only thing you could maybe argue is people avoided each other a bit more and spit didn’t travel… but the virus was airborne and that was considered highly likely even in Jan 2020.

Fauci’s FOIA requested private emails cover a lot of this; as does many many of the top epidemiologist (who were censored).

*Addendum*: It’s the same with the companies, CDC and FDA who suppressed ivermectin research

https://twitter.com/rwmalonemd/status/1607710183022628864

IMO the real reason they claimed “masks didn’t work”, “alternative drugs don’t work”, etc is because they needed the EUA. The companies producing the vaccines lobbied to get everything else suppressed so they could role out mRNA tech. That tech will allow them to offer pretty much any genetic therapy. Government had every incentive as well, more centralization and no liability. Pushing alternatives would pose more risks, with no upside.

Imo this was inevitable. It was only preventable with an open market of ideas, which Twitter, Facebook and others suppressed.

I'm willing to believe your claim that only N95 masks work, and other options do nothing at all, but what am I to do with seemingly reliable information that states otherwise?

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

It's just one source, but I'm genuinely curious.

I say go to all large scale peer reviewed research prior to 2020. You’re taking some story from someone who writes for a college publication, not a peer reviewed source. There are researchers from Stanford who said exactly what I did above.

Trillions of dollars were pumped into propaganda and research in 2020. It takes years to go through, receive grants, construct experiments, get approvals, analyze and validate. We are only now starting to see initial results for new masking studies. They still need to be replicated, etc.

Here’s an example of a large scale study from 2015 where cloth masks increase risk of illness (over nothing):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25903751/

Here’s a 2021 study showing masks aren’t really good as well (a randomized control trial) https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817

My general point isn’t the specifics, it’s that the jury is out.

Do you believe surgical masks work during surgery? There’s “no evidence” they do this.

There’s also no reason that hearing there is “no evidence” for something requires you to adopt the silliest possible assumption for whether it’s actually true, but doctors seem to like doing this anyway.

(The actual answer for whether masks are “effective against covid” is “which covid?” - cause it’s different for 2020 covid and Omicron. Omicron is so infectious that you cannot avoid it using any kind of NPI at all.)

The major conclusion to that discussion ("surgical masks work during surgery") was that the did work, but because they form an effective barrier against spittle and so on.

Studies show that surgical masks are only marginally effective at their goal of reducing transmission, and then only if they are worn properly. Of course, one can rely upon medical staff for that. Not so much the general population.

I find this not very credible as the biggest contributor to the anti-masker anti-vaxer movement, especially because that movement exists in places where most people don't even know what the CDC is.

The CDC was not the only institution that spread this anti-mask narrative.

"CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID."

Can you provide the source for this?

Late Feb 2020 until early April 2020 https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

It is clear that the message in almost all that mask communication was that masks actually do work, but please save them for medical personnel... here are a few weak reasons why they probably won't help you that much anyway.

And comparatively, they are way more critical for medical personnel. They should have just communicated it that way rather than trying to downplay effectiveness. Shortages abounded anyway.

“The” source?

Assuming you were alive and paying any attention the past two years, the source would be your own eyes and ears, consuming the (US) CDC’s official communications. I wasn’t even in the US and encountered them! In fact, I once even repeated one of their false claims about masks very early last year during a recorded zoom call with a friend. Then after looking at the very different claims from my local CDC, I realized the US one was wrong.

I think so much of the messaging would have been better if there were disclaimers about “we are still doing research” and “based on our knowledge at this time”… or even timeboxing the advice so it’s updated every 12-48 hours even if unchanged.

This specific messaging has been a rallying point for people who don’t even believe covid exists. At least that was the case in the US

I was in Taiwan (and also was for the first SARS), and I think the messaging here was much more competent but also more humble and less aggressive than much of the rest of the world’s.

To be fair though, the VP was an epidemiologist, so there was an unfair advantage.

In America we were already in such a weird situation I doubt anything would’ve truly been 100% effective. It’s interesting to hear these different perspectives though

To be clear, I think that lockdowns are a gross affront to civil liberties and unjustified for anything under a 10 (and probably even) 20 percent lethality rate.

My opinion at the time (when vaccines looked very distant) was that places like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Korea could still control the pandemic via border quarantines and contact tracing (which happened) and that places like the US also could also achieve good results via mass testing (which didn’t happen).

It would have taken about a billion tests per week, but the US certainly had the industrial capacity do it. The problem, IMO, was lack of state capacity. Even as the pandemic spread around the world, the FDA continued processing applications for PPE producers, vaccines and everything else at the same sluggish rate (of a 6+ months delay) that it had been.

Tyler Cowen spoke at length about this on various economics and other podcasts.

Which btw in the early days, think early march 2020, a 10% ifr was still on the table. Italy and wuhan (incomplete) data was … not encouraging. And remember that SARS-cov-1 had an ifr of 40%. And was spread by fomites.

So in early 2020, with limited data - china really screwed is here - the initial lockdowns in places like SF Bay Area made sense. But the lockdown didn’t persist of course and realistically speaking people always had freedom of movement: the police were NOT and we’re directed to not aggressively ticket/arrest: all those contacts just increased the chance of infection anyways.

Now as for the rest of the US I disavow what happened there.

In most cases it was. But the 15 seconds that would get distilled down for the short cable news attention spans didn't usually include it.

I have personally had discussions with people about this. I’m about as liberal as they come, but a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo. It’s still weird that I feel the need to clarify my political stance on an apolitical issue like this. As time went on messaging improved, but the initial confusion was definitely there.

Nobody knew what was going on, I read as much about covid as I could (including HN comments about something to do with quinine that was popular for a day or two)

This is the source I found https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

I think there is a big time Mandela effect here. I remember “don’t buy masks” as being about preserving masks for essential workers and medical professionals, I don’t necessarily recall the portion where they said it didn’t help infection rates, but yet there it is.

> "a lot of covid guidance was confusing in the beginning and I think that admitting that has somehow become taboo."

I think any reasonable person can acknowledge there's a huge leap between "I was confused by what you said" and "YOU LIED TO ME!!!!"

It's almost as though they were operating with incomplete, imperfect information at that time, and they needed to make some best-effort guesses based on previous events.

https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8...

They've used two different narratives at two far apart times that CNN highlights quite well.

Don't forget the CDC and FDA completely fucked up COVID testing at the start. The FDA banned unapproved lab tests, and wouldn't quickly approve the tests, The test the CDC developed that they forced everyone to use was shit and didn't work properly.

It’s wild how we’ve completely forgotten the fomite hypothesis that was assumed for the first couple of months of the pandemic. Remember the guy who wanted us to bleach our vegetables? Remember all the distilleries making hand sanitizer because touch was the only thing that mattered?

You don’t have to assume the CDC was full of lies if you remember that they were working from an inaccurate hypothesis at a time when reducing transmission rates seemed like it might be the most important thing in the world.

It wasn't a bad thesis, that would be giving them credit they don't deserve: https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20c6-8...

Dr Fauci feared the rising costs of masks and whether the medical system would have enough. That wasn't his decision to make, but he made it. He later started using a new line, which is that they weren't aware that 40-50% of people were asymptomatic which was irrelevant for the problem at hand.

That’s a great read! Fauci explains what facts he didn’t have at the time and why learning those facts changed his mind.

If Covid was only transmissible by people with symptoms, you could control spread by asking those people to stay home and everyone else is clear — no masks needed. If it’s impossible to know if you’re infectious without testing, masks make more of a difference. More effective ones are obviously better.

I certainly knew at the time that I was triaging masks because health care workers were more important than me. I still have a note on my fridge from February thanking me for donating some N95s I had from wildfire season. The trade off was pretty clear.

That's a narrative change, not a changing thesis. He knew at the time masks were needed by the general public but lied to the American public so that healthcare workers would have an adequate supply. He admits to that much. Again, a decision that was not his to make. He then realized that the lie was worse than he'd anticipated and started encouraging masks. Couple that with that Dr Fauci has been tied to being knowledgeable on gain of function research and most people can read between the lines.

They/he lied, because they wanted to make things look under control and if everyone starts wearing masks, then it would cause panic and it will looks like a global pandemic. The shortage of the masks would have happened anyway, as it wasn’t purely driven by local US demand, but also by overseas supply chain issues. And the US has means to restrict sale of strategic goods to the population in case of emergency. So there was really no good reason to tell people not to wear masks.

yet, masks did nothing other than stoke fears and division, as you're doing here. our masking behavior was, and continues to be, irrational, in that it was done at the wrong times with ill-conceived intent. people worried about masking against strangers, when most transmission happened from someone you knew and trusted (probably 95+%). they were generally ineffective by design (<n95), worn incorrectly (loosely), and worn at the wrong times (outdoors/retail). basically no one wore masks at home around their family and friends, where it might have actually reduced some transmission. understanding this, a little distancing was just as, if not more, effective and less divisive despite the literal interpersonal distance.

the CDC was initially correct in assessing that (the way we wear) masks would not be a panacea for covid, but that was politically unpalatable which is why it was walked backed so haphazardly. masks, and all the CDC outrage around them, was effectively mediopolitical redirection of our anger toward each other rather than toward our corporatocratic institutions to quickly and correctly assess the threat and then appropriately deploy (only) effective measures.

> most transmission happened from someone you knew and trusted (probably 95+%)

While this is true, at least in the early pandemic when social circles were pretty tight (often just your household, but even if not quite a bit smaller than during normal times), the virus has to be introduced to that social circle, it won't just manifest itself out of nothing in one of it's members. Masking when not interacting with that circle will help keep the virus out of that circle of people in the first place.

This is a very hard thing to maintain for long periods of time, but in the context of 2020 it's a reasonable approach to take.

sure, but that fits into the extant ~5%. it just takes a friend of a friend/family member to spread through social circles, since they overlap greatly, even for the tightest ones.

as i see it, masks make sense in 2 general cases:

1) when uncertainty about transmission and lethality is high, as was the case in nov/dec 2019, until population risk is more closely bounded

2) when situational risk is measurably elevated over baseline, like having comorbidities, surgery, packed mass transit, etc.

by april 2020, we (in the US at least) had enough information that masking wasn't going to be that panacea, when taking human behavior into account (trust channels, weariness, etc.). yet, it was still weaponized by the media and politicians.

i know this because i was making these very same points back in april 2020. to be effective, a mask has to be worn at the right times (like being face-to-face with another human) and correctly (creating a tight seal around the nose and mouth using an effective filtering material). most people weren't doing either of these most of the time.

The US CDC's advice for the general public not to wear masks was born of several factors:

1. A severe shortage of masks which were considered to be particularly effective, specifically N-95 masks capable of filtering viral particles. Such masks as were available were being preferentially directed to healthcare providers and first-responders.

2. A concern that the general public would not wear or use masks appropriately, and might take additional compensatory risks on the premise that masks, often utilised suboptimally, provided strong protection. Note too that at the time vented masks, which had a flap that opened on exhale (and hence transmitted any viral particles to the environment) were fairly popular and widely-utilised.

3. A thought that COVID-19 was not as subject to airborne transmission as it turned out to be --- fomite-based transmission (particles on surfaces generally transferred by hand) was thought to be significant. Subsequent evidence has shown this to be far less the case than thought at the time.

4. A general lack of hard knowledge of specifics of the novel coronavirus, resulting in recommendations based on general principles of vector reduction drawn from other diseases.

5. A decidedly muddled, politicised, and anti-scientific response from the US administration at the time. For those keeping score, that was not the present Administration, though from discussion in this thread, that might not be clear.

6. In an epistemic environment in which trust in media, government, and expertise had been under prolonged attack.

All of this was discussed at the time, and in particular Zeynep Tufekci was discussing most of these factors as early as 17 March 2020 in New York Times opinion pieces and elsewhere. Example:

"Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired"

Subtitle reveals much: "To help manage the shortage, the authorities sent a message that made them untrustworthy."

... First, many health experts, including the surgeon general of the United States, told the public simultaneously that masks weren’t necessary for protecting the general public and that health care workers needed the dwindling supply. This contradiction confuses an ordinary listener. How do these masks magically protect the wearers only and only if they work in a particular field?

Second, there were attempts to bolster the first message, that ordinary people didn’t need masks, by telling people that masks, especially medical-grade respirator masks (such as the N95 masks), needed proper fitting and that ordinary people without such fitting wouldn’t benefit. This message was also deeply counterproductive. ...

It is of course true that masks don’t work perfectly, that they don’t replace hand-washing and social distancing, and that they work better if they fit properly. And of course, surgical masks (the disposable type that surgeons wear) don’t filter out small viral particles the way medical-grade respirator masks rated N95 and above do. ...

[P]roviding top-down guidance with such obvious contradictions backfires exactly because lack of trust is what fuels hoarding and misinformation.

<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...>

There's much more, the piece is well worth revisiting and should be a key document in future studies of the pandemic and its senselessly botched response.

Failures to accurately describe the circumstances and context of the CDC advice, or to acknowledge that the CDC rapidly reversed course once this became evident are themselves harmful.

Science is that which adapts to new knowledge and understanding. Dogma is that which clings to articles of faith despite evidence, in the interest of advancing a specific ideological agenda.

For all its faults, the CDC followed science. Incorrectly initially as it turns out, but ultimately correcting itself rather than insisting on dogma.

That point is made in another comment on this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34150615>

The further complication is in crafting effective, credible, useful, and actionable messaging in a time of crisis. Here too the CDC failed, but in large part because significant other actors were strongly intent (and remain strongly intent) in seeing it fail.

> Thing is, there wasn't that much of it before the CDC spent over a month spewing bullshit telling people not to wear masks because masks don't stop the spread of COVID.

That's not what they said, which kind of highlights just how much misinformation was indeed being spewed well before then.

Great points. Moderation is a very hard job, and good moderators understand they will likely be biased and can admit to it. I think moderation fairness problem is equivalent to the "auditing the auditor" problem; for some given events, how do we ensure that the labels given to the event are accurate and unbiased.

One solution might be for n moderators to evaluate and give the label to the reported violation, and ensure n is odd and larger than 1. However, this is tedious (although that is the tradeoff for fairness) and assumes there's an equivalent number of moderators who lean liberal, conservative, and neutral (in addition to assuming there's no biases created by the culture of the social media platform and management).

Perhaps each report should be given a detailed criteria as to why it was labelled as inappropriate, but this too would be subject to bias, emotional response from both parties, and slow down the moderation process which is likely backed up with many events in the queue, without really any direct benefit to the bottom line of the company although one could view this as a quality issue and lack of QA will ultimately produce an inferior product that is heavily QA'd.

There is definitely a difference of the types of information shared.

Misinformation - False information that is spread regardless of intent to mislead.

Disinformation - False information that is spread with intent to mislead.

Misinformation can fall in the category of "Bullshit" quite often. There's no regard for the truth. Rather only a care that individuals are persuaded. This lack of respect I believe is the core problem these articles are trying to discuss.

This is the post-truth politics world we live in. Encouraged truth-telling, fact checking, not reopening settled debates, pressure big tech to combat disinformation(note the word used here, not misinformation), etc.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” - Unknown

If big tech has to combat disinformation. Big media should be held accountable to correct earlier misinformation. Rather than the "all or nothing" approach we see today until the next developing story makes headlines years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

How is the title misleading? Facts from the CDC itself was suppressed when it didn't fit the narrative. Even here on HN where titles are supposed to be the original unless clickbait the word "rigged" is changed to "moderated".

Moderated implies it's unbiased while it's clearly not.

> How do you moderate at this scale without bots and contractors?

How about: you don’t. It’s not up to twitter moderation to determine what is fact in real-time.

>>But then, should Twitter have opted for more false negatives than false positives? I don't think so.

100% yes. The process used by multi-billion dollar global communication platforms for fact-checking should not be this sloppy, where they themselves become purveyors of misinformation in marking accurate information as misleading.

It's one thing for some regular Joe Blow to post misinformation. It's another for the party with the full weight/authority of being the platform provider, and all of the credibility that comes with that, to post misinformation.

Hindsight is 20/20. We didn’t know anything about Covid in the early months and the CDC was following plans designed to counter something closer to the 1917 Spanish Flu.

We should all be grateful they scared the crap out of us. What if a variant started killing kids? What if a variant started killing 25-35 year olds?

Read history. That’s what happened when the Spanish Flu came around for a second swing.

It wasn’t about being accurate. It was intentionally about over-reacting because we just didn’t know enough.

We knew in March 26, 2020 it was not the Spanish flu because the data from the cruise ship diamond princess came back and the cfr was 1.1%. This was a shipped filled with the most vulnerable, obese people over 65. We should have never closed schools or lockdown in the USA.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00885-w

I think you're missing the aspect of Spanish flu that presents the threat. CFR doesn't define the threat.

I'm sorry but this is nonsense. No clarity of hindsight is required to realize that the conversations regarding COVID were not good faith explorations of the facts or the risks. Decisions were made very crudely in order to determine the proper course of action, and virtually all necessary mechanisms for continuously evaluating what we knew or were doing were forcefully marginalized. If you were somebody genuinely interested in understanding the pandemic, you immediately found that virtually all the sane conversations you were looking for were taking place in the same fringes as the places where lunatic conspiracy theorists were, because they were the only places that tolerated any discussion whatsoever.

That may have been the case in the very beginning, but it certainly evolved into let's scare the crap out of people to achieve whatever outcome we want.

What outcome is that, exactly?

That's an interesting idea, but it completely falls apart if one remembers the "don't buy masks" phase of the CDC's efforts.

Not just hindsight. Many people came to the same conclusion in the moment.

Doesn’t sound to you like hindsight is 20/20. Sounds like you’d want to take the exact same approach next time something like this happens

I don't think the key is to blame CDC or Fauci or the government. The key is that people should be able to examine their numbers, critique their analysis, and challenge their policies, just like people should do to any doctrine. Yet Twitter staff, at least some of them, turned such normal debates into political issues, and tried every way to ban the people or villainize them.

How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true.

The rising tribalism in times of digital information is truly interesting phenomenon. When most people realise how easily we are manipulated just by words and images in media, trust in any information will not exist. We are really go to post-truth times.

It seems to me that many of the current changes in society are not really changes, but just the ending of what was an abnormal little, extremely pleasant, bubble in time. And it's in that bubble that "we" (Westerner, over the age of ~30) all grew up in.

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. .... I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false." - Thomas Jefferson, 1807 [1]

That sort of condemnation of the news would have been, at the minimum, quite hyperbolic during the time we grew up in. But now? It seems like a scathing, yet completely reasonable, criticism of the current state of media. And this goes on endlessly far back. Read the classics (Plato's "The Republic" feels effectively prophetic at this point) and it goes from sounding alien, during our bubble, to sounding like something oddly familiar.

It's quite comforting in a way. We're not stepping into some great new unknown, but merely returning to the endless cycling of history.

[1] - https://www.loc.gov/resource/mtj1.038_0592_0594/?sp=2&st=tex...

Back then, news, or even ability to read anything was not available as it is today. So it is a little bit different in a scale.

"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

> How can anybody be surprised that so many people belive in so called "conspiracy theories" when many of them looks like true.

The Darwinian nature of conspiracy theories mean that if they didn't look like the truth, they'd not really establish much of an audience.

In other words, this as how human societies naturally build consensus.

No, consensus building is the reverse. It's people playing the game vs. the game playing people: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-beli...

Consensus building is looking for ways to persuade people who aren't predisposed to an idea to come around to it (and because it's bidirectional, simultaneously being open to ideas one isn't predisposed to). Conspiracy theories are looking for ways to become something that fits people's predispositions.

"Conspiracy theories are looking for ways to become something that fits people's predispositions." Maybe that is exactly yours predisposition?

Umm... I guess?

What do you imagine happens to conspiracy theories that don't fit people's predispositions?

Those get a new name. Hoax, fake news, relativisation, anti-whatever, propaganda, PR...

Wait, are you asserting that calling them "conspiracy theory" implies they fit people's predispositions?

Isn't that what you tried to write in previous post?

Generally I think pejorative categorization implies a lack of arguments or interest in specific topic.

It is easier to say that something is conspiracy theory (or... you name it) than bringing arguments that supports different point of view.

> Isn't that what you tried to write in previous post?

Really not.

> Generally I think pejorative categorization implies a lack of arguments or interest in specific topic.

> It is easier to say that something is conspiracy theory (or... you name it) than bringing arguments that supports different point of view.

I think you've lost the thread here. You seem to be arguing against yourself. I'm not assigning a pejorative categorization or speaking to whether a particular story is or isn't a conspiracy theory.

All I'm saying is that, by their very nature, if a conspiracy theory didn't look like it was true to its audience, it wouldn't have much of an audience, and I provided a link to a pretty detailed explanation of how the phenomenon works.

I'm surprised you find this controversial, but it's entirely possible I'm wrong. I'd honestly love to hear something that explains how conspiracy theories that don't look like they are true to their audience nonetheless do garner an audience.

"All I'm saying is that, by their very nature, if a conspiracy theory didn't look like it was true to its audience, it wouldn't have much of an audience..."

I don't think thats allways true. For example cremation masses in concentration camps during WW2 was so horrible that noone sane believe it. So then come denial not only of this information but also those who spread it. Similar phenomenon we se nowdays. Audience comes when those who spread those information (Im not judge validation of it) are suppressed. This makes interest.

Sorry, I'm not native English speaker, my expression in words is limited.

> For example cremation masses in concentration camps during WW2 was so horrible that noone sane believe it. So then come denial not only of this information but also those who spread it.

But the conspiracy theories, in this case, were the denials, which as you mention, did fit people's preconceptions.

> Sorry, I'm not native English speaker, my expression in words is limited.

I picked up on that. No need to apologize. It turns out your command of English is better than my command of any other language, so you're ahead of me.

"But the conspiracy theories, in this case, were the denials, which as you mention, did fit people's preconceptions."

Uh, ok, that's a twist! So... Is conspiracy theory saying that social media censor in favor of pharma lobby or the opposite?

Sorry, I missed your reply there. I guess I'd say the idea that the pharma lobby is controlling how censorship works on social media would be the conspiracy theory.

Which is not based on article here.

Any discussion of this that ignores the role of vaccine manufacturers in this process are simply lacking. The government had no real incentive to push a policy against science except financial interests (and the influence of people with financial influence.)

Case it point - the demonization of ivermectin - one of the safest drugs ever created that saved so many people's lives (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34466270/). It's also inexpensive. The entire case was that people are promoting something that has not validated as being effective. Not, that its dangerous or that it's stealing people's money - it's not been proven to be an effective treatment. And doctors lost their licenses (many more threatened) over this.

You mean doctors like this Dr. Karas here one lost their license?

As early as November 2020, Dr. Robert Karas, the jail’s doctor, told inmates who had contracted COVID that he was giving them a cocktail of vitamins, antibiotics, and steroids when in fact he was administering dangerously high doses of the dewormer.

“At no point were Plaintiffs informed that the medications they were consuming included Ivermectin,” the lawsuit says. “Further, Plaintiffs were not informed of the side effects of the drug administered to them or that any results would be used for research purposes.”

As a result, these men experienced diarrhea, bloody stools, stomach cramps, and vision problems, the lawsuit says, all of which suggest ivermectin poisoning.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/inmates-sue-arka...

Yes, definitely citing an arstechnica piece citing a lawsuit's claims by very credible inmates is the winning argument.

Notably, the article doesn't say that he did lose his license, or that that is even a possible outcome.

Also, I would like to point out that prisoners in the land of the free are still humans.

Why point that out? Seems like a non sequitur.

no, I mean other doctors that prescribe a safe drug.

If the inmates had too much, they had too much. And experimenting or giving a treatment without proper disclosure is wrong and the doctor should lose their license for that - if nothing else. But thanks for bringing that example because it shows the evil of experimenting on people without full disclosure.

Now if you want to talk about the incidence of heart-attacks and myocarditis after vaccines and the experiments that were run on the public without proper notification of their risks, we'd have an interesting discussion. As the twitter files show, any such discussion was suppressed because "the vaccines are safe" and anyone that say otherwise is "promoting misinformation".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence

An older person I know created twitter just to follow pandemic news and is now in the antivax and homeopathy echo chamber through replies and suggested tweets under the 2 people he follows

I'm sorry I found this hilarious

One interesting aspect of these arguments is that people often attribute the spread of anti-vaccine views to social media platforms like Twitter, rather than acknowledging the role of government and media in promoting false narratives that have contributed to widespread mistrust in mainstream institutions. While I personally believe that homeopathy is completely baseless, I can understand why someone who has witnessed the mishandling of the pandemic might lose faith in the objectivity of science and medicine. I used to work at major scientific publisher and was as "pro science" as could be, and I am also extremely disillusioned by the last 2 years.

Do you think the authorities actions are a result of intentional malice/dishonesty or incompetence?

Be careful because this the playbook of how these influencers draw people into the echo chamber. Slowly breed mistrust in anything and everything mainstream, encouraging you to think critically. Once there is a level of mistrust in everything, they feed you sources they want you to believe, "don't believe these guys, I've shown you the light, now believe me"

It also serves to alienate the person from friends/family/casual discussion, driving them further towards the chat groups and sites

The actions of "the authorities" (or rather - many people working in "the authorities") were both malicious/dishonest and incompetent at different times (and for different people).

I can try and attribute the "masks don't work" narrative to incompetence (they were trying to save the masks, and that backfired), but it isn't hard to argue that that was also dishonest.

The same applies to the "you MUSTstay indoors" messages followed a few days later by "you should go and take part in a protest with hundreds of other people" because, suddenly, racism is a health emergency bigger than covid (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/12/racism-publi...).

I am not in the "ivermectin cures Covid" camp. I don't think it does based on the available research. But the campaign to paint it as a "horse dewormer" was as far from honest as possible and I very much doubt that it was organic (Ivermectin is a drug that is prescribed to 150 000 people in the US every year, it's also commonly used to deworm dogs, and cats, and yet somehow each news outlet focused on horses).

I could go on, but the fact of the matter is that I simply don't trust the mainstream media anymore and totally understand why many people do not either. I don't care what you think about that, from my perspective "don't believe these guys, I've shown you the light, now believe me" has been employed time and time again to smear people who had heterodox opinions during the pandemic (and way before it) too.

I get what you mean, thanks for the explanation. Just out of curiosity, do you avoid news/media now, or get it from other sources?

I use the website Ground News (https://ground.news/) to try to get information from as many sources as possible. In the past, I may have dismissed some people as being "crazy" or believing in conspiracy theories, but the past few years have shown me that it is important to keep an open mind and not be too sure of my own beliefs. As a result of this realization, I have been more open to talking to people, including friends and family, whom I may have previously avoided or dismissed (think - Trump loving uncles, or anti-vax brothers-in-law)

I am also much more sceptical of"experts" ("experts say that") and phrases like "there is no evidence for X" (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...).

Thanks that site's pretty cool

The same people taking the piss about “rednecks” and ivermectin were telling people how to make DIY abortion pills

https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1521511916912488448

https://twitter.com/motherboard/status/1433174812801765384

Main thing this article seems to illustrate is that the federal government was blatantly violating the 1st amendment to silence viewpoints counter to it's own. I really don't care what a private platform does, the actions of the government far outweigh anything Twitter did in this case.

but it was a "noble lie" for the interest of the public. I think those are allowed.

What are we, children?

Candidate for worst take in 2022?

Could you elaborate into what is noble about censoring the discussion about the safety of covid-related mitigations by official, recognised scientists?

I think he is being sarcastic. I think...

yes - search "noble lie" covid and you'll understand the reference.

Looking at the results disparity for "noble lie" and +covid both in the news and search tabs in Google is really eye opening given everything that has been released with twitter's moderation tooling with regards to deboosting and view filtering.

It seems only conservative and libertarian sources are covering the recent deposition in which he confessed that he knowingly made false public health statements in the early days of the pandemic. Both moderation and policy decisions were based on these statements.

The first article google returns is on slate.com which hardly qualifies as conservative/ libertarian. And it was fairly critical of Fauci for his suggestion mask usage was not recommended which he supposedly made in order to prevent a run on them.

What makes it noble and who gets to decide when the interest of the public good is sufficient to suspend the rights of the citizenry? If it is to be believed that most people lack the intelligence to behave in ways that are in their own and society’s best interest then what is the point of democracy? What other rights are we willing to suspend for the interest of the public? Even if it is justified in this instance, what else could the precedent be used for?

This subversion of rights and erosion of trust with government actors directly pushing for censorship, no matter what the intentions, will cast doubt on the system as a whole and any purpose it might have in the short term is far outweighed by the damage it causes in the long term.

I highly recommend reading the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, specifically articles 51 through 55.

sorry - it was sarcasm. search "noble lie" and covid and you'll see the reference to Fauci.

My bad, that's on me, I am having trouble parsing out sarcasm with some of the comments on this topic.

This is such an interesting view. I understand this as you accept being taken for an idiot, if it's in your interest. And you accept that the person making that decision has your interest in mind. Do I understand you correctly?

Myself I prefer having all the facts and drawing my own conclusions, being able to ask questions and consider all options. I'm capable of it, and people in power are seldom there based on competence.

Edit: I see I fell for Poe's law. Thank god.

sorry- it was sarcasm - I'll try to remember to put a <sarcasm> next time.

Usually I would've expected so, and I even considered including it in my answer. But the last 2 years has made me question humanity too many times. It's a shame.

It really has gotten weird out there. With the rise of Q and Q like groups on the right and the insanity of the far left; even the most out there theories have a set of adherents.

It's not just the CDC who failed, it's also the WHO. Truest in the WHO plummeted after they appeared to 'cover up' for China.

From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7992121/pdf/406...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) initially declined to endorse wearing of ‘medical masks’ as a non-pharmaceutical intervention to prevent or reduce the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and strongly opposed using other forms of masks. In the second version of the WHO’s advice in March 2020 (WHO, 2020a) it stated that:

A medical mask is not required for people who are not sick as there is no evidence of its usefulness in protecting them.

Cloth (e.g. cotton or gauze) masks are not recommended under any circum- stances.

However, by December 2020, the WHO recommended wearing of non-medical masks of various kind in certain community settings—subject to recommendations on how this is done. It did so, “Despite the limited evidence of protective efficacy of mask wearing in community settings” (WHO, 2020b). Various public health experts and epidemiologists have gone further, asserting that community use of non-medical masks is crucial for slowing transmission and attributing better outcomes in some countries to early adoption of widespread mask usage. Some countries that were initially reticent to even recommend mask use have made a comparable about-turn, making mask wearing mandatory and failure to do so subject to criminal penalty.

Under the currently-dominant hierarchy in evidence-based medicine, credible evidence on mask usage must come from randomized control trials; it was the absence of significant positive effects from RCTs prior to the pandemic that informed the WHO’s initial stance.

Some seem to be okay with the government and intelligence agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech to make sure we only get to learn and discuss corporate sponsored healthcare advice now.

I dream of a United States with 0 Ads for Prescription Medicine, and the end of "Ask your Doctor about [Brand]"

It used to be like that before the turn of the century. Then, shilling for Big Pharma became cool slowly and surely.

Yeah so we took out alcohol advertising and replaced it with a different kind of evil.

Alcohol ads are definitely still a thing. Perhaps you’re thinking of tobacco?

I meant spirits but yeah you’re right tobacco is a better (worse) one.

Television ads for spirits, too, are legal and not uncommon in the United States.

Doctors have sometimes gotten kickbacks from Big Pharma for promoting some medicine. There’s been lawsuits in the USA over this and I am sure if the profits outweigh the costs Big Pharma will try it again. Here’s an example from Pfizer (2010): https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/insurer-sues-pfiz...

And rightly so, doctors that take kickbacks are acting against their oath and should be relieved of their license to practice.

Oh no, but what about free speech? /s

"But it's not real censorship unless it's the government doing it! Corporations and institutions can ban/deplatform whoever they want!"

(Well, at least until an 'evil conservative' controls a significant platform, it seems...)

Who was enforcing corporate healthcare? You just made that part up. And also, Twitter is a corporation itself. Government is supposed to regulate. They exchanged information. They were told when laws were being broken. Deleting content was entirely Twitter's discretion. And they did what they deemed most beneficial to their operations and their shareholders.

"healthcare *advice" leaving that word out misrepresents the parent.

I understand why people hold the same position you do, but I still believe it's wrong and shortsighted. It will be inevitably abused in a way you disagree with in the future.

Do you think saying "vaccines cause cancer" is fair game then? Where do you draw the line?

What do you mean by fair game? Is that true? Probably not. Should people be censored and prevented from talking about that? Absolutely fecking not. We have enough examples of medical misinformation coming from the most reputable sources to doubt their ability to impartially make decisions about what should and shouldn't be "fair game".

So we should not prevent people from talking about the fire in the crowded theater is what you’re saying?

There's a fun story related to that quote. It's a quote from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the same Supreme Court Justice also well known for his "two generations of imbeciles" quote in a ruling in defense of eugenics. The quote comes from the case Schenck v United States [1].

Holmes envisioned the quote as a reasonable metaphor for why Mr. Schenck must be imprisoned for spreading such dangerous, provocative, and utterly unacceptable speech. That speech? Scheck was handing out fliers encouraging people to refuse to comply with the military draft.

So yes, I do think it's important we allow people to discuss this "fire in the crowded theater" because if the present somehow doesn't show you where the alternative leads, then merely look to the past - there are illustrations aplenty. Schenck lost and was convicted under the Espionage Act.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Yes, if people want to discuss fire in a crowded movie theatre they are free to do that.

That doesn't mean they can jump out of their seat, scream "fire", and urge everyone to evacuate the theatre. I could see consequences for doing that, but calmly asking "does anyone smell smoke?" seems harmless.

So you _do_ draw a line.

Yes and that line is drawn at an action, not a word.

People can talk about whatever they want and there isn't a line I would draw anywhere that said "you can't talk about that". People can _talk_ about whatever they want.

You're playing with words. Let's go there. Perhaps I'm discussing the fire loud enough for people to hear. How do you differentiate between "word" and "action"?

You don't draw the line.

Some of you have a real problem understanding the entire meaning of free speech. If you just think a few steps ahead you'll understand that if you "draw the line" then someone has to be the arbiter of truth. That arbiter will not always be on your side as we've seen over and over throughout history.

If you see someone touting a blatant lie you only need o refute it with actual evidence. Suppression of this stuff will do nothing but cause you to look like you're trying to hide evidence for some nefarious reason.

You do not get to play mother to an entire nation of people and decide what they are allowed to see and not see. Grow up, act like an adult and realize you're going to hear things that aren't true and things you don't agree with. This is how civil discussion takes place.

"Some of you": nice.

You do sound like someone who never had to decide anything in their life and thinks only theoretically, disregarding reality.

Absolute free speech is dividing by zero, basically.

why are you moving goalposts?

parent did not say you are free to yell fire in a crowded theater

How am I moving goalpost? Parent is living in a fantasy world where pure argumentation replaces BS. I'm guessing Jan 6 and COVID proved that world doesn't exist.

There's an alternate fantasy world where authorities never wrongly decide what truth is. I'm guessing the 20th century proved that world doesn't exist, either.

So: We live in a world where there's lots of BS, much of it deliberately malicious, and in a world where authority figures will misuse authority over "truth", sometimes deliberately and blatantly to further their own power. Now what? What is the best strategy for maximizing good and minimizing harm in the world we actually live in?

That’s my point: talking in a absolutes gets us nowhere, because the world is messy and value is in nuance. Absolute free speech being a singularity, the point is that there ought to be some kind of regulation, the amount of which is a work in progress.

I can go to the sources, read studies and ask for opinions on stuff I don't know about.

What I cannot do is read a deleted message.

I'm more scared of those eager to use their well oiled delete and ban buttons, than someone spewing bullshit.

I know you're just making a straw-man, but can you be sure no vaccine will ever have a component that causes cancer? Even if you can be sure what's the benefit of suppressing those claims rather than just ask for evidence that supports the claim? It's not that difficult.

It's been shown than a sufficiently high number of people won't care about evidence, no matter how hard it's been displayed. Then you get Jan 6th.

Most of us just don’t get healthcare advice from the internet or social media.

I wonder how many of the "my kids and I are masking forever" crowd is due to the Twitter echo chamber. If anything contradicting the most dire of COVID effects is stifled then it's no surprise that some of the population became extreme. Their beliefs are even now reinforced by the Twitter/ social media echo chamber of the people they follow. It's sad and I feel for these people and especially for their kids

And how does this number compare to the number of people who refused to take precautionary measures such as masking and vaccines due to Twitter echo chamber, and then died of COVID? Very sad, and I feel so bad for those people and their kids.

It doesn't there are different outcomes. Twitter hid the anti-vax messaging and promoted the pro-vaccine and pro-masking messaging.

~1600 people under the age of 18 have died of covid since it began ~3 years ago. Since it began though its a very different virus, Omicron is far less deadly. Kids that are constantly masked will have long term social and learning issues. I think we have reached the point in the pandemic where the harm from constant masking out weighs the benefits. The vast majority of people agree with that. Even the 80+ year old president is rarely masked these days. I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just saying from a risk / reward perspective, masking kids likely does not deliver unless those children are ill to begin with.

Regarding vaccination, I agree social media led to many people that should have been vaccinated (overweight, lung conditions, etc.) not getting vaccinated and they died where they likely did not have to. I knew 2 of them. I'm not an anti-vaxxer and was vaccinated and received a booster shot. I am not getting anymore of them as I had covid and it was not a big deal so I know longer think the risk is worth the reward. My kids are not vaccinated and unless there is a major mutation in the virus will not be. They have all had covid without issue.

What _should_ Twitter have done? I see plenty of "nothing", so that's not interesting. But if there was a Blue, and surveys where you could see the opinions aggregated by, say, doctors with ivy league degrees, would that be useful? It would allow for dissenting voices but (maybe?) less likelihood of those voices overwhelming the majority? Any other opinions?

How about letting people discuss, even retarded arguments. If they are in fact retarded disproving them shouldn't be so hard right? The Streisand effect should teach us something, and when so many of the so called conspiracy theories proved to be likely and even true (lab leak theory for example) who are people going to look to for information?

The best example I can remember was a fact-check by Reuters on the claim that clinical trials were not completed. Their debunk started by rephrasing the claim to a straw-man that "trials had another year to finish", to debunking with: "No according to Pfizer source X it will be done by Y".

I did the math, and from article publication to date Y it was 10 months, so sure, technically correct, not a year. But does the straw-man of a specific date debunk the claim that the "trials are not completed"?

Tragic but that was the state of the discourse and it's ridiculous, what did they expect? This is going to take a long time to repair and how global it was makes me draw the most sinister conclusions. I don't want to but it's the only explanation I see.

> If they are in fact retarded disproving them shouldn't be so hard right?

Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize that half of them are stupider than that.

--George Carlin (I think)

I wonder why people believe that CDC must always be right, and therefore any doubt or challenge to CDC’s messages is misinformation that is worth banning. I thought every school in a modern society teaches student not to blindly trust the authority.

I wonder as well. That's just one government, as the article points out. Other governments had different responses, recommendations and policies. What made Sweden's approach for example, more wrong than the CDC?

Related: there isn’t enough discussion on actual executive decision making. The experts are supposed to give their inputs, but the buck stops with the executives who are tasked with balancing various trade-offs(including the inherent uncertainty in faulty/noisy scientific models).

https://www.slowboring.com/p/fda-cost-benefit

There never is one single “right” decision, the balancing of trade-offs is inherently political.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier

The CDC is just one such expert. Then there are legal experts, economic experts, public opinion experts, foreign policy experts.. in the private sector a CEO(or wall st trader or tech PM) is expected to weigh all of these, decide, and live or die by the consequences of their decisions . Tough job, which is why they get paid so much.

An executive has the authority to completely override the experts after consulting an astrologer, tossing a coin, or washing his hands.

This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci is completely misguided.

> This fetishization of the Science or villainization of CDC/Fauci are completely misguided

Fair point. Doesn’t mean that people who pointed out inconsistencies in CDC’s data or referred papers of different opinions should be banned or villainfied, either

Of course.

When there are literally millions of medical experts recommending taking vaccines, why would you expect most people to do otherwise?

We're not all medical experts. And, we can't survive without trusting others.

It wasn't really a recommendation per gov policy in many countries, it was take the shot or else type of deal. Also any talk that didn't toe the official line was deemed "misinformation".

The goalposts for what was "misinformation" moved all the time too. Making the whole misinformation information campaign silly stupid, but one just doubled down on it.

The problem is not that people "don't trust others". The problem seems to be that some people "trust the wrong people" (according to some "experts").

The biggest problem with the so called "experts" is that they seem to think that they are automatically owned our trust. But there does not seem to be any penalty for getting things wrong (don't mask, mask with cloth mask, mask with n95).

It's also quite interesting that even the ancient people knew about different modes of persuasion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion

There was Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The appeal to authority, to emotions, and to the logical truth of the claim. You need all of them to convince someone to something. Somehow modern experts think that the only thing they need is Ethos and enough legal might to enforce compliance.

Easy answer: people care about policy, not facts. They will grab onto facts that support the policy they want, and push away facts that don't. The more politicized the issue, as with COVID, the more fearful they become that any doubt or nuance will cede ground to the "other side".

And they're right in the sense that the "other side" is doing the same thing.

For example, every news headline about the pandemic had one of two policy subtexts: Democrat subtext (we need to mask up, lock down, vaccinate), or Republican subtext (we need to open up, drop mask rules, etc). Any media article, when reporting on news, statistics, or scientific studies, would always present it in one of those two contexts. So any new piece of information would be evaluated and presented by the media and by Twitter, not on a basis of how it contributed to our knowledge and evidence-based decisionmaking process, but on a basis of which policy position it seemed to support.

And of course, humans love to form political factions and fight each other ("my" group versus "theirs"), and powerful/rich people gain lots of power/money from this process by leading or feeding one side, so the media and political ecosystem encourage this dynamic.

This is really sad. Facts matter, especially for issues of life and death. Heck, facts matter, even for politics.

The question wasn't whether the CDC was "always right", the question was whether - given that Twitter already actively moderated content for other reasons - Twitter executives thought that the CDC had better arguments and evidence that certain statements were false and harmful than the people making them, and that "public health" was at least as good a reason for blocking/labelling tweets as those other reasons. (Most of the better criticisms of Twitter policy focuses on the complete lack of authority of most of the algorithms and individuals actually implementing the moderation to judge whether certain claims were new evidence or nonsense). It's not like there was ever any shortage of criticism of the CDC as an organization on Twitter.

My school didn't teach me to treat statements from practitioners of evidence-based medicine and vendors of colloidal silver as equally likely to be true or that people should pick recommendations based on which got the most social media upvotes either

Some ideas are good. Other ideas are bad.

If people are able to share ideas, some people will share bad ideas. This problem goes back to Gutenberg.

Some will argue that the powers that be owe it to the less intelligent and less powerful masses to make sure to remove bad ideas, and/or to promote good ideas.

Others will point to history and note that banning books, or forcing people to read the “good ideas” has rarely been a successful long term strategy.

I side with those who reference history. History tends to be cyclical. Most thoughts have been thought before. Students of history have learned that manipulating what people think by engineering the free flow of ideas may work great in the short term, but longer term it’s doomed to failure.

It sounds a lot less nefarious when you consider that the "suppressed" views were believed at the time - and not without reason - to be both incorrect and harmful. The passage of time and 20/20 hindsight has revealed that some of the mainstream views were themselves incorrect, but if we're counting the hits for alternatives then we have to count the misses as well. Many claims about methods of transmission, dangers of vaccines, or efficacy of alternative treatments do not look any better in hindsight, and should not be forgotten. Being a "contrarian" or "devil's advocate" or whatever has still meant being wrong - and harmfully wrong - most of the time.

I'm not at all excusing anything that happened at Twitter or elsewhere. There's plenty to criticize, but these breathless accusations of ultimate evil are not only silly but hypocritical. If we're going to be harsh judges, let's not be one-sided about it. Plenty of the "opposition" deserve some pretty strong condemnation too, having made their own contributions to the death toll. I see way too many people here refusing even to talk about those failures, because of their own political leanings. Is this a site for curious inquiry, or pure political piling-on?

I agree with Twitter's decisions but... where did it get us? Covid denial still exists and now it has a bonus persecution complex due to Twitter's moderation. Clearly debating with crackpots doesn't work but shutting down the debate doesn't work either.

it is easy to point to specific negative outcomes but difficult to measure the harm that was potentially avoided and difficult to weigh a total cost/benefit to these actions. I don't think that I personally feel confident that the outcomes is net bad.

Hopefully some people had better healthcare outcomes because of what twitter showed them and decided not to show them. Hopefully some people stayed on the platform because they felt it was less spammy or full of disinformation (on whichever side/topic).

It's a real problem and there is no solution in sight I'm afraid. Typically it takes some kind of massive crisis to precipitate a change and then less than a century later all of that gain of insight will be lost again so we get to repeat history. 2019 was a re-run of (talk about being on-time) 1918.

> It sounds a lot less nefarious when you consider that the "suppressed" views were believed at the time - and not without reason - to be both incorrect and harmful.

The same thing was said about those who opposed the Iraq War.

It's amazing how quickly the supposed "liberals" forgot this lesson and beclowned themselves.

if you keep getting the facts wrong in hindsight, maybe you should be more open to considering other opinions instead of censoring them

At the very least, GP, consider that you are not an epidemiologist or an MD, and that Twitter should not have censored such qualified individuals with unreliable and inconsistent "AI".

At Twitter, this technology was trained to parrot the U.S. CDC, over the legitimate objections and disagreements from their counterparts in the EU and WHO. As well as many others.

> Is this a site for curious inquiry, or pure political piling-on?

Good question. It seems that curious inquiry was not an important consideration during the height of a pandemic caused by a novel pathogen. We all paid the price for that, sadly. Some of us would like a word or two.

I'm sorry if that's inconvenient for some people, particularly decision makers who were not only in power, but who abused that power to censor dissent.

> It sounds a lot less nefarious when you consider that the "suppressed" views were believed at the time - and not without reason - to be both incorrect and harmful.

Actually that makes it worse. It means people overreacted because of short-term thinking.

That kind of overreaction and general freaking out has done a lot of damage and it's going to be what our Covid policy is remembered for in the history books.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I think the longest lasting legacy of covid will be the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

I am a conspiracy theorist[1], and this was all well known since before we even did '2 weeks to slow the spread'. I'm just glad some of the mainstream folks are figuring it out now.

[1]: The term "conspiracy theory" is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which claims the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...)

Indeed, I’m lead to believe Trump forced us to lock down. It’s good that now under the current president we no longer have lockdowns or restrictions.

Biden’s administration was ready to put people out of work if they didn’t get the shots. Red team vs blue team rhetoric is nauseating.

Indeed, I’m sure this would mean the current unemployment rate is far higher than it was in January 2021 no?

The courts blocked the insanity.

And they only did that because too large a proportion of workers showed the backbone necessary to lose their jobs and livelihoods in order to not take the shots. If the opposition had been something closer to 10% instead of 30% I think it's a good bet that the courts would have punted on the question.

As someone who spent the fall and winter of 2021 checking my email each morning to see if my employer was initiating a mandate, I have a deep & abiding appreciation for all the brave resisters who paid a steep price to put these fascistic mandates on the ashheap of history where they always belonged.

When secretive governments and corporations give stories that don't pass basic tests, our lives depend on finding the most likely truth. This is theorizing. If you don't think they are telling the full truth, you are a conspiracy theorist. I am proud to be one too.

What people don’t get is that the opposite of conspiracy theorist is also a sort of theorist that chooses the prevailing narrative or status quo. A friend of mine coined the term complacency theorist.

> '2 weeks to slow the spread'

Wasn't that to prevent over-crowding of hospitals? Were hospitals not over-crowded?

Aside from a few urban hospitals which were turned into COVID case dumping grounds in the early weeks, no, they weren't. Hospital employment tanked at the beginning of lockdowns and has only just recovered to pre-Covid levels: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6562200001

It doesn't seem like you've said anything backed by facts.

The number of employees in hospitals dropping at the start of the pandemic supports that hospitals were under extra stress.

Also, it's logical to assume that a crowded and understaffed hospital is a bad place to be when there's an airborne disease spreading. Hard to argue against suggesting people do everything can to stay home for two weeks to not get a new under-researched disease in those conditions.

If these measures had actually lasted for only two weeks we'd hardly still be discussing them in the waning days of 2022.

You're still in quarantine?

The original comment I was replying to was implying 'two weeks to stop the spread' was a conspiracy.

Nice to see people downvoting me for a reasonable comment, while I can't downvote them. Typical for HN. Feel free to downvote this one.

The best part about being a conspiracy theorist is not having myocarditis.

Heart problems caused by the virus, especially if you haven't been vaccinated, are far more frequent and severe than from the vaccination. Our immune system is powerful and can hurt us all by itself; but it's powerful because it has to be.

So in fairness, I am in no way anti-vax but I am not vaccinated and intend to ride out this whole unvaxed thing until either my risk levels become higher or some new bad ass strain comes along like the fourth horseman.

So as I understand your logic is unvaxed = worse infection = worse heart damage. At this point close to 100% of the western population has had covid. Has there been enough research to know for sure that the unvaxed are at a higher risk for heart damage or are you simply asserting that because it sounds logical?

There's a good recent analysis of the hospital stats vs vaccination rates over time, amongst other things. But remember, our defense against viruses includes having infected cells kill themselves, so damage is always widespread over the body after a serious viral infection, it's just that the heart and lungs can't take time off or ramp activity down sharply to recover, so they're extra vulnerable. People dying days after recovering from Spanish flu and returning to strenuous farm work was common, for example. Two such cases among my grandmother's 12 siblings.

You're right re 100% infection by now. I had the first two shots (and two infections, one before vaccines were available.) But I did skip the next two, since the bivalent wasn't available yet and evidence re boosting with the same old vaccine was thin. (Antibodies are an indicator not the whole story.) Now I'm scheduled for a bivalent shot. The first vaccine doesn't really help with the new strain, says a recent study. (Google pubmed and you can really dive into the papers, and know more than I about it pretty quickly.)

So what would you call things like the QAnon theories? If you didn't believe them that is.

Disinformation. In the case of QAnon I'd go one further and call it a psyop. The idea that it's all just a big laugh carried out by Jim Watkins or some 8chan randos is risible.

Was def some sort of psyop.

By whom? Who benefits aside from enemies of Western democracies?

The large number of elites who were shown by the Epstein scandal to participate in pedophile rings, concerns about which are now equated in most of the public's mind with wild ARG apophenia.

I think Covid (and all the anti-vax grift around it) was the last straw, exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system.

It reminds me of this recent quote from Cory Doctorow:

>We’ve had massive institutional failures that make people not believe anything. We focus a lot on the technical mechanics of why people don’t believe anything. Ten years ago, my pain specialist wanted me to go on opioids. I did my own research and determined that big Pharma was conspiring to kill people like me and I was right. The fact that I have the same epistemological basis for my healthcare decision-making as anti-vaxxers is undertheorized in rooms like this one. We leave people in an epistemological void.

Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/12/reimagining-d...

Similarly, here's a medical health expert talking about how he's a junkfoodaholic:

https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1607144563558187009

What does this man's self control have to do with whether it's beneficial to take vaccines for your health or the health of those around you?

The for profit health system has a ton of problems and should be abandoned but it’s not the reason why people lost their minds over Covid. Germany has a better health system (for normal earners. The US system is great for wealthy people) but still has a ton of anti vaxxers and Covid deniers.

I feel Germany is a slightly different beast as a large part of the anti-vax crowd in Germany seems to recruit itself from left-ish/Green corner of politics, the people who've been anti-Monsanto for decades. It's not a far jump from there to anti-vax (it's all big US companies etc.)

How's that different from the US? Nominally left-leaning yoga moms are a huge part of the antivax moxement. It's the same thing - a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to think critical, a naive belief that "nature good, human-made bad" without any nuance, and the willingness to deify their prophets of "natural healing".

Nominally left-leaning yoga moms should stick to yoga. The same goes for nominally right-leaning yoga moms. And yoga dads. Unless they feel like ditching every other 'human made' component from their lives as well for consistency.

Essential oils for broken legs.

Many people point out that hospitals tend to have tough luck with anything except broken bones.

Preventative medicine, nutrition, etc have an impressive record for everything else. Essential oils may be a rather small part of this.

> Many people point out that hospitals tend to have tough luck with anything except broken bones.

Many people talk dumb nonsense. Doesn't mean you should pay attention. Next time you have kidney trouble, appendicitis, an infected gal bladder, a blood clot in your aorta, a leaky heart valve or an infected tooth you'll be talking to a yoga mom then?

Indeed, many people induce unnecessary stress upon themselves spewing vitriol. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading... I spoke in general on purpose, to avoid getting into the weeds on statistics like this. Of course we are aware of modern medical techniques. But the general divide between holistic and allopathic medicine is well known. Perhaps a deep breath is in order.

> Nominally left-leaning yoga moms are a huge part of the antivax moxement. It's the same thing - a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to think critical, a naive belief that "nature good, human-made bad" without any nuance, and the willingness to deify their prophets of "natural healing".

Nice straw man you've got there. It would be a shame if this scientific bibliography were to shatter your worldview: https://gist.github.com/stefantalpalaru/b630413da6889c79f795...

Correct reasoning

In Spain there is universal healthcare which is not perfect but works relative ok (although has been eroded over time) and most antivaxxers(and anti mask and anti everything) could be found within the right spectrum, basically as no sayers to everything the current government (social democrats) would recommend and propose.

In Germany, anyone who didn’t agree with forcing people to get vaccinated and with lockdowns was considered a Covid denier. But in the end, once mask mandates were lifted and basically no one wears a mask any more, you see that a loud and aggressive minority was the one imposing the rules on everyone.

exploiting fears that were constructed by a cutthroat for-profit health system

...have we so soon forgotten the risks and consequences of viral mutation? 2020 and part of 2021 was the world trying to prevent COVID from mutating and following the same trajectory as the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak.

We're over-indexing on institutional failures and failing to consider non-institutional failure rates.

Institutions fail, and when they do, it's a huge disaster. Absent institutions, the general public also fails, and when they do, it's a huge disaster.

Now, compare the failure rates.

When individuals fail, we seem to think, either "well, they'll get smarter for the next time" or "well, I'm smart, so that won't happen to me" (the famous last words of every mark that walked the earth), yet when institutions fail, the prevailing wisdom seems to be, "institutions always fail"... this despite institutions effectively being composed of individuals, but with systemic checks and balances in place that attempt to mitigate for the failings of both individuals and institutions.

There's a long line of con men, fraudsters, quacks, etc. (let alone strategic/systemic adversaries) cheering in the bleachers, hoping that the public will decide that institutions cannot help and that "doing your own research" is the path to success.

Weird take imo, if anything I think trust in big pharmacy among the mainstream has increased, although maybe the fringe moved a bit more, most people still got vaccinated etc.,

Republicans were already anti everything before the pandemic.

People (on HN) are acting like the misinformation being targeted was innocent stuff on 51:49 judgement calls — complete retconning of the abject lunacy profiteers were out there saying. Talk to anyone in health care, people were nebulizing bleach and hydrogen peroxide, convincing their vets to give them literal animal medicine when the supplies of human ivermectin were cut off, taking fish antiparasite drugs, and on and on. There were prominent VCs who claimed they “were literally saving lives” by incessantly promoting sham medicines. Many of the “doctors” in those front line groups made millions of dollars off their grifts in selling rxs to anyone with a check book. I don’t know that there were better citizens than Pfizer and Moderna during the pandemic, but there were absolutely much worse ones.

People were censored early in the pandemic for saying that wearing masks was a good idea, and a number of other things that are now widely accepted as true.

Another excellent example of retconning. Who specifically was censored for saying that?

I don't know about censored, but from what I remember there was a bit of an about face on masking. This timeline seems to mesh with what I remember: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...

And I think some platforms (specifically, I believe YouTube and Twitter, but maybe others) prevented or de-funded etc., content that was contradictory to CDC guidelines.

Some lies are necessary. Put yourself in the shoes of a public health official. You just got home from shopping for groceries, and the whole toilet paper aisle was empty. You know very well that the same thing will happen with masks and other PPE needed by medical personnel if you tell the truth, and that this will likely result in an even-higher death toll. What do you do?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

I was responding factually to the assertion. I didn't state whether I thought it was right or speculate on the motive. On that though:

I agree that medical workers should have received priority for supplies they need, both because they obviously need to be kept healthy to help everyone, and because it seems fair to do so.

I doubt the CDC would base their guidance on that though, although it does say that medical workers need them more, their statements imply that normal people didn't need to wear them to prevent the spread of the disease, which is what the CDC was after, not necessarily stating that it wouldn't help people to wear them, although I think the assertion was also somewhat that it wouldn't help people to wear them. Of course, this changed as they learned more. Even today, I believe this is the state of things, masking helps you somewhat, but it's even more beneficial for the people around you.

That said, I wouldn't approve of the CDC giving false guidance about masks to protect medical workers. Even if medical workers should get priority, and the government had to enforce that, the CDC should be trustworthy, and shouldn't lie, even if it's beneficial.

You tell the truth, because if you tell such an obvious lie it will reduce trust in all future public health announcements!

OK, you tell the truth. The same idiots who are still working their way through acres of hoarded TP buy up every mask they can find. Your local hospital can't get any. Now what?

Can you be more specific? Who, where, and what did they say?

I ask because social media was full of that discussion so if there was any censorship it must have been highly ineffective.

> I'm not a conspiracy theorist

As told in my Middle Eastern history class, "it's reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist when you've been the subject of countless governments conspiring against you and/or your people -- in fact it would be unreasonable not to be one".

Iranians who claimed the US Government had orchestrated their elections were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 47 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".

Americans who claimed the US Government had lied to them about mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, vaccine safety, lockdown durations, COVID severity, dangers of remote schooling, etc. were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, then 2 years later the US said "oh yeah, we totally did that".

Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.

I love how conspiracy-theorists self-congratulate on things that totally haven’t happened. There’s been no “oh yeah we totally did that” about vaccine safety, lockdowns, covid severity or much else, yet here you are claiming to have been right all along in some nebulous way.

It’s very funny to watch.

I feel like you completely ignored the point of the person you replied to...

The point seemed to be “conspiracy theorists are proven right in the end, it’s the only rational approach”, but then it claimed as evidence a bunch of stuff that hasn’t actually come true.

Conspiracy theorists are not driven by facts or evidence, as a community they have a scatter-gun approach, and then retcon in “see, we were right all along” by claiming a tiny portion of their collective predictions came true, neatly forgetting the rest that didn’t. Often even those they do claim have come to pass have not, and rely on a misinterpretation or exaggeration.

It’s quite funny to watch, a combination of survivorship bias, confirmation bias, wishful thinking and at times downright disingenuousness.

> Be a conspiracy theorist. To be anything else is to burry your head in the sand.

That's dangerously wrong. Yes, if you have some rational reason to believe that a conspiracy is the best explanation for a particular thing, even if others don't see it, then go nuts. That's healthy and good IMO. Even laudable. However, "conspiracy theorist" as an ongoing identity or habit is not healthy either for your own reputation or for the well being of those affected by unfounded accusations. Occam's Razor is not burying one's head in the sand.

Sure, don't jump to "the government is conspiring against us" at first pass, but also don't dismiss otherwise reasonable arguments on the grounds "there's no way the government isn't acting as a force of Platonic Good, what are you some sort of conspiracy theorist?"

I don't know.

It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know.

I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.

And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop.

Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome.

Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment.

This is a worrisome development.

There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. The knock on effects from the absolute bad faith mess from discourse around vaccines is going to fuck up so much in public health for decades.

I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

> There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well.

Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

> I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths.

I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it.

At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them.

> But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.

Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.

> time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question.

We're about to find out, buddy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...

Ugh. Ok. Let's hope they manage to contain it and that the anti-vaxx crowd will realize in time what kind of risks they are playing with.

The white lie didn't stop profiteering, it was transparent for anyone watching with their eyes open and only made hoarding worse.

Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)

I worry, but also remember that much of the pandemic was just a replay of the Spanish Flu. Distrust in masking, distrust in vaccines, a complaint about the "media" keeping "the truth" from the public.

> This is a worrisome development.

Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers?

I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.

A very eye opening realization I had after 2020 is that the vast majority of people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, and that applies specially to snobby intellectual circles like academia or this very forum. They are the most indoctrinated people on Earth and it's like talking to a wall.

> promote misinformation and silence real information

"misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.

Oops, we suppressed correct info, but it's not our fault, we didn't know it was correct!

Which “real information” was silenced? I sure hope you’re not referring to that farce of an article from ZeroHedge about “weaponized lab-grown covid.” What misinformation was promoted? Are you still on about the first week or 2 when they said masking was ineffective?

Here is some promotion of misinformation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqaN68vBvXQ&t=3

Exactly.

Want to reduce the impact of anti-vax messaging? The government could stop lying and trying to suppress truthful information to start with.

This narrative is analogous to having dropped your ice cream cone on the ground, and being upset at the tyranny of your parents preventing you from continuing to eat it.

Every centralized service will inevitably be goaded into censorship for assorted reasons. Every filter has false positives. Grifters, charlatans, and informational warfare campaigns pumped pure horse shit into our memetic stream (through our own institutions even), driving the signal well below the noise floor. Twitter attempted to filter out the hostile noise to remain useful, necessarily throwing a lot of worthwhile information out in the process.

I've never been a fan of "web 2.0" centralization, and generally believe in free communications via libre software. But spinning this most recent tempest-in-a-teapot as some watershed scandal is ridiculous. Especially in the larger context of Twitter just being bought out by an impotent strongman, who has been marketing it with a brand of "free speech" while censoring per his personal whims.

If these events are really what it took for you to start paying attention to the power centralized companies wield, then congratulations I guess? But litigating what Twitter Past did as exceptional, as if censorship isn't intrinsic to the technical foundation of the whole service, just seems like a denial mechanism that will circle you back to your previous unaware state.

I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles.

This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination.

I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.

Many young and healthy people still don‘t know anyone personally who died due to covid, nor anyone claiming to have long covid.

Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

> Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.

In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50.

And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.

Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments

The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never".

If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.

Yes, that's very true. But that is also a super dangerous conclusion, that means that effectively until the dead are quite literally piling up in the streets that people will be happy to pretend it isn't real. This ability to deny something as long as it doesn't affect you personally is likely a very handy trait at some times but during pandemics it is going to lead to major trouble.

Or people were managing their own risks. I got vaxxed and followed mandates while they were in place, but as soon as my area relaxed things, I went back to life as normal, as did a majority of people. But I knew and interacted with people who didn’t mask and didn’t get vaccinated, and while I disagree with their risk assessment, I didn’t treat them as outcasts or murderers, nor did I advocate for them to be banned from the public sphere. Fortunately, I live somewhere that is more balanced in their approach, and just had mandates and lockdown to curb earlier waves prior to the vaccines. Which suits my risk assessment and most people where I live. The ones who complain tend to be rather politically motivated to the left, but most of them stopped following recommendations after a while.

I think back to the big controversies over athletes like Kyrie Irving and Novak Djokovic, and I never understood how they were a risk warranting that kind of response. That’s where the anti-anti-vaxxers look authoritarian.

This is just my story, but I had a situation where a close friend's mother died from COVID. Someone else from the social circle, who knew that person well but was antivax, their first response to hearing them pass from COVID was, "but she had diabetes right? And wasn't she overweight? So it wasn't just COVID?".

So it didn't matter if people lost friends or loved ones, the political war has casualties in their minds.

> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries

I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.

The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you.

This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them.

This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt

> To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.

> There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room.

Thromboembolic events are a common side effect of COVID-19, and vaccine roll out often led to infection surges as the sense of normality returned before full immunity.

Those events also happened in patients reporting full isolation.

They're also caused by Covid infection. Which makes sense, if the spike proteins produced by the vaccine cause these issues, then so do the spike proteins produced by the virus.

That logic is most likely simple, elegant and wrong.

Welp, I'm open to clarification.

Given both the vaccine and the virus can cause myocarditis or pericarditis, and given that the only thing they have in common is the spike protein, I'm curious as to where you think I went wrong.

Where you went wrong is getting it backwards. The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

And that cardiac events in both cases are a minor part of the greater effects and dangers of catching the disease.

So it's about not focusing on the wrong things

> The vaccines are orders of magnitude less likely to cause cardiac problems than the virus itself, for fairly obvious medical reasons.

Do you have a citation or evidence for that statement? Estimates for cardiac vaccine injury are in the 4-5% range. Your statement would imply that 40% of people infected with Covid would have cardiac issues. The evidence in low vaccine rate countries (or Africa) contradict your statement (no where near 40% of the population is getting cardiac issues).

The vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia caused by the adenovirus vaccines turns out to be due to PF4 binding to the adenovirus capsid and has exactly nothing to do with the spike protein, even though that is the only common factor between the vaccines and the virus. But it turns out that the clotting problems are totally separate.

So that is a failure of the same kind of logic that you're trying to employ. You have a virus with a clotting issue and a vaccine with a clotting issue, and they both only share the spike protein, and we know for certain now that isn't the mechanism.

A quick search finds literally dozens of articles in medical journals like these:

Thrombotic complications are frequent in COVID-19 and contribute significantly to mortality and morbidity

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32857878/

One of the special characteristics of this disease is that it may predispose patients to thrombotic disease both in the venous and arterial circulation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33719953/

Which doesn't tie the problem to the spike protein or relate it to the vaccines.

Oh, it wasn't clear that that is what you meant. Thanks for elaborating in a sibling comment.

How are you supposed to communicate 1 in 10^7 chance of anything happening versus communicating it's risk-free. The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference. College-educated members of society sure, but what about the rest? Health messaging has to be broadly applicable. Most people won't have an issue, so it's simplest to convey this idea.

> 1 in 10^7 chance

I'm not sure I believe that.

> The public isn't educated well enough to ascertain the difference.

The public may be uneducated but they're still equipped with brains capable of pattern recognition.

In my country, the public saw young famous people "mysteriously" dying of heart attacks and strokes immediately after getting vaccinated, in some cases not long after tweeting some insults at skeptics. People are watching and they are going to connect dots.

I have a little collection of screenshots of people who suffered such a fate... It's unfortunate really.

You’re suffering from confirmation bias just as much as /r/HermanCainAward. There are 8 billion people in the world, there will be plenty of examples of any theory you can come up with.

In my country the vaccination was by prescription. People who wanted to be vaccinated would sit down for 3 minutes with a doctor who would tell them their probability of complications if they got Covid vs adverse events if they got the vaccine, given their sex and age bracket. (Well, not much was known for the first shot, but by the second shot side effects were well known.) Then if they consented they would be administered the vaccine. 80% of the population consented. This is how you do responsible public health communication.

As an aside, naming phenomena after priests / politicians like that can't possibly be productive. It's telling the outgroup (people who admire Cain) that they are worthy of contempt instead of addressing their object level concerns and misunderstandings.

Sorry, are you suggesting that people without a college education are too ignorant to make judgements about their own health and that it's therefore ok to lie to them?

This sort of high handed paternalism is exactly the attitude that has destroyed faith in institutions.

That's exactly what they are suggesting, unfortunately. I was about to reply to another comment but I think it was deleted. I think what I wrote is important enough to post here anyways.

> It's obvious the messaging landed on was chosen was to maximize the individual choice to vaccinate as that was reasoned to the best possible outcome for all.

This is inducing people to pick the choice you consider correct. This is unethical in the medical profession. Ethical conduct is to present the facts and let the patient decide. You don't "maximize" any outcome, nor do you "reason" about anything on behalf of the patient. To do so means you are prioritizing concerns other than your patient's best interests and once they figure this out you are done.

If necessary, you can and must use simpler language to help them understand complex concepts. What you cannot do is decide for them in advance and then misrepresent facts in order to manufacture consent for the intervention you favor.

If people are as indeed as smart as you and your parent commenter say they are, then they will understand there doesn't exist any risk-free medical procedure. Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all. The argument could evolve further to say, the messaging doesn't matter at all, since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice, so why be upset about it? Or, stated in other words, when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance? I guess the ultimate terminus of this discussion is the interpretation of what it means to characterize the vaccine as safe.

> Having to remind of them of that fact is the kind of patronizing you both seem to be rallying against, after all.

Not really. You'd be surprised how many people believe that. They need to make informed choices. The way to do that is to say "the benefits are X and the risks are Y". If they have trouble understanding X or Y, you do whatever is necessary to help them understand.

What you don't do is say "Oh COVID-19 vaccines? Yeah, go ahead, nothing to worry about, they're completely safe". It's not up to you to determine that they are safe, the patient makes that judgement. One person might consider them safe, another might not.

> since everyone is smart enough to make their own choice

They don't have to be "smart enough" to make choices. Unless they are mentally impaired to the point of dependence on a legal representative, they have the autonomy to decide about any matter regarding their own bodies. Even if they are uneducated. They could refuse it simply because they don't like vaccines or even you personally and it's your duty to respect that.

Unless the patient is literally dying right in front of you, there is no case you could make for overriding their will on any medical treatment, and even that varies by nation.

> so why be upset about it?

Because it's unethical and undermines trust. When you do this, people notice. They immediately stop trusting you and start actively resisting you instead. As is their right as human beings with freedom and autonomy.

> when exactly where they lied to if you claim they're smart enough to dissect the nuance?

It's still a lie. Detecting the lie does not somehow invalidate the fact it is a lie.

There's a difference between a national public health messaging and a 1:1 discussion with your physician, and I don't think you're reasonably distinguishing between the two. No politician would spend 60 minutes discussing how they'll do Big Goal X and here's the 40-point plan. Read the fact sheet if you want the details or talk to your doctor. I got a fact sheet and had to wait for my vaccine, so plenty of time to read and ask questions or change my mind. And your points about the forcing of vaccination, I don't recall any instance of forced covid vaccine injections. Yes, in a parent comment you linked to something terrible that happened in the 1900s. Lots of terrible things happened in history.

There are people who have taken 2nd mortgages on their homes to send money to Trump for his “stop the steal” grift. People are too ignorant in general.

We shouldn't lie but 99% of college grads are either nominally or practically innumerate, a probability alone isn't enough

Our government, and the moderators at Twitter, lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types (i.e., people pushing zinc, or colloidal silver, or chiropractic as "cures" for covid).

People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.

This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.

> People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted.

Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it.

This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.

> the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects

Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]:

> In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate".

Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned:

> In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

From a recent interview in Unherd[5]:

> And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.

> That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.

Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]:

> Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?

> He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.

> Is it still active for you?

> It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.

Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

[2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director

[4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr...

[5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff

[7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...

He’s a common one and it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease and pushing myths about herd immunity, he was never deplatformed. Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.

> He’s a common one

How did he get into the "usual suspects" box?

> it’s worth remembering that despite lying about the severity of the disease

He wasn't just wrong or mistaken (if he was) or providing a different view, he was lying. That must be how he got into that box. I presume you have some sort of evidence, given such a bold claim?

> pushing myths about herd immunity

Would you care to give an example of that too? As I understand it, he was pushing the conventional line, conventional up until this pandemic, at least.

> Twitter chose not to have their company amplify his voice but his followers and organic discovery were unaffected.

That isn't true. From [1]:

> Actually, it’s a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.

> “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter employee told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed this.

and from the Unherd interview I provided above:

> What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages.

That means "organic discovery" is severely limited. I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.

[1] https://www.thefp.com/p/twitters-secret-blacklists

What moves him into probable deception for me is that he wasn’t just repeatedly wrong about everything of substance but that his errors were always aligned with something which made him money. Botching the methodology on the paper you’re using to argue for removing safeguards is bad but it’s worse not to mention that you were funded by one of the industries affected.

> I wonder if you would consider a hellban to be deplatforming or not.

I would consider it something which didn’t happen to him. Being blocked from trending based on his history of bad advice may not be something you like but it‘s nowhere near deplatforming unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.

> Botching the methodology on the paper you’re using to argue for removing safeguards is bad but it’s worse not to mention that you were funded by one of the industries affected.

You're being too coy. Which industry and which paper? I'm not sure what's preventing you from being more specific, especially since you were lamenting vague examples earlier.

> unless you’re defining that term as meaning that you don’t get free promotion.

So if you can seemingly access a service but not be provided that service then you haven't been deplatformed? That sounds a lot like being given a telephone and a dial tone but you can only call out to prearranged numbers and meanwhile no one can call in nor find out your number and yet the phone company claims they're not denying you service. In other words, preposterous.

> lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types

I would say they lumped themselves. Even the worst grifters know how to cloak their schemes in language of "free inquiry" and "skepticism" and so on. If the true skeptics do nothing at all to distinguish themselves from the grifters, that's on them. None of us are mind readers.

How could one make such a distinction? The key is that a true skeptic is not the same as a true believer in some alternative theory. A true skeptic will follow the scientific method - identifying specific flaws, being open to discussion of experiments to resolve open questions, citing sources that others can check, etc. Most importantly, they will apply the same level of skepticism to alternatives or to other topics. A true believer, on the other hand, will push their own theory with weak evidence, weak connections, and no attempt to correct those flaws even as they're relentless in criticizing others. When you look past the whitewash of "all voices [but effectively only their own] deserve to be heard" rhetoric, it's usually not that hard to spot the difference.

Exercise for the reader: apply this method to the many comments here about "thrombo-embolic events" as an argument against vaccines (for any group or generally). How many of the people flinging that newly-learned term around are true skeptics, and how many are just reflexive contrarians?

Many people felt they couldn't even question the pharma/big gov narrative without being branded "internet weirdos and agitators" or anti-vax.

This is in part because whackos of all stripes often start with “I’m just asking questions here!” and then proceed to spout their nonsense.

The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.

man, skip talking about the vaccines, what about the refusal to simply utilize MASKS???

If you have them...

Are you referring to how the US Surgeon General told everyone masks didn’t work or something else?

It wasn’t simple. Next time, it will be important to be transparent about the tradeoffs of different types of material, and any need to route masks towards certain sectors being temporary. The strategy to feed the public a series of simplified messages was harmful from a public health perspective and sets the next pandemic response up for unnecessary challenges. All this is compatible with mandatory mask wearing, too.

The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.

In France a government official was explaining (while France had supply shortages) that masks required complex training to wear properly, and she herself did not know how to wear one, and so were useless to most people.

A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them.

Similar situation in many countries.

For me it gave a big distrust of conspiracy theorists and reflexive contrarians, due to things like the ivermectin saga.

Ivermectin Saga? You distrusted the 'conspiracy theorists' who took a perfectly safe drug that had been taken in the billions of doses a year prior? It was known as a possible protease inhibitor and was very safe to take. Where was the misinformation in what I just posted?

More convincing people they didn't need the vaccine because of one or two miracle studies that had huge red flags and overly slanted their metastudy. Brett Weinstein holding the "emergency podcast," which was always really about self-promotion.

The problem with ivermectin wasn't safety, but efficacy. If you have worms, ivermectin is great for you! Take it!

All the studies that showed ivermectin's effectiveness against Covid happened to be from countries with low levels of sanitation. The kinds of places where people are likely to suffer from worms without knowing it. If you have worms and Covid, and take deworming medicine, guess what? You're more likely to beat the 'rona. It doesn't mean the ivermectin cured you of Covid.

If I could upvote this 1000 times, then I would.

Or, put another way, people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk, who used trickery to order the medication when it became restricted due to an unprecentedly and unplanned-for low supply, who resorted to using animal versions and mis-dosing themselves, risking needing a spot in the hospital that was already desperately needed for COVID patients. Yes, we distrusted those people, and for good reason, I should say.

> people who self-medicated instead of getting the vaccine, putting those around them at risk

How do you come to this conclusion when the vaccine's effectiveness against transmission was never demonstrated in controlled trials, and very highly vaxxed jurisdictions like the Bay Area saw huge and persistent waves of cases?

> How do you come to this conclusion

Because there have been many many studies of the effect of the vaccine, in many different countries, by many different groups.

The results are overwhelmingly that the vaccine saves lives.

> saw huge and persistent waves of cases

This is a bad argument.

A vaccine can be useful, and save millions of lives, even if we falsely assume for the sake of argument that it doesn't reduce the amount of people who get infected or transmissibility.

People were given billions of doses a year under supervision of doctors for actual cases where it made sense to take ivermectin. They weren't self-medicating with horse paste from agricultural feed stores like the idiots in the US.

It gave me a reflexive distrust of both sides. Govt officials utterly ignorant of the published research and happy to contradict it then reverse themselves next week; and unread citizens cheerfully making up their own fantasy worlds.

I was prepared with 20 N95 masks (ten years old but carefully sealed for a pandemic.) Which didn't matter because the provincial care workers spread the illness like wildfire through my building (they were seeing clients willy nilly all over the place, with no PPE, and with rules that forbid them from taking a day off with a note from a doctor who's face they'd breathed into. Also with no PPE.)

The vaccination story was a big win; and that was the decision that counted. So science won, and govts got the one key choice right, China aside. Antivaccers, zero.

I am fairly certain this is an American thing, or more broadly an issue in countries with lower levels of education and overall mistrust in their governments which clearly don’t work for them.

The basis of my argument is counter example countries such as Denmark. In Denmark, we all got vaccinated, and as soon as a second booster (3rd jab) was available, the government coordinated the distribution with pharmacies to allow administration. The response of the people was so immediate that within a week or so > 80% had at least 2 jabs plus booster. This meant that we could open up immediately, and covid became a thing of the past.

Denmark had a peak at the time, with far far far lower deaths per infection than other countries and previous peaks.

The difference is in communication. The Danish government and the responsible department communicated everything and monitored the situation in a way that allowed quick and nimble responses.

We had free jabs, nobody forced us to get vaccinated, we all did so willingly, we had free testing, and if we didn’t want a jab, we could wear masks and what have you.

> I am fairly certain this is an American thing

The exact same thing happened here in the Netherlands.

Perhaps Denmark is the exception then?

Maybe, it would be worth investigating what made that difference. For sure NL was in chaos and, drivers were a relatively small number of individuals with a disproportionate influence on the outcome.

That started during Vietnam, we are still recovering.

I disagree.

Anti-vax movements have been around for as long as there have been vaccines. The only thing that "solves" this problem is a new disease and vaccines that completely displaces the old.

Think about it: when was the last time, since the pandemic began, that you heard about autism and the MMR vaccine? that began in the late 90s (with no scientific basis I might add) and persisted for decades. Now no one talks about, thinks about or cares about it anymore. It's completely off the radar.

Covid anti-vax movements will meet the exact same fate come the next major vaccine.

It’s the same people, though. RFK Jr. pivoted and incorporated anti-Covid vax rhetoric into the rest of his platform, and that’s bringing the anti-Covid vax conspiracists into the autism myth fold. And the existing anti-vax community fed into QAnon, as well documented by Marc-André Argentino[1].

This is the tricky problem. Trusting the marketplace of ideas works if everyone who participates is interested in spending the time needed to evaluate claims.

[1] https://gnet-research.org/2021/03/17/pastel-qanon/

And if they are acting with good intent. But some people really would like to see the world burn and there are enough of them that they can do real damage. All those conspiracies originate somewhere and quite a few of those people are well aware of the fact that what they are doing will cause damage.

I couldn’t agree more. In some cases the anti-vax movement is simply being used as a tool for power.

It's not all the same people, though. Anti-vax nutjobs were primarily fringe leftists, through 2019. For a few reasons, Covid policy drew a ton of fringe right-wing nutjobs into the movement.

In my experience, possibly the worst thing that was done was labeling people who argued against forced vaccination as anti-vaxxers, no matter whether they were against vaccines or not. That made a large number of reasonable people very hostile, and reasonably so; they were being declared an enemy.

I am not directing this at you personally, but:

Why do we have so much compassion for people arguing against forced vaccination, and yet so little compassion for people who were scared of an unknown disease and angry that people were pushing back against the best known way to slow or stop the spread?

Why is the burden of rationality on the latter group? Why don’t they get to be hostile?

> Think about it: when was the last time, since the pandemic began, that you heard about autism and the MMR vaccine? that began in the late 90s (with no scientific basis I might add) and persisted for decades. Now no one talks about, thinks about or cares about it anymore. It's completely off the radar.

I encounter normies talking (inaccurately, lack of nuance, etc) about the "vaccines cause autism" meme on a regular basis.

big government + big pharma got us a vaccine fast

Some people see things very differently than I do, is what I realized - I thought science, tech, pharma, and government did brilliantly (after a slow start because of ... reasons), and I was amazed at the mind-numbingly massive delivery of the mRNA vaccines (and all the others).

Created? Please, it was already there. Gestures vaguely at every Libertarian, (Neo-)Luddite, Jenny Mccarthy and basically the city of Portland.

> the distrust it created for big government, big pharma, and big tech.

No worries. The people will forget it just like they forgot the Iraq War, the Avandia drug scandal, the Three Mile island, the Mexican gulf oil leak, Iran-Contra and everything else.

They will vote in the election. The administration will change. And despite the incoming administrations will be staffed fully by the SAME people who staffed the administrations in the past 40 years, the people will think that something has 'changed' because the frontmen of the administration have different faces.

Then rinse and repeat.

Nothing happened at TMI

That’s not true. The extra cancer screening saved tens of lives and the strangling of the nuclear industry probably resulted in millions of excess deaths from pollution compared to if TMI had never happened.

History strongly shows that epidemics do change political consciousness, toward psychological conservatism. It will take two generations (as with economic depressions) before things get anything like as loose and sloppy again. We'll fail in other ways, meanwhile. Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself but I think there will be some permanent change from this.

> Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself

To start with, getting fed up with aristocrats would be a revolutionary and progressive thing, not conservative. But it does not seem like there is enough such sentiment in the UK to change things. They still have their royals with veto power, they still have the unelected house of lords with aristocratic, religious and appointed hereditary members and the FPTP system. The house of lords can infinitely send back any bill to the parliament, by the way - which amounts to a total veto power.

Re aristocracy, I only mean that change happens drop by drop even when the movement toward it is all but invisible, sometimes.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist either but I do have considerably less respect for the WHO than I did before the pandemic. They seem more interested in playing politics and appeasing authoritarian regimes than putting out concrete policy on things which might actually help. Their back and forth on masking was an utter shambles, their stance on Taiwan a disgrace, their "fact finding" missions to China pointless and their Secretary General would often behave like an unhinged lunatic during press conferences.

I don't much care for his politics but David Cameron has some interesting ideas on how we can do better: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/covid-shows-new-global-virus-... .

Large institution makes mistakes in face of unprecedented crisis, news at 11.

All those standing by the sidelines and criticizing those in the hot seat would no doubt have done a much better job at managing this.

I'm all for learning the lessons (such as the link you posted) but I'm categorically against assigning blame against those that worked their asses off to help mitigate this, as long as the lessons stay learned and we do much better next time.

Obviously not every move deserved the beauty prize but you have to take into account that the WHO does not have the power required to demand that parties follow up on their advice, which makes theirs a highwire act somewhere between medicine and politics. Which means there are bound to be compromises and degrees of supplication that are ultimately not perfect but that at least move the needle (pun intended) in the right direction.

Contrast that with the disinformation barrage that had only one purpose (to destabilize and undermine as much as possible the effort to contain COVID-19). It's pretty easy to criticize, very, very hard to do better.

>which makes theirs a highwire act somewhere between medicine and politics.

Welp, that's probably not what people thought about the WHO before Covid, and certainly justifies the decline in trust. Maybe they could rebrand as World Health And Politics Organization.

> Welp, that's probably not what people thought about the WHO before Covid

That would be hopelessly naive then. We do not have a 'world government', every government has complete autonomy on how they deal with healthcare issues, something that I believed to be well known. That's why each government has their own ministry of health and their own way of dealing with health insurance, budgets and so on. The degree to which these things are organized is impressive but in the end if the WHO publishes a guideline you'd be stupid to ignore it but you can if you want. And plenty of countries did.

And no, it should not result in a decline of trust in the WHO who clearly advocated for moving as fast as possible while governments the world over with some very rare exceptions took a 'let's wait and see' approach. If anything it should reduce the confidence that you can solve global issues with local policies.

It's ironic that people who are nominally against the existence of a world government were demanding that the WHO act as if it's part of one: the WHO doesn't have an army or a police force. Do folk think a hostile showdown between WHO and a Great Power host country will result in anything besides deportation or the arrest of WHO envoys at point of entry?

"Large institution makes mistakes in face of unprecedented crisis, news at 11. "

There are different categories of "mistakes".

In the face of an unprecedented crisis it is understandable that there will be uncertainty in what courses of actions to take, and mistakes will be made.

However, how Taiwan was treated, or declarations by people who have a clear self-interest that the virus could not possibly be a lab leak when it was simply impossible at that time to have done the necessary due diligence one way or abnother were clearly pre-meditated and political in nature and should make any thinking person think twice about what comes out of the WHO/CDC.

These are two of the many CYA and/or turf protecting situations that happened that have significanlty wekend trust in these organizations.

Maybe in the US, but not worldwide. When you compare, countries where citizens trusted the government and generally followed the government's plans fared better than countries where individuals fought for their rights to choose what they think was best for them.

IMHO Covid demonstrated the importance of trust in the system. When people trust the system, and think of the society as something they need to work together to maintain, they tend to come out better. Even after their governments did make many bad decisions.

If people don't trust a system that raised them, there are inherent flaws with the system that it is either unable or unwilling to address

Just because X is bad doesn’t imply Y isn’t worse

Sure, but a major flaw of the American system is that it's deliberately pushing its people into being distrustful of the system (and each other). Not trusting the government, or wanting to make it less effective, is considered a virtue in many parts of America. (And it's not just the conservatives.)

Yes, but those flaws are not simply among the people these criticisms are leveled at.

Technocratic autocracy created the issues, but the response is typically "so add more technocratic autocracy".

It's not just those evil billionaires (read, people in the .1 percent whereas being on HN makes you highly likely to be in the 1%) manipulating society, it's Good, Honest, Educated professionals who are making incorrect or reactionary decisions regularly and doubling down when called on it.

How are you measuring that?

To say "trust the system" requires a religious inclination that many don't have

This statement only makes sense on a philosophical level.

Actually, it is incorrect on that level also. Religious faith is only one form of faith, there are many others.

This would seem to presume an opaque system whose workings are entirely unknowable with divine providence... rather than something constructed, operated, and controlled by humans.

The American public lost faith in all those institutions in the 1970s. COVID didn't make a dent. Hell, we already stopped trusting science in general well before COVID-19. Our authority figures are largely ignored in favor of whoever shouts the loudest and angriest. We elect maniacal buffoons from TV rather than experienced, trustworthy, decent human beings (and again, that started in the 80s).

People will always swallow a magic pill that fixes all their problems. What changes is the form the pill takes and who's selling it.

I can see what you are saying, but personally the longest lasting legacy for me was a deepening of my distrust of about one third of humanity that will drag us kicking and screaming into the void if given power. The anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the ivermectin cult, the toilet paper hoarders, and all the others that have no idea how science works in its stumbling manner.

There’s apparently a lot of people upset about Twitter for trying to manage misinformation. I’d like to see equal information leaked from Fox for comparison, who should have journalistic integrity since they’re a news company.

It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about, and not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.

Given that extreme level of ridiculous harmful misinformation being presented, it seems obvious to me that any reasonably ethical link in the communication chain should attempt to speak up.

Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.

He also suggested UV lights applied from the inside of the human body could cure COVID. It remains unclear which orifice was recommended, but one was heavily implied. [1]

What a weird time that was.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG0ciGfJ1xY

You do know that this is a line of research right?

https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-05-01/cedars-sin...

It is easy being smugly wrong.

The first link says (my emphasis):

> The investigators emphasized the preliminary nature of their research, noting that they did not demonstrate a causal link between the improvement in patient conditions and the reduced viral loads.

I don't know why people did make fun of him suggesting using UV. CNNing of the mind works well in the distopia that has became the western world.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101113442...

But that paper is specifically not about COVID-19 - "it is reasonable to suggest a human Coronavirus HCoV-OC43 as a surrogate for SARS-CoV-2" - and is only tested in-vitro - "For each irradiation experiment 50 μl of virus suspension [...] was placed in each well of a black 24-well plate".

It might encourage people to give grant money for further research but it is 100% not evidence for the efficacy of "sticking a UV light inside the body will kill COVID-19".

yes it is not evidence and I don't think trump's tone was 100% sure of it. he just asked if there might be a way. that doesn't totally sounds dumb to look at it according to prior research.

But according to Trump he wasn’t actually asking, he was being sarcastic.

Just to be absolutely clear -- you're claiming that nobody had any problem with Trump? Not sure what media you consume if so.

You do see the difference between Fox and Twitter right? One is an open platform that is supposedly neutral and “follows the Science” and the other is media company that doesn’t pretend to be neutral.

"fair and balanced"

Twitter is neither open nor neutral

“the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.”

This is a lie and you should not be propagating it in the current year. It’s honestly embarrassing you can’t do primary research at all and still talk with authority.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S101113442...

thats ok. you can lie and twist the reality but it won't work with people who can read or listen.

That article is about UV light, not bleach?

because the parent video never mentionned bleach. He asked if we could have something that could disinfect from the inside. CNN translated that as bleach. just like they translated the hunter biden story as russian propaganda. that is US media so its nothing special. what is special is that educated people are talking about bleach while they have access to the source material and can tell there is not once mention of bleach

Trump responded to a point from one of his actually-qualified officials which specifically mentioned the efficacy of household bleach in killing the virus outside the body by speculating about "doing something inside" and "injections" of "that disinfectant"

Most people's key takeaway from this is that highly-influential public figures with no scientific background probably shouldn't start inarticulately positing their own ideas for cures in public health briefings, not that the real problem is the media just didn't acknowledge he was talking about injecting (or "maybe not injecting") a different type of disinfectant...

Trump, incidentally, announced shortly after his biggest fans had mined the internet for evidence of Trump's awareness of cutting-edge research that his comments were actually "sarcasm", which would of course have been worse still.

you know saying that trump is right on a few topics doesn't mean we are fan. most of the immigration policies and china policies that biden is running right now are from the trump era. Biden was saying then that trump was racist for doing it.

Pretty sure this study was put out to see if his remarks had any merit at all.

Immediately prior to Trump’s remarks, Bill Bryan said:

“‘We tested bleach,’ he said at one point. ‘I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.’”

Trump followed this with:

“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.”

So to be completely fair, Trump suggested that injecting bleach could cure covid. Much better.

It’s embarrassing that there are people in this thread claiming he wasn’t talking about bleach.

> is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.

That's a question. A statement would begin with "there is".

It's embarrassing that people are mischaracterizing his remarks based on a bad transcription.

new account spamming lies and snark

> It seems weird to me that Twitter is the only one people seem to be up in arms about

They're the only one releasing internal files. If others did, like Facebook or Youtube, or Fox if you really want (but that would be a strange choice) do you think we'd only be up in arms about Twitter or do you think you might hear "Now it's Twitter and Facebook!" Regardless, I've seen plenty of people pointing out that this probably went on in many places, it's just harder to get worked up about a negative, implausible as it is.

> Twitter didn’t even really block most things, they just added a small banner alongside some statements that amount to being a reminder to check your sources.

That's simply not true and makes it seem like you haven't read the article or the associated Twitter thread. I'm not going to provide the quotes because you should've read the article instead of providing an untrue anecdote, and you can click the link above.

It's also not relevant whether they blocked "most things", what matters is that they blocked true things, things provided by notable experts, and that they were blocked because they inconvenienced the powers that be or dissented from the official line.

But twitter is supposed to be a dumb pipe and its role is to facilitate the debate, not to take sides. That's why people are upset. The parallelism is not with Fox, but like if FCC was jamming the airwaves of tv channels it doesnt like

It still seems weird to me to give digital services a free pass on ethical matters

Then why dumb pipe should be worth 44B$? And you are contradicting yourself - if something is facilitate debate (as opposed to enable) then it is not dumb.

Do satellites and telephone wires not facilitate debate?

> not the times the US president did things like suggest to the public, on live national tv, that consuming bleach could cure Covid.

That's not what he did: https://eu.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...

"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, supposedly 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. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"

He continued.

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in 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."

It’s even worse than that! We’re getting some internal Fox News communications as a result of the Dominion lawsuit and nobody cares that Hannity knew the election fraud claims were false. He just went right ahead and interviewed Sidney Powell anyhow.

You don’t think people are up in arms about Trump or Fox News? We live in very different realities. Also, you’re comparing apples to oranges here.

the explicit mandate of Fox is to spread lies to try to increase division in the US and to weaken the country. it would be weird to complain aobut this if you also want to destroy the country from within

What is the realistic legal recourse for those who were censored from pressure by the US government? Sue the relevant agencies or executive branch? Will anyone even go to prison or lose their job?

None because there was no censorship or pressure.

This is demonstrably false. As admitted by the government itself.

Can you quote what explicit pressure was applied?

Go read the twitter files drops

I did and I’m missing the pressure. No one can seem to point it out too; when asked they either say “read the files”, or “when the FBI asks you to do anything it’s automatically a threat.” Still waiting for maybe a link to one of the tweets at least that people find so problematic.

I used to work for the FBI. Whenever I asked for something there was an understanding that it would happen.

When is a question not a question?

Very curious about your perspective as you seem to be the only one so far here who has said they worked for the FBI. What role did you have?

Has anyone ever said "no" to a request? Were those requests lawful or were you asking others to do illegal things? If you did ever get a "no", was it your job or did you know of others whose job it was to exact revenge or to otherwise illegally coerce compliance?

According to the Twitter Files, Twitter itself said "no" to many requests. What was the ill-fate they met for saying "no" to the FBI?

The way I see it, when you're a multibillion, multinational corporation that has a very powerful board of directors and an experienced legal team, saying "no" to a request from FBI is not only an option, it likely will have zero consequences. Other massive companies are able to say "no" to the FBI and are still in business. Does "come back with a warrant" not do the trick anymore?

I never saw any shady asks when I was there, but my field was different. Name dropping FBI got people to jump through whatever hoops 100% of the time. My bias may come from asking willing folks things that were legal.

My point was simply that when you come in with that kind of authority, people often just follow orders and don’t push back. That’s a powerful stick to wield and should be wielded responsibly.

In my review of the twitter files, this was not done in every case.

That's not true.

> Will anyone even go to prison or lose their job?

Why would they? This is another nothingburger, Musk is just seeking attention for the sake of attention. If that means echoing antivax bullshit, or trying to make sure Hunter Biden's penis is available for all to see on the internet, that's what he will do.

Ro Khanna, the Congressman representing S.V. has thoughts on using "nothingburger":

> Here’s why I think the “nothingburger” argument is compounding the problem.

https://www.thefp.com/p/ro-khanna-on-twitter-free-speech

It's worth a read to at least consider his thoughts.

I have read his thoughts, and while he makes good points he ignores the clear facts:

- censoring Hunter Biden's nudes from the site was the right thing to do.

- The laptop hoax had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, and still seems likely to have been developed by the Russian government

- banning trump was the right thing to do, he had just attempted a coup against the US (I also think banning dictators/autocrats would be the moral thing to do)

The other thing people are ignoring is that trump's team requested things to be removed, and they were as well: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-granted-requests-fro...

Everyone is acting like Twitter favored progressive causes, they did not. In fact we know from the Twitter files nothingburgers that Twitter gave "LibsOfTikTok" _favorable_ handling, preventing them from being properly moderated without higher levels of approval than other accounts. Con accounts were treated with kid gloves to prevent the backlash that Twitter is receiving anyway.

Multiple independent investigations showed that the laptop story was accurate. Our intelligence agencies conspired to suppress it, knowing it was true.

The FBI had the laptop for a year before the NY Post story.

The FBI, while under the Trump administration, was doing Biden's bidding?

Cool story.

I've never heard or read anything particularly interesting when it comes to the laptop. You have a link to source I could feasibly trust (NY Post falls far, far below that bar) that explains how there's evidence the Bidens did something corrupt?

> Multiple independent investigations showed that the laptop story was accurate.

This is not true, at best it is conflating some truths (copies of a hard drive exist and have some actual emails / pictures, a laptop was provided to the FBI) with lies (every file on the laptop is verified to belong to Hunter Biden! The laptop proves Joe Biden worked with his son in corrupt deals!).

What they've shown is that there was a hard drive, heavily manipulated by multiple parties, that eventually made their ways to law enforcement. Those hard drives to not show what most cons are pushing (that Joe Biden is corrupt), they do show Hunter Biden had a lot of sex and did a lot of drugs.

If you're interested in digging into this story with an open mind, including diving into the "soft corruption" of Hunter Biden's activities (similar to other rich, connected kids, e.g. Don Jr, way less corrupt than Jared and Ivanka gaining WH influence), watch this rundown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDcIludbsUw. It is long but worth it, and examines the issue from multiple angles.

Wow, Khanna comes off really good here as a rational patriotic centrist. It makes me wonder about his future political ambitions. People should read the interview if unfamiliar with him.

People who use the phrase “nothingburger” aren’t persuadable.

Well, when you see it, you know the person isn't really saying something; they're repeating a slogan.

That's an interesting deflection, considering there have been 10+ "twitter file" drops and nothing of import has come from them. The closest to the 1st amendment complaints we've seen is the fact that the trump WH reached out to Twitter to do things and Twitter complied.

That said, for some reason most folks are focused on the Biden campaign doing the same (to get Twitter to remove pictures of Hunter's penis from the internet).

If the government pressures a platform to censor information I would think that goes against freedom of speech or maybe freedom of the press

There isn’t a legal recourse. Nobody will go to jail. Nobody will lose their jobs.

Trust will continue to deteriorate.

probably best to consult a lawyer to determine which laws, if any, were broken and if you have standing to sue

i, a non-lawyer, think you probably have no recourse

The Covid pandemic has taught me that facts don't matter — context is key. Being able to frame global discussions in any way you desire is true power.

"This one health professional was off once so here are the opinions of random handles created a few days ago with two followers that you should take medical advice from".

what's wrong with suppressing anti-vaxer views on twitter? elon's guy says twitter rigged the debate. yes so what. why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers? If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.

I wished Elon Musk would fuck off to Mars already, he's done enough damage. But trust him to see how far he can milk this and it gets lapped up and amplified like it is the biggest scandal since Watergate, whereas the most you can take away from it is that there were a lot of people doing their utmost best to ensure the platform functioned with minimum damage potential.

“I see nothing wrong with banning people who disagree with me”

> what's wrong with suppressing anti-vaxer views on twitter?

there's no such thing as anti-vax views. there's only science/facts and lies.

> twitter rigged the debate. yes so what... (the views that I supported carried the day)

most bizarre argument i've come across on the internet today.

> why should they have to provide a leveled platform for vaccine supporters vs anti-vaxers?

sounds to me here like you want to live in 'La-La land'.

> If you look at china now there is a tragedy due to no vaccinations being available.

covid is such a tragedy that china is loosening [0] some of its zero-covid restrictions. also, there's no shortage of vaccines anywhere as of today. you might want to cross-check that piece of misinformation.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/china-to-end-quarantine-for-...

I think you are crazy. we have the exact same opinion on this.

Here's one of the tweets mentioned in the article that was labeled as "misleading":

https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.am...

Can you explain what is actually misleading about it, or, more broadly, how is it anti-vax?

My guess is doing this type of moderation is cheap labor and can have mistakes.

Probably the moderator didn't analyze the case thoroughly enough to understand the cherrypicking bias and marked it as misleading. It's not like you have scientists analyzing every tweet to find the scientifically biased views.

It's sad even the right wing delusion has crept in here of all places.

Relevant context - this was written by a member of the team who released the Twitter files, alongside Matt Tabibi.

Also, readers should know that The Free Press is Bari Weiss¹. Vanity Fair described her as "a provocateur", which is the kindest-possible interpretation of her editorial philosophy.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bari_Weiss

And Vanity Fair is a pillar of concise and objective information?

Come on, at least be fair.

Honestly, yeah. Have you read their reporting?

Flagrant ad hominem is beneath this forum.

And wikipedia bios of people challenging the narrative are also heavily censored and manipulated by the intelligence apparatus.

Oh well if Vanity Fair says it then it must be so

> In 2021, Weiss compared her own professional travails to Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist who was threatened with being burnt at the stake if he did not renounce his scientific views.

Oh, wow.

yep if they're saying stuff I don't like they're crazy and a provocateur, hey, maybe they're even a communist!

Edit: removed inflammatory comments

Not seeing how I did any discrediting, just thought it was interesting as I was reading through it. I intentionally wrote this in a neutral way - e.g. I could have just as easily mentioned John Carmack and Oculus.

Unless you believe that Matt Tabibi is not a reputable journalist or that the Twitter Files lack credibility, this feels like a very defensive gut response.

There's no debate happening on Twitter. It's just for people to make a scene and try to get clout. Why are these random people not participating in actual research?or writers for real publications? Instead they're posting hot take one liners with no repercussion if they are incorrect. It's misleading to make it appear like there are two equal sides like this thing is trying to make it look like.

> Why are these random people not participating in actual research?or writers for real publications?

The author of the article wrote for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Wired. Are those not real publications?

I mean the people on Twitter the article is writing about

> KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker

> Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician,

This article is just trying to get people outraged by making it an us vs them trying to make this look like it wasn't a fringe view at the time.

> American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.

Political outrage porn pretending random people are a persecuted

How do you state it's a fringe view when the viewpoint was actively being suppressed by everyone?

You've chosen a few examples where the posters didn't have strong credentials - how about the Harvard professor?

You think the only reason it is a fringe view in the first place is because it was suppressed? The only thing holding back anti mrna research was tweets and pop Sci quality articles in news?

The core issue isn't an political us vs them issue like this and other articles suggest.

I didn't address the hardvard guy because idk how many other Harvard researchers or w/e the tittle is. Likely the guy is not holding a popular view. How many other people work at hardvard and Stanford and other top universities?

I don't really care about a private company making reasonable decisions and learning about their internal debate process. Up until Musk, I was impressed to see Twitter grow a backbone and not fall to the cowardly cries of "free speech."

What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?

There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine.

Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities.

This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.

> a question for another time

Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?

I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine.

If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data.

I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.

I think the issue is anything except “the vaccine is perfectly safe”, despite being demonstrably false, was until recently considered “misinformation” and a censorable/bannable offence. Now if you want to make the argument that banning facts for the greater good is acceptable that’s one thing, but nobody seems willing to admit they’re in favour of that in so few words.

You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. I think the vaccine probably saved more lives than it cost, but I'm a lot less confident because of how much bad-faith covering-up of any counterveilling evidence there's been.

(Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)

> You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting.

Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.

It's not like there's a replication crisis on, or we've recently seen promising drugs withdrawn because a couple of misclassified deaths in the RCT meant heart problems went unnoticed...

This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent."

Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.

It’s telling that this reply and mine below it are being flagged instead of responded to.

The initial safety trials for the vaccines involved tens of thousands and by the time you had the chance to get the vaccine it had been given to millions of people (with any adverse effects tracked). One of the vaccines was pulled off the market for super rare side effects!

And at the same time, it was obviously, provably known that the vaccine was better than covid. Did you know covid causes myocarditis too? More often than the vaccine does?

If your standard for informed consent is more information that was available for the covid vaccines then I assure you the other health decisions you are making in your life are not meeting that standard. You also aren't the best at evaluating risk. It's very much like being against seatbelt mandates because they sometimes cause injuries in car crashes.

Now it is a separate question of whether the current vaccine policy makes any sense, but its a much less impactful question because the policies from 2021 mostly did the job of protecting people.

I know all of those things. It still doesn't matter. Informed consent must happen. We have a long and rich medical history of finding out what happens when that sort of thing is brushed off. "Hey, I'm doing you a big favor" doesn't matter, consent does.

Given all the things the government is capable of doing (drafting you, imprisoning you, taxing you, taking your property, etc), you are putting way too high a standard on this.

The government has an interest in the overall public health and will make controversial decisions to that effect. They've done it before and will do it again. There were also right in this case so that is kind of important.

I agree they could have been wrong, and that would have sucked. But they weren't. The processes and safeguards to the very aggressive policies got to the correct endpoint, and saved a lot of people's lives (in some cases against their will).

Okay, so someone in a labcoat tackles me, gives me a shot, tells me it is for my own good, then runs off. That's ... okay?

The end result is irrelevant. It's the "she had an orgasm, so how could it be rape?" defense. The recipient must consent, and they must be in full possession of the facts for them to make that decision. Even if it is a decision you do not agree with, it is still theirs to make.

The government didn't do that though (even though they could have!). Tons of people remain unvaccinated, though I acknowledge in certain cases the person had to find a different job more compatible with their inability to do risk analysis.

Remember also that if you get sick and go to an ER, they are required by law to treat you. The society has an interest in preserving this legally required service to be available to it's people.

You weep at the lack of informed consent for the vaccine but have no concern for the person who bleeds out in a car accident because the EMTs were overwhelmed with COVID patients who had completely preventable serious disease.

You don't want to take a measles vaccine due to the potential side effects (remember: nothing is perfectly safe), but yet want to live under the protection of everybody else who did take it.

If you choose to live in a society you gotta take one for the team every now and again. Sometimes the government is wrong and it sucks, but this was not one of those times!

Oh, I have taken the vaccines. I just believe that informed consent is always a must. I should be informed of the side effects, all of them. Hiding them from me is not an option.

I guess we fundamentally disagree on the need for informed consent. I believe that "you don't get to know that" is not acceptable, no matter how well-meaning people are. We used to sterilize people without telling them, under the exact same auspices (Buck vs. Bell). I quote Oliver Wendell Holmes "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."

So don't read about the side effects of anything you are prescribed, I would still like to.

The authorizations for these vaccines had 10+ hour public meetings and hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. The studies listed the known data on side effects.

Obviously the vaccines were not without risk, and when the government said they were "safe" that did not mean they were 100% safe... Nothing is. They were safe to the standards of other vaccines in broad use.

I will acknowledge that in addition to the known deaths from JNJ, I'm sure there were a bunch of unlucky people who had reactions to vaccine that caused issues or may have even killed a few people who were extra sensitive or unlucky. However if the choice is either getting the vaccine first or getting COVID first, and one is 100x safer than the other one for all of these side effects, then it's still hard to disagree with anything the government did.

And at the end of the day a lot of anti-vaxxers or vax-curious people argue in bad faith with bad data (I'm not saying you are, but it is common). And even I agree that the "good" data isn't perfect. We still have reporting issues of died with COVID vs died from COVID, but even with any reasonable assumptions about these distinctions the vaccines give all people of any age enough additional protection to be worth it (for the initial 3 doses at least - I make no claims beyond that).

> one of the few things we know for sure

Objectively, with the rate of change and revelation surrounding the vaccine, I'm not sure how anyone can confidently assert that we know anything about it "for sure." We're learning new things about side effects and efficacy quite often at the moment.

Current data suggests that the virus is far more deadly for a certain segment of the population but there are significant negative health impacts for other segments of the population, while the feds and pharma are pushing even more vaccine use for demographics which have consistently shown low vulnerability.

There's simply too much nuance to make a blanket "we know for sure" statement about this. It's a living, evolving topic.

And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?

Side effects you say? Obligatory reminder that millions (maybe over 10 million) of anti-vaxers have long covid.

That sounds like you're part of the gaslighting. What, no non-anti-vaxxers got long Covid? Don't kid yourself. (And even if you do, don't try to kid us.)

> but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine

Curious, did this happen to you?

It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919

> cowardly cries of "free speech."

What a world we live in where this is a reasonable statement to many.

If the only people crying for free speech are only the people who gets rotten tomato-ed every time they get up on a podium, it makes a lot of sense.

> What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?

You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0].

I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming.

[0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...

This is what we get when we expect corporations to police speech, and when governments pressure them to do it.

We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by making the conspiracy theories about censorship become true!

Besides, even if you wanted corporations to police speech and decide what is true, would Twitter and Facebook really be the ones you would want to do it?

It’s been very sad to see Westerners, especially Americans, and especially American liberals be so fearful and weak that they discarded the single most important principle of freedom, liberty, and human rights: freedom of speech.

That sacrifice got us nothing. Misinformation still spreads and it is more attractive than ever to the conspiracy-minded precisely because they can see the attempts to suppress it! Forbidden knowledge is always more attractive. It wasn’t worth it!

The only way out of this is to stop asking corporations and governments to censor things. Just stop.

You are mistaking social media companies as platforms for speech. The are not. They are for profit companies that must police their content to attain maximum ad revenue. They will curate, filter and edit content solely for that purpose.

I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.

They are absolutely platforms for speech and in many cases they are the main source of news for people. Facebook and Twitter matter more than CNN.

By the way, all the newspapers and mainstream media that were displaced by social media are almost all ad-based, for-profit enterprises too.

There is a lot of speech on Twitter and Facebook, but the purpose of those companies is profit. If they could curate and filter content to increase revenue, they will. Plus, telecom laws protect them from liable so they can get away with publishing outright lies.

The fact that people use these poorly vetted sites as their primary source of news is unsettling. There is a lot of quality content, but it’s surrounded by a lot of garbage (from both the left and the right).

The NYT and WSJ both operate by much higher standards than I’ve ever seen on FB or Twitter. The newspapers are far from perfect, but they do abide by ethical standards. And most importantly, they are liable for their content.

And yet the purpose of the NYT and WSJ is also profit. They also publish a lot of total dreck.

You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.

Right, but you don't expect NYT or WSJ to be required to print every "letter to the editor" submitted by anyone in the world. They are for-profit, non-government, and they print what they want. Twitter is also for-profit and not the government – so why is it different if they also choose not to broadcast some things?

Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their coverage or convince them to downplay (or emphasize) certain stories. I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

> I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.

The importance is that every free and democratic nation in the world has its’ policies influenced by the loudest voices on Twitter. So if Twitter amplifies an idea it becomes reality.

Does it really do that? Or is it just a distraction? All the noise from the Twitter didn’t stop Trump from giving his speech on Jan 6th. Biden didn’t backtrack on the pull out from Afghanistan because of Twitter. No gun bans. No end of drag show book time.

I’d say it’s just a reflection of us, not our compass.

Quite a lot of people know what Trump tweeted, even though they never had Twitter accounts.

Sometimes it seemed like most of the news coverage of Trump consisted of news anchors reading his tweets on air. His tweets got a lot of the people into DC on the 6th to hear his speech in the first place.

Twitter is not just a distraction, sometimes it is the news.

Social media companies try to portray themselves legally as platforms in order to eliminate legal liability for the content that users post on their platform.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Ok I stand corrected on this law, which basically says that companies aren't liable for user-generated content (the article could've just said that in the first line).

Either way from a moral perspective doesn't change the fact that a platform censoring viewpoints is a violation of the principal of free speech, and morally reprehensible in a free democratic society. Twitter tried to be the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, and I'm glad that Twitter's new management recognizes the error of their former ways and is committed to not repeating the same Orwellian mistakes.

Parent wasn't making a legal argument. A bunch of the comments in this thread are about trust. Do you think it's good for trust to have "for profit companies policing their content to attain maximum ad revenue"?

Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?

Do I think it’s good? I do not. That’s one of the reasons I dislike the crux of the argument about free speech on Twitter. Social media doesn’t care about those things. They may say they do when they are flush with money (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”), but when push comes to shove, they’ll do anything to make a buck.

There is a place for social media in our world, I just don’t want to hold it up to such lofty aspirations that it will never achieve.

Twitter is by far and away the #1 place to exchange and debate ideas. It is critical that speech on it remains free.

I'd flip that around and say that it is critical that we ensure Twitter is not the #1 place to exchange and debate ideas.

There should not be a single, privately owned town square. There should be thousands of town squares where people can go and engage. Some should be public and some should be private. Placing all our free speech eggs in the Twitter basket will not end up well.

i would be more alright with twitter doing no policing if they also did nothing to promote or curate any content. this means no recommendations, no trending, no "recommendations" and might also mean no ads.

if they are gonna to have all that, which i think they need to survive as a business, then the next best thing would be to empower users to have more control over the content they see ala email filtering

This is incredibly naive. Popular platforms receive a lot of horrific stuff being posted. Some things need to be censored. Without moderation every platform would dissolve into a race to the bottom. For an example of this see this article https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382

Free speech on centralized platforms is a pipe dream. Every company always has motivations to censor including legal, financial, personal, practical usability, etc.

Just because the ticket has finally come in for censorship that offends your sensibilities, does not change the fact that this dynamic has existed for the past two decades. The pot has been slowly boiling, and you are now realizing it. Good - jump out!

The only way out of this is decentralized platforms running on Free software, period.

Original title is "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate". Why the change from "Rigged" to "Moderated"?