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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Twitter Files 10

Another thread, another author writing for the Twitter Files. Link

David Zweig writes the following.

  1. Twitter and other important internet platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) were in meetings with the Trump WH since the start of the pandemic to help combat misinformation. The Trump WH was concerned with 5G conspiracies, "runs on grocery stores", and "panic buying".

  2. The Biden WH on the other hand was concerned about Covid. They wanted high-profile anti-vaxx accounts taken offline, noting people like Alex Berenson. The justification was that Covid misinformation was killing lots of people.

  3. Twitter did not immediately capitulate, they were internally hesitant and debating as to whether to suppress people spouting arguments that went against government positions on the topic. But this does not mean that they didn't suppress people.

  4. Twitter's moderation, as you might expect, consists of machine-learning bots at the first layer, then contracted moderators from the Phillipines, and lastly review by "higher level employees" (implied American, or familiar with the culture).

  5. Twitter took the establishment position on Covid, sure, but this went far beyond just applying the "misinformation" tag to people saying vaccines don't work or that Covid is a hoax. It went as far as slapping that label on anyone saying anything that contradicted the mainstream CDC position on anything Covid-related or Covid-narrative-related. In most cases, the same message was seen ("Misleading: Learn why health officials recommend the vaccine for most people") and could no longer be interacted with. Some examples:

    • Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, argued that not everyone needed to take a vaccine, and that it was good for old people and their caretakers, but children and people with natural immunity were fine.

    • @KellyKGA cited CDC statistics to argue that Covid was not the leading cause of child deaths from disease.

    • @_euzebiusz_ cited a study which argued that mRNA vaccines were associated with cardiac arrests.

I have to say, if there was ever a case that reeked of TDS to me, it would be Jim Baker complaining and asking why Donald Trump saying "Don't be afraid of Covid" wasn't a violation of the company's Covid policies, to which Yoel Roth reminded him that it was a "broad, optimistic statement". Or maybe Baker just had a day of Covid-brain, who knows?

In any case, I'm really annoyed that Zweig doesn't talk at all about the Trump WH and what Twitter did or did not do during that time, or about any other requests the Biden WH might have made. Yeah, it's Covid and all that, but are you seriously telling me the Biden WH didn't ask about other topics? At least tell us if so. Tell us about how many requests were made, percentages of fulfilled requests, etc. You could very much do that here and make a stronger, more principled point.

As for what was said, I don't really think it's new. Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.

P.S: whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?

I have no idea what the strategy on Musk’s part here as to the rollout of these files.

Not the rollout to “alternative” journalists—he is probably right that the “mainstream” media would not cover this. (Emphasis on probably, because the Times absolutely loves to hate on big tech, and if they had any scoop on this shit going down inside of Facebook/Meta, they’d be on it like flies.)

I mean, why is this getting dribbed and drabbed out during one of the lowest media engagement weeks of the year in messy Twitter threads? This is not actively ongoing suppression. There is no upcoming election or policy debate that is immediately impacted by this. Nobody outside the extremely motivated and extremely online and extremely right is going to give even the slightest notice to this, as it’s presented in such a slapdash way during the peak of holiday season.

It's coming out in real time as the journalists involved are going over the data that Elon is providing them and finding interesting things to share. It's not optimized for engagement because neither Elon nor the journalists are prioritizing that. It's not a television show, there's no market research happening here.

twitter is still pretty active on the holidays. a lot of people have nothing better to do but kill time online on holidays

P.S: whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?

Activity monitoring

As for what was said, I don't really think it's new. Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.

Even if it wasn’t new-new, could there be a case for that exploring the modus operandi of this is in itself worth discussing?

It also helps cement that this wasn’t an isolated once-or-twice thing.

As for what was said, I don't really think it's new. Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.

As with most conspiracy facts, when they come out, the significance is not that they are new. The significance is that we have yet another proof that the crazy conspiracy theory guys who said it from the start were actually right all along. And The Experts (TM) who denied that is is about controlling the narrative and suppressing the debate, and claimed it's only to combat "dangerous health misinformation" that could "hurt people", lied to us all along. It's not new, just now we have the receipts.

Said what from the start? There's quite a bit of nonsense in that category, most of which is still not backed up by these press releases.

The people who were relatively level-headed at the start, saying things like "kids under 16 really have no reason to use up doses," have been reasonably validated. Those paranoid about microchips and 5G and injecting bleach disinfectant have not. Keep that in mind before trying to encourage people to follow the independent free-thinkers. I still don't believe their success will generalize.

Said what from the start?

That Big Tech (and Big Social Media) perform censorship and narrative pushing at the behest of US government, for political and partisan reasons. That many of the things The Experts (TM) say about COVID and prevention measures (including masks, lockdowns, effectiveness and safety of the vaccines, necessity of children vaccination, etc.), as well as about COVID origins, are not The Science Is Settled (TM) and some of them are plain false. And that at least some of The Experts (TM) knew it in advance and chose to lie and censor "for own good" - or for the benefit of the political party they belong to.

Keep that in mind before trying to encourage people to follow the independent free-thinkers

You want to warn me that if there's freedom, you can make mistakes. Thank you, I know. The other side of it, which somehow is always omitted, is when there's Settled Science (TM), there also are very costly - and often deadly - mistakes, but unlike the former case, where you bear the consequences of your own mistakes, here you bear the consequences of somebody else's mistakes and you have no choice not to. And on the top of that you're supposed to be thankful for it - after all, they were taking away your freedom for your own good!

I still don't believe their success will generalize.

You are free to follow The Experts (TM) off whatever cliff they are leading you to. It would be nice though to give people - especially those that are being proven right again and again in their conspiracy facts - an option to not to be dragged with you by the force of government coercion.

Said what from the start? There's quite a bit of nonsense in that category, most of which is still not backed up by these press releases.

This is a major part of why this matters: Normal sane questions about the official COVID / vaccination narrative were ALL lumped into the "5G towers" category in precisely this way. The intended effect of banning a doctor who says, "Maybe babies don't need vaccination" was to put them in the same "heretic" bucket as the "Bill Gates Depopulation" theorist.

This was an acceleration of the previous "stigmatize anti-vaxxers" paradigm that made any questioning about vaccine schedules or ingredients tantamount to "mass murder."

Injecting bleach is actually a valid treatment. I’ve had it done to me it works. For specifically a viral infection in my eye.

And granted I didn’t actually use bleach but betadine a strong disinfectant used to clean things after surgery. I can’t even remember if Trump said bleach or just disinfectant.

Nasal spray disinfectants I believe have strong studies on them for fighting COVID.

And you can buy it at wal-mart to throat gargle.

The whole bleach thing was a leftist conspiracy that rightists believes it. But there’s also similar medical usages to kill viruses.

Here’s Trumps actual comment

He continued.

"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."

All of which is a scientifically studied with positive results COVID treatment (inhaling nasal disinfectants)

Ah, you're right. My mistake.

Speaking of tech company censorship: Youtube deleted a video from pharmaceutical company Aytu Bioscience about a proposed technology for using UV light inside the lungs, which they released a press-release about a few days before Trump's comments and was developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai who had been working on it since 2016. Their Twitter account was also suspended for a little while. (I wonder if there was any internal discussion about that the Twitter Files journalists could look up?) Given the timing it seems very likely it was what Trump's comment was referring to (or at least the part of the comment mentioning light), it was probably mentioned to him in one of his regular coronavirus meetings. Youtube deleted the video because a New York Times reporter reported it to them:

I contacted YouTube about this video, which is being shared on tons of replies on Twitter & on Facebook, by people asserting that it backs up Trump's idea throwing it out there that UV rays kill coronavirus. YouTube just said it removed it for violating its community guidelines.

He also wrote a NYT article about it in which he talked to a Youtube spokesperson, which confirms the removal was intentional rather than purely automated. You'd think that if nothing else Youtube would have sufficient double-standards favoring credible institutions to not censor pharmaceutical companies talking about research they're involved with in cooperation with Cedars-Sinai, but apparently not.

That does not sound like an injection. It sounds like external application, as I have had done when I have had eye infections (albeit bacterial, not viral, so it was an antibiotic, not iodine). And that is the point: There are all sorts of substances which are beneficial when used externally, but harmful when used internally. Even the nasal spray study you link to below appears not be meant to be inhaled but rather to be applied to the lining of the nose. The actual study makes that clear: The goal is to develop something to "reduce[] nasal shedding", and they tested the effectiveness by using nasal swabs "collected at 5, 15, and 60 minutes post-dose to assess immediate and residual impact of treatment."

Yeah, it does seem that the treatment is to bathe the eye in iodine, rather than to inject it ["It is already used perioperatively as standard of ophthalmic care"].

My main point is there are treatments quite similar to injecting bleach. Eye baths because your eyes are an organ and not like your skin. Nasal sprays because that’s an internal treatment and diluted enough can kill viruses without threatening internal processes. Chemo therapy is even closer to injected something bad to kill bad and good.

Blueanon running with he said we should literally drink bleach probably did hurt the sale and development of betadine nasal sprays which probably costs more lives than a few people dying from drinking bleach. Because the product was too close to his comments and Trump of course could never be right.

And my point is that the treatment is NOT even remotely similar to injecting bleach. You are talking about localized treatments on the surface of the body -- the nasal sprays in question were applied to the nasal epithelium, were they not? And the eye baths are just that: Baths; the eye is immersed in fluid which surrounds the surface of the eye. There are, of course, [treatments that inject medicine into the eye}(https://www.aao.org/eye-health/treatments/eye-injections), but those appear to be antibiotics, not antiseptics, and even in those, AFAIK the medicine is confined to the eye, unlike injections that address infections, which are distributed throughout the body. And it is the "throughout the body" part that makes injecting bleach hazardous, is it not?

PS: I don't know whether Trump was right or wrong; for all I know, it is possible to develop some sort of injectable antiseptic. I am just saying that your example is not evidence one way or the other.

Going to be honest I just disagree. These uses seem similar though not identical to injection. Even moreso nasal sprays because your definitely digesting some of the substance.

I guess I simply don't understand that the fact that users might accidentally inhale a chemical that is not meant to be inhaled says anything about the viability of designing that or any other substance to be intentionally inhaled or injected. It seems completely irrelevant.

More comments

deleted

Yea it’s the same thing as the very fine people quote. Where he never said KKK were the fine people but the left decided to say he did and promoted it everywhere.

It reminds me of the MTG quote about the Rothschilds boiling down in popular culture to "Jewish space lasers," and now I get ads on Facebook for army patches for the "Jewish space laser corps."

Holy shit, I had no idea that wasn't what she'd actually said. I assumed it wasn't quite a direct quote, but a distillation of something she'd said, rather than a deliberate fabrication from a media snake looking for a dunk. MTG's actual post is (from my perspective) pretty kooky, but this doesn't justify the willful distortions. Jonathan Chait, the weasel that got that ball rolling, explains thusly:

To be clear, the story, which I wrote, did not say she used the words “Jewish space laser.” It accurately reproduced her entire post blaming the Rothschilds, and I noted that “the Rothschild family has featured heavily in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories since at least the 19th century.”

The story in which Chait definitely didn't say that she used the words "Jewish space laser" is titled "GOP Congresswoman Blamed Wildfires on Secret Jewish Space Laser". Every time that I think I have adjusted my views of journalists to be sufficiently low, I find out that I need to turn that mental ratchet once more.

Having just read the post, "GOP congresswoman blamed wildfires on secret jewish space laser" is... not a bad description. What's the willful distortion you're seeing here?

I had no idea that the same post was speculating on possible corruption as well.

It's almost as if reframing it in maximally silly terms will allow the non-kooky bits to be ignored.

I would consider an accurate and neutral single-sentence framing of MTG's post to be "MTG speculates that wildfires may be caused by industrial mistake with space-based solar power". The use of "laser" implies to almost any reader that this is an intentional, aimed weapon; MTG speculates that such a beam could look like a laser, not there is a weapon being used. There is no suggestion in her post that said "laser" is "Jewish" in anyway. I would consider describing her speculation as being a "secret Jewish space laser" to basically just be dishonest dunking.

"MTG speculates that wildfires may be caused by industrial mistake with space-based solar power".

I loathe journalists, and MTG is at least putatively on my side. Her post is written in the profoundly annoying "just asking questions" style which adds a degree of ambiguity, but I don't think your summation is accurate. She claims that connected officials gain fiscal advantage from the wildfires, and have implemented policy to maximize this advantage: the areas under threat from wildfires are the same areas where the high-speed rail project is planned to go through, and the same officials are investing in the power company supposedly causing the fires, the rail project the fires are enabling, while passing legislation to protect the power company from adverse consequences of the fire. The implication I'm reading is that they're setting the fires on purpose, not a mistake.

MTG herself uses the term "laser or beam of light" twice, making the claim that it's reasonable to attribute the fires to such space-based beams.

Does the industry in question even exist? Obviously the company is a thing, but do they actually have emitters or a ground station operating? Much less a setup scaled sufficiently to deliver significant power?

Having just read the post, "GOP congresswoman blamed wildfires on secret jewish space laser" is... not a bad description. What's the willful distortion you're seeing here?

Yes, it is a distortion, here is link to her original post.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-wildfires-space-laser-rothschild-execute.html

It is not "secret Jewish space laser", but "secret Rotschild space solar power microwave transmission"

Do not blame her, we are all science fiction nerds, we would love to live in world where launch costs were low enough to make this possible.

On the other hand, rather not - imagine how high would energy prices have to be to make this pay, or imagine the power of aerospace lobby to push for this bondoogle anyway.

Maybe MTG is visitor from another timeline, either utopian or dystopian compared to ours? This would explain many things.

SpaceX has plenty of military contracts with secret payloads. There are also plenty of military installations in California.

Beamed energy would be great for military logistics. Especially for the remote outposts in Afghanistan that we were still maintaining at the time of MTG's post.

Blue light is most probably a transformer frying or power lines arcing, but maybe not.

MTG's thesis is that a well-connected energy company is beaming energy down from space, and that these beams are being used to intentionally start wildfires, apparently to clear the way for the high-speed rail project.

"Secret": She implies a secret plan to use the collectors to set wildfires, and also implies that the company may have more satellites in space than is publicly known.

"Jewish": The Rotchschilds connection, natch.

"Space Lasers": the solar emitters are putatively in space, and she mentions eyewitness accounts of "lasers or blue beams of light", and then suggests that the solar emitter beam might resemble a laser or beam of light.

"Secret Jewish Space Lasers" is not a maximally-charitable interpretation of her claim, but it's certainly defensible. I do not think it can be fairly argued that the journalists in question are twisting her words. She really did claim that possibly-secret space-based satelites were being used by democrats and the Rothschild corporation to start wildfires with concentrated energy beams.

The whole bleach thing was a leftist conspiracy that rightists believes it. But there’s also similar medical usages to kill viruses.

Using bleach as universal cure is way older than Trump presidency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement

(Yes, know all problems with rational wiki, but it is good resource for all kinds of alternative medicine and miracle treatments. Consulting RW before you decide to use ancient native cure instead of soulless Western medicine might save your wallet and your life)

Whether bleach use increased during coronavirus panic in response to Donald's unfortunate utterances, is disputed.

https://reason.com/2020/04/28/the-myth-of-the-bleach-drinking-masses/

Why are you trying to lump him in with quacks, when he literally linked a mainstream optometry journal?

Injecting bleach is actually a valid treatment. I’ve had it done to me it works. For specifically a viral infection in my eye.

I, and I think many other people want more information about this.

Notice how the following paragraph I mention using betadine and not bleach (and Trump never said bleach but a disinfectant).

And yes this treatment was painful. But I also had a nasty eye virus and was unable to look at light for weeks before this treatment. It’s not the least bit enjoyable to apply a strong disinfectant directly to your eye.

https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/article/whats-the-buzz-about-betadine

And it was studied as a nasal spray for covid https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/Article/2022/February/Study-finds-nasal-spray-could-aid-battle-against-COVID

Again trump said disinfectant and bleach was blueanon. Drinking disinfectant probably wouldn’t work but it is used to reduce viral load when the virus is in the eyes, ears, throats.

Why do contrarians have to answer for every tinfoil conspiracy? Where are the generalized successes of the expert class in discussing controversial issues?

Per the OP:

As with most conspiracy facts...the crazy conspiracy theory guys who said it from the start were actually right all along.

Per the OP:

As with most conspiracy facts...the crazy conspiracy theory guys who said it from the start were actually right all along.

Not really. Crazy conspiracy guys were at the start saying:

COVID is fake

COVID is just a flu

COVID is killing tens of millions in China

COVID is dangerous only to Asians, White people are immune

COVID is going to kill us all, hide in a bunker!

and many more.

Official position was changing overnight by 180 degrees, while there were too many mutually contradictory "unofficial" positions to count.

Better question than "who was right in early 2020?" is "what the official authorities knew at the time and how they made their decisions?"

https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1607425359229890560

Yes, plenty of verifiable facts were and are dismissed as crazy conspiracy theories. Why does that mean people who were talking about them have to answer for theories about graphene or whatever?

If the contrarians have, indeed, went with the line "vaccine is not as efficient in combatting disease or particularly preventing its spread as was claimed particularly during the most fervent phase of vaccine advocacy", of course they don't have to answer for tinfoil conspiracies.

However, there are also people who did, say, claim that the vaccine is going to kill or sterilize something like a quarter or a half of the vaccinated population in a very short order, few months to an year, and who are now doing victory laps when it is revealed that, indeed, vaccine is not as efficient in combatting disease or particularly preventing its spread as was claimed particularly during the most fervent phase of vaccine advocacy, even though that's quite a different claim from the most lurid vaccine genocide visions.

Birthrates are down, cardiac incidents are up.

If you expect random High-school graduate citizens taking a side in a political debate to quantitatively accurate instead of merely directionally correct, then you're holding them to a higher standard that the government, media, and the academic-medical-industrial complex have held themselves for the past 3 years.

Again, "birthrates are down and cardiac incidents are up" - both something that could have multiple different explanations, such as COVID itself, lockdown aftereffects and other social developments than Covid - is qualitively different from the most lurid predictions of mass death and sterility, and even if one would manage to ascertain a partal correlation with vaccines, something I haven't actually even seen anyone conclusively show from the data, that would be far from something allowing the lurid-prediction-makers to start declaring they were correct all along.

Generally the random high-school-graduate citizens also generally don't develop these views by themselves but by trusting media figures, politicians and academic-medical-industrial figures - sure, these would be instances of the contrarian type, but still generally claiming credibility on the basis of their credentials etc.

Can you name any motters who are doing that? Because I thought our dissidents stayed pretty firmly within the bounds of rationality, although admittedly I got burned out on covid talk pretty quick.

There's been a few mottizeans that I recall claiming there would be unspecified declines in fertility due to the vaccine(including myself).

I don't recall anyone claiming "the vaccine will sterilize half the vaccinated population".

I wasn't talking about Motters here, more referring to my observation of some local Covid dissident types.

Motters! @Fruck how could you?? Our proper name is Mottizens thank you very much.

Ohhh you would be a good little mottizen wouldn't you? Not I! Fuck your pretty little cottage with the pretty little white picket fence and pretty little petunias in front of it. And your pretty little mailbox and the pretty little dog sitting off to the side prettily chewing on a pretty little possum carcass, and all the other trappings of your pretty little life. I am forming a resistance to the tyranny of friendliness imposed by zorba and his lackeys - sitting up in their ivory tower, clucking and stroking their beards, chuckling conspiratorially as they grow fat off the fruits of our labour. I say enough! I say we take back the night! And the first step is to stop being good little mottizens, paying your taxes and judging posts for Rationalatosk (who minds the tree of knowledge). Instead be a motter, be hard and tough and mumble a bit, and still help Rationalatosk but be snippy about it, and we will smash the state and send its minions running for the hills! Motters for life!

Ah I thought you said the first comment too, and I was going to say I don't think we need to worry about that 5g shit or sterilising half the population when we're encouraging free thinking on the motte. It does kind of feel like covid skeptic motters never get a victory lap, but I know that's mostly observation bias.

Both dissidents and experts contain multitudes. Some dissidents overstated, beyond what the evidence shows, the dangers of vaccines, but experts were also guilty of exagerating the harns of the virus itself. That the sane dissidents are by the mainstream media tarred with the same brush as the 5G qanon believers, but all experts aren't consider discredited by some of them, falsely, claiming that Covid was the fourth or fifth leading cause of death in all pediatric age groups, is the hypocrisy.

And now the existence of those nuts is going to be picked at by embarassed officials and censors to pretend that all of the criticism of their incompetent bungling was at the level of Nicki Minaj's cousin's friend's balls.

whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?

The Facebook leaker defeated Meta's internal security measures by taking photos of documents with her phone. If these were at-the-time unapproved attempts at leaking, then photos of screens by phones makes sense.

I wonder how many of these there will be

P.S: whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?

I don’t think this would be very likely, but maybe fear of keyloggers?

Old school field-craft making a come-back.

Can’t say I thought it was too likely, but well!

There’s probably more sophisticated ways for a company to keep track of who’s being a rat at this point, but I wouldn’t know much about it.

Let’s hold off on complaining about not getting more. If history is any indication, more will come.

If the intended release schedule for this is that we're going to be getting drops well into Jan or Feb, I'm probably just going to stop reading. I appreciate Musk for letting people report on it, but if this requirement to publish nothing off Twitter that isn't first reported on-site stays in effect, I'm going to lose my mind and patience.

Why? In someways I think it’s more interesting because it allows for responses that appear foolish days or weeks later. If you believe many actors are conflict theorist, then the drip drip drip exposes them.

It might be interesting from a "own my enemies" kind of view, but I'm not interested in owning the whomever, I'm interested in what actually happened. This drip-drip-drip / insistence on controlling the rate/flow of information is making me suspicious in ways I can't quite articulate properly.

It can only be interesting to the extent that there's actually interesting information coming out. A lot of releases are misses rather than hits, but all of them get hyped like they're about to prove that lizard people are real.

I don’t think they’ve been missed. It has been people saying “nothingburger because not XYZ” or “we knew that.”

To the first, later releases clarify that XYZ is not a good argument. To the second, ”knowing” something is different from knowing it. That is, confirmation is important.

((I can't help but think the combination of a December 26th release and the overtly culture-warry nature of theFP is intentional, given some other decisions; this does seem like the sort of efforts that you'd want to run if you didn't want to get a lot of gen-pop attention.))

@KellyKGA cited CDC statistics to argue that Covid was not the leading cause of child deaths from disease.

[Contemporaneous discussion here]. This one particularly bugs me because it was really bad work from the CDC, and either Twitter put a CDC slide deck referencing a preprint above their own ability to do math, or (to steelman) wanted the debunking of a bad study blocked for general trust or virtue of silence reasons. It's good that this wasn't in the list of things that the Biden team was forcing, but it's not so good to find out that it actually hit a human for review.

In any case, I'm really annoyed that Zweig doesn't talk at all about the Trump WH and what Twitter did or did not do during that time...

Yeah. It'd be either really philosophically convenient or inconvenient if the Trump White House's broader incompetence meant it also couldn't coordinate the level of meanness that the Biden White House has, but it's hard to tell if that's actually the case or if Zweig's just glossing over it. Banning talk of store runs hit a lot of stuff, and that's being overtly charitable and assuming it's not a byword for all of the mask-labeling that was flying around.

Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.

To an extent, but as with the last few posts, there's more to the matter than whether or not it was happening at all. The information here absolutely removes a lot of the more charitable options or explanations. The possibility that the more aggressive abuses of these labelings were just a side effect of a well-intentioned but purely-algorithmic and poorly-designed process was a least moderately plausible, and it was never clear to what extent twitter's 'manual' review ever touched a human or would ever consider appeals. For KellyKGA specifically, there were believable reasons she might have gotten a bunch of gang-reporters!

Nope! Get enough 'tattles', and be on the wrong side of a question, and out you go. You could hire an attorney and get twitter to do an internal audit (wtf?), and while that might get you unsuspended even that the highest levels of human review was... charitably not very good at math or far more interesting in the connotations or side effects of true information than the truth. That's kinda important, and really hard to prove from outside.

Likewise, 'everybody' knew that the CDC and White House were coordinating 'misinformation' work, because they published news saying exactly that. But it kinda makes a difference if they were just discussing policy at a theoretical level, or on an object level, or even if it were just specifically The World's Wrongest Man that the White House wanted to ban. But even Berenson's lawsuit wouldn't have been able to find that he was just one (high-profile) of a list that the government was sending to Twitter and regularly raising pressure on. And it's probably still not illegal! But even if every single one was similarly wrong, the White House singling out specific people and strongly encouraging social media companies to ban them is something quite a lot of people would deny was happening just six months ago.

I've interacted with some of the people doing review of internal, employee-generated content at Facebook, and they're seeming incapably of deductive reasoning.

I posted internally that since the COVID risk is concentrated among the elderly and we have few, if any people at the company that are 70+, then our risk profile is lower than the risk profile for the country as a whole.

This resulted in content removal and a meeting with the censors. I tried to explain the reasoning and it was like talking to a wall. I was effectively told that you're not allowed to do your own reasoning. Conclusions like this have to come from an "authoritative source" and that such sources are either government public health agencies or peer reviewed papers.

I was also told I didn't have a source on age distribution at the company, which would mean this was speculation which was also not allowed.

For KellyKGA specifically, there were believable reasons she might have gotten a bunch of gang-reporters!

Wait, can you explain what you mean? Your linked image just shows this person refusing to continue the debate.

KelleyKGA has a habit of tweaking the noses of fairly high-profile people: the guy in that screenshot is a previous (Trump-appointed) US Surgeon General, but compare here (bio).

That doesn't sound like a lot, but it doesn't take a lot to get a hatedom, these days.

One hour between first and last post in thread - better than previous twitterfiles releases!

This doesn't seem that surprising - headlines like Feds step up pressure on social media over false COVID-19 claims were plentiful and the censoring of professors etc for poor reasons has been covered extensively. And every tweet marked as misinformation or suspended account was already public information.

e: It'd be interesting for them to do deep dives into twitter's internal processes, or any kind of long-form piece. Instead, meandering twitter threads and context-free screenshots.

Notes from Trump-land: the cognitive dissonance of the Trump fandom being against the Trump vaccines is resolved in pre-pandemic reports that Trump is a germophobe, that he’s a man who trusts the American medical establishment including big pharma. It’s only natural that one man (no matter how smart and big-league clever) couldn’t be absolutely right on everything.

Also, he had Mike Pence (out of the fandom’s good graces since saying he wouldn’t halt or delay the tally on 1/6) run the Federal task force on the coronavirus. So, if fans can’t swallow the idea that Trump was fooled by Big Pharma, at least they can find solace in swamp Pence being in with the conspiracy. (“We should have trusted the fly all along.”)

I don't think his base was ever that strongly opposed to vaccines on principle (that came later after Biden won). Rather, they opposed masks, lockdowns, etc.

I think this assembled from a combination of aggressively pushing the vaccines, aggressively suppressing any debate about its dangers, creating a regime of zero liability for Big Pharma and it being pushed by the same people that did "masks, lockdowns, etc.". Anything with the same properties would encounter resistance, especially in the population which has low trust in the government from the start, and in the government controlled by their enemies doubly so. It's not the opposition to the idea of the vaccination per se, which was pretty fringe prior to that. It's the source and the implementation of this particular one. If there were a force in US politics which was genuinely concerned about health and genuinely tried to optimize for vaccine acceptance and not culture war, then they would coopt Trump and other right wing celebrities into the effort. But there are no forces in US politics that aren't in the war - they just don't survive anymore - so that wasn't going to happen. Everything (important) is a tribal issue now.

Easier path to resolution from my (admittedly tiny) corner of Trump-land - expedited development of vaccines was a good idea, was executed better than could reasonably be expected with the American federal government obstacles, and the vaccines represented an honest best effort to handle COVID-19. They may have even worked fairly well against vanilla COVID, although that's not entirely clear and became irrelevant in short order. There was no grand conspiracy, the vaccines aren't particularly dangerous, they're just incredibly disappointing when it comes to stopping variant transmission. Trump did approximately nothing wrong with regard to executive action on the vaccines.

The sins around vaccination have nothing to do with development and everything to do with the mandates (both the ones that survived challenges and the ones that were eventually struck down). These mandates were policies of the Biden administration and/or other entities following the federal lead on the topic. With regard to vaccines, the simple resolution to this set of claims rounds to Trump Good, Biden Bad.

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There is also a lot of contempt for the fact that vaccine producers were absolved of liability by the government, with their liability shifted to the gov't fund -- they feel like that's either 1) fishy or 2) irresponsible. T

Is that really the argument? Seems odd, since that has been standard procedure for vaccines since the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

COVID vaccines did not fall under the NVIC; the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act put COVID countermeasures as a whole under the sole jurisdiction of the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. There are valid reasons for that. some other anti-pandemic measures are similarly separated, but does impact a number of traits. I don't think it should change the responsibility calculus too heavily, but I've had no small number of people (including coworkers!) that saw the VICP as a rubber-stamp fund and the CICP as largely focused on minimizing outlays (I was never able to get good numbers on either assumption).

This was not helped further that the CICP took forever to start releasing compensation.

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Like /u/drmanhattan16,

Just FYI, this isn't how you mention people here. You would use "@" instead of "/u/".

Can we at least give some of the due necessary to the reasonable arguments for waving liability? In the middle of an ongoing pandemic that threatens million of lives you actually do have a pretty good case that a potentially dangerous vaccine is more useful than no vaccine at all and that is realistically your alternative if pharma companies feel as though they need enough rounds of testing to mitigate this additional liability. If they were only give to the very high risk populations and had some huge greater than 10% chance of complications that might still be a good play. The calculous is much different when forced on everyone but that's a different objection.

Like /u/drmanhattan16,

Just FYI, this isn't how you mention people here. You would use "@" instead of "/u/".

Did you mean to reply to someone else?

More comments

If they were only give to the very high risk populations and had some huge greater than 10% chance of complications that might still be a good play. The calculous is much different when forced on everyone but that's a different objection.

I don't think it's possible to separate that objection -- if you're going to force the vaccine on literally everyone over 12 and heavily market it (using government resources to boot) for toddlers on up (did they ever get it approved for infants? even worse if so), then the vaccine had better be awfully damned safe -- and if it's not, skin in the game would be helpful.

How many people would have even known that?

There's far too many cases where people just lack the historical knowledge to understand why/how normal something may be that seems odd from the outside looking in.

I do think there's a little more "they pushed untested technology on us" in the conservative world than your description

A lot of that is coming from conservative people in heavily-blue states or cities, where there really were attempts to make not getting the shots seriously harmful to careers and ability to be in society, and where any suspicion was treated as socially unspeakable.

A lot of military-adjacent older people (not saying conservative) also have inspiration from the military's previous Anthrax vaccine, which had a variety of pretty nasty effects and lead to some pretty severe paranoia. Combined with the weird behavior around the CICP (possibly just a combination of delays and higher standards of proof than the unofficial-autistic-baby-fund for other vaccines?) and sometimes ridiculous pressure being brought against critics of the mandates, it's not too hard to come up with Red Tribe motivations.

In net, I think the paranoia was wrong (modulo younger kids and the heart risk, albeit more b/c COVID risks are so low for that group anyway rather than the risk being clear), but the Blue Tribe assumptions that it was solely motivated by foundationless reasoning bugs me.

who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?

Incompetent computer users ... or competent whistleblowers? I was under the impression that these releases are all of management-approved, post-Musk-buyout results of trawling through historical archives, but if I'm wrong and any of the data were amassed contemporaneously, then it would just have been good personal security to collect them via "the analog hole" rather than via a screenshot that could be more easily logged and reviewed.

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