[jMyles]

I agree with everything you've said with regard to the justice of the matter, but I don't think that there is a free market at work in social media.

* So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared

* Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant, and completely overran anything representing a nonviolent scientific dialogue during the recent COVID19 pandemic

* States, with their monopoly on the legitimate initiation of force, pick winners and losers at every level of the experience, from chip makers to the duopolistic mobile OS vendors to their app stores to the social media offerings. Sure, network effect may describe the reason people join and stay, but the availability of places to join and stay is in no sense a market phenomenon

Consider: the major social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time. Do you suppose that's just because they enjoy his company?

[thegrimmest]

> So-called "intellectual property" laws dramatically skew what can and cannot be shared

Agree! let's get rid of these :)

> Censorship at the behest of world governments is rampant

Agree! States have always pursued censorship to maintain power. That doesn't contradict the point that social media companies themselves are not state actors, and are not the problem.

> States ... pick winners and losers

I'm not sure I'm 100% on board here. States may thumb the scales, but the fact of the existence of FAANG/MANGO seems much more like a market phenomenon than an interventionist project.

> social media barons meet with POTUS all the freakin' time

There is almost no clearer display of corporate self-preservation than social media vendors kowtowing to the president.

Much of what you're outlining is standard run of the mill corruption. The US Government (and others) is acting in contradiction to its stated principles. This is not a new phenomenon, and seems in the category of core human governance challenges.

[immibis]

Is this a new technique where you put COVID denialism into an otherwise good comment? Does it have a name?

[jMyles]

I think you may have misunderstood my comment - or perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the censorship regime.

If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.

I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.

Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.

[mullingitover]

The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week.

It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.

[jMyles]

> None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced.

...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.

Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!

Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.

What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.

Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.

David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!

All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).

There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.

And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.

...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.

[immibis]

A lot of people with credentials join the grift train, yes. Apparently it's quite profitable. Listing many of them isn't really an argument that the grift is true.

[jMyles]

What a bizarre and reckless take. I thought this 'no true scotsman' nonsense was put to bed in 2022.

By this metric, who is _not_ a grifter? You have to be Scott Gottleib or Peter Daszak - shilling pseudoscience while sitting on the boards of corporations making billions from the pandemic - to _not_ be a grifter? Is that it?

[mullingitover]

> Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook!

These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it.

Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds.

In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew

[jMyles]

...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell:

* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.

* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.

* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.

* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.

* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.

* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.

* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.

...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".