Recall how various studies on covid lethality, vaccination and masks were wildly different. The Israel study is a quick one. This is exactly what happened when influenza was new in the 1920's.
Yet the "experts" made it sound like everyone is going to die if you are not wearing a mask 24/7 and isolating. This is what "do no harm" ideology becomes - causing mass harm to everyone to potentially protect a few.
I think the current implementation of Twitter, with its short messages, is especially bad at nuance, which is pretty critical for working the actual truth.
But, ignoring the current state, I wonder how the truth sorting system could be implemented. It would fundamentally have to ignore emotion and tribalism, so voting is out. It would have to be evidence based, so the concept of a "trusted" sources would probably be required, which seems like a circular requirement.
> Or, at least, present both sides
Maybe the bubbles could be popped by allowing "counter tweets", which could be presented along with the original, one for each "combating" perspective. How would the counter tweets be crafted though? Surely not one person. Maybe a mix of tweets? How are those tweets selected? What happens when the two "agreed upon" perspective are actually incorrect, and a third, nuanced, point is the actual truth?
None of the articles on HN have much of good faith discussion. I just see it as “progressives are pissed because their platform of power is being seized”. A lot of that relied on platform censorship on places like Twitter.
Just now, the WhiteHouse account is being fact checked. That doesn’t sit well with progressives.
And the WH deleted some of those tweets after being fact checked.
White House Deletes Misleading Tweet Giving Biden Credit For Social Security Check Raise:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/11/02/whit...
The white house press releases have been a total disaster. I thought we had it bad in the previous admin. Lies after lies told to American public. Much of this stuff goes unchallenged on all social media.
I’ve been following epidemiology experts and no one implied “everyone dying”, nor recommended “24/7” mask wearing (rather cited lowered transmission rates) and yes isolation lowered transmission rates too.
The flak they had to take for inconveniencing the lifestyle of people in the interest of prioritizing health outcomes for all, is insane.
If anything, we learned that the thought of care for others at a small cost to the self is extremely triggering for many Americans and is easily politicized as a wedge issue to influence voting.
What Twitter does uniquely is prevent you from discussing topics in depth or being able to have nuanced/deep conversations afterwards. The difficulty of including nuance or of responding in depth leads to people competing over who can make the most provocative statements.
Two people exchanging sequences of 25 tweet chains in order to make points and counterpoints is a desperate workaround by people who are trying their best to avoid this dynamic. They have to bend over backwards to do it when instead it should be the easy default
> Twitter is/was the only remaining news medium
And twitter is an important reason that other, more reliable and informative news outlets went under.
Also standards of journalism integrity were bad then but they are abysmal now. Very few journalists actually investigate stories, most just re print press release.
But of course you are right: who could have foreseen how much bad news people want to read and how little they want to pay for quality news. Why do people watch Fox or read Murdock media rags?