"So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms" -- which is exactly why I dumped FB and never got on Twitter. As a molecular biologist, I posted a Medium article about the failure of Pharma to release the vaccine molecular biology data (despite the use of public money). Questioning whether the mRNA vaccines were as immunologically efficacious as they could be, my arguments about so-called mucosal immunity were based on solid immunological principles, which I taught at a postgrad level for 20 years. In retrospect, had I posted on major social media, I'd likely have been censored by some technocrat a-hole with a near-zero knowledge of molecular immunology. Just an observation of how bloody absurd this is/can be.
I don't think it is antitrust cases that the companies fear, but rather an immediate loss of income from subsidized advertisements and other government financial benefits.
Facebook has been running nonsense ads since before the 2020 election. Somebody was paying for those ads, and the DNC won the election, so my guess is it was the DNC .
Nowadays I see pop up ads for Facebook on Youtube. Why would Facebook pay Google to display pop up ads that say "join Facebook, connect with your friends" ? My guess here is that the pop up ads are secretly subsidized through the universal service fee.
Wow, Caitlin. Your powerful statement that, "It's always easier to move with power than against it." says it all! I've seen this in all sectors of society from the top down, especially now within the sub-sectors of Public Health. Any one with any sense can see that "Public Health" is not about health at all. Rather, they are all aligning with establishment interests, like an army of tin soldiers, lined up to do the bidding of their masters, for the win. All of them selling their souls for the dollar.
“ People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship.”
Johnstone, Greenwald, Taibi, and many other writers on the far-left or alt-right are ranting that Biden's fascist government is bullying internet corporations to censor misinformation about COVID-19 as millions die across the globe. The Stasi do that; not America. They demand the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom. That strikes me as a very lethal two-edged sword they are swinging.
It is a two edged sword, and I also fear empowering censorship in social media.
Yet, Bolsonaro and Youtube channels directly funded by his goverment, has caused CHAOS in Brazil, making people not wear masks (to the point of shooting comercial stablishments for trying to enforce masks inside), promoting Cloroquine as a solution untill july 2021(!), promoting aglomeration of people in sports events and others, RAIDING hospitals saying COVID was a farce.
It reached the point not of not being about free speech, but of avoiding deaths. It is not always about opinions.
I doubt that teaching thinking skills is the solution because people cannot think logically when they are emotional. Research has shown that as emotion levels increase, rational thinking decreases. Antivaxxers are not stupid. They are misinformed and riled up. Their ambient fear, loathing, hatred, greed, whatever causes them to ignore facts as fake or lies and to even assert that conflicting results over time means science cannot be trusted. Sometimes they twist a few facts to create complex conspiracies to justify their views. They are applying pseudo logic because of an emotion state ignited by political grifters and scammers but a sort of logic nonetheless. We readily see this in children, and for their protection we ground them. We cannot ground adults - just try to stem the flow of confusion that enables fascist group think by muzzling/grounding them.
Step back from the specific issue of vaccines for a second. It's important to note that trust in institutions is *gone*. It's an ongoing problem that started long before Trump: How can we get people to trust (in this case) the government when it's the cause of so many of their problems—by policy?
Teaching people to tell for themselves when someone's full of shit would help. Then it would be on institutions to earn and keep the critically-thinking public's trust.
I agree. Alas, we cannot even teach basic household financial management in high school. In some states is it forbidden. Do you think the politicians want voters to detect when they are gaslighting them? There is also the issue of learning (not just teaching) critical thinking skills, and it seems that is not a trivial challenge either. I finally developed those skills halfway through grad school. Having sat in hundreds of peer reviews of grant applications to NIH and DOD, I can attests that not all PhDs seem all that sharp in critical thinking skills.
Just like being lied to about covid lab leak theory right? Or being lied to about it transmitting human to human? Ot being lied to about masks? First being told masks don’t work. Then being told masks do work and double mask all the while politicians are breaking their own rules. Or being lied to by CDC when it announced “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors. The real number “seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent.”
Admit it, you claim anything which opposes your faulty view point and contradicts your initial narrative to be “lies and misinformation”. You don’t actually believe in science.
People who argue ad hominem usually have no factual basis for the opinions that they argue. However, in this case, you have unmasked me. I do not "believe' in science. Science is merely a methodology for testing hypotheses; not a religion in which you believe or not. You might think that an NIH retiree such as myself, who spent most of his career performing and administering health research, might feel some sort of religious zeal for scientific methodology. But no, science is just a tool for testing hypotheses.
I said nothing untrue nor did I espouse misinformation. I merely pointed out that what Caitlyn and others were arguing is essentially: give me liberty or give me death (or at least some potentially nasty consequences). People who "believe" the factoids you mentioned might go maskless and vaxx'dless. As a consequence, clinical reports indicate that they risk disease, subsequent chronic disorders, and in some cases death. Thus, endorsing the right to lie to the public strikes me as reckless right now. The logic of their reasoning is however, from an historical perspective, not in dispute.
"ad hominem" is defined as "directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining."
My comment was directed against your position of broad brush generalization and therefore not an "ad hominem".
You broad brush generalized and that too completely incorrectly that those who don't want their freedom of speech trampled upon are "demanding the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom" and "endorsing the right to lie". If you think freedom of speech is equivalent to "demanding the right to be lied to", then you are engaging in elitism and intellectual authoritarianism. Only real authoritarians with superiority complex believe in the "I get to decide what's good for you and what's bad for you and you should just shut up and take it".
You, as an "NIH retiree" should know better but there's always been a trend of such elitism from the "scientific" community. Now a days, that trend is on steroids. One day lockdowns, social distancing is super important, anti-lockdown protests are dangerous, next day you get 1200 "scientists" writing about why mass BLM protests are totally fine because "white supremacy is a health emergency".
In addition to recent disclosures that Dr. Fauci knew early last year that the virus showed signs of lab manipulation yet continually lied to the public on this issue, a substantial group of scientists have now admitted they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those scientists. This is what she now says:
"... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists". The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?
Making this more nefarious is the fact that the government itself has an interest in silencing debate and criticism, as it funded gain-of-function research – and thus might bear responsibility for – the creation of COVID-19. Your logic will gladly censor anyone who speaks out against gain of function research.
Funny thing you mention "go maskless". Before the whole politicization of science, the same scientific community used to say the exact opposite regarding cloth masks even to the point where they said "Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection". Even Fauci is on tape saying masks won't help. Later on he claims that he lied because of shortage in masks. So if he's willing to lie once, then why won't he lie again? Here's actual studies before politicization of covid:
> Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims. In intention-to-treat analysis, facemask use was neither effective against laboratory-confirmed vRTIs (OR 1.35, 95% CI 0.88-2.07) nor against CRI (OR 1.1, 95% CI 0.88-1.39), not even in per-protocol analysis (OR 1.2, 95% CI 0.87-1.69; OR 1.3, 95% CI 0.99-1.83).
> Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%. This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
> Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims.
> Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids (36). There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
> We did not consider the use of respirators in the community. Respirators are tight-fitting masks that can protect the wearer from fine particles (37) and should provide better protection against influenza virus exposures when properly worn because of higher filtration efficiency. However, respirators, such as N95 and P2 masks, work best when they are fit-tested, and these masks will be in limited supply during the next pandemic. These specialist devices should be reserved for use in healthcare settings or in special subpopulations such as immunocompromised persons in the community, first responders, and those performing other critical community functions, as supplies permit.
You think someone pointing out the fact that cloth masks widely used by everyone having a penetration of 97% is "dangerous"?
Hysterical hyperbole and broad brush generalizing similar to "demanding the right to be lied to" is what is very common now a days - if you are pro second amendment, then you must be wanting to shoot and kill everyone and not care about the victims, if you are anti-illegal or anti-corporate sponsored mass immigration, you must be a racist and xenophobic, if you don't want men competing in women sports, in their private areas like bathrooms and spas, then you must be transphobic and so on, if you don't want to surrender all your rights instantly to the government, you must be a climate change denier. That hysterical hyperbole is how you end up with things like Patriot Act and forever wars where speaking out against spying is labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorist sympathizer".
"So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms" -- which is exactly why I dumped FB and never got on Twitter. As a molecular biologist, I posted a Medium article about the failure of Pharma to release the vaccine molecular biology data (despite the use of public money). Questioning whether the mRNA vaccines were as immunologically efficacious as they could be, my arguments about so-called mucosal immunity were based on solid immunological principles, which I taught at a postgrad level for 20 years. In retrospect, had I posted on major social media, I'd likely have been censored by some technocrat a-hole with a near-zero knowledge of molecular immunology. Just an observation of how bloody absurd this is/can be.
I don't think it is antitrust cases that the companies fear, but rather an immediate loss of income from subsidized advertisements and other government financial benefits.
Facebook has been running nonsense ads since before the 2020 election. Somebody was paying for those ads, and the DNC won the election, so my guess is it was the DNC .
Nowadays I see pop up ads for Facebook on Youtube. Why would Facebook pay Google to display pop up ads that say "join Facebook, connect with your friends" ? My guess here is that the pop up ads are secretly subsidized through the universal service fee.
Wow, Caitlin. Your powerful statement that, "It's always easier to move with power than against it." says it all! I've seen this in all sectors of society from the top down, especially now within the sub-sectors of Public Health. Any one with any sense can see that "Public Health" is not about health at all. Rather, they are all aligning with establishment interests, like an army of tin soldiers, lined up to do the bidding of their masters, for the win. All of them selling their souls for the dollar.
“ People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea
I love you.
All just logical ramifications of the war against free speech and journalism, cf. the show trial of Julian Assange.
Johnstone, Greenwald, Taibi, and many other writers on the far-left or alt-right are ranting that Biden's fascist government is bullying internet corporations to censor misinformation about COVID-19 as millions die across the globe. The Stasi do that; not America. They demand the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom. That strikes me as a very lethal two-edged sword they are swinging.
Tomonthebeach,
It is a two edged sword, and I also fear empowering censorship in social media.
Yet, Bolsonaro and Youtube channels directly funded by his goverment, has caused CHAOS in Brazil, making people not wear masks (to the point of shooting comercial stablishments for trying to enforce masks inside), promoting Cloroquine as a solution untill july 2021(!), promoting aglomeration of people in sports events and others, RAIDING hospitals saying COVID was a farce.
It reached the point not of not being about free speech, but of avoiding deaths. It is not always about opinions.
I mean, we could teach critical thinking skills: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/europe/finland-fake-news-intl/
Interestingly, Thomas Frank referenced the Stasi recently when discussing tech censorship:
https://youtu.be/L_mAT8rOgxA?t=2676
I doubt that teaching thinking skills is the solution because people cannot think logically when they are emotional. Research has shown that as emotion levels increase, rational thinking decreases. Antivaxxers are not stupid. They are misinformed and riled up. Their ambient fear, loathing, hatred, greed, whatever causes them to ignore facts as fake or lies and to even assert that conflicting results over time means science cannot be trusted. Sometimes they twist a few facts to create complex conspiracies to justify their views. They are applying pseudo logic because of an emotion state ignited by political grifters and scammers but a sort of logic nonetheless. We readily see this in children, and for their protection we ground them. We cannot ground adults - just try to stem the flow of confusion that enables fascist group think by muzzling/grounding them.
Step back from the specific issue of vaccines for a second. It's important to note that trust in institutions is *gone*. It's an ongoing problem that started long before Trump: How can we get people to trust (in this case) the government when it's the cause of so many of their problems—by policy?
Teaching people to tell for themselves when someone's full of shit would help. Then it would be on institutions to earn and keep the critically-thinking public's trust.
I agree. Alas, we cannot even teach basic household financial management in high school. In some states is it forbidden. Do you think the politicians want voters to detect when they are gaslighting them? There is also the issue of learning (not just teaching) critical thinking skills, and it seems that is not a trivial challenge either. I finally developed those skills halfway through grad school. Having sat in hundreds of peer reviews of grant applications to NIH and DOD, I can attests that not all PhDs seem all that sharp in critical thinking skills.
> They demand the right to be lied to
Just like being lied to about covid lab leak theory right? Or being lied to about it transmitting human to human? Ot being lied to about masks? First being told masks don’t work. Then being told masks do work and double mask all the while politicians are breaking their own rules. Or being lied to by CDC when it announced “less than 10 percent” of COVID-19 transmission occurred outdoors. The real number “seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent.”
Admit it, you claim anything which opposes your faulty view point and contradicts your initial narrative to be “lies and misinformation”. You don’t actually believe in science.
People who argue ad hominem usually have no factual basis for the opinions that they argue. However, in this case, you have unmasked me. I do not "believe' in science. Science is merely a methodology for testing hypotheses; not a religion in which you believe or not. You might think that an NIH retiree such as myself, who spent most of his career performing and administering health research, might feel some sort of religious zeal for scientific methodology. But no, science is just a tool for testing hypotheses.
I said nothing untrue nor did I espouse misinformation. I merely pointed out that what Caitlyn and others were arguing is essentially: give me liberty or give me death (or at least some potentially nasty consequences). People who "believe" the factoids you mentioned might go maskless and vaxx'dless. As a consequence, clinical reports indicate that they risk disease, subsequent chronic disorders, and in some cases death. Thus, endorsing the right to lie to the public strikes me as reckless right now. The logic of their reasoning is however, from an historical perspective, not in dispute.
"ad hominem" is defined as "directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining."
My comment was directed against your position of broad brush generalization and therefore not an "ad hominem".
You broad brush generalized and that too completely incorrectly that those who don't want their freedom of speech trampled upon are "demanding the right to be lied to, manipulated, and scammed to death in the interest of freedom" and "endorsing the right to lie". If you think freedom of speech is equivalent to "demanding the right to be lied to", then you are engaging in elitism and intellectual authoritarianism. Only real authoritarians with superiority complex believe in the "I get to decide what's good for you and what's bad for you and you should just shut up and take it".
You, as an "NIH retiree" should know better but there's always been a trend of such elitism from the "scientific" community. Now a days, that trend is on steroids. One day lockdowns, social distancing is super important, anti-lockdown protests are dangerous, next day you get 1200 "scientists" writing about why mass BLM protests are totally fine because "white supremacy is a health emergency".
In addition to recent disclosures that Dr. Fauci knew early last year that the virus showed signs of lab manipulation yet continually lied to the public on this issue, a substantial group of scientists have now admitted they refrained from publicly acknowledging the evidence that the virus may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab. Alina Chan was one of those scientists. This is what she now says:
"... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191
It never occurred to these "scientists" that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats in China is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling by "scientists". The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on?
Making this more nefarious is the fact that the government itself has an interest in silencing debate and criticism, as it funded gain-of-function research – and thus might bear responsibility for – the creation of COVID-19. Your logic will gladly censor anyone who speaks out against gain of function research.
Funny thing you mention "go maskless". Before the whole politicization of science, the same scientific community used to say the exact opposite regarding cloth masks even to the point where they said "Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection". Even Fauci is on tape saying masks won't help. Later on he claims that he lied because of shortage in masks. So if he's willing to lie once, then why won't he lie again? Here's actual studies before politicization of covid:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3349234
> Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims. In intention-to-treat analysis, facemask use was neither effective against laboratory-confirmed vRTIs (OR 1.35, 95% CI 0.88-2.07) nor against CRI (OR 1.1, 95% CI 0.88-1.39), not even in per-protocol analysis (OR 1.2, 95% CI 0.87-1.69; OR 1.3, 95% CI 0.99-1.83).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
> Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%. This study is the first RCT of cloth masks, and the results caution against the use of cloth masks. This is an important finding to inform occupational health and safety. Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection. Further research is needed to inform the widespread use of cloth masks globally. However, as a precautionary measure, cloth masks should not be recommended for HCWs, particularly in high-risk situations, and guidelines need to be updated.
> Facemask use does not prevent clinical or laboratory-confirmed viral respiratory infections among Hajj pilgrims.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3349234
https://www.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
> Disposable medical masks (also known as surgical masks) are loose-fitting devices that were designed to be worn by medical personnel to protect accidental contamination of patient wounds, and to protect the wearer against splashes or sprays of bodily fluids (36). There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.
> We did not consider the use of respirators in the community. Respirators are tight-fitting masks that can protect the wearer from fine particles (37) and should provide better protection against influenza virus exposures when properly worn because of higher filtration efficiency. However, respirators, such as N95 and P2 masks, work best when they are fit-tested, and these masks will be in limited supply during the next pandemic. These specialist devices should be reserved for use in healthcare settings or in special subpopulations such as immunocompromised persons in the community, first responders, and those performing other critical community functions, as supplies permit.
You think someone pointing out the fact that cloth masks widely used by everyone having a penetration of 97% is "dangerous"?
Hysterical hyperbole and broad brush generalizing similar to "demanding the right to be lied to" is what is very common now a days - if you are pro second amendment, then you must be wanting to shoot and kill everyone and not care about the victims, if you are anti-illegal or anti-corporate sponsored mass immigration, you must be a racist and xenophobic, if you don't want men competing in women sports, in their private areas like bathrooms and spas, then you must be transphobic and so on, if you don't want to surrender all your rights instantly to the government, you must be a climate change denier. That hysterical hyperbole is how you end up with things like Patriot Act and forever wars where speaking out against spying is labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorist sympathizer".