Civics 101. The term judiciary refers to the courts. Courts don’t prosecute anyone. Prosecutors do. Prosecutors are part of the executive.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
They built up what’s called the Disinformation Industrial Complex. They put pressure in various ways on tech companies to censor and funded many institutions to get speech that goes against the official narrative censored as misinformation.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Without that groundwork, the WHO would not have been able to get Twitter and Facebook to censor lab leak claims in 2021.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
We have the emails. “Critical that responsible, respected scientists and agencies get ahead of the science and the narrative of this”
What’s that from?
That doesn’t change the fact that the censorship wouldn’t have worked without the structures of the Disinformation Industrial Complex for which Democrats are responsible.
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica).
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.
I’m not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake.
This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more “mercenary” form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let’s not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included “COVID is not real” or “ivermectin cures COVID”, stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US’ first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points.
Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don’t think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be “just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content”. Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools.
What’s that from?
I honestly don’t know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying “this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper” would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned above, and that the Wuhan coincidence seems really fishy and the scenario of a virus escaping a lab not so absurd, but once we get into technical arguments like e.g. the one surrounding the furin site, it’s only experts that can really chime in knowingly. If all the experts also have competing interests, then it’s a problem, but that doesn’t magically confer domain knowledge to everyone else so they can double check their work.
Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Afterward, Farrar speaks more with Fauci and Farrar writes an email to Tedros who heads the WHO to propose how to move forward. That’s one of the bullet points from that email. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/ gives you a lot of details about what happened in that week.
Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021 that’s worth reading. In it he talks about working 24⁄7 during that time, with one night receiving 11 calls during the night. He talks about having to get a burner phone after he talked with British intelligence about the possibility of there being a lab leak. He talks about fearing that revealing a lab leak might start WWIII.
Disinformation is a problem, but the most important disinformation seems to come from nation states. The most consequential case of disinformation of the last decades was the claim that Iraq has a WMD program.
The WHO’s disinformation claim of “COVID is not airborne” seems to me worse than “Ivermectin cures COVID” and I would expect that “COVID is not airborne” killed more.
Fauci statement in congress that a paper where he named the PDF in his own emails “Baric, Shi et al—Nature medicine—SARS Gain of function” doesn’t contain anything about gain of function research is disinformation.
If we look at the last year the biggest disinformation story seems to be that Russia blew up their own pipeline when it was relatively clear to Western intelligence that Ukrainians blew it up.
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian psyop is itself a disinformation campaign to mislead the American people. You might say that it’s ironic that the most high-profile use of the tools of the disinformation campaign was part of a disinformation campaign but that’s what it was designed to do.
It’s a system designed to censor speech that goes against the narratives that the authorities spread and not one that’s about factual accuracy.
The social media censorship prevented relevant information from surfacing. The early analysis that argued that COVID did not come from a lab was basically an argument that the sequence is too far away from the published sequences and nobody would go through the effort to make so many changes in the lab. That argument falls apart when you know that the month the Chinese military overtook the lab in Wuhan the lab took down their virus database, where the information to what sequences they could work with was stored.
The ending of the lab leak censorship happened when important people got aware of the fact that the Chinese did their experiments under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent the researchers from being infected by airborne pathogens (and despite the WHO disinformation COVID is an airborne pathogen).
While that information was known to Fauci in February 2021 it was kept out of the public view for 2021. You actually had to read the papers that Shi’s lab published to know it and the censorship created an environment where nobody did.