There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disagreement among researchers.
I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.
Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event.
Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.
I think this is a good place for authorship attribution AI's. A plugin that will identify text that resembles known PR and propaganda and links to the original source.
Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?
Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.
> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
If we're going to talk about the intelligence community, then the same criticism that gets used against the media needs to be brought up: the Iraq WMD.
> In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources
Where on earth do you get this from?
In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.
> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking
Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)
This was an interesting read, but I think there's something missed with fact-checkers. They seem to be caught in a strict binary of true and false when there's often a third possibility: we do not have the necessary information to either prove or disprove a claim/statement.
There are alternatives ( at least around the World ), that include a limited range of conclusions from "true", "imprecise", "out of context", "manipulated" to "false".
I agree but I think it has to do with credibility and authoritative sources that used to be credible within some reason no longer being so.
I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.
I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.
That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.
Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
It’s be fairly confused if a flat earther talked about GLOBAL warming.
On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.
From the OP: "There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.
My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."
I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.
> There is just more disagreement and dissension than you would know unless you took the time to reach out to people and speak to them in a more relaxed way.
That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.
> fake consensus that can become very misleading
It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:
Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.
I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.
Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.
You really hit the nail on the head with this comment.
Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.
Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.
It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....
Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.
Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.
That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.
Many HN users seem confident they know the truth, and that they know which sources are credible, and are comfortable suppressing anything contrary to what they already think, often without explanation. I don't think HN is quite an echo chamber yet, but it's well on its way.
> I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it
I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.
Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.
Which "we" are you speaking for here - since you're saying you won the war I guess you must be Soviet? You were having major debates about who the good guys were at the time - you had a non-aggression pact with Japan right up until the final weeks, and that very much affected the course of the war.
The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.
As far as I can tell this is a false premise. The scientific consensus on zoonotic origin was never really considered conclusive by anyone and was never really sold as being conclusive. There was a very strong backlash against the ridiculous theories spread by people like Tom Cotton that virus was engineered that absolutely soured the debate. And people like Trump and his sycophants who didn't just suggest lab leak but declared it as being overwhelmingly likely. That made honest debate extremely difficult. And even know the hand-wringing of "oh now they were right all along" is even worse. There was not then nor is there now sufficient evidence to declare this a settled debate. Trump is and was wrong. And Cotton shot himself the foot by ruining his credibility before trying to reset his opinion. In reality, we don't know. Zoonotic remains most likely. More investigation is warranted but is unlikely to turn up a smoking gun.
How can you read this then casually say Tom Cotton was spreading ridiculous theories that covid was engineered? One of the main points in the article is he never said that and what he did say was pretty reasonable. It’s ok if you think the article is wrong about that, but you should at least give a source for your claim at this point.
You’re incorrect on nearly all of this and haven’t “broken out” of the forced narrative. All I can suggest is you go back to the primary sources yourself. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take your preferred media outlet’s word for it. Dig it up and decide.
The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.
But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.
Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both.
While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.
Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.
Good thing they aren't monopolies, then. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Reddit are are all very popular places for people to post their views. And that's not counting the myriad lesser places like the one we're using now. And of course anybody can drop a few bucks on a blog of their own.
I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.
This argument seems to assume that Internet hosting is like air — a natural resource which by default is available for everyone to use, but social media companies restrict unfairly.
As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.
Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.
If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.
I agree with you in spirit, though I feel like the issue is more about whether social media are common carriers [1] or publishers.
They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.
I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.
Not all opinions deserve equal airtime. Fringe opinions should have to work harder to get to the mainstream. Isn’t that exactly what happened here? This is the fringe opinion that had the most inherent value and it’s proved that by breaking through. IMO I wish the platforms had censored more bad info than this. It’s crazy to me that there isn’t more friction for bad ideas.
There's also systematic censorship and disinformation against prophylaxis and early treatment information, which could prevent millions of hospitalisations and deaths. [1]
e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]
A recently released meta—analysis from the British Medical Journal suggests that the evidence base for ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID-19 is low.
Facebook's policy page only mentions censoring content suggesting that the virus was "man-made". Did Twitter actually ban users who suggested _only_ that the virus leaked from a lab? I'd be surprised because I follow some fairly big accounts there which have posted about the lab leak theory.
There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak".
Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc.
Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked...
...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.
What’s the difference? I suppose it is possible that the Wuhan bat hunters found this virus occurring naturally and just, you know, kept it around without telling anyone...
There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.
I'm generally in favour of the actions taken against misinformation but this situation surprises me. Lab leak always seemed plausible and non-crazy even if you think the odds are against it.
I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
If we accept that taking action against misinformation is good, then this sort of mistake will inevitably happen.
If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.
This is a good example of why opponents to actions against misinformation oppose it. Nobody should make these calls because the wrong call will be made eventually, and the power to silently mediate and manipulate discourse is very tempting.
If your pursuing a misinformation campaign it does make since to occasionally publish some facts. That way people can wring their hands if they should ban you or not, and so your supporters have something to say that you were right about.
I'm not sure whether it's plausible to non-experts like you or me is a valuable way to categorize it. But the reason to be cautious about it is the potential for violence. Both at an individual level against people perceived as Asian and at a global level of a hot war. A good example here is after 9/11. The US had a rash of violence against people who people thought looked Muslim, like the Sikh gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi [1]. We ended up invading not just Afghanistan but Iraq and we still haven't brought all the troops home.
> Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory.
Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:
> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.
> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.
"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":
> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.
This is classic “nurse vs. feminist nurse” cognitive distortion. Whether the virus was developed as a bio weapon, or simply as a product of well-intentioned gain-of-function research, is irrelevant to the factual basis of whether or not it escaped from the lab. We don’t need to establish how and why it was created, only that it was, in order to assess the likelihood of lab release as a root cause of the pandemic.
Exactly what many were warning about with big tech censorship and getting vilified for it. But it's good if it fails quickly and conclusively, instead of taking years to get to that point.
Remember, the discussion of the lab leak theory is strongly correlated with a rise in hate crimes against Asian-Americans. There were also lots of links made between the lab leak theory and needing to tighten immigration policies to keep out "undesirables".
The theory that "SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab" overlaps some with the theory that "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made", but they're not the same thing. According to the article Facebook's policy change is towards posts saying "SARS-CoV-2 was man-made". Did Facebook's policy ban posts which supported the "lab leak" theory but didn't claim the virus was "man-made"?
Twitter users got banned in early February 2020 because they were sharing images and videos from locked-down Wuhan that were deemed as inappropriate.
I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.
Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.
Also a reminder that "right wing" is such a wonderful term. Mention it, and all the discussion that you don't like can be easily shrugged off, or better, attacked.
Really, why is it so important that we need to pitch left against right? Why can we establish facts, carry out reasoning, and be explicit about interpretation vs conclusion?
How many countries can thrive when all that matters is partisanship or moralizing everything? Maybe Americans should learn a little history about Ming dynasty: The Tung-lin-tang turned everything into evil vs. good, to the point that the government couldn't get anything done and the ruling class couldn't get any fact straight. A dynasty with hundreds of millions of people was conquered by a barbarous tribe, and the entire nation became the laugh stock of the world in merely 150 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy).
By the way, Tung-lin-tang were experts of mind reading. Their most effective method of attacking their political opponent is to attack their motive. To them, narrative was all that matters.
This is true of almost all the social media "censorship" by the way. They have multiple governments either directly passing laws requiring content removal, or pressuring them to remove more.
Facebook, Twitter, and much of the news media have been in the service of CCP as part of an influence operation and suppression of dissent.
There needs to be an investigation. The people involved in these decisions need to be put under oath and testify how they came to the decision to ban users. Emails and messages should be subpoenaed to see if there was illegal coordination across services. There needs to be an complete investigation if any of the people involved were being influenced by or were agents of the CCP.
Reminder that Facebook and Twitter banned users for talking about the lab-leak theory. Youtube accounts also got demontized/banned.
Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.
It's one more example of how yesterday's "misinformation" can become tomorrow's "information", and how dangerous it is for sites to censor entire conversations because they (or their so-called 'fact checkers') believe in one side of a narrative.
Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?
Have you got a link to examples? I’m wondering if they weren’t also saying that China deliberately leaked the virus.
Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.
A Infamous case was Twitter baning Zerohedge because of it.
And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it).
Zerohedge getting banned from Twitter for publishing an expose of the Wuhan Lab which is pretty close to what is acknowledged as a probable story these days is the most high profile example.
And the amount of evidence in both cases is equal right now - slim and circumstantial. Just because one is political doesn't make it more worthy of censorship if you're removing content based on "misinformation." There's no real evidence underlying either statement.
Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same."
Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut.
I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.
I agree and have experienced what you wrote, except I have no idea what your last paragraph means. What are you referring to / talking about? It feels like maybe an example of the phenomenon we're talking about lol
There used to be a lot of media, with a lot of different motivations. Now there are only a couple of major companies running most of it, and a small number of sources that everyone else rewrites.
I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.
People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.
My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.
Genuine question: were people ever reading the source material? Seems like a dubious claim that folks of yesteryear read deeply into original sources. Most people read headlines and attention grabbing quotes and this was just as true 100 years ago. I recently read about the Russian revolution and it was similar to today.
There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.
"Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The Machine Stops, page 18
Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.
It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.
Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume.
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison
To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only.
Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?
"everyone is just repeating talking points they read online"
The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet.
People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative.
It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.
This has been a horrifically sad accepted reality of US higher education for a generation. Students are easily-influenced, naive, and economically vulnerable.
A thread about how the mainstream media is eating crow over being so wrong here is not really the best place in the world for you to grind your axe with Zerohedge.
Yeah I’m curious too..like do people remember a time when everyone formed unique and contrasting views about national subjects they didn’t personally have in depth domain knowledge of? Whats the expectation here?
The extinction of species and even languages triggers mass self-examination. But entire cultures are currently evolving at a speed and in a direction that will essentially lead to their extinction within two or three generations, and few people are mourning the loss yet.
Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.
The media is so disappointing these days. A lot of people don't remember this, but the mainstream media outlets were actually playing down the coronavirus pandemic at the start. Then they attacked the travel ban to China. Then did a complete U-turn. Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is. It seemed like they hated Trump and would fight anything he did.
I saw a viral clip of the Kayleigh McEnany pointing out this hypocrisy and the immediate response as she dropped the mic and walked off was someone in the press shouting "you were prepared for that!". No shit she was prepared for that? That's her job? How is that a bad thing? Oh, because your gotcha question didn't work. Ridiculous.
> Pelosi was dancing in the streets of Chinatown San Francisco to prove how safe and not racist she is.
Why does this keep coming up?
This was literally a problem at the time: a pandemic in China was resulting in a huge amount of local racism and ostracism of American Chinese descendants and expats, people who, by you know, being in a completely different country, weren't somehow magically more dangerous then anyone else.
The absolute most racist and non-sensical reaction people had to COVID-19 was to immediately decide that local asian people were immediately dangerous viral vectors.
I'm not disappointed the media got Covid wrong at various points in time. Most people got Covid wrong at the beginning. And almost everyone, including me, has had a bad Covid take at least once.
I didn't see Covid coming. And if someone really saw it coming, they could have made thousands/millions shorting the stock market (and some people did).
Point is, I don't view this as grounds to attack the media. I do find it disappointing that the media is usually not willing to admit their mistakes, and usually doesn't do a good job at expressing scientific uncertainty.
None of the articles you cite demonstrate what you seem to think they do. When the number of cases was minuscule, the threat to Americans was low and those articles were spot on: Keep vigilant, get your flu shot, but don't stress too much yet. Citing Pelosi visiting San Francisco (at a time when there were zero cases in the region, but a growing number of anti-Asian hate crimes) again doesn't make a point to any reasonable person. These claims speak only to zealots.
More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.
Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point. It did nothing for testing or tracing. It was the laziest, least-effort action possible. And to be clear, long after all of these things, Trump declared that the number of cases would soon be 0. He made similar "nothingburger" comments for months.
No, every bit of cynicism about the media coverage of travel bans seems 100% justified. For context, I'm from the UK where we have a right-wing Brexit-supporting government that's perceived very much as a Trump analogue - except they didn't impose travel bans on places like China early in the pandemic. Which means that over here, people blame our pandemic deaths on the supposed fact that our Government avoided placing restrictions on travel because they're evil right-wingers who were too worried about the damage to the economy that would cause. There was literally a talking point where the Guardian dug up an estimate that imposing travel restrictions on China would've delayed the outbreak here by something like a month, but it had to be a ban on all travellers who'd been in China within 14 days and not just direct travel - that is, it specifically had to be a Trump-style travel ban, an Italy-style one would not have worked. Meanwhile, their US coverage was attacking Trump for his travel ban.
Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse in his electoral campaign to reinstating them with the exact same rules as Trump used as his first act in office, and the mainstream media cheered him on every step of the way...
> More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.
> But you find issue with the media.
> Incredible.
The HN topic is about the media, so I'm talking about the media.
> Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point
I'm not defending Trump. I'm pointing out media hypocrisy. What did they do? Call the travel ban racist. Their behaviour has been very partisan, often at the expense of the truth. Exhibit A: the lab leak theory in the OP.
> It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do
I thought the federal government does not even have the legal power to do so. Personally, though, I think giving local government more power is a genius design by the founding fathers.
> was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe.
I'm not sure if this claim is true, either. Trump did at least two things: 1. Signed a deal with pharma companies to promise that the federal government would buy their vaccines to every American so the companieswould be all in to develop vaccines. 2. Promised to give resources to state governments. Both Cuomo of NY and Newsom of CA thanked government for keeping its promises.
This last year alone has made me lose more faith in the democratic party and the media altogether. Not only did they push a radical agenda with retribution, they did it like religious people used to do centuries ago. Don't challenge the status quo or face reprecussions (fine, demobilization, banned). Now egg on their faces.
Over the last several years, it's become clear to me what the large social media companies want to be: de facto world governments.
They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals.
We can provincially argue about who can say what in the US on which platforms, or what the rules _might_ be to demonetize and/or kick people off platforms, but at the end of the day, the platforms themselves, through means mostly opaque to us, are negotiating as if they were our local tyrannical government with complete control over the public square and public places.
I understand that for many this is completely far-fetched and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a difficult thing to freely admit and grasp. It's also very difficult for those that are currently happy with whatever the most recent decisions are.
Yes, the net is still (mostly) free and open, and competitors _might_ come along and take the place of the current major social networks, but at heart this is a problem based on generalizing and universally abstracting social interactions. You could split up and/or dismantle every major player today and be in the exact same spot five or ten years from now when the next ones come along.
I am happy that more and more people are finally waking up to the danger here. If we are allowed to adequately describe the nature of this problem, we might have a shot at fixing it.
Social media companies just want to make money. It's people who want social media companies to act like government. Originally, Facebook was pro free speech because in a vacuum that's what would make the most money. Facebook only started censoring when people started complaining about it.
That's a pretty bizarre take considering how incredibly narrow their authority is. The hottest hot takes on this topic all came from elected officials and second-rate professional media.
The US federal government is basically a giant case of regulatory capture so many people understandably confuse power and influence. However the distinction remains and it is of essential importance. None of the big tech companies have any real power, all they have is influence. In countries where they don’t have politicians under their influence they are helpless.
I _almost_ am completely on your side in this discussion. The facts of the matter are as you describe.
I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want.
The game they're playing is not direct application of political power, it's subtly using influence over a decade or two to position world governments where they want them. If I had to guess, they'll leave those governments in place as polite fictions, much as the Roman Senate continued to "defend" the Republic for a long, long time after Augustus changed all of that.
By the way, astute observers in various governments know the game being played, it's just very difficult to directly move against companies that appear to be cooperating. Folks want their Farmvilles. My money says that we'll see a lot more regulatory capture with various reforms over the next few years, the political calculus being that it's better to absorb them than fight them (at least short term, which is good enough to get elected a few more times).
One problem with politically charged issues is that one's bias can significantly color unresolved factual issues. In the article the early 'red flags' pointed out in the January 2020 study by The Lancet left clear open questions regarding the Seafood Market hypothesis, but many in the media glossed over these red flags. Now that additional facts are coming to light including the fact that multiple scientists at the lab were hospitalized with Covid like symptoms in late 2019, the facts are starting to pierce through the early dismissal of the lab leak theory by many journalists. I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred. I really like the site https://www.allsides.com/ that provides Left/Center/Right bias indicators for any story so you can read all sides and get the gist of how politics is coloring current stories in the media.
> I think this will result in a rethink of how we tag unresolved topics as "False Information" or before enough facts are gathered. Perhaps a "Controversial" tag would be preferred.
If anything, it will taint the credibilty of people who claim they have the insight to tag the information's credibility in the first place.
Weren't scientists from the Chinese CDC actually authors of the Lancet article that everyone cited? It doesn't seem like they were trying to push any seafood market hypothesis either.
The author of that article is actually Peter Daszak of Ecohealth Alliance, that was funding the Wuhan lab for gain of function research, seemly using money from US government (NIH and another department I can't recall now).
EDIT: why people are downvoting this? I got something wrong? The Peter Daszak that signed the article is not the same one that runs Ecohealth Alliance?
There were also a number of HN stories posted early in the pandemic concerning the lab-leak hypothesis. These paint a ... complicated ... picture of that theory and those who advocated for it. Few of the submissions had any significant discussion, I'm simply going off what was submitted to HN.
(Note that there may well have been other submissions which were flagged and killed, or which don't match my search terms --- I included one such addition based on a variant of terms.)
In general the early claims of a lab leak:
- Lacked any specific proof.
- Came from sources with questionable credibility.
- Were rejected by others with no specific allignment to those claiming the leak, and with general credibility.
I'll note that the leak hypothesis remains unproven, though the evidence supporting a serious, independent, and pointedly, non-Chinese-led investigation is mounting. I found the Bulletin of Concerned Scientists article a week or so back persuasive.
But the point remains that attributing an original cause to some event is complex, and requires a reality-based investigation grounded in facts rather than ideology or motivated reasoning. Much (though not all) of the lab-leak advocacy has been lacking in this objectivity, and even the most persuasive arguments to date make a case for the possible origin, not a certainty.
I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak. Preventive measures (themselves reflecting an evolution of understanding over time) and vaccines (rejected by a disappointing fraction of lab-leak enthusiasts) remain the most potent tools we have.
Consideration for costs, and prevention (or early alerting) of future outbreaks do depend in part on determining ultimate origin. That's something to keep an eye on, but not the principle concern of the moment.
> I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak
It would have mattered a lot back in early 2020, when the (circumstantial) evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled. And I’m not sure what your point is—are you implying that the world is incapable of both handling the pandemic and investigating its origins simultaneously? Like, we are going to get collectively distracted or something? No—investigate the origins now. This is not something to delay on.
The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.
IMO, determining the origin of the virus is of much more consequence than who was right and who was wrong back in 2020. If the virus crossed over naturally, it's reasonable to conjecture that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often in the future. If it was human error in a lab, I would actually be relieved -- this seems like something that's much easier to correct. FWIW, I do think available evidence supports a lab leak more than any other hypothesis.
I agree that it's extremely important. If it was a lab leak, there are many safety process and regulation improvements we might be highly motivated to make. It's a thing we can actually have some control over. If it was a natural virus, there's good reason to collect and study more pathogens so we have a head start if one of them crosses into humans. Not that both of these things aren't good responses to the pandemic, but having a specific answer will direct more funding at the problem.
Politics has made it very likely that we will never know where it started, but that's okay. More important is how the next one could start, which is being investigated more thoroughly now. If we survive the current and future variants of covid we'll be better placed for the next plague. If not for the systems put in place because of SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 could have spread far more widely before being detected.
Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.
Is it? We can assume that both things happened and prepare better for both types of development in the future. In the case of lab release, details would have to emerge to be reactive about fixing any issues with procedures. That doesn't mean that we can't be proactive in analyzing current procedures and trying to find and correct weaknesses.
I read spillover a few years ago, which is all about zoonotic crossover events, would recommend it, even if it is a bit dry in parts.
The problem is, as an expansionist species we're naturally going to encroach on natural reservoirs for pathogens.
The smoking gun of people working at the virology institute may yet turn out to be nothing more than a red herring, if they live and work in the epicentre of where the outbreak started, it only stands to reason they'd also run the risk of catching it.
I wanted to add -- the two most compelling pieces of information I've seen that make the lab accident theory more plausible to me are:
1) The verified existence of the bat-originating corona virus that killed 3 miners with Pneumonia some years ago being housed/researched in the WIV
2) David Baltimore of Cal Tech's remark ""When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2"
Thanks for the recommendation. I will check this out asap!
To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.
Readit News
I think this part of the text really sums up everything I hated about reading the news and social media in 2020. Each site seemed to be funneling you into a single source of truth and way of not only thinking, but FEELING about an event. I don't like being reminded of corporate sponsored social movements if I open facebook/google/amazon/twitter. I don't want my app reminding me to vote/get vaccinated(I did both btw) every time I open it without a way to dismiss and select 'I already did, stop reminding me.' I don't want reddit creating a central sub-page for discussing [Current Event] within the narrow bounds of what their moderators think is acceptable. I don't like non-dismissable context text on twitter and under youtube videos that are often off topic and triggered by bad speech detection that simply take you to a link dump of regular news articles. I don't like the idea that there's an oligopoly on "truth" and "credible sources." No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking, and the reality that so much casual skepticism on a variety of topics was suppressed and equivocated with being a flat-earther is sickening.
Which is a big problem. In the intelligence community, people are taught to distinguish between data items from different sources, which may indicate confirmation, and data items from the same source via different paths, which don't.
Is this a real review or is this person writing their review from a script? Am I interacting with a real person or someone paid to sway the public opinion of something on a forum?
Edit: Maybe we could prevent more influence by Satya @ MS and the like. "In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..." https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
> what was most notable about this episode is that it was not just CNN which reported this fraudulent story. An hour or so after the network shook the political world with its graphics-and-music-shaped bombshell, other news networks — including MSNBC and CBS News — claimed that they had obtained what they called “independent confirmation” that the story was true.
> All of this prompted the obvious question: how could MSNBC and CBS News have both purported to “independently confirm” a CNN bombshell that was completely false? The reason this matters is because the term “independently confirm” significantly bolsters the credibility of the initial report because it makes it appear that other credible-to-some news organizations have conducted their own investigation and found more evidence that proves it is true. That is the purpose of the exercise: to bolster the credibility of the story in the minds of the public.
> But what actually happens is as deceitful as it is obvious. When a news outlet such as NBC News claims to have “independently corroborated” a report from another corporate outlet, they often do not mean that they searched for and acquired corroborating evidence for it. What they mean is much more tawdry: they called, or were called by, the same anonymous sources that fed CNN the false story in the first place, and were fed the same false story.
> NBC News pretended they had obtained “independent confirmation” when all they had done was speak to the same sources that fed CNN.
What do you mean by this? And I'm not being snarky, really.
Is it? What if the alternative is that people feel the wrong way about things?
Where on earth do you get this from?
In additional to the yellow cake fiasco, remember the pressure US and British intelligence came under find kompromat on UN security council members to bully them into voting for the Iraq invasion.
Complete and utter lap dogs.
Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...
I remember watching one of those movies like Zeitgeist 15 years ago (but it was about physics) and being enthralled by it and eagerly shared everything I learned with a bunch of people for months.
I eventually learned like 80%+ of that movie was made up BS, purposefully made to look more credible than it actually was.
That ruined the entire thing for me. It wasn't ethical or right to pick and choose pieces from a dishonest source -- The whole thing was thrown out much like not credible witnesses in a court case.
Again, I totally agree with the consequences of this and that it's not a good thing but if you met someone who talked about the flat earth nonstop and then told you about global warming, would you listen with the same openness if they believed the earth was round?
On a serious note I’ve learned to not take anything as gospel. Facts aren’t binary, they sit on a spectrum and also in an ecosystem. Given the natural information compression that exists in thought and language it’s impossible to be too sure of anything. The one thing I’ve stopped however is being 100% sure of anything. Of course I will dismiss obvious BS from sociopaths but on the other end of the spectrum I also tread more lightly.
My strong suspicion is that this is true across domains of expertise, and is creating a lot of bubbles of fake consensus that can become very misleading. And I don’t have a solution."
I've also found this to be true on HN, though slightly less so. The above comment might be an example, where it oversimplifies something and everyone just appears to agree.
That's been my biggest problem with most conversation I have. Nuance has been lost.
> fake consensus that can become very misleading
It's PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION / Social desirebility bias: Preference falsification is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one's true preference. The public frequently convey, especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from what they truly want, often because they believe the conveyed preference is more acceptable socially. It include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system:
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580
Why would anyone admit to being a [Insert anything against the establishment/mainstream media narrative]? You just get vilified and attacked.
I know several people and many qualified people (doctors) who got banned from YouTube, FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit and got "Disinformation" label slapped on their posts. Even on HN itself, there was a strange stink in the responses to a few of my comments simply stating that we shouldn't simply ignore this theory. Most people were responding with links to places like Snopes, Politifact, NYTimes, WaPo, MSNBC etc - places which have shown their biases several times in history but people kept trusting them as "authoritative" sources. The "fact checkers" were doing nothing more than narrative control but it was enough to chastise people. Some were really mean comments. I would expect such responses from Reddit but I wasn't expecting it on HN. The biggest irony was that we were being accused of being in a cult.
Does anyone think these platforms will now go back and "uncensor" those accounts? Will apologies be issued? I doubt it.
Frankly I wish you were a journalist more than this author that we are commenting on. He lacks your judgment.
Just to add to your point the most obvious tell for these kinds of suppression activities is the utter lack of curiosity.
It should have been a trigger for curiosity and investigation immediately that this virus happened to emerge in the same city as China's only BSL4 lab. You know the BSL4 lab with NIH and NAID grants specifically specifying taking bat born Corona viruses and infecting humanized mice with them.....
Curious journalists would have identified these earlier.
Unfortunately, journalist these days appear to really really enjoy dunking on each other on Twitter and doing anything they can to own the right winger / white supremacist / whatever they are calling people that don't agree with everything they say.
That doesn't take much brains it just takes an affinity for sadistic behavior.
On topics that are so niche there are no discernible ideological battle lines it can be decent.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
I basically agree with the sentiment, but some of this stuff is tricky. We really do need everyone to get vaccinated, in the same way we need everyone to not dump their sewage in the middle of the street, in order to protect the health of the public at large.
Imagine we were living during WWII and having this discussion. Would you feel differently? Because I don’t think we could have won the war if we were simultaneously having major internal debates about who the good guys were.
The same goes for everyone else. France had major internal debates about who the good guys were. So did the UK. So did the USA. So did Ireland. Everyone took took particular actions on particular timelines, made particular compromises, and they were right to do so.
The lab leak is overwhelmingly likely. It’s the Occam’s Razor without question. It’s still a hypothesis to be clear. It’s not proven. It could be wrong. But if we are assigning probabilities, it’s extremely one sided. It should have been the leading hypothesis from the beginning.
But Trump said it, so it must be wrong. We must find reasons for it to be not only wrong, but worthy of ridicule. And when those narratives fall, we must keep shifting the goal posts. And when that doesn’t work anymore, we must blame our failure on republicans in some roundabout way.
Sorry, that’s not how we science. We have to put the damn political tribal warfare away for a minute.
While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just a matter of Facebook / Twitter / YouTube needing a better moderation process - this is more fundamental. No person or organization - no matter how benevolent or wise - should have the power to declare truth in a society.
Fringe opinions need constitutional protection - regardless of the era or the technology.
The power to silence will always be abused.
I also disagree that sites moderating is against the intent. Freedom of speech is one right, but so is freedom of association. Should HN be required by law to platform anybody with an "unpopular fringe opinion"? I'd say no. Using government power to force participation in speech someone finds odious is just as bad as using government power to shut down speech.
As everyone here should know, it’s not like that: hosting can be awfully expensive, especially for media content. Social media companies receive money from advertisers, and use that money to host content from users and partners that hopefully makes those ads look appealing too. It’s that simple.
Should these companies be compelled by the government to display content that makes their customers (advertisers) look bad? That seems like an awfully deep intrusion into a private business.
If the social media companies truly were monopolies, that would be another thing. But it’s hard to make that argument when new entrants like Snap and TikTok are able to conquer entire market segments and reach $100B valuations in a matter of years.
They shield themselves when they claim to be a carriers, yet act like publishers. The monopoly aspect, I agree, would be more important to speech, given they behave as publishers of what you may as well consider on-spec content.
I'd like to get clear on to what degree they should be considered carriers or publishers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
e.g. YouTube recently censored the Ivermectin Global Summit, in which doctors and scientists showed the overwhelming scientific evidence for Ivermectin from around the world. [2]
1. https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/nj9713/ivermect... (video with timestamps and my summary of the key points)
https://ebm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/05/26/bmjebm-2021-111...
How can you be so gung-ho with relatively new vaccines, but bury relatively benign and longer standing interventions?
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of function" research, what practical impact the research could reasonably have been predicted to have, etc.
Still, if your theory is that the lab took a bat virus, performed some research on it such as "serial passaging" to determine if it could mutate to become more infectious to humans, the virus does mutate (thus proving the hypothesis), and then a sample of the mutated virus is accidentally leaked...
...that seems like a plausible theory, and it's now showing up in mainstream discussions; eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca.... But I could easily imagine that being considered a suggestion the virus was "man-made", and censored.
I don't envy the task of making a call on any of this stuff.
If you're in favor of taking action against misinformation, then you should be willing to accept this situation as an acceptable failure. I'm not willing to accept that.
Who would be the one to determine what is misinformation and what is not?
We shouldn't take any action, at least at a governmental level. And certainly not on the level of a big corporation like Facebook.
It's very embarrassing that Facebook and YouTube banned this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi
Can we define/refine the concept of "lab-leak theory" a bit? Because some of the stuff floating around a year ago was a bit unhinged from reality:
> You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world.
* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/why-do-politicians-keep-brea...
> Ebright helped The Washington Post debunk a claim that the COVID-19 outbreak can somehow be tied to bioweapons activity, a conspiracy theory that’s been promoted or endorsed by the likes of US Sen. Tom Cotton, Iran’s supreme leader, and others.
> But Ebright thinks that it is possible the COVID-19 pandemic started as an accidental release from a laboratory such as one of the two in Wuhan that are known to have been studying bat coronaviruses.
* https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav...
"In the Shadow of Biological Warfare: Conspiracy Theories on the Origins of COVID-19 and Enhancing Global Governance of Biosafety as a Matter of Urgency":
> Two theories on the origins of COVID-19 have been widely circulating in China and the West respectively, one blaming the United States and the other a highest-level biocontainment laboratory in Wuhan, the initial epicentre of the pandemic. Both theories make claims of biological warfare attempts. According to the available scientific evidence, these claims are groundless.
* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7445685/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
Facebook's April 2020 covid-19 policy notice only mentions "man-made". https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
I know that my main information source on the virus back at the time was a Chinese lady expat living in the States who was writing for Epoch Times, not the most credible source generally speaking but on this she was ahead of the MSM by at least a day, that is when the MSM wasn’t ignoring what was happening in China completely.
2017 conference at (Wuhan Institute of a virology) with gain of function research being top priority: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/International_Confe...
Ecohealth Alliance partnership: https://web.archive.org/web/20210323171425/http://english.wh...
US Gov from state department: http://web.archive.org/web/20210116001621/https://www.state....
EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak discussing gene editing in coronaviruses in december 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Y843FFJvI
Note: The documentation isn’t even new... all those people banned and censored via Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc [1], have been saying this the entire time. Its kind of amazing to watch both realities (left wing media va alternative media) collide. Gives me hope to be honest.
[1] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...
Really, why is it so important that we need to pitch left against right? Why can we establish facts, carry out reasoning, and be explicit about interpretation vs conclusion?
How many countries can thrive when all that matters is partisanship or moralizing everything? Maybe Americans should learn a little history about Ming dynasty: The Tung-lin-tang turned everything into evil vs. good, to the point that the government couldn't get anything done and the ruling class couldn't get any fact straight. A dynasty with hundreds of millions of people was conquered by a barbarous tribe, and the entire nation became the laugh stock of the world in merely 150 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macartney_Embassy).
By the way, Tung-lin-tang were experts of mind reading. Their most effective method of attacking their political opponent is to attack their motive. To them, narrative was all that matters.
The reputations of media outlets, social or otherwise, are to be protected at all costs.
This is true of almost all the social media "censorship" by the way. They have multiple governments either directly passing laws requiring content removal, or pressuring them to remove more.
There needs to be an investigation. The people involved in these decisions need to be put under oath and testify how they came to the decision to ban users. Emails and messages should be subpoenaed to see if there was illegal coordination across services. There needs to be an complete investigation if any of the people involved were being influenced by or were agents of the CCP.
Let's call it for what it is - employees of Facebook and Twitter and Google were complicit in a coverup of malfeasance that cost hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. Named individuals set these policies and put them into action - they need to be exposed and held accountable.
Fauci has now completely inverted his statement...
Deleted Comment
Will there be apologies given to the people banned, isolated from participating in socialization during a pandemic where online communication was a vital tool for human connection?
Deleted Comment
https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid-19-misinfo-update/
I do not see where discussion lab leak is prohibited.
Saying “it is possible but very unlikely that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab” is talking about the lab-leak theory. Saying “the virus was cooked up and leaked from a Wuhan lab to hurt Trump’s re-election chances” is also talking about the lab-leak theory.
And all that Zerohedge did was point out a lot of public documents, nothing private, and no bioweapon theory. (Twitter claimed Zerohedge had doxxed the scientist, but Zerohedge only had shown the official lab website and documents from it).
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-coronav...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/zerohedge-banned-from-twitter-...
Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online.
Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".
Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut.
I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.
Who isn't?
The people that answered "I'm not" to that question, those people are the problem.
Let's get them fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.
Deleted Comment
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison
Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?
The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet.
People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative.
It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.
I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking
Would you mind sharing some examples, as well as the counterpoint arguments you add to the real life conversation?
I've seen claims like this before, and it almost always comes from people who get their news from places like Zerohedge or Infowars.
Ironically, their twitter account was banned precisely for reporting on the possibility that the virus was a lab leak:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zerohedge-twitter-ban-over-co...
A thread about how the mainstream media is eating crow over being so wrong here is not really the best place in the world for you to grind your axe with Zerohedge.
Also, what are info wars?
Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/time-for-a-reality-che...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/03/why-we-sho...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/world/europe/coronavirus-...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/29/8008132...
I saw a viral clip of the Kayleigh McEnany pointing out this hypocrisy and the immediate response as she dropped the mic and walked off was someone in the press shouting "you were prepared for that!". No shit she was prepared for that? That's her job? How is that a bad thing? Oh, because your gotcha question didn't work. Ridiculous.
Why does this keep coming up?
This was literally a problem at the time: a pandemic in China was resulting in a huge amount of local racism and ostracism of American Chinese descendants and expats, people who, by you know, being in a completely different country, weren't somehow magically more dangerous then anyone else.
The absolute most racist and non-sensical reaction people had to COVID-19 was to immediately decide that local asian people were immediately dangerous viral vectors.
I didn't see Covid coming. And if someone really saw it coming, they could have made thousands/millions shorting the stock market (and some people did).
Point is, I don't view this as grounds to attack the media. I do find it disappointing that the media is usually not willing to admit their mistakes, and usually doesn't do a good job at expressing scientific uncertainty.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't find this. Can you send a link?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK8P8FQWozA
Not exactly dancing in the streets, but definitely encouraging people not to fear.
Dead Comment
More critically, you have a higher standard of every random article in every newspaper than you do of agencies actually responsible. Which is truly dystopian.
Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point. It did nothing for testing or tracing. It was the laziest, least-effort action possible. And to be clear, long after all of these things, Trump declared that the number of cases would soon be 0. He made similar "nothingburger" comments for months.
But you find issue with the media.
Incredible.
Also, remember that the current US president literally went from using the idea that travel bans were dangerous, counterproductive and made things worse in his electoral campaign to reinstating them with the exact same rules as Trump used as his first act in office, and the mainstream media cheered him on every step of the way...
> But you find issue with the media.
> Incredible.
The HN topic is about the media, so I'm talking about the media.
> Speaking of which, Trump's "travel ban" (that wasn't a travel ban) was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe. It did nothing to restrict US citizens traveling to and from the affected areas unrestrained, which thousands continued to do, even if we believed it would be remotely effective at that point
I'm not defending Trump. I'm pointing out media hypocrisy. What did they do? Call the travel ban racist. Their behaviour has been very partisan, often at the expense of the truth. Exhibit A: the lab leak theory in the OP.
I thought the federal government does not even have the legal power to do so. Personally, though, I think giving local government more power is a genius design by the founding fathers.
> was the single action taken after the virus was already spreading uncontrolled in NY, Washington State, and Europe.
I'm not sure if this claim is true, either. Trump did at least two things: 1. Signed a deal with pharma companies to promise that the federal government would buy their vaccines to every American so the companieswould be all in to develop vaccines. 2. Promised to give resources to state governments. Both Cuomo of NY and Newsom of CA thanked government for keeping its promises.
They won't admit that, and you'll hear a lot of gab about algorithms and cooperation with various governments, but at heart it appears to me that this is cooperation with various governments as a government themselves. It's a negotiation among equals.
We can provincially argue about who can say what in the US on which platforms, or what the rules _might_ be to demonetize and/or kick people off platforms, but at the end of the day, the platforms themselves, through means mostly opaque to us, are negotiating as if they were our local tyrannical government with complete control over the public square and public places.
I understand that for many this is completely far-fetched and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a difficult thing to freely admit and grasp. It's also very difficult for those that are currently happy with whatever the most recent decisions are.
Yes, the net is still (mostly) free and open, and competitors _might_ come along and take the place of the current major social networks, but at heart this is a problem based on generalizing and universally abstracting social interactions. You could split up and/or dismantle every major player today and be in the exact same spot five or ten years from now when the next ones come along.
I am happy that more and more people are finally waking up to the danger here. If we are allowed to adequately describe the nature of this problem, we might have a shot at fixing it.
Being a government is definitely the best and easiest way to make money.
Deleted Comment
I disagree, however. Influence at the scale these companies have is its own power. There's a reason Zuckerberg is a fan of Caesar Augustus; with the proper and delicate application of influence in the right places, you can get whatever it is you want.
The game they're playing is not direct application of political power, it's subtly using influence over a decade or two to position world governments where they want them. If I had to guess, they'll leave those governments in place as polite fictions, much as the Roman Senate continued to "defend" the Republic for a long, long time after Augustus changed all of that.
By the way, astute observers in various governments know the game being played, it's just very difficult to directly move against companies that appear to be cooperating. Folks want their Farmvilles. My money says that we'll see a lot more regulatory capture with various reforms over the next few years, the political calculus being that it's better to absorb them than fight them (at least short term, which is good enough to get elected a few more times).
(1) https://www.allsides.com/tags/wuhan-lab?search=wuhan%20lab#g...
Wishful thinking perhaps, somehow I doubt most of the media/gov't figures who dismissed these claims did so in good faith to begin with.
If anything, it will taint the credibilty of people who claim they have the insight to tag the information's credibility in the first place.
EDIT: why people are downvoting this? I got something wrong? The Peter Daszak that signed the article is not the same one that runs Ecohealth Alliance?
Wuhan lab staff sought hospital care before Covid-19 outbreak disclosed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259953 - May 2021 (343 comments)
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
Israeli startup claims Covid-19 likely originated in a lab, willing to bet on it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585833 - Dec 2020 (351 comments)
Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)
Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)
Search, bound from 2020-1-1 to 2020-6-1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1593475200&dateRange=custom&...
26 March 2020: Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/experts-know-the-new-coronav... (Note this was from a modification of the above search)
28 March 2020: Scientific community MUST rally to expose likely leak from a Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710662 (no link)
6 April 2020: Trump says U.S. investigating whether virus came from Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886182 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-...
30 April 2020: Nobel Prize winner who discovered HIV says covid19 is from Wuhan lab,has HIV DNA https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23037036 https://www.cnews.fr/france/2020-04-17/le-coronavirus-est-un... (Said Nobelist is an anti-vaxxer.)
1 May 2020: No evidence that deadly bat virus escaped Wuhan lab https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041789 https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/No-evidence-that-deadly-... Original source is a Washington Post article from 30 April (https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-lab...)
4 May 2020: Australian intelligence knocks back US government's Wuhan lab virus claim https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23074121 https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intellige...
10 May 2020: Germany Doubts US Claim of Wuhan Virus Lab Leak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23130107 http://www.courthousenews.com/germany-doubts-us-claim-of-wuh...
18 May 2020: Busted: Pentagon Contractors’ Report on ‘Wuhan Lab’ Origins of Virus Is Bogus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223986 https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-contractors-report-on...
(Note that there may well have been other submissions which were flagged and killed, or which don't match my search terms --- I included one such addition based on a variant of terms.)
In general the early claims of a lab leak:
- Lacked any specific proof.
- Came from sources with questionable credibility.
- Were rejected by others with no specific allignment to those claiming the leak, and with general credibility.
I'll note that the leak hypothesis remains unproven, though the evidence supporting a serious, independent, and pointedly, non-Chinese-led investigation is mounting. I found the Bulletin of Concerned Scientists article a week or so back persuasive.
But the point remains that attributing an original cause to some event is complex, and requires a reality-based investigation grounded in facts rather than ideology or motivated reasoning. Much (though not all) of the lab-leak advocacy has been lacking in this objectivity, and even the most persuasive arguments to date make a case for the possible origin, not a certainty.
I'd argue that for the current outbreak the origin all but certainly does not matter in terms of steps taken to contain and end the outbreak. Preventive measures (themselves reflecting an evolution of understanding over time) and vaccines (rejected by a disappointing fraction of lab-leak enthusiasts) remain the most potent tools we have.
Consideration for costs, and prevention (or early alerting) of future outbreaks do depend in part on determining ultimate origin. That's something to keep an eye on, but not the principle concern of the moment.
It would have mattered a lot back in early 2020, when the (circumstantial) evidence for the lab leak theory was assembled. And I’m not sure what your point is—are you implying that the world is incapable of both handling the pandemic and investigating its origins simultaneously? Like, we are going to get collectively distracted or something? No—investigate the origins now. This is not something to delay on.
Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23070031 - May 2020 (76 comments)
Experts disagree on whether Covid-19 could have leaked from a research lab - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22695825 - March 2020 (6 comments)
The others seem to either have no comments or in one case (the Montagnier one) to be more of a distraction. If I missed any other actual threads, please let me know.
Regardless of the politics, it's likely that many labs have reviewed their procedures to be sure people won't be infected by their work/contaminate their work.
The problem is, as an expansionist species we're naturally going to encroach on natural reservoirs for pathogens.
The smoking gun of people working at the virology institute may yet turn out to be nothing more than a red herring, if they live and work in the epicentre of where the outbreak started, it only stands to reason they'd also run the risk of catching it.
To return the favor, I recommend checking out the Lapham's Quarterly issue on "Epidemic" that collected historical writings across many instances of widespread plague and disease.