reminds me of my favorite Mark Cuban quote from a few years ago: “I’m the one guy who says don’t force the stupid people to be quiet — I want to know who the morons are.”
As a side note: can we all agree that ANY congressional act related to the internet from the fucking 1990’s should have been scrapped/rewritten by now? The fact that we’re trying to apply a technology-based act from 1996 to social media is goddamn nonsense. The basic concept that everything should/can be considered a publisher OR a platform is outdated, and the terms themselves are ill-defined as they relate to the internet today.
Yeah, I think the way they handle this is a completely separate issue altogether.
From what I understand from my tech guys, the way they weed these things out is through another process which involves advanced tech and shit that I don’t understand. It’s a straightforward technical process, not something influenced by any “ideology”. They do the same thing with the ridiculous amount of China bots and fake accounts.
It’s definitely not something related to the topic at hand, nor is it really political - as in “Right vs Left” in the US - at it’s roots.
EDIT:
It even spans to ad buying. Heard lots of silly, hilarious things about the way the CCP uses certain overseas accounts and 3rd parties to buy ads and stuff which, according to what I’ve been told, can easily be traced back to the original buyers. Some are so blatantly obvious in various ways they’ve become, like stuff you see in absurd satirical comedies, long standing jokes.
So, even then, it’s a different issue from moderating the content from normal ad buyers.
Frankly not much. I didn’t want to look into it so I only read the bits that were showing up on my news feed. I did know that they were pulled from the app stores and also about AWS suspending service (but not the legal argument they made). I also was referring to their payment processing provider (can’t remember the name) and others when I mentioned that, as I believe it was more than just AWS.
But yes, I was referring to AWS as well hen I mentioned materially disrupting business operations. I may have misunderstood part of your post, but I was under the impression that you were saying being pulled off of the app stores was “forcing them out”. I don’t think that’s the case because a) you can still host your app for download on your own website b) they were/are a household name so name recognition means people can search for them (not taking away an audience) c) terms of service for app listings might be “at will”, but I didn’t know what the terms were.
First, please bear in mind that random platforms are not and SHOULD NOT be expected to understand research studies.
Second please keep in mind that the state of research is changing all the time, quite literally. That’s neither the researchers’ nor the platforms’ fault. It just is the nature of doing science on tricky shit.
Third, nobody that I am aware of was ever booted/banned/censored for talking about HCQ. I read HUNDREDS of posts on the topic across multiple platforms and they’re all still there. There was no flood of banning people for talking about HCQ.
Finally, keep in mind that study is preprint and pre peer review. It is interesting but there are some significant…ah… challenges… to interpreting it the way you want to here. I don’t really want to get into it but some of these yellow flags are referred to in the medrxiv comments. I say yellow because research can be flawed without being intentionally misconducted, or for that matter flawed without being wrong regarding their hypothesis. Yellow flags don’t mean that shit is fraudulent or even wrong, they just mean shit is tricky and complicated. But they do mean “be careful when interpreting results”.
Small size of treatment groups, incredibly high mortality rate in the study sample pool to begin with, a retrospective observational study design which by definition CANNOT discover causality, etc.
During a quick perusal it looks like the authors did a thorough job of statistical analysis through different models, but since this was effectively a study to generate hypotheses that’s not sufficient to determine causality. In addition retrospective analysis can lead to false positives of a sort (p-hacking and related flaws, though it should be noted many studies fall victim to flaws like p-hacking without being deliberately misconducted, so I’m not making any ethical judgement or even a value judgement on the correctness of their work). Therefore it is rather important to use retrospective analysis within certain limits and not to place too much faith in the conclusions.
I should note that I only skimmed it for about 30 seconds, so I did not read too deeply. Methods section was light and short for my taste but they ended up putting a lot of things into the results area.
I have numerous friends who were not outright banned but were put in Facebook jail for up to 30 days for discussing HCQ. The ones who weren’t had fact checks stuck to their posts saying they were false.
I just got done listening to the Joe Rogan podcast #1671 with Brett Weinstein and Dr. Pierre Kory.
There were a number of concerns raised on the episode, all of which sounded like reasonable concerns of reasonable scientists discussing pertinent, cutting-edge topics reasonably. Brett Weinstein got a hard strike on his YouTube channel for having a scientific discussion around the drug ivermectin.
Why?
Because social media companies have banned discussion of ivermectin as it relates to treating COVID. Just like they banned discussion of the Wuhan Lab leak theory. This seems completely insane to me. We have woke know-nothings deciding what’s okay for you to watch.
We’re already through the looking glass. The overwhelming majority of the information about the world flows to people through social media. The majority if that traffic exists on the small handful of platforms that all seem to share the notion that they ought to be the gatekeepers of information in our society today.
@flipcollar You’re absolutely right to point out just how dated the legislation governing social media is. There was nothing remotely like social media when the law was drafted.
For crying out loud, Strom Thurmond voted us here. He was born in 1902, bringing all 94 years of his wisdom to bear on the vote. A bunch of dead guys who barely understood technology set the legal framework we operate in today, where the internet is at the center of nearly everything we do. Ted Stevens thought the internet was a series of tubes. Robert Byrd started a Klan chapter in the 1940’s.
It is insane that we’re operating under this framework, and we’re seeing the insane results in real time. Short of actual wartime conditions, good things never follow when the powers that be start censoring stuff they don’t like.
Strom Thurmond pictured below. Good riddance to that old racist coot.
It’s not like they are Covid deniers or even anti-vaxxers, although they may have questions about these particular vaccines (and I don’t think they are pushing some global conspiracy with these vaccine concerns). I wonder how much of it is China related. John Cena apologizes like a punk. LeBron James will go after anyone in the NBA who is critical of China. There’s a German soccer player of Turkish descent who was not merely benched but told to not even suit up after he criticized China. And he was the highest paid player on the team.
I agree with this. There’s no reason he needs a strike on his account. That’s in no way the same as telling people to drink bleach or that vaccines are unsound or anything else.
I may be hypersensitive to it but here’s the problem I see - ins’s post was basically implying - without outright saying so - that research into ivermectin is shut down because some unnamed authorities don’t like it.
It’s not. This is demonstrably false. New papers are put out frequently. In fact there are over 70 registered clinical trials of various sizes going on with ivermectin for covid (I might add that these were almost all registered BEFORE the Rogan podcast aired). And in fact research continues on HCQ as well.
I’m fine having a discussion about social media censorship and how or whether to modify s. 230 or anything else, but that’s not the vibe I got from this recent discussion. Yes, I know you’ve been talking about social media for a while so I track where you are coming from.
I am likely hypersensitive to the topic… But the thing is, we have these same discussions on a ton of things: stem cell treatments, HCQ, ivermectin, and a bunch of others. In practically every one there’s a variation of the line “THEY won’t let the treatment get approved be there’s no profit/they hate stem cells/ blah blah blah”. “Is it really JUST a coincidence??” I mean there’s no question that the FDA has made questionable decisions in the past but this type of comment just misses so many fundamentals of research practice that exist for good reasons.
Anyway, The volume of SM posts is impossible to moderate without algorithms, but I 100% agree that these are a) only as good as their training model and b) written by people who don’t understand science, regardless of whether they’re actually politically biased or not. There is no world in which a scientist talking about science should get a hard strike by default for saying things about the field they study.
I read that in the other thread but I hadn’t finished the podcast yet so I didn’t comment. That’s not the message I got at all. They mentioned something like 60 studies concerning ivermectin and COVID, so I’d call it obvious that research isn’t shut down.
The case these guys were making is that the behavior of the WHO and, by extension, social media companies using WHO guidelines to censor discussion, is becoming increasingly difficult to explain under a good faith assumption. The promising nature of the studies, Dr. Kory’s own treatment successes and other treatment successes (particularly in Mexico) were brought up.
This is also in the context of many hundreds of millions of doses of this drug being given out already and the relative safety and minor side effects that’s been established. This is also in the context of the US government throwing 3 billion dollars at developing new drugs for COVID.
If what these guys say is true, I find it very concerning that You Tube is censoring this content and that anyone would want anything other than a pedal-to-the-metal effort on getting this treatment option out there or ruled out, regardless of what hurdles need to be cleared. Another Operation Warp Speed sounds good to me.
Sure, but if the discussion is focused on the social media aspect then I think a significant portion of the hoopla needs to take into account that nobody at YouTube has any bloody idea how to assess this stuff. That’s why they decide to use WHO guidelines for their algorithm in the first place (assuming you are accurate here because I don’t want to go digging).
Now you can argue that the WHO is full of shit. I might quibble but wouldn’t fully disagree, because the WHO is fundamentally political in many respects rather than scientific. I certainly would not argue that they have plenty of dubious if not stupid guidelines.
But I cannot make a connection to a giant conspiracy on this. This topic is already difficult to explain to lay people under the best circumstances. I don’t favor assuming malfeasance in this instance. Now you may be correct about social media in general, but we both know algorithms are only as good as their training systems, and when you take people who don’t know how to assess the training resources then by definition you will have a shitty algorithm.
A better idea would have been to get scientific experts to consult and/or train the algorithms, but that would cost a lot more money and corporations are nothing if not bottom line conscious.
I absolutely positively do not believe the WHO or anyone else is purposely holding research on ivermectin back. There’s no economic reason to do so, there’s no scientific reason to do so, and there’s a public health reason to not hold it back.
My issue with post (not the podcast referenced) was that ins made a series of statements about the science not social media. He claims that weren’t factual (“ivermectin has been extremely effective in prevention and curing covid”). That’s potentially true but not confirmed right now. This isn’t surprising given the complexity of the topic and research in general, but it represents a misunderstanding.
Then he posited that the drug was of no financial interest. He also said that the drug wasn’t accepted by medical authorities, but implied in his statement was that the thing should really be a treatment and they’re just holding things back because… “No financial interest to anyone”. In a follow-up post he said that astrazeneca suddenly picked dup research on ivermectin only after this podcast and rhetorically asked “is this just a coincidence?”. The implication was that AZ is a scumbag company that was ignoring the drug until public pressure from this remarkable podcast made them rethink things. Yeah…no.
These aren’t questions that can be answered quickly or easily from a research perspective. There’s due diligence for a reason, no matter how many problems the process has. So the nature of my responses to him were along those lines. I feel that if you’d wanted to put a post out about social media censorship his post would have contained more references to SM and censorship.
But like I said I might be just hypersensitive given my experience in biochemistry.
OMG not only was it painful to watch because of the fact he virtually kowtowed to the China market, he also did it in very fucking inaccurate “Mandarin”. Dumbass probably used google translator.
EDIT:
FWIW they also flagged lots of videos of people, some from White dudes living there too, talking about lots of misconceptions about China during the HK protests which were completely true IME. I don’t think YouTube is being influenced by them, especially since they’re still banned there.
If ivermectin is effective in preventing catching COVID, it would also mean it has to be taken at frequent, regular intervals. Which would make it highly replenishable from a sales perspective. The fucking long term profit potential would be pretty massive if/when COVID becomes endemic and new strains keep popping up and evading vaccines.
Even now, when even countries like Australia still has a 3.5% vaccination rate, the potential for profit in the short to mid term would be pretty huge. I’m guessing AstraZeneca is going this route because of the bad rep it’s vaccine has gotten in various parts of the world.
I repeat again. Big pharma companies, make the majority of their money from patents, not drug production and sales with little margin.
In most countries drug rates are controlled. They are brought to the market with very little margin from supplier, then it is taxed, then the pharmacy is selling with a small margin as well. The consumer rate is usually high because of high taxes.
In contrary oil and gas are sold with very large margins.
You have to know the market a bit, before making such claims.
Ivermecting is extremelly cheap drug. The margin is probably less than a dollar. Even if you make a global monopoly and sell the drug to everyone. It is still 8 bils in income. Which is pathetic for a global monopoly. You will have to invest at least half into assets in order to make global production.
While you have a point, which is actually pretty much what I wrote sans the patent, I don’t think you understand the difference between a replenishable product like ivermectin vs the vaccines. I’m not even sure you know how a patent works or what can be patented.
What is the half life of ivermectin? Does it affect one’s body in anyway similar to what the vaccines are designed to do?
You’d have to take it every day to maintain protection against COVID if it’s proven to be able to do so unless some company somehow manages to develop something like the monthly spot on topical treatment that can also provide systemic protection like they did for animals with other drugs in the same class.
Either way, you stand to profit through:
Mass, repeated sales with the benefit of brand recognition.
Any patents on potential development of extended delivery methods.
Seriously, how about leveling with me here? Did you get all your information from podcasts? Cos I can’t even find any link online about AstraZeneca and ivermectin although I’ve not discounted the possibility.
Its more than built into the algorithm. Ivermectin is mentioned by name in the terms and conditions, just like the Lab Leak theory was. Until it wasn’t. It’s not subtle at all. They just call it a forbidden topic for some reason.
My point is that the leeway afforded by section 230 is allowing these transnational media conglomerates to operate freely in a de-facto ministry of truth role. The entire idea of online moderation is a fool’s errand. Let the First Amendment be our guide, which would mean only removing direct calls to violence. Slap a warning label on the rest and let adults decide for themselves and for their children what sort of content to consume.
As far as the WHO goes, I think the guys on the Rogan podcast characterized them quite well. There’s no denying the tremendous work done in decades past, but that’s not the same WHO we have today. It is quite obvious that China sets WHO policy, and it seems obvious that those policies are not there to produce the best possible health outcomes.
If transnational social media companies who just so happen to control the majority of information being shared adopt WHO policy for social media use in the USA, that de-facto means that China is at least strongly influencing, if not outright setting social media policy in the USA. The fact that we’re leaping, not crawling, towards a social media landscape like China’s seems rather obvious to me. If a sitting president can be silenced today, what sort of power will they have 10 years from now? How about 20? What happens when deep-fake videos are indistinguishable from real video?
None of this heavy-handed censorship was in-place 10 years ago, and I don’t recall anything bad coming about because of it. Now we have You Tube taking it upon themselves to protect you from hearing a scientific discussion between scientists about science by removing the video and issuing a hard strike on the content creator who makes his living on You Tube.
What else are they protecting us from? What other ideas will be squashed? What other ideas will be put to the front of the line? If millions can be made to believe that white supremacy is an existential threat in the USA today, what else can people be made to believe?
When has any company ever been this powerful?
@ins@dt79 Let’s keep this thread on-topic concerning social media censorship and hopefully more Jon Stewart jokes in the future. I’d rather not get into the business or research side of drug companies here unless we’re talking about how it relates to social media censorship.
The thing is people keep saying “social media has made it impossible to talk about X, or for person X to speak.” All the while person X or topic X is discussed all over the internet, radio, tv.
If people want to argue that Twitter restricting a person or a topic is wrong I’m fine with that. But the handwringing idea that this action has silenced discussion on a topic or kept a person from sharing views is ludicrous. I’m not necessarily defending the practice as much as the hyperbolic arguments.
