Is this the beginning of the end for YouTube?
As someone who deeply hates how much fake news have been spreading in the past few years, I still find this very worrying, especially since the WHO has been very inconsistent with their messaging during this pandemic [1] and sometimes plain wrong [2].
To be fair no major health organization has been completely consistent or completely "correct" regarding the pandemic, in fact its virtually impossible to do so as the situation develops and our understanding of the situation changes. The recent change to CDC guidelines for the general public to wear face masks is an example of reaction to new research.
That's not to say there isn't outright incorrect fake news, but in hindsight some guidelines will always seem more correct than others.
Fine, things like this "happen". That is, incredibly cowardly and dishonest persons can play roles in otherwise not completely cowardly and dishonest organizations. However, where is the criticism? Does this guy still have a job at the WHO, what would you guess?
People who look the other way with something like this have nothing to tell me, ever, just like someone who murders people doesn't get to tell me to not use swear words.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about outcome and public safety, and wants to cooperation of people who pay attention and are not blackmailable -- I dare say, the kind of people whose support you want, not the "majority", but the ones with principles and determination, who will stick with things as long as the things demand it, not as long as they are cozy -- should get the WHO as far away from this as soon as possible. That shouldn't even need saying, but now that it's been said a lot, failure to even acknowledge the issue simply means some people do not care about outcome, they care about agenda and the prepared networks to push it, and others just blindly fall in line.
Telling people to not fly across the world is bannable misinormation acording to Wojcicki's definition. Of course, it wouldn't be banned, because the actual rule is a much more subjective "whatever makes YT look bad to advertisers and PR"
A big hinderance to containing the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 was all the cancelled flights, since it prevented medical experts from getting to the impacted areas. While it seems counter-intuitive at first, travel bans do little to stop the spread (especially after it's reached other countries), but they do limit our ability to fight the pandemic.
Well this isn't the ebola epidemic of 2014 now is it? Rules that apply to countries with extremely deficient medical systs don't apply to the richest country in the world.
To be fair no major health organization has been completely consistent or completely "correct" regarding the pandemic
Exactly, which is why declaring that any one entity is the unquestionable source of truth not only shreds the concept of freedom of expression but may be actively harmful.
The recent change to CDC guidelines for the general public to wear face masks is an example of reaction to new research.
Was it actually in response to new research? (Not a rhetorical question). My impression is that they had to change their policy because their "noble lie" of "masks don't work, also we have to save them for healthcare workers" was increasingly recognized as utter nonsense. Which might not have happened if anyone who advocated masks had been summarily deplatformed.
Responding to new research is one of reasons they list on their site for the face new mask guidelines. It was shown that asymptomatic people can also transmit the virus, so the CDC is recommending everyone, not just high risk people, wear face masks to limit the spread in areas where social distancing is difficult.
"In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission." [1]
However, I enjoy dabbling in the crazy side of youtube now and again, and there is absolutely content out there that will harm people, and there seems to be an audience for it.
It seems like one of those lamentable 'this is why we can't have nice things' stories.
The line youtube is drawing seems like the wrong line. Youtube has a storied history of making dumb choices and an inscrutable system to appeal their arbitrary decisions. I'm pretty confident they will continue to mess it up.
I would like to be a free speech maximalist; it's easier since there are no tough choices to make. Unfortunately there has always been speech that is not protected (incitement/yelling fire) and we are left with the difficult task of delineating which side of the line some speech falls.
In the end that means we must always be ready to fight to keep our freedom of speech.
My sense is that the denotation of the rule ("no contradicting the WHO") and the obvious connotation of the rule ("no cranks claiming Corona is a lie that you can cure by drinking bleach") differ.
My guess would be the intent and general enforcement of the rule will not be designed to preclude criticism of the form "The WHO is politically hobbled by needing Chinese cooperation, leading to awkward situations like the Taiwan exchange" or "The WHO was slow to adjust mask guidance in response to increasing on-the-ground evidence of asymptomatic transmission" or "The one study about surface life of Coronavirus is based on very limited research design parameters and the in-air survival number seems totally indefensible", or even an Ioaniddis-style "We're vastly overestimating the threat here" objection motivated by "good science" concerns.
I wouldn't preclude, like every stupid automated Google system, that legitimate content would be removed. But I think the intent is not to remove scientifically-oriented criticism or guidance or expert debate or context. I think it's meant to remove cranks.
I understand that denotation is important, just as it is when parsing say privacy policies or AUP documents or whatever -- and if people have criticism then YouTube should refine the language here. But we shouldn't blind ourselves to the fact that reality is primarily connotative.
I have zero objection to major providers collectively deciding they don't want to do business with Del Bigtree. Others might. Regardless of where you end up on that, I think we can agree that the debate here is about Del Bigtree, not about epidemiologists disagreeing.
Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
> Wojcicki: "So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy
> Who: Fact. There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
> Potential Youtuber early January: There is news going around of a new SARS-like pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan on Chinese Social Media. SARS was very contagious, so if this is SARS we should be very worried of a pandemic, especially with our interconnected world.
> WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
> WHO: Not a pandemic
> WHO: China is transparent and setting new standard for outbreak control
> WHO: Advice members not to ban travel from China
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I've noticed that it's difficult to find user-generated current-events content on Youtube. The search results are dominated, artificially it feels, by clips from the major broadcasters and news agencies. User-created content is pushed down. I guess that's what preferring "authoritative" sources looks like, and I wonder if people are just "choosing" ("demanding") what the search results have been rigged to give them.
Me. All of my Canadian news broadcasters stream on YouTube and cover covid related news both live and recorded content. I use YouTube because I will not pay for cable service just to watch the news.
I can see why they want to remove bad content, but a single authority is very bad.
The fact that they are backing WHO here as a means of curation and censorship instead of a less political org like the CDC, is pretty concerning. We already know WHO has stated objective falsehoods multiple times that impact the health of the world negatively.
please see the top comment in this thread, or the fourth top comment in this thread. I'm not sure why I was downvoted for making the same point as the top comments.
The actual title of the article is "Coronavirus: YouTube bans 'medically unsubstantiated' content." While the article does state that content that contradicts WHO advice would violate this policy, the implication behind the current title, that the policy is exclusively focused on the WHO, is incorrect.
Fake news can't be solved with bans, only through education. Education is a long term investment though and everyone wants immediate fixes. Expect more of this nonsensical short term thinking.
With all my heart, I agree with you; but I wished I shared some of your enthusiasm.
I've been brought up with the saying, 'The sole purpose of education is to help a person think sensibly in difficult times'.
However, I've not come across any _major_ shift in education systems worldwide. Yes, there are heartening stories about a few charter school systems [1] and a few countries making strides (like Finland). But these are one off success stories.
I do hope that technology companies make a step towards solving this.
But our startup culture, unfortunately, also is laced with trying to 'show growth' all the time and that leads us to think short term too.
Perhaps something like the LTSE may help private players take long term bets (fingers crossed).
Also, even the history of education is ripe with missteps [2], mind you :) not unlike the decision by YouTube here (as someone said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions)
Don't get me wrong, I want to be as optimistic as you are :)
I think the issue is people latch on to these things due to feeling or being powerless. They reach for solutions rather than being stuck in an endless waiting or trusting period, hoping for remote experts to do something. Education can help that but not always, and especially if the experts are adversarial to groups of people.
Education is limited to things we know. It's a knowledge transfer. In areas where there is no prior knowledge, education isn't a fix. Also, prior knowledge can be contested with new knowledge and then change to a hopefully more correct version. It is this process that gets exploited by fake news. Take the example of Napoleons height. In school I learned that he was of a small stature. In recent years I've heard (read on Wikipedias list of common misconceptions) that this was in fact false, he was average height and only appeared small because he was often seen next to someone who was unusually large. So now what am I going to make of Napoleons height? I can't easily confirm the truth and it doesn't really matter anyway, so suddenly I realize that I never had true knowledge about his height. It's the same with other things that I were thought. I realize most of it is just what someone told me and not real knowledge. This reflects pretty much the majority of my education and I think I now understand Socrates a little better: "I know that I know nothing".
So no, education isn't a silver bullet. It's just a nice sounding word for "things I've been told by other people". It doesn't really help me differentiate between what's the truth and what isn't. So once there are two ideas, like "Napoleon was a short person" and "Napoleon was of average height" I'm lost. Either could be true and I don't have the free time to get to the bottom of every single thing I once thought I knew.
Things like this are tricky to me. YouTube is a private platform, so they can make their own decisions, but any sort of censorship is scary to me.
I honestly don't know where to stand when it comes to issues related to censoring content like this. On one hand, you can limit information we know is false, but restricting spread of information is censoring people, something that is pretty widely regarded as oppressive.
I guess all I can do is wait and see what comes of this.
>On one hand, you can limit information we know is false, but restricting spread of information is censoring people, something that is pretty widely regarded as oppressive.
Yes. But liars, cranks and con artists should be oppressed.
I want people claiming vitamin C and turmeric will cure COVID-19 to have a voice.
Whether that voice has value is an individual decision you and I get to make, on our own.
What data do you have, that proves diferuloylmethane is ineffective in treating COVID-19?
Are you 100% sure that diferuloylmethane cannot be an ingredient in a battery of medicine to help recover from COVID-19?
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
Not a central authority that removes that choice from both of us leaving us with no choice.
> I want people claiming vitamin C and turmeric will cure COVID-19 to have a voice.
They're scammers. They're perpetrating a scam. "Giving them a voice" means allowing them to scam others out of money. Why should YouTube be complicit in running a scam?
Yeah, no... I'm not jumping down that rabbithole of thought-terminating cliches. HN is already replete with countless tiresome retreads of the same slippery slope arguments around freedom of speech, censorship, social media policies, whether truth even exists, Voltaire quotes and Orwell references. Feel free to browse if that's what you're looking for, they all devolve into the same unproductive quagmire.
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
I don't, for a second, believe Youtube has figured that one out.
Now whether you have decided to reject all competing hypothesis to something you have already decided to be the truth so you can move on with your life and be productive in areas you find valuable - that's your call but if I see you foisting your opinions on what kind of content I get to see, that's you infringing on my freedom and we have a problem.
There's some irony in you refusing to engage with thought terminating cliches when your original post that kicked this sub-thread off was "Yes. But liars, cranks and con artists should be oppressed."
Maybe it is, but almost no one who asks "but who decides x" in these threads is actually interested in debating the matter. They typically already believe no one should be allowed to decide, and they have no intention of actually engaging you in conversation beyond lecturing, berating and snark.
Learning when to step away from such fruitless pseudo-debates before wasting hours on the online equivalent of beating one's head against a brick wall is a valuable survival skill here. Sometimes it's best to simply state your opinion and move on.
> almost no one who asks "but who decides x" in these threads is actually interested in debating the matter. They typically already believe no one should be allowed to decide
I take you up on that offer.
Let us, for a moment, discuss this.
To disconnect us both from the exact matter at hand, because we are likely at this point pretty attached strongly to our biases to it, let us step aside, choose a completely different topic and hypothesize that our debate is on "should the government be allowed to track crimminals moving about in society".
I propose, that yes, murderers should be tracked at all times, as they move about in society, with tracking devices embedded onto their ankles.
You propose, no, no one, including murderers should be tracked at any time.
I then propose that murderers should be given a choice between been tracked, or have their pictures and descriptions published on a public website where anyone interested in staying away from murderers can check in.
> Putting up content on a webserver is not a Youtube competitor.
Is anyone preventing me, by force or law, from hosting video on my own website? If not, you cannot compare government mandated anything with market forces. All you're saying here is that youtube is a really good product. That doesn't make obvious competitors "not count".
I have to be honest, that already seems like exactly the kind of conversation I want to avoid.
The problem here, and it may just be an issue with the internet as a medium, or certain tendencies within technically-minded individuals, seems to be an overriding mistrust of nuance and complexity that leads to polarized, intransigent opinions.
Because really I can see both sides of that argument. On the one hand, society has an obligation to protect itself from bad actors, and part of that necessitates an ability by governments to surveil their citizens to a degree. On the other hand, people have a right to privacy and personal liberty, and governments' power shouldn't be absolute. But no one wants to hear that the only options which balance these concerns are the messy and imperfect ones where we try to do the best we can with imperfect information, and at times conflicting motives and agendas, and laws that require interpretation based on context, rather than being executed like code. The world isn't black and white, it's grey on grey on grey.
I can also see the other side of my own position in this thread - Youtube and other platforms could certainly use their outsized cultural influence and right to moderate content to suppress legitimate information or political activism. I just work from the apparently controversial premise that falsehoods do exist and that it does society no good to allow them to spread, even in the name of "free speech," and disagree with the premise that just because there is no universally acceptable, mathematically provable, perfectly objective answer to "who decides who the liars, cranks and con artists are" which doesn't carry a risk of abuse or hypocrisy, doesn't mean the only acceptable answer is that "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
> It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
This is such a silly argument. If I tell you two pieces of information: "Vaccines cause autism" and "Vaccines do not cause autism", how do you practice believing? By putting children at risk of preventable diseases?
Same goes for hydroxychloroquine or turmeric for covid-19. We have (at this point) decent scientific evidence for these not helping prevent the disease, and yet people will take them and either hurt themselves (chloroquine) or be willing to engage in more risky behavior otherwise.
The easiest way I have of putting this is that there is no difference between having no information, and having all possible information. If I present you with all possible strings of length < 100 containing "covid-19", you'll have lots of reasonable sounding statements about preventing the spread of covid-19. But without authoritative and reliable sources for why some of those strings are valuable to obey and others aren't, you're in no better place than if you had no information at all.
So if they make the wrong decisions and spread misinformation or fail to censor misinformation, can I sue them?
Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility? Is it just because they happen to agree with your worldview? And what if they don't -- what if they start banning videos that suggest Taiwan is a country? Would your opinion change?
> So if they make the wrong decisions and spread misinformation or fail to censor misinformation, can I sue them?
IANAL but unless someone is knowingly spreading false information as true (i.e. fraud), the answer is no. They probably don't even carry the burden of having to reasonably vet information first.
> Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility?
Because it is your privilege to use YouTube, not your right.
They don't control the flow of information. Feel free to host your alternative to YouTube if you there's a good number of people who feel the same as you out there. The problem is I'm pretty sure you're the exception... and even if you weren't, once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas so the easier recommendation is: get off your high horse.
That's sort of my point, private corporations run sites that are used by hundreds of millions of Americans, but they're not held accountable by our laws the way, for example, news corps are.
> once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas
Yeah I'm not saying only YouTube should be regulated, I'm saying sites like YouTube and Facebook should be properly classified as publishers and held to standards as such.
> They don't control the flow of information.
This is a false statement. The vast majority of Americans get their news from Facebook, and yes, YouTube. They do control the flow of information. If it's not on Facebook or YouTube, it might as well not exist for over 50% of Americans. That's huge power that these corps wield with no oversight, dontcha think?
You know its funny how I only see this argument when the service is doing something they agree with. When it's something they don't like there's suddenly outrage.
Remember a few years ago ISPs wanting to remove net neutrality and wanting to potentially charge for access to websites on "their platform"? Suddenly they're big enough to be a "public utility" and "invasion of free speech".
Completely different. ISPs are often a government granted monopoly. You can't just up and start one to compete, so it makes sense that they must be neutral. It's not a free market.
Anyone can start a YouTube clone, and if enough people disagree with YouTube's policies, they'll come use the clone. That's the free market of ideas.
This seems very simplistic. YouTube is more than a company, it is a community of hundreds of millions of users and thousands of workers. People use YouTube not just for ability to search and share videos, or the recommendation engine, but for the user created content. The owner of the platform is the shareholders, and their designee, the CEO, is ultimately responsible for the decision. I don't think the broader definition of YouTube made this decision.
I think it's wrong to be okay with YouTube suppressing information and misinforming people about global pandemics just because they own the corporation and infrastructure YouTube is built on. YouTube is abusing their monopoly to hurt people.
People don't like government censorship and misinformation not because it's inherently wrong for government to do these things, but because censorship and misinformation create harm. When you consider YouTube's scale and lack of real competitor - it's obvious that their censorship and misinformation is also harmful and therefore problematic. Even if it's legal, it's certainly not moral.
I agree with your point of view. Youtube is not the government so it, in my opinion, should have its own freedom to make its own rules.
The issue to me is that Youtube is pretty much THE video sharing platform. Yes there are others but as a content creator you will reach the most people on Youtube.
Would criticism of WHO be removed. Would information about China's handling of the outbreak be banned if it is contradictory to the WHO point of view. These videos are already demonetized.
I also am frustrated when I see videos claiming garlic will prevent coronavirus. Or that 5g is the cause. I would like to think people will recognize this is not accurate but people continue to amaze me.
In some ways though if I believe in freedom of speech though I suppose I should be prepared to accept all speech.
I think that YouTube is in absolute legal right to ban whatever content they want, and I wouldn't want that legal right taken away from them (or any other content platform).
However, I absolutely disagree with this specific ban on their end, and it deserves to be criticized. But, again, they shouldn't be legally restricted from making this decision, no matter how poor I believe the decision is.
i agree. but at the same time, why do people not get up in as much arms about manipulation? of course, censorship is a form of manipulation, but the u.s. media, advertisements, corporate culture, politics, etc. is one big cesspool of manipulation, both direct and indirect. it's just as controlling if not more controlling than censorship and, of more sinister nature, hides behind supposed ideals of freedom.
I don't like this. All of the question of 'Why on earth choose WHO' aside...it is dangerous and depressing precident.
I live with a number of ladies who are very familiar with plant medicine. When this whole thing started we all started taking lots of dandelion root / hawthorne tincture. Dandelion is well known to both help your lymphatic system and support respiratory issues.
Hawthorne is an amazing heart / circulatory support. There is literary NO RISK for us in applying these home grown medicines.
We've all been infected since then, and each of us had pretty mild symptoms, that lasted for relatively short amounts of time. About two to three weeks. Many many people see 30-40 days of symptoms.
It cost us nothing. The medicine was prepared at home. Who knows what using these plant medicines across a population would result in statistically? Maybe it would reduce hospitalizations by 1%, or maybe it would reduce them by 75%, we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
YouTube is a fantastic avenue for period to share their own experiences. Yes, you must take what people say with a grain of salt. You can't just believe anything you see. I feel sad that they are censoring people from sharing their own experiences in this time where are governments and medical systems are largely failing us.
> I feel sad that they are censoring people from sharing their own experiences in this time where are governments and medical systems are largely failing us.
Right in the beginning even the WHO knew little about Covid19 and transmissibility, mortality , etc., so anyone questioning their initial assertions would have been banned. That’s bad. The WHO is not an infallible know-it-all.
>Who knows what using these plant medicines across a population would result in statistically?
Isn't that a big point of this? Who does know? The answer is nobody, but a lot of these "alternative" medicine pushers aren't asking questions but instead presenting their "alternatives" as absolute cures
> The inspection reports portray an industry struggling to meet basic manufacturing standards, from verifying the identity of the ingredients that go into its products to inspecting finished batches of supplements.
> Some firms don't even have recipes, known as master manufacturing records, for their products.
> Others make their supplements in unsanitary factories. New Jersey-based Quality Formulation Laboratories produced protein powder mixes and other supplements in a facility infested with rodents, rodent feces and urine, according to government records. FDA inspectors found a rodent apparently cut in half next to a scoop, according to a 2008 inspection report.
> we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
Lots of people are making lots of money selling this stuff. It's a huge industry.
Your "plant medicine" is very likely worthless, as most are.
Lots of people have few to no symptoms. Your anecdote means nothing, and is a prime example of why we don't use anecdote instead of actual data - if people are put off engaging with actual medical services and instead are bamboozled by this sort of woo, bad things can and will happen.
WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Yes, there's a lot of information out there about SARS-COV2 and COVID-19 infections out there that are downright misleading at best and life threatening at worst.
No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
We already have examples of central authorities pushing "information" that they agree with and supressing information they believe is "incorrect" - as a freeish country, we should absolutely not encourage this behavior.
The argument can be made that Youtube is a private company and free to do as they please.
I personally dont agree with that argument - to a regular random person, Youtube is synonymous with video content.
Youtube is the news.
Perhaps one solution for Youtube would be to demonetize and label such content as "unsafe" aka "don't sue me bro mode".
Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content.
Anyone who watches the content with "unsafe" mode on, sees the content.
Give customers the choice to choose and make up their own minds.
Removing content with the authority of being the primary video content platform? They don't get away so easy.
With power comes responsibility.
They have to handle this another way and this, is not it.
you conveniently left out number three in that you connected (1) and (2) via analogical reasoning. of course, i suspect that's what they disagree with.
Equating WHO to Fox News directly as organizations does not make any sense. They are not even on the same domain.
I assumed, the readership would not conflate them on all possible attributes.
The reason for my statement was specifically to point out the flaw that WHO is guided solely by medical reasoning.
Just like it would be a flaw to assume Fox News is the unbiased broker of news events.
Is the connection that cambalache thought I was making that WHO and Fox News are both brokers of medical news and information?
If so, I'm at a loss on how to better phrase "WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics." to convey my intent and would really appreciate better phrasing.
I would posit that the analogy is unnecessary and detrimental and that the statement "WHO is a political organization with medical leanings" stands perfectly well on its own. As have been outlined in this thread, the analogy serves more to lead the reader to wonder whether you meant to equate the two in quality or some other attribute(s) moreso than it does to explain the meaning of the first statement.
All organizations are political organizations. However, with regards to COVID, I consider WHO's advice to be mainly aimed at preventing COVID and trust them more than the USG on these issues.
> No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
Huh? If I ran a hosting platform and people were putting absolute BS on there, I'd remove it too. People who run hosting platforms want to have integrity.
The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it, and they dug their heels on calling the outbreak a pandemic for weeks.
I think it depends how youtube draws the line. If they’re removing stuff like “use colloidial silver” or “no need to wash your hands” then sure. But the WHO is not gospel.
The errors the WHO has made have generally been corrected and so far as reliable authorities go on the pandemic there isn't a more reliable one, even if all are fallible. It's a better standard than nothing for stopping misinformation from killing people.
I agree that they're generally have good advice. But, I looked at their mask guidance, and they're still recommending that healthy people do not need to wear masks.
This ignores the possibility that people may be asymptomatic and contagious. Some government authorities have called for mask wearing outside. They are contradicting the WHO.
Should Youtube remove these views? That's why I said it all depends just how strictly they're going on WHO guidelines. If they're only removing obvious nonsense, fine. But the WHO should not be the only authority, especially if different health authorities may disagree.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,"
That’s totally true, but I don’t think it should be controversial to say that the WHO lied by omission, and that their statement was intentionally intended to convince countries _not_ to lock down.
"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.
It may not have explicitly stated that there was no human to human transmission, but that was strongly suggestive that there wasn’t.
The default assumption should be, that a virus affecting hundreds of people already, could be contagious. Suggesting otherwise, with no reasonable evidence to support such, is deliberately obfuscating if not deliberately misleading. There was absolutely no reason to make such a statement other than to parrot without question what was being reported by the PRC.
Considering Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus received support from the PRC in his candidacy for leadership of the WHO, and the significant ties between his home country of Ethiopia and the PRC, I’m skeptical that it was just absolute ignorance without any political influence or bias that prompted such a statement.
Actually, technically that is the WHO summarising results from preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities.
Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy. It's like a newspaper reporting on the words/claims of a celeb or politician, and folk claiming that those words/claims were actually the newspaper's claims.
> Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy.
WHO is in fact making that claim at the behest of China. The are not reporting like a newspaper as you claim, because a newspaper would have a duty to investigate the claims, the WHO just took China at their word and republished it.
WHO is the UNs international health organization and they are supposed to be independent. The onus is on the WHO to publish this alleged “preliminary investigation” referenced by the Chinese Authorities (hint: it does not exist). Once they admit there was no actual written report of the “preliminary investigation” or data provided by the Chinese Authorities, then they can identify the actual Chinese Authority who made the representations to the WHO, and we can continue to peal back the layers.
Do you think repeating propaganda designed to cover-up a huge outbreak is responsible for such an organization? At the time of that tweet they had zero access to China.
Did the WHO explicitly deny human transmission? Their earliest reports I saw said “we have no confirmed evidence of human transmission, but we are likely to find it”. It’s the second half of the sentence that people and the media seem to have ignored.
>“From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO’s emerging diseases unit. The WHO is however preparing for the possibility that there could be a wider outbreak, she told a Geneva news briefing. “It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture.”
I didn't see where they said that second half, do you have a source? Because all I saw was a tweet from them saying that they haven't found any evidence of human to human transmission.
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
> The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it
I don't think anyone on HN needs to be told that "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" is not the same as "there are evidence that human to human transmission is not possible" which is how everyone is trying their hardest to interpret it as.
> even after Taiwan told them about it
Do you have a primary source about it? Every time someone references it, it's an editorial obfuscating the embarrassing primary source of Taiwan's "warning" email from December 31 which reads:
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment.
I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.
Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
where they're asking for the WHO's help clarifying something they heard over the news.
Taiwan told them about human-to-human transmission in December, and the WHO responded by repeating CCP propaganda verbatim in January saying there was no evidence of it.
Note that at the time WHO had zero access to China, because of the cover-up ongoing.
If that was the reason, why ban instead of just demonetizing those videos, like YouTube already does with tons of other videos that are not "advertiser-friendly"?
This is a ridiculous assumption. For two obvious examples, Art Bell attracted plenty of advertisers, as did early-day Howard Stern.
Some advertisers do, and some do not. Don't lump them all into a single bucket. YouTube is creating an environment that guarantees a future without Art Bells or Howard Sterns.
The concern you raise could easily be remedied with a single checkbox on the advertiser portal labeled "Display this Campaign on Fringe Content". The fact that with the enormous technical capability of Google, they choose not to do this and instead decide that they know the advertisers' preferences better than the advertisers themselves demonstrates clearly that this is about power and control, not ad revenue or serving the customer.
I didn't say I did. I said one must be very careful to not leap to the conclusion that just because a show agrees with you, that therefore they are unbiased. Or that one is not suffering from bias themselves.
We're all very good at tricking ourselves into believing that we are objective. It's called confirmation bias.
Although some of us, like me, actually are being objective.
Agree. They are a monopoly, and cannot be allowed to function like any old hosting platform.
The WHO was wrong on many occasions during this pandemic. They said it couldn't or was hard to transmit between people - meanwhile, it was spreading everywhere and Taiwan tried to warn them.
They said we should not shut down international travel from China. Wrong again. Taiwan and a few others did and it helped out immensely.
Appealing to human authority as the source of truth is dangerous. For humans, truth only has a chance to come out when vigorous debate is allowed.
According to the preliminary epidemiological investigation, most cases worked at or were handlers and frequent visitors to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The government reports that there is no clear evidence that the virus passes easily from person to person.
Currently, no case with infection of this novel coronavirus has been reported elsewhere other than Wuhan.
"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.
To me - its just weasel words issued by an organization that was denied first hand access to wuhan. Perfectly crafted to play both sides.
None of us should be surprised that a large scale multi-national organization like the WHO can only speak in bureaucratic half truths. Their primary purpose for the CCP is to be a tool for moral laundering.
Do you have references for this, or the scientific data that Taiwan used to make that assertion at the time the WHO made that statement? It would better help your argument, and make it more powerful, since the only quoted text is the WHO stating "According to the preliminary epidemiological investigation..", which might very much be factually true.
4chan was taking the virus seriously back in January, when the WHO was denying the need for travel lockdowns. The misinformation coming out of the WHO is what killed people, not the early warning that 4chan gave us.
Edit: note that in both replies to my comment, none of the specific facts I mentioned were responded to. The response of the countries is being blamed, the date I mentioned is being ignored; but I am comparing the information coming publicly out of the WHO in January to the information coming out of 4chan in January.
In hindsight, if you compared the information from both at that time, you would have had a better idea of the real situation if you believed 4chan over the WHO.
Do you really believe that? Check archive.org. The WHO published info on CV including technical guidance for the health ministries of nation states, at least as early as January 24. It’s safe to assume that national delegates would have been in discussions with WHO ahead of this. Remember, there’s only one WHO and yet we have many different responses and outcomes in different countries. The only logical conclusion is that those nations who’s responses led to poor outcomes should look to their own interpretation of WHO advice and the decisions they themselves made, as the cause of poor outcomes.
The key sentence that Tedros is being criticised for is:
“First, there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement.”
However, in the same speech:
“ we must all act together now to limit further spread.
The vast majority of cases outside China have a travel history to Wuhan, or contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan”
and
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it”
This leads me to believe that perhaps he was trying to have it both ways:
- flag the need for action
- keep a major player from “losing face”.
I don’t envy his job, or in fact any of the UN organisations. You’re at the mercy of your big funders; you’re trying to influence hundreds of countries who’d rather focus on their own internal politics; you have no actual power. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. How on earth do you move the needle at all in that kind of environment?
His job is world health. If he put "saving face" for China, or trying to keep his job, over recommending a travel ban to prevent the spread of a deadly virus, then he is incompetent and he failed to prevent deaths... and my point still stands.
Your point only stands if the health ministers of the countries receiving that advice, had no responsibility for the advice they gave their own governments. Or do you believe that nation states bear no responsibility for their own decisions? Remember, WHO has no actual authority to impose anything. National governments do. Look to your own health minister and leaders for where to sheet the blame. Anybody hearing or reading that speech above that didn’t act - especially given all the actual technical guidance being offered by the WHO at the same time - should be looking in the mirror. A point I made elsewhere still stands. From the same source of advice - WHO - multiple nation states took different courses of action. Why do you think that is? They surely can’t all attribute their decisions to WHO otherwise all countries would have acted the same way. Clearly that’s not what’s happened.
The WHO is a source of information. The decisions made based on that information by various countries is completely irrelevant to anything I'm trying to say.
The WHO chose to recommend against travel bans. This was the information they shared with the world. If countries chose to enact such bans anyway - good for them: they knew better than to believe the WHO. The WHO, compared with 4chan, was in January the inferior source of public information about the virus.
This is a hilariously revisionist take people are trotting out.
Forget the WHO for a second (which remember was politically cast adrift by the US when they refused to participate in it.)
The news coming out of Europe/Iran/China had lay people in the US concerned by late February -- yet the American Government did everything it could to belittle or otherwise diminish the threat. Now it wants to turn around and suggest that it's actions are to be blamed by the WHO? What happened to self-responsibility?
You are making a different point that the US could have acted sooner in late Feb.
Before the news coming out of Europe and Iran things were breaking in China. The 4chan guys were all over it way back in Jan. Remember the Chinese Dr whistle blower who got punished for letting the truth? He was dead by Jan 20-22.. at this point the WHO was downplaying, later praising China and telling everyone not to wear a mask.
The WHO response caused the outbreak to get out of control in Europe and elsewhere long before it hit North America.
"4chan was taking the virus seriously back in January,"
I think the thread under this is kinda missing a deeper point. 4chan was taking this virus seriously back in January. I also wouldn't be surprised that 4chan was the original origin of "it's just a flu, bro" meme, which is to say, plenty of 4chan and related communities was also mocking the idea of taking it seriously.
The point of free speech isn't that the speech will freely contain only the truth. The point of free speech is we need that debate to find the truth. Declaring the WHO as the one and only source of truth is a bad idea, even before we observe the fact that it has manifestly made numerous incorrect statements within the past couple of months, and that reasonably people can question some of the things it is saying even now.
There isn't an option where we get only pure, unfiltered truth. Sorry. That's life. But there is an option where we pretty much guarantee ourselves that we will not get the truth, and that option is declaring a single trusted source of truth who will somehow transcend the fact they are made up of falliable and potentially untrustworthy human beings to deliver you that truth.
4chan and terrorgram were also workshopping Corona-chan memes, entertaining the misconception that black people were immune to it, and trying to figure out ways to launch the boogaloo on the back of it.
They take it seriously in the same way that a rotating drum full of ping-pong balls happens to contain the winning lottery numbers every week. Glomming on to novelty is is the defining trait of quasi-anonymous social networks.
Think of all the protest and conspiracy against Bill gates, 5G, think how many people are still gathering, not wearing any protection, think of how Trump compared it with just another flu, how it would just magically go away. I'd say misinformation indirectly killed thousands of people
I think it's unfortunate that the population has become so stupid that we need to protect them from killing themselves by drinking household chemicals, based on tweets or whatever.
Maybe they should just have a disclaimer on every video: "Watch this with a critical eye and a grain of salt. Perhaps a truckload of salt. Use your brain."
>Given that, who should YouTube use as a source of truth?
Why are we expecting a private company to provide "a source of truth"? What happened to the whole idea of the Internet being about the free flow of information?
>Or should they let 4chan tell your grandma to drink bleach to fight the Rona?
Why don't we have parental controls for our parents yet? Why are we applying blanket bans on parts of the Internet when it's clearly a specific subset of the population that needs hand-holding to not injure themselves or others?
Apparently I have hit the nerves of lots of people from my parent post and since I am and like to be publicly accessible, people who disliked my thoughts have really let me know what they think of me and where I belong :D
I am noticing, increasingly in the country I live in - the U.S., an extremely concerning attitude towards love for censorship.
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
The problem is not primarily when you make bad decisions and suffer harm from it. It's when you make bad decisions and others suffer harm from it. You even bring up drunk driving, yet your argument remains exclusively about damage to yourself.
Your freedom ends where the freedom of the next person begins. So not only is it "not free", it's also "not boundless". You don't get to kill people intentionally. You also don't get away with it if you do it by gross negligence (such as drunk driving).
Inciting violence is an offence in most parts of the world. Not because governments love to be oppressive but because society figured out that it's the point where you cross how much personal freedom you can have without infringing on everyone else's.
Where is this point for COVID-19 misinformation? It's a difficult question, and it's unclear what is appropriate and what is overbearing. What is clear is that harm is actively being cause by people propagating this nonsense. Whether an ideal rational adult could cut through it is entirely immaterial to this question, it doesn't stop the harm.
this is an excellent idea: safe mode. let people who can't decide for themselves what's safe to watch, let them watch safe mode only. everyone else, should be able to decide for themselves (opt in)
The problem isn’t letting people decide for themselves. It’s the fact that when it comes to some things, even a small minority “deciding stupid” can destroy the commons eg endanger lots of lives.
Isn’t there a saying that’s something like, “your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins”?
Who gets to decide what is nonsense. What happens when society thinks YOU are the one with nonsensical beliefs?
"Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy."
When people are directly threatening people because they are even slightly linked to 5G towers, or they're peddling nonsense like 'drinking bleach will cure you of corona', then I think it's fair to draw a line in the sand and say those are dangerous, nonsensical beliefs.
But to be fair to the person you’re responding to, you still haven’t answered his actual question - who gets to decide?
The example you gave is only “obvious” because the majority think so. However we’re increasingly living in an environment where people are “fleeing the centre”. People have abandoned authority, and are increasingly abandoning science, even to the point of doubting or reinterpreting their own lived experience.
The key to “common sense” is “common”. When very little is held in common, where do you find common sense?
This is precisely why, in my view, the single greatest danger to mankind is - a “meta-danger” perhaps - is the explosion in deliberate attempts (irrespective of motive - lulz, commercial profit, political influence or psychological warfare) to misinform, sow discord, and erode trust. It is an absolute scourge and is already starting to bite us in the collective arse, by limiting our ability to act collectively for objective common good.
Apparently I have hit the nerves of lots of people from my parent post and since I am and like to be publicly accessible, people who disliked my thoughts have really let me know what they think of me and where I belong :D
I am noticing, increasingly in the country I live in - the U.S., an extremely concerning attitude towards love for censorship.
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
> Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content.
Even that is an authoritarian nightmare. We already have laws that restrict minors from participating in certain activities.
You're saying you want YouTube to be the parental guardian of children based on their current whims. They should bar content from minors where the law requires it. Let the legislatures battle the people over whether the law-of-land should include barring minors from information that "contradicts" the WHO.
How easily we drop our freedom and liberty for a tiny bit of supposed safety. Unbelievable.
I think tech moved too quickly and in some ways, due to power being left on the table by government, tech became responsible; much like how businesses have taken up the responsibility of American healthcare due to the issue being under-addressed by government.
Now that YouTube is used by people of all ages, Google has to make social and political decisions about what kind of content is appropriate for different ages.
On the broader topic, breaking up Youtube, Facebook and the like is entirely desirable but would probably be pointless unfortunately. Increases in copyright zeal make a new competitor to YouTube impossible and the network effect guarantees both theirs and Faceebook's dominance. In light of this, I imagine the only solution is to legislatively guarantee an uncensored platform on essentially the same logic that requires net-neutrality.
But I point out that "uncensored" is entirely ambiguous. For better or worse, the vast mass of people want and expect it with the percentage very dependent on the particular item. From archaic restrictions on "dirty" words over radio waves through to displays of sex to recruiting terrorists to national secrets to doxing individuals to child pornography.
For right or wrong, somewhere, the public, legislators and each individual decides to draw a line. In addition, for short periods of crisis or certain locations or certain influencers, the line can move. The often misused example of yelling fire in a theater comes to mind but a national leader harmfully using false announcements to raise the value of stock he owns would be an example. More relevant would be the South African leader who zealously told his people AIDS can only come from drug abuse.
On the YouTube issue, for right or wrong, they drew the line in a place some would not. I would guess because they view such messaging as unusually fatal in the short term and they don't want to be a part of it. And that they could not find any simple judgement criterion that would do what they want without doing too much and yet be palatable world wide. If we legally require them to carry every upload regardless of content then it will lift all their burdens. But it will certainly create very real problems for others.
My point is that the issue is far more complex than bumper sticker sized answers.
Might I suggest a line? Damage. Quantifiable damage that reasonable people could assess in a court of law. Stop and think about every exception to free speech that the US has: libel/slander, disclosing troop movements, breaking non disclosure agreements, perverting the course of justice, direct incitement of violence... they all fairly directly cause damage.
This line is not particularly fuzzy, and it makes some forms of censorship against speech that clearly doesn't cause direct quantifiable damage stand out as something entirely different than the other exceptions.
Some examples: hate speech does not cause damage that could be proved and quantified in a court of law. "Bad words" do not cause damage. Conspiracy theories do not directly cause damage (unless a court decided reasonable people would do things that caused damage based on the information, so there could be exceptions here).
Everything is indeed complex. But some ways of thinking about a problem can make the complexity more manageable.
> Increases in copyright zeal make a new competitor to YouTube impossible and the network effect guarantees both theirs and Faceebook's dominance.
A Youtuber I follow recently made a really good point: Youtube has been promoting official channels of traditional media, it's extremely rare for a new Youtuber to become a big name, and most novel video content/memes now comes from TikTok. We're likely seeing Youtube fall out of relevance right now, with the younger generation going to TikTok instead.
The YouTube statement was not, really, about the WHO. It was an interview. Wojcicki was pointing out that they'll be removing "medically unsubstantiated" content like 5G conspiracy theories, and as an example said that anything that clearly contradicts the WHO would likely not qualify.
The decision to put "WHO" up there in the lede seems to be click baiting on the part of the BBC. Frustratingly I can't find a link to a transcript of the original interview, or even an indication from the article about who it was with.
> Fact check your work. Use reputable sources from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and National Health Service to inform your content. For official resources relevant to your country/region, check here.
Google has a long history of partnering with partisan political organizations to police content, including Politifact and the Washington Post, among others.
In the age of misinformation, how do we better equip our society to know (or even desire to know) what is accurate information?
I think it's easy to think of censorship as the answer, and it's easy to think that in this extreme circumstance that it's the answer. Maybe it is a slippery slope.
It is a problem though. People aren't doing a very good job of handling it on their own, either. So what's the answer? Genuinely curious about this.
Concise statements, concise pro arguments, concise con arguments, each pro/con having its own pro/con arguments behind it via hypertext. Make it easier to explore the tree of evidence.
It doesn't work that way. It's trivial to build a rigged tree of evidence that makes any claim look good. Remember gish gallops from 90s internet arguments?
The answer is reputation. Organizations need to market their dedication to objectivity - the processes they combat their own biases and the ability they have to cover different perspectives.
I think that HN readers trend rationalist and see the problem as one of presenting evidence. I respectfully disagree and present a different perspective, one which premises that objectivity is futile and that information is social/tribal.
There is truth and then there is information. I think that people can know only information — projections of truth we think to be truthful. Information must be stored as memory and thereby is rendered organic and messy.
I argue that information is socially constructed. Given the overwhelming complexity of the world, individuals evaluate the trustworthiness of information by how much they trust its transmitter and how people in their network — who collectively form their realities — also receive that information. There is scarcely enough time or resources for individuals to independently evaluate information (in a non-social way for truthiness). Observe for ourselves: how much do we accept as information just because someone we and our friends/family/colleagues trust says it?
In short, (I think that) we believe what others believe. The cost of evaluating information is too high, and so too is the social cost of believing something that is contrary to the beliefs of those others who constitute our immediate realities (the ones we directly experience day to day).
The answer in a democratic society that aims to have a free press? I think that at an abstract level the answer will have something to do with shortening the diameter of our society-level social network and more densely connecting distant subgraphs — such that different social realities can be bridged and the Overton window can be narrowed around the mean.
One merge-tribes implementation: Institutions that socialise people at a national or state-level and cross social classes, like a year of mandatory national civil service around the country. As we go through life, we progress through a series of institutions that socialise us at increasingly wider levels: family, grade school (hyperlocal), maybe religious group, middle school (local), high school (local), then university for some (international or national but upper middle-class if prestigious; otherwise regional). The EU’s Erasmus Programme brings EU students to study in other EU countries: individual networks that otherwise would never connect, get connected — and at a collective level the Programme contributes toward a pan-European identity. But in the US and the EU there are lack of institutions that socialise the masses both at a national/union level and across class. I expect that people will balk at the idea of a compulsory program in a “free” society, but I think that it is more productive for people to think about what a healthy society should ask of each members so that it can sustain a healthy abundance of freedom.
Another idea: Facebook and other online social networks creating intimate channels — not mass channels that inevitably devolve into shouting and chanting — that foster more cross-societal interaction and awareness. Though I think this is a lot weaker than an “IRL” solution.
I find our modern epistemic crisis very interesting and welcome emails to discuss.
You have not made a case for why you think that public health issues — such as Covid — should be a topic fully exempt from restriction by YouTube. You've made the case that freedom is good and that YouTube can take all sorts of steps, but you haven't explain at all what your position on this tradeoff is.
As a country that restricts public behaviors when they conflict with public welfare, it is plausible to expect that YouTube would restrict contradictory information about Covid at this time. There are millions of views on content suggesting that Covid isn't real, for example, and those will — under this plausibly correct approach — end up terminated and removed.
What public good do you suggest outweighs the public harm done by allowing (for example) "Covid isn't real" content to remain visible online?
You haven't described any public good that lends weight to your argument, and without that, your argument won't sell to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Freedom is not always a good thing, and we absolutely have laws restricting it for valid and serious reasons. If you wish others to consider that YouTube should exercise less restriction of freedom in this area, you need to be much more specific about why — to you, personally! — you think that good will come of them backing off.
By the time the United States was founded, the idea of restricting speech that "conflict[s] with the public welfare" had become so frequently abused for self-serving censorship that a prohibition against the whole idea was written into the the highest laws of the country. The rationale for doing so applies today. A society can't figure out what is true if well-meaning people in power have the ability to censor anything that they don't believe is true. Censors can be mistaken on the facts as much as anyone else, and it's a fundamental weakness in human nature that we apply different standards to claims for and against our interests. Some central body limiting information flows for the "public good" has never led to anything actually good and never will.
The public good arising from free speech is truth.
Thanks for your explanation. But one thing still confuses me.. that we should just leave the "covid is a lie" contents there despite the high possibility that it may kill people?
The highest laws of the country were written specifically to ensure that restriction of speech is permissible when it causes significant harm to the population without any benefit outweighing that harm.
It is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater and that is permitted under our country’s highest laws.
The case you’re making is that corporations, who do not have the power of military force over their citizens, should be held to the same standard of law as the governments that do.
As those governments legally have the right to prioritize the greater public gonod over individual rights, your logic implies that corporations, too, should be expected to prioritize the greater public good over individual rights.
This seems in direct contradiction to your point that speech should not be restricted, and so I cannot accept your reasoning as presented.
I think the root of my disagreement is with your phrase “self-serving speech”: the nation’s free speech restrictions must serve the nation’s citizens as a whole, in order to be legal. They must prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few, and do so only in circumstances where the harm is great if left unrestricted. The nation did not put into place such protections at the corporate level, resulting in YouTube, a platform with a population greater than that of our nation, having no legal requirement to prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few.
If your position is that YouTube should be bound to the same onus of responsibility as our nation, then YouTube should be taking much more aggressive action to censor content than it has done to date. It should be restricting individual speech where the welfare of the world’s citizens is at risk of significant harm, exactly as our nation’s laws are.
It seems like your true argument is not with YouTube, but is in fact with the theory that the welfare of the entire population is sufficient cause to restrict individual freedoms; and that this view applies both to YouTube’s policies, and to United States constitutional law. It’s your right to hold that view and express it in general, but I cannot agree, as I consider its outcomes both unjust to the greater good and unsupported by law.
By spreading misinformation about face masks and travel bans, they do actually put people's lives on the line, though. WHO's body count is greater than some cable news network with less viewership than a mid-sized YouTube channel.
Let's not forget WHO opposed travel bans on numerous occasions, said face masks were not effective, and repeated CCP propaganda verbatim while seeking to punish China's enemies (and hanging up on reporters when questioned about it).
Then the Director-General implied, without a shred of evidence, that he was the victim of racist smears from Taiwan's government after he sought to put them in direct danger by denying them access to critical data.
The WHO is worse than Fox News and it's not even in the same ballpark.
Taiwan data was being counted with China's. This means that many of the early safeguards Taiwan was taking to protect their country was overlooked as it's effectiveness didn't show up in the global trends reported by the WHO. In fact, when specifically questioned by the press on how Taiwan was so successful at containment and preventing the spread, the WHO leadership acted like they had never heard the term Taiwan before.
So has Newfoundland's response to the pandemic been extremely effective [0]. Where is Newfoundland's data being published by the WHO site? Here is what I was able to find as far as case statistics: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... No mention of Newfoundland in that document that I can find.
Is that quantifiably true? There are the same number of deaths in Shanghai and Beijing as Taiwan and the population is about the same size while Shanghai and Beijing have much less "travel restriction" from Taiwan. Why should the WHO, an agency of the UN, make an extremely aggressive political and undemocratic move and special case Taiwan when only 14 of the 193 members of the UN have diplomatic relations with Taiwan and when it performed average vis a vis other Chinese provinces.
It's evidence that the WHO is a political organization, and some of its recommendations, such as being against international travel bans, may be influenced by politics over public health.
> American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
> When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
> The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
Importantly, however:
> In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
Neither does the US. Taiwan is only recognised by IIRC 12 natinos, mostly small island states. This has become another weird internet talking point as international recognition pretty much unanmiously switched to the PRC in the 1970s.
Pretty much all global institutions have informal or de-facto relationships with Taiwan, that's besides the point. Not recognizing Taiwan formally has been the position of just about any institution or country on the globe for 50 years.
It's the awkward way they one representative handled a question on Taiwan. Pretending he didn't hear the question. I think it speaks more to the unwillingness of a world health organisation to even discuss politically dangerous topics.
>I think it speaks more to the unwillingness of a world health organisation to even discuss politically dangerous topics.
Which is perfectly reasonable if you understand that these questions are looked at through the lens of international diplomacy and these people don't just wing geopolitical questions because every single answer can cause an international shitstorm (not just in regards to China, but every territorial conflict really). This may look awkward to the ordinary viewer but it's not really.
The WHO has a fairly strong interest in staying out of politics and being a health organisation, so whatever diplomatic position they take is mostly just going to be whatever the status quo is. If you think the non-recognition of Taiwan is unethical then you should take that up with your respective government, a guy speaking for the WHO isn't really in any position to make incindiary political commentary.
I saw that video and was shocked that a representative from WHO would behave that way, pretending not to hear the question and hanging up... utterly childish behaviour. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to take an organisation like that seriously?
Politics are a fact of international relations. It's childish to think an international organization that depends on its member countries for funding can just completely ignore that or blow it off, rather than eat shit occasionally in order to work around it.
Sure, they can make a bold impassioned speech about how science is far beyond petty concerns like national sovereignty and so on, but this isn't a movie where a great speech suddenly brings everyone to their senses. In reality the WHO works through public health departments in nearly 200 countries and also gets its funding from governments, so if they spit int he face of sovereignty, they'll cease to exist in any meaningful way and aggregate health outcomes will definitely be worse.
Straw man - you're making an argument against a point I didn't make or even insinuate.
I didn't say organisations can or should ignore politics - of course, politics affect every organisation, especially those that work across borders.
My entire comment was about the childish behaviour of the WHO represenatative when asked about Taiwan[0] - he was literally one step away from putting his fingers in his ears and shouting "na na na na na!".
The mandate of the WHO is to improve world health. Thus avoiding politically sensitive issues is correct if that helps the organization to reach its goals.
Edit: since people are misunderstanding this post, I am 100% pro-ROC and anti-PRC. I wish the ROC could rename itself to something else without triggering a PRC invasion. Check my comment history. I'm 100% pro-ROC and I support the ROC's continued (since 1912) independence as a sovereign entity. 中華民國萬歲
"Taiwan" isn't a country. It's an island controlled by the Republic of China alongside its other holdings. The ROC is a state that has existed since 1912 with continual international diplomatic recognition since then. Other countries switching diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC didn't magically make the ROC vanish.
I really dislike the fact that the media and government in the US refers to the ROC as "Taiwan". It muddies the conversation and I constantly have to explain to people that there are two governments/countries over there, one from 1912 and one from 1949.
False. And don't use the term "Chinese" as it's ambiguous. This is not what the PRC claims.
The ROC has existed since 1912 and has only occupied Taiwan since 1945 (some claim since 1952 and the Treaty of San Francisco). The ROC has been an independent state with continuous diplomatic recognition since 1912. It does not need to declare independence. I just take issue with people calling the ROC "Taiwan" as it gives ammo to PRC shills who intentionally muddy the conversation with their claim that "Taiwan is a part of China" where the term "China" is ambiguous or referencing the "One China" principle which the US doesn't even recognize (acknowledges the existence of, but does not adhere to).
> I just take issue with people calling the ROC "Taiwan" as it gives ammo to PRC shills who intentionally muddy the conversation with their claim that "Taiwan is a part of China"
...Calling it "Republic of China" is straight up saying "[this area] is a part of China". Naming it "Taiwan" is giving it an identity independent of China.
No, the current situation is that there are two governments both claiming to represent "China", not that the ROC is part of what you are calling "China" (PRC). The ROC can't amend its constitution to rename itself without triggering a PRC invasion.
You are using "China" to refer to the PRC which is misleading and muddies the conversation. I'm against calling the PRC "China" as much as I am against calling the ROC "Taiwan". Please use the full name or the acronym to avoid ambiguity.
"Taiwan" passports say "Republic of China" on them.
My passport stamps from when I entered Taiwan say "Republic of China".
Taiwan is just _one_ of the islands that the ROC controls. Calling the ROC "Taiwan" muddies the conversation and helps the PRC narrative that "Taiwan is a province of China".
The ROC has been a de facto independent country since 1912 when it was founded. The existence of the PRC since 1949 has not changed that.
Something you shouldn't use when talking about highly politicized nationstate issues with intentional ambiguity being injected by shills on the aggressor side.
On the military and foreign relation really matters in this list. In my understanding, the only reason these two still exists is because US is backing them up since WW2.
Every one of the many Taiwanese people I know refer to it as Taiwan, too. It's very rare to hear anyone refer to it as the ROC, unless in the context of specifically making a distinction from the PRC, or in a formal document.
Right, calling the ROC and all of its holdings "Taiwan" just muddies the conversation and gives ammo to PRC shills claiming "Taiwan is a province of China" which deliberately uses the name of a single ROC holding and the ambiguous "China" term.
Do you tell your friends about your summer trip to the Republic of Korea? Or were you visiting the Kingdom of Belgium that year? Do those friends invite you to visit their hometowns in the French Republic, or the Federal Republic of Germany? Maybe you can stop at the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg along the way from one to the other?
When shills from an aggressor nation in a highly politicized international conflict intentionally inject ambiguity into the names used by the states on either side of the conflict, you should strive to be as articulate as possible to avoid misunderstandings.
People commonly refer to the United States of America as "America" which is odd since there's also Central and South America. Being common doesn't equal being correct, and in this case the ambiguity is used by the aggressor state (PRC) to get people to believe a certain narrative. I'll continue to inform folks where I can as most people aren't aware of the situation between the ROC and PRC. I don't care about downvotes on this site _especially_ if it's because I'm stating facts that people do not like.
I don't have any dislike for the fact that the ROC is an independent country, whether my government diplomatically recognizes them as such or not. I'm just pointing out that, if a Taiwanese family invites you to dinner, they're going to be weirded out by you continually saying "Republic of China" throughout the conversation.
I have lots of Taiwanese friends, but I appreciate your concern. I do use 中華民國 when talking about politics or anything related to the government or cross-strait relations. If I'm talking about the island of Taiwan specifically, I have no problem saying "Taiwan".
Because all of them are actually from the island of Taiwan (not Kinmen or other holdings of the ROC), and they generally (and increasingly) do not want to be associated with "the Chinese": https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=166
"China" is a bad brand name nowadays. I really wish they could formally rename their country with a resumption of the civil war.
Here's the TAIWAN ALLIES INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION AND ENHANCEMENT INITIATIVE (TAIPEI) ACT OF 2019. It starts: To express United States support for Taiwan's diplomatic alliances around the world.
The name "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China") isn't used. However there are sentences like this:
Since the election of President Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan in 2016, the Government of the People's Republic of China has intensified its efforts to pressure Taiwan.
lol, see my first post in this thread. I said I didn't like the fact that the USA calls the ROC "Taiwan", and I think you are overestimating my ability to influence USA foreign policy. The USA doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with the ROC so using "Taiwan" is a kludge.
Taiwan is the common name for the state that officially goes by the name Republic of China. It's de-facto administrative boundaries have been the island of Taiwan for the last 70 years. That's long enough for most people stop caring all that much. Many countries in todays world were still colonies back then.
The ROC had existed continuously since over 30 years before it occupied the island of Taiwan. What about people in Kinmen? Do you consider them part of "Taiwan"? Please use the official government name to stop aiding the PRC in its misinformation campaign.
Sometimes, I'll hear someone talk about a place called "Virginia", and I'll have no idea what they are talking about. Eventually, I figure out through context clues that they are referring to the Commonwealth of Virginia. I wish they would save me the time of having to constantly explain why they are wrong.
Bad analogy. This would be like people calling Rhode Island "Newport". The official state name is (the State of) "Rhode Island" (and Providence Plantations), and calling it by the name of one of its territories makes no sense.
See my edit. I'm 100% pro-ROC and 100% anti-PRC. Calling the ROC and its other non-Taiwan holdings "Taiwan" helps the PRC with their "Taiwan is a province of China" narrative. First time I, a stringent anti-communist, have ever been called a PRC shill. There's zero chance I'd be allowed to enter the PRC if they can see my internet posting history.
"Republic of China" sounds like something related to China. Maybe some sort of separatist organization? If the PRC invades it, that must be some sort of civil war, an internal Chinese matter. Can't blame China for conquering itself.
"Taiwan" doesn't sound related to China at all. It implies no more "Taiwan, province of China" than "Taiwan, country in East Asia".
So why not simply declare Taiwan to be a country de-facto, despite a bunch of governments who suck up to China pretending otherwise? Who gets to decide what a "country" is?
Are you advocating for separating the island of Taiwan from the ROC? I'm honestly not sure what you're getting at here.
The ROC has already been an independent entity for over 100 years. There is nothing new in this situation that needs to be declaring independence. If the ROC amends its constitution to remove "China" from its official name, the PRC will attack instantly (they've said as much).
This comment egregiously breaks the site guidelines. Personal attack is not allowed, and neither are accusations of shillage, which are overwhelmingly figments of internet imagination (I've spent hundreds of hours investigating this kind of thing). Please stick to the rules when posting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> Neither does the US. Taiwan is only recognised by IIRC 12 natinos, mostly small island states. This has become another weird internet talking point as international recognition pretty much unanmiously switched to the PRC in the 1970s.
That's misleading. The US de facto recognizes Taiwan, and the only reason it doesn't recognize it de jure is that the PRC would formally cut off relations if it did.
My guess it’s okey to do that because Chinese internal politics is based on PR which is populistic in nature. What is the proportion of people who would go out looking for lists of American exports into Taiwan vs the proportion of people who would hear Taiwan being pronounced by the president of the US?
Taiwan is a unique proposition, and eviscerating the WHO for having trouble with it without acknowledging that everywhere else has the same problem makes it look like the person is either ignorant or has some agenda.
Well, the WHO probably reads what comes to it from Taiwan, but they don't publicly give lip service to it because that would piss of china, the very large country whose cooperation they needed given that the apparent origin of the pandemic there.
The existence of political factors (which are not the fault of the WHO) makes it less than perfect, but people using it as a cudgel against the organization are (not you necessarily) are insinuating that the WHO's failure to be perfect thus makes it scientifically useless. This is an obvious bad-faith argument deployed for rather obvious political ends.
> The only reason it doesn't recognize it is because US kicked RoC out of UN by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758
Huh? The Wikipedia article you linked says the US voted "No" on Resolution 2758. I don't see how you can claim the US did the kicking by opposing the resolution that did the kicking.
That article also states that before that vote...
> ...the United States was proposing that while the credentials of the PRC representatives would be accepted and the PRC would be seated as China’s representative with a seat on the Security Council, the ROC would continue to enjoy representation in the General Assembly.
> The "No" is a gesture. If US was serious about the "No' where won't even be a Nixon visit or Resolution of any kind.
But the question isn't just the recognition of Taiwan/ROC, in isolation by itself. It also includes the recognition of the PRC, the existence of which is a fact on the ground that's difficult to ignore.
Sure the US could have continued to plug its ears and ignore the PRC, but that was untenable and becoming increasingly so. It's pretty clear that the US's preferred option would have been formal recognition of both Taiwan and the PRC, but it doesn't always get what it wants, so it has had to contort its official position and practice deliberate ambiguity, instead.
The TAIPEI Act doesn't change the US's position on recognition as a country.
It specifically says "the US should advocate for Taiwan’s membership in all international organisations in which statehood is not a requirement"
Note the statehood is not a requirement thing.
I think it would be great if Taiwan had observer status at WHO, and I think the TAIPEI Act should help towards this. But the point remains: Taiwan is an unusual entity, and WHO is far from alone in having trouble with this.
All due respect, but this is lunacy. The way the guy reacted then hung up is unconscionable. The WHO is clearly corrupted by China's money.
And the US is still connected to Taiwan and provides them military support. And we have a $250M 'de facto' embassy there.
Honestly, I'm so shocked and dismayed by your comment, that I think I want to stop participating on Hacker News. Your perspective is relativism ad infinitum. This is the thing I fight most against.
This isn't a community for hackers & painters anymore. Eternal Relativism is impossible to win against.
This statement shows the power of western media. Yes the WHO doesn't. Neither does any other political entity in the world.
Neither the US, nor the 14 of 193 UN members that has diplomatic relations with the ROC, nor does "Taiwan" itself recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation.
Even the most pro-US pro-independence party in Taiwan, the DPP, does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. According to Taiwan, Taiwan is a province of the ROC which includes the mainland and the present country of Mongolia.
And you would want the health agency of the UN to be the first in the world to spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so?
Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission not happening and WHO refused to acknowledge Taiwan's reports. Then on January 14th, WHO tweeted saying human to human transmission was not possible. Then when it came out that they were wrong, they claimed Taiwan never emailed them. Taiwan brought receipts with the emails.
Also the WHO spokesman went on an interview with Hong Kong media and refused to even answer a question about Taiwan, then hung up the call after pretending to not hear the question.
This is not corporate media telling me so (don't even know why you would claim that). This is plain facts on video and email available for everyone to see.
Seems like a goalpost shift since I was just responding to your claim about "Taiwan sovereignty".
And since you brought up the December 31st email, that only amplifies my point about corporate media if you formed your opinion on editorials obfuscating the primary source rather than the primary source itself. Here's the actual email from Taiwan https://twitter.com/mohw_taiwan/status/1248915057188024320
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
It's so embarrassingly not "a warning" from Taiwan that Taiwan has been busy deleting the original email from their press release archives and rerouting permalinks to their emails (still available on their tweet at.cdc.tw/23iq82) to a further obfuscating rebuttal.
Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
You are proving my very point. The twitter email you linked specifically says "atypical pneumonia".
> In China, the term “atypical pneumonia” is commonly used to refer to SARS, a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.
"transmitted between humans" - what WHO claimed does not happen even though Taiwan warned them about it.
> patients had been isolated for treatment
That's also referring to the human-to-human transmission part of COVID - which WHO denied. This is the warning Taiwan had sent in December and WHO lied and went even further to state that they never received any email from Taiwan. It's literally in the email. I don't know how much clearer they can get.
> Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
You trying to claim I don't have critical thinking makes you sound arrogant. I don't want to engage in flame wars on HN so it's not replying to it further.
I'm afraid this is another goalpost shift. Remember we started with
> recognize Taiwan as a sevreign nation
I'm then responding to your
> Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission
Very bold statements. If you're saying that the WHO should have changed their January 14 statement from "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" to "there are clear evidence of human to human transmission because Taiwan stated:
News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you.
You keep saying I am moving the goalpost but I am not. My original comment was in reply to the last statement where you said:
> "spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so"
and I was merely pointing out that the HK media is the one which pointed out how WHO ignored Taiwan's warning. Then you went around stating I "don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking" which is just a silly ad hom attack and not worthy on HN. I almost always read the primary source and that's exactly what I had done with the Taiwan vs WHO thing. I don't just watch the media and believe everything they say, I have seen too many examples of them not reporting the facts. Also I haven't even seen much coverage of the Taiwan situation in the western media so I have no idea how you are making that conclusion. Most of the western media is too busy defending China anyway.
> then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you
Considering you think the Taiwan's email wasn't enough to justify a different statement from WHO than parroting China's talking points, why do you think WHO lied about them never receiving any correspondence from Taiwan warning about human-to-human transmission?
Also maybe calling people names and thinking you are somehow better than the person you are interacting with is a tactic you wish to employ though I don't think it's suited for HN discussions. Let's not resort to that.
This is why using WHO as the body for 'truth' is idiocy. They have a hundred different incentives pulling them in different directions. Automatically making it a poor 'source of truth' or, even worse, what is not okay to talk about.
It might be a good source of information for governments around the world looking to take the most neutral diplomatic and balanced stance on every issue.
Not sure why those same incentives should then be influencing what people are allowed to talk about on the internet.
I think I generally agree. I'm very against YouTube content control whether it's censoring gun contents or taking down pro-China channels during the Hong Kong protests.
Your statement misses the point a bit though. I don't think anyone's arguing that WHO/UN is a source for (political) 'truth'. It's just a medical advisory body. If the UN was the source of 'truth', Israel might not exist in the present form anymore since half of all UN resolutions against single countries are against Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolut.... The fact that no one is likely to know that is precisely because what you're arguing against is already not true.
The first time I got a color printer/scanner the first thing I did was slap a $5 bill on there to see if it would print a color copy.
What do you think happened?
I'll give you a hint: "EURion constellation".
Anyway, my point is, "It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye." When it comes to pandemics or currency control our systems have no problem toeing the hard line.
Has nothing to do with whether you like it or not, government's gonna govern. Make FAANG the new government and they're gonna govern.
I was defending Facebook for removing anti-quarantine events. There's a difference between mere opinions versus actions that directly risk the public health of non-participants and I think Facebook is nailing it.
However, Google has gotten it wrong:
1. As others have said, WHO has not earned this trust to date and is also a political organization, not one that is independent.
2. There were other options available, such as demonetization. Stopping people from profiting over putting out information that could hurt people seems more legit to me. They also could have used disclaimers, like the article mentions Facebook is doing for similar content.
3. Another option available to them? Limit the promotion of these videos through recommendations. I get why Google wouldn't want to actively be promoting videos that give terrible misinformation, so they can decide not to promote while still allowing the video to be posted. This is their normal policy for content that is considered "harmful misinformation." (Which was strengthened last year.) Why not use existing policy?
However, I'd actually be fine with them removing video of people drinking bleach to combat coronavirus. And maybe even just encouraging others to do so. But taking vitamin C? (An actual example in the article.)
Vitamin C is like, classic nonsense. People only take it seriously because it's been around forever, like homeopathy and acupuncture, not because there's any good evidence for it doing anything useful, beyond, you know, preventing scurvy.
Just look back through the years where the WHO has posted information and data that has been false. There were scientists and doctors who disagreed, those doctors were correct. So YouTube wouldn't allow correct information in this scenario for Covid 19?
In Canada for months we followed WHO's directions to a tee and ended up rapid growth of infections until we did a 180 and implemented nearly every measure that the WHO disagreed with.
Taiwan is one of the few countries to have very few cases, and they essentially did a lot of measures the WHO did not recommend initially.
WHAT measures did the WHO "disagree" with that saved Canada? I'd love to see this post cited up to include what measuring you're referring to in both parts (agree w/WHO and disagree) and where the WHO disagreed with Canada's measures.
I think he saying that Canada followed WHO advice to their detriment whereas Taiwan strayed from WHO advice with success. I don't know about any specific examples but the efficacy of masks is one I've heard about -- essentially the WHO discouraged use of masks whereas now the common wisdom seems to be that even makeshift masks when widely used are a lot better than none.
EDIT: As of 3/30 WHO still doesn't recommend wearing masks (except for the obviously sick) - contrary to Vancouver BC who now require at least a covering or mask.
> The WHO advised against the public wearing masks
Nope. Your article is actually about the UK's government's advice and lumps in the WHO. Here's a WHO publication from 30th of January 2020 [0] that advises all sick with "flu-like symptoms" be provided a mask (as well as healthcare workers).
The WHO, like every national government, have recommended prioritizing masks to the sick and healthcare workers since the start of the year. Canada didn't contradict that and still doesn't as far as I've read.
Giving masks to asymptomatic members of the public only makes sense when there's a large enough supply to do so without starving essential services or known carriers.
> and advised against travel restrictions.
Your own link contradicts this claim.
> However, in certain circumstances, measures that restrict the movement of people may prove temporarily useful, such as in settings with few international connections and limited response capacities.
> Travel measures that significantly interfere with international traffic may only be justified at the beginning of an outbreak, as they may allow countries to gain time, even if only a few days, to rapidly implement effective preparedness measures. Such restrictions must be based on a careful risk assessment, be proportionate to the public health risk, be short in duration, and be reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.
They then go on to essentially say that it won't work (and spoilers: It didn't work, they were 100% correct).
It also fails to show how Canada acted against the WHO advice? That was the core claim above, and your response doesn't even attempt to show that.
In fact Canada has been in lock-step with the WHO since the beginning and still is. Even according to your links.
> They then go on to essentially say that it won't work (and spoilers: It didn't work, they were 100% correct).
How didn't it work?
All of the really successful countries at handling this pandemic continue to have significant travel measures that interfere with international traffic.
For example: Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, even (infuriatingly, given their opposition to anyone else doing it [0]) Mainland China itself!
The WHO still right now does not support wearing masks if you’re not sick. The fact that we know that people can be sick and spread the virus and still not show any symptoms suggests that every country in Asia supporting wearing the masks early on is right and the WHO is wrong.
As ever, the face mask issue is more complicated than it appears at first glance.
Yes, if everyone in the world had a sufficient supply of face masks and wore them correctly all of the time then the R0 would drop significantly.
The two keys parts of that statement are _sufficient supply_ and _wear them correctly_.
There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
I've seen people who have bought facemasks touching their face and fiddling with the masks. They don't know how to wear them correctly, making their purchase a complete waste. They've wasted stock that could have been made available to healthcare workers.
If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
But it isn't and they aren't.
WHO seems to understand this and so it seems to be a factor in their advice.
I believe they may have even made a statement to this effect at some point?
It's not complicated at all, except for those who wish to cover up responsibility for how unprepared we have been.
>There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
Anyone that has access to cloth can make a rudimentary mask that is better than nothing.
>If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
Taiwan is an interesting case. They are not recognized as, really anything, except part of "One China" by the UN. Anyway - WHO wouldn't talk to them, even when they asked nicely.
But they, like HK (and Vietnam, and SG and I don't know who else) are part of the "China is asshoe" club (i.e. the TW believe that the Chinese government will always lie and obfuscate, true or not), and had pretty direct experience with SARS and the other corona virus (not MERS, but my brain isn't working). In any case - they had protocols in place start mandating masks - pretty much day 1. They also paid for a factory expansion of the largest vendors, pretty much day 1, and pre-paid for a pretty large order.
I heard a rumor that the Vietnamese actually hacked a Chinese "mainframe" and stole materials that allowed them to prepare. I don't know if this is true, and it is not related to Taiwan's already-in-place response plan.
Richard Dawkins recently said that HK is doing well because it followed the recommendations of the WHO.
Which is literally not the case. They wore masks, and protested to get borders closed to non-citizens asap. If the citizens had not taken things into their own hands I fear they wouldn't be in such a good position as they are now.
The WHO needs to be dismantled. china has far too much influential power in the WHO. There should be 0 politics within the WHO, no pandering to the ccp. They should exist to help everyone in the world during an outbreak like this.
What's most interesting about watching platforms target "mis"-information is the question/problem of whether and how they define it.
For example, Facebook refers to "fake news" as "false news"; if you search their domains for "false news is", you'll get around 6,500 results, none of which include an actual definition of what "false news" is. Setting aside the obviously problematic policy issues associated with this, it suggests that FB either doesn't have a definition or has one but has chosen not to publish it.
Loosely, I think you could categorize information on a grid (allowing for overlap), where the columns are "information", "wrong information", and "non-information"; the rows are "deliberate" and "inadvertent".
"Dis"-information would fall under "deliberate" and "wrong", whereas "mis"-information is "wrong" but may be "inadvertent" (someone posting something they don't know is incorrect, for example). OTOH you can have "deliberate" "non-information" in the form of "obscurantism" or "inadvertent" "non-information" in the form of "bullshit". And of course you can have all kinds of stuff in between.
Then again, most platform policies ultimately boil down to whether or not a statement is likely to cause to some kind of real harm. If that's the case then I'm not sure why you need to formally identify it as "misinformation" at all. If at the end of the gay you're going to say "We removed this because it violated our policy against posts that may cause actual harm to others", then calling it out as belonging to any particular category of impermissible content is just a perfunctory nod to transparency in your policy enforcement.
If anyone here has a policy issue they're seeking advice on please feel free to reach out. I love this stuff.
Not even mentioning they are playing a dangerous censorhip game, it's very weird that they pick the WHO over the CDC after all the WHO controversies. (Taiwan, slow COVID-19 response, alignment with China lines, head of WHO was part of the corrupt Ethiopian government, $200M in business class travel, and probably more scandals.)
CDC has also a way bigger budget than the WHO. $11.1B vs $4.2B.
The majority of WHO controversies are made up, the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues; and whatever you want to say about Taiwan it is a very heated political situation.
That's also the evidence of "alignment with china": because we in the west see a failure to recognise taiwan as siding with china. Which is odd because the USA doesn't officially recognise Taiwan itself. In fact the WHO did almost exactly what a US diplomat would have done- albeit a bit delayed.
Corruption not withstanding (yeah, it's unfortunate but that thing is going to happen, what matters is the response not that it happened) it's better to have a bipartisan global concerted effort to manage these things than the centralised health organisation of a single country. Even though that country is the homestead of the service in question.
> The majority of WHO controversies are made up, the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues; and whatever you want to say about Taiwan it is a very heated political situation.
They make overt political statements all the time. For one: calling Taiwan racist when it took issue with the WHO’s inaction after their attempts to disseminate health information.
Then Tedros calling travel bans “stigmatic.” Precisely when travel bans were needed at the onset of the spreading.
If WHO is supposed to be apolitical, it shouldn’t be parroting Chinese talking points.
The Head of the WHO was attacked by racist trolls who were outwardly Taiwanese; for excluding Taiwan from membership (like _all_ U.N. projects do), And he commented about the abuse.
Taiwan does not exist as an entity to the WHO because it is not recognised by the United Nations.
As much as Taiwan has valuable lessons it's basically akin to asking why the WHO isn't listening to the municipality of sealand.
The journalist asking that question in the first place knew that Taiwan is a political hotbed and was looking for a story, they got one and the WHO is under the bus- at a time when we need a united front in healthcare globally.
If you think that's an acceptable answer, then Tedros could have given it as an answer instead of an irrelevant diatribe about mean people online.
Public health is, like aviation for example, one of those things where recognition of "legitimate" governments has to take a back seat to de facto reality. If the WHO is unable to deal with Taiwan, then we need a different organization that can.
The only way to have real collaboration on a global level is to take no sides of any kind and only agree with absolute consensus. Anything else is picking a side and alienates part of the world.
I'm sorry that the WHO isn't playing into the politics you or I like, in this case it almost certainly would have saved lives, but that's kind of the point. As soon as they "wake up to the reality" of something such as, idk, Crimea being Russian territory? then suddenly they're alienating Ukraine and its allies.
It's stupid, and fickle, but the only winning move is not to play.
They clearly took a side, I don’t know how you can look at it any other way. In your counter factual with Russia, of course they should recognize the de facto situation and send aid if something terrible happens there, regardless of how mad that makes Ukraine.
It doesn’t really matter whether my politics were assuaged, though, because they pissed off the majority of their funding and had it cut off. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Do you think it was "racist trolls" in Taiwan who made him make those factually wrong statements? Or is it more likely that the financial relationship with the WHO maintained by China influenced what they were saying? Which one is more likely?
If you don't mind me asking, could you please provide the source for one WHO controversy that is made up? Preferably one of the large ones, if applicable.
Well, the majority of the issues seem to stem from the 'pro-china' stance which, aside from one persons fumbling reply has no real basis. The journalist was a bit of a poison pill there asking an intentionally loaded question. The WHO doesn't recognise Taiwan because the U.N doesn't. Not because of China.
It also comes from the Absurdly laudatory praise that WHO was giving China in January about how they were setting standards for transparency and how their quick behavior had saved the world.
> China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
So when it's convenient, we look to Trump as an example?
It's terrifying to watch so many people argue back and forth so adamantly defending their sides, meanwhile almost no one even brings up the possibility that they both screwed up.
One dimensional politics will be the end of the American Empire.
It's disingenuous to act like the WHO was the only folks doing this at the time, and it's being used to deflect blame - "blame China!" - from the administration.
That said, the "WHO praised China!" meme is largely a deflection. Trump, talk radio, and Fox have been pushing it heavily in an attempt to blame others for the US's poor response.
"The WHO is just as trustworthy as Trump" doesn't really seem like a big vote of confidence for the organization. This comeback only makes sense if everything is a purely partisan divide and anyone who is against WHO must be pro-trump.
If you want to get into the details. The United Nations does not recognize Taiwan entirely because it is in the interest of China, China's strategic funding of the United Nations, and their institutional power they have as a security council member with Veto power. No other country has an interest in China claiming Taiwan isn't a country. Which it is by all means, they have their own government, land, culture, etc. They are not a part of China, it is just used a source of legitimacy for the commonly threatened and strategic takeover the CCP talks about.
So the UN does not recognize Taiwan because of China.
It is naive to say that China does not influence these international organizations for political gain. In fact anyone who studies international politics academically would acknowledge that every country who participates in these international organization uses them to gain political influence. I would argue that they exist primarily for political influence, instead of their intended goal; I mean the UN did leave a country right when a genocide started so they didn't have to deal pay to deal with it, among countless examples of it being used for international legitimacy at any cost.
> the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues;
The WHO is very much a political entity in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party. There's a difference between refusing to comment on Taiwan and pretending like Taiwan doesn't exist.
Ignoring the political aspect, they've dealt with this crisis terribly, being slow to respond and giving downright false advice like telling people not to wear masks.
Did you watch the video of the WHO representative when asked directly about Taiwan pretending like he didn't hear the question, disconnecting, and then talking about China without so much as even mentioning the word "Taiwan"? https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/124394050651140096...
Perhaps not as a state, but it seems as likely that they would recognize data and observations given to them from Taiwan as they would data given to them from Hong Kong... or from Hubei.
Free speech (well, most freedoms, really) will die the day we decide "saving lives" is worth _any_ cost.
Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?), I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread, lower the suicide rate of those vulnerable to hate speech, etc. And why stop there? Remove 2nd amendment and you can save even more lives! Too much freedom just seems to lead to people dying, because people make bad choices that affect others.
You’re on a slippery slope and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation. The danger of losing civil liberties comes when the exception becomes the rule.
AFAIK, no amendments have been violated since YouTube is a private entity. They can editorialize what they, how they want. It’s is their liberty to make a choice here, the same as your liberty to not support that choice.
> and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation
exceptional situations are ripe for exploitation by corporations and governments and political parties. And indeed we've seen all of these try (and succeed) in taking advantage of the situation...
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill
A reasonable point. But I am worried about the day that those who seek more power are able to convince people that we are in a sustained exceptional situation that is not really all that exceptional. And with private entities doing their bidding to clamp down on dissenting voices, that could become even more possible.
I don't think we are there yet, but we should be wary of that possibility.
That's a slippery slope right there, a very dangerous one. In the US, spaces where one engages in political activities have moved from public (town square in front of City Hall) to private (the mall plus parking lot). That's a problem.
The other thing is monopolies. In the past, when you were on the fringes of the spectrum you'd publish with your fringe publisher and could at least get your message out. Nowadays Youtube suppresses the neonazis. That's nice and good, as long as it's nazis, but what if they don't like what you have to say? Big publishers and government have a symbiotic relationship, and there is always a sprachregelung.
That’s not a slippery slope but your point further on is valid. The privatization of the town square carries the potential to erode our civil liberties as these new public centers aren’t held to the same standards. The question here is then how do we protect that.
Which freedoms do we give up here? Freedom of the individual or freedom of enterprise? Imo if a corporate entity decides to act like a public space, then it should be treated like one and held accountable as such. Otherwise we’ve created a simple way of bypassing some constitutional liberties.
That still however doesn’t answer the question as to where we draw the line for freedom of expression. Nazis took over once in the public sphere and they can do it again. I will argue against moral relativism here and say yes it’s ok to suppress nazis so long as we don’t turn that around and become needlessly oppressive in other ways.
Indeed they are liable... well, to a certain degree:
A prime example here is the DMCA — but there are also other existing laws that place restrictions on content, which Youtube (and other platforms/publishers) must adhere to.
If anything that only proves the GP's point. During the mentioned time period the only solution was to infringe on civil liberties by imposing a strict quarantine, and yet the people of the day still decided that it was better to die free than to live oppressed.
I am noticing, increasingly in the country I live in - the U.S., an extremely concerning attitude towards love for censorship.
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
If we want to convince people, we can't stop at saying "freedom", as if that makes the rest self evident. We have to explain why freedom is important. Why the cost is worth paying.
>Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Also you should be free to sue the content creator, maybe instead of censoring content youtube should have better "know your creator" type legislation?
> I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread
Well, if you read the whole thing, the 1st amendment includes the freedom to peaceably assemble, so at least to that extent it has already been removed and to cheering crowds no less.
I'm responding to this not for you, but for others. You should know that what you've just said indicates a disgusting train of thought not characterised by any good intention.
--
The issue when talking about the long term affects is that, you're right, we don't have enough information. However that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and do nothing.
The whole point of humans recording history (and science is mostly just trying things and writing them down so we can build on this knowledge later) is to see patterns and conclude things.
There's all kinds of misinformation that can spread in the cracks here because only history will tell us the real truth, but drawing on similarly infectious diseases from history will help significantly.
It's not 'ascientific' to draw from the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is ascientific to say: "This disease is completely unknown so we should wait until the human death toll has reached critical mass before making an action which could impact our wealth".
For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.[0]
In case you forgot, economy is the quantity and value of transactions in a market. Less people is lower quantity.
From the admittedly little we know about the disease, it is much more deadly than anything that's currently making the rounds. (If you're going to rebut me please control for number of people infected, because it's a common misconception that "more people die of other things" but that's because "other things" are affecting more people)
> For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.
First of all, even if the true mortality rate of covid-19 were 1-2% (it isn't, it's likely much lower), it wouldn't infect 100% of the population.
You can't just do [total confirmed deaths] / [total confirmed cases] to arrive at a mortality % and then multiply by the total population to get a death count. That's horribly biased and not grounded in reality. The current estimated fatality rate is biased in my opinion as it mainly selects for people already in hospitals. Research is indicating that [total confirmed cases] may be much, MUCH smaller than [total cases] [0]. People are getting it and recovering without every being tested. Some people (a lot of people?) have mild-to-no-symptoms.
Look, it's reasonable to want to prevent excessive loss of life. But it's a double edged sword. Mortality rate for people aged 20-30 is estimated at .2% (though it'll like turn out to be lower for healthy adults). Prolonged stay-at-home orders have driven up suicide rate though (not to mention the devestating damage to people's livlihoods). 2 graduating seniors recently committed suicide at the Air Force Academy presumably related to covid-19 lockdown orders, and with a class of ~800, that's already more deadly than covid-19.
You're right we shouldn't "sit on our hands", but we also shouldn't fall victim to the politician's fallacy [1]
If you want to have an actual conversation, I'm happy to do that.
First of all, everything coming out in the news recently should cure you of the illusion that we have any idea about the number of people infected. Estimates of an undercounting of a factor of ten in the early days in New York. An aircraft carrier with 60% of cases being completely asymptomatic. Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
It's interesting that you use the precautionary principle only towards a virus but not towards a wide scale social experiment on an overwhelming majority of the population.
The elderly certainly contribute to the economy, but if you're pretending that it's anywhere near the impact of something like global unemployment in developed countries hitting 10%, you're being obtuse.
Your description of the economy is rudimentary and shows disregard for things like organizational capital which are vital to an effective economy.
And finally, the corpus of scientific knowledge is one thing -- attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
> attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
Look at what happened to the Chinese stock market once pictures of people literally dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan leaked, and before there was a lockdown.
What's the point of supporting the current economic model if it doesn't support human welfare? What's the point of any of our abstractions if they don't serve human welfare?
I'm totally in agreement with you.
The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.
Don't you think this is because the modern secular attitude has no real foundation to make moral choices and picks "saving lives" almost randomly, just as a plausible highest good? :)
For example, Christianity strives to save souls, not lives. That gives a very different vantage point. From this point it's absolutely clear that the right to speak candidly cannot be abolished on such a ridiculous premise as saving lives.
Nothing of value was lost. It doesn't matter if you hold WHO in poor regard; pay for your own hosting if you want to publish content that YouTube doesn't want to host. I'll never understand the twisted mental gymnastics that lead people to believe they should be entitled to free HD video hosting from a private corporation.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] thread[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
[2] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
That's not to say there isn't outright incorrect fake news, but in hindsight some guidelines will always seem more correct than others.
Fine, things like this "happen". That is, incredibly cowardly and dishonest persons can play roles in otherwise not completely cowardly and dishonest organizations. However, where is the criticism? Does this guy still have a job at the WHO, what would you guess?
People who look the other way with something like this have nothing to tell me, ever, just like someone who murders people doesn't get to tell me to not use swear words.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about outcome and public safety, and wants to cooperation of people who pay attention and are not blackmailable -- I dare say, the kind of people whose support you want, not the "majority", but the ones with principles and determination, who will stick with things as long as the things demand it, not as long as they are cozy -- should get the WHO as far away from this as soon as possible. That shouldn't even need saying, but now that it's been said a lot, failure to even acknowledge the issue simply means some people do not care about outcome, they care about agenda and the prepared networks to push it, and others just blindly fall in line.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
Telling people to not fly across the world is bannable misinormation acording to Wojcicki's definition. Of course, it wouldn't be banned, because the actual rule is a much more subjective "whatever makes YT look bad to advertisers and PR"
http://www.flanderstoday.eu/politics/white-house-praises-bru...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ttpHvK6yw
Exactly, which is why declaring that any one entity is the unquestionable source of truth not only shreds the concept of freedom of expression but may be actively harmful.
The recent change to CDC guidelines for the general public to wear face masks is an example of reaction to new research.
Was it actually in response to new research? (Not a rhetorical question). My impression is that they had to change their policy because their "noble lie" of "masks don't work, also we have to save them for healthcare workers" was increasingly recognized as utter nonsense. Which might not have happened if anyone who advocated masks had been summarily deplatformed.
"In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission." [1]
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...
However, I enjoy dabbling in the crazy side of youtube now and again, and there is absolutely content out there that will harm people, and there seems to be an audience for it. It seems like one of those lamentable 'this is why we can't have nice things' stories.
The line youtube is drawing seems like the wrong line. Youtube has a storied history of making dumb choices and an inscrutable system to appeal their arbitrary decisions. I'm pretty confident they will continue to mess it up.
I would like to be a free speech maximalist; it's easier since there are no tough choices to make. Unfortunately there has always been speech that is not protected (incitement/yelling fire) and we are left with the difficult task of delineating which side of the line some speech falls.
In the end that means we must always be ready to fight to keep our freedom of speech.
My guess would be the intent and general enforcement of the rule will not be designed to preclude criticism of the form "The WHO is politically hobbled by needing Chinese cooperation, leading to awkward situations like the Taiwan exchange" or "The WHO was slow to adjust mask guidance in response to increasing on-the-ground evidence of asymptomatic transmission" or "The one study about surface life of Coronavirus is based on very limited research design parameters and the in-air survival number seems totally indefensible", or even an Ioaniddis-style "We're vastly overestimating the threat here" objection motivated by "good science" concerns.
I wouldn't preclude, like every stupid automated Google system, that legitimate content would be removed. But I think the intent is not to remove scientifically-oriented criticism or guidance or expert debate or context. I think it's meant to remove cranks.
I understand that denotation is important, just as it is when parsing say privacy policies or AUP documents or whatever -- and if people have criticism then YouTube should refine the language here. But we shouldn't blind ourselves to the fact that reality is primarily connotative.
I have zero objection to major providers collectively deciding they don't want to do business with Del Bigtree. Others might. Regardless of where you end up on that, I think we can agree that the debate here is about Del Bigtree, not about epidemiologists disagreeing.
Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
> Who: Fact. There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
> Potential Youtuber early January: There is news going around of a new SARS-like pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan on Chinese Social Media. SARS was very contagious, so if this is SARS we should be very worried of a pandemic, especially with our interconnected world.
> WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
> WHO: Not a pandemic
> WHO: China is transparent and setting new standard for outbreak control
> WHO: Advice members not to ban travel from China
Who ??? who in its right mind is watching youtube for an "authoritative" source ??
I can see why they want to remove bad content, but a single authority is very bad.
-----------------------------------------
"WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks."
https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
Upvoted!
I wish yours was the top rated comment and more thought like you.
Instaed we have views like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956485
Very concerning.
As I wrote here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956536
To a regular random person, Youtube is synonymous with video content.
Youtube is the news.
Perhaps one solution for Youtube would be to demonetize and label such content as "unsafe" or don't sue me bro mode".
Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content. Anyone who watches the content with "unsafe" mode on, sees the content.
Give customers the choice to choose and make up their own minds.
Removing content with the authority of being the primary video content platform? They don't get away so easy.
With power comes responsibility.
They have to handle this another way and this, is not it.
I've been brought up with the saying, 'The sole purpose of education is to help a person think sensibly in difficult times'.
However, I've not come across any _major_ shift in education systems worldwide. Yes, there are heartening stories about a few charter school systems [1] and a few countries making strides (like Finland). But these are one off success stories.
I do hope that technology companies make a step towards solving this. But our startup culture, unfortunately, also is laced with trying to 'show growth' all the time and that leads us to think short term too. Perhaps something like the LTSE may help private players take long term bets (fingers crossed).
Also, even the history of education is ripe with missteps [2], mind you :) not unlike the decision by YouTube here (as someone said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions)
Don't get me wrong, I want to be as optimistic as you are :)
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/KIPP (I think I came across this while reading Outliers by Gladwell)
[2] http://www.csun.edu/~vcmth00m/AHistory.html
I think the issue is people latch on to these things due to feeling or being powerless. They reach for solutions rather than being stuck in an endless waiting or trusting period, hoping for remote experts to do something. Education can help that but not always, and especially if the experts are adversarial to groups of people.
So no, education isn't a silver bullet. It's just a nice sounding word for "things I've been told by other people". It doesn't really help me differentiate between what's the truth and what isn't. So once there are two ideas, like "Napoleon was a short person" and "Napoleon was of average height" I'm lost. Either could be true and I don't have the free time to get to the bottom of every single thing I once thought I knew.
I honestly don't know where to stand when it comes to issues related to censoring content like this. On one hand, you can limit information we know is false, but restricting spread of information is censoring people, something that is pretty widely regarded as oppressive.
I guess all I can do is wait and see what comes of this.
Yes. But liars, cranks and con artists should be oppressed.
It's extremely upsetting to see decisions like the parent's.
What's more concerning is the tone is absolute - the intention is "I know exactly what is right and the world shall follow my lead".
That guy Gandhi causing all kinds of trouble! Ban his content!
That guy MLK causing all kinds of trouble! Ban his content!
That guy Edward Jenner with his braindead idea of vaccination proposing we infect ourseves to get better! Ban! Ban! Ban!
History has many examples what that thinking leads to.
Whether that voice has value is an individual decision you and I get to make, on our own.
What data do you have, that proves diferuloylmethane is ineffective in treating COVID-19?
Are you 100% sure that diferuloylmethane cannot be an ingredient in a battery of medicine to help recover from COVID-19?
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
Not a central authority that removes that choice from both of us leaving us with no choice.
They're scammers. They're perpetrating a scam. "Giving them a voice" means allowing them to scam others out of money. Why should YouTube be complicit in running a scam?
Perhaps you left out the videos that warn others of said scam.
Don't treat adults like chlidren or, pretty soon, you will have a world full of only children with no adult supervision!
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
'a new clinical trial to investigate vitamin C infusion for the treatment of severe 2019-nCoV infected pneumonia has begun in Wuhan, China'
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
I don't, for a second, believe Youtube has figured that one out.
Now whether you have decided to reject all competing hypothesis to something you have already decided to be the truth so you can move on with your life and be productive in areas you find valuable - that's your call but if I see you foisting your opinions on what kind of content I get to see, that's you infringing on my freedom and we have a problem.
Learning when to step away from such fruitless pseudo-debates before wasting hours on the online equivalent of beating one's head against a brick wall is a valuable survival skill here. Sometimes it's best to simply state your opinion and move on.
I take you up on that offer.
Let us, for a moment, discuss this.
To disconnect us both from the exact matter at hand, because we are likely at this point pretty attached strongly to our biases to it, let us step aside, choose a completely different topic and hypothesize that our debate is on "should the government be allowed to track crimminals moving about in society".
I propose, that yes, murderers should be tracked at all times, as they move about in society, with tracking devices embedded onto their ankles.
You propose, no, no one, including murderers should be tracked at any time.
I then propose that murderers should be given a choice between been tracked, or have their pictures and descriptions published on a public website where anyone interested in staying away from murderers can check in.
What's your next move?
When did YouTube become a government? The context is different. No matter what YouTube does, I can still host my own video.
Youtube has become so large precisely because this is a very difficult problem to solve.
Putting up content on a webserver is not a Youtube competitor.
Is anyone preventing me, by force or law, from hosting video on my own website? If not, you cannot compare government mandated anything with market forces. All you're saying here is that youtube is a really good product. That doesn't make obvious competitors "not count".
The problem here, and it may just be an issue with the internet as a medium, or certain tendencies within technically-minded individuals, seems to be an overriding mistrust of nuance and complexity that leads to polarized, intransigent opinions.
Because really I can see both sides of that argument. On the one hand, society has an obligation to protect itself from bad actors, and part of that necessitates an ability by governments to surveil their citizens to a degree. On the other hand, people have a right to privacy and personal liberty, and governments' power shouldn't be absolute. But no one wants to hear that the only options which balance these concerns are the messy and imperfect ones where we try to do the best we can with imperfect information, and at times conflicting motives and agendas, and laws that require interpretation based on context, rather than being executed like code. The world isn't black and white, it's grey on grey on grey.
I can also see the other side of my own position in this thread - Youtube and other platforms could certainly use their outsized cultural influence and right to moderate content to suppress legitimate information or political activism. I just work from the apparently controversial premise that falsehoods do exist and that it does society no good to allow them to spread, even in the name of "free speech," and disagree with the premise that just because there is no universally acceptable, mathematically provable, perfectly objective answer to "who decides who the liars, cranks and con artists are" which doesn't carry a risk of abuse or hypocrisy, doesn't mean the only acceptable answer is that "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
I also appreciate that you empathized with my POV.
To clarify, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Thank you for this conversation, I for one learned a lot.
This is such a silly argument. If I tell you two pieces of information: "Vaccines cause autism" and "Vaccines do not cause autism", how do you practice believing? By putting children at risk of preventable diseases?
Same goes for hydroxychloroquine or turmeric for covid-19. We have (at this point) decent scientific evidence for these not helping prevent the disease, and yet people will take them and either hurt themselves (chloroquine) or be willing to engage in more risky behavior otherwise.
The easiest way I have of putting this is that there is no difference between having no information, and having all possible information. If I present you with all possible strings of length < 100 containing "covid-19", you'll have lots of reasonable sounding statements about preventing the spread of covid-19. But without authoritative and reliable sources for why some of those strings are valuable to obey and others aren't, you're in no better place than if you had no information at all.
Nuance in these discussions basically flies out the window entirely, and frankly, its stupid.
Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility? Is it just because they happen to agree with your worldview? And what if they don't -- what if they start banning videos that suggest Taiwan is a country? Would your opinion change?
IANAL but unless someone is knowingly spreading false information as true (i.e. fraud), the answer is no. They probably don't even carry the burden of having to reasonably vet information first.
> Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility?
Because it is your privilege to use YouTube, not your right.
> once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas
Yeah I'm not saying only YouTube should be regulated, I'm saying sites like YouTube and Facebook should be properly classified as publishers and held to standards as such.
> They don't control the flow of information.
This is a false statement. The vast majority of Americans get their news from Facebook, and yes, YouTube. They do control the flow of information. If it's not on Facebook or YouTube, it might as well not exist for over 50% of Americans. That's huge power that these corps wield with no oversight, dontcha think?
> get off your high horse
Uh there's no horse anywhere around here sir.
Remember a few years ago ISPs wanting to remove net neutrality and wanting to potentially charge for access to websites on "their platform"? Suddenly they're big enough to be a "public utility" and "invasion of free speech".
You can't have it both ways.
Anyone can start a YouTube clone, and if enough people disagree with YouTube's policies, they'll come use the clone. That's the free market of ideas.
See: Reddit/Voat
I think it's wrong to be okay with YouTube suppressing information and misinforming people about global pandemics just because they own the corporation and infrastructure YouTube is built on. YouTube is abusing their monopoly to hurt people.
People don't like government censorship and misinformation not because it's inherently wrong for government to do these things, but because censorship and misinformation create harm. When you consider YouTube's scale and lack of real competitor - it's obvious that their censorship and misinformation is also harmful and therefore problematic. Even if it's legal, it's certainly not moral.
Yes, WHO decides.
The issue to me is that Youtube is pretty much THE video sharing platform. Yes there are others but as a content creator you will reach the most people on Youtube.
Would criticism of WHO be removed. Would information about China's handling of the outbreak be banned if it is contradictory to the WHO point of view. These videos are already demonetized.
I also am frustrated when I see videos claiming garlic will prevent coronavirus. Or that 5g is the cause. I would like to think people will recognize this is not accurate but people continue to amaze me.
In some ways though if I believe in freedom of speech though I suppose I should be prepared to accept all speech.
What’s legal and what’s moral aren’t the same thing.
I think that YouTube is in absolute legal right to ban whatever content they want, and I wouldn't want that legal right taken away from them (or any other content platform).
However, I absolutely disagree with this specific ban on their end, and it deserves to be criticized. But, again, they shouldn't be legally restricted from making this decision, no matter how poor I believe the decision is.
i agree. but at the same time, why do people not get up in as much arms about manipulation? of course, censorship is a form of manipulation, but the u.s. media, advertisements, corporate culture, politics, etc. is one big cesspool of manipulation, both direct and indirect. it's just as controlling if not more controlling than censorship and, of more sinister nature, hides behind supposed ideals of freedom.
I live with a number of ladies who are very familiar with plant medicine. When this whole thing started we all started taking lots of dandelion root / hawthorne tincture. Dandelion is well known to both help your lymphatic system and support respiratory issues.
Hawthorne is an amazing heart / circulatory support. There is literary NO RISK for us in applying these home grown medicines.
We've all been infected since then, and each of us had pretty mild symptoms, that lasted for relatively short amounts of time. About two to three weeks. Many many people see 30-40 days of symptoms.
It cost us nothing. The medicine was prepared at home. Who knows what using these plant medicines across a population would result in statistically? Maybe it would reduce hospitalizations by 1%, or maybe it would reduce them by 75%, we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
YouTube is a fantastic avenue for period to share their own experiences. Yes, you must take what people say with a grain of salt. You can't just believe anything you see. I feel sad that they are censoring people from sharing their own experiences in this time where are governments and medical systems are largely failing us.
Upvoted.
I don't feel sad, I feel outraged!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956536
To a regular random person, Youtube is synonymous with video content.
Youtube is the news.
Perhaps one solution for Youtube would be to demonetize and label such content as "unsafe" or don't sue me bro mode".
Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content. Anyone who watches the content with "unsafe" mode on, sees the content.
Give customers the choice to choose and make up their own minds.
Removing content with the authority of being the primary video content platform? They don't get away so easy.
With power comes responsibility.
They have to handle this another way and this, is not it.
This is bogus.
Isn't that a big point of this? Who does know? The answer is nobody, but a lot of these "alternative" medicine pushers aren't asking questions but instead presenting their "alternatives" as absolute cures
A lot of deaths:
https://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/07/02/dietary-supple...
> The inspection reports portray an industry struggling to meet basic manufacturing standards, from verifying the identity of the ingredients that go into its products to inspecting finished batches of supplements.
> Some firms don't even have recipes, known as master manufacturing records, for their products.
> Others make their supplements in unsanitary factories. New Jersey-based Quality Formulation Laboratories produced protein powder mixes and other supplements in a facility infested with rodents, rodent feces and urine, according to government records. FDA inspectors found a rodent apparently cut in half next to a scoop, according to a 2008 inspection report.
> we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
Lots of people are making lots of money selling this stuff. It's a huge industry.
Lots of people have few to no symptoms. Your anecdote means nothing, and is a prime example of why we don't use anecdote instead of actual data - if people are put off engaging with actual medical services and instead are bamboozled by this sort of woo, bad things can and will happen.
WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Yes, there's a lot of information out there about SARS-COV2 and COVID-19 infections out there that are downright misleading at best and life threatening at worst.
No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
We already have examples of central authorities pushing "information" that they agree with and supressing information they believe is "incorrect" - as a freeish country, we should absolutely not encourage this behavior.
The argument can be made that Youtube is a private company and free to do as they please.
I personally dont agree with that argument - to a regular random person, Youtube is synonymous with video content.
Youtube is the news.
Perhaps one solution for Youtube would be to demonetize and label such content as "unsafe" aka "don't sue me bro mode".
Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content.
Anyone who watches the content with "unsafe" mode on, sees the content.
Give customers the choice to choose and make up their own minds.
Removing content with the authority of being the primary video content platform? They don't get away so easy.
With power comes responsibility.
They have to handle this another way and this, is not it.
Agree, youtube has to be very careful there.
> WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Hell no! The fact you even consider them in the same sentence is astounding. No point in continue reading .
NPC programming successful. Unauthorized content tail-dropped.
> Hell no! The fact you even consider them in the same sentence is astounding
Which one do you disagree with:
1. WHO is a political organization with medical leaning
2. Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Ah, I see your point.
Equating WHO to Fox News directly as organizations does not make any sense. They are not even on the same domain.
I assumed, the readership would not conflate them on all possible attributes.
The reason for my statement was specifically to point out the flaw that WHO is guided solely by medical reasoning.
Just like it would be a flaw to assume Fox News is the unbiased broker of news events.
Is the connection that cambalache thought I was making that WHO and Fox News are both brokers of medical news and information?
If so, I'm at a loss on how to better phrase "WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics." to convey my intent and would really appreciate better phrasing.
Huh? If I ran a hosting platform and people were putting absolute BS on there, I'd remove it too. People who run hosting platforms want to have integrity.
I think it depends how youtube draws the line. If they’re removing stuff like “use colloidial silver” or “no need to wash your hands” then sure. But the WHO is not gospel.
This ignores the possibility that people may be asymptomatic and contagious. Some government authorities have called for mask wearing outside. They are contradicting the WHO.
Should Youtube remove these views? That's why I said it all depends just how strictly they're going on WHO guidelines. If they're only removing obvious nonsense, fine. But the WHO should not be the only authority, especially if different health authorities may disagree.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20
Their phrasing is correct and so is their methodology.
The default assumption should be, that a virus affecting hundreds of people already, could be contagious. Suggesting otherwise, with no reasonable evidence to support such, is deliberately obfuscating if not deliberately misleading. There was absolutely no reason to make such a statement other than to parrot without question what was being reported by the PRC.
Considering Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus received support from the PRC in his candidacy for leadership of the WHO, and the significant ties between his home country of Ethiopia and the PRC, I’m skeptical that it was just absolute ignorance without any political influence or bias that prompted such a statement.
Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy. It's like a newspaper reporting on the words/claims of a celeb or politician, and folk claiming that those words/claims were actually the newspaper's claims.
WHO is in fact making that claim at the behest of China. The are not reporting like a newspaper as you claim, because a newspaper would have a duty to investigate the claims, the WHO just took China at their word and republished it.
WHO is the UNs international health organization and they are supposed to be independent. The onus is on the WHO to publish this alleged “preliminary investigation” referenced by the Chinese Authorities (hint: it does not exist). Once they admit there was no actual written report of the “preliminary investigation” or data provided by the Chinese Authorities, then they can identify the actual Chinese Authority who made the representations to the WHO, and we can continue to peal back the layers.
EDIT: Here's the link to their news conference on Jan 14th (same day as the "China has not reported human-to-human transmission" tweet): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia-wh...
Relevant bits:
>“From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO’s emerging diseases unit. The WHO is however preparing for the possibility that there could be a wider outbreak, she told a Geneva news briefing. “It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture.”
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
(this is CCP propaganda and they had zero access at the time, and it was after Taiwan told them about human-to-human transmission)
> The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it
I don't think anyone on HN needs to be told that "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" is not the same as "there are evidence that human to human transmission is not possible" which is how everyone is trying their hardest to interpret it as.
> even after Taiwan told them about it
Do you have a primary source about it? Every time someone references it, it's an editorial obfuscating the embarrassing primary source of Taiwan's "warning" email from December 31 which reads:
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment.
I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.
Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
where they're asking for the WHO's help clarifying something they heard over the news.
Note that at the time WHO had zero access to China, because of the cover-up ongoing.
Some advertisers do, and some do not. Don't lump them all into a single bucket. YouTube is creating an environment that guarantees a future without Art Bells or Howard Sterns.
The concern you raise could easily be remedied with a single checkbox on the advertiser portal labeled "Display this Campaign on Fringe Content". The fact that with the enormous technical capability of Google, they choose not to do this and instead decide that they know the advertisers' preferences better than the advertisers themselves demonstrates clearly that this is about power and control, not ad revenue or serving the customer.
All TV news shows are that. For example, consider the cliche about the news business "if it bleeds, it leads" which is far older than Fox News.
We're all very good at tricking ourselves into believing that we are objective. It's called confirmation bias.
Although some of us, like me, actually are being objective.
The WHO was wrong on many occasions during this pandemic. They said it couldn't or was hard to transmit between people - meanwhile, it was spreading everywhere and Taiwan tried to warn them.
They said we should not shut down international travel from China. Wrong again. Taiwan and a few others did and it helped out immensely.
Appealing to human authority as the source of truth is dangerous. For humans, truth only has a chance to come out when vigorous debate is allowed.
EDIT: adding references as requested.
WHO ignored Taiwan:
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/ahel/202003240229.aspx
On Jan 12:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
None of us should be surprised that a large scale multi-national organization like the WHO can only speak in bureaucratic half truths. Their primary purpose for the CCP is to be a tool for moral laundering.
Do you have references for this, or the scientific data that Taiwan used to make that assertion at the time the WHO made that statement? It would better help your argument, and make it more powerful, since the only quoted text is the WHO stating "According to the preliminary epidemiological investigation..", which might very much be factually true.
The US government? Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Or should they let 4chan tell your grandma to drink bleach to fight the Rona?
Edit: note that in both replies to my comment, none of the specific facts I mentioned were responded to. The response of the countries is being blamed, the date I mentioned is being ignored; but I am comparing the information coming publicly out of the WHO in January to the information coming out of 4chan in January.
In hindsight, if you compared the information from both at that time, you would have had a better idea of the real situation if you believed 4chan over the WHO.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
Nations who handled the crisis the best, imposed travel bans early on and were criticised by the WHO.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china...
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
The key sentence that Tedros is being criticised for is:
“First, there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement.”
However, in the same speech:
“ we must all act together now to limit further spread. The vast majority of cases outside China have a travel history to Wuhan, or contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan”
and
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it”
This leads me to believe that perhaps he was trying to have it both ways:
- flag the need for action
- keep a major player from “losing face”.
I don’t envy his job, or in fact any of the UN organisations. You’re at the mercy of your big funders; you’re trying to influence hundreds of countries who’d rather focus on their own internal politics; you have no actual power. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. How on earth do you move the needle at all in that kind of environment?
The WHO chose to recommend against travel bans. This was the information they shared with the world. If countries chose to enact such bans anyway - good for them: they knew better than to believe the WHO. The WHO, compared with 4chan, was in January the inferior source of public information about the virus.
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
This was after Taiwan's warnings in December which they ignored.
Forget the WHO for a second (which remember was politically cast adrift by the US when they refused to participate in it.)
The news coming out of Europe/Iran/China had lay people in the US concerned by late February -- yet the American Government did everything it could to belittle or otherwise diminish the threat. Now it wants to turn around and suggest that it's actions are to be blamed by the WHO? What happened to self-responsibility?
Give me a break.
Before the news coming out of Europe and Iran things were breaking in China. The 4chan guys were all over it way back in Jan. Remember the Chinese Dr whistle blower who got punished for letting the truth? He was dead by Jan 20-22.. at this point the WHO was downplaying, later praising China and telling everyone not to wear a mask.
The WHO response caused the outbreak to get out of control in Europe and elsewhere long before it hit North America.
If they’d switched tune to ‘close your borders’ and ‘this is a global pandemic’ earlier you would have seen some different responses.
I think the thread under this is kinda missing a deeper point. 4chan was taking this virus seriously back in January. I also wouldn't be surprised that 4chan was the original origin of "it's just a flu, bro" meme, which is to say, plenty of 4chan and related communities was also mocking the idea of taking it seriously.
The point of free speech isn't that the speech will freely contain only the truth. The point of free speech is we need that debate to find the truth. Declaring the WHO as the one and only source of truth is a bad idea, even before we observe the fact that it has manifestly made numerous incorrect statements within the past couple of months, and that reasonably people can question some of the things it is saying even now.
There isn't an option where we get only pure, unfiltered truth. Sorry. That's life. But there is an option where we pretty much guarantee ourselves that we will not get the truth, and that option is declaring a single trusted source of truth who will somehow transcend the fact they are made up of falliable and potentially untrustworthy human beings to deliver you that truth.
They take it seriously in the same way that a rotating drum full of ping-pong balls happens to contain the winning lottery numbers every week. Glomming on to novelty is is the defining trait of quasi-anonymous social networks.
How many? I don't think it's very many.
I can't see and end game that's not terrible.
https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance
How many? Give numbers. I don't think very many people followed that advice and got killed by it, and I cannot find any data that suggests otherwise.
As another commenter noted, wearing a mask contradicts WHO advice.
Maybe they should just have a disclaimer on every video: "Watch this with a critical eye and a grain of salt. Perhaps a truckload of salt. Use your brain."
Why are we expecting a private company to provide "a source of truth"? What happened to the whole idea of the Internet being about the free flow of information?
>Or should they let 4chan tell your grandma to drink bleach to fight the Rona?
Why don't we have parental controls for our parents yet? Why are we applying blanket bans on parts of the Internet when it's clearly a specific subset of the population that needs hand-holding to not injure themselves or others?
I am noticing, increasingly in the country I live in - the U.S., an extremely concerning attitude towards love for censorship.
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961402
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961382
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961354
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961374
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956622
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956559
Your freedom ends where the freedom of the next person begins. So not only is it "not free", it's also "not boundless". You don't get to kill people intentionally. You also don't get away with it if you do it by gross negligence (such as drunk driving).
Inciting violence is an offence in most parts of the world. Not because governments love to be oppressive but because society figured out that it's the point where you cross how much personal freedom you can have without infringing on everyone else's.
Where is this point for COVID-19 misinformation? It's a difficult question, and it's unclear what is appropriate and what is overbearing. What is clear is that harm is actively being cause by people propagating this nonsense. Whether an ideal rational adult could cut through it is entirely immaterial to this question, it doesn't stop the harm.
You're delusional, and you're infected with propaganda already. Full stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I live by that philosophy!
As I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956768
"... if I see you foisting your opinions on what kind of content I get to see, that's you infringing on my freedom and we have a problem."
Your quote is more concise and to the point :D
"Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-convi...
The example you gave is only “obvious” because the majority think so. However we’re increasingly living in an environment where people are “fleeing the centre”. People have abandoned authority, and are increasingly abandoning science, even to the point of doubting or reinterpreting their own lived experience.
The key to “common sense” is “common”. When very little is held in common, where do you find common sense?
This is precisely why, in my view, the single greatest danger to mankind is - a “meta-danger” perhaps - is the explosion in deliberate attempts (irrespective of motive - lulz, commercial profit, political influence or psychological warfare) to misinform, sow discord, and erode trust. It is an absolute scourge and is already starting to bite us in the collective arse, by limiting our ability to act collectively for objective common good.
I have no idea at all how we fight this threat.
EDITED: SP. collect > collectively
Apparently I have hit the nerves of lots of people from my parent post and since I am and like to be publicly accessible, people who disliked my thoughts have really let me know what they think of me and where I belong :D
I am noticing, increasingly in the country I live in - the U.S., an extremely concerning attitude towards love for censorship.
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
Please don't post any more duplicate content to HN. It adds noise.
Even that is an authoritarian nightmare. We already have laws that restrict minors from participating in certain activities.
You're saying you want YouTube to be the parental guardian of children based on their current whims. They should bar content from minors where the law requires it. Let the legislatures battle the people over whether the law-of-land should include barring minors from information that "contradicts" the WHO.
How easily we drop our freedom and liberty for a tiny bit of supposed safety. Unbelievable.
Now that YouTube is used by people of all ages, Google has to make social and political decisions about what kind of content is appropriate for different ages.
On the broader topic, breaking up Youtube, Facebook and the like is entirely desirable but would probably be pointless unfortunately. Increases in copyright zeal make a new competitor to YouTube impossible and the network effect guarantees both theirs and Faceebook's dominance. In light of this, I imagine the only solution is to legislatively guarantee an uncensored platform on essentially the same logic that requires net-neutrality.
But I point out that "uncensored" is entirely ambiguous. For better or worse, the vast mass of people want and expect it with the percentage very dependent on the particular item. From archaic restrictions on "dirty" words over radio waves through to displays of sex to recruiting terrorists to national secrets to doxing individuals to child pornography.
For right or wrong, somewhere, the public, legislators and each individual decides to draw a line. In addition, for short periods of crisis or certain locations or certain influencers, the line can move. The often misused example of yelling fire in a theater comes to mind but a national leader harmfully using false announcements to raise the value of stock he owns would be an example. More relevant would be the South African leader who zealously told his people AIDS can only come from drug abuse.
On the YouTube issue, for right or wrong, they drew the line in a place some would not. I would guess because they view such messaging as unusually fatal in the short term and they don't want to be a part of it. And that they could not find any simple judgement criterion that would do what they want without doing too much and yet be palatable world wide. If we legally require them to carry every upload regardless of content then it will lift all their burdens. But it will certainly create very real problems for others.
My point is that the issue is far more complex than bumper sticker sized answers.
This line is not particularly fuzzy, and it makes some forms of censorship against speech that clearly doesn't cause direct quantifiable damage stand out as something entirely different than the other exceptions.
Some examples: hate speech does not cause damage that could be proved and quantified in a court of law. "Bad words" do not cause damage. Conspiracy theories do not directly cause damage (unless a court decided reasonable people would do things that caused damage based on the information, so there could be exceptions here).
Everything is indeed complex. But some ways of thinking about a problem can make the complexity more manageable.
A Youtuber I follow recently made a really good point: Youtube has been promoting official channels of traditional media, it's extremely rare for a new Youtuber to become a big name, and most novel video content/memes now comes from TikTok. We're likely seeing Youtube fall out of relevance right now, with the younger generation going to TikTok instead.
The YouTube statement was not, really, about the WHO. It was an interview. Wojcicki was pointing out that they'll be removing "medically unsubstantiated" content like 5G conspiracy theories, and as an example said that anything that clearly contradicts the WHO would likely not qualify.
The decision to put "WHO" up there in the lede seems to be click baiting on the part of the BBC. Frustratingly I can't find a link to a transcript of the original interview, or even an indication from the article about who it was with.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260
> Fact check your work. Use reputable sources from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and National Health Service to inform your content. For official resources relevant to your country/region, check here.
WHO is just another example.
As such, they are subject to freedom of speech rules, and likely will come under increasing scrutiny as they very well should.
Its about time, too.
I think it's easy to think of censorship as the answer, and it's easy to think that in this extreme circumstance that it's the answer. Maybe it is a slippery slope.
It is a problem though. People aren't doing a very good job of handling it on their own, either. So what's the answer? Genuinely curious about this.
There is truth and then there is information. I think that people can know only information — projections of truth we think to be truthful. Information must be stored as memory and thereby is rendered organic and messy.
I argue that information is socially constructed. Given the overwhelming complexity of the world, individuals evaluate the trustworthiness of information by how much they trust its transmitter and how people in their network — who collectively form their realities — also receive that information. There is scarcely enough time or resources for individuals to independently evaluate information (in a non-social way for truthiness). Observe for ourselves: how much do we accept as information just because someone we and our friends/family/colleagues trust says it?
In short, (I think that) we believe what others believe. The cost of evaluating information is too high, and so too is the social cost of believing something that is contrary to the beliefs of those others who constitute our immediate realities (the ones we directly experience day to day).
The answer in a democratic society that aims to have a free press? I think that at an abstract level the answer will have something to do with shortening the diameter of our society-level social network and more densely connecting distant subgraphs — such that different social realities can be bridged and the Overton window can be narrowed around the mean.
One merge-tribes implementation: Institutions that socialise people at a national or state-level and cross social classes, like a year of mandatory national civil service around the country. As we go through life, we progress through a series of institutions that socialise us at increasingly wider levels: family, grade school (hyperlocal), maybe religious group, middle school (local), high school (local), then university for some (international or national but upper middle-class if prestigious; otherwise regional). The EU’s Erasmus Programme brings EU students to study in other EU countries: individual networks that otherwise would never connect, get connected — and at a collective level the Programme contributes toward a pan-European identity. But in the US and the EU there are lack of institutions that socialise the masses both at a national/union level and across class. I expect that people will balk at the idea of a compulsory program in a “free” society, but I think that it is more productive for people to think about what a healthy society should ask of each members so that it can sustain a healthy abundance of freedom.
Another idea: Facebook and other online social networks creating intimate channels — not mass channels that inevitably devolve into shouting and chanting — that foster more cross-societal interaction and awareness. Though I think this is a lot weaker than an “IRL” solution.
I find our modern epistemic crisis very interesting and welcome emails to discuss.
As a country that restricts public behaviors when they conflict with public welfare, it is plausible to expect that YouTube would restrict contradictory information about Covid at this time. There are millions of views on content suggesting that Covid isn't real, for example, and those will — under this plausibly correct approach — end up terminated and removed.
What public good do you suggest outweighs the public harm done by allowing (for example) "Covid isn't real" content to remain visible online?
You haven't described any public good that lends weight to your argument, and without that, your argument won't sell to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Freedom is not always a good thing, and we absolutely have laws restricting it for valid and serious reasons. If you wish others to consider that YouTube should exercise less restriction of freedom in this area, you need to be much more specific about why — to you, personally! — you think that good will come of them backing off.
The public good arising from free speech is truth.
That was not the question. The question was, are people losing their lives worth having no censorship of a specific topic.
It is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater and that is permitted under our country’s highest laws.
The case you’re making is that corporations, who do not have the power of military force over their citizens, should be held to the same standard of law as the governments that do.
As those governments legally have the right to prioritize the greater public gonod over individual rights, your logic implies that corporations, too, should be expected to prioritize the greater public good over individual rights.
This seems in direct contradiction to your point that speech should not be restricted, and so I cannot accept your reasoning as presented.
I think the root of my disagreement is with your phrase “self-serving speech”: the nation’s free speech restrictions must serve the nation’s citizens as a whole, in order to be legal. They must prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few, and do so only in circumstances where the harm is great if left unrestricted. The nation did not put into place such protections at the corporate level, resulting in YouTube, a platform with a population greater than that of our nation, having no legal requirement to prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few.
If your position is that YouTube should be bound to the same onus of responsibility as our nation, then YouTube should be taking much more aggressive action to censor content than it has done to date. It should be restricting individual speech where the welfare of the world’s citizens is at risk of significant harm, exactly as our nation’s laws are.
It seems like your true argument is not with YouTube, but is in fact with the theory that the welfare of the entire population is sufficient cause to restrict individual freedoms; and that this view applies both to YouTube’s policies, and to United States constitutional law. It’s your right to hold that view and express it in general, but I cannot agree, as I consider its outcomes both unjust to the greater good and unsupported by law.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
> WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Yes, they have opinions. That doesn't make them as corrupt as Fox News.
Let's not forget WHO opposed travel bans on numerous occasions, said face masks were not effective, and repeated CCP propaganda verbatim while seeking to punish China's enemies (and hanging up on reporters when questioned about it).
Then the Director-General implied, without a shred of evidence, that he was the victim of racist smears from Taiwan's government after he sought to put them in direct danger by denying them access to critical data.
The WHO is worse than Fox News and it's not even in the same ballpark.
Can anyone elaborate why exactly allowing demonstrably harmful and malicious lies during a major health emergency is a good thing on its own merits?
"Contradicting WHO" is not the same as "demonstrably harmful and malicious lies"
I have read about some videos where they talk about using code words to circumvent being flagged. How much of this is human moderated?
For reference, Taiwan's handling of the pandemic has been nothing short of amazing. Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/taiwan/
---
[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/covid19...
Granted.
> and some of its recommendations, such as being against international travel bans, may be influenced by politics over public health.
This is the part that's not proven.
> American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
> When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
> The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
Importantly, however:
> In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Tsai_call
Which is perfectly reasonable if you understand that these questions are looked at through the lens of international diplomacy and these people don't just wing geopolitical questions because every single answer can cause an international shitstorm (not just in regards to China, but every territorial conflict really). This may look awkward to the ordinary viewer but it's not really.
The WHO has a fairly strong interest in staying out of politics and being a health organisation, so whatever diplomatic position they take is mostly just going to be whatever the status quo is. If you think the non-recognition of Taiwan is unethical then you should take that up with your respective government, a guy speaking for the WHO isn't really in any position to make incindiary political commentary.
But it does support the statement that "The WHO is a political organization with medical leanings".
Personally I think that statement puts it a bit too strongly. It would be like saying "PyCon is a feminist organization with technical leanings."
Or even any cases where they were wilfully blind?
Sure, they can make a bold impassioned speech about how science is far beyond petty concerns like national sovereignty and so on, but this isn't a movie where a great speech suddenly brings everyone to their senses. In reality the WHO works through public health departments in nearly 200 countries and also gets its funding from governments, so if they spit int he face of sovereignty, they'll cease to exist in any meaningful way and aggregate health outcomes will definitely be worse.
I didn't say organisations can or should ignore politics - of course, politics affect every organisation, especially those that work across borders.
My entire comment was about the childish behaviour of the WHO represenatative when asked about Taiwan[0] - he was literally one step away from putting his fingers in his ears and shouting "na na na na na!".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCFPFWsIPmM
"Taiwan" isn't a country. It's an island controlled by the Republic of China alongside its other holdings. The ROC is a state that has existed since 1912 with continual international diplomatic recognition since then. Other countries switching diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC didn't magically make the ROC vanish.
I really dislike the fact that the media and government in the US refers to the ROC as "Taiwan". It muddies the conversation and I constantly have to explain to people that there are two governments/countries over there, one from 1912 and one from 1949.
The ROC has existed since 1912 and has only occupied Taiwan since 1945 (some claim since 1952 and the Treaty of San Francisco). The ROC has been an independent state with continuous diplomatic recognition since 1912. It does not need to declare independence. I just take issue with people calling the ROC "Taiwan" as it gives ammo to PRC shills who intentionally muddy the conversation with their claim that "Taiwan is a part of China" where the term "China" is ambiguous or referencing the "One China" principle which the US doesn't even recognize (acknowledges the existence of, but does not adhere to).
...Calling it "Republic of China" is straight up saying "[this area] is a part of China". Naming it "Taiwan" is giving it an identity independent of China.
You are using "China" to refer to the PRC which is misleading and muddies the conversation. I'm against calling the PRC "China" as much as I am against calling the ROC "Taiwan". Please use the full name or the acronym to avoid ambiguity.
- a military
- a government
- a language
- a judicial system
- foreign relations, however hampered they are by the Communist party
It also happens to be in a state of cold war with their nominally Communist neighbour.
If it's not a country, nothing is.
"Taiwan" passports say "Republic of China" on them.
My passport stamps from when I entered Taiwan say "Republic of China".
Taiwan is just _one_ of the islands that the ROC controls. Calling the ROC "Taiwan" muddies the conversation and helps the PRC narrative that "Taiwan is a province of China".
The ROC has been a de facto independent country since 1912 when it was founded. The existence of the PRC since 1949 has not changed that.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961335
Common names are common for a reason!
I'd note that you linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_Armed_Forces to support your argument.
But the very first sentence of that page is "The Republic of China Armed Forces, commonly known as the Taiwanese Armed Forces..."
"China" is a bad brand name nowadays. I really wish they could formally rename their country with a resumption of the civil war.
Here's the TAIWAN ALLIES INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION AND ENHANCEMENT INITIATIVE (TAIPEI) ACT OF 2019. It starts: To express United States support for Taiwan's diplomatic alliances around the world.
The name "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China") isn't used. However there are sentences like this:
Since the election of President Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan in 2016, the Government of the People's Republic of China has intensified its efforts to pressure Taiwan.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/167...
South Beach?
LA?
Vegas?
Source: I've lived in that area.
"Taiwan" doesn't sound related to China at all. It implies no more "Taiwan, province of China" than "Taiwan, country in East Asia".
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22962035
The ROC has already been an independent entity for over 100 years. There is nothing new in this situation that needs to be declaring independence. If the ROC amends its constitution to remove "China" from its official name, the PRC will attack instantly (they've said as much).
If you want more explanation about the astroturfing rule, there's years' worth at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
That's misleading. The US de facto recognizes Taiwan, and the only reason it doesn't recognize it de jure is that the PRC would formally cut off relations if it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_in_Taiwan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taipei_Economic_and_Cultural_R...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwa...
Like, it's ok that we sell Taiwan fighter jets and tanks to defend themselves against China, as long as we say that Taiwan belongs to china.
I'll never understand politics.
Taiwan is a unique proposition, and eviscerating the WHO for having trouble with it without acknowledging that everywhere else has the same problem makes it look like the person is either ignorant or has some agenda.
The existence of political factors (which are not the fault of the WHO) makes it less than perfect, but people using it as a cudgel against the organization are (not you necessarily) are insinuating that the WHO's failure to be perfect thus makes it scientifically useless. This is an obvious bad-faith argument deployed for rather obvious political ends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_and_the_United_Nations#R...
The only reason it doesn't recognize it is because US kicked RoC out of UN by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758
> The only reason it doesn't recognize it is because US kicked RoC out of UN by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758
Huh? The Wikipedia article you linked says the US voted "No" on Resolution 2758. I don't see how you can claim the US did the kicking by opposing the resolution that did the kicking.
That article also states that before that vote...
> ...the United States was proposing that while the credentials of the PRC representatives would be accepted and the PRC would be seated as China’s representative with a seat on the Security Council, the ROC would continue to enjoy representation in the General Assembly.
Keep in mind RoC was one of the five founding members of UN.
But the question isn't just the recognition of Taiwan/ROC, in isolation by itself. It also includes the recognition of the PRC, the existence of which is a fact on the ground that's difficult to ignore.
Sure the US could have continued to plug its ears and ignore the PRC, but that was untenable and becoming increasingly so. It's pretty clear that the US's preferred option would have been formal recognition of both Taiwan and the PRC, but it doesn't always get what it wants, so it has had to contort its official position and practice deliberate ambiguity, instead.
It specifically says "the US should advocate for Taiwan’s membership in all international organisations in which statehood is not a requirement"
Note the statehood is not a requirement thing.
I think it would be great if Taiwan had observer status at WHO, and I think the TAIPEI Act should help towards this. But the point remains: Taiwan is an unusual entity, and WHO is far from alone in having trouble with this.
"(3) Taiwan is a free, democratic, and prosperous nation of 23,000,000 people and an important contributor to peace and stability around the world."
And the US is still connected to Taiwan and provides them military support. And we have a $250M 'de facto' embassy there.
Honestly, I'm so shocked and dismayed by your comment, that I think I want to stop participating on Hacker News. Your perspective is relativism ad infinitum. This is the thing I fight most against.
This isn't a community for hackers & painters anymore. Eternal Relativism is impossible to win against.
Bringing the behavior of US-- a sovereign state-- into the discussion is completely inappropriate.
This statement shows the power of western media. Yes the WHO doesn't. Neither does any other political entity in the world.
Neither the US, nor the 14 of 193 UN members that has diplomatic relations with the ROC, nor does "Taiwan" itself recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation.
Even the most pro-US pro-independence party in Taiwan, the DPP, does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. According to Taiwan, Taiwan is a province of the ROC which includes the mainland and the present country of Mongolia.
And you would want the health agency of the UN to be the first in the world to spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so?
Also the WHO spokesman went on an interview with Hong Kong media and refused to even answer a question about Taiwan, then hung up the call after pretending to not hear the question.
This is not corporate media telling me so (don't even know why you would claim that). This is plain facts on video and email available for everyone to see.
And since you brought up the December 31st email, that only amplifies my point about corporate media if you formed your opinion on editorials obfuscating the primary source rather than the primary source itself. Here's the actual email from Taiwan https://twitter.com/mohw_taiwan/status/1248915057188024320
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
It's so embarrassingly not "a warning" from Taiwan that Taiwan has been busy deleting the original email from their press release archives and rerouting permalinks to their emails (still available on their tweet at.cdc.tw/23iq82) to a further obfuscating rebuttal.
Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
> In China, the term “atypical pneumonia” is commonly used to refer to SARS, a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.
"transmitted between humans" - what WHO claimed does not happen even though Taiwan warned them about it.
> patients had been isolated for treatment
That's also referring to the human-to-human transmission part of COVID - which WHO denied. This is the warning Taiwan had sent in December and WHO lied and went even further to state that they never received any email from Taiwan. It's literally in the email. I don't know how much clearer they can get.
> Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
You trying to claim I don't have critical thinking makes you sound arrogant. I don't want to engage in flame wars on HN so it's not replying to it further.
> recognize Taiwan as a sevreign nation
I'm then responding to your
> Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission
Very bold statements. If you're saying that the WHO should have changed their January 14 statement from "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" to "there are clear evidence of human to human transmission because Taiwan stated:
News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment. I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us. Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you.
> "spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so"
and I was merely pointing out that the HK media is the one which pointed out how WHO ignored Taiwan's warning. Then you went around stating I "don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking" which is just a silly ad hom attack and not worthy on HN. I almost always read the primary source and that's exactly what I had done with the Taiwan vs WHO thing. I don't just watch the media and believe everything they say, I have seen too many examples of them not reporting the facts. Also I haven't even seen much coverage of the Taiwan situation in the western media so I have no idea how you are making that conclusion. Most of the western media is too busy defending China anyway.
> then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you
Considering you think the Taiwan's email wasn't enough to justify a different statement from WHO than parroting China's talking points, why do you think WHO lied about them never receiving any correspondence from Taiwan warning about human-to-human transmission?
Also maybe calling people names and thinking you are somehow better than the person you are interacting with is a tactic you wish to employ though I don't think it's suited for HN discussions. Let's not resort to that.
It might be a good source of information for governments around the world looking to take the most neutral diplomatic and balanced stance on every issue.
Not sure why those same incentives should then be influencing what people are allowed to talk about on the internet.
Your statement misses the point a bit though. I don't think anyone's arguing that WHO/UN is a source for (political) 'truth'. It's just a medical advisory body. If the UN was the source of 'truth', Israel might not exist in the present form anymore since half of all UN resolutions against single countries are against Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolut.... The fact that no one is likely to know that is precisely because what you're arguing against is already not true.
What do you think happened?
I'll give you a hint: "EURion constellation".
Anyway, my point is, "It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye." When it comes to pandemics or currency control our systems have no problem toeing the hard line.
Has nothing to do with whether you like it or not, government's gonna govern. Make FAANG the new government and they're gonna govern.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/counterfeit-money-eurion-cons...
However, Google has gotten it wrong:
1. As others have said, WHO has not earned this trust to date and is also a political organization, not one that is independent.
2. There were other options available, such as demonetization. Stopping people from profiting over putting out information that could hurt people seems more legit to me. They also could have used disclaimers, like the article mentions Facebook is doing for similar content.
3. Another option available to them? Limit the promotion of these videos through recommendations. I get why Google wouldn't want to actively be promoting videos that give terrible misinformation, so they can decide not to promote while still allowing the video to be posted. This is their normal policy for content that is considered "harmful misinformation." (Which was strengthened last year.) Why not use existing policy?
Edit: One example Google could give of precedent is that they removed videos of people encouraging and participating in the Tide Pod Challenge: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/17/16902990/youtube-tide-pod...
However, I'd actually be fine with them removing video of people drinking bleach to combat coronavirus. And maybe even just encouraging others to do so. But taking vitamin C? (An actual example in the article.)
But I didn't know that, interesting.
Taiwan is one of the few countries to have very few cases, and they essentially did a lot of measures the WHO did not recommend initially.
WHAT measures did the WHO "disagree" with that saved Canada? I'd love to see this post cited up to include what measuring you're referring to in both parts (agree w/WHO and disagree) and where the WHO disagreed with Canada's measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/all-uk-hospita...
https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
As I understand it - many Canadians of Asian decent in Vancouver BC wore masks early on.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
EDIT: As of 3/30 WHO still doesn't recommend wearing masks (except for the obviously sick) - contrary to Vancouver BC who now require at least a covering or mask.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...
Nope. Your article is actually about the UK's government's advice and lumps in the WHO. Here's a WHO publication from 30th of January 2020 [0] that advises all sick with "flu-like symptoms" be provided a mask (as well as healthcare workers).
The WHO, like every national government, have recommended prioritizing masks to the sick and healthcare workers since the start of the year. Canada didn't contradict that and still doesn't as far as I've read.
Giving masks to asymptomatic members of the public only makes sense when there's a large enough supply to do so without starving essential services or known carriers.
> and advised against travel restrictions.
Your own link contradicts this claim.
> However, in certain circumstances, measures that restrict the movement of people may prove temporarily useful, such as in settings with few international connections and limited response capacities.
> Travel measures that significantly interfere with international traffic may only be justified at the beginning of an outbreak, as they may allow countries to gain time, even if only a few days, to rapidly implement effective preparedness measures. Such restrictions must be based on a careful risk assessment, be proportionate to the public health risk, be short in duration, and be reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.
They then go on to essentially say that it won't work (and spoilers: It didn't work, they were 100% correct).
It also fails to show how Canada acted against the WHO advice? That was the core claim above, and your response doesn't even attempt to show that.
In fact Canada has been in lock-step with the WHO since the beginning and still is. Even according to your links.
[0] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/risk-co...
How didn't it work?
All of the really successful countries at handling this pandemic continue to have significant travel measures that interfere with international traffic.
For example: Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, even (infuriatingly, given their opposition to anyone else doing it [0]) Mainland China itself!
[0] https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/china-praises-canada-slams-u-s-...
Yes, if everyone in the world had a sufficient supply of face masks and wore them correctly all of the time then the R0 would drop significantly.
The two keys parts of that statement are _sufficient supply_ and _wear them correctly_.
There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
I've seen people who have bought facemasks touching their face and fiddling with the masks. They don't know how to wear them correctly, making their purchase a complete waste. They've wasted stock that could have been made available to healthcare workers.
If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
But it isn't and they aren't.
WHO seems to understand this and so it seems to be a factor in their advice.
I believe they may have even made a statement to this effect at some point?
>There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
Anyone that has access to cloth can make a rudimentary mask that is better than nothing.
>If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
But they, like HK (and Vietnam, and SG and I don't know who else) are part of the "China is asshoe" club (i.e. the TW believe that the Chinese government will always lie and obfuscate, true or not), and had pretty direct experience with SARS and the other corona virus (not MERS, but my brain isn't working). In any case - they had protocols in place start mandating masks - pretty much day 1. They also paid for a factory expansion of the largest vendors, pretty much day 1, and pre-paid for a pretty large order.
I heard a rumor that the Vietnamese actually hacked a Chinese "mainframe" and stole materials that allowed them to prepare. I don't know if this is true, and it is not related to Taiwan's already-in-place response plan.
Which is literally not the case. They wore masks, and protested to get borders closed to non-citizens asap. If the citizens had not taken things into their own hands I fear they wouldn't be in such a good position as they are now.
The WHO needs to be dismantled. china has far too much influential power in the WHO. There should be 0 politics within the WHO, no pandering to the ccp. They should exist to help everyone in the world during an outbreak like this.
It barely worked in the first place, and is all sorts of corrupted now; I believe they should burn it to the ground.
But! Opinions vary! :-) And I am often wrong in matters outside my particular domains of experience.
For example, Facebook refers to "fake news" as "false news"; if you search their domains for "false news is", you'll get around 6,500 results, none of which include an actual definition of what "false news" is. Setting aside the obviously problematic policy issues associated with this, it suggests that FB either doesn't have a definition or has one but has chosen not to publish it.
Loosely, I think you could categorize information on a grid (allowing for overlap), where the columns are "information", "wrong information", and "non-information"; the rows are "deliberate" and "inadvertent".
"Dis"-information would fall under "deliberate" and "wrong", whereas "mis"-information is "wrong" but may be "inadvertent" (someone posting something they don't know is incorrect, for example). OTOH you can have "deliberate" "non-information" in the form of "obscurantism" or "inadvertent" "non-information" in the form of "bullshit". And of course you can have all kinds of stuff in between.
Then again, most platform policies ultimately boil down to whether or not a statement is likely to cause to some kind of real harm. If that's the case then I'm not sure why you need to formally identify it as "misinformation" at all. If at the end of the gay you're going to say "We removed this because it violated our policy against posts that may cause actual harm to others", then calling it out as belonging to any particular category of impermissible content is just a perfunctory nod to transparency in your policy enforcement.
If anyone here has a policy issue they're seeking advice on please feel free to reach out. I love this stuff.
CDC has also a way bigger budget than the WHO. $11.1B vs $4.2B.
Ref:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...
That's also the evidence of "alignment with china": because we in the west see a failure to recognise taiwan as siding with china. Which is odd because the USA doesn't officially recognise Taiwan itself. In fact the WHO did almost exactly what a US diplomat would have done- albeit a bit delayed.
Corruption not withstanding (yeah, it's unfortunate but that thing is going to happen, what matters is the response not that it happened) it's better to have a bipartisan global concerted effort to manage these things than the centralised health organisation of a single country. Even though that country is the homestead of the service in question.
They make overt political statements all the time. For one: calling Taiwan racist when it took issue with the WHO’s inaction after their attempts to disseminate health information.
Then Tedros calling travel bans “stigmatic.” Precisely when travel bans were needed at the onset of the spreading.
If WHO is supposed to be apolitical, it shouldn’t be parroting Chinese talking points.
The Head of the WHO was attacked by racist trolls who were outwardly Taiwanese; for excluding Taiwan from membership (like _all_ U.N. projects do), And he commented about the abuse.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/taiwan-who-tedro...
Taiwan does not exist as an entity to the WHO because it is not recognised by the United Nations.
As much as Taiwan has valuable lessons it's basically akin to asking why the WHO isn't listening to the municipality of sealand.
The journalist asking that question in the first place knew that Taiwan is a political hotbed and was looking for a story, they got one and the WHO is under the bus- at a time when we need a united front in healthcare globally.
And the racist abuse was entirely real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/taiwan-rej...
Public health is, like aviation for example, one of those things where recognition of "legitimate" governments has to take a back seat to de facto reality. If the WHO is unable to deal with Taiwan, then we need a different organization that can.
The only way to have real collaboration on a global level is to take no sides of any kind and only agree with absolute consensus. Anything else is picking a side and alienates part of the world.
I'm sorry that the WHO isn't playing into the politics you or I like, in this case it almost certainly would have saved lives, but that's kind of the point. As soon as they "wake up to the reality" of something such as, idk, Crimea being Russian territory? then suddenly they're alienating Ukraine and its allies.
It's stupid, and fickle, but the only winning move is not to play.
It doesn’t really matter whether my politics were assuaged, though, because they pissed off the majority of their funding and had it cut off. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
What is not a fiction in Mainland China evicting Africans and blocking them from Shopping malls after the government accused them of being diseased.
Where is Tedros' comments against China amid this actual documented racism?
The WHO have handled this horribly at just about every stage and deserve every bit of criticism sent their way.
The head of WHO is corrupt.
If you don't mind me asking, could you please provide the source for one WHO controversy that is made up? Preferably one of the large ones, if applicable.
Here's a bit of "Why" the WHO doesn't recognise Taiwan: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/why-does-who-exclude-taiwan
Here's a bit on the Racist campaign against the director of the WHO: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/taiwan-rej...
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/12208181153549230...
> China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
Jan 24!
It's terrifying to watch so many people argue back and forth so adamantly defending their sides, meanwhile almost no one even brings up the possibility that they both screwed up.
One dimensional politics will be the end of the American Empire.
It's disingenuous to act like the WHO was the only folks doing this at the time, and it's being used to deflect blame - "blame China!" - from the administration.
That said, the "WHO praised China!" meme is largely a deflection. Trump, talk radio, and Fox have been pushing it heavily in an attempt to blame others for the US's poor response.
So the UN does not recognize Taiwan because of China.
It is naive to say that China does not influence these international organizations for political gain. In fact anyone who studies international politics academically would acknowledge that every country who participates in these international organization uses them to gain political influence. I would argue that they exist primarily for political influence, instead of their intended goal; I mean the UN did leave a country right when a genocide started so they didn't have to deal pay to deal with it, among countless examples of it being used for international legitimacy at any cost.
The director of WHO tried to make Robert Mugabe the goodwill ambassador. How exactly is this "made up" and not "political"?
The WHO is very much a political entity in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party. There's a difference between refusing to comment on Taiwan and pretending like Taiwan doesn't exist.
Ignoring the political aspect, they've dealt with this crisis terribly, being slow to respond and giving downright false advice like telling people not to wear masks.
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-03-2020-information-...
Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?), I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread, lower the suicide rate of those vulnerable to hate speech, etc. And why stop there? Remove 2nd amendment and you can save even more lives! Too much freedom just seems to lead to people dying, because people make bad choices that affect others.
AFAIK, no amendments have been violated since YouTube is a private entity. They can editorialize what they, how they want. It’s is their liberty to make a choice here, the same as your liberty to not support that choice.
exceptional situations are ripe for exploitation by corporations and governments and political parties. And indeed we've seen all of these try (and succeed) in taking advantage of the situation...
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill
I don't think we are there yet, but we should be wary of that possibility.
That's a slippery slope right there, a very dangerous one. In the US, spaces where one engages in political activities have moved from public (town square in front of City Hall) to private (the mall plus parking lot). That's a problem.
The other thing is monopolies. In the past, when you were on the fringes of the spectrum you'd publish with your fringe publisher and could at least get your message out. Nowadays Youtube suppresses the neonazis. That's nice and good, as long as it's nazis, but what if they don't like what you have to say? Big publishers and government have a symbiotic relationship, and there is always a sprachregelung.
Which freedoms do we give up here? Freedom of the individual or freedom of enterprise? Imo if a corporate entity decides to act like a public space, then it should be treated like one and held accountable as such. Otherwise we’ve created a simple way of bypassing some constitutional liberties.
That still however doesn’t answer the question as to where we draw the line for freedom of expression. Nazis took over once in the public sphere and they can do it again. I will argue against moral relativism here and say yes it’s ok to suppress nazis so long as we don’t turn that around and become needlessly oppressive in other ways.
Then they are publishers and not platforms. So they are liable for all content on their website.
A prime example here is the DMCA — but there are also other existing laws that place restrictions on content, which Youtube (and other platforms/publishers) must adhere to.
The basis for those civil liberties is a document written by people accustomed to seeing 400k Europeans die of smallpox every year.
Yeah, seems like an equivalent comparison to me.
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1700s/The-Se...
More concerning is that the proponents have "good intentions" at heart.
It's almost as if the concept of freedom is not understood.
Freedom is not free.
Freedom has a price, often a heavy price that one has to pay for it.
The fact that we are not children anymore who desparately need oversight and constant handholding, seems to be an alien concept.
"Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Well, I watch that video and research what the potential effects of drinking bleach even if there was no SARS-COV2 in this world would be and then weigh the potential effects of a COVID-19 infection and weigh the options.
This is, what I assumed, were the responsibilites of an adult - a process to make rational decisions instead of being spoonfed and told what to do like one would a child.
As I clarified elsewhere on this thread, the point I was making wasn't "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
Yes, being an adult means having the freedom to drink alcohol and drive a car instead of waiting for a bus or a parent to come pick me up.
It also means having the responsibilities of making my own decisions instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me.
What's the expectation - that if the decision making authority makes a wrong decision that kills me, I can then blame them and collect damages?
That's crazy talk - for one, I will be dead already!
Also you should be free to sue the content creator, maybe instead of censoring content youtube should have better "know your creator" type legislation?
Well, if you read the whole thing, the 1st amendment includes the freedom to peaceably assemble, so at least to that extent it has already been removed and to cheering crowds no less.
People dropping dead in the streets will trash the economy.
People die all the time. Pretending that the jury is out on the long term impacts of Covid 19 is ascientific.
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The issue when talking about the long term affects is that, you're right, we don't have enough information. However that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and do nothing.
The whole point of humans recording history (and science is mostly just trying things and writing them down so we can build on this knowledge later) is to see patterns and conclude things.
There's all kinds of misinformation that can spread in the cracks here because only history will tell us the real truth, but drawing on similarly infectious diseases from history will help significantly.
It's not 'ascientific' to draw from the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is ascientific to say: "This disease is completely unknown so we should wait until the human death toll has reached critical mass before making an action which could impact our wealth".
For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.[0]
In case you forgot, economy is the quantity and value of transactions in a market. Less people is lower quantity.
From the admittedly little we know about the disease, it is much more deadly than anything that's currently making the rounds. (If you're going to rebut me please control for number of people infected, because it's a common misconception that "more people die of other things" but that's because "other things" are affecting more people)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_consequences_of_popul...
First of all, even if the true mortality rate of covid-19 were 1-2% (it isn't, it's likely much lower), it wouldn't infect 100% of the population.
You can't just do [total confirmed deaths] / [total confirmed cases] to arrive at a mortality % and then multiply by the total population to get a death count. That's horribly biased and not grounded in reality. The current estimated fatality rate is biased in my opinion as it mainly selects for people already in hospitals. Research is indicating that [total confirmed cases] may be much, MUCH smaller than [total cases] [0]. People are getting it and recovering without every being tested. Some people (a lot of people?) have mild-to-no-symptoms.
Look, it's reasonable to want to prevent excessive loss of life. But it's a double edged sword. Mortality rate for people aged 20-30 is estimated at .2% (though it'll like turn out to be lower for healthy adults). Prolonged stay-at-home orders have driven up suicide rate though (not to mention the devestating damage to people's livlihoods). 2 graduating seniors recently committed suicide at the Air Force Academy presumably related to covid-19 lockdown orders, and with a class of ~800, that's already more deadly than covid-19.
You're right we shouldn't "sit on our hands", but we also shouldn't fall victim to the politician's fallacy [1]
[0] https://news.usc.edu/168987/antibody-testing-results-covid-1...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
First of all, everything coming out in the news recently should cure you of the illusion that we have any idea about the number of people infected. Estimates of an undercounting of a factor of ten in the early days in New York. An aircraft carrier with 60% of cases being completely asymptomatic. Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
It's interesting that you use the precautionary principle only towards a virus but not towards a wide scale social experiment on an overwhelming majority of the population.
The elderly certainly contribute to the economy, but if you're pretending that it's anywhere near the impact of something like global unemployment in developed countries hitting 10%, you're being obtuse.
Your description of the economy is rudimentary and shows disregard for things like organizational capital which are vital to an effective economy.
And finally, the corpus of scientific knowledge is one thing -- attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
...
I'm totally in agreement with you.
The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.
For example, Christianity strives to save souls, not lives. That gives a very different vantage point. From this point it's absolutely clear that the right to speak candidly cannot be abolished on such a ridiculous premise as saving lives.