But along with fringe Covid ideas, we limited actual speech on legitimate areas of public discourse around Covid. Like school reopening or questioning masks and social distancing.
We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.
(And I believe those experts actually did about as best they could given the circumstances)
Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.
There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.
If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?
It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.
>As super low hanging fruit: > June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0] > June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1] > 0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac... > Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
My hypotheses for our discrepant viewpoints were 1) my aging memory, or 2) different experiences, but it's actually 3) not using words to have the same meaning!
Citing this as "blatant truth suppression" weakens my view of any other evidence or argument you put forward, because I no longer trust that we can use words in ways that are compatible with each other.
I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.
I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.
Experts have a worse track record than open debate and the COVID censorship was directed at even experts who didn’t adhere to political choices — so to my eyes, you’re saying that you’d give in to authoritarian impulses and do worse.
At some point in any emergency, organized action has to be prioritized over debate.
Maybe that is still authoritarian, but they do say to have moderation in all things!
From health emergencies to shootings to computer system crashes to pandemics — doing things without a reason to believe they’ll improve the situation is dangerous. You can and many have made things worse. And ignoring experts shouting “wait, no!” is a recipe for disaster.
When we were responding to COVID, we had plenty of time to have that debate in a candid way. We just went down an authoritarian path instead.
Ah… so… ”we must do something! Even if it’s the wrong thing”
Hot take.
I don't see how that turns into you needing to mandate what I read and who's opinions I hear.
I have a three month old son. At the time he was being born, in my city, there was an outbreak of one of those diseases that killed more then one kid. Don't tell me this stuff doesn't have a direct impact on people.
More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.
I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.
When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.
In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.
Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.
We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.
It’s not if Google can decide what content they want on YouTube.
The issue here is that the Biden Whitehouse was pressuring private companies to remove speech that they otherwise would host.
That's a clear violation of the first amendment. And we now know that the previous Whitehouse got people banned from all the major platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
If the Trump administration had decided to follow through with their threats, ABC could have sued and won.
Lastly, Jimmy Kimmel could have(and still possibly might be able to) sue for tortious interference.
They asked him to apologize and he refused, so they suspended him.
Eg, even though completely factual and documented including the posts having citations, pointing out that BLM is Marxist in political orientation and that their violence against Asian and black small businesses doesn’t make sense through a racial justice lens but does through a Marxist revolutionary lens.
Censorship of that topic due to feelings shut down honest discussion about the largest organized political violence the US has seen in decades.
As censorship always does.
It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.
You had direct statements like this from scientific experts, those experts turned out to be the middleman group that was funding Wuhan via NIH grants.
Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has been among the most vocal critics of the idea of a lab leak, wrote, “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Given an expert statement like that, youtube can and did take down lableak videos because they were misinformation (contrary to the information provided by the experts).
What happens when the “police” disagrees with and silences what you believe is true? Or when they allow the propagation of what you believe to be lies?
Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?
This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.
Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.
If you were on the early Internet, you were self policing with the help of admins all the time. The difference was you had niche populations that had a stake in keeping the peace and culture of a given board
We broke those boundaries down though and now pit strangers versus strangers for clicks and views, resulting in daily stochastic terrorism.
Police the damn speech.