Facebook and Twitter Must Do More To Fight Anti-Vaccine Misinformation, a Dozen State Attorneys General Demand (washingtonpost.com) 153
A coalition of 12 state attorneys general on Wednesday sent a letter to Facebook and Twitter, pressing them to do more to ensure online falsehoods aren't undermining efforts to vaccinate the public against covid-19. From a report: Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) and 11 other Democratic state attorneys general called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to "take immediate steps" to fully enforce their policies against vaccine misinformation. The attorneys general say the companies have not cracked down hard enough on prominent anti-vaccine accounts that repeatedly violate the companies' terms of service. They also say that falsehoods about the safety of coronavirus vaccines from a small pool of individuals has reached over 59 million followers on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter, citing data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which studies online misinformation and disinformation. They sent the letter the day before Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai are expected to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The hearing is broadly focused on disinformation, and lawmakers and their staff have been in communication with leaders of Anti-Vax Watch, a collection of people and organizations concerned about vaccine disinformation.
12 AGs who should be fired (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution to free speech you don't agree with is to use the free speech you have to point out why others are wrong. I wonder what other pets of the constitution these idiots will trample over next. I think they should be shown the boot.
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The solution to free speech you don't agree with is to use the free speech you have to point out why others are wrong.
Problem: You can't use facts and logic on people who didn't form their beliefs based on facts and logic.
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:5, Insightful)
Citation needed.
This is just a loquacious way of relieving yourself of the responsibility to communicate the information you have in a cogent and comprehensible manner to people whom you despise anyway and need an excuse to put down and brand as subhuman and beyond the reach of polite society.
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Mod up
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Citation needed.
You just provided one!
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:3)
"There's no reasoning with people who won't just take my word on it" is the punchline of a joke, not a philosophy of a sound civil society.
You can tell it's a joke because even the pseudointellectuals espousing this view make it into a joke. They used to (maybe still do) call it "sealioning" when someone asks them for a deep conversation. They throw up a cartoon graphic of a sea lion and have good laugh among themselves, secure in their knowledge that there cannot possibly by any intellectually honest quest
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Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason "debate me" has become a meme. One side is willing to do open and honest debate where facts are presented and people are allowed to draw their own conclusions based on the arguments made.
Wrong.
It's become a meme because casual people will look at them and think they have some sort of facts on their side. If the "debate" is something they already believe themselves then it reinforces their beliefs.
People with actual facts will mostly avoid them because they either don't want to get involved with idiots of because they recognize that even getting into a debate gives credence to the idea that there's even anything to debate.
eg. Richard Dawkins refusal to debate creationists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Which is seen by the creationists like this:
https://www.conservapedia.com/... [conservapedia.com]
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:2, Troll)
What's better propaganda for the young earth creationist or the flat earther?
1. Dawkins agreed to debate me! ...and then walked all over me
2. Dawkins is afraid to even be in the same room with me
At some point, one has to believe that Dawkins cares less about educating people who need education the most and cares more about scoring cheap points with his fundamentalist-atheist base...the better to get more speaking gigs and book deals with.
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Or he knows it's tedious and pointless to debate people who will not accept observable facts.
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he's not obligated to teach.
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People aren't obligated to bash their head against the same brick wall forever. He's done a lot of debating work morons. It's annoying, tedious, frustrating and deeply repetitive.
He's done far, far more than you ever will and you're sitting there like an armchair quarterback complaining how he hasn't done even more for your idle entertainment. He does care about teaching, much more than your do because he got off his arse and did a bunch . The extent of your care for the topic is complaining about how other
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:2)
I could say the same thing about people who take it as an article of faith that whole swathes of the population are categorically lost by the sole virtue of a not being sure about what's true in a world flooded with propaganda.
Re:12 AGs who should be fired (Score:4, Insightful)
doesn't even matter... either you're a first class citizen with the ability to make decisions for yourself or not; the responsibility is on the individual, not the collective, in the democratic ideal
a right to choose for themselves is not dependent upon another's approval, if it was, then it's not a right, but a granted priviledge, revocable at any time
I'm sure to those you refer to, their decision makes perfect sense or is at least acceptable to them; to not honor their decision and force them to do something else
is a far worse option than whatever you'd have them do 'for their own good'
one might correctly say that self-determination has a few downsides, especially when you feel others aren't making the same decisions you would, but having an exteranl entity (person or group) deciding for everyone else is historically shown to be oppressive and tyrannical, if not at first, then it always will get there soon eventually
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Mod this up
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the responsibility is on the individual, not the collective, in the democratic ideal
So ... how many anti-vaxxers will take personal responsibility for the deaths that will follow?
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the responsibility is on the individual, not the collective, in the democratic ideal
So ... how many anti-vaxxers will take personal responsibility for the deaths that will follow?
About as many people that have killed others by spreading the flu because they didn’t get a flu shot.
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How many Slashdot posters will take responsibility for not understanding what the Galileo Affair was actually about - hint, it wasnt about whether the earth was flat or round, that had been settled by this point in history for the Roman Catholic Church, it was about whether the round earth was at the centre of the universe or not.
The Galileo Affair was about the battle between the opposing theories of geocentricism and heliocentrism - with Galileo being on the latter side of the discussion, and the Roman Ca
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I suppose for my misinformation, some here would think me ready for the gallows; but here you are to add another viewpoint to the mix and lo and be-phukkin-hold.... folks can decide for themselves or look up more info to be sure
thanks for the fix but really, your post does more to advocate multiple viewpoints and the positives that come of it; there are many on this thread that would seem to prefer one person/group decides what is right and wrong and everybody else must just follow it, no dissent allowed
s
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Problem: You can't use facts and logic on people who didn't form their beliefs based on facts and logic.
Problem: People who didn't form their beliefs based on facts and logic. -- FTFY
All of which is irrelevant, as general misleading speech is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), the Supreme Court established that speech advocating illegal conduct is protected under the First Amendment unless the speech is likely to incite "imminent lawless action."
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/189/brandenburg-v-ohio [mtsu.edu]
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^ This here
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v That there
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In Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), the Supreme Court established that speech advocating illegal conduct is protected under the First Amendment unless the speech is likely to incite "imminent lawless action."
And afterwards they decided that there is "no constitutional value in false statements of fact" - Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc, 418 U.S. 323 (1979)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah, and that is the foundation for things like libel, slander, defamation, etc. Gertz v Welch is specifically about libel and not general misleading or false statements about a thing.
We have legal remedies for this, as Syndey Powell is now finding out. Depending on the nature of the statments, the pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines may have legal recourse. But none of that would rise to the level of require prior restraint.
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Except giving advice about a vaccine is practising medicine which requires having an appropriate license and/or being registered with the appropriate professional body.
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Unless the person is claiming to be a doctor, good luck with making that stick in a court.
https://healthcare.findlaw.com/patient-rights/what-is-the-unauthorized-practice-of-medicine.html [findlaw.com]
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Never mind that such a system that allows for that invites all of the worst sort who would control the facts for their own ends. Look no further than Lysenko for how this plays out in reality. If you're a bit far-sighted Galileo is bit another example. There are plenty in between if you
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Well, we can legally ban the indoor church attendance in cases of quarantine. This does not ban religion, the religious services are *still* being held, either over the internet, or outside on the lawns, etc.
Reminds me of the grandma who was handcuffed for refusing to leave a bank, after being told to leave because she was not wearing a mask. She felt her rights were being violated because of the mask wearing thing, instead she was being removed for tresspassing. So the same attitude exists - or as my mot
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Well, we can legally ban the indoor church attendance in cases of quarantine.
We can? Where in the US was that done?
I know Newsome tried it in California, but SCOTUS ruled his ban unconstitutional. IIRC, SCOTUS did say last May that limits on attendance could be imposed on church services, but outright bans?
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Well, we can legally ban the indoor church attendance in cases of quarantine.
We can? Where in the US was that done?
I know Newsome tried it in California, but SCOTUS ruled his ban unconstitutional. IIRC, SCOTUS did say last May that limits on attendance could be imposed on church services, but outright bans?
If I understood the Supreme Court's ruling correctly, they didn't decide that in-person religious services can't be banned because of a pandemic, only that religious services can't be treated differently from other similar gatherings. California had stricter limits on religious services than they had on places like casinos, and that's what the Supreme Court ruled was discriminatory.
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If I understood the Supreme Court's ruling correctly, they didn't decide that in-person religious services can't be banned because of a pandemic, only that religious services can't be treated differently from other similar gatherings. California had stricter limits on religious services than they had on places like casinos, and that's what the Supreme Court ruled was discriminatory.
Did some digging. Looks like the plaintiffs in the case used the "you're treating us harsher than other entities" as one of their arguments for injunctive relief, but I don't believe SCOTUS used that argument as the sole basis of their ruling. [supremecourt.gov] In fact, Justice Roberts writes:
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Yes, it was Newsom, and there was a ban until the SCOTUS ruled, and it got a lot of people angry. But even after, there are limits on how many people you can have in a certain sized area and that still rubs people the wrong way (even if you use the same rules you do for bars). While that's deemed ok by the fire marshal (usually), it's not ok from the governor who's from the wrong party.
Remember, even though Christians are very large in number in the US, they have lots of political power, and there once wa
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Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. My question was "are you saying it's legal to ban in-person worship in cases of quarantine?" I believe that's what you said at first, but I can't really tell what your answer is from your reply.
I'm not aware of any court ruling that allows the government to ban in-person worship during a quarrenteen - or at any other time. There's the recent South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom case, and there's the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo case from last November
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And yet, even though the supreme court upheld this internment, it was eventually overturned recently in 2018. Thus, the current law of the land is that it was illegal.
But, and here's a sticking point with regards to the courts versus executive, the courts give great leeway during times of war. And to a lesser extent, emergencies are often considered as exceptional cases. And a further sticking point, the executive can and has ignored the supreme court in the past. Courts have no real power against the ex
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So what? Should we ban religion for that same reason?
I'd be happy to, but the ensuing civil unrest wouldn't be worth it.
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You aren't entitled to make people form the beliefs you want or to accept YOUR facts and logic. Believe it or not you and those in your echo chamber don't have some magical truth, insight, or intellect which others need only be exposed to in order to disagree. People disagree with you because they don't trust your sources, they don't buy your faulty 'logic', and they accept the appeal to authority arguments of those YOU find to be experts. Inversely they also don't pretend the figures you worship need to b
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If you're putting other lives in danger then it's a problem no matter how the beliefs were arrived it.
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Every action we take puts lives in danger including our own so your assertion is meaningless and can used to sell most any atrocity in order to stop risk. Your reasoning can be used to outlaw pools, chlorine, and even cleaning a yard which might bring someone upon its uneven turf risking their life.
Walking, do you know how many people die in a fall or collapse? Anyone walking is not only recklessly endangering themselves but also emboldening others with their reckless behavior. More pedestrians on the stree
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:2)
Sounds so dramatic.
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They're not fining the people who believe stupid things, they're asking the messenger to not forward their messages.
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:2)
How dare the government try to regulate business!
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theory.
anti vacciners wear red hats and scream a lot.
a lot
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aw.
is some ones wittle feelings hurt
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Well, it's a pandemic. Congress and supreme court have already decided that quarantines are fully legal and may be implemented by state or local health authorities despite quarantines violating several fundamental rights.
Re: 12 AGs who should be fired (Score:2)
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If the letters threatened (or even suggested) state action in retaliation for Facebook's inaction, then I would agree. But it looks like the fine letter is just an exhortation, rather than extortion.
We call on you to take immediate steps to fully enforce your companies’ guidelines against vaccine misinformation. By effectively rooting out fraudulent information about coronavirus vaccines, you can prevent needless illness and death and hasten our road to recovery.
https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/... [ct.gov]
One can argue that the State never merely makes suggestions or asks for favors, and that the slippery slope ends with every form of social media acting as a mouthpiece for Big Brother. But I suspect this argument would generally come from people who just a few months ago wanted
1st Amend. Not Absolute (Score:2)
There have always been health and safety related limits to the 1st Amendment. Let's agree to some practical rules and limits. Trolls can kill.
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Well, lying is protected speech....opinions, on all topics are protected.
There's not terribly much with the exception of direct incitement to violence that is not protected.
It is up to the listener to ascertain what they want to believe.
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That appears to be the Slippery Slope fallacy. Civilization requires compromise and both sides can use slippery slope to "defend" their view.
Re: 1st Amend. Not Absolute (Score:2)
water is deadly, people drown in it everyday. it's a slippery slope to allow a drop of it in our schools, potentially endangering innocent children.
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Shouting fire in a crowded theater is also misinformation, with similar deadly results.
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Where do you draw the line? Should Facebook be allowed to promote drinking bleach, or claim that tobacco has health benefits? Free speech after all. Or won't they even be allowed to promote homeopathy or acupuncture?
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We should distinguish between Facebook making those claims and one of their users making those claims.
If FB makes those claims, they could be sued, but if one of their users makes that claim, the author of such a post should be the party sued.
Can you make false claims about products you sell? (Score:2)
How is this all that different? Or do you think anti-vaxxing isn't a business? Because I assure you it is. Go look into the major posters and you'll fine 2 kinds: foreign adversaries trying to get us to kill ourselves and people hocking crap like essential oils and homeopathy.
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I have a feeling they are well aware of the legal limits of free speech. For example, you can't hide behind the 1A when using speech to commit fraud. The issue is not the speech, it's the deliberate, intended outcome that you engineered.
Similarly here people are harmed by vaccine misinformation. The intent is clearly to mislead, often for personal gain through ad revenue and donations.
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But giving advice on vaccines is surely practising medicine? Why is giving medical advice on the internet a free speech issue? Give medical advice in any other way with out the appropriate license and well expect to be in trouble with the law pretty dam quick.
The relevant state attorneys should demand Facebook disclose the names/address of the people and they should just then file charges for practising medicine without a license.
If they actually happen to have an appropriate license/registration then spewi
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If I was a mod I'd step up your post. If they are State Attorney Generals and have an issue with the first amendment, then they shouldn't be in office. They're not doing their job right.
There are plenty of exceptions to "free speech".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The constitution is a practical tool (Score:2)
20 years ago when I was in high school, my registered Proud Democrat history teacher somehow managed to get me to submit an essay that praised to concept of the "living document" Constitution and I actually remember writing the words "The Constitution is not the word of God; it is a practical tool for organizing a government"
That is an accurate statement. Was there part of it you disagree with now?
The constitution is not the word of God. The constitution is a practical tool for organizing a government.
Re: The constitution is a practical tool (Score:1)
As with the slogan "black lives matter," I do not disagree with the literal words at face value and devoid of context, but I very much object to the baggage that is strongly correlated with those words.
In the case of my high school essay, the words I wrote were the rhetorical flourish at the end of an argument against originalism. That argument against originalism was grounded in utilitarian considerations that placed greater weight on overall economic "efficiency" as perceived by 15-year-old me, and failed
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>> I do not disagree with the literal words at face value and devoid of context, but I very much object to the baggage that is strongly correlated with those words.
OK, so you treat the Constitution as a religious document. Something the founders certainly didn't do (and never intended anyone else to do, either). Speaking as a True Originalist (aka a medium that can talk to the Spirits of the Founders), I can tell you with perfect certainty that they (the Founding Fathers) think you're a weirdo. Also,
Re: The constitution is a practical tool (Score:4, Insightful)
There will always be some level of "interpretation" required with the Constitution. The problem is that Liberal Doctrine allows it to be almost entirely changed through "interpretation" as a way to avoid following the Amendment process. This is even more problematic since the Purpose of the Constitution is to LIMIT the powers of the government, not just to provide an organizational framework.
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Another example of (mis)interpreting the Constitution as a way to avoid following the Amendment process is when the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment [politico.com].
Re: The constitution is a practical tool (Score:2)
ah, perhaps you are not familiar with the intentional use of hyperbole in rhethoric?
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Good, then maybe you can find one for me that says (1) gun ownership should be an individual right rather than a collective right, and (2) that whether it's an individual or collective right should not be left to the states to decide.
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The word 'practical' might be more questionable with each passing day. People's partisan loyalties have allowed them to be twisted in knots.
Even libertarians are caught up in the catch 22 of having pretended government created entities (corporations) are private and should be treated like real people, Now it is getting tough to explain why they shouldn't be allowed to censor and manipulate all news and media
Almost nobody is accepting an appeal to the actual Constitution and limits it places on the state...
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It is common knowledge amongst right-leaning people for at least 20 years that the constitutional protections of individual rights and strictres on government action are an obstacle, especially with regards to speech and activity we disagree with. This is an issue across the spectrum. For issues on the right there are many that do indeed wnat an official religion, and they want their religious monuments to be put on government property, and they want to require everyone to say the pledge of allegiance in
Vaccines have been out for less than 6 months (Score:1)
This isn't the flu vaccine. Many people have a wait-and-see attitude and want to error on the side of caution. Welcome to a free society.
These AGs need to go back to the Soviet Union where they came from.
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I'm fine with people having a wait and see attitude from their homes as far as vaccine side effects go. But then they shouldn't be expected to be welcome in stores/bars/restaurants/gyms/airports/etc.
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Vaccines aren't 100% effective, and I don't want to be a carrier, keeping the disease alive in my system if I get infected. And giving it more chances to mutate to make a variant the vaccine doesn't work against. And I don't want to infect others either.
Further, i don't want you free-riding on the vaccinated population. We allowed people do that with measles and now it's back. Antivaxers should go live on their own island somewhere.
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Probably, because of people like you. If we punished people who didn't take steps not to spread the plague we could eliminate it. See also, New Zealand
What vaccine misinformation? (Score:1, Insightful)
Like the fact that it isn't actually FDA approved yet? It's only been approved for "emergency use" but the FDA has not ruled out the chances of serious side effects.
Or the fact that two of the major vaccines are based on entirely unproven technology. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on an entirely new "mRNA vaccine" technology that has never been successfully used before. In Moderna's case, that's despite having been trying to make a successful mRNA vaccine for over a decade at this point.
As the wh
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I wish people like you would keep their opinions to themselves. Seriously. You're not helping anyone with this crap, even if there is truth to it.
Our lives, our economy, nothing is going to get back on track until people feel safe going back out again. Half the country absolutely sees Covid as a serious concern and will continue not to frequent restaurants, shops, malls, theaters, etc. as a result.
For those folks, a vaccine is going to be the only thing that gives them confidence to go back out into the wor
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The entire problem is that the masses feel what they're told to feel by the mass media.
If the mass media would stop stirring up panic, the masses would stop panicking.
It's mass mind manipulation plain and simple.
Having people disagree with the public narrative (read: intentional manipulation towards a *private* agenda) is not the cause of all this fear.
Telling someone that the v may not be safe is not the cause of all this fear.
What we need is an honest media that can be *trusted*, telling the *truth*. Peop
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Which is better?
What possible victory do you get by convincing a lemming not to vaccinate? You might be right about the vaccine, who knows, but would being right
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I actually didn't say any of that.
What I said was if you didn't agree with what "the betters in government and media tell us", no problem, don't believe it. Just don't spread it. Let those that believe go, they certainly don't need to be talked out of it.
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I think it is more the case that the ones who want to resist want everyone else to resist as well, as though they need to feel that their resistance is right, justified and valid. It's not enough that you resist, it is important that everyone else resist with you.
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The AstraZeneca vaccine is most likely safe. The stroke stats are on the borderline of being a statistical concern such that at worse the risk is minor (compared to Covid itself). In my opinion they should allow volunteers to take it rather than have it sit in warehouses, where the volunteers are informed of the possible blood-clot risk.
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Covid occupies two chambers but A.Z. only one. Survival logic and math suggests A.Z. (assuming one doesn't have access to the other vaccines). Vulcans would take the A.Z.
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Complaining about things you don't understand is hilarious. How often are you eating heavily processed foods and taking hits from a vape pen?
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Or the fact that two of the major vaccines are based on entirely unproven technology. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on an entirely new "mRNA vaccine" technology that has never been successfully used before
Uh, no. They've both been through stage 3 testing. They've been tested in small scale human tests, and large scale human tests. The scientific result is that they are both effective, and they are being used, successfully, right now.
OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE (Score:2)
Sometimes it seems like anything less than OMG WERE ALL GOING TO DIE makes one a skeptic, a denier, a spreader of disinformation.
The local vaccination "plan" is based primarily on age and I'm in the last group. Not eligible until at least July. I don't even qualify for a test. No symptoms, no contact tracing, no test.
COVID is no joke. If you're 85, obese and have emphysema it's going to fuck you up. My age, health and lifestyle, on the other hand, raise no flags. Published data say I have relatively lit
ITS NO BIG DEAL STOP THE OPPRESSION (Score:2)
Sometimes it seems like anything less than ITS NO BIG DEAL STOP OPPRESSING ME makes one "paranoid" and interested in Soviet-style mass population control and repression.
Our local vaccination plan is based on vulnerability, which correlates with old people. I'm not technically in an eligible cohort, but with doses going unused a short drive away I was able to get both first vaccination and the appointment for the second.
Covid isn't that serious if you have been vaccinated and practice the most minimal of pr
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My age, health and lifestyle, on the other hand, raise no flags. Published data say I have relatively little to worry about. Does this make me a denier?
Not a denier, but maybe insensitive.
Your position assumes you will not suffer a severe outcome, but does not acknowledge that you could spread to someone who would, either directly or indirectly.
That's really the rub. You might not get really sick, might not be a Covid long-hauler, might not die. But in the network of people you come in contact with, you could carry and give it to someone that is not in your age group, does not live your lifestyle, or has a comorbidity contributing factor that maybe you can
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Thus, the two main threads of the covid narrative:
Policies based on feelings and guilt trips rather than hard data.
Suspicion (and thus control) of everybody, even healthy people.
...laura
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The unfortunate part is that since it is hard to spot an asymptomatic spreader, it is hard to study how that spread has occurred. And you wouldn't want to just let loose an asymptomatic just to study spread knowing that those you infect could have bad outcomes...
So this lack of source data for study somehow translates into "no evidence to support..." arguments. Common sense from other airborne contagions have demonstrated easy transmission between individuals in close proximity, but somehow Covid is magical
Laws with teeth (Score:1)
It should be a felony to knowingly make false medical claims if you claim to be any kind of related authority, such as a medical expert or news organization. It's the equivalent of "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" (if no fire). Just because the deaths or injuries are slower doesn't make the analogy false.
As far as holding hosters accountable, if a given message reaches a certain threshold of views*, they should also be held responsible in a similar fashion. The threshold prevents mom and pop hosters from
Where "misinformation" = "anything we don't like" (Score:2)
I am troubled that some people don't understand that big government, big pharma, and their friends ALWAYS lie.
People wear their trust in these inherently untrustworthy institutions as if it were a badge of honor, rather than a mark of willful ignorance and stooopidity.
I'm simultaneously both glad I won't have to live through this shit much longer, and terrified that my children probably will.
And... (Score:2)
And the rest of must do more to get these authoritarian idiots out of office.
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if you are going to use the Georgia Guidestones as a reference, then everything else you put forth sounds like nonsense
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Seriously consider accessing online dictionaries https://www.dictionary.com/bro... [dictionary.com]
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I would suggest that you stop watching intentional disinformation
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You're an utter moron. In the early days of the virus there were a lot of unknowns. Fauci gave opinions based on the knowledge at the time. You can't say exactly how the virus spreads until you do controlled lab testing. Once it was known the virus travels by particulate matter he recommended the use of masks. Dr. Fauci is a world class physician and immunologist. Go read up on his work and credentials if you feel he isn't the right person for the job.
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*citation needed.