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Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. You can put "may" in any statement and it's technically true, doesn't mean facebook/twitter can't mark it as misleadin

Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. You can put "may" in any statement and it's technically true, doesn't mean facebook/twitter can't mark it as misleading.

throwaway8581 5y ago
The point is they dismissed it out of hand and banned anyone who said otherwise. Btw, liberal news outlets are finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  People were banned for falsely asserting it was confirmed to be a lab leak. That's still a false assertion. I'm not aware of any major news outlet - liberal or otherwise - "finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right" at this point. The WSJ story the other day doesn't come close to that assertion yet.
  - throwaway8581 5y ago
    Funny that no one was banned for saying, as many did, that it was impossible for it to have come from a Chinese lab. Those asymmetries in enforcement always seem to lean in the same direction.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      It's a shame you're being downvoted, because you're exactly correct. I heard a lot of rhetoric around it being impossible that it was a lab leak. I thought it pretty unlikely, but claiming that it was impossible is just as misinformative as claiming it 100% was a lab leak.
      - timeon 5y ago
        Can you give an example?
  - therealjumbo 5y ago
    Facebook banned a New York Post story that was factual and not inflammatory: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/548612-facebook-prevents-sharing-of-new-york-post-black-lives-matter-story https://thehill.com/homenews/media/548612-facebook-prevents-... So people or stories get banned even if they are true for some other reasons. You don't know what those reasons are, and they may change going forward.
    - vharuck 5y ago
      Do you have a link to the New York Post story? I didn't see a link in the article you shared, and Facebook's claim was that the NYP story included a person's home address(es).
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Facebook banned that story - as clearly stated in the article - for doxxing someone's private address. They've done this for years, as has Twitter (example from 2017: https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/03/technology/business/twitter-content-moderation-policy-updates/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/03/technology/business/twitter...). https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/privacy_violations_image_rights https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/privacy_violatio... > We remove content that shares, offers or solicits personally identifiable information or other private information that could lead to physical or financial harm, including financial, residential and medical information, as well as private information obtained from illegal sources.
      - vxNsr 5y ago
        That’s simply false. They don’t block stories that doxx people’s private addresses, their policies are enforced unequally and only when it suites their own political agenda, whatever that may be. Pretending they’re being fair, when you know they’re not is gaslighting. You may think it’s ok for them to apply their policies unequally, and dishonestly; that’s another discussion, but please don’t act like what they’re doing is fair or honest. The biggest example of them not blocking doxxing was the implicit help in spreading the Parlar hacked data. I know of fb devs who participated in spreading it. It can also be very easily argued that the leader of the BLM movement is a public figure and sharing her home address is not doxxing. And I’m sure that argument has been used to allow sharing private info of similar public figures who Facebook’s progressive devs didn’t care for.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    > People were banned for falsely asserting it was confirmed to be a lab leak This is such a false spin on what was actually happening. It was only a year ago. It isn't hard to remember. People were banned/downvoted to oblivion for merely suggesting the lab leak was a credible theory, not for claiming it was definitely the 100% truth. Stop gaslighting.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      I don't find it hard to remember, and conflating downvotes and bans as if they're the same thing is disingenuous.
throwaway3699 5y ago
Conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to just be conspiracies. That's why we need to be able to talk about them. I'm not qualified to say if the lab leak has any credence, but it wouldn't be the first time the powers at be have been wrong. Just look at the classic "WMDs in the Middle East" rhetoric that lead us to war.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I don't think the WMD thing was anyone being wrong; rather it was a deliberate lie to justify a war that was wanted for other reasons. But agreed in general; I think there's a lot of political opposition on the left to the lab-leak theory, in no small part because Trump pushed so hard to blame the Chinese for the virus while in office. Even if unlikely, a lab leak is far from impossible as a cause, and we should talk about it and explore it until evidence conclusively rules it out.
moralestapia 5y ago
>Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. Are they? It's easy to walk down the slippery road that leads to authoritarian behaviors.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Obviously problematic is a spectrum. Banning them is problematic too. But yes, conspiracy theories are problematic. They lead to poorly informed decisions such as anti-vac and asian discrimination and anti-semitism.
  - PureParadigm 5y ago
    Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Suppressing research into these would also lead to poorly informed decisions. For example, government mass surveillance on the scale revealed by Snowden was considered a conspiracy theory before the proof emerged. So I would disagree that "conspiracy theories are problematic." Some are problematic, but there are also some that turn out to be extremely important. No progress is made without questioning authority and the status quo.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      Needing to have evidence to not have your theory marked as misleading doesn't disincentivize research into conspiracies. It does the opposite. There would be more research into these theories so that their purveyors could say them without being labeled misleading. Anyone would still be able to do their own research under this model too, they would hopefully just know not to blindly believe what they read. Investigating wrongdoing and backing up findings with evidence is extremely important. Spouting unfounded lies is not.
      - PureParadigm 5y ago
        The bigger problem is when platforms block the content. In this case very few people will hear about the conspiracy theory. So then few will know that this is something worth investigating. This dramatically hinders research into the (potentially true) conspiracy theory. I have less of a problem with marking things as unfounded if they are actually unfounded. I wouldn't use the term misleading because not all unfounded claims are false. There's still a lot of gray area here. Maybe the person in charge of making those judgements is not a subject matter expert. Or maybe the person making the claim has some additional information that cannot be revealed. (Perhaps they are inside the organization and cannot leak too much or they will be caught.) I would set the bar for marking things as misleading as requiring evidence to the contrary. I think it is fine to mark things as lacking evidence, as long as that can be established fairly and reliably. I have my doubts that this can be done reliably, but as long as there is no blocking occurring, I think the harm of a mistake is minimized. Anyone claiming to be an impartial subject matter expert capable of making these judgements should provide evidence of that claim.
boruto 5y ago
Thanks to Ministry of truth at Twitter, I feel so much protected from conspiracy theories online.
tomjen3 5y ago
Is it misleading to say that the CIA did mind control experiments on US citizens and that it lead to domestic terrorism? Is it misleading to say that a group of doctors conspired to ensure that black Americans died of a disease they could have cured, just so that they could study their effects? Because those are conspiracy theories, and they are both true.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Things which have actual evidence get to move from "conspiracy theory" to "fact".

Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. You can put "may" in any statement and it's technically true, doesn't mean facebook/twitter can't mark it as misleading.

throwaway8581 5y ago

The point is they dismissed it out of hand and banned anyone who said otherwise. Btw, liberal news outlets are finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right.

ceejayoz 5y ago
People were banned for falsely asserting it was confirmed to be a lab leak. That's still a false assertion. I'm not aware of any major news outlet - liberal or otherwise - "finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right" at this point. The WSJ story the other day doesn't come close to that assertion yet.
- throwaway8581 5y ago
  Funny that no one was banned for saying, as many did, that it was impossible for it to have come from a Chinese lab. Those asymmetries in enforcement always seem to lean in the same direction.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    It's a shame you're being downvoted, because you're exactly correct. I heard a lot of rhetoric around it being impossible that it was a lab leak. I thought it pretty unlikely, but claiming that it was impossible is just as misinformative as claiming it 100% was a lab leak.
    - timeon 5y ago
      Can you give an example?
- therealjumbo 5y ago
  Facebook banned a New York Post story that was factual and not inflammatory: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/548612-facebook-prevents-sharing-of-new-york-post-black-lives-matter-story https://thehill.com/homenews/media/548612-facebook-prevents-... So people or stories get banned even if they are true for some other reasons. You don't know what those reasons are, and they may change going forward.
  - vharuck 5y ago
    Do you have a link to the New York Post story? I didn't see a link in the article you shared, and Facebook's claim was that the NYP story included a person's home address(es).
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Facebook banned that story - as clearly stated in the article - for doxxing someone's private address. They've done this for years, as has Twitter (example from 2017: https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/03/technology/business/twitter-content-moderation-policy-updates/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/03/technology/business/twitter...). https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/privacy_violations_image_rights https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/privacy_violatio... > We remove content that shares, offers or solicits personally identifiable information or other private information that could lead to physical or financial harm, including financial, residential and medical information, as well as private information obtained from illegal sources.
    - vxNsr 5y ago
      That’s simply false. They don’t block stories that doxx people’s private addresses, their policies are enforced unequally and only when it suites their own political agenda, whatever that may be. Pretending they’re being fair, when you know they’re not is gaslighting. You may think it’s ok for them to apply their policies unequally, and dishonestly; that’s another discussion, but please don’t act like what they’re doing is fair or honest. The biggest example of them not blocking doxxing was the implicit help in spreading the Parlar hacked data. I know of fb devs who participated in spreading it. It can also be very easily argued that the leader of the BLM movement is a public figure and sharing her home address is not doxxing. And I’m sure that argument has been used to allow sharing private info of similar public figures who Facebook’s progressive devs didn’t care for.
- spiderice 5y ago
  > People were banned for falsely asserting it was confirmed to be a lab leak This is such a false spin on what was actually happening. It was only a year ago. It isn't hard to remember. People were banned/downvoted to oblivion for merely suggesting the lab leak was a credible theory, not for claiming it was definitely the 100% truth. Stop gaslighting.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    I don't find it hard to remember, and conflating downvotes and bans as if they're the same thing is disingenuous.

throwaway3699 5y ago

Conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to just be conspiracies. That's why we need to be able to talk about them. I'm not qualified to say if the lab leak has any credence, but it wouldn't be the first time the powers at be have been wrong. Just look at the classic "WMDs in the Middle East" rhetoric that lead us to war.

kelnos 5y ago
I don't think the WMD thing was anyone being wrong; rather it was a deliberate lie to justify a war that was wanted for other reasons. But agreed in general; I think there's a lot of political opposition on the left to the lab-leak theory, in no small part because Trump pushed so hard to blame the Chinese for the virus while in office. Even if unlikely, a lab leak is far from impossible as a cause, and we should talk about it and explore it until evidence conclusively rules it out.

moralestapia 5y ago

>Yea, conspiracy theories are problematic. Are they? It's easy to walk down the slippery road that leads to authoritarian behaviors.

colinmhayes 5y ago
Obviously problematic is a spectrum. Banning them is problematic too. But yes, conspiracy theories are problematic. They lead to poorly informed decisions such as anti-vac and asian discrimination and anti-semitism.
- PureParadigm 5y ago
  Some conspiracy theories turn out to be true. Suppressing research into these would also lead to poorly informed decisions. For example, government mass surveillance on the scale revealed by Snowden was considered a conspiracy theory before the proof emerged. So I would disagree that "conspiracy theories are problematic." Some are problematic, but there are also some that turn out to be extremely important. No progress is made without questioning authority and the status quo.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Needing to have evidence to not have your theory marked as misleading doesn't disincentivize research into conspiracies. It does the opposite. There would be more research into these theories so that their purveyors could say them without being labeled misleading. Anyone would still be able to do their own research under this model too, they would hopefully just know not to blindly believe what they read. Investigating wrongdoing and backing up findings with evidence is extremely important. Spouting unfounded lies is not.
    - PureParadigm 5y ago
      The bigger problem is when platforms block the content. In this case very few people will hear about the conspiracy theory. So then few will know that this is something worth investigating. This dramatically hinders research into the (potentially true) conspiracy theory. I have less of a problem with marking things as unfounded if they are actually unfounded. I wouldn't use the term misleading because not all unfounded claims are false. There's still a lot of gray area here. Maybe the person in charge of making those judgements is not a subject matter expert. Or maybe the person making the claim has some additional information that cannot be revealed. (Perhaps they are inside the organization and cannot leak too much or they will be caught.) I would set the bar for marking things as misleading as requiring evidence to the contrary. I think it is fine to mark things as lacking evidence, as long as that can be established fairly and reliably. I have my doubts that this can be done reliably, but as long as there is no blocking occurring, I think the harm of a mistake is minimized. Anyone claiming to be an impartial subject matter expert capable of making these judgements should provide evidence of that claim.

boruto 5y ago

Thanks to Ministry of truth at Twitter, I feel so much protected from conspiracy theories online.

tomjen3 5y ago

Is it misleading to say that the CIA did mind control experiments on US citizens and that it lead to domestic terrorism? Is it misleading to say that a group of doctors conspired to ensure that black Americans died of a disease they could have cured, just so that they could study their effects? Because those are conspiracy theories, and they are both true.

pjc50 5y ago
Things which have actual evidence get to move from "conspiracy theory" to "fact".