This is the one time I vehemently disagree with Schneier. Creating mass censorship infrastructure to automatically ban stuff that isn't "truthy" can easily be abused for totalitarian ends. He's right that it would be easier to set up such infrastructure if you have an apolitical pretext, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.
I have a personal belief that if something can be gamed for power, it'll be gamed for power. It's not a possibility, it's just a matter of time. No-go for mass censorship devices.
Mass censorship is indeed a very dangerous approach. I agree that it's a terrible idea. However, the core message of the article doesn't necessarily require censorship.
> We need to solve the problem of misinformation during pandemics together — governments and industries in collaboration with medical officials, all across the world — before there’s a crisis.
A creative structural solution might be able to address our current problems without actually censoring anything. Or perhaps I'm overly optimistic.
One of the leading investigators of online disinformation behaviours, Kate Starbird of UW, started looking at ad hoc informational networks (largely though not wholly ham radio) springing up around natural disasters, while at the University of Colorado. Disinformation was a concern but not nearly so much as it's been in the online world, for interesting (and not fully understood) reasons.
Licensing, volunteer organisations, training, and extant community among hams likely plays a strong role.
Well, on the other hand: if there was a Pandemic, Google and Facebook are trusted enough to put some kind of official info out there that could help to mitigate the problem. I’m by no means a Google or FB fan, but if they showed a big banner on their websites what to do to deal with the Pandemic, many people would probably consider it legit.
>> Much of it will be well-intentioned but wrong — like the misinformation spread by the anti-vaccination community today — but some of it may be malicious.
Well, a lot of the misinformation about vaccines has clear financial motives: it's spread by people selling "natural" remedies, homeopathic "vaccines" and so on or making their living by writing books and speaking in talk shows etc.
A while ago, I searched around to find info about a recent glyphosate panic surrounding the Impossible Burger. I kept finding multiple, obscure sites (some nakedly involved in selling "natural health" products) with the same copy-pasted article[0][1][2] but not much else. The article even gives itself away to any sober reader; it's obnoxiously loaded, with a heading, "Impossible Foods Resorts to Insults, Name-Calling to 'Defend' Their Fake Burger". Still, it's cute to see disinfo in action.
No legitimate-seeming news source was saying much about the issue at the time, and older sources were saying the glyphosate levels were within safe limits[3].
In the U.S. we have a medical system where people avoid going to the doctor for fear of cost. I feel like this is not the best system to have in a pandemic or epidemic situation.
When I saw the title, I was expecting an article about how we need to: educate citizens ahead of time about the different ways that disease can spread ensuring they don't fall prey to misinformation, fund more research for monitoring and mitigation, invest in stuff like "you need to let your employees work from home if there's a pandemic if possible, you need to emphasize to healthcare and transportation workers that in an emergency they are going to be needed the way that soldiers are needed in wartime and pay them extra".
But, it's just another demand for everyone to build a permanent apparatus to censor every communication that doesn't come from a very official and accurate source such as the publisher or the author's employer. This line of thinking is basically saying that democracy is a failure -- that most people are a bunch of easily deluded simpletons who have to be herded around for their own good, and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic. Maybe that's part of the answer to a very important question behind all this, which is "why are people losing trust in society's most basic institutions, even when they're right?"
”and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic.”
They can, but why would they? The power of society is that we work together. You don’t need to know how to grow wheat, bake bread, or herd cows anymore, either, but that doesn’t make us simpletons.
I looked into some recent disease-related misinformation (re Zika) and honestly it would be hard for many people to look at it and immediately say why it was wrong (it was extremely wrong). It wasn't like "putting Vaseline under your nose stops you from getting the flu". So I don't think people can really be prepared for everything ahead of time & there has to be some authority.
I still think that the key problem is that people distrust health and government institutions, not that they're allowed (for now) to post quackery or misinformation. I don't really understand how one gets that way. There are perceptions that public health institutions are politicized. Maybe they've never been friends with a doctor or a health official. Maybe their trust has been broken re health or even some other part of government. You can delete someone's posts pretty easily, but you can't force someone to trust the CDC or whoever. It needs to be built over time.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadHoping that we'll actually prepare for a pandemic seems remarkably long sighted for such a short sighted species as ours.
> We need to solve the problem of misinformation during pandemics together — governments and industries in collaboration with medical officials, all across the world — before there’s a crisis.
A creative structural solution might be able to address our current problems without actually censoring anything. Or perhaps I'm overly optimistic.
Licensing, volunteer organisations, training, and extant community among hams likely plays a strong role.
Well, a lot of the misinformation about vaccines has clear financial motives: it's spread by people selling "natural" remedies, homeopathic "vaccines" and so on or making their living by writing books and speaking in talk shows etc.
So not at all well-intentioned, I'd say.
No legitimate-seeming news source was saying much about the issue at the time, and older sources were saying the glyphosate levels were within safe limits[3].
[0]: https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/06/...
[1]: https://healthtipdaily.com/impossible-burger-attacks-moms-fo...
[2]: https://healthvox.net/2019/06/04/impossible-burger-attacks-m...
[3]: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/impossible-burger-everything-you...
But, it's just another demand for everyone to build a permanent apparatus to censor every communication that doesn't come from a very official and accurate source such as the publisher or the author's employer. This line of thinking is basically saying that democracy is a failure -- that most people are a bunch of easily deluded simpletons who have to be herded around for their own good, and they can't even learn ahead of time what they might need to know in a pandemic. Maybe that's part of the answer to a very important question behind all this, which is "why are people losing trust in society's most basic institutions, even when they're right?"
They can, but why would they? The power of society is that we work together. You don’t need to know how to grow wheat, bake bread, or herd cows anymore, either, but that doesn’t make us simpletons.
I still think that the key problem is that people distrust health and government institutions, not that they're allowed (for now) to post quackery or misinformation. I don't really understand how one gets that way. There are perceptions that public health institutions are politicized. Maybe they've never been friends with a doctor or a health official. Maybe their trust has been broken re health or even some other part of government. You can delete someone's posts pretty easily, but you can't force someone to trust the CDC or whoever. It needs to be built over time.