Efficacy is still tested with vaccines because there is a statistical expectation of contracting a given disease.
If you give 40,000 people a random mix of placebo and vaccines and then monitor whether or not they contract the target disease, you get an indication of efficacy by comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo group.
I ignore all of the COVID vaccine messaging histrionics. The level of ignorance and political maneuvering out there is astounding.
When I'm afforded the option to get the vaccine, I'll make an assessment of risks based upon data we have at that time vs the risks of contracting COVID.
If I had to make that decision today, I'd take the vaccine. But by the time I'll likely be able to get it in February or so, we'll have millions more data points that I'll be able to consider.
Your scenarios depend upon narrowly assumed premises that fail as soon as you put real people in the mix. Sure, if we lived in a perfect world where your woodworking moderators knew for a fact when libel was taking place or Nazis were posting - then we could all rest easily because they would de facto be preventing harm, not causing it.
But that's not the way it works. In reality, moderators don't know legal libel when they see it to the point that they should be automatically indemnified. We see in day-to-day life that not everyone who is accused of being a Nazi or a racist is one in fact. Sometime the accusation of being a Nazi is itself the libel, and if your woodworking moderators are participating in the perpetuation of that libel; then they should be held to account.
If your woodworking community, through moderation, decides to weigh in on user comments through moderation, badging, or editing; then it should be liable for any libel that it amplifies through its policies. If a person can show actual damage from those policies in court, then why should your woodworking community get a pass?
My POV is from American politics where the left is in lockstep with the censorship going on at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. This very story is about how Joe Biden is being protected by those tech giants. Those tech giants also are the ones protecting leftist movements like Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Maybe there's a part of the left outside of the USA that still stands up for free speech? Not here in the USA. That game is over. Except for a few voices in the wilderness like Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris, the left is comprised of those whose interests and actions now align with the tech giants.
Do you think we should filter out astroturfers and Russian bots?
I don't think that anyone is complaining about the filtering of deliberate fraud from outside influences. What people are complaining about are the obvious biases exhibited by the large social media companies. Take this new Hunter Biden example. Twitter claims that they don't want to promote hacking and releasing of private information. Hunter Biden's laptop was abandoned, not hacked. Besides, where was that privacy stance a week or two ago when Trump's taxes were leaked? Facebook claimed unreliable sourcing for the story. Where were such concerns when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had said that our troops were "suckers and losers"? Or when anonymous sources were claiming that Trump had been peed on by Russian hookers?
We have independent election observers.
Yeah and we balance things out by letting both major parties watch for funny business. Who watches Facebook and Twitter? Those companies are loaded with ex-Democrat operatives in senior positions. They've run out anyone who even smells halfway conservative. Facebook and Twitter have demonstrated time and again that they aren't just getting rid of fake news and bots. They're weighing in on complex political and statistical issues by silencing information sources that they don't like.
there are actors who want to harm the free and good faith discourse of our public forums
Yeah and evidence shows that some of those people are controlling information from within the social media giants.
This screed is disappointing to me. We tell people to go out and do their own research. We tell people to avoid just buying into group think. We want people to be informed citizens who do research, share their research with others, and are open to revealed facts vs just buying into the most appealing emotion-laden rhetoric.
Some dude does a bunch of research, reasons as carefully as he can about the subject, and openly provides his research and reasoning to others. The very first note in his research is a disclaimer to say that he's a layperson with no medical or scientific credentials. It doesn't appear that he's trying to deceive anyone.
Why the piling on? Why the expenditure of so much effort to silence his intellectual inquiry?
It's just as easy to find supercuts of Pelosi, DeBlasio, and other prominent Democrats telling people that they didn't need to start social distancing or that the virus wasn't airborne contagious.
Bad judgement is a human failing that cuts across party lines. To think that this is a long-term credibility problem for only some people shows a lack of a healthy diversity of news sources. At the end of this, everyone will go back to their teams' dugouts and prepare for the next political battle. Nothing will have been learned about credibility.
Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility
Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.
Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.
Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.
If you give 40,000 people a random mix of placebo and vaccines and then monitor whether or not they contract the target disease, you get an indication of efficacy by comparing the vaccinated group to the placebo group.