When you say "the administration", it's worth noting you're describing actions by two different administrations. Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views through soft censorship.
Censoring an interview with a political opponent is a far cry from spreading disinformation that is counter to broadly accepted medical advice during a pandemic with the intent of harming the general population.
More to the point… the same president was in power during when COVID information was supposedly being censored, and today when political opposition is supposedly being censored.
So OPs argument that it’s both parties doing it falls flat on its face.
Sure, but that's the straw-man version of the argument. During COVID, there was aggressive censorship of _everything_ related to the virus that didn't exactly toe the party line. Satire, comedy, and truly live questions (like the weak version of the lab leak hypothesis, that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab into human population) were censored alongside the obviously false, harmful, and misleading takes about drinking bleach and Ivermectin.
Both science and democracy require active conversation that permits dissenting viewpoints and challenges to the accepted wisdom. Once we have an organization deciding what "the truth" is, we're doomed to stagnation and extremely vulnerable to organizational capture by self-motivated people.
In other words, once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted by people with anti-social intents.
Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injecting bleach" which was advice given by the then president, and ivermectin, which was advice given by 100s of online podcasters.
Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.
What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."
Certainly at the beginning, the tools weren't 100% in place, at least in the west. Famously, China silenced one of the very first COVID reporters and forced him to recant, before he himself died from the virus.[1]
As the pandemic wore on, we began to see a fight over "fact-checking". Mostly, it played out on Facebook and YouTube, not in traditional media. At the height, I saw a lot of channels self-censoring by avoiding any mention of the words "COVID", "virus", "coronavirus" etc to avoid the AI bot that would capriciously ban or demonetize their videos because it clocked them as COVID misinformation, even when they weren't primarily talking about the virus or proposing any sort of false, harmful, or misleading takes. Many channels do similar today, saying "PDF files" instead of pedophiles or "SA" / "Sea Ess Eh Em" instead of "sexual assault" or "kiddy porn" while talking about the Epstein files. Or everyone's favorite, "unalive" or "self-delete" instead of "dead"/"kill" or "suicide".
I don't have a good source for most of that handy - I just remember living through it. I'm sorry, I know anecdotes aren't data!
Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I also lived through it, and you and I remember it differently. Which is why I asked for clear examples, because it's easy to go back and forth about anecdotes.
> once you build the political, legal, and technical machinery of censorship, you're half way to having it co-opted
Indeed, my original post ("Both political parties have tried to silence dissenting views") was simply about censorship being bad no matter which political party does it. I hate that the current administration is doing it. I hated it when the prior administration did it. If we can't acknowledge that both parties did it, then when the parties switch again, there will still be secret soft censorship happening. It's a moral hazard to reflexively discount when a side I may agree with does something wrong.
It's getting increasingly harder to point out when both parties are wrong without people assuming it's a back-handed defense of the other party.
> "The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic... Take, for example, Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kulldorff often tweeted views at odds with U.S. public health authorities ... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one that happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines."
"Pressured." They merely suggested that it was better for the country and for business, and most of the companies agreed. There were no threats of fines or lawsuits, and none were levied.
Weren't there huge monopoly cases being furthered against Meta, Twitter and TikTok at that time? And more action against other major tech companies
If I'm threatening you over your 'possible' monopoly with one hand, and 'politely' asking you to censor millions of stories with the other - are those things completely unrelated? Or is there possible an implied message there?
A mafioso will never tell you straight-up that they're threatening and extorting you. But if you look between the lines even a little bit you can discern the message.
(Sometimes the person delivering that message isn't even aware of the threat they're sending; afaik it's entirely possible that Lina Khan was completely genuine with her push.)
> and none were levied.
Well everyone did what they were 'politely asked', didn't they. Meta alone removed or suppressed well over a hundred million posts.
> None of these antitrust cases were dropped for doing what was in their mutual interest.
I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
> You're grasping at straws.
Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
> Zuckerberg said Meta didn't do everything they were asked.
They didn't do everything, they say (did they ever say what they refused to do?), but they did a lot. As did Twitter. We know this for a fact.
> I'm not understanding either what you're claiming or why you believe it. Keep in mind that I don't believe in always taking what the government says at face value.
There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
> Why would I be desperate? I've no skin in this game, beyond a general wish not to have legitimate and important speech suppressed and censored.
You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not, which makes it difficult for you to advance your nonsensical "both sides" narrative.
> There was no punishment for not following the government's recommendation or reward for following it.
You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
> You're desperate because you claimed that the government had censored COVID speech, and I showed that it had not
You certainly did not. You showed that you don't even know what happened, couldn't be bothered looking into it, and yet are happy to pronounce 'the truth' as if it didn't contradict well known and documented reality.
That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
> You don't know that, and it's not reasonable to assume that. They all mostly caved, hence the letters of regret and the Twitter files etc.
I do know that, and what's more, I assert that you know that too. Hence, why you wrote "mostly" and why you have so far been unable to show any punishment for the "some" who didn't "cave" to the suggestions given without any threat of punishment.
The Twitter files also did not show any threat of punishment. The letters of regret came from Zuckerberg, who, as we have already seen, did not claim any punishment was threatened or meted when he did not agree with some claimed recommendations.
> That's called 'arguing in bad faith' and it's highly discouraged here.
This is exactly how the current CBS censorship works. The FCC said they "may" revise a rule, so CBS complied in advance by removing the political speech that the admin wanted to avoid.
Unfortunately, reasonable views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed. Kulldorff only responded to a question saying: "COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children." Which is correct, mainstream epidemiology and was the government guidance in the most countries at the time.
> views from experts like Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Jay Bhattacharya Professor of Medicine at Stanford were also suppressed
It turns out that when you have millions of doctors (or scientists) in the world, at least some of them are going to say things that go against scientific consensus. This does not mean they're correct.
Here are 2 more examples of people saying things:
> [Kulldorff's] declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. Francis S. Collins, NIH director, called him a "fringe epidemiologist". [0]
The lesson here is, if you're cherry picking individuals, rather than going with peer-reviewed scientific consensus, you're liable to be blown way off-course at some point. Personality cults are bad no matter who it is.
He's describing the same administration in two different terms. Mark has no problems lying to people that Biden administration sued Meta (it was Trump's [1]) and individuals like Joe Rogan have no problems not calling him out on it.
Trump was president in 2019, 2020. Covid starts in 2019. It's his administration that the twitter files is talking about when they mention censorship. It's his administration that started the big tech lawsuits.
This seems like a tenuous connection at best. The Biden admin were actually sued for their relationship with social media companies. The suit failed but the conclusion was still that the administration was involved in pushing social media companies to take specific actions. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/murthy-v-...
> The Biden admin were actually sued for their relationship with social media companies. The suit failed but the conclusion was still that the administration was involved in pushing social media companies to take specific actions. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/murthy-v-...
That's an misleading description of the "conclusion" (and incorrect if by "involvement" or "pushing" you meant unconstitutional behavior). The conclusion of Murthy v. Missouri is that the plaintiffs lacked standing to seek a preliminary injunction against the federal government's (under the Biden administration) requests/"demands" to social media companies to remove users' speech [1]. Why was there no standing? Because the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate a minimum of evidence that the Biden administration had coerced or threatened social media companies to censor users' speech [1]:
> To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction.
Or rather, the plaintiffs did not demonstrate sufficient evidence that, in the period leading up to the original lawsuits, the social media companies' decisions to remove the relevant speech mentioned by the Biden administration had been anything other than the social media companies' voluntary choices.
If you actually read the case the evidence is clear that the government was giving direction to social media sites. Which is what the comment I was replying to was about. Read the dissenting opinion.
I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct, and not actually examining the case itself.
"actually read the case" includes reading the judgement ("the conclusion"), which overrules your personal judgement (and mine, whatever it might've been).
> Read the dissenting opinion
Dissenting opinions are often irrelevant, equivalent to a loser shouting into the void because they lost. By definition, dissenting opinions are incorrect, because to be correct, they would need to be shared by the majority, in which case they would be in the non-dissenting opinion, if anywhere.
> I think you're coming at this from the angle of the court is always correct
By definition, the court is always "correct" unless contradicted by a constitutionally higher authority. In particular, a court consensus of 9 co-equal judges is more correct than a subset of 1 or 2 of those same judges. And while I'm sure you're a nice, competent person, perhaps even a lawyer, the court is more correct than you here.
I'm not sure why you're absolving yourself of free will. When courts ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just, were they correct? What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just. Would the judges who support abolition be "losers shouting into the void"? It seems like your position falls apart pretty quickly to anyone with basic morals.
Courts and judges are not perfect. Are you just clinging to that belief to justify a predetermined opinion?
> What if a court today ruled that chattel slavery was legal and just
What if it ruled the opposite (the status quo), and you used your same argument to say that the courts are wrong and that chattel slavery actually is legal and just?
What makes you, 1 random person out of billions, more correct than the courts, just because you might personally feel chattel slavery is legal and just?
> Courts and judges are not perfect.
If courts and judges are not perfect, then that means that you and your dissenting opinions are even less perfect. Even if we were to accept mob rule, the people don't share your dissenting opinion, so your proposal seems to be that a randomly-small minority of random people unaccountably decide matters of law based on whatever criteria they feel at the time -- a worse option than courts in every way.
They do know that. They are disingenuously attempting to equate asking a platform to remove disinformation with using government resources to threaten a platform into silence.
