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I don't really care about a private company making reasonable decisions and learning about their internal debate process. Up until Musk, I was impressed to see

I don't really care about a private company making reasonable decisions and learning about their internal debate process. Up until Musk, I was impressed to see Twitter grow a backbone and not fall to the cowardly cries of "free speech." What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something?

dannyw 4y ago
There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine. Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities. This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.
- dboreham 4y ago
  > a question for another time Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?
- peter422 4y ago
  I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.
  - transcriptase 4y ago
    I think the issue is anything except “the vaccine is perfectly safe”, despite being demonstrably false, was until recently considered “misinformation” and a censorable/bannable offence. Now if you want to make the argument that banning facts for the greater good is acceptable that’s one thing, but nobody seems willing to admit they’re in favour of that in so few words.
  - lmm 4y ago
    You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. I think the vaccine probably saved more lives than it cost, but I'm a lot less confident because of how much bad-faith covering-up of any counterveilling evidence there's been. (Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)
    - polygamous_bat 4y ago
      > You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.
      - lmm 4y ago
        It's not like there's a replication crisis on, or we've recently seen promising drugs withdrawn because a couple of misclassified deaths in the RCT meant heart problems went unnoticed...
  - at_a_remove 4y ago
    This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.
- laserdancepony 4y ago
  And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?
- wmf 4y ago
  Side effects you say? Obligatory reminder that millions (maybe over 10 million) of anti-vaxers have long covid.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    That sounds like you're part of the gaslighting. What, no non-anti-vaxxers got long Covid? Don't kid yourself. (And even if you do, don't try to kid us.)
- Yhippa 4y ago
  > but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine Curious, did this happen to you?
  - shingle 4y ago
    It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919
icelancer 4y ago
> cowardly cries of "free speech." What a world we live in where this is a reasonable statement to many.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  If the only people crying for free speech are only the people who gets rotten tomato-ed every time they get up on a podium, it makes a lot of sense.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something? You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0]. I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming. [0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-are-lice-they-cause-typhus https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...

dannyw 4y ago

There are very real people who have been harmed by side effects from the vaccine. Whether the virus itself would've been more deadly is a question for another time, but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine, and you were silenced on social media, sometimes invisibly like you're being gaslit, and so were the doctors and researchers, it's easier to understand the strong emotional reactions to unnamed large entities colluding with other large consumer facing entities. This also creates a tendency to migrate to communities that share your point of view, creating an echo chamber.

dboreham 4y ago
> a question for another time Why? Surely this is the primary question to ask ahead of time?
peter422 4y ago
I’m sure you mean well, but one of the few things we know for sure is that the virus is way, way, way more deadly than vaccine. If you are going to overlook all those RCTs run all throughout the world with different types of vaccines and huge populations of people, then you really should reflect on your own analysis of the data. I'm not saying the vaccine is perfectly safe, as few things are, but it's obviously, provably, much better to get the vaccine before you get COVID if you care about reducing the overall risks to your health.
- transcriptase 4y ago
  I think the issue is anything except “the vaccine is perfectly safe”, despite being demonstrably false, was until recently considered “misinformation” and a censorable/bannable offence. Now if you want to make the argument that banning facts for the greater good is acceptable that’s one thing, but nobody seems willing to admit they’re in favour of that in so few words.
- lmm 4y ago
  You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. I think the vaccine probably saved more lives than it cost, but I'm a lot less confident because of how much bad-faith covering-up of any counterveilling evidence there's been. (Were vaccine RCTs pre-registered? If they were, how many pre-registered trials were mysteriously stopped or abandoned?)
  - polygamous_bat 4y ago
    > You can prove anything you want with RCTs if you do enough selective reporting. Once you get to claims like these it's really difficult to prove anything anymore. At that point we may as well throw out hands up and start huffing bleach.
    - lmm 4y ago
      It's not like there's a replication crisis on, or we've recently seen promising drugs withdrawn because a couple of misclassified deaths in the RCT meant heart problems went unnoticed...
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  This may even be true, but you're missing a key point. There's a phrase and I think we're going to see a lot more of it surface in the discussions around this in the future. The phrase is "informed consent." Informed consent means knowing the risks. It's why we have little packets of paper with side effects, why that guy on the radio rattles off "may cause ..." at the end of commercials for medicine. Being good for us on a statistical level does not in any way free the people who push whatever on us from the burden of informed consent.
laserdancepony 4y ago
And the causality of the myocarditis has been attributed to the vaccine by whom? WebMD?
wmf 4y ago
Side effects you say? Obligatory reminder that millions (maybe over 10 million) of anti-vaxers have long covid.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  That sounds like you're part of the gaslighting. What, no non-anti-vaxxers got long Covid? Don't kid yourself. (And even if you do, don't try to kid us.)
Yhippa 4y ago
> but if your loved ones were unlucky enough to get myocarditis from the vaccine Curious, did this happen to you?
- shingle 4y ago
  It happened to me, and when it did I was met with outright denial of its most likely cause (Pfizer shot a week before) and thinly veiled accusations of being anti-vax for suggesting that. See my previous comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33599919

icelancer 4y ago

> cowardly cries of "free speech." What a world we live in where this is a reasonable statement to many.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
If the only people crying for free speech are only the people who gets rotten tomato-ed every time they get up on a podium, it makes a lot of sense.

_gabe_ 4y ago

> What I don't follow is the jump some people make from reasonable moderation like this, to fascism. They see internet platform moderation as a gateway drug to a physically oppressive government. I don't see how this jump is possible. Am I missing something? You should watch the movie, The Pianist. It put the rise of Hitler's regime in a completely different perspective for me. Nobody in Germany at the time thought that the small things mattered too much. They all slowly shifted with the times until one day they were actively killing millions of innocent people. It's also interesting that a lot of Hitler's propaganda involved blaming the Jews for common health problems[0]. I'm not saying that any of this is comparable to Covid, because it's not. But your comment seems naive. There is no jump from a free government to a "physically oppressive government". There's a series of small compromises made by the people to give the government more power that ends up culminating into something nobody ever saw coming. [0]: https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-are-lice-they-cause-typhus https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/propaganda-poster-jews-a...