It is misinformation because it is outright wrong. Follow Malone for a couple of weeks and you will see he has nothing else to share but: Vaccines are bad, Vaccines are killing people.
> As we prevent three deaths by vaccinating, we incur two deaths.
> "Are we headed for the situation where the ~30% unvaxxed will be devoting their lives to operating whatever is left of the economic infrastructure and serving as caretakers for the vaxxed?"
This is what got him banned from twitter.
Why don't you try to investigate a bit yourself? People with credentials can have no other motive to spread misinformation and all the motive to "save the humanity" ? Sad to see this on HN.
I listened to the podcast he did with Joe Rogan. 95% of what he talked about was fairly convincing and I agreed with it pretty strongly (or mundane and uncontroversial,). 5% was questionable and less convincing. Based on Malone's history (I think he had a strong, rare allergic reaction to one of his COVID shots that very nearly killed him) it seems likely that he argues in good faith. My prior here is that I already considered the harms in censoring good faith incorrect arguments greater than the benefits of it.
The things he mentioned in the podcast that I agreed with and honestly are pretty convincing:
- censorship of criticism of COVID medicine online is out of control and dangerous. How can you ethically give a drug if you're not allowed to publicly question whether it's safe or not? He gives a ton of examples of very mundane statements by many different people on many different platforms that led to disproportionately negative impacts on their lives relative to the fairly mundane claims they made.
- conflicts of interest exist and are not to be taken lightly. The FDA, CDC, drug companies, are all basically the same people. There is a profit motive to minimize the harms of certain drugs. This is not a hypothetical -- see oxycontin, tobacco, etc. There is reason to be suspicious of "health authorities".
- a lot of people seem to have crazy, obviously wrong/outdated views of COVID that are orders of magnitude off from the actual risks, and are very militant about policing those views and imposing them on others through government action. In some respects it resembles mass hysteria (this is the "mass formation psychosis" meme that went the rounds on the news, where he compared it to the rise of the Nazis. This was taken out of context largely I think, but you should listen to it for yourself).
- the nuance is lost in discussion of covid these days. You're either a science-based smart person or a conspiracy theorist antivaxxer. There is no in-between, and the truth is probably not absolute on one side even if it's heavily leaning on one side.
The thing he mentioned that I disagreed with or found less convincing, but are worth mentioning because they raise points that can and should be addressed:
- Malone's most questionable claim and the one he caught the most flak for is his claim that the risk of serious side effects in some populations as an adverse reaction to the MRNA vaccines can exceed the reduction in risk from covid-19. These are populations like kids, 20-year-olds, or people with a history of allergic reactions to vaccines. He claims that while the data on its own suggests the opposite is true, the side effects of vaccines are underreported due to flaws in the federal vaccine side effect reporting system, and that the deaths by covid are overreported by hospitals.
(He gives a fairly reasonable argument for this, and I think it's worth listening to it for yourself rather than reading the same mostly out-of-context sentences repeated on news articles reporting on the podcast, but after further research I am mostly unconvinced -- the main counterargument that is convincing to me being that over 100 countries have given the MRNA vaccines and you'd expect at least one of them to notice such a serious effect if it existed)
I have not responded without listening to what he said, I followed him for quite some time to see what exactly he had to say.
I do not like censoring by big tech as well, but when they take down outright lies which actually get viral and change people's opinions, I am no longer sure. Nuanced facts, data does not go viral. Tweets with controversial information do.
Serious side-effects, risk-benefit calculations, are very nuanced and take much more effort to bring up and share [1]. He presents a very one-sides story, every single day. That is not helpful.
He took very selective parts of news which aligns with his opinions and tweeted just that. Thanks to twitter's censoring, I can't even share those :facepalm: but you can look up archived data [2]. It is not even a single person, they have a pretty good group doing it every single day (Peter McCullough, I am sure you heard of him) [3] [4].
I find it difficult to create a censorship model that can distinguish between "nuanced counterfactual take" and "contrarian falsehood". I think a lot of people already know this is a problem (e.g. censorship of the Wuhan lab theory).
I am fairly biased though -- I would rather 100 dangerous falsehoods get shared (even if it results in a lot of people believing wrong things) than a even 1 true fact get censored and that puts me in the weird position of often defending people and takes I disagree with and dislike.
- https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/jan/06/who-robert-ma...
- https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252...
> As we prevent three deaths by vaccinating, we incur two deaths.
> "Are we headed for the situation where the ~30% unvaxxed will be devoting their lives to operating whatever is left of the economic infrastructure and serving as caretakers for the vaxxed?"
This is what got him banned from twitter.
Why don't you try to investigate a bit yourself? People with credentials can have no other motive to spread misinformation and all the motive to "save the humanity" ? Sad to see this on HN.