COVID-19 Will Someday Fade Away. The Wireless Location Data Practices Being Embraced To Track It Probably Won't.

from the nobody's-watching-the-watchers dept

Location data has long proven to be hugely profitable to wireless carriers, given it's used by everyone from city planners to marketing departments. Now it's proving useful to help spread the track of COVID-19, allowing researchers to see not only who an infected person has been in contact with and where they've been, but also helping them predict where hot spots might appear next. Such technology was used during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to help both track and predict the movement of the disease.

Now the government says it's working in partnership with the advertising industry to use such location data here in the States. The Wall Street Journal (paywall, alternative read at The Verge) indicates the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local governments have already received cell phone data about people in areas of “geographic interest." In this case, to track movements and determine how well people are adhering to "stay at home" restrictions:

"The goal is to create a government portal with geolocation information from some 500 cities across the country, to help ascertain how well people are complying with stay-at-home orders, according to the WSJ. One example of how the anonymized data was reportedly used: Researchers discovered large numbers of people were gathering in a New York City park, and notified local authorities."

Of course just because we're in a pandemic doesn't mean that privacy concerns magically evaporate, or that we shouldn't make an effort to respect citizen privacy. We've noted repeatedly that anonymized location data isn't really anonymous, and individual identities can usually be ferreted out with little to no effort. The more widely this data circulates, the more likely the chance is it's abused by everybody from industry and government to hackers and con artists.

The other obvious problem is that the fear of a pandemic creates wonderful cover to abuse the collection of this data for other, less noble purposes. The wireless industry was just busted selling access to this data to any nitwit with a nickel, which is likely why government is collaborating with the ad sector and not carriers directly (at least not yet, and as far as we know). The Washington Post also indicates that Google and Facebook, fresh off one of the biggest privacy scandals in U.S. history, are also collaborating with the government in regards to location data.

As anybody tracking this space knows, it's extremely difficult to claw surveillance power back from the government once it's been obtained, and with the U.S. still having no real privacy law for the internet era, it's a virtual certainty that the collection of this data will be abused. There could certainly be ways to mitigate that harm -- such as sunset provisions on collection and strict rules governing how this data can be used -- but we'd already made it abundantly clear as a nation we weren't particularly interested in such options, and with a climate of fear likely overshadowing everything, it's not likely we're about to start now.

While it takes a while, the threat posed by COVID-19 will eventually retreat. The surveillance practices we normalize during this period will very likely be here to stay.

Filed Under: covid-19, location data, privacy, surveillance

Dr. Drew Pinsky Played Down COVID-19, Then Tries To DMCA Away The Evidence

from the copyright-as-censorship dept

Update: The full video is now back up and it's even worse than the original clip we posted. It's unclear if it went back up thanks to YouTube deciding it was fair use, or Pinsky removing the bogus takedown. Either way, watch it here:

Copyright system supporters keep insisting to me that copyright is never used for censorship, and yet over and over again we keep seeing examples that prove that wrong. The latest is Dr. Drew Pinsky, the somewhat infamous doctor and media personality, who has been one of the more vocal people in the media playing down the impact of the coronavirus. In a video that had gone viral on Twitter and YouTube, it showed many, many, many clips of Dr. Drew insisting that COVID-19 was similar to the flu, and that it wouldn't be that bad. Assuming it hasn't been taken down due to a bogus copyright claim, you can hopefully see it below:

As you can see, for well over a month, deep into March when it was blatantly obvious how serious COVID-19 was, he was playing down the threat. Beyond incorrectly comparing it to the flu (saying that it's "way less virulent than the flu" on February 4th -- by which time it was clearly way more virulent than the flu in China), he said the headlines should say "way less serious than influenza," he insisted that the lethality rate was probably around "0.02%" rather than the 2% being reported. On February 7th, he said your probability of "dying from coronavirus -- much higher being hit by an asteroid." He also mocked government officials for telling people to stay home, even at one point in March saying he was "angry" about a "press-induced panic." On March 16th, the same day that the Bay Area in California shut down, he insisted that if you're under 65 you have nothing to worry about, saying "it's just like the flu." This was not in the distant past. At one point, a caller to his show, again on March 16th, said that because it's called COVID-19 that means there were at least 18 others of them, and that's why no one should worry -- and Drew appeared to agree, making it appear he didn't even know that the 19 refers to the year not the number of coronaviruses, and even though there are other coronaviruses out there, this one was way more infectious and deadly, so it doesn't matter.

To give him a tiny bit of credit, on Saturday, Pinsky posted a series of choppy videos on Twitter in which he flat out said that he was wrong and he was sorry for his earlier statements, and said that he regretted his earlier statements. He also claimed that he signed up to help in California and NY if he was needed. But, even that apology seems weak in the face of what else he said in those videos... and, more importantly, his actions. In terms of what he said, he kept saying that he always said to listen to Dr. Fauci and to listen to your public health officials. Amazingly, at one point in his apology video, he insists that he thinks the real reason why New York got hit so bad is because of hallways and trains. Yet, in the video above, at one point he literally mocks NYC Mayor de Blasio for telling people to avoid crowded trains, saying: "de Blasio told them not to ride the trains! So they're not riding the trains! So I am! [guffaw] I mean, it's ridiculous."

Given that, it's a bit difficult to take him seriously when he claims that all along he always said to listen to your public officials, when just a few weeks ago he was mocking them. Indeed, as multiple people have pointed out, the issue here isn't so much that Pinsky was wrong -- in the early days, when there wasn't as much info, lots of people got things wrong about COVID-19 (though Pinsky kept it up way way after most others recognized how serious it was), but that he acted so totally sure about his opinions that this was nothing to worry about. It was the certainty with which he said what he said that was so much of the problem, including deep into it already being a pandemic with local officials warning people to stay home.

But, even worse, just as he was doing the right thing and mostly apologizing... he was trying to hide those earlier clips that made him look so, so, so bad. His organization began sending out DMCA notices. If you went to the original YouTube upload you got this:

That says: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Drew Pinsky Inc." Now, some might argue that it was just some clueless staffer working for Dr. Drew sending off bogus DMCAs, or maybe an automated bot... but nope. Drew himself started tweeting nonsense about copyright law at people. I originally linked to that tweet, but sometime on Sunday, after thousands of people -- including some of the most famous lawyers in the country -- explained to him why it was nonsense, he deleted it. But I kept a screenshot:

That says, amazingly:

Infringing copywrite laws is a crime. Hang onto your retweets. Or erase to be safe.

The wrongness-to-words ratio in that tweet is pretty fucking astounding. First of all, the layup: it's copyright, Drew, not copywrite. Make sure you know the name of the fucking law you're abusing to censor someone before tossing it out there. Second, no, infringing copyright is not a crime. Yes, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement, but this ain't it. Someone posting a video of you would be, at best, civil infringement. For it to be criminal, someone would have to be making copies for profit -- like running a bootleg DVD factory or something. Someone posting a 2 minute clip of your nonsense is not that.

Most important, however, this isn't even civil infringement, thanks to fair use. Putting up a 2 minute video showing a dozen or so clips of Drew making an ass of himself is not infringing. It's classic fair use -- especially given the topic at hand.

So it's really difficult to believe that Drew is really owning up to his mistakes when at the same time he says he's sorry, he's actively working to abuse the law to try to silence people from highlighting his previous comments. Also, someone should point him to Lenz v. Universal in which a court said that before sending a takedown, you need to take fair use into consideration. It certainly appears that Drew hasn't the foggiest idea how copyright law works, so it seems unlikely he considered fair use at all.

I certainly understand that he likely regrets his earlier comments. And I appreciate his willingness to admit that he was wrong. But to really take ownership of your previous errors, you shouldn't then be working doubletime to try to delete them from the internet and hide them from view. That's not taking ownership of your mistakes, that's trying to sweep them under the rug.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright as censorship, covid-19, drew pinsky, fair use, takedowns

How The Public Domain Coronavirus 'Beauty Shot' You Now See Everywhere Came To Be

from the public-domain-ftw dept

By now, you've probably seen this image of the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 a million times:

It's freaking everywhere. And it's in the public domain. That's because it was created by employees at the CDC, and as a work of the US government it is exempt from copyright laws, meaning anyone can use it. Which is probably why everyone uses it. One of the many reasons why a public domain is so useful.

The NY Times has a nice story about how the image came to be that's well worth reading.

On Jan. 21, the day after the C.D.C. activated its emergency operations center for the new coronavirus, Ms. Eckert and her colleague Dan Higgins were asked to create “an identity” for the virus. “Something to grab the public’s attention,” she said. Ms. Eckert expected that whatever they came up with might appear on a few cable news programs, as their creations had in the past.

Instead, as the pandemic spread and intensified, their rendering’s reach did, too. “It started popping up around the world,” she said.

The story goes into a fair bit of detail about how it was created and also some of the design choices that Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgns made to make that design so memorable.

They chose a stony texture, wanting it to seem like “something that you could actually touch,” Ms. Eckert said. Other details — like the level of realism and the lighting, which has the spikes cast long shadows — were calibrated to “help display the gravity of the situation and to draw attention,” she said.

After reading about that, I discovered that there were a variety of other images of this particular coronavirus used around the globe. Here's just a few (there are so many more...):

Indeed, this is the image that the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has been using:

Not quite as nice as the CDC's... and thanks to more murky copyright laws in the EU, not as clear if it's in the public domain, so wasn't nearly as likely to catch on and become the symbol we all associate with COVID-19.

Filed Under: cdc, copyright, covid-19, illustration, public domain

Those Ex-Theranos Patents Look Really Bad; Contest Opened To Find Prior Art To Get Them Invalidated

from the you'd-think-it-should-be-the-other-way-around dept

A few weeks back we wrote about how Fortress Investment Group -- a massive patent trolling operation funded by Softbank -- was using old Theranos patents to shake down BioFire, a company that actually makes medical diagnostics tests, including one for COVID-19. Fortress had scooped up the patents as collateral after it issued a loan to Theranos, which Theranos (a complete scam company, whose founders are still facing fraud charges...) could not repay. Fortress then set up a shell company, Labrador Diagnostics, which did not exist until days before it sued BioFire. After it (and the law firm Irell & Manella) got a ton of bad press for suing BioFire over these patents -- including the COVID-19 test -- Fortress rushed out a press release promising that it would issue royalty-free licenses for COVID-19 tests. However, it has still refused to reveal the terms of that offer, nor has it shared the letter it sent to BioFire with that offer.

And while some have argued that after issuing this "royalty-free license" offer, the whole thing was now a non-story, that's not true. It appears that the offer only covers half of the test: the pouches that have the test-specific reagents, but not the test device that is used to analyze the tests. And so while the COVID-19 test pouches may get a "free" license, the machines to test them are still subject to this lawsuit.

In the meantime, tons of people have been asking how Theranos -- who appeared to never have a working product, despite publicly claiming it did (and convincing Walgreens that it did) -- could possibly have received patents on technology that never actually existed. Tragically, the answer is that our patent system (for reasons that make no sense) does not require a working prototype, which results in all sorts of nonsense getting a patent. That said, the good folks at Unified Patents have launched a crowdsourcing contest for prior art about the two Theranos patents in question.

We kindly ask our crowdsourcing community of thousands of prior art searchers to take a few minutes to help identify prior art on these patents that never should have issued and help rid the world of them, in the process improving the world’s chances of testing for and containing COVID-19 and other dangerous public health concerns.

The contest will expire on April 30, 2020. Please visit PATROLL for more information or to submit an entry for this contest.

If you're looking to help out and would like a place to start, the good folks at M-CAM, who analyze patents for prior art and obviousness, have a fairly remarkable analysis of the Theranos patents, and refers to Fortress/Softbank/Labrador as "graverobbers." The analysis is worth reading, including this analysis of the 1st claim in the patent for "a two-way communication system for detecting an analyte in a bodily fluid from a subject...":

No shit. My tongue is part of a system which detects various ‘analytes’ in food such as salt, sugar, and acids. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m starting to worry that I might be the next target for an infringement lawsuit.

But on a more serious level, the analysis explains why the patents are pretty much exactly as sketchy as you would expect from a company of Theranos' reputation:

... the claims of the patent they state are being infringed are incredibly mundane and obvious (patents must be non-obvious to be granted). They include gems such as "a) a reader assembly comprising a programmable processor that is operably linked to a communication assembly;" where they point out that Biofire’s machine uses, of all things, an ETHERNET CABLE to export data from its processor. Heathens!

It then notes that M-CAM found at least 416 other patents that appear to be significantly similar to the patents at issue, which makes you wonder why the hell the USPTO approved these patents in the first place...

Filed Under: covid-19, crowdsourcing, diagnostics, patent troll, patents, prior art, testing
Companies: fortress investment group, irell & manella, labrador diagnostics, softbank, theranos

Controversial Spyware Vendor NSO Group Is Helping The Israeli Government Spy On Its Own Citizens

from the for-their-health,-of-course dept

Israel's leading malware purveyor is pitching in to help with the pandemic. NSO Group -- which has pitched its spy tools to a number of questionable governments -- is trying to help track the spread of the virus with its proprietary surveillance tool.

This would be the third effort by the country to keep tabs on the disease, starting with the Israeli government's authorization of the use of phone/location data to monitor infected individuals. There's also a more voluntary effort, created by the country's Ministry of Health, that allows users to "check in" by providing data about where they've been and whether or not they've tested positive for the disease.

But it's NSO's spyware that's the most worrying. Motherboard was able to observe the software in action and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports it's a pretty scary piece of spycraft.

The spyware company has adapted the user interface and analytical tool that they already had developed to be used alongside its powerful malware known as Pegasus, which can hack into mobile phones and extract data like photos, messages, and phone calls, from them. NSO is not collecting location data from phones. It only provides the software to governments, which then get the location data from telecom companies and ingest it within the software, according to the source.

At least NSO isn't injecting itself into users' phones, but that's about the only positive thing that can be said about it. The software -- code named Fleming -- takes this data and creates heat maps showing people's movements: where they go, how long they stay, and who they come in contact with. Sure, the data is anonymized, but that's a dodge. Anonymized data can be de-anonymized with very little effort. But with NSO's offering, de-anonymization is just another bullet point on the feature list.

With the goal of protecting people’s privacy, the tool tracks citizens by assigning them random IDs, which the government—when needed—can de-anonymize, the source explained.

With NSO on board, the Israeli government is looking towards a more China-esque management of the country's citizens. China has "citizen scores." Israelis will now be tagged with health scores.

On Monday, Israel's Defense Minister Naftali Bennett tweeted that the Israeli government is working on "world-leading" AI system that will give every citizen a grade between 1 and 10 to determine how likely they are to spread the coronavirus and if they need to be tested, but that it hasn’t gotten all the necessary approvals yet. On Tuesday, Israeli news outlet Calcalist reported that Bennet was referring to NSO’s solution.

If every citizen is getting a score, it would appear the government isn't going to have much use for anonymized data. Seemingly unable to see the downsides of inflicting mass domestic surveillance on Israel's residents, Bennett is fully embracing the involuntary sacrifice of citizens' privacy in exchange for unproven pandemic-fighting gains. The Defense Minister has made it clear he thinks other governments should follow Israel's dubious lead.

Of course, once this pervasive tracking is in place, it will stay there long after the virus is under control. There's no set expiration date for this worldwide health crisis. Once it does retreat into the background, the usual national security and law enforcement concerns will replace it and the access government agencies have taken for granted for months or years won't be relinquished without a fight. And there's a good chance the officials that decided it was necessary to place the country's citizens under surveillance won't see the need to roll things back to their pre-coronavirus level.

Filed Under: covid-19, disease tracking, israel, privacy, spyware, surveillance, tracking
Companies: nso group

Strange Times: During The COVID-19 Outbreak, Evictions Get A Pause...In Final Fantasy 14

from the final-notice dept

As the world navigates the reality of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic, we've already noted several ways that the outbreak has changed our daily lives. Me being me, I noticed just how many professional sports organizations were moving into broadcast versions of their eSports as a way to fill the void. That of course isn't the only way video game life has changed.

Another appears to be the odd case of Final Fantasy 14, an online MMORPG. The game has had a vibrant, if congested, real estate economy involving the buying of virtual homes and properties. Due to the outbreak, the game recently announced that, similar to real life in many cities, evictions were on a pause.

In an announcement yesterday, the Final Fantasy XIV team announced that they would freeze housing evictions within the game due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic affecting the world. Automatic demolitions on abandoned houses in the game’s fantasy world of Eorzea are on hold for the foreseeable future.

“Taking into account the world-wide spread of the COVID-19 (also known as “novel coronavirus”) and the financial consequences of various cities going into lock-down, we have decided to temporarily suspend automatic housing demolition,” the announcement said.

We're in a state where it's hard to generate much sympathy for anyone who would lose a virtual house while real life folks are losing their jobs, their well-being, and their lives. That isn't the point of this post. Instead, I find it somewhat interesting, after years of video games being looked down on by older generations, the industry is ingrained in every day life to the point that there is some sort of mirroring effect going on. Evictions in real life get stayed, evictions in virtual life get paused. COVID-19 effects the real economy, COVID-19 effects the virtual economy.

This is interesting, but not meant to replace any of the real world work and danger that currently exists. Still, you have to wonder coming out of this whole ordeal whether we'll see real world effects on entertainment choices as well.

Filed Under: covid-19, final fantasy 14, virtual evictions, virtual worlds

Senator Loeffler's COVID-Related Stock Trades Looking Even Worse, While Feds Start Investigating Senator Burr's

from the insider-trading dept

As we noted just a few weeks ago, two Senators -- Kelly Loeffler from Georgia and Richard Burr from North Carolina, both of whom were publicly trying to play down the risks associated with COVID-19 -- were quietly engaging in stock trades that suggested they had a different viewpoint (while five different Senators sold stock during this period, only Loeffler's and Burr's look particularly suspicious). Burr's stock sell-off was revealed first, and got the most attention, in part because he's also the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and was getting classified briefings about COVID-19. The latest news on that front is that the Justice Department has supposedly opened an investigation:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr sold off a large amount of stocks before the coronavirus market crash, and now the Justice Department is looking into his statements around this time period, NPR can report.

Others have reported that the FBI has been in contact with Burr. That doesn't mean much for now, and the investigation may turn up nothing. But it's worth noting that it's happening.

The other Senator, Kelly Loeffler, has some more bad news, as new reports suggest even more stock trading that at least looks suspicious. As was noted in the original report, Loeffler had sold off a bunch of retail stock, and bought into a company that does videoconferencing. The original reports suggest that she sold off somewhere between $1.3 million and $3.1 million in stock right before the US economy went south. Turns out it was way more. The new report shows that she also sold off nearly $19 million in stock of Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. It is worth noting that Loeffler's husband is the chair and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, and the sales took place between February 26th and March 11th. That means at least some of those sales were happening while she was insisting that the US had everything under control.

Perhaps even more damning, though? Beyond buying into a videoconferencing software company, Loeffler and her husband, Jeff Sprecher, also purchased a bunch of stock in DuPont, a major supplier of the personal protective gear that hospitals are all now desperate for:

Sprecher bought $206,774 in chemical giant DuPont de Nemours in four transactions in late February and early March. DuPont has performed poorly on Wall Street lately, but the company is a major supplier of desperately needed personal protective gear as the global pandemic strains hospital and first responders.

So, to recap: they sold somewhere in the range of $20 million worth of mostly stock market and retail companies -- and bought into videoconferencing and protective health gear. All while telling the public that the government she's a part of has everything under control.

Filed Under: congress, covid-19, fbi, insider trading, investigation, kelly loeffler, richard burr, stock trades

Democrats Being Blocked From Advertising On Trump's Failed COVID-19 Response Due To Content Moderation Rules

from the oh-fun dept

Here we go again: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well -- and, as we've discussed, things are especially tricky when it comes to content moderation and political advertising. Now, when you mix into that content moderation to try to stop disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and you run up against... politicians facing blocks in trying to advertise about Trump's leadership failures in response to the pandemic:

Prominent Democratic PACs in recent days have funneled millions of dollars into television ads accusing Trump of mishandling the coronavirus crisis. But staffers of several Democratic nonprofits and digital ad firms realized this week that they would not be able to use Google's dominant ad tools to spread true information about President Trump's handling of the outbreak on YouTube and other Google platforms. The company only allows PSA-style ads from government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and trusted health bodies like the World Health Organization. Multiple Democratic and progressive strategists were rebuked when they tried to place Google ads criticizing the Trump administration's response to coronavirus, officials within the firms told Protocol.

That anti-conservative bias sure is a pain, eh?

This wasn't just a one-off. Apparently other politicians have also been told they can't use Google's ad platform for those ads either:

One Democratic strategist said his digital firm had already gone live in recent days with several ad campaigns related to coronavirus on Facebook, which allows most political ads about the disease. "As we were getting ready to start broadening [the ad campaign] into Google, we reached out to Google to clarify what their rules were going to be," said one Democratic strategist who requested anonymity in order to maintain his relationship with Google. A Google ad representative told them they would not be able to place the ads.

But, of course, since federal government agencies are allowed to advertise on the platform, and this administration appears to view the entire apparatus of the federal government as solely part and parcel of the Trump re-election campaign, that basically means that Trump gets free reign over Google ads:

The Trump campaign and Republicans across the country also are not allowed to run advertisements right now. But the democratic strategists argue that the CDC and White House's messaging, which are permitted by Google, fall under Trump's purview.

"For Google to basically say that the Trump administration is the only entity that is allowed to talk about the most important issue in politics really puts their thumb on the scale of the incumbent president and against anyone who is really looking to challenge him," said Eli Kaplan, a founding partner of Rising Tide Interactive, a digital marketing firm for Democratic political organizations and progressive nonprofits.

This isn't to criticize Google, but to again highlight the straight up impossibility of the situation. More specifically, it's not hard to follow the very logical and reasonable thought process that leads to these rules being put in place. It wanted to limit people exploiting COVID-related panic for commercial reasons, and thus chose to limit COVID-related ads to government entities only. But, the issue comes down to distinguishing political ads from commercial ads, and it's easy (if you're not having to make that distinction) to just say that you'll allow the political ads, but not "commercial" ads, but suddenly that opens up a ton of other questions that all of the platforms have been dealing with regarding moderation of political ads: what is a political ad exactly? In some cases, it's more obvious, but in many cases, it's a big gray area.

This isn't about bias and it isn't about malice. It's about the simple fact that if you do content moderation, almost every "policy" you put in place will come back to bite you when you realize that, in practice, something will happen that seems insane even when you have a perfectly logical policy in place.

Filed Under: ads, content moderation, content moderation at scale, covid-19, democrats, political ads
Companies: google

How Do You Moderate COVID-19 Misinformation When It's Coming From Official Sources?

from the content-moderation-at-scale-is-impossible dept

Continuing our never-ending series of posts about the impossibility of content moderation at scale, let's take a look at just how impossible it is to handle misinformation in the age of COVID-19. Ben Thompson over at Stratechery has a truly wonderful post highlighting this problem with regards to Twitter's disinformation policies, and how things break down when the "misinformation" is coming form official sources. We noted this, to some extent, the other day when we called out Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo for saying that he was seeking to have anyone who posted false information online about COVID-19 prosecuted. During the press conference, he said to only listen to "your elected officials, or to your appointed officials." But, as we noted, our elected officials and their appointees aren't always right.

As Thompson points out, Twitter also took the seemingly reasonable position that in an effort to stop (widespread) COVID-19 misinformation, it would start taking down content that disagreed with official government statements:

Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports, we will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners, including public health authorities and governments, and continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content.

But... what if that official information was bad? Ben points out that the World Health Organization (WHO), the US CDC, and the US Surgeon General all provided bad information to the public regarding the wearing of masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19.

But, as Zeynep Tufecki wrote in an excellent NY Times article a few weeks ago, however well-intentioned these claims were, they not only were wrong, but they backfired. The message was spread this way, in part, to try to stop the hoarding of masks that were absolutely necessary for medical professionals. The supply of these were limited and because our government seemed unwilling to properly prepare for a pandemic, we were caught short. But telling people that the masks don't work was wrong and a mistake.

It is of course true that masks don’t work perfectly, that they don’t replace hand-washing and social distancing, and that they work better if they fit properly. And of course, surgical masks (the disposable type that surgeons wear) don’t filter out small viral particles the way medical-grade respirator masks rated N95 and above do. However, even surgical masks protect a bit more than not wearing masks at all. We know from flu research that mask-wearing can help decrease transmission rates along with frequent hand-washing and social-distancing. Now that we are facing a respirator mask shortage, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that surgical masks are “an acceptable alternative” for health care workers — again, obviously because some protection, even if imperfect, is better than none. In the face of this, publicly presenting an absolute answer — “You don’t need them” — for something that requires a qualified response just makes people trust authorities even less.

Fourth, the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. told the public to wear masks if they were sick. However, there is increasing evidence of asymptomatic transmission, especially through younger people who have milder cases and don’t know they are sick but are still infectious. Since the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. do say that masks lessen the chances that infected people will infect others, then everyone should use masks. If the public is told that only the sick people are to wear masks, then those who do wear them will be stigmatized and people may well avoid wearing them if it screams “I’m sick.” Further, it’s very difficult to be tested for Covid-19 in the United States. How are people supposed to know for sure when to mask up?

Indeed, there is very strong scientific evidence that masks -- even homemade ones -- do quite a lot to help slow the spread of COVID-19 -- mostly in protecting non-infected wearers and protecting them from getting sick. In fact, the evidence seems to suggest that masks warn by those who are already sick from COVID-19 don't actually help that much. This is from a 2008 study of the impact of masks on respiratory infections:

So, now, how do you deal with this as a content moderator? Here, the government is clearly saying that you shouldn't wear masks unless you are symptomatic. But actual evidence suggests that's a bad idea, and that the government actually pushed out misinformation in an attempt to cover up its own failure to have a proper supply of masks ready to go -- and then to prevent hoarding of what was out there. While the strategy to prevent hoarding may be well-intentioned, the fact that the health claims were misleading and potentially harmful is a concern.

So, should Twitter be blocking posts telling people to buy or wear masks? Or is that "harmful"? It's difficult to say.

There are, indeed, similar challenges around potential treatments for COVID-19. For example, over the past few weeks there has been tremendous controversy about a variation of chloroquine, which is mostly known as an anti-malarial drug that is useful in treating conditions like lupus. There have been a few small studies that have suggested that chloraquine, combined with some other drugs, might help. Maybe. But there are lots of questions about those studies, and there's little solid evidence to back it up. Yet, it might actually help. After the President spoke about chloraquine in a manner that was not yet supported by science, many of his supporters have been flooding the internet and airwaves with exaggerated claims about it and its possible effectiveness. Again, what's important here is that it might be effective, and the FDA has now approved it for emergency use to treat COVID-19 as more tests are ongoing.

But how do you moderate tweets about it? How do you distinguish accurate discussions of what the studies currently say with those pushing it as a miracle drug? I've seen some serious discussions analyzing the effectiveness of chloraquine that appear promising -- but all of the tests so far are small and limited, and it would be a mistake to read too much into them. But how do you then hand that off to a moderator and get them to understand the difference between careful, thoughtful, nuanced discussions about it... and whatever nonsense the President himself is spewing? Again, the President is an "authoritative source" in most contexts...

Even more complex: I'm guessing that if more evidence does eventually come out that chloraquine is effective (again, I'm making no statement one way or the other as to whether or not that will happen as I honestly have no idea), you can bet that those who had their nonsense tweets about it "being proven 100% effective" (as I've seen on Twitter a few times) will insist that Twitter was "censoring the truth" in some effort to probably "undermine the President" or some such nonsense. But, of course, that's not accurate at all. Determining what is and what is not "misinformation" in the midst of a pandemic when no one really knows fully what's good information and what is not puts content moderators in an impossible position.

When the WHO, the CDC, the Surgeon General and the President might all be pushing misleading information, how are we expecting social media content moderators to magically get it all right?

Filed Under: cdc, chloroquine, content moderation, content moderation at scale, covid-19, face masks, masnick's impossibility theorem, misinformation, surgeon general, who