I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.
They could do a chronological timeline. They could choose to not do any editorializing. They chose instead to get into the content promotion business.
Their active choices lead to this result
There are countries where Facebook is the entire internet. Maybe they tried to make it happen and maybe they didn't - but however it happened, they are effectively the Ministry of Information now for that country. They probably shouldn't be. Everyone agrees on this, even them. But like the child-kings of history, it is still the situation. Avoiding the job is simply doing it badly.
Google, Twitter, others, are in a similar boat. They find themselves effectively running branches of government now, not of countries but of the world. Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody knows how to do it correctly, least of all people that mainly want to make money on a website.
The censorship is not because they're evil. It's because one of their subjects approached them saying their stuff is getting people killed and they were like, "Aaugh, I'm just a web site! I don't deal in such matters! Get it off me!" Because they think they're a web site. A political philosopher or an expert statesman would weigh philosophically how to maximize freedom and minimize harm while understanding that freedom gets some people killed, with an eye towards avoiding atrocities. Facebook isn't thinking about the historical risks associated with censorship because they still think they're a web site.
They don't know how to drive this thing - nobody does - and they are going to drive it straight into wars and catastrophes and atrocities. At least, that's the risk. There are countries whose actual ministry of information communicates matters of public safety primarily through Facebook. Or hosted on Amazon. Or whatever. And that company is going to make some minor change intended to protect transgender people in Wisconsin or something, and accidentally massively empower an oppressive government in Africa. That's the problem space. You think you're miserable because people in California are currently effectively setting policy in Arizona? Imagine you live in India. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and this might be one of the biggest crowns ever made. It would be nice if we could find a way to destroy the ring. I definitely don't see another serious answer. In the mean time, the situation is what it is. The rest of us are idiots if we sit around criticizing them for not being perfect. We should be figuring out how to help!
Regarding perspective mismatches because Facebook "still thinks it's a web site", thought-experiment nitpick: do Facebook really believe this, or is their problem a) that they are expected to behave as a website by the very same governments they're (optimistically) trying to support, and/or b) that they're afraid to stand up and behave how everyone's pining for them to do because doing so would "rock the boat", so to speak, and trip all over large swathes of plausible deniability that are still comfortably nestled in shadows and grey areas?
It's hard to blame them. The head shift is difficult. They didn't ask for this responsibility, and finding themselves at the wheel of something enormous they aren't qualified to pilot, shrink from the task. Any sane person would. I only write about it here in the hopes that we all can start taking these problems seriously. How should a global information community work?
It's not literally true that Facebook is a branch of government, either. It's just the closest analogy I have, and it's closer to the truth than where we started. Really, they are something new. Something nobody knows how to manage correctly yet. I am not the only one to understand that the stakes are high, which is why people keep passing the buck. Facebook wants the government to tell them what's expected and allowed, and the government refuses -- or acts in small-minded expedient ways, too. They don't know either.
This disinformation and censorship question is one of a hundred with deep philosophical and legal elements. What Facebook thinks about the value of free speech, how they decide disputes should be adjudicated, what they do in small cases of deception and fraud and political manipulation, actually matters a lot more to us practically than what our own laws say. This is a shame, because our legal thinkers actually have a lot more experience with being wise and just when it comes to such matters. Facebook has the power to set policy in a way no one ever has before, and they do not seem to be thinking in terms of implications for humanity. They seem to be thinking in terms of how to get people off their back because this sort of thing isn't what they do. Or perhaps more charitably, because the people coming to them with problems are so terrifyingly powerful and the problems are so terrifyingly high stakes. There have been complaints about minor changes in advertising policy throwing elections in far-flung countries. Would you want that responsibility?
This is why I say we need a Thomas Jefferson. What I really mean is, we need a political philosopher who sees the moment and its dangers and opportunities clearly, and can try to help us do things fairly and right. I don't know where you'd find one, though.
You're right that it isn't as easy as that -- people's expectations play into it. Governments', yes, and people's too. While I say Twitter should be creating a legislature and courts and a constitution, we'd all think they were insanely arrogant to do so. Even though now that I say it, you can probably see that it probably is getting to the point where that's needed. But they aren't ready for it and we aren't either -- inertia and expectations. A Thomas Paine could fix that. I don't know where you'd find one of those, either.
We are at a time of great change in history. The information revolution is in full swing. The internet had been a tool for research, then a toy for nerds, then a novel technology full of opportunity. Now it is changing the way society organizes itself. Some people think these digital communities will supplant nations, or exist alongside as something equally important. I don't know. I suspect the change is as profound as the one that ended the middle ages, when we transitioned from the church as a primary social organization to nations. But living in the middle of history, who's to say?
It took us a while to figure out how to run nations, too. We really shouldn't expect too much for a generation or two at least.
My main hope in writing this is to encourage people to take the problem seriously, and think of it as belonging to the space of political philosophy -- which it does. If you work for one of these organizations, learn something about the history and philosophy of government -- why we have laws, why we have courts, why we have elections, why we have bills of rights. You are running a community bigger and more diverse than any nation, with totally novel powers and limitations, totally novel ways to be unfair and evil that you need to avoid, and you do not have the resources to do it right, nor can anyone even tell you what doing it right even looks like. It has to be invented. Get help -- from history, from scholars, from anywhere you find it. If you find Thomas Jefferson living under a rock, hire him immediately.
The rest of us are living under the feet of a giant struggling while trying to carry far too many boulders. We yelp when he steps on us -- and we should -- but we should also be trying to figure out if we can build something that will help carry that load. The boulders are there regardless and the guy is hardly up to the task. Running massive communities fairly is hard and complicated. We need widsom and principled understanding. Attacking the overwhelmed monarch is not how you get peace and justice -- you get that by finding him advisors and engineers that can help him build it.
The situation as it stands is untenable. We need a better way. But until we have one, the situation is what it is and we should help the poor guy stuck managing it.
Fortunately for us, Facebook believes in its own political neutrality and very much wants us to believe it too. It is a conceit and a fiction -- I think we all know that -- nothing in the world is ever actually politically neutral, and the behavior of these entities is, at times, over the line of how close to perfection you might expect someone making a reasonable and principled effort to get. (An understatement, I know. I still choose to interpret what is happening as a sign of distress, not malice, on Facebook's part.) But we should nonetheless take their conceit at face value, hold them to that standard, expect them to try hard to get close to that ideal, and even assume they were trying and made a human error when they fall short and help and expect them do better. It is a tremendous gift that they are trying and think it is worth it to try. Even if that effort is not principled and sincere -- even if they're just trying to make others think they're politically neutral -- it's a massive gift. Run with that. Take it for all it's worth. Believe them and help them succeed and tell them that you're willing to believe they mean well if they act, not even perfectly, but reasonably. The alternative -- a world in which they cannot win and might as well not try, in which we have an openly and unapologetically politically non-neutral entity with this much power -- is far worse.
Facebook may have a lot of power, but it is not so much that going to war with half their countrymen is a good idea -- this is true both for them and for society. Perhaps they would be within their rights to do it, but the effect would be very bad for everyone. The predictable result of that scenario -- the establishment of a competing social media option with a competing flavor of censorship -- eliminates the possibility of healthy, democratic discourse. Our traditional media is in this state right now, which is why both sides are so useless. They cannot talk to each other. They can only talk to themselves. They cannot think high-mindedly about what is best for society. They can only talk about how wrong their enemies are. In an echo chamber and a war, everyone goes crazy, no matter how right they were at the beginning or overall. We need to be able to listen to each other, and choosing to fight instead would just hurt everyone. Loud bias on two sides does not moderate towards reason -- it accelerates towards two flavors of insanity.
We need each other. If we fight, all we will do is break the system, and -- as we see in traditional media -- this isn't worth it. As we navigate society-wide issues, it is easy to see that it would be really nice to have an information infrastructure that worked, but alas, in a short-sighted effort to win an election here or an issue there, we broke it. This is unfortunate because a functioning and rational information infrastructure would be a really helpful tool to have when you need to address a bigger problem like a pandemic. Even looking just domestically, the truth is that neither side needs to win half so badly as they need to be able to trust each other, and need the wisdom that they can come up with together. But of course, this information problem is not primarily domestic. It is revolutionary and it is global. We absolutely cannot afford to fight bitterly over stupid, provincial issues while trying to think about the sort of massive political and philosophical problem that is private companies in California pretending they are not running information infrastructure in Burma. Putting that infrastructure in the center of a US-based political war is a horrific idea to contemplate.
We can't go down that road here. Can't. And even if it looks like Facebook is going down it, responding by fighting is going down it with them. We have no choice but to figure out how to get along. We need high minded wisdom, we need the ability to listen to a huge, global community and make sacrifices for each other. We need excellent vision, and we need good ideals, and we need pragmatic political understanding. Affection and trust and good faith and cooperation are too important to sacrifice. We cannot fly apart, we cannot become enemies, we cannot take offense over small things. The only way to get to where we need to be is to insist on expecting everyone to be doing their best to get along and to accept nothing less. Facebook may be politically biased, but I refuse to accept that. To the degree that it is the case, they can do better, and I believe they want to, and I will help.
The cynical attitude may be true, but the deeper truth is that we cannot afford it.
Yes, Facebook has found itself wielding power that it could have never imagined. Nobody is prepared or qualified for that kind of power. That's why it took 700 years from the Magna Carta until the US Constitution to formulate a reasonable contract to limit such power.
Now you have the most dangerous combination of all. The two ingredients which when combined has resulted in horrific atrocities.
The paradox of tyranny 1) The desire to make the world a better place 2) The power and means to actually do so
A glib argument? Sure. But this was the same argument used to censor other political speech. What's good for the goose is good for the gander...
And just last week we have the white house essentially openly confirming state involvement.
Arguably, any entity that submits articles of incorporation to any jurisdiction is an extension of the that jurisdiction.
And in practice, it works out this way. Modern examples: CCP board members on top china tech co's and NSA PRISM integrations with top US tech cos…
Why do you think that?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...
I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet.
The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"
No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow the same rules enforced on everyone else, but that they still agreed with doing it.
I think what we're seeing here is what happens when you lack some sort of free speech libertarian fundamentalism. Facebook don't have to engage in "statecraft", whatever that is, no more than the designers of SMTP did. They could choose not to. They could say "we will shut down accounts when under court order to do so, end of story". Then governments who think a citizen is breaking a law about speech would have to go to court, win, and then the judge would say, here is an order requiring Facebook to shut down the account of this law breaker (which could automatically hide all content they created). All the evolved mechanisms, the checks and balances of the actual state would be in effect.
But Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and like most firms there, has systematically made deals with far-left devils in order to hire them and put them to work, often without really understanding if it's worth the cost. Does Google actually need 144,000 employees for example? It hardly seems more productive than when I started there and it had 10,000. Their "hire first ask questions later" approach inevitably leads to hiring lots of extremists and wingnuts, people who are there primarily to get closer to a nexus of power they can wield for their own political agendas. The constant dramas we see emanating from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco are the inevitable consequence.
Tech firms could fix this problem very quickly if they wanted to: just announce a renewed commitment to freedom of speech, platform principles and passive moderation. Any employee who doesn't like it can leave. Many would, but those companies are so over-staffed they'd barely notice, and the environment for those who remain would be drastically more pleasant.
I see it as a problem that we can iterate “content” faster, identify “audience groups”, run marketing analytics, A/b test “narratives”, all to craft believable, plausible “content” and then mass broadcast it.
We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block.
How does this have anything to do with the First Amendment? How do free speech rules bring the balance of power back to individual human levels of filtering?
Mind you the First Amendment is an American construct. It does nothing for things like genocides in Myanmar, or journalist suppression or hate crimes and the like.
Maybe so, but I just don't trust that the "BS filter" big tech has constructed will block only "BS" and not true things inconvenient to a certain strident brand of west coast morality. The NY Post story from last year certainly wasn't "BS".
I don't think algorithmic BS is anywhere near as big a risk as you think it is, and I think the risk of outright censorship is far larger than you imagine. Big tech should be a common carrier and viewpoint discrimination in moderation should be illegal.
Look, I am not unsympathetic. I have personally gone through the whole cycle - I started from "the antidote to bad speech is more speech, not censorship", To advocating for better tools to handle misinformation.
I would honestly LOVE for the world to work how I thought it did. I worry about the tools we create to clean our "gardens". Yet, without those tools I know most large communities would fail to be governed.
I am largely tired, of these debates on HN where old arguments are rehashed, un-tempered with empirics. Heck, people should be upset that the data that can answer these questions is under NDAs.
Why reddit? That site is a soup of immaturity, did you expect otherwise? On reddit you have people with 5 accounts creating conversations to control narratives and make it look like you have a larger group than you do supporting your case. This is more difficult to do on FB because they do a bit of account validation and other measures.
And your example of a political forum on reddit is a great example of why we don’t want censorship. On reddit admins ban for simply not speaking to the narrative or saying something that is not misinformation yet the admins don’t like. This is literally the same problem we have with FB now. The moral of the story is, stop censoring. It’s ok someone doesn’t say what you think is the truth, I promise the world will keep spinning.
If people are creating 5 accounts to create a narrative, well then thats the job isn’t it? Stopping those 4 fake accounts.
But that would be censorship. So what is your solution for the problem you yourself have described?
Plus, If your first option is to choose a forum where you self select out of dealing with messy problems, then your experience is invalid for guidance on dealing with messy problems - no?
I can’t seem to see anything but a contradiction of your own purposes here.
Perhaps you see how these things are not contradictory>?
I didn't say it wasn't worthy of being heard, I said it's immature and there's zero cost to account creation and therefore you have literal children going to that site and spitting nonsense. Moderating that site is like herding cats.
> If people are creating 5 accounts to create a narrative, well then thats the job isn’t it? Stopping those 4 fake accounts. But that would be censorship.
Yup, banning them would. Did I say ban them? It was used as a reference to immaturity, because immature / crazy people create accounts to make a cohort that does not exist.
> So what is your solution for the problem you yourself have described?
In short, change the way these people are raised. Change what they're being taught in schools that enables this behavior. It's unacceptable to throw online temper tantrums when you don't get your way. It's also unacceptable to attempt to force those into your beliefs. So start by teaching children that instead of raising the entitled society that we have today.
For those, seemingly like yourself, who thinks the world will end if a group of people start believing the world is flat, I'd say learn to ignore people.
> Plus, If your first option is to choose a forum where you self select out of dealing with messy problems, then your experience is invalid for guidance on dealing with messy problems - no? I can’t seem to see anything but a contradiction of your own purposes here. Perhaps you see how these things are not contradictory>?
How about let me speak for myself and quit carrying the conversation forward using assumptions from yourself?
How does this work? Specifically the faster than a normal humans BS filter.
In my simple way of putting it - creating a website, or creating a post, and then having it disseminated is dirt cheap today. You can get an article on a news website, having it referenced by a youtube channel, have that sent to a twitter feed.
That alone is sufficient to discuss an increase in the volume of content being created - however, that volume also gets disseminated as fast as it is created, which is what accounts for the speed.
This is also without looking into the fact that people tend to use superficial traits to assess whether information is credible online.
"Yet, research shows that people rarely engage in effortful information evaluation tasks, opting instead to base decisions on factors like web site design and navigability. Fogg et al. (2003), ... They argue that because web users do not often spend a long time at any given site, they likely develop quick strategies for assessing credibility."
From: Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics, (Miriam J.MetzgerAndrew J.Flanagin)
So a good looking website, with content that purports to be endorsed by known authorities, and hits the right cultural blind spots for its audience will get past their filters.
Which is getting closer to the problem as I see it - the tech infrastructure has out scaled the default biological tools we are born with.
I'm not sure, but it might have once been that way, before I used it.
There is a string you can append to the URL (?sk=h_chr) to get a chrono view, but it doesn't seem to work well; for instance it doesn't go very far back and it's not clear to me that it's complete.
If my friends were posting lots of "spam, porn, and shock videos", I think I'd rather know it, whether or not I could tolerate it.
How do you get from "people may not be reliable witnesses of their own preferences" to "I know their preferences better"?
The first doesn't sound that improbable, but the second is a non sequitur, even if a popular one. If it's easy to lie to yourself, doesn't that suggest it's even easier to lie to yourself about what others think?
My previous comment suggested multiple reasons why people might not choose the chronological ordering even if they prefer it. Most people surely aren't aware of the trick, and using it limits the number of posts available. It's not clear that it shows all of them within a range either. I myself only use it about half the time, not because I don't want things in order, but because I have the sense that I'm missing something either way.
>I think people would find Facebook less engaging and fun to use if it didn’t tune what it showed them based on their perceived interests and their activity
I think an important point is that "engaging" is not at all the same thing as "fun to use". Meth is engaging, but in the long run, not that fun. The conflation of the two is useful for apologetics but not necessarily convincing to a lay individual.
>it wouldn’t be ideal to be put in a position to have to remove family members because their posts are boring
"Boring" sounds like a different sort of thing from "spam, porn, and shock videos". That kind of post does sound more plausible.
But Facebook provides controls to filter people if you want, and there is no reason that if they stopped choosing what you see that the user's controls would have to go away.
What is the rational argument that Facebook knows which family members of nearly 3 billion people are "boring", though?
I commend you for crystallizing the argument which I think is indeed representative of what the industry believes about itself and many others reject.
Virtually everything in computing, or the real world, for that matter, is solving some sort of optimization problem, explicitly or implicitly.
I'd paraphrase your comments as, Facebook solves an optimization problem, they make billions of dollars doing it, so it is objectively the optimum.
There are two objections I think that capture most of the opposition.
- Real optimizers can't promise a true optimum every time; they sometimes converge on a local optimum. This local optimum may not be within any particular distance from the global optimum either.
- "Fewer things you just scroll past" is not necessarily what the *user* wants to optimize. It is not in fact what I want to optimize. I'm not sure if I made it clear, but the *existence* of things that I don't actually read is important contextual information. So is the relative order, the timing, the source...
I think non technical people sometimes get angry because they intuitively feel that people claim objectivity without justification, but I think it's possible to provide a bloodless, abstract, logical, and specific critique more suitable for a software engineer's mentality, and that's what I tried to do above.
[One other general issue I thought of - optimizers can have the wrong constraints; everything in life normally has rules and limits on how you can pursue a goal. The ends don't necessarily justify the means. So this is another thing that is not covered by simply saying the optimizer produces the optimum]
[This topic makes me think of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_Folded_Hands]
A lot of people say they want this... but so far every study has come back with the result of “even the people who say they want it, consistently rank their experience as lower-quality when they get it”
It's faulty logic to say that therefore I must not want a chronological view, just because I don't like a particular implementation.
Nobody wants censoring that is not in your control.
Unfriending is easy. You see what you want to see.
Who wants to not know the sort of group they belong to?
Censoring things that are not acceptable at all is different from censoring (or reordering) things that are determined to be sub-optimal for a particular person to see, that come from members of the group who are not going to be banned.
Which is really the topic here?
As I contemplate the subject, I think I draw the line between a set of human-understandable rules, enforced by some combination of human and machine partners, versus a set of goals that drive a ruthless optimization process that is opaque.
So no, it's not that all "curation" is bad.
Actually, once you start to probe, I think you'll find people disagree in degrees, even though most people consider their lines in the sand clear and commonsensical.
Yes. The US has managed fine with exactly such a dichotomy. The reason it’s easy to draw a bright line at obscenity/porn is because you know it when you see it.
> What about hate speech? Should that go there?
No, but speech inciting violence is pretty easy to recognize. Again, First Amendment jurisprudence has developed clear rules for this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/09/10/49...
In practice, the line exists, whether or not it's clear to you, it is clear to Facebook, because they already (and always will) act differently depending on their judgment of which side something falls on.
There are things that are totally outside the pale, and then there is the practice of curating peoples' feeds amongst the stuff that is allowed.
Some people specifically don't like the second thing, even if it would lead to some metric declining.
It is a difference in kind, not degree.
You can have an arbitrary number of rules, enforced by human and machine, for acceptable behavior in a forum. I think that's basically the case on HN or reddit.
But if you have an optimizer that filters and reorders things on top of that, then any particular item that is moved or removed is not against any rule. And nobody can really say why, even if they are informed of what happened.
The latter thing is what many people, including me, think is terrible, and the distinction is not fuzzy even if you can call it all "censorship" or "curation".
Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
No, but many (most?) people are. So many of "those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant" may well have gotten much of their hesitancy from people who are on Facebook and got much of it from there.
Then again, among this crowd here... I think most people I know are. You?
I’d say the side effects are real and they should be given adequate rest to recover.
Actually visit the areas with hesitancy, then come back and see if you say the same. I know some 100 people that are hesitant. Not a one of them are on FB, nor listen to anything FOX puts out. It's gov mistrust fueling it. Not Tucker Carlson. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard lately.
When you join you know what you signed up for, you don't get the right to fuck over your unit because you are a dumb ass, too bad so sad.
But being on the fence/ skeptical and seeing disinformation that aligns with your fears does move someone from the hesitant to resident category
Tuskegee experiment cast a very long shadow and contributes a significant reason for the racial divide in vaccination rates for covid. No research needed, the bias is built into cultural memory.
One method a Black pastor and I came up with for our county and surrounding ones was to bring the parishioners to a county vax clinic with white folks also present, and let them point in the pan of pre-drawn needles for which one they wanted, so they didn’t have to fear they were getting a “Black” vaccine
Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
So if this is true then there should be no testing period right? We should know out the gate if a vaccine is safe or not right? Clearly this is incorrect.
If you like testing vaccines, join the military. Then let’s see after you’re injected with various chemicals and get a 100% disability from it if you feel the same way and attempt to force others into your line of thought.
The issue isn't people that didn't want early untested vaccines, it's people that ignore the test results to continue to not want them.
Hopefully full FDA approval helps, as the process gets through the bureaucracy.
From the FAQ on the Pfizer vax:
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine..."
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA-approved or cleared product. FDA may issue an EUA when certain criteria are met, which includes that there are no adequate, approved, available alternatives. In addition, the FDA decision is based on the totality of scientific evidence available showing that the product may be effective to prevent COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product...."
Not to mention this trial period along with vaccine development was accelerated.
Also, from actual mouths of those hesitant, the reason is mostly gov mistrust. Which is yet again another problem of this divide dems have been building.
But the testing is done on some. You can go read the results, or have an expert read them for you. For example: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Isn't that the better option anyway, if you don't trust the government?
/me reviews history of Fauci speaking…
Nope.
When approval gets completed and the left quits trying to force the vaccine on people and implying they are too stupid to understand why they need it, when they quit trying to censor information they don't like (what do you think the #1 cause of gov mistrust is these days? how do I know the paper you posted isn't gov propaganda? you see how deep and dangerous censorship is?) maybe you’ll get more traction.
Further what you’re implying with these types of statements is that science never makes a mistake. We both know that’s not true don’t we? So while in aggregate the risk to an individual is limited, individually it’s their life and the only one they get. Let them make their own decisions. With delta now we can’t get herd immunity anyways.
And while we’re here, how many people do you know that have had COVID? Also stop telling people they need an expert to explain it to them.
> Also stop telling people they need an expert to explain it to them.
I said to read it yourself or get an expert, the latter meaning one you choose.
I didn't say anything about Fauci, and I didn't say you need an expert.
> how do I know the paper you posted isn't gov propaganda?
If that's the worry why does FDA approval matter?? this doesn't make any sense.
> Further what you’re implying with these types of statements is that science never makes a mistake.
No I'm not. I'm just saying that the vaccine is quite tested at this point, comparable to other vaccines.
And the rest of what you said about trying to convince people isn't related to what I said.
Great! Don't tell someone to get an expert unless you want them to not listen to you. OK?
> I didn't say anything about Fauci, and I didn't say you need an expert.
I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
> If that's the worry why does FDA approval matter?? this doesn't make any sense.
Because that's why some people are hesitant, lack of approval. Others like myself won't believe pretty much anything put out by the left.
> And the rest of what you said about trying to convince people isn't related to what I said.
It 100% is, you're just avoiding it because it's difficult. Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are. It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
Does the 'or' not make sense here? If you don't feel qualified, you can get anyone you trust that is. If you do feel qualified, then go read it yourself.
> I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
> Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are.
It's impossible to downvote replies to your own comments.
> It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
OK so I'll try again. If you want someone to listen to anything you have to say, do not start off implying they need someone to interpret information for them. Fix your language or not, I don't really care anymore.
> In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
Famous mechanic? Just curious, can you list any famous mechanics that anybody would know? Anyways, since this one is too difficult for you (see how offensive that is?) I'll explain more. Last year how many times did these people step on their toes when speaking to the public? That mask vs no mask thing early on in the pandemic. What became clear is that these "experts" will say whatever is needed to get people to do what they want. Be it get vaccinated or stay indoors. They lied to attempt to control people, and destroyed all the trust they had on the way.
> This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
It is tested in that we've stuck in in arms and most people don't die. Please explain to me in excruciatingly great detail what will happen to our bodies as a result of this shot in 5 years. When you can answer that question, then it's tested
Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (or other forms of permanent damage short of death) from diseases for which vaccines exist produces net positive impacts on the tax rolls/life insurance balance sheet/quality of life.
I guess "produce profit and avoid unnecessary misery and harm" is a political purpose, but I don't understand how anyone could speak derisively about it.
Before last year, I would have said that the clear and obvious harms of polio were the reason so many people got vaccinated that polio is basically eradicated. But since the start of COVID, over 10 million humans have died miserable deaths from COVID, yet so many people reject the vaccine.
There's an extremely grave threat, but there's also an easy way to gain near complete invincibility to that threat, but tens of millions of people in just the US are refusing invincibility to COVID. 99.2% of US COVID deaths now are among the unvaccinated [0]! 99.2%!!! Clearly there's something going on to make so many people make such an irrational choice, and that's worth studying, as the benefit of getting a few more people to embrace invulnerability is worth so much more than the cost of funding some research and outreach.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new...
And what's more, that's not even the impressive part of the curve in terms of magnitude. Polio was once so commonplace that the idea of being anti-vax would have been completely absurd to everyone just some 40/50 years ago, when you had someone crippled by childhood paralysis (of which Polio is the most common cause) living in basically every city block. And even in the White House, from 1933 to 1945.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
Doesn’t even pay well - like at all. Dunno why you got downvoted so much.
For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.
The real issue with Facebook is the editorial decisions they make about promoting some content over others. It’s totally optional and is also a powerful form of censorship. A link that shows up in no one’s “algorithmic timeline” is worthless, even if it is not actually removed from the platform.
The essential lie is that the algorithm is neutral. It’s not; it is intentionally biased to favor Facebook’s goals: increase ad inventory and the data used to target ads.