Based on the principle that the counter to misinformation is better information, not less misinformation.
> The scientific consensus
The issue is that this isn’t a fixed thing and changes in real time. So it’s challenging to know what the “consensus” is now, especially if your goal is to filter out wrong or anti-consensus, what method do you use to decide what is allowed and what isn’t?
Finally, while Covid is serious and millions of people died. Diabetes and drug overdoses kill as well. We would be better served by limiting the misinformation that is ads for pharmaceuticals and coca cola.
I think people buying sugary drinks over the past 50 years killed more than many diseases. [0]
So I feel like the harm caused by trying to filter social media messages by the government is greater than any potential benefit.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/diabetes.htm 100k diabetes deaths per year in the US alone
The US has the most extreme version of freedom of speech of any country in the world. There are quite a few versions that are perfectly reasonable and implemented successfully without sliding down a slippery slope into a "ministry of truth".
So the slippery slope is a fallacy in this case.
The issue of sugary drinks is a false dichotomy. Nobody gets sick and dies from drinking a coke. They get sick and die from drinking tons of it all the time. If you want to draw a line for what kind of speech puts people in imminent danger, sugary drinks are definitively not over that line, while spreading a potentially lethal disease is clearly over that line.
> So I feel like the harm caused by trying to filter social media messages by the government is greater than any potential benefit.
What evidence are you basing that on? In the past the government granted licenses to broadcast networks on TV, and had strict requirements on the kinds of things they could say on air. Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen?
They get sick and die from drinking 100k cokes over their life due to watching lots of ads.
No one gets sick from just one exposure to misinformation either. They sick from thousands and thousands that change their behavior.
Ads for coke impact behavior negatively and result in poor health outcomes and death.
Ads for opioid painkillers impact behavior negatively and result in poor health
outcomes and death.
Much more so than any Covid misinformation. That’s why I compared them.
If the goal is to protect people, then we should restrict ads of “unhealthy” things. Right? Have that ministry of truth review what products are healthy or unhealthy.
And just have them review all ads for if they are healthy or unhealthy.
It’s exactly a slippery slope argument. I think applied correctly because if the government does this for some topics they will do them for more. Especially if they apply your logic of whether they should reduce harm.
> Did we fall into a tyrannical dystopia as a result? Did something worse than hundreds of thousands of people dying happen?
This is an unprovable statement. But other countries had better outcomes. Perhaps the government’s actions resulted in more deaths than otherwise. Maybe only 900k would have died instead of 1.1M if government hadn’t restricted information flow.
But sugar is bad for you. Ads for sugar aren’t intended to convince people to drink it in moderation. Just like ads for cigarettes aren’t intended to make people smoke one per day.
My point is that if we wanted to limit misinformation that causes harm, limiting ads for coke that result in sugar consumption that contributes to diabetes deaths. Lots and lots. Hopefully Covid won’t keep causing hundreds of thousands of deaths per year (1.1M so far in 3.5 years) but diabetes is just getting worse.
Obviously government can do both and doesn’t have to choose. But it seems like limiting free speech for a minor benefit isn’t worth it when there’s a much clearer line to take. Preventing drug advertising is pretty simple and was already illegal until 1998.
That people honestly think this is a bad thing is depressing. The government simply cannot be trusted in the wider picture to make these decisions about good vs bad speech.
I mean, the court seems to agree with this statement but it makes absolutely no sense to me. The classic example is yelling "fire!" in a movie theater because people might get hurt.
This seems like the same kind of thing but much, much more harmful.
This commonly brought up example is a complete garbage. It was first brought into American jurisprudence during WWI
In fact, this case illustrates exactly why we ought not to criminalize speech. The phrase first entered American jurisprudence in Eugene v Debs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs), in which the government tried to prosecute an anti-war protester. Do you think the anti-war guy was popular in his time? Do you understand now why the government has no business policing speech?
In the United States, short of direct threats, you can always say whatever you want. It's a fundamental human right, and frankly, no government has a moral right to take that away. This idea is foundational to American democracy. FFS, civil rights group will defend your right to proclaim 'hate speech' in
This isn't the case. There are many exceptions to the 1st Amendment's protection of speech, beyond just true threats.
This is legal [0], and is a misunderstanding. The case where this came up was overturned as telling fire falsely is crime depending on the circumstances. And yelling fire truthfully is never a crime.
If there’s a fire in a crowded theater, you definitely want people yelling fire. And trying to limit them will lead to more deaths, not less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
The United States government lacks the right to do this in essentially all cases because it's a right retained by the people. It's a pretty nice right and ought to be protected, which it -- usually -- eventually is.
> The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying. And this isn't like a seatbelt issue where people just put themselves at risk.
Human rights are not -- and should not be -- subject to scientific consensus.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
No... You know it doesn't and you also know that this kind of speech is nothing like the speech that was directly prevented here by the government, so let's stop playing games.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
One way in america we've always defined free speech is this:
"your right to swing your fist ends when it lands on my face."
I don't think people have a right to free speech when that speech is purposely, and I do mean purposely because it was done on purpose, designed to spread misinformation in such a way that others are harmed by it.
There are limits to free speech, and the conversation ends with Popper's paradox.
It can make educational posters, it can distribute information, but it can't use it's authority to limit the speech of others.
One of my videogame youtubers, the GameGrumps, couldn't say "We have covid" on youtube. Not fake health advice or anything, just explaining they got it and couldn't record for a few days.
There is always an edge case, a grey area, a situation where you have to use your judgment.
Also "There's no carve out for "a really good reason"" is simply incorrect. Fraud? Child pornography?
What about if you put the wrong ingredients on your food product and it kills someone with an allergy?
Let's say you put out a fraudulant ad selling a bridge. You can be sued, the FTC can sue you, and there could (unlikely) be jail time for you.
What the Government can't do is say you're prohibited to take out an ad until they approve it - which is exactly what happened with covid. The Whitehouse abused it's power to prohibit speech being made - it didn't sue someone for eg selling a false cure.
Part of the problem is the process. When I sue you for fraud, we go in front of a judge. I have to prove you're engaged in fraud - the burden is on me. If we prevent any unapproved ad from being posted by Government power, there is no due process and the burden of proof shifts to you that you aren't breaking the law. That's not how our justice system works.
Second, there are defenses to CSAM - it's not whatever the government feels is CSAM. The material has to actually be exploitative of children and for obscene purposes, it can't be a medical photo or a Nirvana album cover.
Do you really not see a difference between a probibition on any speech not preapproved by the Whitehouse versus charging people for CSAM posession?
This wasn't the Whitehouse post-hoc suing someone for hawking false covid cures. This was the Whitehouse saying unapproved messages could not be even discussed by private citizens on platforms.
We're commenting on the judgment. Made by judges.
I'm going to stop responding here, this strategy of basing arguments in imagined alternative worlds of facts is not interesting.
The Whitehouse is a defendant, not a plaintiff.
None of the people censored have standing or were able to go in front of the judge.
"How wrong was this action?"
"How bad does the event have to be to justify the wrong action?"
"Who is responsible for making the judgment call?"
"If that party shirks, does it fall to anyone next?"
"Who is morally accountable for the bad event given that it could be avoided via certain actions?"
The scientific consensus you refer to gives important and helpful facts that inform this discussion by characterizing the bad event in detail. But the scientific facts cannot answer the foregoing questions, as you hope, because it provides no insight on any of the other facets. That's why there's debate and discussion rather than an open and shut case.
But in this case the costs (people dying, or in many cases losing months of their lives to extreme fatigue, other health problems, the overloading of medical infrastructure causing many other problems, etc) far, far outweigh the costs of a hypothetical tyranny situation.
Except none of these "experts" had any clue if their costly measures would work at all. And to this day you can't look at a chart and see a major difference between anywhere. Virus is gonna virus. You cannot control it.
Simply put, you were lied to. Break out of your echo chamber and listen to people calling you out. They are right, you are not.
There is more to life than a myopic focus on exactly one form of illness.
Actually calling for specific individuals or groups of individuals to be lynched crosses a line with most people, but not all. Spreading sincerely held beliefs that are unintentionally harmful is below that line for many if not most.
This is so thoroughly ingrained in our legal system and culture that only Alito (who is on the conservative wing) dissented in Snyder v. Phelps [0]—all four liberal justices concurred that hate speech against gay people outside of a funeral could not be punished (in the circumstances in the case).
As someone who had knowledge of Covid-19 before the mainstream AND got sick from it before it was widely reported, (they were still denying it was in the US at this time), I knew that it wasn’t anything major for the majority of the population. Yet the government and corporations used this as an excuse to force us inside for no logical reason. Masks assist the spread, yet we were told the opposite[0]. Vaccines were first said to “prevent”[1], and then they moved the wording to being “less likely to spread”[2]. Social distancing only prolonged the pandemic and put more at risk, as the only way to reasonably mitigate a non-deadly and contagious disease for which we have no real vaccine against is to create herd immunity, just like we do with the flu every single year. Yet the government used social media to continue to spread the misinformation that you crave, creating propaganda and draconian rules in order to worsen the long-term impacts.
[0] - https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfL2sespLnY
[2] - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/11/covid-19-vaccination-...
If you can just put all of the ideas that people were wrong, lied, whatever, and just look at some data, I think you will see a clear pattern:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Try putting the table of weekly excess deaths in order of highest %.
The fact that the spanish flu was worse doesn't mean anything. You wouldn't eat rotting food because it only kills you 3% of the time compared to drinking a liter of bleach.
Yes, people got a lot of things wrong during the pandemic, and the scientific consensus was constantly changing. I can't think of anything in the world where people don't make mistakes and learn as they go.
There's always a risk of getting things wrong, but if, for the mask example, the risk is that you're needlessly uncomfortable if it doesn't help, and that you will be less likely to kill people if it does, maybe you should just buck up and inconvenience yourself slightly.
In the case of masks it's pretty goddamn obvious they work anyway. Do you think maybe every surgeon in the world, who spends 8+ years studying medicine, just wears masks because they're brainwashed? Or maybe you, social media guru, might have been misled?
As is a pattern in your replies you continue being either horribly ignorant or just downright malicious, neither of which is surprising from someone who uses CSAM as a shield for censorship. If you think for even an iota of a second that properly worn surgical masks are comparable to the cheap slapped-on masks that were worn during the pandemic, then you’re genuinely not worth discussing this with. Not to mention you didn’t even actually interface with any of previous reply, namely the very first reference I used which already discredited this ignorance.
Continue mindlessly spreading misinformation and lies, you’re a waste of my time.
This is a non sequitur. Surgeons don't wear masks to prevent transmission of airborne viruses.
The government was pushing an entirely incorrect assessment of how Covid spread.
They shut down domain experts who correctly asserted that Covid was fully airborne.
> The evidence that Covid-19 spreads through the air has been there since early in the pandemic - in a Seattle choir, a Chinese restaurant, an Arkansas prison. And “Covid is Airborne” scientists have from around the globe have been pleading with authorities to tell the world, holding symposiums and writing editorial after editorial.
They wrote an open letter in June of 2020 signed by hundreds of fellow scientists appealing to “national and international bodies to recognize the potential for airborne spread” of COVID-19. They have shown that 85% of viral load is in the air. They have explicitly laid out how respiratory viruses hitchhike on aerosols to penetrate the lungs and infect people.
And yet despite all this, and even as the Delta wave - as contagious as (the known-to-be-airborne) chickenpox - rages, there has been no clear guidance from the most prominent public health authorities that Covid is indeed airborne, in plain language that regular people and businesses can use to modify their own behavior and prevent airborne transmission.
https://theair.substack.com/p/why-covid-is-airborne-history
It took two years for those in charge to accept the truth about how Covid spreads.
> Two years of COVID: The battle to accept airborne transmission
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/3/11/two-years-of-co...
> Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air. That mistake and the prolonged process of correcting it sowed confusion and raises questions about what will happen in the next pandemic.
This isn't the consensus at all; the data shows that overwhelmingly lockdowns etc. had no positive effect on overall mortality or even a slightly net negative one. That's why New York had a higher fatality rate than Florida even though Florida had an older (and hence more vulnerable) population. They also had a devastating effect on childhood education/development outcomes.
Why not read through this article in Nature on the effectiveness of various policies?
The WHO's position was that the total closure of businesses and public areas was a tool that could be effective early on in a wave of infections, but governments should recognize that it came with a terrible cost in terms of increasing poverty and other social problems.
They also repeatedly stated that the half-assed "lockdowns" implemented by most jurisdictions (hey guys let's close the pool but we'll reopen it on Wednesdays and Fridays, also restaurants are delivery only for nine months) were next to useless.
Basically, they said you had to go all-in, do it early on, and make it brief or it wasn't worth it.
Not once have I ever seen the nuance of their position accurately reflected in the media or in statements by politicians and governments. It was all 100% left vs right tribe wars / oh look libs are stealing our freedoms / here's another dunk on Trump / Americans of all stripes hating and blaming each other. Millions are poor or dead because we all failed.
New York had a higher fatality rate for the first 2 months, when COVID was new and nobody knew how to treat it. After that Florida had a higher rate. The overall fatality rate in Florida passed that of New York about a year ago.
Here is a graph of the overall COVID deaths per 100k for Florida and New York from the start of the pandemic through the first quarter of this year [1]. I've also included a couple of other large population states (California and Texas), and Washington.
I included Washington because I'm in Washington and my cookies make that site default to including Washington in all the graphs and I was too lazy too remove it. :-)
Note the "Show" drop down below the graph. You can use that to add the numbers for regions, top 10 or top 25, bottom 10 or bottom 25, greater or lass than 5 million population, and others, to get a better idea of how various states did.
Use the "Data" drop down to switch to cases instead of deaths, or to show weekly or daily rates instead of cumulative.
[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-...
With that in mind, I can see why a government might want tools to help keep yellow-journalism-like discourse from dominating public forums, but as noted there’s dangers that come with that. It’s a thorny issue.
Sure I agree in principal, but what is to be done when mentioned advocacy largely falls on deaf ears and ultimately fails? It doesn’t seem like there’s any last line of defense in this situation, making a “game over” frighteningly easy.
So a lot of people fall into conspiratorial thinking about what they're not being allowed to hear. They also lose trust in a government that doesn't trust them in return (or allow them to make their own decisions). So there are very negative second-order effects to going down the route of paternalistic censorship here.
It was so funny to suddenly see the Surgeon General in the USA saying that face masks and coverings are useless, to creating a YouTube video showing how to make one yourself using a rubber band...
https://youtu.be/PI1GxNjAjlw?feature=shared
We know Today that face masks are useless, because it's not the first time we have a large scale virus. Sars and Mers a decade ago gave valuable information which official sources ignored.
One of many sources:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
There are limits to government mandate, it's not allowed to cross, no matter what.
In addition to this case, there are several cases (in Germany, in Israel etc.) where the court pointed out the limits were crossed.
There is a possibility to change the limits through democratic process for a following government.
Eh, no, your seatbeltless corpse could very easily fly out the windshield and damage endangered wildlife like a bald eagle, or even hit a person.
The masks and lockdowns didn't work, they were just tools one political ideology used to oppress the others despite evidence to the contrary. That behavior has been found to be unconstitutional.
Except a lot of that "false information" turned out to be true. You don't get to decide what constitutes "misinformation".
> It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.
This is absolutely not true at all.
I'm honestly shocked that people think this is a case where the government should not step in. I think they should have been much more aggressive.
This judgment and the comments here just baffle me. The scientific consensus is that countries that took a much more proactive, aggressive approach were far more successful in preventing people from dying. And this isn't like a seatbelt issue where people just put themselves at risk.
The fact that people are defending the spread of false information that contributed to people literally dying in favor of a hypothetical tyranny problem just leaves me feeling completely lost.