crudely the basis for the modern counter-disinfo approach is the idea that truth has to be protected from bottom-up threats and the best way to do this is to assume that top-down sources of information are valid

its like infosec strategies that assume that the enemy will never get inside the network and then suddenly get defeated the moment someone logs onto a porn site on a company computer and downloads malware

so now here we are. a former head of the NIH is accusing the CDC of crafting testing guidelines that are not only unsound but will "undermine efforts to end the pandemic and increase the loss of lives." strong stuff!

when you couple this with ongoing generalized uncertainty about the political independence of even venerable medical and scientific agencies in the Trump era (especially around a vaccine) a problem emerges

you see, platforms are in the business these days of frontloading information from agencies like in the CDC during content searches for COVID info and suppressing niche criticism of them https://twitter.com/AriSchulman/status/1288137576193368064

we could go into a long and complicated philosophy discussion about the proper balance between respecting expertise and not being overly deferent to it, the demarcation problem of science vs pseudoscience, speech vs safety, etc

but i am not going to do that. i am merely going to repeat an observation i made in march.

if you assume that there is a nontrivial risk of the President corrupting official sources of information, then maybe assuming that official sources of information should be generally privileged in content filtering is a very big risk!

Is the Varmus and Shah op-ed correct or not? *shrug* it seems to be taken as credible by many of the US epi people and since they are experts I'm inclined to defer to them https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1300642180529229825

But again we circle back to the issue at hand: "What it looks like at this point is you have a White House altering public health advice to improve election chances to the detriment of American lives." OK, so supposing this is true, then where does this leave us

given that we have successfully browbeaten Jack, Zucc, and the others to make entities like the CDC ground truth sources on their platforms??

If you believe that

(a) the White House is craven enough to alter public health information to improve its chance of re-election and doesn't care if people live or die

(b) Agency heads will go along with such efforts

then

how on god's green earth do you justify (c) moderation should define misinformation as information going against recommendations by public health authorities https://www.cato.org/blog/outsourcing-fact-checking-reputation-it

I can think of a very good answer to that right away: yes, this is starting to look very troublesome and uncertain but the information that CDC and co supply will nonetheless be correct most of the time.

when you couple this with, to put it charitably, the "high variance" of crank criticisms of "the Man" you have a very strong justification for continuing to follow the information filtering path we've gone on since March. BUT

one of the problems with this argument is that when you're paranoid enough to assume that the administration will compromise public health information for political gain you should also be paranoid about how you assess "most of the time"

I won't pretend to have an easy answer for what to do about this, its obviously not fair to expect platforms to be able to adjudicate a question that is fundamentally about political uncertainty

I am going to note that this *was* and still *is* a shortcut

https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1300994296233984002

and one that is increasingly looking frail going into an election that likely will involve all-out contestation of

consensus reality by different normally ground-truth generating governmental institutions

https://paxsims.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/preventing-a-disrupted-presidential-election-and-transition-8-3-20.pdf