Is every nonsense tweet supposed to be reviewed and removed?
There's nothing stopping me from going to the "town square" and yapping on about how God has returned, or that Kanye West is my dad, or is dead. People would just ignore me, I suspect. Maybe the odd passer by would insult me. But I wouldn't expect to have some authority figure come by and tell me that I can't say those things. Or worse yet, banish me from the town square altogether so that I could never go there and say anything ever again.
One difference is that Twitter actively promotes trending topics in the sidebar, so it's as if someone noticed that multiple people in the town square were shouting about the same thing and circulated it throughout the town, not just the square, just because of that.
Twitter has always exercised some editorial control over that trending topics sidebar, but it's never been clear to me how much.
Some people deny the holocaust. some deny the Armenian genocide, some deny the death toll of the Chinese cultural revolution, some - many - deny or have not heard of the holodomor (Firefox spelling checker for one, it recognises holocaust but puts a red squiggle under holodomor...), some deny the decades of terror under the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Soviet Union. Denying clearly documented historical episodes speaks clearly of the intention of the agenda of the speaker. It is up to the listener to decide where to place that speaker. Of course this assumes the listener has a reasonably broad education giving him the needed information to evaluate such historically incorrect statements. This is unfortunate given that several of the mentioned episodes - the holodomor, the Chinese cultural revolution, the Armenian genocide, the exploits of the Bolsheviks - receive far less attention than the holocaust. This in turn makes it possible for people to walk around in T-shirts with hammers and sickles or the likeness of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara without any repercussions while those who would try to do the same with anything related to Nazism are quickly dealt with. It is also why Communism is allowed within the Overton window - or at least allowed to sit on the window sill - where Nazism is the prime example of something which should never be allowed in. While I'm fine with the latter the former is a disgrace given the fact that Communism has far surpassed Nazism in its death toll.
So, either allow holocaust denial or forbid all the others - there are many more examples - as well. I vote for allowing denial but then I do have enough background information to be able to place these deniers.
So, improve education, get the subject of history out of the hands of the ideologues and into those of historians worth this title. Make sure that the coming generations know where it is at when they read or meet any of these historically inaccurate narratives.
If the holodomor, the great leap forward, and all the other horrible things that happened under communist regimes are part of the 'death toll of communism', I'd be interested in what you think the death toll of capitalism is. I'd argue the Atlantic slave trade, the Bengal famine, the Irish famine and the genocide of native Americans would count for a start.
The death toll of Capitalism is a negative number.
Poverty worldwide included 94 percent of the world’s population in 1820. This number was reduced to 17 percent in 2011. The largest part of the fall of poverty took place between 1981 when 53 percent of the world lived in poverty and 2011 when the aforementioned 17 percent did so. This rapid fall is largely due to the onset of industrialisation which in turn was made possible by the availability of the capita needed to build the mines and factories. While it may have been a rough ride to start with - working conditions in early capitalism were atrocious - this was eventually solved in western countries due to regulation and enlightened self-interest. The same cycle has taken place in non-western countries where working conditions sometimes more resemble those in the early industrialised west.
Capitalism with regulations is still capitalism, no matter whether that be European- and North American-style big-state capitalism or Deng Xiaoping's Chinese state-regulated capitalism.
Now about those examples you gave:
On the death toll of the Atlantic slave trade here's some numbers courtesy of Statista [1]. From 1501 until 1866, it is estimated that the transatlantic slave trade saw more than 12.5 million African people forcefully put on slave ships and transported to the Americas. Of these 12.5 million, only 10.7 million disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, meaning that approximately 1.8 million (14.5 percent) did not survive the journey, known as the Middle Passage.
The principal cause of the Bengal famine - with a death toll of around 3 million people - was the epidemic of Helminthosporium oryzae (a plant disease affecting rice crops), an epidemic only matched by the Irish potato famine of 1845. This was exacerbated by poor regional administration and the war with Japan [2].
The potato famine was caused by an infestation of Phytophtora infestans (potato blight, a crop fungus) which was exacerbated by the fact that only a single variety of potato was grown in all Ireland in combination with inadequate (the repeal of tariffs on grain products, import of corn from the USA) and counterproductive (continued and sometimes even increased export of food products from Ireland to Great Britain) government responses. The death toll of the Great Famine is estimated to be up to 1 million people.
The death toll of the colonisation of the Americas (north and south) was largely due to diseases like Smallpox which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for hundreds of years but to which native Americans did not have any acquired immunity. It is important to realise that the Spanish and Portuguese and French and British and Dutch (etc.) did not know about the dangers of these diseases to the native population when they landed on the shores of the Americas, this was not some plot to eradicate the native population. It was also not related to Capitalism which only became a thing some 400 years later. As to the numbers involved this seems to be disputed but they are indisputably large, probably in the tens of millions. The number of native Americans killed in combat by westerners in the 'Indian wars' in the United States is far lower, around 30.000. Most importantly, none of this has anything to do with Capitalism unless you want to equate all types and wars of conquest with Capitalism in which case Genghis Khan was the greatest capitalist of all.
Great comment. I learned something about a topic I'm not very familiar with.
I think it's possible that less attention is not the only reason Communism is tolerated more than Nazism. Nazism is much more inherently genocidal than Communism is. While the death toll for Communism is higher, it can be argued (and frequently is according to Wikipedia) that those deaths occurred under Communist regimes, but not because of Communism. So while some may wear a t-shirt with Che on it, they could be attempting to signal a Communist ideal that has never been implemented. While a t-shirt with a swastika on it, or worse, Hitler himself, doesn't leave much room to interpret anything other than racism, fascism, and ultimately genocide.
I also support improved education. Particularly body counts of states and their leaders, past and present. Especially for those that receive perhaps the least attention of all, Western democracies.
The reasoning behind "allowing" Communism while "shunning" Nazism is a product of the way these subjects are treated in schools, media, politics and entertainment. It is not difficult - nay, very easy - to see the parallels between the ideologies but they are presented in a different light: Communism is "basically good but difficult to get right", Nazism is "pure evil and can only lead to death and destruction". It is just as easy to turn these narratives around since national socialism is but a variation on international socialism which - according to doctrine - is the precursor to Communism. The dictatorship of the proletariat needs a class enemy just as much as the "volk" - German for 'people' - needs an enemy to blame for all its misfortunes. It can easily be said that Hitler just did not do national socialism right just like Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty and Castro and all the others did not do international socialism right. There is just as much room for a budding national socialist wearing a T-shirt with "Blood and Soil" on it to claim that he only means the best for his folk, that the Third Reich went wrong when they saw the Jews and Gypsies and homosexuals and handicapped and Slavs and Negroes and unemployed as the enemies of the "volk" who needed to be eradicated - this time things would be done right. He would be just as wrong as the budding international socialist/Communist who makes that claim in defence of his shirt bearing a "Communist and proud of it" [1] banner.
These ideologies belong in the same dust bin of history, "tried & failed disastrously - avoid" but somehow they are not. This needs to change and it needs to change sooner rather than later given the resurgence of Communism as somehow being a viable ideology.
> It can easily be said that Hitler just did not do [Nazism] right just like Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty and Castro and all the others did not do [Communism] right.
I'll assume we can stay focused on Nazism and Communism, rather than any precursors to complicate things. In that case, I don't see how the above statement can be right at all.
According to Wikipedia, communism is all about common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, allocating products to everyone in the society. That sounds very fair, admirable, equitable. Further, it involves the absence of social classes, money, private property. Lack of social classes seems especially appealing to an anti-harm, equality ideologue. Nazism on the other hand is associated with fascism, dictatorship, fervent antisemitism, and racism. These are directly linked to aggressive, harmful mindsets. I mean, it's pretty clear that an ideology that promotes racism is going to lead to problems.
So do you disagree with that? Is that an example, or result of how these subjects are treated in schools, media, politics, and entertainment?
> The dictatorship of the proletariat needs a class enemy
Admittedly, I had no idea what this meant until looking into it just now, but it seems this is further deviating from the main point of Communism vs Nazism since it is not quite Communism. I don't really understand why you're bringing precursors into the discussion if it's very easy to see parallels between Nazism and Communism. We should be able to talk about them directly and leave out precursors. The Che t-shirt guy is not championing precursors to Communism in this discussion, he's championing Communism, which doesn't have inherent animosity as part of its ideology.
> According to Wikipedia, communism is all about common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, allocating products to everyone in the society. That sounds very fair, admirable, equitable.
It doesn't at all. I mean the infantile view of it maybe, in the same way that someone who promises you that their magic snake oil will cure cancer sounds great.
Clearly it can't work though, right? Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it. Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive? It's both no and yes depending on the situation and depending on who you ask. So some people will be unhappy, and so there need to be deciders, enforcement, and now you have classes. So much for the classess utopia.
A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving to prevent a spiral. Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions, so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition. So you have a paranoid police-state dictatorship. It seems almost inconceivable that a communist society can remain stable and productive without this oppression. At that point, the gulags and genocides follow quite naturally.
This all follows from pretty basic obvious principles about human behavior, nobody should even need to look at history to see this. But when you do look at history, it has been proven out again and again from USSR to Cambodia to North Korea to China to Ethiopia. And yet the way it's presented, those failures and atrocities were some kind of aberration and not representative of real communism. Which is totally false, akin to arguing that WWII and the genocide of Jews and other undesirables wasn't true Nazism and that we really should give Naizsm another try (and another few dozen tries after that). These atrocities were directly caused by communism. They are the true communism.
Obviously it's not clear to a lot of people that it can't work. I haven't thought much about it, but here are some responses to your hypotheticals.
> Someone has to decide what is fair, someone has to take things from people, someone has to decide who gets it
I don't think so. You could have the group decide what is fair and there need not be taking things from people if everyone is contributing willingly based on the agreed upon rules. Ownership is common, so control must also be common. As soon as you have a "someone" as you describe you've gone out of the realm of the communist ideology as I've understood it.
> Is it fair to take from someone who is more productive and give it to someone who is less productive?
Common ownership of the means of production and distribution doesn't imply that the distribution must be equal regardless of individual output. So it's back to the group deciding on how that works, since they are the common owners.
> A proportion of your most productive people who view the deciders and redistribution as unfair will want to leave for a society that better values their contributions, so now you need to place controls on them leaving
Even if the group decides on the distribution, you will have a curve representing individual production and another representing satisfaction with the rules. I think this is going to be the case in many ideologies. But this might only be a problem if you're presupposing other problems, like an egotistical psychopath "someone" at the top who insists on maximizing output from their workforce. Which is again way outside the communist ideology. At least, I didn't see anything that required forced compliance as part of the ideology. What if people who were on the strong disagree end of the curve could simply leave? Unfortunately in our world of countries we can't easily go somewhere that operates under rules we are more aligned with, but that's an implementation problem and in this discussion we're talking about the ideology itself, not problems with poor implementation. But we might be getting too close to the infantile view you mentioned. I suppose it's not unreasonable to say that espousing an ideology that can't work "in the real world" is infantile. But when Lennon had people imagining there were no countries and no religion, I don't think he was widely thought of as infantile. I think there is a certain type of person who believes that things can change for the better, even if the changes required are drastically different from what we have now. You could call this type of person a dreamer. Maybe being a dreamer is infantile. Anyway, I don't see how this is related specifically to communism.
> Another proportion of the highly productive and effective people will try to change the system to one that better values their contributions
To me this is also only a problem if other problems external to the ideology are presupposed. And is not communism specific. You've stated that the problems are basic, obvious principles about human behavior. I'm not capable of a decent attempt to refute that. We do have a pretty abysmal track record.
> so now you have to cease democracy and disallow political opposition
Well yeah some people also think the guy selling snake oil out the back of his trunk will cure their diabetes too. I didn't mean literally everybody, I mean any serious person who has put any thought into it.
A group can't decide as a group with everybody on equal terms and no consolidation of power or authority. This is the human condition. This is why communism doesn't work and you definitely do have to hold any stable communist society together with a brutal authoritarian police state and single-party dictatorship. History and reality agree with me.
Wikipedia is not a good source for politically sensitive or contentious subjects as these tend to be taken over by self-appointed keepers of The Truth™ who only allow their own narrative to stay on the page, removing anything else. This is doubly true when relating to the ideologies favoured by those Truth Keepers™, Communism being a prime example of such.
In other words, the Wikipedia page on Communism is not a good source for an unbiased view on Communism.
To answer your questions arising from the propaganda page on Communism on Wikipedia: no, I do not agree with a Communist view on Communism.
> In other words, the Wikipedia page on Communism is not a good source for an unbiased view on Communism
I'm not surprised at this answer. I don't know enough to have an opinion on it, but the cynic in me tends to side with it. In any case, thank you for the discussion.
Can you be more specific? Which statements, and in which countries, would result in arrest? You mentioned the EU, so are you claiming that e.g. if I go to Paris and yell that Trump is dead and Kanye is my father, I would be arrested?
Is it enough that something is 'offensive', or does it also have to be false? I.e. is offensive truth banned, while inoffensive are lies permitted?
The Press Law of 1881, as amended, guarantees freedom of the press, subject to several exceptions. The Pleven Act of 1972 (after Justice Minister René Pleven) prohibits incitement to hatred, discrimination, slander and racial insults.[138][139] The Gayssot Act of 1990 prohibits any racist, anti-Semite, or xenophobic activities, including Holocaust denial.[139] The Law of 30 December 2004 prohibits hatred against people because of their gender, sexual orientation, or disability.[140]
An addition to the Public Health Code was passed on 31 December 1970, which punishes the "positive presentation of drugs" and the "incitement to their consumption" with up to five years in prison and fines up to €76,000. Newspapers such as Libération, Charlie Hebdo and associations, political parties, and various publications criticizing the current drug laws and advocating drug reform in France have been repeatedly hit with heavy fines based on this law.
Also being against the wars and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. Organizing and striking and protesting for labor rights. Environmental activism, protesting slavery and slave labor.
I actually like how Twitter handled it. I don't know if this is new, but some user attached a note saying "This guy is a comedian, this is satire" and other users voted it up so it's right below the tweet itself.
Isn’t that the point? Previously misinformation would be fact checked and removed, and now Musk is opening up for the conservatives to make false statements without moderation, so people are pushing to see if it’s only conservatives that are allowed uncensored easily falsifiable claims, or if those that are against Trump will also be left alone.
I know that the right-and-left flip sides every couple of decades. But even knowing the history of this phenomenon, the COVID19 flip from left-wing anti-vax idiots into right-wing anti-vax idiots caught me off guard.
Its one thing when you read about old political issues from 50+ years ago that talk about these obvious bouts of hypocrisy. Its totally different though when it happens before your eyes live.
> There's nothing stopping me from going to the "town square" and yapping on about how God has returned, or that Kanye West is my dad, or is dead. People would just ignore me, I suspect.
As I understand it, many people are actually incapable of performing this function and are desperate to have what they view as a higher authority (corporations, governments) protect and guide them. I do feel for these people, this must be a terrifying and bewildering time for them. Hopefully if Twitter does become less moderated, it could provide an affordable service for them that filters out content that they would be unable to cope with being exposed to.
I don't see any real issue with Twitter allowing for this.
We could pose the question of "what if we can't trust any information any more?".
But I don't think that's really the case. People are free to follow a set of accounts on Twitter (or similar platforms) that they trust and get their news and confirmations from there.
In my view, we are just moving away from Twitter being an enforcer of "real news" that can (and probably eventually becomes biased due to their power), to an organic platform based on trust and reputation that users are free to join or leave based on the perception of how trustworthy they are.
The issue is the damage that can be caused by saying "January 6th is where we retake democracy and stop the steal". Such statements led to a riot, and were done by a very influential user of Twitter.
Twitter, recoiling in disgust over that event, banned said user. It wasn't much all else considered, but we've woken up to the fact that a large segment of speech is actively harmful to this country.
We don't know how to moderate that speech quite yet. But just letting it all back on surely isn't the answer.
How is this a twitter's problem? If some country wants to censor someone, they could sent court approved letter. At least judges/legal system are trained on what is allowed or not, rather than random ban by faceless mod without any way to talk to contest the ban. Twitter should only ban on clear rules like e.g. no spam, no child porn etc. and leave other things to people who are expert in this. Because if they can't state their rule clearly they probably are prone to making mistake themselves.
Twitter exists in the USA, and Donald Trump's tweets were destroying the foundation our country is built upon.
> If some country wants to censor someone, they could sent court approved letter.
USA holds no laws governing or restricting the speech. Its up to individuals to rise up and say "Stop being a jackass", when a bully is messing with others.
Similarly, Twitter is the owner of... well.. Twitter. Its Twitter's responsibility to govern and moderate the discussion on its platform.
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When someone is harassing you here on Hacker News or engaging in damaging discussion, we rely upon moderators to cut off that discussion and lead us back to some useful path.
That's why we're _here_ instead of a "freer speech" area like 4-chan or 8-chan. Because those other areas are composed of complete nutjobs.
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Anyway, its no big deal if Twitter's new owner wants to become the new 4chan / 8chan / whatever. Its absolutely in his right to take the platform in that direction. But we all know what a good owner _should_ be doing.
There’s obviously of people lashing back because of the acquisition, spreading offensive misinformation in this case, but that just proves the issues Twitter was already having. Mainly, the people who generate the most interest with their posts are bad people you wouldn’t associate with if they didn’t bring eyes to your platform.
I doubt Musk will be able to solve the problem, and I doubt he’ll make his investment back, but he can rest assured it’s impossible to make Twitter worse.
Weak. This is pretty clearly a joke meme. It might be offensive but nobody takes it seriously. So, Musk can let them keep it up, and think they've scored a point. But then they can't complain when there's much more serious and insidious disinformation posted by the opposition, can they?
Honestly, let people say whatever lies and nonsense they want and let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to, or liars destroy their own credibility if they want to.
Problem there is that Twitter's revenue comes from advertisers.
And corporate advertisers aren't looking to have their brand associated with 4chan 2.0.
So if Musk believes in this unfettered free speech concept then it will destroy Twitter. Because what many people don't know is just how dominant Facebook and Google are in the advertising space. It's > 95% of total ad spend for many brands. So dumping Twitter because it's harming their brand will be a trivial decision.
"Advertisers" advertised on Rush Limbaugh. They keep advertising on Fox News. It'll just draw different advertisers.
Advertisers are going to go where the money is. Will the changing demographics make the platform more money for advertisers, or less? That's all they care about.
Incidentally, if it means there's even a chance that we stop seeing even a small percentage of )(&@(#& Liberty Mutual ads, I'm all for whatever that takes.
Oh, I get it, but your conjecture was that Twitter wouldn't make enough money from advertising to stay in business. If these kinds of ads make enough money for Rush (in the old days) and Fox to stay at the number 1 spots in their category, then what do they care?
In 1991, the Information Council for the Environment was founded by the National Coal Association with the expressed purpose of fabricating uncertainty around climate science.
They provided multiple scripts to Simmons Advertising for Rush Limbaugh to read and pass off as his personal dark horse take on climate policy.
Refer to pages 9 and 12 in the PDF linked below [2].
Would you say the coal industry wasn't a very profitable group? Do you think this is the only group who leveraged Limbaugh's voice to deliberately spread misinformation?
Fauci and the CDC have used the networks and elite newspapers to sell the idea that the vaccine prevented transmission of COVID, which has now shown to have been a known lie. How far down this rabbit hole do you want to go? I mean, this kind of media manipulation has been going around since doctors endorsed smoking as good for your health on TV ads. My personal take -- RE: Twitter -- is that this sort of thing needs sunlight and fresh air to sanitize it, not the government or corporations trying to filter it out.
The claim was: "the types of advertisers on Rush Limbaugh etc. [were] Not nearly as profitable as say Nike, GM, Sony, Apple etc."
That claim is false and I provided evidence to show it.
As for your whataboutism: that's patently untrue and you know it. Transmission rate and vaccination rate are very clearly inversely related no matter what dataset you're referencing.
But you're correct, misinformation knows no bounds, be it right wing radio or the comments section of a tech forum. The best we can do is vet sources sufficiently, or otherwise learn to disregard unfounded claims as random noise.
You may not recall, but 4chan was one of the greatest disseminators of information and a huge spawning ground for all kinds of content prior to the emergence of more mainstream platforms. It was also fucking disgusting.
I think so too. He will have to rehire all those content moderators that he is currently firing to keep the ad base alive. He will have to have people monitor and delete Trump and Kanye tweets when they come back online as well as probably 90% of whatever Alex Jones posts but I think he will stop short of closing their accounts; maybe he will have to block them for EU countries I would guess, because that's the law. I don't know how EU could force anything beyond that.
> (1) this is, by the way, something that Musk did to that diver he didn't like.
It also should be noted that Musk __won__ that libel case. So that's "acceptable speech" according to our laws and courts.
So no. Libel laws are _NOT_ the answer. Its too difficult to actually sue someone for libel today. You can apparently call someone a pedophile, advertised to dozens-of-millions of followers, and not be considered "libel" or "defamation".
If there's one thing I learned from that event, its that our libel laws / defamation laws are not strict enough. Its not worth going to the courts on this kind of thing because you'll lose.
Yes, do that. There's absolutely no second order effects that could possibly happen. We'll just go to the courts for everything. I'm sure it's easy and inexpensive to sue someone for libel in different jurisdictions.
> let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to
"Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay liberal" doesn't fall into libel laws.
> Liars destroy their own credibility
And Elon Musk owns Twitter. So that destroys the credibility of the platform, does it not?
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There's also organizations that explicitly peddle in misinformation. See "Russia Today" (or RT), who are trying to say that Ukrainians are gay Nazis, and were banned on Twitter because of it. There's no libel law that covers this case either (no one in particular is getting defamed). Its just war propaganda and is actively harmful misinformation.
> let relevant parties deal with them with libel laws if they want to
Falling for 2016 trap. If it’s unverified info then it should be treated as such. Except majority of the people read it and consider it a true statement. Then it’s too late to debunk it.
I guess my point is that there's more kinds of harmful speech out there than just libel / slander.
> COVID19 can be cured by drinking bleach and/or Ivermectin and/or hydroxyquinoline.
These "cures" range from useless to harmful. But no one is getting defamed, so there's no one who will take the matter to court. What do you want, for COVID19 to take Joe Rogan to court over the Ivermectin statements?
I don't think people realize how useless libel laws are in today's social networks.
But, telling you that nothing works, go home and wait, is not factual. Many things are helpful, especially in combination.[0] This information should not be suppressed.
Monoclonal antibodies and Dexamethasone are effective treatments for COVID19 (depending on a lot of details of course. BA.5 and other variants are showing resistance to many Monoclonal Antibodies)
Dexamethasone studies, even in April 2020, showed a 50% reduction in death rates. This is why the death rate in the USA was so much lower than Italy, because doctors studied the crap out of COVID19 and we begun to find effective treatments.
Instead of spreading information about treatments, a large group decided it was best to spread misinformation about horse dewormers.
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In either case, I think I can safely say that the hoopla about IVM and all that was bullshit. It never worked, but people wanted to believe for... some reason? It got to the point where people were rejecting legitimate treatments (ie: Dexamethasone + Monoclonal Antibodies) and asking doctors for IVM. I know, my sister is a doctor and had to deal with this bullshit.
I'm talking about prophylaxis. Dexamethasone is used for critically ill COVID cases only. There is no approved prophylactic drug or even early treatment drug. It's use an off-label drug or nothing.
The link I referenced includes monoclonal antibody studies, and also paxlovid studies. It happens that I'm fully vaxx'd, got COVID, took paxlovid, and recovered (slowly). You might take a look at the link.
I'm not interested in "large groups", I'm interested in scientific evidence.
You may know that IVM is a Nobel prize winning drug that has been administered in billions of doses world wide for decades. It's on the WHO Essential list and is safer than aspirin.
The FDA staffers really enjoyed their "horse de-wormer" propaganda campaign. Yes, some people were using veterinary grade IVM, because they were denied the pharmaceutical grade prescription.
It's disingenuous, like saying don't drink water, because it's a chemical used in sewage treatment plants.
Here in NH, the legislature passed a bill to allow OTC dispensing of IVM. The Governor vetoed it (rightly, I think). His comment, when he signed the veto, included the remark that the measure was unnecessary, because any doctor can legally prescribe IVM for COVID. Except, most are actually not allowed to do that by their administrators.
As an experiment, my wife asked the local Walgreen pharmacist what he would do, if she gave him an IVM prescription for COVID. "We can't get any," he lied.
With all due respect, IVM has been proven to be a scam treatment with no benefits to COVID19.
If you're still on the IVM hype-train, you've been left behind in this discussion. It is known not to work on COVID19. Its efficacy in treating parasites may be well known, but COVID19 isn't a parasite, its a virus.
As Mark Twain has stated: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". But hopefully it gives you some perspective on the matter. You have been fooled, and you will remain fooled as long as you're holding onto IVM illogically.
If I see "TrumpIsDead" in the Trending box, that doesn't tell me who the liar is. So does that destroy the credibility of the source, or does it destroy the credibility of Twitter's trends feature?
The ultimate outcome of this chaos is that the entire public FINALLY becomes trained to suspect every single thing on twitter is fake or misinformation until proven otherwise.
But anyway how many missed payments of $1 BILLION PER YEAR can Musk miss and twitter still exist? By end of the decade the Saudis or whomever will own it instead.
This is a great test, and I think it nails a core issue with not having content moderation. If Something like this occasionally trends, then it’s engaging and a fun joke. Twitter is oddly better for it. If people can game the system such that “irrelevant misinformation” is the only thing that trends?
Is anyone actually seriously advocating no moderation at all?
I'm pretty close to being a free speech absolutist, but I still like to be in semi-moderated spaces. I don't want the state to do the moderating, but if a place like twitter that I can freely enter or exit has clear rules that are evenhandedly applied it's usually better for it. Now aesthetically I prefer fewer rules and more freewheeling interaction, but I understand that some people want a more constrained space. Both can and should exist.
Is every nonsense tweet supposed to be reviewed and removed?
There's nothing stopping me from going to the "town square" and yapping on about how God has returned, or that Kanye West is my dad, or is dead. People would just ignore me, I suspect. Maybe the odd passer by would insult me. But I wouldn't expect to have some authority figure come by and tell me that I can't say those things. Or worse yet, banish me from the town square altogether so that I could never go there and say anything ever again.