11 ms·

The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate

84 points by progrus 4y ago

sfusato 4y ago
> 39. What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter and other social media platforms—not to mention the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, about lockdowns, about the true risks of Covid in kids, and much more? I guess we will never find out, which is unfortunate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bool3max 4y ago
  That scenario could never have happened, by design.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
The thing is there are many people who are fine with this because their preferred party is in charge. They do not care if these obviously dystopian abuses of power are wrong because they are ideologically aligned with those in power (at least, they think they are)
- monsecchris 4y ago
  They want to police what you say and to whom and call you a fascist simultaneously.
- nemesis1637 4y ago
  This applies to everyone though (not just the right or left). Both the Trump and Biden administration are named here.
  - sfusato 4y ago
    Both parties did it. The idea of choice, of voting in itself, is but an illusion anyway.
AustinDev 4y ago
People flag these so fast, they’ll never make the front page.
- progrus 4y ago
  Nice that the front-page reactionary sniping of Elon Musk’s mercurial decisions has died down, but yeah. Disappointing, willful ignorance. The cold fact that 80% of Twitter was not essential (and that this must also apply to the federal government and other big/corrupt institutions) is not going away, though.
- bbbbb5 4y ago
  This is the first one that's actually a bad look for Twitter, the rest were a lot of noise over nothing.
motohagiography 4y ago
Imo, this is a critical discussion to have. While I have strong opinions that are confirmed by this cut of the story, is there a take that is thoughtful that is better than "it was an emergency, misleading people to ultimately do the right thing was the ethical decision," or is that truly the best rationale for how the platforms and governments handled the pandemic response? It's a critical discussion because right now, it really, really looks like a cadre of people actuated by having power over others (instead of the freedom to build and create by themselves) have co-ordinated through NGOs, operating on compromised institutions and platforms, to deceive the western world into removing all limits to state intervention and protections for basic human dignity and liberty, and to leverage the crisis to ensconce new powers. The people of the world need to be shown how we were not deceived and betrayed. I don't know how long the window of opportunity for truth and reconciliation will last.
sourcecodeplz 4y ago
Kids need routine and social interaction with their peers and teachers. Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immeasurably bad idea. They never closed down schools (except for universities) in Sweden for this reason. They also never forced masks or curfews. The main thing that they did was to limit inside capacity to 50 people max for restaurants and other avenues. There were groups of people who would protest that the government should be enforcing masks, basically full reverse of what people were protesting in all other places around the world.
- bsder 4y ago
  Sweden has about 2x the number of per capita deaths from Covid vs any of Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. You can't simply blow that off and not acknowledge that you are making a tradeoff. My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid. Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid. The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  > Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?
  - tmn 4y ago
    This may be true, but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, don’t be surprised when people think it’s a duck
goldenchrome 4y ago
Strange how this kind of discussion is now considered “okay” to have. I was attacked for trying to have it in 2020, 2021, and most of 2022 but it seems like 2023 is the year that people will wake up. Too little, too late. The media, especially those that seem to have people’s trust like the NYT played a disgusting role in normalizing the marginalization of the unvaccinated.
- kennyloginz 4y ago
  Sounds like you are being attacked often? Maybe inspect your vocabulary , it might be stuck in 2002…. Wake up sheeple.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  [dead]
- MrMan 4y ago
  the unvaccinated should absolutely be marginalized. also the idea that we constantly need to "wake up" to some previously hidden reality is a stupid way to look at the world.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    What other minorities do you believe should be marginalized?
  - stuxnet 4y ago
    Separating people into groups of those that should be marginalized and not is a stupid way to look at the world.
  - mathwords 4y ago
    Nope. Nurses and Doctors who knew they had Covid should never have been forced to get vaccinated. Very simple. Not difficult to understand.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Why? We know that being vaccinated doesn’t keep you from catching or transmitting COVID.
hintymad 4y ago
Is it true that Twitter's Covid Misinformation Policy was that whatever inconsistent with CDC or any public health institution would be considered as misinformation? If so, Twitter was essentially saying that we should not question the government? If so, wouldn't it be dangerous, even to the left? Again, let's look at the history: The soviet said that Lysenco was right, no? China said the yield of rice field could be 100 times higher than normal, no? It was the western democratic governments who pushed eugenics, no? It was the US government who tried to cover up multiple environmental disasters, no? When Catholic church was in power, The Inquisition was a thing, no? It was Pol Pot who told the country that the weak deserved to die, no? Since when our government has become so righteous and correct that any challenge to its message is misinformation? Heck, since when the humanity gets closer to truth by trusting a single institution? I thought forbidding people from challenging a single institution is called Indoctrination. Case in point: why is quoting CDC's own inconsistency a sin? https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607387725065232384?s=20 https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607387725065232384?s=...
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  The old Twitter agrees with you. Rather than give in to every request, they considered them on a case by case basis, looks like (TFA): https://mobile.twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607384015731888135 https://mobile.twitter.com/davidzweig/status/160738401573188...
ledauphin 4y ago
this is all frustrating and disappointing, but at some point would it also be appropriate to question why we seem to have collectively bought into the idea that the best (or only) way to share information with others is to have major media report on it or to share it on some controlled platform? Why isn't the best response to these sorts of embarrassing shenanigans to start emailing or texting links to friends, in the expectation that they'll do the same? I'm tired of the assumption that our fundamentally human networks are things we cannot maintain by our own efforts.
- abracadaniel 4y ago
  People have been inside the walled garden of Twitter for so long, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be outside it. Ultimately, it’s just an app, and the goings on of any app, forum, etc shouldn’t have any major significance on our lives.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  I received plenty of messages and emails from mostly older relatives spreading COVID misinformation (gargling warm salt water etc). I’m not entirely sure letting people spread whatever misinformation they want without any fact-checking is any better than what we had on Twitter.
  - teucris 4y ago
    Hearsay and gossip will happen no matter what. The issue here is amplification - an email from a relative can target a few dozen people at most; a tweet can target a few billion.
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    These people spreading this type of macro info in my circles are the ones who never get sick.
someNameIG 4y ago
> This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607388794772242437?s=20 https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607388794772242437?s=... Because it was misleading, putting it in quotes implies that it wasn't > Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
helf 4y ago
Regardless of what happened when, by whom, and where, it was fucking hilarious watching the world lose it’s shit because you couldn’t go to the bar randomly or eat out. Lost. Their. Minds. wife and I happily read books and watched movies and played board games and went on hikes like usual
- mitch3x3 4y ago
  Key words there being “like usual”.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Honestly, as soon as I saw "wife" I rolled my eyes... there were four or five months (from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021) where I only had a scant handful of in-person interactions with humans I "knew", and like, they weren't even friends... I just mean "people whose name I know and would notice if they were replaced by an NPC"; one of them was "the guy who lives in the park near my house". I have never been so lonely, and I am the kind of person who normally "hates people" a bit :(.
    - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
      My mother is still affected from this psyop. She doesn't even go out anymore. I try to encourage her to find a therapist but my words fall on deaf ears.
- Justin_K 4y ago
  Funny because I wanted to go to the beach like usual but it was closed and the police were issuing $500 dollar tickets if you stepped on the sand.
- collyw 4y ago
  We couldn't leave our apartments except to go to the supermarket for over two months. Followed by another 6 months of absurd rules in winter 2020/2021. You could eat in a restaurant but only until 3pm. You couldn't go outside after 10pm. You needed a mask to walk down the street but could take it off to eat. The fact that everyone just complied with such ridiculousness without question is why I lost my mind.
joeyguerra 4y ago
I'm still shocked that people are using Twitter as a reliable source for anything. WTF.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
So this isn't an official "Twitter files" release, just a random crazy person jumping on the bandwagon? It's hard to tell either way, to be honest.
collyw 4y ago
It can't be called a debate, when one side wasn't allowed to speak.
- voidwtf 4y ago
  It can’t be called a debate, when one side refuses to debate in good faith.
  - collyw 4y ago
    Utterly meaningless statement
capevace 4y ago
The thing is, these tweets are misinformation, presenting cherry-picked studies (which even have editors notes about validity attached) out of context and ignoring ones that don’t fit the narrative. To me, labelling them as misleading is exactly the right call and in my experience this has also happened to Tweets where pro-vaccine data was cherry picked. I feel like people from both sides simply do not follow each other, and so they only see flagging of “their own” people and assume that they are targeted.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  Sorry, but no. If a Harvard epidemiologist comes to another conclusion that the White House finds inconvenient for its mass-vaxxing campaign, that is not "misinformation". That is called research.
  - archontes 4y ago
    No again. That Harvard epidemiologist speaking in an offhand way made it seem as though the only people who needed to take the vaccine were the elderly and their caretakers, which is emphatically untrue. What he likely meant, though didn't communicate, was that only people with prior natural infection need not take it. But even that is misinformation, though it might be his professional opinion. If it is his professional opinion, it verges on malpractice, because it was indeterminate at the time to what degree a natural infection destroyed immune memory cells. We have later found evidence that severe covid-19 cases do in fact disrupt immune memory [1]. This is a thing he should know to be wary of, as measles famously erases huge swathes of immune memory. This in addition to the systemic effects of huge spikes leading to moderate to severe cases going without proper care as a result of a squeeze on resources... It was a bad take, and everyone reading it should have been told it was a bad take. [1] https://news.uthscsa.edu/immune-memory-less-durable-after-severe-covid-19-study-suggests/ https://news.uthscsa.edu/immune-memory-less-durable-after-se...
    - 4y ago
sytelus 4y ago
People forget about those days. We used to get daily news about % of ICU capacity left. Videos of people on respirators. We didn’t knew what this virus was. How bad things can go? Streets in China getting piled up with bodies in bags. People complaining that US govt is not as effective as Chinese. People worried about covid deniers, mask opposition. Entire Twitter population updating their profiles with masks. Fear of long covid. News of unknown impact on kids. No one knew how things would turn out. Most believed that that wasn’t time for debate because there was simply no data. People can argue either way and there will be always groups latching on other side. We needed unity and caution until we figured things out. That’s how efforts against covid misinformation started. In retrospect, it looks like suppression of freedom of speech. It wasn’t until vaccines came out and multiple dosages freed us. Now we look back and worry about that suppression of speech issue and packaging it up politically. I am not on either side but I think based on data we had, lack of vaccines and possibly safety issue for entire populations, people had to do what they had to. I don’t think their actions were politically motivated or ill-intended.
gumboshoes 4y ago
Moderating is difficult. Film at 11.

84 points by progrus 4y ago

> 39. What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter and other social media platforms—not to mention the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, about lockdowns, about the true risks of Covid in kids, and much more? I guess we will never find out, which is unfortunate.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bool3max 4y ago
That scenario could never have happened, by design.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

The thing is there are many people who are fine with this because their preferred party is in charge. They do not care if these obviously dystopian abuses of power are wrong because they are ideologically aligned with those in power (at least, they think they are)

monsecchris 4y ago
They want to police what you say and to whom and call you a fascist simultaneously.
nemesis1637 4y ago
This applies to everyone though (not just the right or left). Both the Trump and Biden administration are named here.
- sfusato 4y ago
  Both parties did it. The idea of choice, of voting in itself, is but an illusion anyway.

AustinDev 4y ago

People flag these so fast, they’ll never make the front page.

progrus 4y ago
Nice that the front-page reactionary sniping of Elon Musk’s mercurial decisions has died down, but yeah. Disappointing, willful ignorance. The cold fact that 80% of Twitter was not essential (and that this must also apply to the federal government and other big/corrupt institutions) is not going away, though.
bbbbb5 4y ago
This is the first one that's actually a bad look for Twitter, the rest were a lot of noise over nothing.

motohagiography 4y ago

Imo, this is a critical discussion to have. While I have strong opinions that are confirmed by this cut of the story, is there a take that is thoughtful that is better than "it was an emergency, misleading people to ultimately do the right thing was the ethical decision," or is that truly the best rationale for how the platforms and governments handled the pandemic response? It's a critical discussion because right now, it really, really looks like a cadre of people actuated by having power over others (instead of the freedom to build and create by themselves) have co-ordinated through NGOs, operating on compromised institutions and platforms, to deceive the western world into removing all limits to state intervention and protections for basic human dignity and liberty, and to leverage the crisis to ensconce new powers. The people of the world need to be shown how we were not deceived and betrayed. I don't know how long the window of opportunity for truth and reconciliation will last.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

Kids need routine and social interaction with their peers and teachers. Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. Like immeasurably bad idea. They never closed down schools (except for universities) in Sweden for this reason. They also never forced masks or curfews. The main thing that they did was to limit inside capacity to 50 people max for restaurants and other avenues. There were groups of people who would protest that the government should be enforcing masks, basically full reverse of what people were protesting in all other places around the world.

bsder 4y ago
Sweden has about 2x the number of per capita deaths from Covid vs any of Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. You can't simply blow that off and not acknowledge that you are making a tradeoff. My anecdata shows that the children who fared well through all of this didn't need group interaction at all. A small number of peers (<4) and a teacher or two were completely sufficient for children up through almost teenage years. In fact, those students are WAY ahead of where there would be even before Covid. Small groupings like that for children would have been completely fine through Covid. The problem in the US is that we, as a society, lack the collective will to fund something so obviously, ridiculously beneficial like that for an extended amount of time.
shortcake27 4y ago
> Keeping them cooked up at home for years is a lot more damaging than a cold. I wonder if the debate was stifled because of reductionist comments like this. COVID-19 is far more serious than a cold. How can we be expected to have a real discussion about this topic when you either don’t understand or choose not to understand the difference between a cold and COVID?
- tmn 4y ago
  This may be true, but doesn’t match many peoples direct experience. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, don’t be surprised when people think it’s a duck

goldenchrome 4y ago

Strange how this kind of discussion is now considered “okay” to have. I was attacked for trying to have it in 2020, 2021, and most of 2022 but it seems like 2023 is the year that people will wake up. Too little, too late. The media, especially those that seem to have people’s trust like the NYT played a disgusting role in normalizing the marginalization of the unvaccinated.

kennyloginz 4y ago
Sounds like you are being attacked often? Maybe inspect your vocabulary , it might be stuck in 2002…. Wake up sheeple.
sieabahlpark 4y ago
[dead]
MrMan 4y ago
the unvaccinated should absolutely be marginalized. also the idea that we constantly need to "wake up" to some previously hidden reality is a stupid way to look at the world.
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  What other minorities do you believe should be marginalized?
- stuxnet 4y ago
  Separating people into groups of those that should be marginalized and not is a stupid way to look at the world.
- mathwords 4y ago
  Nope. Nurses and Doctors who knew they had Covid should never have been forced to get vaccinated. Very simple. Not difficult to understand.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Why? We know that being vaccinated doesn’t keep you from catching or transmitting COVID.

hintymad 4y ago

Is it true that Twitter's Covid Misinformation Policy was that whatever inconsistent with CDC or any public health institution would be considered as misinformation? If so, Twitter was essentially saying that we should not question the government? If so, wouldn't it be dangerous, even to the left? Again, let's look at the history: The soviet said that Lysenco was right, no? China said the yield of rice field could be 100 times higher than normal, no? It was the western democratic governments who pushed eugenics, no? It was the US government who tried to cover up multiple environmental disasters, no? When Catholic church was in power, The Inquisition was a thing, no? It was Pol Pot who told the country that the weak deserved to die, no? Since when our government has become so righteous and correct that any challenge to its message is misinformation? Heck, since when the humanity gets closer to truth by trusting a single institution? I thought forbidding people from challenging a single institution is called Indoctrination. Case in point: why is quoting CDC's own inconsistency a sin? https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607387725065232384?s=20 https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607387725065232384?s=...

bestcoder69 4y ago
The old Twitter agrees with you. Rather than give in to every request, they considered them on a case by case basis, looks like (TFA): https://mobile.twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607384015731888135 https://mobile.twitter.com/davidzweig/status/160738401573188...

ledauphin 4y ago

this is all frustrating and disappointing, but at some point would it also be appropriate to question why we seem to have collectively bought into the idea that the best (or only) way to share information with others is to have major media report on it or to share it on some controlled platform? Why isn't the best response to these sorts of embarrassing shenanigans to start emailing or texting links to friends, in the expectation that they'll do the same? I'm tired of the assumption that our fundamentally human networks are things we cannot maintain by our own efforts.

abracadaniel 4y ago
People have been inside the walled garden of Twitter for so long, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be outside it. Ultimately, it’s just an app, and the goings on of any app, forum, etc shouldn’t have any major significance on our lives.
shortcake27 4y ago
I received plenty of messages and emails from mostly older relatives spreading COVID misinformation (gargling warm salt water etc). I’m not entirely sure letting people spread whatever misinformation they want without any fact-checking is any better than what we had on Twitter.
- teucris 4y ago
  Hearsay and gossip will happen no matter what. The issue here is amplification - an email from a relative can target a few dozen people at most; a tweet can target a few billion.
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  These people spreading this type of macro info in my circles are the ones who never get sick.

someNameIG 4y ago

> This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607388794772242437?s=20 https://twitter.com/davidzweig/status/1607388794772242437?s=... Because it was misleading, putting it in quotes implies that it wasn't > Editor’s Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions of this article are subject to criticisms that are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow once all parties have been given an opportunity to respond in full. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10928-z

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

helf 4y ago

Regardless of what happened when, by whom, and where, it was fucking hilarious watching the world lose it’s shit because you couldn’t go to the bar randomly or eat out. Lost. Their. Minds. wife and I happily read books and watched movies and played board games and went on hikes like usual

mitch3x3 4y ago
Key words there being “like usual”.
- saurik 4y ago
  Honestly, as soon as I saw "wife" I rolled my eyes... there were four or five months (from the end of 2020 to the beginning of 2021) where I only had a scant handful of in-person interactions with humans I "knew", and like, they weren't even friends... I just mean "people whose name I know and would notice if they were replaced by an NPC"; one of them was "the guy who lives in the park near my house". I have never been so lonely, and I am the kind of person who normally "hates people" a bit :(.
  - TurkishPoptart 4y ago
    My mother is still affected from this psyop. She doesn't even go out anymore. I try to encourage her to find a therapist but my words fall on deaf ears.
Justin_K 4y ago
Funny because I wanted to go to the beach like usual but it was closed and the police were issuing $500 dollar tickets if you stepped on the sand.
collyw 4y ago
We couldn't leave our apartments except to go to the supermarket for over two months. Followed by another 6 months of absurd rules in winter 2020/2021. You could eat in a restaurant but only until 3pm. You couldn't go outside after 10pm. You needed a mask to walk down the street but could take it off to eat. The fact that everyone just complied with such ridiculousness without question is why I lost my mind.

joeyguerra 4y ago

I'm still shocked that people are using Twitter as a reliable source for anything. WTF.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

So this isn't an official "Twitter files" release, just a random crazy person jumping on the bandwagon? It's hard to tell either way, to be honest.

collyw 4y ago

It can't be called a debate, when one side wasn't allowed to speak.

voidwtf 4y ago
It can’t be called a debate, when one side refuses to debate in good faith.
- collyw 4y ago
  Utterly meaningless statement

capevace 4y ago

The thing is, these tweets are misinformation, presenting cherry-picked studies (which even have editors notes about validity attached) out of context and ignoring ones that don’t fit the narrative. To me, labelling them as misleading is exactly the right call and in my experience this has also happened to Tweets where pro-vaccine data was cherry picked. I feel like people from both sides simply do not follow each other, and so they only see flagging of “their own” people and assume that they are targeted.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TurkishPoptart 4y ago
Sorry, but no. If a Harvard epidemiologist comes to another conclusion that the White House finds inconvenient for its mass-vaxxing campaign, that is not "misinformation". That is called research.
- archontes 4y ago
  No again. That Harvard epidemiologist speaking in an offhand way made it seem as though the only people who needed to take the vaccine were the elderly and their caretakers, which is emphatically untrue. What he likely meant, though didn't communicate, was that only people with prior natural infection need not take it. But even that is misinformation, though it might be his professional opinion. If it is his professional opinion, it verges on malpractice, because it was indeterminate at the time to what degree a natural infection destroyed immune memory cells. We have later found evidence that severe covid-19 cases do in fact disrupt immune memory [1]. This is a thing he should know to be wary of, as measles famously erases huge swathes of immune memory. This in addition to the systemic effects of huge spikes leading to moderate to severe cases going without proper care as a result of a squeeze on resources... It was a bad take, and everyone reading it should have been told it was a bad take. [1] https://news.uthscsa.edu/immune-memory-less-durable-after-severe-covid-19-study-suggests/ https://news.uthscsa.edu/immune-memory-less-durable-after-se...
  - 4y ago

sytelus 4y ago

People forget about those days. We used to get daily news about % of ICU capacity left. Videos of people on respirators. We didn’t knew what this virus was. How bad things can go? Streets in China getting piled up with bodies in bags. People complaining that US govt is not as effective as Chinese. People worried about covid deniers, mask opposition. Entire Twitter population updating their profiles with masks. Fear of long covid. News of unknown impact on kids. No one knew how things would turn out. Most believed that that wasn’t time for debate because there was simply no data. People can argue either way and there will be always groups latching on other side. We needed unity and caution until we figured things out. That’s how efforts against covid misinformation started. In retrospect, it looks like suppression of freedom of speech. It wasn’t until vaccines came out and multiple dosages freed us. Now we look back and worry about that suppression of speech issue and packaging it up politically. I am not on either side but I think based on data we had, lack of vaccines and possibly safety issue for entire populations, people had to do what they had to. I don’t think their actions were politically motivated or ill-intended.

gumboshoes 4y ago

Moderating is difficult. Film at 11.