hey look, the censors are calling us out by name again!

are they EVER going to learn about streisand effect?

nothing says “you’re over the target” like a bunch of activist censorship fanbois seeking to malign you and proclaim themselves the arbiters of misinformation in a debate to which they contribute nothing but the suppression of science and scientific method.

(also note the error. 4 are banned. señor norteño would appear unaware that the felonious feline was one of the first to be de-catformed. hardly a strong start for our aspiring trust standard setter, is it?)

and look, we almost made the top 10 of substack accounts most frequently linked on twitter! without even being on twitter.

be a dang shame if the gatofans upped their game and took us top 5…

and, as ever with those seeking to look “data-sciencey,” there are network graphs

used in bizarre fashion to draw inapt conclusions and cast aspersions.

i mean, wow, there is audience overlap in people who research the same topics and that results in a tighter network topology than those whose coverage is of diverse and unrelated subject matter?

my goodness, who would have seen THAT coming?

not exactly “book a flight to stockholm to pick up your prize” stuff, is it?

(though i must confess that i find my lack of overlap with robert reich to speak well of my audience. thanks guys.)

we then move on to this:

um, that’s because so many of us are not allowed on twitter, cannot promote our work there, and get down-moderated and shadowbanned when we do.

our message starts on substack and moves to twitter as people with smaller followings digest and post it. we don’t get to drop content to our high follower accounts because so many of us had them taken from us.

thus, our signal comes from grass roots, not from vast bully pulpits.

perhaps that’s why the censors dislike it?

for an alleged resister of autocrats and disinformation, our esteemed critic seems to have little idea of just how this fight is being prosecuted, does he?

one might even be prompted to ask just what realm is being served.

it has been my frequent experience that anyone this fervently foregrounding their disinfo fighting credentials is rarely on the level. more often than not, it’s just a flimsy attempt to camouflage a desire to censor and push dogmatic ends. it also seems to have high overlap with scientific illiteracy.

so i took a look at my newfound critic to get a sense of what he’s all about.

i like to let people lay out their positions in their own words so that i may always have been said to have given them a fair say.

so:

apparently, this guy runs an anti-MAGA bot that seems to support some quite intense and inflammatory rhetoric and positions.

but clearly of a piece with the rest of his work in his main account. take a spin yourself.

amusingly trutherbot gets essentially zero engagement making me suspect that the 2k+ followers are bought or bots representing a telling foray into fraud for a purported truth-teller. most tweets get 0 or 1 like.

we see similar issues with conspirator himself who gets less than 1/10th the engagement i used to get with that follower count. when you have 40k real, engaged followers you get 100 likes in the first 10 minutes of a throw away joke tweet and 100’s or 1000’s of RT’s on anything substantive.

this seems absent here.

curious.

best i can tell, he has no expertise in covid, disease, vaccines, epidemiology, immunology, biology, or even hard sciences.

he seems like a comp-sci data guy dressing up strong political opinions as “research” by presuming anything he dislikes or that goes against his brand of tribal talking points to be “disinformation” which, of course, would seem to render him a poster child for the problem and not the solution.

“stridence over science” is not much of a mantra.

also note the “antivaxx” epithet so often misused to grandstand and vilify. that one is a near 100% shibboleth for “i’m lying now.” claiming one set of vaccines are ineffective or offer negative overall outcomes does not render one an anti-vaxxer any more than disliking brussels sprouts makes one anti-vegetable. many drugs don’t work or have poor risk reward in many circumstances. anyone asserting that to be a controversial claim would seem to have a poor grasp on the notion of pharmaceuticals.

isn’t it curious how the “truth” of one side is so fragile that it cannot be allowed to be challenged and yet the “disinformation” of the other so robust that it constantly invites engagement and refutation and yet seems to remain standing?

and oh how it remains standing.

because the bazaar of open ideas will always run roughshod over the cloistered cathedral and its dogmatic doctrinaire approach to information.

it reminds me of MIT’s feckless foray into “disinformation studies.”

remember this hilarity of assumptive ivory tower elitism doing business as “the science™” and seeking to adjudicate truth as they came for “anti-mask twitter”?

their claims to speak for science as an institution and to disavow it as a process were as desperately wrong as their take on the efficacy of masking to prevent covid spread turned out to be.

science is a process, not an institution

but they sure helped spread the word that there was a real debate here. they helped raise the profile of those they sought to suppress, because that’s what censorship does.

you do not strive to silence those whose opinions lack merit and foundation.

you silence those you cannot refute.

and more and more people know this now.

that which you seek to suppress becomes the signal.

that’s the streisand/obiwan effect for you.

streisand effects and polyglot media

i was actually wondering why i suddenly picked up a surge of subscribers the other day. i think it may actually have been CN’s tweet getting dunked on and used as a source of “who to follow.”

every totalitarian culture eventually discovers that the shortcut to the truth lies in finding out which things one is not allowed to say.

and as NC is learning, some memes are evergreen:

HERE ARE THE QUOTE TWEETS

my only wish is that more people would see the conspirador’s work and think:

“i wonder what these authors have to say that the censors are so keen that i not hear…”

so let’s help him spread his cancel culture lists.

and let’s see if they have the effect he hoped for.

because the cure for bad speech is always more speech and the best way to discredit those who are wrong is to hand them a megaphone and listen carefully to what they have to say.