Because combatting mis/dis-information is largely a problem at the tail-end of the distribution (ie.: the crazier, most unhinged end of it). It's one thing to argue with each other about complicated nuances, it's another thing when people feed bleach to their children because someone on the internet told them it would help with the autism.
That's nice, except sometimes innocent people are the victim. Like the children. Or, in the context of a pandemic, all the other people who are exposed because Bob and Steve won't put a mask on or get a jab.
Except that's not exactly true either, depending on how you look at it. At the population-scale, they do prevent infection and transmission, and they prevent it very very well.
This particular individual has said many other things during and about the pandemic, and this was part of a much broader line of messaging that was, broadly speaking, both incorrect and harmful.
(I'm a biochemist, and immunology and extracellular vesicles are my areas of expertise. No conflict of interest.)
I think the world could benefit immensely from banning some mainstream publications that ferment hatred, instill unjustified fear, destroy innocent people by labeling them with unspeakable labels. Their narratives for decades have destroyed nations, killed millions of people and locked the entire world down for 2 years.
Do I still think they should still be able to have an outlet? Yes, I do. Just like every other publications, individuals and outlets banned by Twitter, FB, and Youtube.
Yep. Finance. Resource allocation has life-or-death impact.
Whether your immunology research finds applications, a hospital gets acquired instead of wound down, or an N95 factory gets built can be a few parameters pushed through a model. Parameters dictated by sentiment.
> this was part of a much broader line of messaging
When you start to do this, you've drifted into censoring people rather than misinformation. You can't censor things that are true for fear that they'll embolden forces that you are against. Well you can, but that's a dictatorship.
I'll replicate the tweet, since I think it's useful when discussing these matters:
> It doesn't stop infection. Or transmission. Don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it - at best - as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity,
"Don't think of it as a vaccine" is trivially false, as it is literally a vaccine. "terrible side effect profile" is false: we now have data that shows at population-scale the vaccine was overwhelmingly effective with minimal side-effects. (We knew that before then, too; anyone looking at the efficacy rates knew it before it hit the gen pop.)
"that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS": that's how nearly all vaccines work, yes. Your body can't really fight an infection with the effects of the vaccine that it hasn't had the time to produce the corresponding antibodies for. (AIUI, rabies is the exception to this, where you can be vaccinated after infection, but that's due to rabies being a very slow moving infection.)
"It doesn't stop infection. Or transmission." And the rest of the tweet is just misleading: nothing is guaranteed in life, but we can look at the probabilities and risks associated with and without the vaccine and know which choice has a lower risk profile, and make a sane recommendation based on that. Wearing your seat belt can't stop death in a car accident, but it is still a good idea. Tweets like these very likely drove people to not get vaccinated, leading to either them dying, or them passing it on to someone who did.
Using some small technicalities around things that cannot be guaranteed not being guaranteed to try to push a bad policy and decision making is not "correct". The evaluation of risk here in the tweet is absurdly bad.
Whether Twitter should be forced to promulgate such idiocy is a conversation that's been had many times since on HN, but it is idiocy.
So soon we forgot the original whistleblower who shared the news of covid to the west and then China censored him..
Many doctors/nurse personnel had medical licenses removed because they spoke against the narrative. Doctors with 30 / 40 years experience being told if you don't parrot what we are saying we are going to make a case that will remove your doctor title. Now we can say 99% of doctor support this.. It was sad seeing doctors twist the truth on tv. As the virus changed trying to stick to the narrative became more difficult.
Apart from the issue with China's control of information, I don't think we have the same memory.
That last paragraph does not match what I saw in most of the world. In particular, this perspective does not really match what happened in Canada, the US, or Europe, at least not in the way I think you are suggesting.
This is the system working as it should. When you are a physician, you have an incredibly high burden of care towards your patients, and you have an ethical and a deontological obligation (in some cases a legal one, though doctors do have a lot of leeway, for patient-centred care, in Canada) to give them the highest standard of care.
As far as I can tell, these are all examples of serious breaches of this duty. These physicians didn't just accidentally cross some fuzzy line, or slip off a tight rope. They were way off in their conduct. Heck, with the exception of one, they apparently didn't even show up in court.
In all of the above cases, it is the public and the patients who are being protected.
The ones being protected are not tbe patients. They lose access to many good doctors who should still be doctors. Many more now don't get the highest standard of care and in some cases any access to care because of these decisions. Removing experienced doctors for political reasons does not provide the highest quality of care..
If people want to do something that puts their own life in danger, and they ought to have known the risks (ie.: in ethical jargon, they have both "moral competence" and autonomy), then that's their business.
If people do things that can hurt other people, and these other people don't have a say in the matter, then with the exception of certain fiduciary-like situation, that's not okay.
don't forget, that disinformation does not appear magically in heads of less bright people. it is engineered by very smart adversaries. so this is not like less educated people are guilty and can be sacrificed.
Ad hominem aside, I was thinking of the midwits with lots of education who conspire with their in-group to manage others. The right thing to do is tell them to leave us alone.
Just to clarify, it was not really meant to be directed at you, it was meant as a generalized statement about people. I don't think I made that clear, sorry.
Parents have claimed religious exceptions to performing recommended medical procedures and inoculations since the dawn of modern medicine, and sought out alternative treatments. The same parents who would try to cure autism by bleach injections are the same ones who would just as readily practice Mesmerism or whatever other 18th century nonsense you can think of.
The only difference is that instead of a stranger coming to town in a tent, like something out of Blood Meridian, it's some glowing words on a box.
Yes, and these are often allowed. However, there are guardrails. Hospitals have multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, ethicists, psychologists and religious counsellors to ensure that these are legitimate beliefs and that risks are within certain boundaries.
You can't exactly apply the same care to the internet at large.
Most of that boils down to very politely asking the parents to follow the recommended standard of care. Unless there's outright abuse, like broken bones without a satisfactory explanation, there's no real intervention.
You want to take a guess at how often an old order Amish child goes to the pediatrician?
But as with anything, you have to think about how things scale. The Amish are a small fraction of the population, and there's no imminent danger that suddenly everyone will take up the behaviour and stop taking their children to the paediatrician. Amish videos aren't "trending" on TikTok. :)
If ever there was, or if that happened, then we might have a crisis on our hands, and we might be talking about doing something about it.
None of this happens in a vacuum, nor should it be considered as if it did.
Mis/dis-information is not only located to the fringe/tail-end. See for example:
1. The reporting of the Hillsborough disaster by The Sun, The Times, The Spectator, and others [1].
2. How Martin Bashir secured an interview with Princess Diana for the BBC by making up information. [2]
3. How the BBC included climate skeptic when debating climate change. [3]
Then there is reporting of technical or scientific discoveries that are slanted by only taking a single source for information, not to mention the consistency of reporting on subjects where a company or other organization has made a PR statement.
There is little investigative journalism and fact checking by major news outlets, just reporting from a single source. This is in part because news can move quickly given 24 hour news, the internet, and social media. It is also in part that paying people to take time to do research for little gain as advertisement and engagement drives profits for news outlets. It is also in part people's inherent biases slanting articles or news reports.
Taking time to read each article (instead of just the headlines), and to follow up on sources (which are lacking in most/all media publications -- unless it is someone saying something on Twitter), so it is difficult to verify everything that is being reported on.
Some discussions are also complicated. Take for example the Y2K problem. A lot of people put in a lot of effort to make sure that it didn't happen (specifically, they were able to minimize the issues to a small number of incidents). The UK government were briefed, who then briefed the press. The press (including the BBC) hyped it up by including people who thought the world would end, and people who were preparing for the worst. When not a lot of issues occurred, people have been decrying that Y2K was fake, in part because of the way the media overhyped the issues and failed to properly convey the potential problems to readers/viewers.
This is true, but the fringe and the tail-end are by far the easiest problem to solve. It's what I decided to focus on, because it seems like people can't even agree that it's a problem in the extremes.
I feel like Infowars can only exist as part of an ecosystem of misinformation. It's easier to talk about, because it's dumb, but it's probably not the most vital thing to address.
If it's a mainstream belief that the whole of climate science is a secret marxist plot to undermine capitalism, then is it really that weird to suggest those same marxists are faking school schootings?
I can ask GPT-3 to generate headlines. Most or all of these will be either incoherent or incorrect to at least this degree. It won't start any wars, because GPT-3 just isn't that influential.
You're not necessarily wrong -- I don't know -- but don't mistake relative influence for relative inaccuracy. I suspect -- but don't know -- that giving Infowars the amount of influence you're citing here would result in a tragedy of at least similar scale.
Infowars wasn't "given" influence. It earned it by making news for wingnuts. Putting wingnut headlines in the NYT would just trash the NYT, which is why they had to work closely with the government to craft messaging that would be convincing to their audience. It wouldn't turn the world into wingnuts.
edit: The world moves towards wingnuttery when outlets like the NYT knowingly (but deniably) lie about very important things, and make it clear that they would do the exact same thing again by not accepting responsibility. Then you've left the public completely adrift. Why not listen to Infowars? The worst they could be are liars.
I'm not going to argue with that (not because I agree, but because it's not a discussion I feel like having). My issue is that it seems to have nothing to do with what I said. I was posing a hypothetical in which Infowars had influence comparable to the entire U.S. media apparatus, not making a statement about their history or how they obtained what little influence they have.
It greatest success was that he was elevated to a significant threat. Before he was just a guy that sold some man-pills, but now he has the world in his grasp only by uttering some words, destroying civil society with misinformation. That is nothing else than a huge promotion.
Meanwhile onlookers are loosing faith in his "opposition". Naturally...
> The New York Times determined that several stories she wrote about Iraq were inaccurate, and she was forced to resign from the paper in 2005.[2] According to commentator Ken Silverstein, Miller's Iraq reporting "effectively ended her career as a respectable journalist".
> She worked in The New York Times' Washington bureau before joining Fox News in 2008.
Some shade being thrown by wikipedia there.
It seems relevant that she literally outed a CIA agent, at the express request of the Republican President's team, to maintain a fictional reason they had invented for starting a war. The President then later commuted the sentence of the person involved, when their appeal failed, and they later got pardoned by Trump.
I'd suggest this perhaps points to the root of the problem being in neither wingnut TV shows, nor The New York Times, but somewhere deeper. When Oliver North and other people who betray their country are getting fat checks to spout lies on Fox News, then really what hope is there for truth to prevail.
edit to add: minor but totally typical detail, the guy who leaked the CIA agent's info, got his licence to practice law back, because this same Judith Miller, claimed that her initial testimony was a mistake. There's just no consequences for lying.
Let's hear from James Risen, reporter at the Times at the time. :)
> What angered me most was that while they were burying my skeptical stories, the editors were not only giving banner headlines to stories asserting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, they were also demanding that I help match stories from other publications about Iraq’s purported WMD programs. I grew so sick of this that when the Washington Post reported that Iraq had turned over nerve gas to terrorists, I refused to try to match the story. One mid-level editor in the Washington bureau yelled at me for my refusal. He came to my desk carrying a golf club while berating me after I told him that the story was bullshit and I wasn’t going to make any calls on it.
As a small protest, I put a sign on my desk that said, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” It was New York Journal publisher William Randolph Hearst’s supposed line to artist Frederic Remington, whom he had sent to Cuba to illustrate the “crisis” there before the Spanish-American War. I don’t think my editors even noticed the sign.
So no, this wasn't just poor old Judy, who provided a convenient scapegoat. You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition. Whereas the flagship paper sends goons with golfclubs to threaten writers into following the narrative.
The original comment I'm responding to asks for examples of corporate media being more wrong for longer. If starting a literal war 15 years ago doesn't count I'm not sure what you're looking for.
> You ask for what protections a blog has? Its protection is that it's a darn blog on the internet just like any random person can make. It has no authority, asks for no special recognition.
Except in a universe where there are no news organizations and only blogs, then blogs will naturally attain a similar amount of influence, but with even fewer checks and balances, and probably lesser liability/responsibility. This is just a natural consequence of the graph-theoretic properties of social networks.
If we agree that the media started the war (just for the sake of argument), then yes, it does count, it seriously counts and it counts for a lot. But you've selected one of the most extreme examples, in a sea of otherwise unremarkable examples. When we talk about an org's track record, we're not hoping to find zero mistakes: we're really hoping to find relatively few mistakes, and accountability and recognition of important mistakes. Also perhaps a self-correction mechanism.
I'm not saying any of that is perfect, but legitimate news orgs do have some of that.
I’m not here to convince you. I can tell you that if there’s a desire to combat misinformation, clean up the institutional dishonesty, secrecy and never ending shilling for the establishment that causes mistrust.
