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by onion2k 2054 days ago
And no, lack of evidence doesn't make things fake.

That's kind of the point I was making. Lack of evidence doesn't make something fake, but it doesn't make it true either. Twitter is pointing that out and telling people where things don't have evidence so they shouldn't automatically accept it as true (or fake). Where something is incredibly influential and could lead to violence I think Twitter should be wary about publishing it. People's safety is important, so while I don't think Twitter should block speech I do think putting a warning on it is reasonable.

If Twitter had existed since the 60s, would it be right for them to block everything mentioning Higgs boson until evidence for it was found in 2012?

Anyone with even the tiniest bit of science education talked about the Higgs Boson as a no more than a possibility and definitely not a fact until it was proved experimentally and the evidence was clear for anyone to see. If people had been saying it was definitely real then a skeptical warning that there wasn't any evidence to prove that might not have been a bad idea.

1 comments

> If people had been saying it was definitely real then a skeptical warning that there wasn't any evidence to prove that might not have been a bad idea.

You're completely wrong on this one. Not only did physicists believe in the existence of Higgs boson, they built upon the premise that it existed for all those years.

Sometimes evidence is not always possible to present or just not practical. Also, there are various degrees of what kind of evidence is acceptable. The evidence required to publish a paper in a scientific journal is different from what is required to make a legal case or report in a magazine. So, with a premise of "requiring evidence", you can be very flexible in terms of what you allow and don't... which is what Twitter seems to be doing.