20 Comments
author

Hey guys, I put in a wrong link to the piece at UnHerd. Please go to my Substack and you will find the link has been replaced.

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Aug 8Liked by Paul D. Thacker

"As I read the article praising Tufekci, I started laughing at how crazy it was that national policy could be set by tweets and an essay, not anything published by scientists. It was just so bizarre."

Manufacturing consent & consensus by manipulating our perception of reality and expert opinion with social media.. snake oil on steroids and viral propaganda.. reconfirming the most dangerous thing spreading through the population is very bad ideas.

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How do people of her ilk manage to attain positions of authority? What is it in their nature that makes them strive for some measure of notoriety? If she truly believed what she was spewing she’d have no qualms about a debate. It must make her hate herself to cut and run.

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She's some sort of domestic counter-intel. Could be armed forces, could be agencies. Western nations consider themselves to be at war and are acting accordingly, specifically with regard to media policy.

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The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

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Thanks Paul for this lengthy and illuminating expose. Will you be posting the FOIAed and leaked emails so we can all get a good look at Zeynep’s shenanigans? Many thanks again for all your work on this!

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author

When you click on the links, the emails open up.

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Thanks - I see that. I was actually asking about the "hundreds of emails I had gone through that found social media influencer Zeynep Tufekci pressured the prestigious medical nonprofit Cochrane" and "The emails were sent to me after someone had filed Freedom of Information requests at different universities, and I got others from a person at Cochrane who is upset at what is happening inside the organization."

Will you be sharing the hundreds of emails (with necessary redactions for privacy etc. of course)?

Thanks again!

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author

They're just boring.

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Standard practice to share FOIAed and leaked emails that are of public interest, no? I've dug through piles of emails and docs that are way more boring, I'm sure... Sorry to nag.

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Aug 8Liked by Paul D. Thacker

Great article. I wish an outcome of your work, in addition to my own intellectual reward as a subscriber, was some kind of payback/ retribution for these horrible people, and their benefactors and companies. If there is any of that, I hope you report on it as well. Like at a minimum, maybe their careers derail into abject hopelessness or something like that. One can only hope.

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author

I'm not feeling like anything happens to them. In today's world, exposure doesn't seem to slow bad guys down. Not enough people out there are reading.

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Thanks for exposing Tufekci, Paul. How does such a negligent person exercise such misplaced power during the pandemic? It shows just how screwed up the communications were then and even now. Apparently, no first world countries learned anything from their consistent disastrous missteps during the pandemic. The ‘five eyes’ countries and the EU can’t wait for the next bogus pandemic to persecute their citizens some more. It’s hard to believe that I am living through a real live Hollywood like horror story in my senior years. Intellectual and emotional courage is in short supply these days. Keep up the good work and thank you.

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author

The problem I think we have is that we know mistakes were made, and that's fine. Difficult, complex problems create mistakes. But there is no desire to sit down and do an after operations assessment to understand what worked and what didn't. It's rather obvious this is because people in charge know they screwed up at times and censored those who spoke up.

They want to move on and bury this.

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Aug 8Liked by Paul D. Thacker

Ive said it before and ill say it again, she is a FRAUD. Better stated, A modern day CON MAN . And the cowards at cochrane all scared of the “New York Times”. She KNEW heneghan and jefferson would tear her to shreds hence her sneaky manipulation of cochrane’s editors. She blocked me ages ago on X.

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author

I'm guessing she had help and was coached by scientists who actully do work on masks.

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She's a civil servant.

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founding

Tufekci's mendacity played well with the NYT and its readership partly because both the paper and its devotees are eager to impose a moral cleansing on society and perceived enemies. Hence the relentless sanctimony about social responsibilities and conscience. They're a mirror image of the neurotic fundamentalists who demand intrusive moral hygiene laws and policing.

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author

I'm not sure I follow all of this, but I agree there's something fundamentalist about the NY Times and their readership. Some of them need to step back from their media bubble and take a walk outside. Talk to different kinds of people instead of denigrating them.

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The willingness of the western world to be fooled ... It takes the breath away, doesn't it ? (A bit like masks do for me.)

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