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Twitter censoring COVID-19-related information made the world worse, and it's good that they've stopped. A lot of people seem to be taking a very naive perspec

Twitter censoring COVID-19-related information made the world worse, and it's good that they've stopped. A lot of people seem to be taking a very naive perspective, thinking that censoring something means fewer people will believe it. In the case of COVID-19 misinformation in particular, I believe this is wrong. At the start of the pandemic, all the major public health organizations told blatant lies about key facts: airborne transmission, surface transmission, whether it was present in US at all, the secondary attack rate, the effectiveness of masks, the infection-fatality rate, and whether it could have been a lab leak. This completely set fire to their credibility. Then they pivoted from attacking pro-maskers to attacking hydroxychloroquine advocates. These attacks consisted of highly ineffectual attempts at censorship: censored enough that everyone can see that censorship is being attempted, not censored enough to stop anyone from seeing it. People are neither geniuses nor idiots. When the public health establishment turned on a dime from attacking masks to attacking hydroxychloroquine, many people inferred from that fact alone that hydroxychloroquine must be effective. It isn't, but the alternate world in which hydroxychloroquine was effective would have looked the same, so the reasoning was valid. Given that history, and especially given how recent that history was, continuing to censor "COVID-19 misleading information" would be utterly insane.

benlivengood 4y ago
I can second the annoyance with the CDC throughout most of the pandemic. I had to read WHO publications and individual studies to get an inkling of what might be going on with covid risk where it mattered; to me and the people I care about (since I could personally do nothing about the rest of the public). I am not a virologist or public health expert, but I can see when a study has reasonable error bars and sample sizes for the inferences they are making from it. I'll also take an average educated guess of many virologists over a single small study, but there was nothing close to consensus on covid among experts for several months. During that time it was clear that isolation was the only provable way to combat covid and contact-tracing was virtually the only conceivable way to isolate without shutting down literally everything. So what did CDC do? No contact tracing, but 6-foot distancing, extreme hand washing, etc. I disagree slightly with your statement about the reasoning that hydroxychloroquine being effective was correct. The correct conclusion to draw from an authority with no-better-than-chance at being correct changing their recommendation is exactly the same no-better-than-chance at being correct. It wasn't quite that bad; hand washing is a general good practice and had a chance at being helpful given no other information. The health agencies issued recommendations with no error bars and wrote themselves into a corner where they couldn't update to more reliable information without continually contradicting themselves, so as a result I still see signs left in stores asking people to 6-foot distance (even though masks are optional). I also realize the underlying problem is that people are terrible at reasoning under uncertainty and also very unfamiliar with trying to do so, and so won't take announcements with error bars in a very useful way. Presented with uncertainty most people default to their status quo as if having less than perfect information is the same as no information. So the CDC's battle was to try to influence public behavior in ways that were ultimately beneficial, while probably knowing they had a limited number of tries before people noticed the uncertainty and reverted to status quo. A very unenviable position. Twitter censoring misinformation may have delayed the build-up to useless uncertainty, or it may have come too late to help much. I don't have evidence either way. One part of the status quo is buying quack medicine, so there was never any hope for preventing some of the population from doing that regardless of messaging or censorship.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Let's see how long this policy lasts if people spread COVID-19 misinformation that replaces Bill Gates as the Boogeyman with Elon Musk. The guy is an intellectual lightweight making intellectual lightweight mistakes. Free speech isn't axiomatically important but only insofar as it increases your chances of survival, which is axiomatically important. That's a common mistake made by "muh freedoms" absolutists.

benlivengood 4y ago

I can second the annoyance with the CDC throughout most of the pandemic. I had to read WHO publications and individual studies to get an inkling of what might be going on with covid risk where it mattered; to me and the people I care about (since I could personally do nothing about the rest of the public). I am not a virologist or public health expert, but I can see when a study has reasonable error bars and sample sizes for the inferences they are making from it. I'll also take an average educated guess of many virologists over a single small study, but there was nothing close to consensus on covid among experts for several months. During that time it was clear that isolation was the only provable way to combat covid and contact-tracing was virtually the only conceivable way to isolate without shutting down literally everything. So what did CDC do? No contact tracing, but 6-foot distancing, extreme hand washing, etc. I disagree slightly with your statement about the reasoning that hydroxychloroquine being effective was correct. The correct conclusion to draw from an authority with no-better-than-chance at being correct changing their recommendation is exactly the same no-better-than-chance at being correct. It wasn't quite that bad; hand washing is a general good practice and had a chance at being helpful given no other information. The health agencies issued recommendations with no error bars and wrote themselves into a corner where they couldn't update to more reliable information without continually contradicting themselves, so as a result I still see signs left in stores asking people to 6-foot distance (even though masks are optional). I also realize the underlying problem is that people are terrible at reasoning under uncertainty and also very unfamiliar with trying to do so, and so won't take announcements with error bars in a very useful way. Presented with uncertainty most people default to their status quo as if having less than perfect information is the same as no information. So the CDC's battle was to try to influence public behavior in ways that were ultimately beneficial, while probably knowing they had a limited number of tries before people noticed the uncertainty and reverted to status quo. A very unenviable position. Twitter censoring misinformation may have delayed the build-up to useless uncertainty, or it may have come too late to help much. I don't have evidence either way. One part of the status quo is buying quack medicine, so there was never any hope for preventing some of the population from doing that regardless of messaging or censorship.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Let's see how long this policy lasts if people spread COVID-19 misinformation that replaces Bill Gates as the Boogeyman with Elon Musk. The guy is an intellectual lightweight making intellectual lightweight mistakes. Free speech isn't axiomatically important but only insofar as it increases your chances of survival, which is axiomatically important. That's a common mistake made by "muh freedoms" absolutists.