We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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“I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest.
>I let them rest from nine till five, For I am busy then, As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea, For they are hungry men. But different folk have different views; I know a person small— She keeps ten million serving-men, Who get no rest at all!
She sends’em abroad on her own affairs, From the second she opens her eyes— One million Hows, two million Wheres, And seven million Whys!”
– Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1902)
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
The UK is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and a host of developing countries, to offset the impact of Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies and his sharp veer towards climate-hostile countries such as Russia and Saudi Arabia.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that?
The article continues,
Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and net zero secretary, arrived in Beijing on Friday for three days of talks with top Chinese officials, including discussions on green technology supply chains, coal and the critical minerals needed for clean energy. The UK’s green economy is growing three times faster than the rest of the economy, but access to components and materials will be crucial for that to continue.
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment.
“Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?” asks Jonathan Kay in Quillette.
“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”
The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.
The astonishing thing is not that a remote detection system gave a reading that suggested something dramatic which upon further investigation turned out not to be. That happens all the time, in every field from mining to astronomy. Nor was there anything astonishing about the furore or about the swarms of reporters who converged on the site. If the inconsistencies in soil density had turned out to be dead bodies rather than “old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts” it would have been a knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself.
What is astonishing, what raises the whole Kamloops affair to the level of mass psychosis, is Official Canada’s response. No graves were found, but it decided to have the whole ‘knife to the heart of Canada’s view of itself’ jamboree anyway.
… Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.
Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends
Mr Kay charitably says that Canadian journalists did not realise how many of these tales could be traced to “a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.” I suspect that quite a few Canadian journalists did realise it. It is not as if the former Reverend Arnett concealed his views. Unlike many of the journalists, Arnett himself was probably sincerely deluded. Like false positive errors from machines, folk who think that they have secret information about a terrible conspiracy involving someone famous are not that rare. Poor old Arnett missed a trick by only witnessing the late Queen and her consort engage in a humdrum spot of kidnapping and murder. If he had just looked a little longer he would have seen them turn into shape-shifting pan-dimensional alien lizards and would have died richer than he did.
So twelve million Canadian dollars and heaven knows how many tons of earth1 later, the story that led Justin Trudeau to fly the flags on federal buildings at half-mast for almost six months and to hundreds of arson attacks on churches has finally been acknowledged to be a false alarm.
Just kidding over the last bit. Official Canada has not acknowledged it. They are in too deep.
As I suggested above, what made this period in Canada’s history unusual is not that the likes of Kevin Arnett – correction, “Eagle Strong Voice”2 as he later preferred to be called – made bizarre claims and that Noam Chomsky believed them. It’s that the likes of the Law Society of British Columbia believed them.
Not just believed them, but made them into an official doctrine that had to be affirmed by anyone wishing to practise law in British Columbia. The second half of Jonathan Kay’s article tells a story that in its implications is at least as frightening as the hysteria and fury described in the first half. Reading it, one keeps expecting to reach the point where one of the eminent lawyers entrusted with maintaining the standards of their profession in Canada’s westernmost province will finally issue a carefully-worded statement about waiting for evidence before making accusations, or about how both sides of any case must be heard, or about any of that old lawyer stuff that they used to believe in. Four years have gone by and that point has not yet come. More to the point, judging from their behaviour none of these eminent lawyers has yet dared to say to their colleagues, “Guys, I hate to be the one to ask, but have we got a watertight case?”
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Related post: There will be no “truth and reconciliation” if an inconvenient truth is made illegal.
1Exactly how many tons of earth remains unclear. As CayleyGraph2015 commented in response to the earlier post, for all the talk of urgent investigation, less actual digging seems to have been done than one might expect given the severity of the allegations and the millions of Canadian dollars given to the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation to investigate the site.
2The “Eagle Strong Voice” link takes you to an excellent article by Terry Glavin in the independent Canadian news website The Tyee about Arnett and his claims, including one that might have been the model for “Pizzagate”. It was written in 2008, demonstrating that Arnett was well known on the conspiracy circuit even then. Interestingly, an editor’s note was added to Glavin’s article in 2021 apologetically saying that despite Glavin’s scepticism the remains of 215 children had been detected at Kamloops residential school. I await an editor’s note to the editor’s note.
“Blasphemy laws are incompatible with free speech”, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
The Government is known to disapprove of the term “two-tier”, especially when applied to policing, in which case, says a recent Home Office report, it can be a telltale sign that you’re of the “far-Right”. Isn’t everything?
I shouldn’t have laughed at that, but I did.
Yet in the last few days we’ve had a perfect example of how our laws are written to be, and correctly interpreted by judges as, two-tier, meaning that they are laws intended to offer different levels of protection and punishment to different groups of UK residents, depending on their faith or ethnic origin.
Martin Frost of Manchester chose (ill-advisedly, I might add) to burn a copy of the Koran in public, live streaming the event, in response to his daughter’s death at the hands of Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.
It is notable how many media outlets skated over the fact that Hamas murdered Martin Frost’s daughter. You might think the Telegraph’s phrasing (“her death at the hands of Hamas terrorists”) was mealy-mouthed enough, but just compare it to this ITV report that said,
The “trigger” for his actions was the death of his daughter in the Israeli conflict which had affected his mental health, the court heard.
Note the scare quotes around the word “trigger”, the words “the death of” as if she died a natural or accidental death, and the reference to it occurring in “the Israeli conflict”. Not the Hamas conflict, not the Gaza conflict, not even the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the Israeli conflict.
Tom Harris’s article continues,
He [Martin Frost] claimed also to have been protesting at the murder of Iraqi asylum seeker Salwan Momika who was murdered in his apartment in Stockholm after he performed his own act of Koran burning for his internet audience.
Forst [sic] pleaded guilty to charge of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm by displaying some writing, sign or other visible representation which was threatening, abusive or insulting thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.” That charge is contained in the text of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, introduced by Tony Blair’s government.
The old blasphemy laws may have been consigned to history decades ago, but they were replaced in 1998 by new ones: it is widely accepted that Muslims take very seriously the physical abuse of their religion’s holy book and are known to feel personally offended by any disrespect shown towards it. Similarly, most Muslims also take personal offence at any physical representation of the prophet Mohammed, hence the outcry against the teacher at Batley Grammar in 2021 who did exactly that by showing his pupils a cartoon depicting Islam’s founder.
That teacher is still in hiding.
In modern Britain, Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none. Two-tier protection is unacceptable because it equates to two-tier freedom of expression, freedom to criticise one religion but not a different one.
Yes. To forestall criticism that just saying “Yes” adds little of value, I shall try to give better value by amending it to “YES, YES, YES!!!”
We can imagine the horror that police officers, court officials and politicians must have felt when legal proceedings didn’t go their way in the case of Jamie Michael, an ex-Royal Marine who had served his country in Iraq but whose anger at the Southport murders of three young girls last summer led him to upload an ill-advised rant against illegal immigrants that a member of staff working for a Labour MS (Member of the Senedd) felt so offended that they just had to report it to the police.
I would not have guessed that someone working for a Labour member of the Welsh Government actually did have something worse to do with their time than their day job.
A jury took less than an hour of deliberation to acquit him.
The terms Mr Michael used were obnoxious and unpleasant. But as the jury agreed, that should not impinge on his right to free speech.
Juries often do things like that, even now. That’s why “Progressives” keep whittling away at the jury system: “Former Justice Secretary calls for scrapping of defendants’ right to choose jury trial.”
“Is Israel Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?”
Dear God. I don’t know where to start.
Is
Israel
Weaponizing the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel
Weaponizing
the Tragic Deaths of the Bibas Children?
Is Israel Weaponizing the
Tragic Deaths
of the Bibas Children?
The children.
The tweet is by Mehdi Hasan, quoting Muhammad Shehada, who describes himself as a “Gazan Political Analyst & Writer.” Mehdi Hasan is a former senior political editor at the New Statesman and is the author of a book called Win Every Argument.
Officers of the Swedish Police have made an announcement regarding the 30 or so bombings in the country in January 2025, attributed to extortion of businesses by criminal gangs, and have said that they can’t cope and they need all of society to mobilise to help them. However, they don’t appear to say how this should be done, or what with, so there might be some misinterpretation and I don’t think that the posse is a thing in Sweden, reported by the independent, reader-funded Nordic Times.
Swedish Police: “Everyone must take responsibility for the bombings”
This puts me in mind of a character in The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, who, as a fore-runner of today’s DEI activists would roundly proclaim ‘We are all guilty!’, a chilling vision of the climate today.
However, coming back to Sweden, we are told:
– The whole society must be mobilized. Everyone must take responsibility and do even more, said Tobias Bergkvist, deputy regional police chief for Stockholm.
During a press conference on Wednesday, the police emphasized the urgency of the situation and the need to take action to stop the wave of violence.
– We have a very serious situation, not only in Stockholm but also nationally, Bergkvist emphasized.
The Nordic Times has its own take on the matter, citing, as the BBC would probably point out, ‘without evidence’ networks of immigrant criminals.
The police do not seem to have gone that far in terms of specificity:
– What we are seeing now is an escalation of violence, but also a change in the problem. The majority of the bombings we have suffered in December and January have rather financial incentives, are strategic acts targeting companies and often for extortion purposes, says Hampus Nygårds, Deputy Head of the National Operations Unit (NOA).
“Criminal ecosystem”
He explains that the purpose of the attacks is to intimidate business owners into paying to stop the threat.
– Money is demanded to stop the violence and threats.
The police describe how a “criminal ecosystem” has emerged, where the recruitment of new perpetrators has now moved to digital platforms. Young people are offered money to commit acts of violence – including murder.
But there is a plan, nothing so far like what appears to be happening in the USA, this is Sweden after all, but the plan is an increased digital presence of the police.
The police are now mobilizing, especially in Stockholm but also nationally. We are taking measures such as reinforcements from different police regions, Bergkvist explains.
An important part of the strategy is said to be to increase the police’s digital presence and competence and to focus more on identifying and stopping bomb makers before the explosions are carried out, but the police believe that crime prevention work cannot be done by the authorities alone.
“We are seeing anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere – how can doctors like me respond?”, writes Dr Mariam Tokhi in the Guardian. She starts with the heartrending story of an eight year old Australian girl called Elizabeth Struhs who died of diabetic ketoacidosis due to the withdrawal of the insulin she needed to live. Her family belong to a religious sect called “the Saints” that believes that medicine should not be used. Her father, mother and brother, alongside several other members of this sect, have been found guilty of her manslaughter. Dr Tokhi then writes,
I am seeing the rise of anti-medical, anti-science narratives everywhere. A patient in my clinic tells us that she has stopped her HIV antiviral tablets, because her pastor told her she has been healed by prayer. A parent rejects mental health treatment for his impulsive, suicidal teenager, telling me that ADHD and major depression are made-up, modern conditions. A pregnant mother asks me to sign her Advanced Care Directive, saying she declines blood products in the event of a life-threatening bleed during birth, worried that she could receive “vaccine-contaminated” blood. Another tells me she will “free-birth” without midwifery or medical care.
During the Covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists distributed junk maps of Covid-19 cases connecting them to 5G mobile phone towers. As a result, I spent countless hours doing community outreach, health promotion work and endless individual consultations trying to debunk pseudoscience and explaining (often unsuccessfully) the risk-benefit ratios of vaccines. In the last year, we have seen outbreaks of pertussis, measles, chickenpox, hepatitis and influenza, often linked to pockets of vaccine refusal.
Medical doctors and scientists now face a barrage of anti-science, anti-medicine narratives, and it feels like we are losing the battle. We are no longer trusted instinctively. So how do we engage with people who mistrust us?
It is a heartfelt piece. I don’t doubt her sincerity. My answer to her question is also heartfelt and sincere: start by admitting what you, the doctors and the medical profession as a whole, did to lose so much trust.
Remember how so many of you said that complete social isolation was vital for the duration of the pandemic except for those attending Black Lives Matter protests? Remember how distinguished doctors, epidemiologists and virologists were denounced when they said that, for much of the population, the risk of harm from Covid-19 was less than the risk of harm from lockdown? Remember how you declared the theory that the Covid-19 coronavirus strain came from a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a racist conspiracy theory, and cheered when Facebook deleted posts that discussed it? Remember how you self-censored discussion even among yourselves of the side effects that the Covid vaccines, like all vaccines, have – thus degrading the system of reporting adverse reactions that was once universally understood to be a vital tool to improve the safety of medicines?
For the record, I have taken every vaccine offered to me, including the Pfizer and the Astra Zeneca Covid-19 vaccines, and I am happy with that decision. But the unquestioning faith I once had that I would be given all relevant information before I chose to accept any medical procedure has gone. Some of it departed alongside the faith that I would be given a choice at all. Such faith as I now have in the medical profession as a whole is in its residual ethics. Most doctors were trained in better times, and according to better precepts. I trust old doctors more than young doctors. Lest I offend any young doctors reading this, that’s still quite a lot of trust. It’s not that I think any significant number of doctors set out to harm people. It’s that I do think a significant number of doctors refused to consider many serious and well-founded policy and treatment proposals regarding Covid on no better grounds than that they might have helped Donald Trump’s electoral chances, and an even larger number never even got to hear about such proposals in the first place, except at second hand as the ravings of folk in tinfoil hats. These proposals were not necessarily correct. But excluding them from discussion for political reasons gnawed away at the edifice of trust in medicine.
And the gnawing persists. When termites infest a property, they eat the walls from inside, so that if you tap the walls they sound hollow. If all else is quiet you can even hear the rustle of tiny jaws directly. That is a metaphor for how millions of people feel about the house of medicine now: not that it has fallen down with a crash – it is still their shelter – but that the walls have hollow patches and that sometimes one hears a soft scratching noise . . . and if you tell the owners of the house about it, they say you are imagining things or just trying to make trouble.
The Guardian‘s (pre-moderated) comments burn with outrage at the medical misinformation that comes from religious people and right-wingers. At medical misinformation coming from left-wing New Age practitioners, not so much; and at medical misinformation coming from the medical profession itself and enforced by censorship, none at all. Maybe some comments that pointed out that the medical establishment itself had some responsibility for the loss of public trust in medicine were made, but the Guardian censored them so we’ll never know what they said.
“The national party has made it so that they’ve set up a standard where if Donald Trump doesn’t literally ruin democracy in a very visible way that people feel, then they’re proven wrong. It wasn’t as bad as we thought, so they’re liars again. They have set themselves up for failure”
– Carly Hammond, a Saginaw city councillor and former trade union organiser who campaigned for Kamala Harris, quoted in this Guardian article from 18th January: Democrats in denial over Trump defeat, voters say: ‘Haven’t learned the lessons’
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Tech billionaire wades into controversy after shooting right arm on upwards diagonal during celebrations of Trump
– subheading to Guardian article on Donald Trump’s second inauguration, 20th January 2025: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally
On 28th September 2018, the fantasy author Niel Gaiman tweeted,
“On a day like today it’s worth saying, I believe survivors. Men must not close our eyes and minds to what happens to women in this world. We must fight, alongside them, for them to believed at the ballot box & with art & by listening, and change this world for the better.”
I presume the “day like today” referred to the fact that the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh as a U.S. Supreme Court judge had been forwarded to the Senate that day. The previous day, 27th September 2018, Kavanaugh himself and Dr Christine Blasey Ford had both testified to the Judiciary Committee. In her testimony Dr Ford said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her approximately thirty six years earlier at a party when both were teenagers. I say “approximately” because although Dr Ford said that the assault was “seared into her memory”, she could not say in which year it happened, nor in whose house the party took place.
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There are times when the message “You’ve reached your monthly article limit” is very welcome. I got it from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. That means I cannot re-read Lila Shapiro’s exposé of Gaiman’s sexual behaviour. Good, I’d rather not read that again. It is clear that he used his fame and status to sexually exploit young women who came into his orbit as fans or employees in a manner that is no less disgusting for being a tale as old as time. Some of his deeds may have reached the level of crimes.
Many now say, “Who cares about the “may”? Let Gaiman be hoist on his own petard! Let those making accusations of sexual assault against him be believed automatically, as he wanted to happen to Kavanaugh.”
I do not say this. The presumption of innocence is a universal principle. That means it applies to everyone, including those who would deny it to others. I used to think it was a settled principle; that anyone in the political mainstream understood its importance. That particular delusion died for me as I watched Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings and read hundreds of tweets and opinion articles like Gaiman’s that said that Ford should be believed because she is female, and Kavanaugh disbelieved because he is male.
The #MeToo movement had ceased to be concerned with justice.
I want the presumption of innocence to be re-established as a universal principle of justice. Justice demands that both sides be heard and that potentially exculpatory evidence be seen. And there are some things in the Vulture exposé to which Gaiman could point in his defence if this comes to a trial. I have talked a great deal about the evils of automatically believing women (or whites or blacks or rich people or poor people or any other category considered as a lump of virtue or vice). But there is an equal and opposite evil, that of assuming that adult women cannot be believed when they say “I consent”.
I had been groping towards a way to express this when Sarah Hoyt of Instapundit pointed me to a writer who had already expressed it better than I could. The piece in question is by Kat Rosenfield and is called “On what women want”. Rosenfield writes,
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Related posts:
“A point that has to be made again and again about high profile sexual abuse cases”
“No evidence will ever be enough for those determined not to believe”
Further to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to see this comment by “MJuma2018” to a Guardian piece called “A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media”:
Part of the reason SM has become a source of news for many is declining trust in traditional media platforms including liberal ones that set out to subtly manipulate readers. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Who holds the media accountable for manipulating readers rather than reporting news? Should they also be held responsible for misleading/manipulative content like the Hunter Biden laptop story and Biden’s cognitive status?
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop on a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
I relieved my feelings by immediately following up my deleted comment with this one,
I just demonstrated to myself that even now, four years later, the mere mention of a certain electronic device that featured in a news story broken by the New York Post brings swift euthanasia to a comment on this website. Guys, stuff like that makes people lose trust in the media.
It was deleted too, of course. Dunno what quality to melt the censor’s heart MJuma2018’s comment had that my very similar one of two months ago lacked, but I am glad to see someone at Guardian Towers woke up.
The Guardian reports,
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Meta will get rid of factcheckers, “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, relies on other users to add caveats and context to contentious posts.
Zuckerberg said Meta’s “factcheckers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”. The tech firm’s content moderation teams will be moved from California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams”, he said. He admitted that changes to the way Meta filters content would mean “we’re going to catch less bad stuff”.
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Today, we are expanding our efforts to remove false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines and vaccines in general during the pandemic. Since December, we’ve removed false claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts. Today, following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
– COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
– Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
– It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
– Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism
Emphasis added.
On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
Update on May 26, 2021 at 3:30PM PT:
In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps. We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge.
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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