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>Banning conspiracy theories is such a slippery slope. And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activ

>Banning conspiracy theories is such a slippery slope. And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths. There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made.

Jimmc414 5y ago
Should we entrust Google, Facebook or Twitter with deciding what compromises have to be made in the name of good science and good medicine?
- zaik 5y ago
  If you accept the premise, what mechanism do you suggest?
  - StanislavPetrov 5y ago
    Accepting that premise is tantamount to admitting you don't have the judgement to be part of the conversation.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    If I were allowed to rewrite all the rules at Youtube, I would simplify censorship. Only content that breaks the laws where Youtube is headquartered would be removed by Youtube. No exception. AI would be allowed to "flag" a video for review and a large crowd-sourced team of moderators would vote on whether or not the video is breaking a law. They would have to attest to which laws specifically are being broken. Moderators that false-flag will slowly lose points that count towards a quorum. When a quorum of moderators agree a video is breaking one or more laws, the video would become invisible to the public and handed off to a forensic interface for law enforcement to subscribe to. The forensic queue would summarize who is posting the most illegal material and give law enforcement officials the ability to search for specific content, IP addresses, geographic locations, etc... Law enforcement could un-flag a video if it is in fact legal. Verified law enforcement are also welcome to join the moderator queue and review process. This might be a good option for those having recently left the police force due to current events. If there are laws on the books that the district attorney does not wish to enforce, they could log in and gray them out. A comment will appear showing which district attorney muted those laws. As for false information, quackery, etc... there would be icons that people could up/downvote to provide public opinion as to something being false information. Post a video of the earth being flat? No problem, go right ahead. People can upvote the "Cool story bro" icon. Quackery icons will slowly de-rank a video from showing up in suggested. There would also be industry specific icons and people verified to be from those industries could double-up-vote icons as well as post comments with a checkmark next to their name linking to their public credentials and contact information. Cost? The verification process would pay for itself. Being a verified subject matter expert provides exposure for the individual, so there is incentive to pay to be manually verified. Being a SME does not grant the ability to remove a video, only the ability to add a comment with a checkmark. Not all SME's will agree with one another. Let the merits of their conversations drive public opinion and emoji voting. Post a cure for covid or cancer? Go for it. Verified doctors and scientists can post checkmark comments and upvote the quackery emojis if they feel it is required. Or they could upvote the green checkmark if they agree. More verified checkmarks equates to higher rank in suggested content.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I mean, we're trusting them with the hosting in the first place. Of course the problem of moderation also falls on them. I mean, let's suppose they only ban straight-up illegal content. Then a similar question could be formed: "Should we entrust Google with the execution of our laws? They are not the police after all!"
Invictus0 5y ago
Lets choose the conspiracy theory videos then. Conspiracy theory is just a term used to dismiss unpopular thoughts. We should be able to talk about the lab leak hypothesis. We should be able to talk about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Discussing ivermectin as a covid treatment will get you banned from Facebook, but Oxford is studying it [0] and nations such as India [1] and Egypt approved it as part of their official protocol. Now, that's not to say that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments--but the fact that you can be deplatformed for even discussing a treatment that has been administered to millions of people is really absurd. We can't expect Facebook or Youtube to understand medicine and decide which medicines are ok for us to talk about; more generally, we can't trust corporations to be the arbiters of reality. [0] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed-in-uk-trial-as-possible-covid-19-treatment https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-state-will-offer-ivermectin-to-entire-adult-population---even-as-who-warns-against-its-use-as-covid-19-treatment/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-...
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals. There is no compelling reason that uneducated citizens with no medical expertise need to discuss them. I personally know several medical professionals that were aghast at the "discussion" around hydroxychloroquine. Also worth noting hiding behind "just discussing" something is a slippery slope in its own right. There's a long history of people claiming to be "just asking questions" when they're transparently using "discussion" as a means to spread fringe ideology.
  - sunshineforever 5y ago
    This is actually a great point that I'd never considered. Its completely true based on my FB or twitter feed where you can find thousands of people who couldn't pass a GED test arguing a bout science that they don't understand.
  - 5y ago
makomk 5y ago
To be clear, your justification for why YouTube needs to censor themselves - "anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths" - is itself widely-believed misinformation. Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia. I'm not sure the USA has ever topped the chart. (Czechia is particularly interesting - they were the European "success story" the British press pointed to earlier in the pandemic as proof that the UK should be able to do better and our government failed us. In reality, they probably just got lucky the first time around. Actually, most of the success stories probably did.) Now, a lot of less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison. If the USA was instead split up into 50 countries, it'd be much further down that ranking even if the exact same number of people died.
- woodruffw 5y ago
  > Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia. I don't know where you got this list from. JHU's database[1] shows Peru and Brazil at the top for the per-capita statistic (not CFR). Brazil, conspicuously, has a COVID-denialist leader, refused a general lockdown, and is currently #3 in the world for deaths. [1]: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
  - makomk 5y ago
    Edited my comment to include a link. The chart you've linked only include the "twenty countries currently most affected by COVID-19 worldwide", whatever that means. Probably something to do with current cases or recent deaths. The numbers I found match that chart for the countries which are on it, but Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria just weren't included even though they would've been higher than Brazil if they were. Edited: as someone pointed out, there's a sortable table further down which gives the same ranking as I quoted, except it includes a couple of additional micro-countries with only a few thousand people. (Also, Brazil is probably pretty representative of South America as a whole, they just seem to have better testing than other countries there and likely report more of their Covid deaths than others. I know a while ago, there was some analysis suggesting Mexico had more Covid deaths than Brazil with a substantially lower population and was just massively under-reporting them due to missing testing.)
briantakita 5y ago
And censoring public conversation to medical malpractice & issues with treatments is also a slippery slope that totalitarian regimes have regularly instituted on their own people. There is a perfect solution, which is for the government & the corporatist state to defend our rights, which include the Freedom of Speech. Somebody is lying & the public has a right to all of the pertinent information & unrestricted conversation. The worst case is for the liars to have total control of the information. Those are the definitions of totalitarianism & authoritarianism. --- Edit: I actually misspoke. The worst case is Technocratic control a la Brave New World, where autonomy is lost & cyber (regulatory) divisions take over all aspects of life. Nothing screams dystopia more than a technocrat with a God complex exerting one's will to control the lives of the population. Human life is sacred & spiritual and the Technocratic movement as it stands today spoils this light to create a horde of undead.
- SantalBlush 5y ago
  People on this site can try to redefine the first amendment all they like, but never in the history of this country has it meant that we get to say what we want wherever we want. I can get fired for saying something offensive, but I don't moan about totalitarianism or the corporatist state, because that would be stupid. If people want to argue the merits of promoting a wider range of speech on social media, so be it, but please dispense with any comparisons to our first amendment right (which is not affected here).
  - a_conservative 5y ago
    "Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech." Benjamin Franklin Bringing up the first amendment is a way to emphasize the importance of the free exchange of ideas. It only legally restrains the government, but now other powers have gained the ability to regulate speech. The principle is the same no matter who the censor is.
    - SantalBlush 5y ago
      Conflating social media bans with a government's ability to punish citizens over speech is utterly absurd. The real complaint here is that folks want to express their opinions on a site with the biggest reach, and if they are relegated to a smaller site (of which there are many) then they pretend their rights are being violated. This notion is itself as anti-free speech as it gets.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths. You mean the anti-science activists who told everyone early on not to wear masks because they were useless, who are now worshiped as infallible heroes? Or perhaps you are referring to the violent extremists who dropped bombs on Syria yesterday? You're right, there is no perfect solution. When the centers of power arbitrarily wield the power to silence dissident voices and call it "moderation" we are all worse off, and only the lies and disinformation of the powerful are allowed to be heard.
- ad_hominem 5y ago
  Now these same centers of power are pushing neoracist anti-white brainworms on us and our children. Twitter, TikTok, et al are full of content leisurely calling white people colonizers, genociders, white supremacists, white skin being an inherent evil that can never be cured etc. But any earnest pushback results in account bans. Which leads to this nasty monoculture of one-sided hatred being allowed to thrive and appear to present a consensus of this being okay.
apostacy 5y ago
> And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths. Have we really learned nothing over the last year and a half? What will it take to shake your faith in the media? Four weeks ago, the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab was a conspiracy theory, likely to get you banned with extreme prejudice for being a qanon white supremecist. COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory. Then it was a conspiracy theory that human to human transmission was possible. Then it was a conspiracy theory that wearing masks was at all helpful. What will be the next domino to fall? What will the new truth be a few weeks from now? If anything, censoring "conspiracy theories" led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. If this was 2015, I think things would have gone much better for us. Citizens would have been able to fill in the gaps where journalists failed us. There might have been a panic for people to buy masks and close the borders, sure, but the pandemic would have probably been contained. I was banned for spreading conspiracy theories in February 2020 when I pleaded with people to practice basic hygiene and postpone travel until we had figured out what was going on.
- deorder 5y ago
  An entire subreddit was quarantined in February last year for spreading misinformation about what was considered fact just months later. As of today that subreddit is still quarantined, even after the last "misinfo", the lab theory, is no longer considered taboo to talk about.
  - hammock 5y ago
    Which subreddit?
    - deorder 5y ago
      /r/Wuhan_Flu More info here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantine-coronavirus-misinformation https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin... Also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_is_up_with_rwuhan_flu_being_quarantined/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i... And a quote from /r/OutOfTheLoop about /r/WuhanFlu: > The users of that subreddit believe in a conspiracy that the Wuhan Coronavirus is more serious than the governments of China and the United States are telling them. They believe the government is mismanaging the outbreak. They were quarantined because an admin believed the subreddit was spreading misinformation. Note that /r/WuhanFlu was already talking about this mismanagement since mid-January. Unfortunately @apostacy (who is getting downvoted) is from what I experienced back then mostly right.
adventured 5y ago
> and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths Seems a bit crude to pick on Czechia, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and France like that. Surely they're not so anti-science as you're suggesting. Covid deaths per 1,000 population: Czechia: 2.85 | Belgium: 2.2 | Italy: 2.11 | Britain: 1.93 | US: 1.84 | Spain: 1.73 | France: 1.65 | Sweden: 1.43 And if we were analyzing trends, Germany rather dramatically joined the Covid party toward the end (with an extreme death rate across a rough five month span). Was that due to a mass spontaneous national anti-science movement on their part? I don't think so.
xf1cf 5y ago
Where do you draw the line at anti-science? Where do you draw the line? Where is the line where moderation becomes censorship? There are so many questions to ask. Is book burning (in moderation) censorship or "stopping extremist ideas"? The analogy is correct. We've reached the point where we aren't moderating actual extremism but impeding on actual inquiry. There are a lot of very, very well researched channels that mention, for example, the lab leak hypothesis and are auto-banned by an algorithm. This was a conspiracy theory until a few months ago. Makes you think, doesn't it?
choward 5y ago
> There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made. It doesn't matter. You should not be censoring peoples opinions or them asking questions. The lab leak hypothesis should have never been censored. Maybe if someone was claiming they knew it was true without providing sufficient evidence I could see a case for it. Calling something misinformation when they aren't presenting it as fact but a possibility is disgraceful especially when it comes to journalism.

Jimmc414 5y ago

Should we entrust Google, Facebook or Twitter with deciding what compromises have to be made in the name of good science and good medicine?

zaik 5y ago
If you accept the premise, what mechanism do you suggest?
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  Accepting that premise is tantamount to admitting you don't have the judgement to be part of the conversation.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  If I were allowed to rewrite all the rules at Youtube, I would simplify censorship. Only content that breaks the laws where Youtube is headquartered would be removed by Youtube. No exception. AI would be allowed to "flag" a video for review and a large crowd-sourced team of moderators would vote on whether or not the video is breaking a law. They would have to attest to which laws specifically are being broken. Moderators that false-flag will slowly lose points that count towards a quorum. When a quorum of moderators agree a video is breaking one or more laws, the video would become invisible to the public and handed off to a forensic interface for law enforcement to subscribe to. The forensic queue would summarize who is posting the most illegal material and give law enforcement officials the ability to search for specific content, IP addresses, geographic locations, etc... Law enforcement could un-flag a video if it is in fact legal. Verified law enforcement are also welcome to join the moderator queue and review process. This might be a good option for those having recently left the police force due to current events. If there are laws on the books that the district attorney does not wish to enforce, they could log in and gray them out. A comment will appear showing which district attorney muted those laws. As for false information, quackery, etc... there would be icons that people could up/downvote to provide public opinion as to something being false information. Post a video of the earth being flat? No problem, go right ahead. People can upvote the "Cool story bro" icon. Quackery icons will slowly de-rank a video from showing up in suggested. There would also be industry specific icons and people verified to be from those industries could double-up-vote icons as well as post comments with a checkmark next to their name linking to their public credentials and contact information. Cost? The verification process would pay for itself. Being a verified subject matter expert provides exposure for the individual, so there is incentive to pay to be manually verified. Being a SME does not grant the ability to remove a video, only the ability to add a comment with a checkmark. Not all SME's will agree with one another. Let the merits of their conversations drive public opinion and emoji voting. Post a cure for covid or cancer? Go for it. Verified doctors and scientists can post checkmark comments and upvote the quackery emojis if they feel it is required. Or they could upvote the green checkmark if they agree. More verified checkmarks equates to higher rank in suggested content.
npteljes 5y ago
I mean, we're trusting them with the hosting in the first place. Of course the problem of moderation also falls on them. I mean, let's suppose they only ban straight-up illegal content. Then a similar question could be formed: "Should we entrust Google with the execution of our laws? They are not the police after all!"

Invictus0 5y ago

Lets choose the conspiracy theory videos then. Conspiracy theory is just a term used to dismiss unpopular thoughts. We should be able to talk about the lab leak hypothesis. We should be able to talk about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Discussing ivermectin as a covid treatment will get you banned from Facebook, but Oxford is studying it [0] and nations such as India [1] and Egypt approved it as part of their official protocol. Now, that's not to say that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments--but the fact that you can be deplatformed for even discussing a treatment that has been administered to millions of people is really absurd. We can't expect Facebook or Youtube to understand medicine and decide which medicines are ok for us to talk about; more generally, we can't trust corporations to be the arbiters of reality. [0] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed-in-uk-trial-as-possible-covid-19-treatment https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed... [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-state-will-offer-ivermectin-to-entire-adult-population---even-as-who-warns-against-its-use-as-covid-19-treatment/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-...

LordDragonfang 5y ago
As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals. There is no compelling reason that uneducated citizens with no medical expertise need to discuss them. I personally know several medical professionals that were aghast at the "discussion" around hydroxychloroquine. Also worth noting hiding behind "just discussing" something is a slippery slope in its own right. There's a long history of people claiming to be "just asking questions" when they're transparently using "discussion" as a means to spread fringe ideology.
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  This is actually a great point that I'd never considered. Its completely true based on my FB or twitter feed where you can find thousands of people who couldn't pass a GED test arguing a bout science that they don't understand.
- 5y ago

makomk 5y ago

To be clear, your justification for why YouTube needs to censor themselves - "anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths" - is itself widely-believed misinformation. Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia. I'm not sure the USA has ever topped the chart. (Czechia is particularly interesting - they were the European "success story" the British press pointed to earlier in the pandemic as proof that the UK should be able to do better and our government failed us. In reality, they probably just got lucky the first time around. Actually, most of the success stories probably did.) Now, a lot of less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison. If the USA was instead split up into 50 countries, it'd be much further down that ranking even if the exact same number of people died.

woodruffw 5y ago
> Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia. I don't know where you got this list from. JHU's database[1] shows Peru and Brazil at the top for the per-capita statistic (not CFR). Brazil, conspicuously, has a COVID-denialist leader, refused a general lockdown, and is currently #3 in the world for deaths. [1]: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
- makomk 5y ago
  Edited my comment to include a link. The chart you've linked only include the "twenty countries currently most affected by COVID-19 worldwide", whatever that means. Probably something to do with current cases or recent deaths. The numbers I found match that chart for the countries which are on it, but Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria just weren't included even though they would've been higher than Brazil if they were. Edited: as someone pointed out, there's a sortable table further down which gives the same ranking as I quoted, except it includes a couple of additional micro-countries with only a few thousand people. (Also, Brazil is probably pretty representative of South America as a whole, they just seem to have better testing than other countries there and likely report more of their Covid deaths than others. I know a while ago, there was some analysis suggesting Mexico had more Covid deaths than Brazil with a substantially lower population and was just massively under-reporting them due to missing testing.)

briantakita 5y ago

And censoring public conversation to medical malpractice & issues with treatments is also a slippery slope that totalitarian regimes have regularly instituted on their own people. There is a perfect solution, which is for the government & the corporatist state to defend our rights, which include the Freedom of Speech. Somebody is lying & the public has a right to all of the pertinent information & unrestricted conversation. The worst case is for the liars to have total control of the information. Those are the definitions of totalitarianism & authoritarianism. --- Edit: I actually misspoke. The worst case is Technocratic control a la Brave New World, where autonomy is lost & cyber (regulatory) divisions take over all aspects of life. Nothing screams dystopia more than a technocrat with a God complex exerting one's will to control the lives of the population. Human life is sacred & spiritual and the Technocratic movement as it stands today spoils this light to create a horde of undead.

SantalBlush 5y ago
People on this site can try to redefine the first amendment all they like, but never in the history of this country has it meant that we get to say what we want wherever we want. I can get fired for saying something offensive, but I don't moan about totalitarianism or the corporatist state, because that would be stupid. If people want to argue the merits of promoting a wider range of speech on social media, so be it, but please dispense with any comparisons to our first amendment right (which is not affected here).
- a_conservative 5y ago
  "Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech." Benjamin Franklin Bringing up the first amendment is a way to emphasize the importance of the free exchange of ideas. It only legally restrains the government, but now other powers have gained the ability to regulate speech. The principle is the same no matter who the censor is.
  - SantalBlush 5y ago
    Conflating social media bans with a government's ability to punish citizens over speech is utterly absurd. The real complaint here is that folks want to express their opinions on a site with the biggest reach, and if they are relegated to a smaller site (of which there are many) then they pretend their rights are being violated. This notion is itself as anti-free speech as it gets.

StanislavPetrov 5y ago

>anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths. You mean the anti-science activists who told everyone early on not to wear masks because they were useless, who are now worshiped as infallible heroes? Or perhaps you are referring to the violent extremists who dropped bombs on Syria yesterday? You're right, there is no perfect solution. When the centers of power arbitrarily wield the power to silence dissident voices and call it "moderation" we are all worse off, and only the lies and disinformation of the powerful are allowed to be heard.

ad_hominem 5y ago
Now these same centers of power are pushing neoracist anti-white brainworms on us and our children. Twitter, TikTok, et al are full of content leisurely calling white people colonizers, genociders, white supremacists, white skin being an inherent evil that can never be cured etc. But any earnest pushback results in account bans. Which leads to this nasty monoculture of one-sided hatred being allowed to thrive and appear to present a consensus of this being okay.

apostacy 5y ago

> And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths. Have we really learned nothing over the last year and a half? What will it take to shake your faith in the media? Four weeks ago, the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab was a conspiracy theory, likely to get you banned with extreme prejudice for being a qanon white supremecist. COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory. Then it was a conspiracy theory that human to human transmission was possible. Then it was a conspiracy theory that wearing masks was at all helpful. What will be the next domino to fall? What will the new truth be a few weeks from now? If anything, censoring "conspiracy theories" led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic. If this was 2015, I think things would have gone much better for us. Citizens would have been able to fill in the gaps where journalists failed us. There might have been a panic for people to buy masks and close the borders, sure, but the pandemic would have probably been contained. I was banned for spreading conspiracy theories in February 2020 when I pleaded with people to practice basic hygiene and postpone travel until we had figured out what was going on.

deorder 5y ago
An entire subreddit was quarantined in February last year for spreading misinformation about what was considered fact just months later. As of today that subreddit is still quarantined, even after the last "misinfo", the lab theory, is no longer considered taboo to talk about.
- hammock 5y ago
  Which subreddit?
  - deorder 5y ago
    /r/Wuhan_Flu More info here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantine-coronavirus-misinformation https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jqbx/reddit-cant-quarantin... Also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_is_up_with_rwuhan_flu_being_quarantined/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/f6jpm7/what_i... And a quote from /r/OutOfTheLoop about /r/WuhanFlu: > The users of that subreddit believe in a conspiracy that the Wuhan Coronavirus is more serious than the governments of China and the United States are telling them. They believe the government is mismanaging the outbreak. They were quarantined because an admin believed the subreddit was spreading misinformation. Note that /r/WuhanFlu was already talking about this mismanagement since mid-January. Unfortunately @apostacy (who is getting downvoted) is from what I experienced back then mostly right.

adventured 5y ago

> and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths Seems a bit crude to pick on Czechia, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and France like that. Surely they're not so anti-science as you're suggesting. Covid deaths per 1,000 population: Czechia: 2.85 | Belgium: 2.2 | Italy: 2.11 | Britain: 1.93 | US: 1.84 | Spain: 1.73 | France: 1.65 | Sweden: 1.43 And if we were analyzing trends, Germany rather dramatically joined the Covid party toward the end (with an extreme death rate across a rough five month span). Was that due to a mass spontaneous national anti-science movement on their part? I don't think so.

xf1cf 5y ago

Where do you draw the line at anti-science? Where do you draw the line? Where is the line where moderation becomes censorship? There are so many questions to ask. Is book burning (in moderation) censorship or "stopping extremist ideas"? The analogy is correct. We've reached the point where we aren't moderating actual extremism but impeding on actual inquiry. There are a lot of very, very well researched channels that mention, for example, the lab leak hypothesis and are auto-banned by an algorithm. This was a conspiracy theory until a few months ago. Makes you think, doesn't it?

choward 5y ago

> There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made. It doesn't matter. You should not be censoring peoples opinions or them asking questions. The lab leak hypothesis should have never been censored. Maybe if someone was claiming they knew it was true without providing sufficient evidence I could see a case for it. Calling something misinformation when they aren't presenting it as fact but a possibility is disgraceful especially when it comes to journalism.