Techcrunch redirects me to guce.advertising.com, is there an alternative link?
Edit: Oh apparently it's just this paragraph (found it on about.fb.com):
> “We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We’re helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe.”
The way I approached this was to avoid anything that has to do with techcrunch. I am more than happy to read the comments on such postings but no way in hell am I clicking on that intentional dumpster fire of trackers, advertisement, convoluted consent forms, etc. I can't help but treat that site as malicious. The fact that such links/sites still end up top of the front page on a site like HN is a bit surprising for me.
I am having workaround for moths. I am not using techcrunch any more. If there are some relevant news, they will be soon on some other site, that is not anti-users oriented. Vote with you "wallet" or soon all the sites will be like this.
> elevating authoritative content on our platforms
That's quite orwellian of them. Oh that explains recent lack of facebook hitpieces by the "authoritative sources". I swear everytime the "authoritative sources" attacked facebook, reddit, google, twitter, youtube, etc, they "elevated authoritative content by authoritative sources" and gave them preferential treatment and magically the hitpieces stop.
Also, rather than offering joint statements and colluding together, I'd rather these social media platforms compete to provide the best information. There is just too much collusion by big tech. We need competition.
This is a great move but I hope everyone is ready to hear a lot of "those west coast liberals are suppressing our freedom of speech!" for the foreseeable future.
Anything short of allowing misinformation, hate and propaganda to run rampant on all channels is an inevitable slippery slope towards an Orwellian fascist dystopia, no nuance can possibly exist. Either we let the trolls, cranks and Nazis take over or it's the camps for us all.
It's become the CMB of the internet at this point.
What will they do concretely? They already missed a window of 2 months ago where they could have had an impact by censuring WHO, European governments and news agency that were spreading fake news in the like of "it's just a flu", "2% mortality".
"Official and authoritative information" in Germany is that only 17 people have died out of the 7500+ officially infected with the virus, with "official information" like that it's not hard for "unofficial information" to be closer to the truth on the ground.
Are you using intuition to say that the numbers can't be right or some knowledge of real numbers?
So how many did die of Coronavirus in reality? If someone is already suffering from life threatening complications would this still count as a Covid death?
> If someone is already suffering from life threatening complications would this still count as a Covid death?
The Western official media was strongly denouncing the Chinese authorities when they were doing similar things a month or so ago in Hubei. Following that same logic I guess cancer is not the number one killer in the world, it's either the respiratory failure caused by that cancer or the related infections. But this is just Western hubris in play, as in "our numbers can never be wrong, reality be damned", and I say that as a guy from the Western "side".
> Following that same logic I guess cancer is not the number one killer in the world, it's either the respiratory failure caused by that cancer or the related infections
But you are not following the same logic. Mine was an honest question while you seem to pick a particular (mis)interpretation.
Complications of a particular illness are part of that illness. I'm talking about adding Coronavirus complications to already life threatening ones from other diseases. HIV/AIDS are considered the killers even if it's unrelated infections that cause the actual death.
Case in point, I was in the hospital when 2 patients with less that 1% chance of surviving (cancer, no immune system) contracted an antibiotic resistant bacteria. They both subsequently died and this was attributed to the cancer not the bacteria because it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that they would have died within days regardless.
So if someone with no immune system dies of Covid-19 can you reasonably say Coronavirus killed them? Or would any minor complication have done the same? If you have a heart attack while driving but it's the crash that actually kills you the cause of death is considered the heart attack.
> So if someone with no immune system dies of Covid-19 can you reasonably say Coronavirus killed them?
Yes, especially if those persons were walking freely and minding about their own lives just a week or two before, as is the case with the majority of the people that have died in Italy because of covid. I highly suspect that only a small fraction of those that died were days or weeks away from dying of other causes. To put things into perspective, from somewhere that I just read now reguarding the situation in Bergamo:
> In Bergamo, normally, about 3/4 people die every day.
> Only yesterday 50 died. 50 deaths in a single day, in a city where 3 usually die.
Bergamo is one of the best developed cities in Northern Italy and as such one of the best developed in Western Europe, I fail to see how the Germans are very different.
> Yes, especially if those persons were walking freely and minding about their own lives just a week or two before,
Then as I said, we're not talking about the same people. I'm strictly wondering how do the patients already on the death bed count. Not about more or less healthy people who are struck down by Covid-19. There are plenty of terminally ill patients in hospitals and they have a good chance of being exposed to this (there are hospitals in Italy where 70% of the personnel tested came out positive).
Please don't spread inaccurate and misleading information. The WHO declared this an international public health emergency just over 6 weeks ago on Jan 30th [0], one week exactly after the first published data indicating high mortality[1] and a few days after the first reports of cases internationally.
The main reason it wasn't escalated sooner is that through January China was still withholding and delaying the release of data. China only confirmed that cases of human to human transmission had occurred on January 10th, and froze reporting of new cases during a party congress that ended on January 17th. So the WHO escalated this appropriately within 2 weeks of the first indications from China that this was a serious issue, despite confusing and inaccurate reporting of data.
Also about 2% mortality was an early estimate, is 20x that of most strains of flu and is comparable to that of the Spanish Flu pandemic. So those estimates were as good as they could have been at the time, and are still not far off what we're seeing happen.
> The reason it wasn't escalated sooner is that through January China was still withholding and delaying the release of data.
The reason doesn't matter (especially when it's waiting for China's trafficked data), the institution knew about the very likelihood of pandemia and still denied it for longer than needed. That allowed various national governments to hide their own lack of counter-measures behind a "reputable" source. And finally the media gave voice (at least in France) to a lot of "experts" that implanted a false sense of security in people's mind. Fake news all the way down, and people are now paying the price for it.
Everybody could see that SARS-CoV-2 infection graph was going to beat SARS outbreak from 2003, long before WHO called an emergency.
They waited until a foreigner (Thai national in Kolkata) died and only then declared an emergency, saying that nobody outside China died yet. During the declaration they sounded more like the WTO than the WHO, stating that banning flights from China would do zero to help combat the spread.
The main reason for not escalating sooner was the tremendous pressure that China applied. In the initial stages the WHO was just a mouthpiece for the Chinese CDC, who was trying to save face.
Then they waited to call a pandemic, while everyone was annoyed with them for waiting.
How long is 'long before'. The emergency was notified 20 days after the very first confirmation this was even human communicable, and 7 days after the first published data on morbidity. These are the facts, and the WHO was communicating all of this promptly.
Yes of course the WHO was just a mouthpiece for what the Chinese were saying in the very early days, because the Chinese were the only people with the data. I understand this is frustrating, it's infuriating in fact.
It's only an international emergency when it's international. It was a declaration of fact, not a prediction about the future. The same is true of calling a pandemic, they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so. That's their job, but there seems to be a popular misconception that they should declare a pandemic when there 'might' be a pandemic, but that's not the case.
I have seen this in my professional life. I've come under pressure to declare escalated emergencies because there 'might be' a high level impact, but the agreed SLAs were to declare those only when there is actual impact. There were specific agreed processes for potential high impact issues and we followed them and they worked, but still I've had pressure to break process and escalate inappropriately, sometimes by very senior management. Fortunately my current management are pretty well informed.
3-4 days after John Hopkins started tracking and the number of infected was still below that of SARS 2003, but exponentially curved upwards. The WHO increased the threat level, but lacked confidence to declare international emergency.
Then in the same speech where they say, they will be fighting a misinformation pandemic, they say nobody outside of China has died, when a Thai national had died in Kolkuta.
All countries complained about the data sharing from China, but when asked, the WHO replied with praise and that it was not time to point any fingers.
Their main concern was for countries with a weak healthcare system, while Italy has the second-best healthcare system of Europe, and India and Africa seem better of.
> they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so.
A pandemic is defined as: "an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people." The fact was that it's an epidemic in China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran, and it is occurring in more than 80 countries, with some devastating effects. Public health experts were all talking of a pandemic correctly, while Ghebreyesus was still doing "an ongoing assessment" before making a decision.
We're arguing about a couple of days here. All the information they had in January was widely distributed and available to medical professionals worldwide. They were advising aggressive containment and isolation methods in the first declaration of the international emergency.
Really, this is the level we're sinking to? The first death in India was on 12 March. The Thai case was not Coronavirus according to the hospital that treated her, she was tested negative and had been in India since November [0]. If you're aware of the case, surely you must know this?
Censorship is the path that leads to tyranny. Better to have all sides without being muzzled. Today’s truth can be tomorrow’s fake news and vice versa.
The issue is that these companies are now providing a platform for the "village idiot", and it's up to people to differentiate truth from falsehoods, which is surprisingly difficult to do on a topic you don't know anyything about.
News media has direct business relationships with these platforms. This isn't about some village idiot. If you are fascinated by village idiots, you are their audience.
And untethered fake news propaganda leads to world wars and butchery of millions of innocent people. There's a balance to be struck and right now, with unfettered capitalism and no social contract in USA, there's just too many people that wish to abuse news to hurt and even cause death of other people.
In a healthy democracy, there are appropriate mechanisms that hold censors accountable than the average layman, so that they do not abuse their office. For this reason they are granted a louder voice.
To be precise, social media platforms do not censor, but selectively grant certain entities a louder voice at a subsidized cost. Of course, these companies are out of the reach of the checks that the US government is laden with, and this should be managed by regulation or other form of checks.
>In a healthy democracy, there are appropriate mechanisms that hold censors accountable than the average layman, so that they do not abuse their office. For this reason they are granted a louder voice.
The majority of the world does not live under healthy democracies. That the west is copying this failed model is concerning.
This counterargument isn't fatal to my point, though I tailored it to the parent comment (re: censors). There are people who can be more easily held accountable for their words, and people for whom it is difficult, or inappropriate, to punish for spouting false information. The responsible broadcaster amplifies the words of people that can be held accountable, and amplifies voices of people that cannot be held accountable only cautiously, and inside certain framed mindset (e.g. reported speech, call out lies, provide a contrasting perspective by a person who can be more easily be held accountable).
With respect to social media, it is clear that it is inappropriate and impossible to hold most laypeople accountable for spreading false information, and so it is responsible broadcasting to only amplify these voices to a limited extent.
I think that it is clear to you that I don't support unconditional free broadcast of factual claims in the Internet age, but one where one's reach must be matched by how much they have staked on the correctness of their information, proportional to the severity of the issue they are weighing in on.
Probably over 50% of movies glamorizes dangerous drug usage, affairs, violence, etc. Same with video games. Does that mean they should be held responsible when someone does something and says, well I thought that was normal because I heard/saw it there?
Any democracy I know (including the US) has used censorship in times of crisis throughout its history. There is little indication that the "slippery slope" is more than a fallacy.
Yes, but was that justified? Any examples for that? Especially on the topic of war a free press was the reason people started to get to know the darker side of war instead of the usual heroic depictions propaganda often proclaimed.
We are not talking about war related strategic information here, so I don't understand your position. I still don't know about any examples. There should be at least some if it is dismissed as necessary.
Agree. An exception is when one or more sides are playing foul game by using fake accounts to spread propaganda.
E.g. look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
Last I checked Twitter had suspended an account who was providing relevant information out of China when the virus was still mostly affecting only them, I think that was around February 20th or so. Yeah, that account was also publishing videos that some might have thought as too bleak (i.e. videos of very desperate people), but that was the actual situation on the ground in Hubei province. Had we listened to videos like those earlier we wouldn't have been in this situation.
The "internet companies" are trying to tackle something that is beyond their control and from the looks of it is close to impossible to contain misinformation and disinformation. So it results them to have a deep integration into our lives and the way the internet works in general. (Google and Facebook can never be taken down, even when they still have content seen as 'offensive', 'misleading' or just completely false by some).
"Don't believe everything you see or hear on the internet" - The Internet
But their attempts to promote authoritative sources like news media that also happens to be in a direct business relationship with them is swallowed up like a blessing. Completely delusional. Maybe not true for reddit, I think they do it for random reasons.
This is the actual consequences of stripping down education on every front.
I've been moderating a handful of communities over on Reddit for about ten years now, among them several are focused on hearing health. Something I see as a matter of routine is the roughly 21 day arc of folks learning that some aliment exists to speaking intentionally as if they are an educated medical professional, while essentially medical rumour and legend mongering.
I don't think this is limited to those with issues of hearing health and I suspect that, while it's more common in circles where doctors often give unspecific bad news with no real resolution (something that many folks don't want to hear), it's not limited to them either.
Right now on Reddit there are scores of subreddits focused on COVID-19 and the Coronavirus, with really terrible moderation. If the admins were actually serious about dealing with missinfo they'd be shutting more than a few down.
> Reddit has been a very good source of information in this crisis.
Got to be joking right? Reddit is pretty much the battleground of misinformation. It's run by think tanks, ngos, intel, media, etc. Most of the threads and most comments are pretty much anti-china propaganda along with some pro-china nonsense. That's it. Every gilded and boosted thread and comment are of a particular propaganda bent.
> That's not as big of a problem in Reddit because of moderation and voting, compared to Facebook and the likes.
The problem with reddit is precisely the moderation. It's why you have garbage echo chambers like r/politics, r/the_donald, r/worldnews, r/news, r/china, r/atheism, [do I need to continue]. Even the coronavirus related subs are heavily politically driven.
Because of the rise of moderation, reddit has turned into hives of extreme echo chambers. Whereas in the past, most major subs allowed all viewpoints, now each sub moderates toward a particular worldview and you get the worst echo chambers.
You get the worst echo chambers due to moderation and censorship. Moderation and censorship doesn't prevent echo chambers and extremism. It promotes it. It's why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, saudi arabia, silicon valley, etc love moderation and censorship.
I think you are correct and overambitious moderators are indeed a problem that fragment communities. t_d, politics and to a degree worldnews are ridiculous instances of this, although there is probably even worse stuff in the underbellies.
I just look at the result and while efforts to manipulate content increases (malicious and manipulative, not moderation), the situation is far, far worse than 5 years ago. Additionally the content has become much more stale.
reddit probably has accurate date, but as a user the impression is pretty obvious.
Having been on Reddit since before it had comments or subreddits, I can assure you that the bias i r/politics is the because of the userbase rather than the moderation.
I have been there too and I think the content massively changed in the last years. I don't even disagree politically on the points they make, but it has got to levels beyond what I call reasonably sane. Not that this wouldn't be true for their most prominent detractors too, perhaps they just adapted. Perhaps it is due to a change in userbase, but the morosity certainly changed.
The mods there don't do much except remove personal attacks and calls for violence, they even have a couple of Trump supporters on the team. You can even submit Breitbart. If it gets dowvoted, how is that the mod's fault? They can't control voting.
No, I am not kidding. Several subreddits kept track of all reputable worldwide news sources of all kinds: news agencies, governments, health organizations...
Deciding who you trust or not is your call, but those news subreddits are invaluable to get updates from all over the world.
I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
> No, I am not kidding. Several subreddits kept track of all reputable worldwide news sources of all kinds: news agencies, governments, health organizations...
The easiest tell that you being deceptive is that you didn't list these subreddits. List them or should I say, go frantically search for them and list them here in a desperate attempt to maintain any sort of credibility. Or are you a major contributor to those subs and are embarrassed to list them because it would be obvious that the subs are part of the disinformation campaign to spread fear?
> I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
You wrote "Reddit has been a very good source of information in this crisis." You are the one building a straw man argument, not me.
Also "so please do not make strawmen" is such interesting phrasing. Can I ask what nationality you are?
I wouldn't want them to care about missinfo to be honest and see this road as a mistake. Education should provide answers, for why reddit cannot be a place for medical or any relevant information. And I don't think there are many users that treat it that way.
I am opposed to the view of some moderators want to paint the site as something different than it is. Reddit consists of user generated content. Users have a right to be wrong. And it is not a place for moderators to distribute their opinions or any official information.
I’ve noticed this arc in myself and my colleagues from time to time: “Oh, you don’t know this thing I just learned?” ... proceeds to lecture condescendingly. I’ve tried to eliminate it in myself, but I’m curious as to the underlying psychology of it. It’s such a damaging behavior.
Yes, I think you are correct. I've also noticed it in own behaviour and now deliberately and consciously avoid it. Instead I try to convey and share my enthusiasm for something I just learned because I think a lot of folks enjoy finding out about things.
I’d rather have information and misinformation - I’m more than capable of filtering myself (years of experience haha) than someone at Twitter deciding for me and banning accounts reporting accurate info from China for being “Sino-phobic” or some other politically-correct censorious reason.
The problem is that if we look back with hindsight, knowing what we know now, then back in (for example) early february there's a lot of material in the "Reddit rumors" that turned out to be accurate and the official position of certain major governments and even WHO was misleading, possibly intentionally.
Yes, it's important to reduce misinformation, but it's also important (and IMHO even more important) to allow challenging the official information. The issue of "truth vs misinformation" is orthogonal to whether the information is approved by some particular source. So what I'm worried about is when the official position of some nationstate conflicts with the truth, then they'll be able to label the truth "misinformation" and get it removed/suppressed because of that, and that is something we definitely want to avoid. Sure, politicians can call anything they dislike as misinformation or fake news, but it's imperative that they don't get the ability to remove/suppress that information just because of that.
Rumors spread in the absence of trustworthy, extensive, reliable information. If in some situation there's no trustworthy, extensive, reliable information provided (for example, about the early situation in Iran) and rumors is all we can get, then rumors don't need to be suppressed as they are the best source of truth available even if it's not perfect.
Not just the WHO and major governments. Remember the whole wave of "worry about the flu, not the coronavirus" articles, some of which outright said that people were irrational for worrying about it? The press haven't got better since either, they've just changed the narrative they're misleading people towards.
The press that has got ,,better'' just is doing the minimum necessary to publish anything believable by a non-informed person. At this point anybody can look at Italy and see that COVID is clearly not better than the flu.
Not sure why I should be trusting Big Tech companies to tell me what is "misinformation." Did I miss the event where they proved themselves worthy of being such gatekeepers?
Kind of ironic, because Facebook at least has allowed and even facilitated "fake news"(regarding anything)for at least 8 years blatantly.This has been done purposefully, let's be clear.
If you get your news/health tips from twitter,facebook or similar platforms, you deserve your fate to be eventually misinformed.Facebook would not risk their profits and existence even if this would become humanity's last plague.
Having access to social media platforms means that you more or less have access to the internet, which is way more filtered than social platforms for qualitative information about anything regarding health.
Anybody else noticed how bad Google search is at search nowadays? YouTube search too. Both of these search engines used to be incredible at turning up results when provided with even the most obscure search terms, but now all of the top results are from main stream media news sites. In their quest to control the spread of misinformation they have neutered their core product. I miss the good old days :(
I moved to DuckDuckGo years ago. I did it mostly out of interest on their stance on privacy, but stayed and never moved out because of how much better their search results are.
It is ridiculously commercialized. If you search for a topic and there is a commercially available product that happens to have the same name, good luck finding relevant info.
Or what is new and even worse, if there is a news article about a certain topic, Google will heavily drive the traffic their way, regardless of the quality of the article.
There are few topics left where search results aren't just shit.
I'm not sure "their quest to control the spread of misinformation" is the reason behind this, as the search quality got lower and lower before the whole panic around misinformation started.
My guess would be that Google is tailoring their search engine to ~80% of the queries and optimizing for those, so when you're searching for the 20%, it's really bad. But when within 80%, it works great.
I remember back in the day when you had to know how to search in order to find things. Some people were better than others and different search engines had different tricks. Nowadays it seems like trying to optimize your search query makes it worse, and most engines just deal with generalized queries.
Whenever I search Google for something, the top links are either ads or SEO'd results I don't care about. In both cases, rich companies paid money in order to put those results there. Any information that rises to the top because of money instead of relevance or merit is highly suspect at best due to the conflict of interest. Why would I want to listen to a company sell me its own product? It's safe to assume everything they say is lies.
Though I'm sure Google holds a share of the blame, from my perspective abuse of search engine optimization led to this issue. There was a period when seemingly everything I searched had some obviously low quality product taking up the first page.
I agree that the current state overvalues crappy media articles, but I'm not sure how much of it is Google's decision or richer organizations learning SEO themselves.
Yeah, you're not the first to notice that. It is very apparent when you search on YouTube for a politicians name and especially if that politician has been involved in a scandal. For American politicians, American mainstream media outlets such as Washington Post, CBS, ABC, Fox News and CNN dominate the search results on the first few pages. Same thing with other countries politicians so for British politicians you get videos from BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian and so on. This happens even as those videos are not the most watched, most highly rated or most recent.
Independent media outlets that live on YouTube's advertising revenue are completely furious about it but powerless to do anything about it.
I don't think it makes the public better informed either. The most powerful propaganda tool is not misinformation but misdirection. Positive news gets boosted and negative news gets suppressed. Essentially that is happening when YouTube boosts mainstream media. One actors view is boosted and all dissenting views are suppressed.
What is Amp? My feeling is that YouTube has special rules which favor these tv networks. I'm noticing the same trend in YouTube results for my own country's political news, albeit on a smaller scale. The major broadcasters videos seems boosted somehow.
Daddy government is why the virus first spread so far in China. Lies and more lies about how the situation was under control is how it got out to the rest of the world.
Public health is almost the canonical example of something where you need concerted response organised by a government. So yes, we expect government action.
The institutions mostly promoted inaction (WHO). And the government does nothing, but censor and provide a mixed message (Lobbyism saying you dont need to social isolate that hard)..
Sorry, you are on your own with this one, when you dont want to rely on the poisoned wells of official news sources.
As long as people need to coordinate in a society, a government will form; it is exactly the institution that handles exactly the matters that need to be solved by societal coordination.
So what counts as misinformation? There is a lot of uninformed statements about SARS-CoV-2 everywhere, including goverments like mine that says that you are "safe" if you just stay 1-2m away from infected persons.
If you ask me, constantly calling this SARS strain Corona, Covid-19 etc. can count as misinformation as well.
I don't think the proliferation of fake news is due to the lack of gatekeeping. I think the issue is the ease of authoring fake content.
Publishing a piece of news/article used to mean hosting a website, registering a domain, writing html, running a web server. All require studying, the very action to battle disinformation.
Now all we have to do is make an account (or even not) and start typing on keyboard.
Opinion is like a-hole, everyone got one. But not every piece of opinion as useful as an a-hole. Lowering the bar of publishing is normalising the weighting of each opinion. Which I think is the root cause of today's internet
You'd be surprised how many fake news artist and disinformation agents have pleasantly designed websites. The problem isn't so much that anyone can post something on Reddit, and people believe it as fact. It is that they read it on Reddit, then their browser history curates their recommended videos on YouTube to validate what they read using real people who make money off these ideas, then they send money to their Patreon to get the exclusive information which includes access to a nice looking website.
From this pandemic I learned that the current internet is far too controlled for information. I got most of my (by now confirmed) information from early leaks. Of course there are ridiculous hoaxes and bad advice floating around, but it pales in comparison to the erroneous information that authorities are putting out, and it is way easier to distinguish as BS.
For instance, I have read from official sources:
Vitamin C does not help. Garlic (powerful anti-inflammatory and antiviral) will not help. Black and green tea will not help. Chance of infection outside of China is negligible. Human-to-human transmission is unlikely. Coronaviruses don't survive on plastics and metal surfaces. Taking anti-inflammatory drugs is not dangerous. Face masks are not protective against the virus. Gargling and swallowing hot iodized salt water does nothing. The virus is not mutating and not creating more deadly strains. The virus can't be made by humans. The official statistics are real and not a gross undercount. Cities will not go in lockdown or quarantine. Longer than expected incubation periods are not impossible. Sauna's and hot showers don't help. Everything is under control and contained. The flu is more deadly. You should not avoid public transit or large gatherings. We have enough ventilators. We have enough protective equipment for medics. You should not be worried about COVID-19 if you got flu-like symptoms before the first confirmed case on 19 January. The CDC is and was not lying about the number of cases, and warnings circulating online reporting community spread are hoaxes. The virus can not pass the brain-blood barrier. The virus does not increase chance of triggering latent schizophrenia and psychosis. Some national from a different country did not die outside of China before the WHO called a world health emergency. This is not yet a pandemic. Fantasies about coronavirus are more contagious than the disease itself. Not eating in Chinatown restaurants is racist. When hand sanitizer ran out, it's not a good idea to make your own hand sanitizer. Countries in Europe won't follow Italy. The virus started in a wet market in Wuhan. You can't blame China for the pandemic, they did a great job and set an example for outbreak response. Papers discussing HIV inserts and gain-of-function infectiousness are retracted because they are completely false, not for fueling conspiracy theories. This virus is not a viable bioweapon, because the mortality rate is too low. The pope will not have coronavirus. Trump will not have coronavirus. Bolsonaro will not have coronavirus. The stock market is looking good right now. There is no reason for panic. This virus is not expected to calm down around June, only to pick up again in November. The government thinks that shaking hands is ok. Experts are right. Experts give correct projections. It is better to listen to public health officials and experts if you want to stay up to date and predict what will happen. There are no terrible long-term concerns of contracting COVID-19 for young people.
I can provide sources upon request if you believe any of these statements.
An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people! Stop managing panic and come clean: You all lost control of a SARS-like virus and containment is impossible.
Instead of quarantining subreddits, you may want to take a look at the immense sockpuppetry from China nr. 1 accounts and the trade war driven anti-China propaganda from U.S. intelligence. Even on HackerNews I get multiple downvotes on posts that are long on page 5. There is a gross information warfare going on, but hey, got to protect against my Facebook aunt trying to give (scientifically unproven) well-intentioned advice, in the absence of any certainty.
Google prioritizes information such as "How to protect yourself against novel coronavirus? Cough in your elbows!". They are arrogantly acting like the public can't handle the truth.
I had high hopes from this title. Unfortunately, it only involves misinformation in regards to COVID-19.
I would really hope they would unite in a joint effort against the spread of propaganda from fake accounts instead.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, take a look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. This is _dangerous_ - it affects people's minds and changes their minds. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
Ironic, considering that “misinfo” was the name of the game when WHO was in charge of downplaying this, and anyone following mainstream media got caught completely flat footed when the dam broke, while I am well stocked up on supplies I purchased in late January.
I know there’s a lot of disinfo and rumors out there. But I don’t want them shutting it all down. Put a warning over it if you must. But without some of these sources I would not have learned about the severity of the virus in time to prepare.
I don’t see social media companies making any dent on misinformation. Here are a variety of examples.
* Troll farms that deliberately seek to manipulate gullible people for unrelated motivations.
* Fanatics, which are the same as troll farms except their motives are aligned to what they claim.
* Cults which are also just like troll farms except their motives are centered around the desires of a central person or idol.
* Liars. People who deliberately mislead others for personal reasons nor affiliated with an organization.
* Stupid people are like liars except their deceit is not deliberate and they have primarily fooled themselves and want to share their foolishness, such as people who put their heads in the sand and twist themselves into knots to ignore evidence when pushing opinions onto people.
* Gullible people are those who spread any information they believe to be true where truth is only based on popularity, conformity, or social expediency.
They will still accept money to show ads for vitamins and other useless "supplements" I'm sure fake news will remain okay if you pay them to spread it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadEdit: Oh apparently it's just this paragraph (found it on about.fb.com):
> “We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We’re helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe.”
That's quite orwellian of them. Oh that explains recent lack of facebook hitpieces by the "authoritative sources". I swear everytime the "authoritative sources" attacked facebook, reddit, google, twitter, youtube, etc, they "elevated authoritative content by authoritative sources" and gave them preferential treatment and magically the hitpieces stop.
Also, rather than offering joint statements and colluding together, I'd rather these social media platforms compete to provide the best information. There is just too much collusion by big tech. We need competition.
Anything short of allowing misinformation, hate and propaganda to run rampant on all channels is an inevitable slippery slope towards an Orwellian fascist dystopia, no nuance can possibly exist. Either we let the trolls, cranks and Nazis take over or it's the camps for us all.
It's become the CMB of the internet at this point.
So how many did die of Coronavirus in reality? If someone is already suffering from life threatening complications would this still count as a Covid death?
The Western official media was strongly denouncing the Chinese authorities when they were doing similar things a month or so ago in Hubei. Following that same logic I guess cancer is not the number one killer in the world, it's either the respiratory failure caused by that cancer or the related infections. But this is just Western hubris in play, as in "our numbers can never be wrong, reality be damned", and I say that as a guy from the Western "side".
But you are not following the same logic. Mine was an honest question while you seem to pick a particular (mis)interpretation.
Complications of a particular illness are part of that illness. I'm talking about adding Coronavirus complications to already life threatening ones from other diseases. HIV/AIDS are considered the killers even if it's unrelated infections that cause the actual death.
Case in point, I was in the hospital when 2 patients with less that 1% chance of surviving (cancer, no immune system) contracted an antibiotic resistant bacteria. They both subsequently died and this was attributed to the cancer not the bacteria because it was pretty much a forgone conclusion that they would have died within days regardless.
So if someone with no immune system dies of Covid-19 can you reasonably say Coronavirus killed them? Or would any minor complication have done the same? If you have a heart attack while driving but it's the crash that actually kills you the cause of death is considered the heart attack.
Yes, especially if those persons were walking freely and minding about their own lives just a week or two before, as is the case with the majority of the people that have died in Italy because of covid. I highly suspect that only a small fraction of those that died were days or weeks away from dying of other causes. To put things into perspective, from somewhere that I just read now reguarding the situation in Bergamo:
> In Bergamo, normally, about 3/4 people die every day.
> Only yesterday 50 died. 50 deaths in a single day, in a city where 3 usually die.
Bergamo is one of the best developed cities in Northern Italy and as such one of the best developed in Western Europe, I fail to see how the Germans are very different.
Then as I said, we're not talking about the same people. I'm strictly wondering how do the patients already on the death bed count. Not about more or less healthy people who are struck down by Covid-19. There are plenty of terminally ill patients in hospitals and they have a good chance of being exposed to this (there are hospitals in Italy where 70% of the personnel tested came out positive).
Multiple regimes have intentionally manipulated facts during this crisis for political reasons. What is the cost of lies?
The main reason it wasn't escalated sooner is that through January China was still withholding and delaying the release of data. China only confirmed that cases of human to human transmission had occurred on January 10th, and froze reporting of new cases during a party congress that ended on January 17th. So the WHO escalated this appropriately within 2 weeks of the first indications from China that this was a serious issue, despite confusing and inaccurate reporting of data.
Also about 2% mortality was an early estimate, is 20x that of most strains of flu and is comparable to that of the Spanish Flu pandemic. So those estimates were as good as they could have been at the time, and are still not far off what we're seeing happen.
[0]https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...
[1]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The reason doesn't matter (especially when it's waiting for China's trafficked data), the institution knew about the very likelihood of pandemia and still denied it for longer than needed. That allowed various national governments to hide their own lack of counter-measures behind a "reputable" source. And finally the media gave voice (at least in France) to a lot of "experts" that implanted a false sense of security in people's mind. Fake news all the way down, and people are now paying the price for it.
They waited until a foreigner (Thai national in Kolkata) died and only then declared an emergency, saying that nobody outside China died yet. During the declaration they sounded more like the WTO than the WHO, stating that banning flights from China would do zero to help combat the spread.
The main reason for not escalating sooner was the tremendous pressure that China applied. In the initial stages the WHO was just a mouthpiece for the Chinese CDC, who was trying to save face.
Then they waited to call a pandemic, while everyone was annoyed with them for waiting.
Just, please don't.
Yes of course the WHO was just a mouthpiece for what the Chinese were saying in the very early days, because the Chinese were the only people with the data. I understand this is frustrating, it's infuriating in fact.
It's only an international emergency when it's international. It was a declaration of fact, not a prediction about the future. The same is true of calling a pandemic, they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so. That's their job, but there seems to be a popular misconception that they should declare a pandemic when there 'might' be a pandemic, but that's not the case.
I have seen this in my professional life. I've come under pressure to declare escalated emergencies because there 'might be' a high level impact, but the agreed SLAs were to declare those only when there is actual impact. There were specific agreed processes for potential high impact issues and we followed them and they worked, but still I've had pressure to break process and escalate inappropriately, sometimes by very senior management. Fortunately my current management are pretty well informed.
Then in the same speech where they say, they will be fighting a misinformation pandemic, they say nobody outside of China has died, when a Thai national had died in Kolkuta.
All countries complained about the data sharing from China, but when asked, the WHO replied with praise and that it was not time to point any fingers.
Their main concern was for countries with a weak healthcare system, while Italy has the second-best healthcare system of Europe, and India and Africa seem better of.
> they declared it when it reached the criteria to do so.
A pandemic is defined as: "an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people." The fact was that it's an epidemic in China, Italy, South Korea, and Iran, and it is occurring in more than 80 countries, with some devastating effects. Public health experts were all talking of a pandemic correctly, while Ghebreyesus was still doing "an ongoing assessment" before making a decision.
Really, this is the level we're sinking to? The first death in India was on 12 March. The Thai case was not Coronavirus according to the hospital that treated her, she was tested negative and had been in India since November [0]. If you're aware of the case, surely you must know this?
[0]https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2020/01/28/no-chance-thai-...
Either they are publishers or platforms.
They can always put disclaimers by every “news.”
In some cases, it's the village idiot, in a village full of village idiots.
And untethered fake news propaganda leads to world wars and butchery of millions of innocent people. There's a balance to be struck and right now, with unfettered capitalism and no social contract in USA, there's just too many people that wish to abuse news to hurt and even cause death of other people.
What are you referring to here? Wars and butchery have been reliably championed throughout history by regular news propaganda.
And misinformation about health issues leads to deaths
To be precise, social media platforms do not censor, but selectively grant certain entities a louder voice at a subsidized cost. Of course, these companies are out of the reach of the checks that the US government is laden with, and this should be managed by regulation or other form of checks.
The majority of the world does not live under healthy democracies. That the west is copying this failed model is concerning.
With respect to social media, it is clear that it is inappropriate and impossible to hold most laypeople accountable for spreading false information, and so it is responsible broadcasting to only amplify these voices to a limited extent.
I think that it is clear to you that I don't support unconditional free broadcast of factual claims in the Internet age, but one where one's reach must be matched by how much they have staked on the correctness of their information, proportional to the severity of the issue they are weighing in on.
The only people in the media fired for the debacle of the Iraq war were the ones who called the lies of the government out.
When we let everyone speak at least the average of all the lies is closer to the truth than when we let only one lie through.
If the slippery slope were real and the control of information successful, you might still think this.
We are not talking about war related strategic information here, so I don't understand your position. I still don't know about any examples. There should be at least some if it is dismissed as necessary.
E.g. look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
[1]: https://botsentinel.com/top-100
[2]: https://twitter.com/brandonbeckham_
"Don't believe everything you see or hear on the internet" - The Internet
I will say though there is a certain decline in older people where they become highly gullible and susceptible to fake news, robocalls, scams, etc.
This is the actual consequences of stripping down education on every front.
Currently full of anti government propaganda, much of it unrelated to the virus.
I don't think this is limited to those with issues of hearing health and I suspect that, while it's more common in circles where doctors often give unspecific bad news with no real resolution (something that many folks don't want to hear), it's not limited to them either.
Right now on Reddit there are scores of subreddits focused on COVID-19 and the Coronavirus, with really terrible moderation. If the admins were actually serious about dealing with missinfo they'd be shutting more than a few down.
Of course there will be misinformation. That's not as big of a problem in Reddit because of moderation and voting, compared to Facebook and the likes.
Got to be joking right? Reddit is pretty much the battleground of misinformation. It's run by think tanks, ngos, intel, media, etc. Most of the threads and most comments are pretty much anti-china propaganda along with some pro-china nonsense. That's it. Every gilded and boosted thread and comment are of a particular propaganda bent.
> That's not as big of a problem in Reddit because of moderation and voting, compared to Facebook and the likes.
The problem with reddit is precisely the moderation. It's why you have garbage echo chambers like r/politics, r/the_donald, r/worldnews, r/news, r/china, r/atheism, [do I need to continue]. Even the coronavirus related subs are heavily politically driven.
Because of the rise of moderation, reddit has turned into hives of extreme echo chambers. Whereas in the past, most major subs allowed all viewpoints, now each sub moderates toward a particular worldview and you get the worst echo chambers.
You get the worst echo chambers due to moderation and censorship. Moderation and censorship doesn't prevent echo chambers and extremism. It promotes it. It's why nazi germany, soviet union, north korea, saudi arabia, silicon valley, etc love moderation and censorship.
I just look at the result and while efforts to manipulate content increases (malicious and manipulative, not moderation), the situation is far, far worse than 5 years ago. Additionally the content has become much more stale.
reddit probably has accurate date, but as a user the impression is pretty obvious.
Deciding who you trust or not is your call, but those news subreddits are invaluable to get updates from all over the world.
I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
The easiest tell that you being deceptive is that you didn't list these subreddits. List them or should I say, go frantically search for them and list them here in a desperate attempt to maintain any sort of credibility. Or are you a major contributor to those subs and are embarrassed to list them because it would be obvious that the subs are part of the disinformation campaign to spread fear?
> I have not claimed all are to be trusted or anything like that, so please do not make strawmen.
You wrote "Reddit has been a very good source of information in this crisis." You are the one building a straw man argument, not me.
Also "so please do not make strawmen" is such interesting phrasing. Can I ask what nationality you are?
I am opposed to the view of some moderators want to paint the site as something different than it is. Reddit consists of user generated content. Users have a right to be wrong. And it is not a place for moderators to distribute their opinions or any official information.
The rest is absolute crap.
A raw feed plus a moderated feed with the option to toggle between them is welcome.
The notion of an Edenic situation where enlightened moderation can squelch the noise is bunk, and a cure worse than the disease.
Yes, it's important to reduce misinformation, but it's also important (and IMHO even more important) to allow challenging the official information. The issue of "truth vs misinformation" is orthogonal to whether the information is approved by some particular source. So what I'm worried about is when the official position of some nationstate conflicts with the truth, then they'll be able to label the truth "misinformation" and get it removed/suppressed because of that, and that is something we definitely want to avoid. Sure, politicians can call anything they dislike as misinformation or fake news, but it's imperative that they don't get the ability to remove/suppress that information just because of that.
Rumors spread in the absence of trustworthy, extensive, reliable information. If in some situation there's no trustworthy, extensive, reliable information provided (for example, about the early situation in Iran) and rumors is all we can get, then rumors don't need to be suppressed as they are the best source of truth available even if it's not perfect.
If you get your news/health tips from twitter,facebook or similar platforms, you deserve your fate to be eventually misinformed.Facebook would not risk their profits and existence even if this would become humanity's last plague.
Having access to social media platforms means that you more or less have access to the internet, which is way more filtered than social platforms for qualitative information about anything regarding health.
Or what is new and even worse, if there is a news article about a certain topic, Google will heavily drive the traffic their way, regardless of the quality of the article.
There are few topics left where search results aren't just shit.
My guess would be that Google is tailoring their search engine to ~80% of the queries and optimizing for those, so when you're searching for the 20%, it's really bad. But when within 80%, it works great.
I remember back in the day when you had to know how to search in order to find things. Some people were better than others and different search engines had different tricks. Nowadays it seems like trying to optimize your search query makes it worse, and most engines just deal with generalized queries.
I agree that the current state overvalues crappy media articles, but I'm not sure how much of it is Google's decision or richer organizations learning SEO themselves.
Independent media outlets that live on YouTube's advertising revenue are completely furious about it but powerless to do anything about it.
I don't think it makes the public better informed either. The most powerful propaganda tool is not misinformation but misdirection. Positive news gets boosted and negative news gets suppressed. Essentially that is happening when YouTube boosts mainstream media. One actors view is boosted and all dissenting views are suppressed.
Daddy government is why the virus first spread so far in China. Lies and more lies about how the situation was under control is how it got out to the rest of the world.
Sorry, you are on your own with this one, when you dont want to rely on the poisoned wells of official news sources.
Government = society.
Government=the people who have the power to kill other people and get away with it. No more, no less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
If you ask me, constantly calling this SARS strain Corona, Covid-19 etc. can count as misinformation as well.
Publishing a piece of news/article used to mean hosting a website, registering a domain, writing html, running a web server. All require studying, the very action to battle disinformation.
Now all we have to do is make an account (or even not) and start typing on keyboard.
Opinion is like a-hole, everyone got one. But not every piece of opinion as useful as an a-hole. Lowering the bar of publishing is normalising the weighting of each opinion. Which I think is the root cause of today's internet
Here are some examples:
https://lightonconspiracies.com/ https://charlesortel.com/ https://truepundit.com/category/featured/ https://crowdsourcethetruth.org/
Those are just a few of hundreds, if not thousands.
I mean there are just so many reasons to do that because people are so bad.
For instance, I have read from official sources:
Vitamin C does not help. Garlic (powerful anti-inflammatory and antiviral) will not help. Black and green tea will not help. Chance of infection outside of China is negligible. Human-to-human transmission is unlikely. Coronaviruses don't survive on plastics and metal surfaces. Taking anti-inflammatory drugs is not dangerous. Face masks are not protective against the virus. Gargling and swallowing hot iodized salt water does nothing. The virus is not mutating and not creating more deadly strains. The virus can't be made by humans. The official statistics are real and not a gross undercount. Cities will not go in lockdown or quarantine. Longer than expected incubation periods are not impossible. Sauna's and hot showers don't help. Everything is under control and contained. The flu is more deadly. You should not avoid public transit or large gatherings. We have enough ventilators. We have enough protective equipment for medics. You should not be worried about COVID-19 if you got flu-like symptoms before the first confirmed case on 19 January. The CDC is and was not lying about the number of cases, and warnings circulating online reporting community spread are hoaxes. The virus can not pass the brain-blood barrier. The virus does not increase chance of triggering latent schizophrenia and psychosis. Some national from a different country did not die outside of China before the WHO called a world health emergency. This is not yet a pandemic. Fantasies about coronavirus are more contagious than the disease itself. Not eating in Chinatown restaurants is racist. When hand sanitizer ran out, it's not a good idea to make your own hand sanitizer. Countries in Europe won't follow Italy. The virus started in a wet market in Wuhan. You can't blame China for the pandemic, they did a great job and set an example for outbreak response. Papers discussing HIV inserts and gain-of-function infectiousness are retracted because they are completely false, not for fueling conspiracy theories. This virus is not a viable bioweapon, because the mortality rate is too low. The pope will not have coronavirus. Trump will not have coronavirus. Bolsonaro will not have coronavirus. The stock market is looking good right now. There is no reason for panic. This virus is not expected to calm down around June, only to pick up again in November. The government thinks that shaking hands is ok. Experts are right. Experts give correct projections. It is better to listen to public health officials and experts if you want to stay up to date and predict what will happen. There are no terrible long-term concerns of contracting COVID-19 for young people.
I can provide sources upon request if you believe any of these statements.
An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people! Stop managing panic and come clean: You all lost control of a SARS-like virus and containment is impossible.
Instead of quarantining subreddits, you may want to take a look at the immense sockpuppetry from China nr. 1 accounts and the trade war driven anti-China propaganda from U.S. intelligence. Even on HackerNews I get multiple downvotes on posts that are long on page 5. There is a gross information warfare going on, but hey, got to protect against my Facebook aunt trying to give (scientifically unproven) well-intentioned advice, in the absence of any certainty.
Google prioritizes information such as "How to protect yourself against novel coronavirus? Cough in your elbows!". They are arrogantly acting like the public can't handle the truth.
I would really hope they would unite in a joint effort against the spread of propaganda from fake accounts instead.
As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, take a look at Bot Sentinel top 100 trollbots [1].
#1 @BrandonBeckham_ is (from my judgment) a fake twitter account [2]. He poses as a veteran Christian that loves everything Trump. All he posts is pro-Trump stuff & Donald J. Trump retweets him frequently.
This is the stuff that needs moderation for misinformation. This is _dangerous_ - it affects people's minds and changes their minds. But somehow this stuff is just ignored by Big Tech.
[1]: https://botsentinel.com/top-100
[2]: https://twitter.com/brandonbeckham_
I know there’s a lot of disinfo and rumors out there. But I don’t want them shutting it all down. Put a warning over it if you must. But without some of these sources I would not have learned about the severity of the virus in time to prepare.
I don’t see social media companies making any dent on misinformation. Here are a variety of examples.
* Troll farms that deliberately seek to manipulate gullible people for unrelated motivations.
* Fanatics, which are the same as troll farms except their motives are aligned to what they claim.
* Cults which are also just like troll farms except their motives are centered around the desires of a central person or idol.
* Liars. People who deliberately mislead others for personal reasons nor affiliated with an organization.
* Stupid people are like liars except their deceit is not deliberate and they have primarily fooled themselves and want to share their foolishness, such as people who put their heads in the sand and twist themselves into knots to ignore evidence when pushing opinions onto people.
* Gullible people are those who spread any information they believe to be true where truth is only based on popularity, conformity, or social expediency.
I want to see how social media eliminates that.