So if I were to tweet that people should wear masks as it helps (evidence by Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, China) will I get banned as CDC says masks don't work?
It barely helps is a simple fact. Look at most of the masks being worn. The have huge gaps all around them. They do no cover the eyes. And if you're not used to wearing a mask you'll be adjusting it constantly -- touching your face.
What untrained people are doing is tying a fomite to their face and expecting it to magically protect them, ignoring the fact that most transmission is via your hands.
Not to be the tinfoil-hat wearer in the room, but you must remember that the CDC is walking the line between "providing good health advice" and "minimizing public panic".
If the USA had a steady supply of masks, they would almost certainly be asking or requiring everyone in public to have a mask on. Because we don't, they have been promoting the idea that "you don't need a mask" in order to minimize panic and make masks more available to people that really need them. Unfortunately this "you don't need a mask" statement is being misinterpreted by people to thinking that masks serve no purpose.
But lets just agree that this disease would not be spreading as fast if everyone had a mask on. If nothing else it would prevent people who have the disease (and maybe don't know they have it yet) from spreading it. Surgical masks are effective at stopping particles coming from the mouth of the user. It also minimizes face touching by creating a physical barrier. N95 masks provide the same purpose, but also offer the added value of filtering particles coming from the outside, towards the user.
I'm pretty worried about this. The measures in place today are entirely warranted, and people will die if their effectiveness is undermined. But if the government announces some unacceptable measure, say a year-long shutdown for the sake of argument, tweets saying "yo wtf we're not doing that" fall under both the letter and spirit of the policy. Can we trust Twitter to revoke the policy in such a case - would they even be allowed to?
I'm not sure I follow the slippery slope. In the scenario where a tyrannical government six months from now is forcing Twitter to censor tweets... wouldn't the same tyrannical government six months from now force Twitter to censor tweets even if they weren't removing conspiracy tweets today?
Normally with a slippery slope argument there is some reason why the person who wants the final step to be taken has to take the earlier steps first, but here it just seems like the proposed bad guy can do what they want when they want to.
I don't think the government's going to force them to censor tweets as part of a tyrannical plan to suppress dissent. Twitter's just wedged themselves in a spot where they may have to censor tweets until the pandemic is over, since any attempt to walk back the policy will be seen - not inaccurately! - as a decision to allow fake COVID-19 news. Maybe inconsistent enforcement of the policy will be a good enough safety valve, but I'd prefer if people judging which tweets they believe were the safety valve.
Sure. So start by going after the Nazis, then look for the Trump campaign staff, then the Covington field trip kids, then all the people who advocated for Brexit, then the Zionists, then Rush Limbaugh followers, then the screw-you-got-mine Libertarians, and finally we can get around to the mealy-mouthed "centrists" who support the establishment and vote for Joe Biden.
— Okay seriously though, my real point is that if they're going draw a line somewhere and that somewhere lies in the middle of a major current event where they are getting a lot of attention as a company and people tweeting about it getting lots of attention and there is an elevated risk of death associated with it.... well, it's just understandable if they decide to draw the line there? Certainly it's much easier to enforce a filter on narrow topical grounds than an ideology-validation filter would be.
> The new policy bans tweets denying expert guidance on the virus, encouraging “fake or ineffective treatments, preventions and diagnostic techniques” as well as tweets that mislead users by pretending to be from health authorities or experts.
What happens when two experts disagree with each other? This rule seems to assume that experts are all in agreement on everything.
WHO themselves have several tweets still up suggesting that the virus is incapable of human-to-human spread.
Suppressing "unofficial" or "inexpert" advice is extremely dangerous, I know people who would not have supplies by now if I hadn't convinced them two months ago that, because China is willing to shut down their economy to stop the spread of it, it is probably going to be extremely serious.
I hope they do not crack down on genuine, proactive communications: saying that the pathogen is more transmissible than it is yet officially recognized to be, or genuine arguments for more proactive isolation.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China" - WHO
I don’t know if WHO was just incompetent with that statement or was protecting / taking direction from the Chinese, but it’s pretty fascinating to be THAT wrong.
This is an interesting paradigm, but I'd assume that anything going against CDC/WHO guidelines will be removed.
I had a physics professor in undergrad that still wasn't sold on the entire dark matter/dark energy phenomena and was proudly in the <1% of physicists who shared his beliefs.
There's nothing there that indicates they'd take down two experts with conflicting views. It simply assumes that non-experts (specifically those pretending to be experts) shouldn't be listened to.
So if someone tweets something said by one expert, but which another expert disagrees with, then what? Do you have to cite the expert who agrees with you in order to not get yanked? Twitter doesn't have thousands of fact checkers/researchers on staff, last I checked, so presumably they're not in a great position to determine whether a tweet is backed by any experts, assuming just one is enough.
> What happens when two experts disagree with each other? This rule seems to assume that experts are all in agreement on everything.
Nothing! That happens all the time.
If twitter can just cull the most dangerous disinformation that's a huge improvement. What remains doesn't need to be consensus, just not disinformation.
It’s not feasible for you to see all opinions given the amount of content on Twitter. Twitter hides content from you all the time through ranking (if enabled) and follower graphs. They’re choosing to hide more content now than they normally would, which is their right as a private publisher.
Seems to me like the virus will spread with or without any tweets. Twitter would like to think it has enough influence to affect it in any way, but that's simply not the case. Only 10% of Americans read Twitter at all, and the percentage who would read a specific tweet is staggeringly low.
One thing we've all learned about epidemiology over the last few weeks is that like many network processes, it's not about the raw number of infected, it's about their centrality to other networks of connections. Hence you get super-spreaders, like how over 80% of the cases in South Korea are directly traced to one person going to church.
If we imagine that news and reporting works the same way, then what matters is not that only 10% of Americans read Twitter, but which 10%. If, say, all journalists and reporters and members of congress read Twitter, then that would be a conduit for misinformation posted on Twitter to spread more broadly, right?
(I do agree that in the past Twitter's role in civic life has been overblown, e.g. westerners projecting Twitter as being operative in the Arab Spring when in fact most domestic organization in the Arab Spring was done over local mesh network apps and Twitter was mostly used to report the events to the English-language world, not initiate change internally)
Careful. Remember, it only counts as a case if it's detected, and South Korea-style contact tracing is a lot less capable of detecting small clusters that have split off from each other due to the people tying them together no longer testing positive than they are large clusters involving the same people going to the same church or office with attendance-tracking on a regular basis.
Incredible. Twitter has been functioning as the self correcting mechanism throughout this crisis, as the experts have fumbled and tripped over their own feet while responding to this crisis.
As of 3 days ago, weren’t the “experts” in the UK saying they were going to let the virus rip through the population to reach herd immunity? Until some dissenting experts noted that doing so would likely cause mass death and chaos. Would Twitter have shut down the members of the public noticing that the UK’s plan was insane, before the change of course?
You can sure as hell bet they wouldn’t shut down the UK government’s initial tweets, despite the fact that they caused the virus to spread.
The problem is WHO and CDC and what not are political organizations, they are influenced by governments, they have agendas and pursue very different goals than your health and safety. "Official" here means authoritative information and power over individuals, not expert opinions to help individuals. Of course censorship is the first thing they reach out for when that power is under threat.
The problem is that they're not even coherent from one day to the next. One day it's "the risk to Americans is low", then THREE DAYS LATER I'm not allowed to leave my house. Glad to see things apparently improving in this U.S. leadership, but Twitter filled a very hard vacuum in the past two months for getting accurate information.
You definitely had to curate your follows, and actually read the scientific articles linked, etc, but thanks to Twitter and Reddit, my family is as ready as we can be, physically, emotionally, and financially.
I remember back in the day when Twitter were free speech absolutists. And then they made exceptions just for direct threats, and just for hate speech, and just for nazis, and...
And how here we are straight-up banning speech that is contra "expert guidance".
how the hell is twitter going to know what counts as "expert guidance"? coronavirus has existed for 2 months. there are many more unknowns than facts. heres a fact: published science says closing borders to travllers is ineffective. but its done anyway (so politicians can be seen as "doing something" instead of nothing). now twitter can say they are "doing something" to stop the virus too! LOL
The day Twitter shut down Zerohedge for reporting on COVID-19, that was the market peak, and roughly a week prior to broad awareness of the scope of the problem.
Put another way: Twitter killed people by suppressing voices that were sounding the alarm.
To this day, they have neither reinstated, nor apologized to ZH for suppressing information that could have saved lives. Jack Dorsey is personally responsible for people dying.
Twitter banned Zerohedge for doxing and spreading misinformation.
"In a piece titled ‘Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?’, Durden included a picture of a scientist at Wuhan’s Institute of Virology and suggested users could pay him “a visit” to find out more about what caused the outbreak."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-01/zero-hedg...
Twitter helped me realize the scope of this problem while the President was blowing it off. I was able to stock up on food, water, N95 respirators, books, and movies, and prep a bunch of stuff into the freezer. 3 weeks later the SF Costco is like a war zone. I’ve been in my house and backyard for 19 days.
I think in order for this to work we have to be more pedantic about expertise. A minister whos expertise is in being elected to UK government official, has expertise in exactly that, being a UK government official. That doesn't make them medical experts, not one bit.
That government official is an expert in the UK government's official policy position regarded the pandemic, but they are, again, not a medical expert.
Whether Twitter is able to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
Big picture, I'm all for Twitter shutting down tweets that proclaim that a specific combination of essential oils will shut down a viral infection.
That's really awful. Twitter has become very heavy-handed lately. Even accounts that just tweets about American politics have been suspended. For example, there's some videos of a certain politician touching women and children inappropriately and those who have tweeted or retweeted some of those videos have either been banned or have had their access restricted.
Yes, I know Twitter is a privately-owned site and they can do whatever they want with their site. But it also means that it should no longer be seen as a neutral platform.
I really wish some hackers got together and created a censorship resistant social media platform. It is sorely needed.
"But it also means that it should no longer be seen as a neutral platform."
Bizarre to me that anyone would ever have thought that in the first place. Twitter has always been a for-profit enterprise, which completely precludes neutrality.
"I really wish some hackers got together and created a censorship resistant social media platform. It is sorely needed."
And then what happens when that platform is used to plan and execute violent attacks and share illegal pornography? I don't disagree that this is a good idea, but it's also not a silver bullet. Free and open communication will always be a perpetual struggle requiring trade-offs and compromises.
If that is bizarre to you then you are simply out of touch. A majority of Twitter users treat the site as neutral carrier of tweets. Nothing happens to a censorship resistant platform that is used to execute violent attacks or share illegal pornography. And that is the beauty of it. Your question is like asking what happens to the room in which I and my co-conspirators plan a coup.
The virus doesn't care about our posts. It does not read them, does not try to influence them. It is mindless and it may not even be alive, depending on the definition of life.
The tools you use to counter a disinformation campaign are not the tools you use to stop a virus. And with authorities actually getting stuff wrong stopping heterodox views is a suicide pact.
China is doing this because they're worried about the stability of their political system. Ours will survive goldbug1989 posting about how much they hate the quarantine or karenlovesyoga writing that essential oils will protect us.
I think Twitter's motivation isn't to reduce the impact of the virus, or that their management trusts governments this much. They're anticipating politicians looking for scapegoats, they're ensuring they can't take the blame from governments following any negative outcomes.
From Twitter's standpoint, if as a business their primary goal is to continue to at bare minimum exist, this is actually their most conservative and lowest risk option. We could debate all day on what sources of information have been the best, government or non-government, but I don't think Twitter is interested at all in considering that side of it.
Any censorship cause a rather strange expression to overcome it.
Example: YouTube automatically disable the monetization on video which utter the words coronavirus. The intent is to prevent malicious videos profiting from spreading the bogus information like drinking a certain herb tea makes you immune to the virus.
The YouTube's intent is understandable, but it ban without considering the context, just blind matching to the word, even if the context is harmless.
The result, the youtubers start referring the coronavirus in an expression "the virus we can't say its name here" and alike.
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[ 170 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadThen again CDC says a bandanna is also appropriate alternative...
If it barely helps and hospitals everywhere are out of masks, then using one for very little gain does hurt. I think that's where we are.
It barely helps is a simple fact. Look at most of the masks being worn. The have huge gaps all around them. They do no cover the eyes. And if you're not used to wearing a mask you'll be adjusting it constantly -- touching your face.
What untrained people are doing is tying a fomite to their face and expecting it to magically protect them, ignoring the fact that most transmission is via your hands.
You can’t have a little gain being hurt.
1) Don't wear a mask unless your sick or caring for someone who is sick? 2) Masks help reduce spread.
If the USA had a steady supply of masks, they would almost certainly be asking or requiring everyone in public to have a mask on. Because we don't, they have been promoting the idea that "you don't need a mask" in order to minimize panic and make masks more available to people that really need them. Unfortunately this "you don't need a mask" statement is being misinterpreted by people to thinking that masks serve no purpose.
But lets just agree that this disease would not be spreading as fast if everyone had a mask on. If nothing else it would prevent people who have the disease (and maybe don't know they have it yet) from spreading it. Surgical masks are effective at stopping particles coming from the mouth of the user. It also minimizes face touching by creating a physical barrier. N95 masks provide the same purpose, but also offer the added value of filtering particles coming from the outside, towards the user.
Normally with a slippery slope argument there is some reason why the person who wants the final step to be taken has to take the earlier steps first, but here it just seems like the proposed bad guy can do what they want when they want to.
— Okay seriously though, my real point is that if they're going draw a line somewhere and that somewhere lies in the middle of a major current event where they are getting a lot of attention as a company and people tweeting about it getting lots of attention and there is an elevated risk of death associated with it.... well, it's just understandable if they decide to draw the line there? Certainly it's much easier to enforce a filter on narrow topical grounds than an ideology-validation filter would be.
So that line has already been drawn, it seems.
What happens when two experts disagree with each other? This rule seems to assume that experts are all in agreement on everything.
They're bad stewards. They're made themselves into censors.
Suppressing "unofficial" or "inexpert" advice is extremely dangerous, I know people who would not have supplies by now if I hadn't convinced them two months ago that, because China is willing to shut down their economy to stop the spread of it, it is probably going to be extremely serious.
I hope they do not crack down on genuine, proactive communications: saying that the pathogen is more transmissible than it is yet officially recognized to be, or genuine arguments for more proactive isolation.
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
I had a physics professor in undergrad that still wasn't sold on the entire dark matter/dark energy phenomena and was proudly in the <1% of physicists who shared his beliefs.
I don't see this implied anywhere. Are you reading something I'm not?
Nothing! That happens all the time.
If twitter can just cull the most dangerous disinformation that's a huge improvement. What remains doesn't need to be consensus, just not disinformation.
Let me see all opinions and make up my own mind.
This should not be a radical idea in a free society.
(And fwiw, I use the unfiltered timeline view, combined w/ lists. I hate algorithmic timelines.)
If we imagine that news and reporting works the same way, then what matters is not that only 10% of Americans read Twitter, but which 10%. If, say, all journalists and reporters and members of congress read Twitter, then that would be a conduit for misinformation posted on Twitter to spread more broadly, right?
(I do agree that in the past Twitter's role in civic life has been overblown, e.g. westerners projecting Twitter as being operative in the Arab Spring when in fact most domestic organization in the Arab Spring was done over local mesh network apps and Twitter was mostly used to report the events to the English-language world, not initiate change internally)
As of 3 days ago, weren’t the “experts” in the UK saying they were going to let the virus rip through the population to reach herd immunity? Until some dissenting experts noted that doing so would likely cause mass death and chaos. Would Twitter have shut down the members of the public noticing that the UK’s plan was insane, before the change of course?
You can sure as hell bet they wouldn’t shut down the UK government’s initial tweets, despite the fact that they caused the virus to spread.
And on and on. Twitter has done a huge service to correct these awful experts.
You definitely had to curate your follows, and actually read the scientific articles linked, etc, but thanks to Twitter and Reddit, my family is as ready as we can be, physically, emotionally, and financially.
And how here we are straight-up banning speech that is contra "expert guidance".
The slopes, they are slippery!
The day Twitter shut down Zerohedge for reporting on COVID-19, that was the market peak, and roughly a week prior to broad awareness of the scope of the problem.
Put another way: Twitter killed people by suppressing voices that were sounding the alarm.
To this day, they have neither reinstated, nor apologized to ZH for suppressing information that could have saved lives. Jack Dorsey is personally responsible for people dying.
"In a piece titled ‘Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?’, Durden included a picture of a scientist at Wuhan’s Institute of Virology and suggested users could pay him “a visit” to find out more about what caused the outbreak." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-01/zero-hedg...
That government official is an expert in the UK government's official policy position regarded the pandemic, but they are, again, not a medical expert.
Whether Twitter is able to distinguish between the two, I don't know.
Big picture, I'm all for Twitter shutting down tweets that proclaim that a specific combination of essential oils will shut down a viral infection.
Yes, I know Twitter is a privately-owned site and they can do whatever they want with their site. But it also means that it should no longer be seen as a neutral platform.
I really wish some hackers got together and created a censorship resistant social media platform. It is sorely needed.
Bizarre to me that anyone would ever have thought that in the first place. Twitter has always been a for-profit enterprise, which completely precludes neutrality.
"I really wish some hackers got together and created a censorship resistant social media platform. It is sorely needed."
And then what happens when that platform is used to plan and execute violent attacks and share illegal pornography? I don't disagree that this is a good idea, but it's also not a silver bullet. Free and open communication will always be a perpetual struggle requiring trade-offs and compromises.
The tools you use to counter a disinformation campaign are not the tools you use to stop a virus. And with authorities actually getting stuff wrong stopping heterodox views is a suicide pact.
China is doing this because they're worried about the stability of their political system. Ours will survive goldbug1989 posting about how much they hate the quarantine or karenlovesyoga writing that essential oils will protect us.
I am certain the power to decide what is and what is not acceptable should not be vested in private companies.
From Twitter's standpoint, if as a business their primary goal is to continue to at bare minimum exist, this is actually their most conservative and lowest risk option. We could debate all day on what sources of information have been the best, government or non-government, but I don't think Twitter is interested at all in considering that side of it.
The YouTube's intent is understandable, but it ban without considering the context, just blind matching to the word, even if the context is harmless.
The result, the youtubers start referring the coronavirus in an expression "the virus we can't say its name here" and alike.
It reminds me of the Harry Potter's You-Know-Who.