
The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis - AndrewBissell
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/temporary-coronavirus-censorship
======
PeterStuer
What is the difference between government running corporations and
corporations running government?

Both are just an oligarchic circle jerk.

------
cryptica
The idea that any kind of censorship is necessary is a terrible argument. Free
speech worked fine thus far in all of history.

The problems are simply wealth inequality and the size of corporations. This
is what's new and unproven.

------
54351623
Considering those two doctors are the poster children of censorship right now,
I've seen more articles about them than any other single medical professional
or said professional's opinions.

------
tengbretson
> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set
> ingesting fish cleaner

Id highly recommend googling for the follow up to this story for the curious
out there.

------
wenc
From the article:

> Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media
> outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type

Genuinely curious, does anyone know what insinuation is being made here? What
does it mean to be of "the Aspen Institute" type?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well, the Aspen Institute is a think tank funded by donations from
billionaires and their foundations. They apparently try to be non-partisan.
They claim to "drive change", but I cynically suspect that they don't make
much of a difference on anything, ever.

Couple that with the "self-styled intellectual elites" comment, and I think
the idea is that of a group of self-anointed bright people who are out to
change the world by sitting around and talking on other peoples' dime, and
feeling smug in the process, while actually doing nothing that matters.

But I'm not the author, and I'm just looking stuff up about the Aspen
Institute, so this is just (slightly informed) guesswork.

~~~
scrollbar
Yep. Check out this podcast episode with Anand Giridharadas talking about his
experiences addressing the Aspen Institute - was my first exposure to it and
was pretty interesting

[https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-
win...](https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-winner-take-
all-ezra-klein-podcast)

------
cvwright
> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set
> injecting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is
> that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by
> being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along.

Damn. Taibbi's not looking to make this debate any calmer, is he?

~~~
jkachmar
He rarely, if ever, is. It’s his biggest flaw, IMO: in spite of the fact that
he’s extremely smart and very articulate, he quickly escalated his rhetoric
and takes extreme positions based on his gut.

------
mikedilger
Censorship "theory" is sound. And that's what is so pernicious and dangerous
about the idea. The idea of removing content that could cause harm makes total
sense. If the people making the censorship decisions were widely respected
experts in the field and ideologically neutral, and used extensive and
rigorous processes to determine what should be and what shouldn't be censored
based on actual harm not political leanings, and were also accountable, then
it could in theory be a useful tool.

But censorship practice is utterly corrupt. It's based on ideological goal-
driven thinking, a form of thinking most of us use most of the time
(unfortunately). The decisions are made by non-experts who are nameless,
faceless and unaccountable. The result is dangerous and divisive.

~~~
tomohawk
Today's expert is tomorrow's outcast or loser.

Experts have a vested interest in protecting the prestige of the knowledge
they are expert in. If an upstart comes along with information the obsoletes
their ideas - just look at what happened to Galileo or any number of other
people.

And note, that an expert doesn't even have to be wrong to be wrong. What I
mean by this is that an expert in epidemiology may be completely correct from
that point of view, but that viewpoint does not include all of the other
fields of expertise that might be relevant when making decisions at a national
level. Tunnel vision is a crazy thing, and causes normally smart people to do
silly things.

~~~
ashwoods
I agree generally with what you say but I’d substitute experts with humans.

------
rpiguy
Although I disagree with it completely, I would defend the right of private
platforms, like Google and Twitter to take down whatever content they like.

When the government starts to mandate what information can and cannot be
shared, that is where I draw the line.

What confuses the issue is that the government and big corporations appear to
be slowly merging into one elite, ruling body. Not sure how to solve the issue
when the lines become more and more blurred.

~~~
tomohawk
Youtube is Google's video monopoly. If there was an actual market with many
providers, then you might make a case. However, a monopolist doesn't get to
make these kinds of decisions.

Would we stand for it if the local electric monopoly started pulling the plug
on abortion clinics? On churches?

A monopoly gets limited discretion in exchange for the monopoly.

~~~
didgeoridoo
You’re talking about government-granted monopolies, like your electric company
example. YouTube is merely limited in its ability to use its pricing power to
squeeze its customers without attracting regulatory attention.

And we aren’t the customer — the advertisers are. I don’t think they’re
bothered one bit by all this.

~~~
vl
YouTube became possible because Google funneled billions of dollars from other
divisions for many years until competition was completely napalmed out and
finally it became profitable. No other company or private investors can do
this kind of investment for so many years. Google should be split up.

------
Barrin92
I'm not American and to me, this kind of response, that I've seen a lot over
the last month, is almost like a sort of turnkey censorship by the means of
uncritical faith into the first amendment and myth.

The entire piece mostly consists of personal attacks. On elites who are
allegedly all corrupt and untrustworthy. On journalists who don't really know
anything, and it conjures up an image of all elites only holding the positions
they hold because they think of everyone else as if they were unwashed masses.

It's hard to have a serious discussion when that's the premise that the
argument is built on. There is no serious discussion on the dangers of false
information, what merit there may be to delegating decision making to experts
in particular in a crisis like this (I for once have more trust in Fauci than
Trump to be honest, and I think many people would agree).

It's almost comical in a way that a piece that asks for more free speech so
vehemently attacks people who exercise their free speech to question something
that really matters, whether the foundations that the United States are built
on are correct. We can and should have free speech about absolutely
everything, except of course the merits of free speech and the American
constitution, which is timeless, self-evident, and made by god.

~~~
runawaybottle
Why do you reject the premise?

In the last twenty years, a motivated political establishment executed a
fraudulent war, with most of the media either being complicit or negligent.
Within the same era, you had a financial establishment that concocted economic
fraud that was akin to a financial terrorist attack that literally collapsed
the economy. Again, the media/press was mostly complicit or negligent as it
happened, and the political establishment was mostly unwilling to administer
criminal justice in the aftermath.

So, that’s roughly two bullshit wars, and economic collapse due to deliberate
fraud on a massive scale, all wrapped up in a package of negligent media
coverage, and zero justice.

These institutions don’t deserve respect at the moment. It will take a long
time to reestablish integrity on their part. I understand if you find this
general attitude snobbish, distasteful, and pretentious, which is fine, you
may be more polite than the rest of us.

But the premise is not inaccurate.

~~~
AndrewBissell
I have never seen a "just trust the experts/institutions" type respond when I
point all this out to them, but you've worded it better than I ever have.

What I find especially funny is the political class's persecution complex on
this point. For all intents and purposes, the "experts" and their enablers in
media and government are still calling a good 98% of the shots, but just
losing that last 2% has sent them into fits of finger-pointing rage.

------
mirimir
Bottom line, if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that
are designed to make censorship impossible.

Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything
remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and
what they don't.

~~~
sneak
I’ll go one further: tell your friends, family, and people that you see
donating free content to censorship platforms like Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, and YouTube that they are harming society by doing so.

It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond
until then.

[https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-
bias/](https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/)

~~~
bilbo0s
Therein lies the issue. To be blunt, human nature is tribalism, it's desire
for food and sex, and, unfortunately, it's waiting until something is a matter
of life and death to respond.

Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should
work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and
play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until
something better comes along to unseat the incumbents.

That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will
have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD
or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was
blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent
in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today.

My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as
censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just
have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking
in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and
freedom.

Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you
don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access
trails for trackers and tracers to follow.

I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong
though?

~~~
mirimir
Most people won't care until it's _their_ ox that's being gored. So the plan
is having non-centralized alternatives ready to spread. Dark marketplaces are
an excellent example. Sure, many have been taken down, but the demand is still
there.

~~~
rhaksw
You're right, and social media users' oxes _are_ being gored, they just don't
know about it.

------
baryphonic
I should state from the beginning that I detest the tech monopolies engaging
in censorship, and I question whether they even have a right to do so (they
seem like common carriers to me).

One of the interesting aspects of this censorship is that is taking places in
the US is that it probably is taking down mostly misleading information. The
main issue with it is that no one actually knows that much, and so whichever
faction of experts is most influential or savvy or popular gets to dictate the
so-called consensus. That being said, while I still vehemently disagree with
censorship, I don't think there is immense harm in taking down a video that
advocates, say, psychic consultation to prevent COVID.

Once a culture becomes a censorship culture, the calculus changes. While right
now in America, the effort appears to mostly be an attempt to weed out
information that these experts believe is untrue, we have seen that in China,
the censorship explicitly weeds out information that _is_ true. The so-called
conspiracy theory about the virus leaking from either the Wuhan CDC or the
Wuhan Institute of Virology in November that has since been corroborated in
multiple Western mainstream publications was discovered mostly due to Chinese
officials engaging in fairly heavy-handed censorship. The Wuhan Institute of
Virology was scrubbed of information about one particular young woman who was
working as an intern there, and has been named as a possible "patient zero." A
paper released by researchers at the South China University of Technology also
suggested the Wuhan CDC as a probable point of origin, and this was also
scrubbed by Chinese Communist Party censors. Every instance of this is like a
canary for lies being propagated by the CCP. And they have helped astute
Western observers of China find the trail of the truth just by looking at
differences in what has been censored without a trace.

This is why I am so opposed to censorship (and torture and deplatforming and
partisan violence and the list goes on): every time it becomes a regular tool,
it becomes twisted only in a way to serve those in power and punish their
enemies, often when the authorities are spreading lies and their enemies are
daring to tell the truth.

~~~
knzhou
This comment is a gish gallop that contains piles of exaggeration,
misdirection, and outright fabrication, and I bet I know its shitty source.
Folks, don’t fall for it. Baryphonic, if you fell for it, I’m sorry, but do
try to seek out at least some of the opposing information, for your own sake.

~~~
baryphonic
Quite a few sources. But please, school me in (1) where I got my information
and (2) what your preferred "opposing sources" are and say, and why they are
credible?

For what it's worth, I do seek out "opposing information" (is that a bit like
"alternative facts?"). Much of it has been fairly non-credible because it
seems to change frequently, more like whiplash. For example, the CCP has made
a big show of shutting down the wet markets, only to allow them to reopen
quietly, despite neither bats nor pangolins, the likely carriers of SARS-Cov-2
to humans, being sold at the wet market in Wuhan.

If you're trying to convince people not to take me seriously, or are trying to
convince me of that as well, then would it not be simpler (and cost fewer
downvotes) to point to the errors in facts I present or my reasoning?

~~~
knzhou
You got most of these bad takes from Project Evidence, a textbook example of a
gish gallop that looks convincing only by the sheer quantity of shit it
contains.

I don't have time to "school" you in everything, because you wrote so much
that was wrong that I don't have time to. That's literally the whole point of
a gish gallop: it takes 10x more words to refute bullshit than to state it.

While I'm having my morning coffee let me do a few:

> the CCP has made a big show of shutting down the wet markets, only to allow
> them to reopen quietly

This is completely wrong, because it mixes up wet markets (which literally
mean any market that doesn't only sell dry goods, and which also exist
throughout Asia, in Europe, and even in the US, and are far less weird than
you've been told:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whbyuy2nHBg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whbyuy2nHBg)
), and the exotic wildlife trade. The latter was shut down, and remains shut
down. The former have never been shut down, because it's where people get
their groceries.

> The Wuhan Institute of Virology was scrubbed of information about one
> particular young woman who was working as an intern there, and has been
> named as a possible "patient zero."

If you actually read the complete evidence that Project "Evidence" gives for
this, it is:

1\. There was a graduate student at WIV that graduated 5 years ago (as
graduate students do)

2\. There was once a rumor on Chinese social media that this person was
patient zero, but absolutely no reason given why that would be the case (and
obviously, Chinese social media is just as unreliable as social media
everywhere else)

3\. This graduate student has not recently made any dramatic public
appearances or viral social media posts (because why would they)

4\. This graduate student is no longer on the lab website (this is completely
normal; they would only remain 5 years after graduating if the lab managers
forgot to keep updating the site)

That pretty much sounds like zero evidence to me. But how do they summarize
it?

> Would it really be impossible for the Chinese government to get in touch
> with her and have her issue an in-person statement to the media? _It would
> only be impossible if she was dead._

I mean, forget about how weird this demand is — it’s negotiating with China as
it they were the Borg. Even if the demand were in good faith, does that sound
like a document aiming to find the truth? Or is it just trying to make a
series of low-evidence claims sound maximally sinister? Are you really the
kind of person who falls for this?

> conspiracy theory [...] has since been corroborated in multiple Western
> mainstream publications

Not the ones I've read, and I've read plenty. This is a massive claim with no
evidence.

~~~
baryphonic
I've never heard of "Project Evidence" before.

~~~
knzhou
Great, so I suppose it's metastasized. How about the rest?

~~~
baryphonic
My intended point about the CCP was that their censorship is often a hint
about what is true and embarrassing (or even destabilizing to the regime) and
this is beyond the pale. I did not intend to make some strong claims about the
absolute veracity of rumors on Chinese social media; rather, I tried to convey
(and I admit that my success at this was clearly mediocre) that censorship is
often a clue about where to look for the truth.

I don't really put much stock into the idea that this particular woman was
patient zero. But it doesn't exactly matter.

A better example would have been a case everyone knows about and that is
uncontroversial: that of Dr. Li Wenliang. He told the truth that the virus was
a coronavirus and probably similar to the original SARS virus, but it was
inconvenient to the state, and so he was hauled in by the police for "making
false comments on the Internet."

If I amended my initial comment and simply used the uncontroversial case of
Dr. Li, rather than discussions about the WCDC or Wuhan Institute of Virology,
I think it stands to reason that I would not have been accused of "Gish
galloping" (thank you for teaching me a new phrase, by the way).

Not that you'll believe it, but I really had no intention of overwhelming you
or anyone else with rumors as a distraction; I was trying to add a couple of
examples to illustrate An asymmetry between American and Chinese censorship.

------
throwaway888abc
Local news outlets reported that Facebook had repeatedly taken down event
listings advertising Thursday’s capitol protest. “Events that defy
government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” a
Facebook spokesperson said, confirming the removal. [1]

One more time: “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing
aren’t allowed on Facebook,”

Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed,

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-
pro...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-
coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol)

~~~
sfj
> Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed,

... on a private platform, so? I hate censorship also, but the more these
major platforms do this, the more people will begin to recognize there are
alternatives. They're shooting themselves in their own foot, and I for one, am
happy to stand back and let them do so.

------
nicbou
We are trusting a few large companies to moderate acceptable speech on the
internet. Is it a good idea to entrust such power to a semi-homogenous group
of liberal Americans in the Bay Area? Shouldn't the rest of the planet also
have a say in this?

Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the
Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the
internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are
headquartered?

What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers?
Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring
homosexual displays of affection?

I find it crazy that we grant those companies so much power simply because
they happen to share some of our views.

~~~
cfmcdonald
> Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the
> Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the
> internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are
> headquartered?

Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people
to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very
disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state?

> What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers?
> Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring
> homosexual displays of affection?

YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30
years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would
have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to
be the dominant video hosting platform.

~~~
sneak
> _Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state?_

For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel
your phone service based on who you choose to call with it.

> _YouTube 's policies reflect mainstream social mores._

This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now
the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”.
Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or
creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”?

Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria,
making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s
that for “mainstream social mores”?

~~~
runawaybottle
Are they deleting them due to graphic explicitness?

~~~
sneak
Does it matter? Wouldn’t you want evidence of war crimes to be both graphic
and explicit, therefore making it better documentation of a crime and more
likely to assist in the prosecution of the criminal(s)?

~~~
NotSammyHagar
It does matter why they ban things. They make mistakes too, sometimes put
things back. It always matters.

~~~
sneak
I disagree. The danger is not YouTube or YouTube's policies, whatever they may
be at any point in time. The danger is centralized models that permit
invisible, sometimes-on, sometimes-off, point-and-click censorship.

Those models fail when the military puts a machine gun in a sysadmin's face in
wartime, regardless of how good or decent their censorship policies were in
peacetime. It's the model that's bad, not YouTube's current policies.

------
sameers
Does anyone understand what point he's trying to make, or is it that the point
is a very generic, "hey censorship is bad," which most people will agree with,
but is argued rather poorly?

At the end he writes, "From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and
reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to
be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to
giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion
of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the
economy..."

Does taking down a video of a couple of charlatans, "stamp out discussion of
things that do actually need to be discussed"? I don't see how at all, maybe
I'm missing something about why this has upset Taibbi so much. Other than,
maybe anything that involves Google/Facebook playing a role in removing
content from the Internet will just make him mad, regardless of the issue at
hand.

~~~
nicodjimenez
Chastising a man that’s complaining about our loss of freedom of speech? The
irony! Censor him!

He’s pointing out a disturbing trend, if you are pro democracy and pro freedom
of speech. What’s wrong with that?

Not everyone believes in democracy / freedom of speech, but these two things
go hand in hand.

You can’t have democracy without freedom of speech and vice versa.

The disturbing trend towards censorship is the first step towards
totalitarianist dictatorships. A lot of people will argue this state is
“inevitable” but resisting the urge towards tyranny is an ongoing fight.

~~~
sameers
Thanks for engaging - I appreciate the chance to have a discussion.

I don't intend to chastise Taibbi at all. I am a fan of much of what he writes
- I share his disdain for the journalistic class as a whole, and I like that
he gets so mad about stuff.

However, I do chastise his tone and direction with this essay. This essay in
itself doesn't convince me that "freedom of speech" is at peril, nor do I
think it is, now more so than previously in the United States. And Taibbi's
style and targets isn't convincing me otherwise at all. What are the markers
of a trend away from free speech? How is there more government suppression of
private opinion now than 10, 20, 30, whatever years ago? I have really heard
no convincing argument, though I have read and heard dozens of alarmist
critiques that focus on this campus protest and that YouTube video
personality, without making a strong argument that these are systematic,
government-led, erasures of minority opinions.

~~~
nicodjimenez
If you don’t think freedom of speech is in trouble in the US right now, you’re
not paying attention. The NBA, Bloomberg News killing stories, YouTube getting
bolder about censorship...

