
Twitter removes two Bolsonaro tweets questioning virus quarantine - chki
https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1492491.html
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osobo
If they delete tweets like that, Twitter gets shit for censoring foreign
officials. If they don't delete tweets like that, they get shit for not
intervening when the public is obviously put in harm's way. I think they chose
the lesser of the two evils. Now, on to censor that umpalumpa you call
president.

~~~
sambe
It's worse than that. He's making a reasonable argument that the public will
be put in the way of greater harm by letting the economy collapse. I'd find it
pretty hard to say whether he's right or wrong.

However, even if you think he's wrong, this is not an argument being made in
bad faith. Censorship is a simply bad way to handle it.

~~~
mantap
Is it reasonable? In Italy and Spain they have so many bodies that they are
running out of space to put them. These people are not dying of economic
effects.

~~~
xenocratus
Italy and Spain are quite developed countries and part of one of the most
prosperous economic blocs in the world. Of course people aren't dying of the
economic effects, the state can support them through this.

Do you think every country can just pull out trillions of dollars worth of
support for their population when stuff like this happens?

~~~
mantap
What are you actually suggesting will happen? That there would be a major
famine in _Brazil_? That Brazilians would freeze to death in the harsh
Brazilian winter? How are these people going to die exactly?

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Traster
Is it not a little bit patronising that American companies think they can
regulate political speech in Brazil? It's quite clear they don't think they
can regulate political speech in the US. What exactly is the difference?

~~~
Joeri
They are not regulating speech in brazil, they are regulating speech on their
platform. Bolsonaro can still say whatever he wants in brazil, he just can’t
do it on twitter.

~~~
juusto
I guess the question is: why don't they censor Trump / Pelosi / etc for
example?

~~~
rumanator
> I guess the question is: why don't they censor Trump / Pelosi / etc for
> example?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)

~~~
disgruntledphd2
This is a fair question.

Once upon a time, I was aware of a similar problem on another social network.

The trouble was, a senior elected official in the US was violating the terms
and conditions of the site.

The solution: create an exemption for them.

Let's be honest, doing this in Brazil is pretty low-risk for Twitter, doing it
in the US could be existential.

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bobcostas55
Will they eventually come for the WHO/CDC/Surgeon General anti-mask tweets?
That's the most interesting case for me, when the expert authorities disagree
with the facts (and in a very dangerous way) how does twitter decide?

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dntbnmpls
Something so orwellian about a tech company censoring the speech of an elected
president of a major country.

Political speech should not be censored. Especially of elected officials. It
should be regarded as part of the historical record at the very least.

~~~
hrktb
Wouldn't it be Orwellian if it was the elected president censoring/redacting
people's tweet ?

I'd be on board with Twitter on this one, hoping they use it as a precedent
for dealing with the other living policy infringements they have on their
platform.

~~~
swebs
No, they're both Orwellian. Censorship doesn't magically become OK just
because it's done by a global megacorp instead of a govermnent.

~~~
rbanffy
It's their platform. They own it. It's not a public space and he's not
entitled to use it for free to further his political agenda.

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rbanffy
I wonder how much it takes for him to get his account suspended.

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enitihas
Is there a world where twitter can remove any of the Trump tweets?

~~~
rbanffy
This one. They just don't want to.

~~~
AnthonBerg
We must help them want to, as a matter of life and death.

~~~
rbanffy
I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't know how.

~~~
AnthonBerg
One piece that may be useful for the puzzle: Approaching this from the
perspective of psychology and familial trauma has helped me understand and
discuss. Someone close to me had a clinically diagnosed narcissistic sociopath
parent. Literature on working with trauma and how to work with the
consequences of psychologically hostile parents helps to understand the model.

The narcissist-sociopath model is very simple and there's kind of always the
same underlying base behavioral script. This is fortunate, because it can be
easily simulated by a normally working mind once we are trained to do it. It's
very unintuitive if we are caught unaware.

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jonathanstrange
A positive aspect of the coronavirus is that it allows you to determine which
politicians are sociopaths and which aren't.

~~~
thu2111
Because putting entire nations under forced house arrest based on the output
of computer simulations isn't even slightly sociopathic? It's literally got
"social" in the word.

Argue that it's the right choice by all means. To argue that politicians
caring about the economy - that thing that also keeps us alive - is
"sociopathic", just shows a complete loss of perspective.

~~~
jonathanstrange
Ordering quarantine is quite obviously not sociopathic to anyone who
understands exponential growth and can do basic calculations.

> _To argue that politicians caring about the economy - that thing that also
> keeps us alive - is "sociopathic", just shows a complete loss of
> perspective. _

It's hard to see how someone who directly weighs deaths against economic
benefits in such a situation (before the pandemic has even peaked) could not
be a sociopath, and by "sociopath" I really mean the personality disorder, not
some subjective sentiment. It's a hypothesis, but one that would be easy to
confirm empirically with standard personality tests.

You have to bear in mind that politicians in those positions have good
scientific advisors. They were attempting to delay measures in order for the
economy of their country (or their personal stocks) to come out better in the
end. They were willing to risk this gamble, even though they knew that this
results in many more deaths, because no country's health care system can deal
with so many patients at once. Except for Bolsonaro, all of these sociopaths
have backed off by now, because most sociopaths are also narcissists and they
realized the many deaths would make them look bad.

That's the sad truth, whether you like it or not. The good news is that there
are less sociopathic heads of states than one might think and the vast
majority of all decision makers have reacted wisely. Let's not forget that.

~~~
thu2111
_Ordering quarantine is quite obviously not sociopathic to anyone who
understands exponential growth and can do basic calculations._

Lots of people understand both yet are sounding the alarm as loudly as they
can about over-reaction, the poor track record of epidemiology and the poor
quality of the data. For instance it's not even clear COVID-19 is spreading
exponentially. The percentage of positive results from tests done is not
scaling exponentially, but only the raw numbers are being reported usually so
an exponential increase in the number of tests can make it look like an
exponential increase in spread.

The world does have experience of bad policy initiated by governments who were
following what they perceived as scientific advice (of the kind politically
acceptable to themselves). The worst one being Lysenkoism. And of course abuse
of psychiatric evaluations to declare anyone politically opposed to the
government as mad or bad has a terrible history as well.

You should really think a lot more carefully before declaring anyone who
disagrees with you as having a personality disorder. Shutting down the world
indefinitely will cause _everyone_ to die: that is a fact. COVID-19 will not
approach even a fraction of that, not even under the worst case projections.
Obviously at some point the "sociopaths" as you put it have to win the
argument or else we're all reverting back to stone age times.

 _You have to bear in mind that politicians in those positions have good
scientific advisors_

Having read the output of such scientists, I don't think that's at all
obvious. You're assuming it, maybe hoping it, but scientism is a real problem
in academia.

 _They were willing to risk this gamble, even though they knew that this
results in many more deaths, because no country 's health care system can deal
with so many patients at once._

So far not a single countries healthcare system has come anywhere even close
to collapse. All stresses have been highly regional and could have been
handled by inter-region transfers, yes, even in Italy and China. In fact in
Italy a politician wondered the other day why they are transferring patients
to Germany when nearby Veneto the ICU is 2/3rds empty.

[https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/die-verlangsamung-ist-
da...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/die-verlangsamung-ist-da-in-
italien-zeichnet-sich-die-wende-in-der-coronakrise-ab/25698124.html)

And a significant source of the pressure on healthcare systems is in fact the
quarantine measures placed on staff, many of whom are self isolating without
symptoms.

The belief in totally collapsed healthcare systems comes entirely from
simulations of questionable utility (because attempts to simulate prior
epidemics have failed).

~~~
jonathanstrange
The exponential spread of SARS-CoV2 in the early phase (without containment
measures) is a fact. You will not find an expert who thinks its R0 without any
measures is <=1, since no data would support this thesis. Look at the curves.
Estimates are currently between 2 and 4. As for health care systems not
collapsing: _All countries have reacted with drastic measures_ and that is the
reason why their health care systems have not collapsed. Some have also better
health care systems than others (e.g. Sweden, Netherlands). If you think any
country could have done without quarantine or equivalent measures such as
constant testing, temperature measurement, forced quarantine of infected, and
very stringent case tracking, then you really do _not_ understand exponential
growth and how the disease spreads.

I'm not declaring anyone who disagrees with me to have a personality disorder,
I have laid out reasons why it is very likely that a certain small percentage
of politicians has one. It can be inferred fairly well from what they say. In
fact, a certain small percentage of the general population has them, so it
would be a miracle if politicians where somehow exempt from personality
disorders. Sociopaths lack empathy, so they have no problem weighing other
people's lives against any other factor. That is a fact, too. As I said, it
would be easy to confirm my claim with personality tests. It's not an
outlandish view at all.

