It was crazy to see suggestions to wear masks or claims that covid was airborne getting "fact-checked" by the media only to reverse their position months later after WHO put out new statements. In particular, the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around without mentioning whether there were any credible high-powered studies that had even attempted to find evidence of the phenomenon.

The WHO has a lot of blame itself for misinformation. And, I personally believe, a lot of conspiracy theories definitely caught fire from their mistakes.

https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898?lang=en

Uh... are you suggesting that at some not-insignificant point into the pandemic someone credible was arguing COVID was NOT airborne?

Actually, yes. For the first half of the pandemic, much of the medical community was unsure if COVID was airborne.

Examples:

- https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-reverses-agai...

- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7

- https://archive.is/wPD2D (Tweet from WHO)

Note that "airborne" has a specific meaning in medical literature. Everyone agreed COVID could be transmitted in the air by respiratory droplets. But to be truly "airborne" means the virus could be aerosolized and float freely, without being attached to a larger droplet.

Both droplet-based and aerosolized/"airborne" spread allows viruses to be transmitted in the air. But a truly "airborne" virus can travel much farther.

It's the difference between needing 6 feet and 20 feet of distance to prevent spread.

(To put it bluntly, it's the difference between avoiding spittle, or avoiding the equivalent of cigarette smoke. Two very different threat models.)

This is the excuse hospitals used to send nurses into covid units with no or insufficient PPE when they got caught flat-footed having no stored supply. (and it was BS)

Early in the pandemic there was a very aggressive "you don't need masks and please don't buy them because hospitals need them"

Ex: "US Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams not only wants people to stop buying facemasks to prevent the novel coronavirus, but warns that you actually might increase your risk of infection if facemasks are not worn properly. [...] On Sunday, Adams posted on Twitter that people should stop buying masks. Rather, he tweeted that to keep yourself and those around you healthy, wash your hands often, avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands and disinfect surfaces."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...

Yes, in the early days of the pandemic there was a lot of official resistance to acknowledging this, mostly because doing so would have meant accepting that COVID was effectively unstoppable.

Yes I believe it was the WHO or US government (the only sources I was following at the time) that explicitly stated they "did not have evidence" covid was airborne.

You don't remember health authorities telling people masks don't work, and to wipe your groceries down? I do.

I remember Pelosi telling people to go dance around the streets of Chinatown and celebrate the new year or they're racist.

I don’t know your definition of credible. But the Swedish institute of health (my translation) still has articles of it being spread by droplets. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb...

The entirety of first half was "Nurses and Doctors need the mask, please don't buy them."

The consensus and official line amongst epidemiologists (and the health organizations and media that relayed this official line to the public) was that COVID was only transmitted by droplet transmission i.e. droplets that fall to the ground within several feet (hence the 6 feet / 2 meters social distancing rule) and don't float around in the air. This was despite obvious evidence of outbreaks that could have only occurred via ventilation systems or the virus floating around in the air in an elevator.

Here's an article going over the issue and what convinced them to change their mind: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

It turned out they were wrong not just about COVID, but a whole host of other diseases, based on erroneous criteria about what sized droplets could float in the air. Ironically, doctors from centuries ago with their theories of "miasma" / bad air would have been closer to the truth.

With hindsight we can see their mistakes but isn't following the expert line the best thing to do in an uncertain situation?

Perhaps until they prove themselves confused, unreliable, hypocritical, dishonest, deceptive, irrational, malicious, and/or self-contradictory.

Over the course of the pandemic this threshold was crossed for a lot of people.

Following the best guess of those with the knowledge and experience is definitely the best best, but I find myself, like most people, questioning their motives. It's healthy to do so but also a sad commentary.

I mean there was a very sizable group that saw the mistakes in real time. Not necessarily the medical mistakes but the censorship mistakes. I’m not sure how anyone can know what to do in an uncertain situation like that but being unable to question authority isn’t good for most societies.

Many of these things were obvious at the time if you were paying attention.

Many people were also certain of obvious beliefs that turned out to be untrue.

When experts are wrong ignore them as noise. I trust the cdc as much as I trust Jim Cramer on investments. Both are technically experts

Unfortunately, we've learned that the experts are there mainly to reinforce whatever makes businesses money. That's who gets access to the airwaves and government press conferences. So if you think there's an alternative reality that might be unprofitable, you have to figure it out for yourself. The best COVID info is and was on Twitter since 2020. Just stunning amounts of primary lit being shared with expert opinion. You have to tune your bullshit sense though, and unfortunately that might require having a science background...

This is how many people realized that COVID is airborne and that only N95 and better respirators provide real protection. People now discuss air cleaning, the impacts of Long COVID, etc. The vaccines were seized upon by the political parties as a wedge issue to force the economy open. They help with medical system capacity, but do not block transmission and Long COVID.

You can find an ongoing science based pandemic response policy at https://pandemicjustice.icu

Trusting in appointed experts instead of critical thinking is the worst thing to do in uncertain times.

Nobody knew if covid was airborne at the time, so the most correct answer was nobody knows. Some people got lucky by making things up on the spot and guessed it was airborne. At a certain point their confirmation bias and distrust of media broke their perception of the world and they became antivax etc, still no critical thinking taking place.

Many did not know and took extra steps like wearing a mask. What the experts did was say anyone wearing masks is racist against asian people.

Their was no vaccine at this point so no one against it yet.

The critical thinking can be found in the independent minds of those who made the choice to wear a mask. Listening to an expert didn't play out well.

Your genius is only validated by the experts eventually proving that wearing a mask was a good idea.

Do you have the quote from the WHO saying the use of masks was racist?

Thank you. Because what you're talking about is blind trust in someone who has been put into a position of supposed authority. I can't bring myself to do it - I don't know these people so until I'm presented with credible evidence that makes sense to me, I believe a position of extreme skepticism is warranted.

Sure as a general rule, but that doesn't render those experts free from criticism when they make mistakes. That low confidence scientific hypotheses were treated as high confidence scientific results is a valid critique of expert interaction with the general public, as it led to search engine censorship of objectively true information.

This isn't quite correct. They eventually knew that masks worked, but delayed to help doctors get them: https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...

"delayed"? They lied.

> the phrase "no credible evidence" was wildly thrown around

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

DDG may not be the best if you want to avoid political meddling. I switched to Brave after https://web.archive.org/web/20220831110219/https://twitter.c...

I get so tired of seeing yegg raked over the coals for this one.

A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things. They take in all of the internet and decide what to present to users. For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system, and a propaganda machine like Russia's is absolutely capable of exploiting a search engine that doesn't proactively take measures to avoid being exploited.

That DDG wanted to avoid spreading Russian propaganda that argues against the very existence of the Ukrainian people isn't DDG meddling in politics, it's them steering clear of enabling genocide.

it is not a search engine's job to filter their results based on acceptable politics. the only explicit filtering out they should be doing is filtering out manipulation, explicitly illegal content, spam, fraudulent content and stuff like that. aside from that the filtering algorithm should be largely neutral and unbiased. it's not a search engine's job to refuse to answer search results because the owner finds it distasteful.

How do you think search engines detect manipulation, down, fraudulent content, etc, if not by judging the content? Content is all a search engine sees.

An article about a Nigerian prince who needs money is likely to be a scam. An article about how Ukraine is really just a rebellious Russian province is likely to be state-sponsored propaganda.

>manipulation

This seems to be the case being argued here

>explicitly illegal content

Illegal according to who?

>fraudulent content

Fraudulent according to who?

These things you name are an editorial decision and are not unbiased

Does bad-faith propaganda not qualify as fraudulent content?

So no more NYT?

yes they should obviously be filtering out or downranking manipulated and fraudulent propaganda content. these policies would have existed before the invasion happened so there would be no reason to say that you are going to be downranking russian information unless you are planning on adding additional filtering and manipulation to the ranking on top of what you would normally do to content. they should be filtering all content neutrally and equally, not filtering russian content more because the owner wants to inject politics into their algorithm.

They could simply add a “propaganda” tag and give an option to filter out the search results marked with that tag. If anything I can specifically search for Russian propaganda, for whatever reason.

Yes, you can, and downranking propaganda wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.

But when my naive sister-in-law hears something about how Ukraine isn't a real country, I don't want the first page of results for "history of Ukraine" to turn up Russian propaganda.

I live in a red state, and there are astonishing numbers of people here who already buy Putin's story. I'm fully behind DDG deciding they didn't want to play a role in spreading his message even further.

> wouldn't stop it from turning up if you go looking.

Yeah, same goes for your naïve sister-in-law. So why don’t they add the “propaganda” tag, so that your relatives could clearly see it and I could search for it (for whatever reason)? They could even add some links to some better sources, as an option. And use some disclaimer when you click on these results, like “Hey, this is a propaganda resource, be careful. Here’s the links where you can read up on the topic if you need unbiased information”. That would probably have at least some educational value, unlike removing and/or downranking the results.

> A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things.

That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.

> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system

I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.

> The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.

Sometimes a company takes an ethical stance for the sake of being ethical. Shocking, I know, but it occasionally happens.

I'm not sure I would consider downplaying misinformation websites as "political meddling". In fact, I think I like DDG more for it.

Yeah. Like downranking Iraqi websites in a hypothetical 2003 when they said "We dont have WMDs". So much better.

Do we really need a search engine that censors incorrectly when we really need facts?

Similarly, some people can't handle the truth, but that is not the search engine's job to correct, is it?

Same here. I can't debate what the "other side" is thinking if I don't know what it is.

If they want to add a side link to more authoritative sources (like what Spotify does for podcasts discussing Covid), then fine, but don't censor me if I'm actively looking for "disinformation."

I didn't mind them deleting the antivax garbage

Of course you do not mind. But that means that you have no room for complaint when they delete something that you consider to be "not garbage".

Yes you do. Agreeing with some moderation does not mean you must agree with all moderation.

Calling censorship "moderation" doesn't make it not censorship.

Ok. Agreeing with some censorship does not mean you must agree with all censorship.

No, it doesn't, but you're a hypocrite if you don't.

If you think there's nothing wrong with the idea that "censorship is good as long as I'm not the one being censored", I don't know what to tell you.

Not everyone is a speech absolutist, that doesn't make them hypocrites.

In fact, as speech absolutists have taken over a few platforms, we've discovered that the primary hypocrisy surrounding speech is that there's a lot of people who claim to be speech absolutists, but aren't when push comes to shove.

If you eat bread, you must also eat shit. If you don't, you're a hypocrite.

It's astounding how many people are incapable of making judgments except along artificial lines given to them by sophists.

"Now, Madam, we're just haggllng over price."

Censorship is a good thing as long as only things I don't like get censored!

This is a false equivalence only unless you are a moral nihilist.

Everyone wants a censor on their side, but they rarely are

In this particular case, it's about wanting information from the people actually researching a subject vs people making stuff for political or business purposes.

Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith. Which you can't say for people who are spreading made up or poorly sourced information to make a buck.

Society generally frowns upon allowing people to blatantly lie or act in bad faith order to sell products. While that might be a form of censorship, it's one that society largely benefits from having in place.

There were plenty of knowledgable scientists including those with specific familiarity that were censored because it didn't fit the media narrative at the time.

> Even if researchers are wrong initially, because of lack of data, they are still acting in good faith.

A researcher or other "expert" should have at least some sense of when the data being used are limited, flawed, or even unavailable.

Under such circumstances, the only way to act in good faith would be for such a person to say something along the lines of, "I don't know" or "It's not possible to say at this time."

Such a person making some other authoritative pronouncement (even with caveats attached), especially if it turns out to be incorrect, should not be seen as "acting in good faith".

In this particular case, what product was sold by antivaxxers or how did they make money?

Much of the "antivax garbage" turned out to be true. In hindsight, do you still believe that censoring true but inconvenient information is morally acceptable?

> turned out to be true

Like the microchips?

They did not say all

How about none of it.

They also gave no reason to believe the "most" claim. What actually are the things that were proven to be true that were censored as misinformation?

Truth is messy. The vaccine is an amazing achievement and saved many lives. Understating the health risks to young men (myocarditis), and overstating the efficacy fed the anti-vaxxers, and was a disservice to science and healthcare.

And we haven’t even talked about the prevention paradox.

you're avoiding the question.

The fuck I am, which antivax conspiracy theor(ies) were actually proven true?

That in some patients there might be adverse health effects from the vaccine. That the us funded gain of function research in novel coronaviruses. That the virus would mutate faster than the vaccine rollout and Covid would go seasonal.

And you’re still avoiding the question.

How much? Do you have any links to discussions or data that were against covid vaccination and turned out to be truthful and useful? I'm really curious because I've never heard of this in my personal information bubble, despite trying to widen it as much as I can.

It’s not inconvenient and more importantly not information. It’s annoying and not based on facts. I’d love to see any actual research done at a molecular biology lab that’d back an anti-vax fantasy. And then there’s the whole epidemiology level…

> Much

[Citation Needed]

Imma need a source

This word is quickly becoming a part of the "does not mean anything" crew from its constant overuse and involvement in strawman-ing.

100% agree.

I somewhat agree. I don't mind if true falsehoods/spam is removed. The problem was, the "anti vax" label was applied to far too much, including things that were later found to be true.

The article I was looking for was about intravascular injection of the vaccine, and its possible relation to adverse effects, which now has merit in 2023 [1].

[1] https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/inadvertent-injection...

"remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies. The funniest lie was "a corona virus outbreak of a novel strain in close distance to a biolab which does experiments on corona viruses ... is without a doubt of natural origin!"

> "remains at the injection side" was one of the more blatant lies.

Correct: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9313234/

How is your attitude not equivalent to "I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them"?

There are reasons someone might want to find those links, even if they disagree with them. When Google hides them from you without your consent or ability to opt out, they're treating you as if you were a child. Or perhaps more like livestock.

> I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed...

The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.

I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.

> religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members

I have seen something similar to this in the wild. Members of a church install spyware on their home computer that church officials can access to snoop on their internet traffic for "accountability" reasons. Members are shamed for looking at any content deemed wrong.

One young man got in trouble for looking at SFW images of models. Turned out he wasn't even the one who had visited the site, it was his sister looking at fashion ideas.

Yeah, a friend of mine found a (non-religious) service like this for help with porn addiction. Not my cup of tea, but I could see it working for many people.

> The thing is, this likely is true for him.

It's true for basically everyone. Smart people, "rationalists", et c., fall for scams, nutty scientific or conspiracy theories, advertising, romantic political or economic ideas, cults or scam-religions, and other crap all the time.

So a fortiori, it's true for him too!

I wouldn't necessarily exclude myself from the set of people who would benefit from externally managed filtering.

> I am so weak-willed that there is the horrific danger that I will start believing them

That's what "Manufacturing Consent" isn't it? That entire concept seems sound and passes the smell test. People see things repeatedly from authoritive-sounding people and they believe it (in the case of the book, by governments and their catspaws).

There is no reason a search and social bubble wouldn't wind up with a similar outcome.

Is my authority defiance resource just cranked up to 11? I don't even like those groups I tend to agree with, and when I do find myself agreeing with them I silently sit there wondering if that somehow means I am wrong.

I only said it sarcastically about the original commenter because it's difficult to believe that anyone could truly be like that. Sure, we're all aware of the dregs who seem to form their political beliefs from Uncle Creepy's Facebook meme pictures, but I've always believed those people to be nothing more than a (sizable) minority.

It's estimated that 50-70% of the world has no inner monologue.

Humans really are that simple. A lie, when repeated enough, can become truth.

Everything related to the lab leak has been systematically suppressed for spurious reasons despite no proof that it isn't a possibility. I had Chinese national friends and colleagues (most of them party members) talking about it in January 2020 from Chinese sourced media before Western media had any awareness at all on the matter.

> despite no proof that it isn't a possibility

Because you don’t get to come up with a “theory” and dump the burden of the proof on someone else. That’s incredibly stupid. Not how how science and common sense work.

Since when? It may not be a good argument but should we be deplatforming people over it? Go to Reddit front page right now and try to find something that isn’t a poorly argued political post. What’s the difference? Just because you may disagree with someone it doesn’t mean they NEED to be silenced.

Politics is about how you think things should be run. Science is about what we have evidence for. They are not the same thing.

Science is about coming up with a hypnosis or theory and testing it.

The evidence comes at the end not before the theory

We don't give any credence to untested hypotheses

We generally don't employ hypnosis. Sometimes we even skip the hypothesis step, because "what the hell is that" is enough to start generating data. Don't confuse all of scientific research with the scientific method; it's just one method of investigation.

A theory is usually based on some prior knowledge or observations. But let’s forget that for a second. In the anti-vax case, their argument is: “All your research in favor of vaccinating the population is wrong. We don’t have any evidence for it, but you should turn your public health policy 180 degrees!”. I don’t why it’s so hard to grasp the issue.

Are you saying that people shouldn't get to publicly say anything that they don't have proof of?

I think in practice free speech should be limited if it’s clearly damaging. In case of anti-vax movement, it’s just crystal clear that allowing them to spread the word was detrimental to public health. So I’m in favor banning those who use their rights to free speech to undermine the policies and efforts that are put forward to save lives.

And I see how the concept of “misinformation” can be used very broadly to silence political opponents. But I do wish there was a perfect solution.

> I think in practice free speech should be limited if it’s clearly damaging.

The problem with that position is, who decides what counts as "clearly damaging"? What if the government and media were extremely anti-vaccine and chose to censor pro-vaccine speech instead, calling it "clearly damaging"?

I don't think it's spurious to require evidence first before spreading possibly false narratives.

> despite no proof that it isn't a possibility

That seems like a slightly tortured double negative.

It's like the argument between internet atheists and internet Christians.

Christians say God exists

Atheists say God doesn't exist.

Christians tell the atheists to prove that God doesn't exist.

Atheists say you can't disprove a negative.

Christians take that as winning the argument.

Atheists take that as Christians being stupid and close minded.

Atheists counter with telling the Christians to prove God does exist.

Christians say you have to take it on faith.

Repeat ad nauseum extremis infinitum.

I can see both sides to the argument.

I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax. But I can see the point of view those mentioning what happens when there is deletion/censorship of things in the future that I could have interest in.

We also do know that there exists "some" subset of things that were mentioned that seemed antivax on the surface but did actually turn out to be true or at least somewhat true. But these were usually not outright false claims, but informed speculations or very niche.

It was such a dividing topic that any form of skepticism however small was seen as an attack. This as someone who is vaxed and has gotten every booster available.

> I personally don't mind deletion of antivax stuff because I'm not antivax

The term antivax is a problem.

Very few people are actually anti all vaccines, and nobody should be pro all vaccines for everyone all the time. There have been actual truly failed vaccines, are you "antivax" if you wouldn't volunteer to take them? Should articles about past failed vaccines be censored from the internet? Of course not.

The term is sloppy and careless, but people love it, probably because it lets you be part of a team. But everybody means something different by it.

Nobody should presume any new implementation of a class is good just because there have been previous successful implementations. Reality doesn't make things so easy for us.

I'd much rather see the antivax garbage debunked. Think of it as a form of vaccination for the mind.

Nonsense. There isn't some super clearly defined line between pro-vaxx and anti-vaxx across the thousands of issues and questions related to covid. Science isn't anti- or pro- anything. Particular beliefs that were labeled "anti-vaxx" were often just not clear or understood yet.

Also, it's not the job of a search engine to be your nanny. What if you are researching conspiracy theories or opposition beliefs, even if you don't believe in them? How would you find them?

Do you put "everything" in "quotations" all the "time"?

I used it to convey some external concept, rather than my own thoughts.

"controversial": Others called it controversial. I did/would not.

"against the grain": Others thought that there was a grain. I did/would not.

"real time": Not literal.

Maybe this is a regional/age thing?

edit: actually, asking ChatGPT why they're in quotes gives the similar answers as mine, so I guess it's not too odd. New session prompt with 4.0: "Why are some of these words in quotes?"

Fluff removed, same order as my answers:

> ... In this case, "controversial" could imply that the speaker doesn't personally find the topics controversial, but acknowledges that others may perceive them as such.

> ... indicating that it's being used in its typical idiomatic sense.

> ... Here, the quotation marks might be used to stress that the term isn't being used in its strictest sense.

x-posting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35980374

(I'm the CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo.)

It is simply not true that we have censored anything or made ourselves "the arbiters of truth." I realized I previously explained how our news rankings work very poorly on Twitter but I subsequently put out a clarification in this help page with a much clearer (and detailed) explanation of how our news rankings actually work: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/ne...

From that page: "When we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly non-political manner, meaning we don’t evaluate or otherwise take into account any potential political bias or leanings of websites in our search result rankings."

That's an awful lot of pilpul. You admitted it proudly on Twitter expecting praise, it's too late to talk your way out of it now because you didn't get the reaction you expected.

Are you trying to rewrite history? Sorry, you don't have that kind of clout. You 100% censored search results. Also remember that time you got caught hiring based on race instead of actual qualifications? We do. DDG is a propaganda machine with racist policies. I wouldn't use your product if you paid me.

> Many sites may occasionally do one or more of these things, but we take action very rarely, only in the most extreme cases. To identify these rare, extreme cases, we rely on multiple non-governmental and non-political organizations that specialize in objectively assessing journalistic standards. To take any ranking action using this factor, we must see at least three of these organizations independently assess a site as having extremely low journalistic standards and also see that none of these organizations have assessed the same site as having even somewhat robust journalistic standards.

This is far too vague. Last year Bazbaz told Recode that sites like RT and Sputnik were "extreme" cases (https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-speech-p...). While I tend to agree, which other sites are extreme cases? This isn't published. Despite the claim that none of this is done for political reasons, I find it hard to trust that these "non-governmental and non-political organizations" act and are chosen without any bias. Your method isn't published or explained. I really think these organisations should, at minimum, be listed. So too should all the sites DDG considers to be "extreme" cases. Then we could decide if we think DDG is being politically neutral.

My confidence in DDG is shaken, and I don't think I'm alone. We live in a world where so many major software brands we love have made overt moves towards censorship on political grounds. If DDG could prove they reject this authoritarianism I think it would serve as a major USP.

Oh, DuckDuckGo just does that sometimes. Pretty often I'll pick a result then back out to the search results, and the one I had in mind to click next just isn't there anymore. However annoying, I wouldn't immediately jump to a political motivation.