I guess the bigger question about this is what possible reasons to remove there could be. The video itself is pretty famous now and available in many places.
"...noted relevant comments regarding censorship that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had recently made.
"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy ... [removal] is another really important part of of our policy," Wojcicki reportedly said."
Sure, I didn't express myself clearly enough sorry. That WHO quote is hers and therefore that of Youtube. But it was a general remark made before the removal or even the creation of this video. The article in this submission however [and to some extent the comment above] seems to imply that her WHO remark gives the reason for the removal.
Now it can of course still be that the WHO reasoning will at a later time be officially quoted for the removal of this video, but that is pure speculation. And also it would be a huge stretch. There is no official reason given for the removal.
Why trust the WHO when they are being defunded in the first place? After mismanaging and trying to cover things up?
Sounds like YouTube is blindly following the WHO. I am so sick of big tech and all the censorship, privacy invasion, etc. Wish there was more alternatives but everyone will flock to what’s popular...
Wish I had the resources to start alternatives, maybe headquarters in Texas where I bet they have a more freedom mindset compared to all the Californian tech companies that’s just a bunch of followers instead of leaders.
Seems all the stuff they preach about connecting the world, accessing all the worlds information and diversity is just some sort of double speak. Like censoring Alex Jones, sure people disagree with him maybe Just some things or even everything he says but if you don’t agree with him, don’t watch his channel, don’t follow him. This whole deplatformig thing is like something from 1984.
I enjoy using YouTube for tech talks, tutorials, following vloggers but a lot of stuff about YouTube is disappointment... and then don’t even get me started mentioning all the automated copyright stuff that doesn’t even consider fair use or is abused.
> Alex Jones, sure people disagree with him maybe Just some things or even everything he says but if you don’t agree with him, don’t watch his channel, don’t follow him
Alex Jones was successfully sued because of his videos and repeatedly warned. YouTube like any business has a right to legally protect themselves. If YT continues to host Jones's content they could be held legally liable. I'm no fan of YouTube but they're clearly in the right in Alex Jones's case.
Yeah, I don't agree with anything Alex Jones says, but I do think he should be allowed to say his own perspectives on things. Just used him as an example.
I never really watched his full shows which is a few hours daily I think. Don't really have the attention span to listen to all the people who call in and stuff. I seen just clips and hilights here and there. He recently built a new website which is sorta like his own little private YouTube.
I'd imagine YouTube would be covered under Section 230 immunity would cover them.
Personally I think as long as something isn't illegal, let them publish it... However I bet if you had that policy your hosting company would shut you down unless you owned your own datacenter and peering agreements...
But I heard on YouTube you can't even say the C word right now without the algorithm messing with your videos... Like some travel vlogger was talking about how it disrupted his travel plans, so he called it the current unicorn instead. Not some conspiracy theory video either, just telling his true story. So I think YouTube is going overboard right now with their censorship... and more and more censorship, people start censoring themselves and are scared to speak out about things... I think this is a dangerous and dark path we're going down - regardless if people think there's some conspiracy with a global elite or deep state or whatever you want to call it is apart of it or not...
By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus? Because I seem to recall the WHO (or I think it was the CDC?) blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks in order to keep them available to health professionals.
I think this underscores why I'm so uncomfortable with YouTube doing censorship (or anyone doing it). The official narrative is not always right.
In fact anytime we have a new discovery in science it starts out in contrary to the official accepted explanation and only gradually and often grudgingly gains acceptance over time. If you silence dissenting voices you also silence progress. Which is maybe why China struggles to innovate compared to the West.
My understanding has always been that good science is supposed to be falsifiable. If the new rules are science can only be dictated by authoritative institutions and cannot be publicly questioned, is it still science?
The primary issue is that "dictating" has been implemented with owning the channels and making bad decisions with the channels consensus process. The Internet needs to be reworked to get rid of these large corporations being able to own channels, but Hell if I know how to do it.
Because I seem to recall the WHO (or I think it was the CDC?) blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks in order to keep them available to health professionals.
>By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus?
Cry wolf when this actually happens. I try not to be dismissive, but the repeated harping about masks strikes me as a lack of original thought at best and a coordinated smear campaign at face value.
We get it: the WHO should've recommended masks full-throatedly. But your interpretation that a YouTube policy will be applied maliciously without any justification for why doesn't convince me.
I doubt it will be, or least I hope not. But at some point they'll cross the line, they may have already done so and I just don't know about it.
I don't like censorship. It's dangerous. It's the tool of choice of authoritarians everywhere. Free speech, even of opinions we find distasteful or downright ugly, is still worth upholding.
I want to add that hate speech is a different thing, but where one draws the line there is also a slippery slope.
Look at deplatforming of people like Steven Pinker or Jordan Peterson to see how actually quite moderate, well reasoned, well spoken people are getting censored. That's a disturbing trend.
Because YouTube is already known as one of the worst cancers on the internet, and has allowed the stupid to herd and multiply.
Flat Earth. Pizzagate. Soros conspiracies. Chemtrails. Anti-vaccers. These were all laughable fringe things that the disturbed came up with. Then YouTube came along and suddenly the stupid were discovering one another, confirming each other's idiocy.
YouTube is probably a little tired of this. The fringe can of course create their own video sites, just as they made their own "Twitter" and their own "Reddit" (all abysmal failures when they learn how miserable and deplorable they are).
LOL, dang -the enabler of right-wing asshats- has hellbanned me. ROFL. Eat a big ol' donkey dick, dang. You have turned HN into a AGW denying shithole.
No one banned you. Your comment was affected by user flags and software. Rightly so, as you've been trolling up a storm (or trying to), and using multiple accounts to do it.
Obviously, though, if you keep posting like this then we will have to ban you. If we don't, people will complain about us privileging you, as we ban other accounts for less and you're breaking the site guidelines badly: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Agreed. These people own several urgent care clinics and are suffering financially. I don't understand how much they understand about how misleading they are being (they could be foolish enough to believe their own mistakes) but it is clear that they are suffering financially and are trying to figure out a way to stay afloat.
A simple check of excess mortality shows that something has already killed more people than would normally die during a bad flu season in areas affected by the virus, and we're nowhere near the end of the infection. And that's with lockdown measures that obviously suppress a bunch of common causes of death.
To successfully argue that covid-19 is less bad than the flu, you would have to show that all these extra dead people died of something other than covid-19. Good luck with that.
Yes, and Sweden has excess mortality that is higher than a bad flu year for Sweden, and the excess mortality matches up pretty well with the official covid-19 death count.
Which means that covid-19 is deadlier than the flu.
Many are seeing sharp increases in mortality, higher than normal flu years. If covid-19 isn't deadlier than a normal flu, then death rates must have spiked in all these countries because of something else. That is one extraordinary claim if I ever saw one.
(In addition, it's false that Sweden isn't doing a lockdown. Sweden is simply one of the countries that have enacted the least harsh lockdown measures. It's a grayscale, not binary.)
We accept people dying from the flu every year, because vaccines and other measures have pushed the death rate low enough. It is also very rare that young people die from the flu, and since there is a vaccine there is an element of personal responsibility.
In comparison, unmitigated covid-19 seems to be 5x-10x deadlier than a regular mitigated flu, and covid-19 cases requires a lot more healthcare resources in the form of ICU beds and ventilators, which is a very limited resource. If we run out of ICU beds, people will start dying of other preventable things like heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. In addition, covid-19 kills far more young people than the flu does.
It is very probable that we'll live with a mitigated coronavirus for a long time ahead, either by getting vaccines, or by discovering treatments that reduce the fatality rate. But as long as we don't have those mitigation strategies, lockdowns are all we have to reduce the fatality rate low enough for us to accept it.
Right now covid-19 is excessively deadly, and that is why we are in lockdown, and will remain in lockdown until it isn't, or until economic desperation changes the tolerance for its fatality rate.
5x-10x * ~0 is not a huge difference in practice. Flu is also contained towards the winter, what would it do for the whole year?
I've already had the virus and known several friends to have it, we're not spring chickens, but were otherwise healthy. Our daughters didn't even get it, sons were mild. So fear mongering about the young is not very compelling.
Lockdowns are useful in big dense cities, they make a lot less sense in sparser areas. One size does not fit all.
We can't tell yet. That's the problem with all this bullshit. Science does not let you predict the future. It's like that old mathematics quote, "All models are wrong. Some models are useful."
We really have no idea what the results of US vs Sweden or Tennessee vs Virginia will hold up by looking at it now. We need to wait 12 months, look back, add some margins of error, find correlations and debate about the potential causes.
I can understand everyone being upset and wanting things now. People are dying. Other people are 2 months behind on all their bills and going to food banks for the first time in their lives to feed their families. Despite the contrary, most States are still denying unemployment to independent contractors and business owners like hair dressers.
But making any type of prediction at this point is irrational. We need to weight everything. It's not as simple as Lives vs Economy .. the economy provides for lives.
Elon’s response since the beginning has been way off, “The coronavirus panic is dumb” (March 6). I guess he doesn’t want to learn from his mistakes.
It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting the virus rip through the entire country had been enacted in March.
Regarding the removal of the video from YouTube, i don’t like this. Even though it’s clearly wrong, and is being used to push for something bad, YouTube exercising this type of censorship over legal content worries me.
I'm not really a fan of the idea that any person (or company) can be compelled to give a platform to someone (or something) they don't want to. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a soapbox, and it certainly doesn't guarantee you the right to someone else's soapbox. It sounds like a strictly emotional argument to suggest that YouTube doesn't have the right to decide what is or isn't allowed on their platform, and it breaks down under any sort of scrutiny. There are all sorts of other "legal" things that you, yourself, would likely draw the line on.
To some extent I think using the word "censorship" is disingenuous here as well. No one is censoring this video, they can post the video on their own website wherever they please. Just because you can't post the video on someone else's website doesn't mean you are being censored.
The (dictionary) definition of censorship does include private institutions censoring. For instance, if private libraries remove a book from their shelves because they dislike the contents, that’s absolutely censorship.
It’s YouTube’s legal right to remove this, but I do recognize that the more YouTube exercises censorship and editorial judgment over the content, the more likely they are to remove content I like and agree with as well, so that is what concerns me.
And I also wonder if removing this specific video might do more harm than good, because it lets the authors cry out that the establishment is censoring them and helps promote their conspiracy-theory-level thinking. In certain cases speech suppression can be very effective, but since powerful elements of US society (e.g. Fox News) are engaging in motivated reasoning to agree with the contents of this video, it could provide an additional plank to convince those who aren’t capable of evaluating the scientific arguments themselves.
You can criticize a company's behavior while recognizing it is their right to do what they are doing. We do it all the time with other industries. Critiques of hiring/firing decisions, environmental practices, poor customer service, bad products, etc.
It is not unreasonable to dislike the trend of a company named "YouTube" increasingly favoring large state-sponsored and corporate organizations both in hard policy and soft algorithms.
> It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views
The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.
Yes, I find that even more bizarre. The “just the flu” crowd clearly put down their stakes with death predictions for a no-mitigation scenario that were greatly exceeded by the actual high-mitigation scenario we experienced over the last 1.5 months.
For instance, here is Elon claiming on march 18 that by the end of April, the USA would have followed the same pattern as China and cases would have dropped to near zero. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20
(Never mind that china achieved this by a massive shutdown and quarantine regime stricter than any US state has done). His prediction was way off but he doesn’t seem to have learned.
In case of the "doomers", there are strong psychological elements at play. Lockdowns are not fun and have an obvious cost to the economy and to people. Lives and companies and future plans are being ruined at an astonishing rate.
In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead.
The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run.
So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail.
And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.
Elon is a good critical thinker and saw from the very beginning that the response to COVID-19 was way out of proportion. Lots of other scientists and doctors saw from the very beginning that COVID-19 was not worse than the flu, most of whom have been censored again and again. There's even a paper published about it early in March showing the new corona virus is not worse than the ones before [1]. So Elon is being proven correct again and this is not the first time this happens.
“Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.”
“Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.”
“Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”
Your quoted paper is 5 weeks old, as shown by the excerpt “ compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.”
Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count.
This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu. Even the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu pandemics didn’t do this.
>The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu
The second wave of the 1918 flu killed between 17 to 50 million people, perhaps as high as 100 million people, during the fall of 1918, with a higher than expected mortality rate for the young and healthy. It killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world's population.
So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
Your argument assumes that coronavirus deaths will stop tomorrow, and also that mitigation measures used to reduce deaths from coronavirus via social distancing don’t affect the evaluation of whether it is “deadly”.
It feels like you didn’t engage with the data I presented at all. (Edit: removed sentences that would only apply if you had read my other post)
Edit 2: if your only argument is that COVID-19 is not worse than Spanish flu, that’s something that is reasonable. It’s worse than any pandemic flu since Spanish flu though, this is a once in a century occurrence.
I apologize, there's a lot of numbers flying around and I probably did miss the thrust of what you were saying. I shouldn't have focused on the comparison with the 1918 flu.
Plus, as someone pointed out, drawing conclusions from the numbers we have so far in comparison with the 1918 flu is difficult.
I've been working with NYC numbers. The link you gave was for NY State deaths. NYC has reported about 12.3k deaths [1], has a population of about 8.4 million [2] and 21% of people appear to have antibodies at this time.
Doing some math with the above numbers I end up with .14% dead so far with 1/5th of people exposed. From there I assume the amount of dead would quadruple before we reach herd immunity. I also assume that antibodies provide at least a handful of years of immunity, just like for other coronaviruses, reducing the severity of future infections. A likely outcome is that this becomes another variant of several coronaviruses that circulate with the common cold.
I guess even for those who might agree with all of the above there still exists differences in opinion on what actions should be taken. I personally understand some people's comparison with the yearly flu, but realize that is most definately not an apples to apples comparison.
Yes I believe your rough math is matching others that are reported by the scientific literature which is estimating around 0.7% infection fatality ratio (IFR) for this virus, 4*0.14 would be on the low end of estimates but within the consensus estimate. Seasonal Flu IFR is estimated to be between 0.04% and 0.1%, so by your numbers the coronavirus is, at a minimum, 5 times more deadly than seasonal flu.
I also agree this virus will become a part of life in the future. Although some Asia-Pacific countries seem to have successfully controlled the spread (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) the only way for them to keep it from spreading will be to maintain a border closure until a vaccine can be developed to safely give their populations herd immunity.
In the west, we let the virus run free for two months and it’s probably too late to get it under control no matter what we do now.
> The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
Wow: you are saying the final death rate from Covid19 will be from 0.01% to 0.06%.
You are making irrelevant comparisons: we don’t yet know how many people will die from Covid19; we have no idea of numbers of deaths in many poorer countries where deaths can’t even be counted; comparing number of deaths in a world with 7 billion people against number of deaths for 1918 population is pointless.
I agree with what you are saying, the numbers I presented in response to a comparison with the 1918 flu are not good to draw conclusions from.
In fact I will admit that thinking further about the numbers we have so far I am sobered by how they may add up across the world.
But back on topic, talking about lockdowns: The stated purpose of the lockdown was to flatten the curve so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, which has been successful so far. Do you think lockdowns lower the number of deaths when all is said and done? How long can lockdowns be sustained? Would it be more effective for vulnerable folks to self-isolate? Unless we can mass produce a vaccine in the next couple of months won't this continue moving through the population regardless of what we do?
> So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
No. We don't know the numbers because most countries don't have the numbers yet. This 200,000 number includes data from countries like the UK or US who are only counting confirmed covid-19 deaths. We know that deaths outside hospital make up about half the total, so we'd expect about 400,000 deaths.
The death counts rise extremely quickly, but also drop quickly as well. The total amount of deaths is represented by the area of under the graph, not the maximum. This is a tall, but narrow spike.
Also, bear in mind that you're being very selective with your data: you're picking out one of (the?) most densely populated centers, which also happens to be an international travel hub
There isn’t any reason to believe the virus kills a resident of NYC any easier than it kills a resident of Kansas if either is infected with it.
NYC is an excellent example to look at precisely because of what you said - it’s a dense population center and international travel hub, so it was seeded with quite a few coronavirus cases early on and unfortunately the virus seems to have infected up to 20% of the residents of the city (as shown by a new serology survey), despite social distancing having begun mid-March.
Other regions outside NYC weren’t as affected in terms of mortality, and we have no indication that’s because of anything other than that not as many people outside NYC fell ill with the virus.
The drop in deaths after the spike is because of data reporting (deaths are commonly revised upward as the data trickles in) and also because 6 weeks of social distancing and school closures would have greatly reduced the spread of the virus, this is just common sense as we know the virus spreads through physical proximity of an infected person with non-infected persons, and social distancing has greatly reduced the number of those situations.
The infection rate relevant insofar as it means the population will approach 100% infection [1],- and subsequent immunity or death - faster than other regions. Densely populated areas like New York will have a sharp spike and sharp decline. Loosely populated areas like Kansas will see a slower, steadier rise but also a slower and steadier decline. Social distancing makes areas behave more like rural areas, by virtue of limiting contact. But the same number of people are going to get infected eventually until herd immunity is achieved.
Faster infection doesn't directly result in higher total fatalities, unless medical care lacks capacity. This is a bigger problem for places like New York where the infection rates did put significant burden on healthcare facilities. On the flip side, places less dense than NYC can go without restrictions and this will not impact the overall health outcomes.
Deaths nation-wide have peaked more than a week ago. Deaths among developed countries have also mostly peaked over the last few weeks. Testing almost always under counts, both by virtue of not counting asymptomatic people, and by delays in forming antibodies in the infected. The latter also affects random studies. New York's 20% indicated infection rate likely means that the infection rate today is approaching the 50% or more required to achieve herd immunity.
1. To be more specific, it's estimated that the virus will spread to 50-70% of people before herd would diminish the ability of the virus to spread much further.
> New York's 20% indicated infection rate likely means that the infection rate today is approaching the 50% or more required to achieve herd immunity.
Yes, if by approaching you mean at least twice the number of people who have already died from the virus would have to die to achieve this, since 20% is less than half of 50%. I’ve seen scientific experts estimating that with this specific virus, due to its high R0, 50-70% is not the threshold for herd immunity anyway and it could be up to 84% or higher (Polio = 80%, Measles = 95% thresholds, for comparison). That could mean up to 4x the amount of deaths we’ve already seen.
The total number of people who would be affected by a herd immunity strategy could also be changed by a social distancing intervention around the time the threshold is reached. Otherwise, models indicate there would be an overshoot and a higher % of people would end up being infected than is necessary for herd immunity. No country or region seems to have reached this threshold yet though since they all engaged in social distancing first. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1252078649827667968
The other option would have been to do what several countries in the Asia Pacific region did - Taiwan, Vietnam, and apparently China, for instance. Instead of allowing the virus to run free, they have worked toward eliminating it within their borders. Many lives will be saved if that plan can succeed and they can avoid a “herd immunity” result until a safe vaccine is available to provide the herd immunity.
The R0 of Measels is 10-3x as high as COVID-19, at 12-18 as compared to 1.7 to 5. The total number of people affected to achieve herd immunity is fixed. Distancing reduced the rate at which people get infected. And contrary to what you claim, several countries are not engaging in social distancing. And they're not experiencing death rates several times higher than the US.
Where much of the western world is seeing cases peak, China has been seeing them rise again [1]. The idea that the virus has been eliminated is incorrect. China aggressively flattened its curve, but concluding that they will eliminate infections without herd immunity is not a certainty at this point.
One of the comments made in the video (referenced in the article as well) is
"We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses."
Since early Feb we've seen ~54K deaths from Coronavirus alone (excluding influenza deaths) [0]. The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
The data regarding number of deaths is severely tainted though. Many doctors have claimed(this is also mentioned in the OP video) that their administration pressures them for including COVID-19 in causes of death.
But in reality, the number of excess deaths compared to the average year, or compared to last year, is well above the counted number of COVID-19 deaths. Anecdotal claims about deaths being miscounted as COVID-19 don’t really stand up to this.
The level of deaths/week we are seeing is like nothing that has occurred in decades of recorded vital statistics. (The 1968 flu pandemic shows on the 2nd chart, but is small beans compared to COVID).
For those that are paywalled, in New York the excess deaths of 6 times normal. You can't make that go away by claiming normal deaths are being misclassified.
There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. It seems unlikely that we actually have fewer heart attacks, but people are scared of the hospital - so don't go and are more likely to die.
I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it is something important like medical care.
On the flip side I saw a short interview with a UCSF doctor that went to help out in New York where mentioned the hospital converted their cafeteria into a COVID19 ward. Not just in case but because it was full of patients on vents.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
> I also saw a medical worker saying that if someone dies before testing, that will be counted as a COVID death[1]
But this is what happens for flu too. You want to count them using the same methodology. You either use confirmed cases (Covid-19 kills more people than a bad flu year, and yes we do test for flu); or you use confirmed and suspected cases (again, covid-19 kills more than a bad flu year); or you use excess mortality (and this year we have huge increase in excess mortality).
There's no way to look at the data and come up with anything other than "covid-19 kills a lot of people".
I question your line of reasoning. I don't know if critical thinking correlates to emotional intelligence. Someone can be a genius in some regards and an idiot in others.
I honestly am not sure how to put the idea that this is not worse than the flu together with the death numbers that we've seen in New York City, Italy, and other places. Suppose the death rate had been inflated as Roussel et al. suggest, is there another more important metric by which to measure the severity of the pandemic or the necessary severity of reaction to a pandemic (though the death rate in NYC is definitely more than .2% because that much of the population has already died)?
Calling COVID-19 "just the flu" is certainly wrong, but it's still fair to draw comparisons between the two. The latest projected death estimate for the US is 60-80k, down from an original estimate of 100-240k. We're about a week past the peak death rate and the total death count is approaching 60k, so the revised estimate was likely too optimistic probably closer to 100k is more realistic. By comparison 80k people died of the flu last winter in the US (last winter was higher than the average flu season, average is apparently closer to 40-60k). 600k die annually of cancer, on average, as another point of comparison.
Even if the current estimate is undercounting by half, COVID-19 will still have killed 2x as many people as last flu season. It's inherently speculative to compare against the death toll of what would have happened without a total economic shutdown. Figures ranging from 1-2 million have been tossed around here on HN. NPR ran a story with a claim of 1.3 million. However the experiences of countries that did not adopt distancing restrictions or adopted much less drastic ones, including denser and more populated ones like Japan, are not seeing anything close to these death rates. We'll be able to glean better information once testing becomes more widespread and comparisons can be made more reliably, but the 10-20x increase in deaths without social distancing that was initially claimed doesn't seem to be happening.
It's not "just the flu", its "just 3-4x deadlier than the flu, and spreads twice as fast". How scared are people of the flu? How scared are people of COVID-19? The latter is way more than 3 to 4 times larger than the former. If you asked people in 2019 "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can stop a virus that will probably kill ~4x as many people as the last flu season[1]. Should we do it?" How many people would say yes? Probably not very many.
Phrase the same question differently: "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can halve cancer deaths for this year. Should we do it?" Again, people would balk at this.
This is why the coronavirus panic is dumb in a lot of people's views. People are experiencing fear that is orders of magnitude off from the actual threat. Much in the same vein that people fear shark attacks when they are incredibly rare.
1. This is assuming a death toll of a quarter million, all of which are prevented in this scenario by economic shutdown. In reality, we'd only be saving the delta between the deaths with the shutdown and without.
I think I can understand a bit why people are afraid of this type of content.
First note that this video is more than just "opinions that they don't agree with" as the doctors are claiming and framing as fact some blatantly false ideas (like their statistical nonsense where they extrapolate their testing data to get a .03 IFR).
Now note that a lot of people are using this video to justify their desire to not social distance. I know older at-risk people who are using this video to try and convince other older at-risk people to stop social distancing. What if some of those at-risk people were people you cared about? Then you might be afraid about these opinions.
Whether the answer is calling on Twitter and Youtube to curate people's tweets and videos, I'm not sure (and I want to believe the answer is no, but I'm very much not sure that it is).
One of the comments made in the video (referenced in the article as well) is
"We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses."
Since early Feb we've seen ~54K deaths from Coronavirus alone (excluding influenza deaths) [0]. The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
What happens to at-risk people lockdown ends? They could continue to shelter, but if the rest of the world isn't, anybody they make contact with will put them at higher risk due to decreased practice of social distancing.
A natural byproduct of a functioning society has always been otherwise avoidable deaths: car accidents, workplace accidents, flu deaths, etc.
The idea that we can hide out until the virus completely disappears is a fantasy. The only sustainable path forward is targeted lockdown and isolation for the most vulnerable along with mustering our energies for testing and treatment.
That’s not a good argument - we cannot possibly get to herd immunity with the infection rates we’re seeing under lockdown. Without loosening of the restrictions and a measured return to work, we’ll be stuck in Shelter mode for years before we get to 60+%...
Yes, actually. Here's an example, probably the best natural experiment we're going to see in this context. Five times more, depending on your idea of "order of magnitude".
Ah, this is hacker news - to me, an order of magnitude means double, 2^n where N=2 and N=>4, on deaths per 100k. Those are different countries, though, with much higher population density. This is the only case where culturally and demographically similar countries pursued different courses in a way that makes them eligible for direct comparison.
One can compare it to its immediate neighbors (Finland, Denmark, Norway) and get your order of magnitude right there. Norway: 206 deaths, population a bit over 5.8 million. Finland: 199 deaths, population a bit over 5 million. Sweden: 2,355 deaths, population a bit over 10 million. I'll let you carry out the division yourself.
Comparing to its geographical and cultural neighbors helps deal with differences in city structure, public health system, trust in government, population density, etc.
You’re comparing apples to oranges here - Sweden is pursuing a narrow tall spike before getting to herd immunity, and Norway and Finland are trying for a looooong shallow curve. The area under the curve is what counts, and we won’t know those numbers for months.
All of these European countries are more similar than different. What we see here is significant data that contradicts the conclusions in the article. In other words, it is possible that Sweden's policy is working.
The goal of the shelter in place is to “flatten the curve” so that the medical system is not overloaded. According to that article, they believed that their medical system could handle the load and has.
NPR reported that 1.3 million would have died without social isolation in the US. This is 20x higher than the latest estimate. On hacker news I've seen people claim figures ranging from 1-2 million, to 3-6 million on the more extreme end.
Even if we take Sweden's case at face value this is still 1/4 the multiplier that people seem to think it is. Furthermore, Sweden is pursuing a strategy of herd immunity: let people get infected so that the populace becomes immune. They should see a higher rise in deaths, but also a faster decline as the virus runs out of viable hosts. A tall, narrow spike versus a wide, shorter curve. The area under the final curve is what we're looking for.
I am definitely on the lockdown side of things, and I think NYC especially bungled their response, but I also don't think this is a fair comparison- NYC is so much more densely packed.
There's lots of counfounding factors, especially since there are basically no countries with no restrictions (Sweden has the same level of restrictions as many US states, for example).
But in general, yes. Areas with stronger restrictions have significantly fewer deaths, and areas that enacted restrictions saw deaths drop by 3-5x already, with continued downward trends as opposed to upward exponential ones.
Early in the outbreak, Italy locked down cities in the North, but not the rest of the country. Areas just within the lock-down area fared much better than those just outside it.
New York has >50x deaths per capita as SF, which sheltered-in-place a week earlier (and which had been steadily moving in that direction for two weeks prior).
This could be a different story a year from now, where NY ripped the band-aid off and achieved herd immunity long before SF, and SF took a much longer time resulting in a longer economical slump and still similar deaths over a longer period of time.
I'm not saying it will be that way, but it's worth considering.
Sorry but there are other paths to containing the virus without resorting to draconian measures, especially when those measures are indiscriminate blunt instruments (for example applying same restrictions to urban and rural areas).
Sweden's first case with community spread was from the end of February, so it's been spreading for a month or two less than in, say, Germany.
Despite that Sweden has the same per capita infection rate and a per capita death rate of around 3x Germany's.
And that's still with some social distancing requests, there just isn't a stay at home order.
So yes, unless Sweden tightens restrictions, I'd expect to see it hit an order of magnitude harder than nations doing more restrictions, despite still having some.
This is not to mention that Japan's going through some problems right now too in various ways. Not only did they experience a spike in COVID-19 cases early this month due to lax measures, Hokkaido actually had to go into lockdown again because they lifted the shelter in place order and it resulted in an even larger second wave of cases.
The fact that we're delusional enough to think that we're somehow safe from the same thing occurring here is absurd. And this is in a country that's far better about following shelter orders and mask-wearing guidance!
There might be people who died from Covid-19 who weren't tested post-mortem, especially in February when the virus was flying under the radar.
NYTimes had an article which showed a number of places around the world have had a surge in deaths compared to the same time period in previous years. And even if you subtract the known Covid-19 cases, there's still a sharp increase in the count.
That's the exact opposite of what's happened. The number of deaths being reported includes "probable deaths". It's even more than the actual confirmed cases.
Look at the graph on the last page for NYC for example:
Just because they are counting probable deaths does not mean they aren't also undercounting the true deaths. Given the rate of testing confirmed is clearly << true, so I don't see why there is so much objection to using some form of probable deaths. And I haven't seen any legit claims that the specific mechanism for determining probable deaths used in NYC is net overcounting.
Excess death data so far suggests that they are indeed undercounting true deaths. While it is certainly possible lockdown has caused some additional immediate deaths, it is also likely other deaths (eg decreased car accidents) have gone down. So it will require further analysis once this is all said and done and more data is available, but my money is that the US has undercounted deaths thus far.
Well the flu deaths are all counted as probable deaths, what you call "confirmed cases" for flu deaths is at least an order of magnitude lower (in Germany in the 2017/18 flu outbreak it was a couple of hundred, while the outbreak is typically blamed for around 25000 deaths in that year, based on statistics).
To highlight the spike in deaths being significantly higher than even the worst flu over the last years look at the data from Euromono https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
It's even worse if one considers that so far the deaths have been quite localised compared to e.g. the flu.
Their charts also show how mild the last few flu seasons were. I assume during that time people aged and became ready to be reaped by the next big flu or coronavirus.
> The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
those deaths are after the seasonal flu is heavily vaccinated against. in 2017-2018, flu vaccine generation was at a record high [0] (in the US).
its heavily vaccinated against (with many sectors like military and healthcare requiring vaccination) exactly because its dangerous.
isnt this a normal flu? what would happen if we stopped producing normal flu vaccines? in other words, what if a new flu came out that ignored our current vaccines - a novel virus?
Exactly - there's so many people spreading this conspiracy theory bullshit and it's completely farcical even at a glance. Like do they think it's normal during flu season to have to bring in tens of refrigerated trucks to act as temporary morgues? [1]
The pattern is so transparent too - telling us to listen to "both sides", and implying we're being biased when we dismiss obvious misinformation. I can't help that the American right is so detached from reality.
There's a global pandemic. This bullshit will literally kill people. YouTube is a private company, and they have every right to remove this from their system.
Just because someone is a “doctor” doesn’t mean they are a reputable, trustworthy source of information. For example, there are doctors who promote the idea that hydrogen peroxide can cure cancer, and that tens of thousands of dollars worth of antibiotics can cure “chronic Lyme disease”. It seems absurd with how hard it is to go to medical school and get a license, but people come out the other side with the same intent to defraud, manipulate, and con people out of their money.
But of course people who want to believe what they say will eat it right up and point to their credentials as proof of what they believe.
In can go both ways, that's right, which is why we tend to trust the larger collection of people who have also done more to verify and support their claims. Two doctors in a YouTube video with anecdotal evidence that contradicts what the rest of the medical establishment says doesn't bode well for their believability.
True honest belief backed by data that is hard to disprove.
We have a million cases and 55k deaths even with shutdowns. Is it that hard to figure out the rest?
> Two doctors in a YouTube video with anecdotal evidence
The video was a news conference from Dr. Dan Erickson, who along with Dr. Artin Massihi, own the largest COVID testing site in Kern County, Accelerated Urgent Care, California. They have done more than half the testing there. It wasn't some random joe making claims.
Also there are doctors who have a strong incentive to stop the shut down because they own a few urgent care clinics that are having financial troubles during stay-at-home orders. And still more, there are doctors who don't have good reasoning skills.
> What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6%
> Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.
Idiotic (and, yes, such an error IS idiotic) fumbling with statistics is displayed on a daily basis.
It doesn't matter what 'side' you are on: idiots abound.
Doomer fallacies:
Charts showing exponential growth of positives, without taking into account the exponential growth of tests...
Flu-Bro fallacies:
Antibody surveys that don't take into account false positives and make no mention of the expected number of positives in a population (both needed to make ANY sense of the results.)
Doomer fallacies:
No distinction between dying 'with' versus dying 'from'.
Flu-Bro fallacies:
Relying on death counts from the Chinese Communist Party.
Doomer fallacies:
Comparing 'positive' test rates between populations and countries with utterly different criteria for administering tests.
etc.
One thing you can count on, though: You will usually get a downvote on Hacker News if you deviate from the mainstream.
> One thing you can count on, though: You will usually get a downvote on Hacker News if you deviate from the mainstream.
Previously you were in a discussion with me arguing with great confidence that the virus outbreak would be a distant memory in two months. I just looked it up; it was 61 days ago.
You were using terms like "chicken littles" then. I'm all for reading different viewpoints, but if you're going to throw around insults like "doomer", you're not likely to get a civilised discussion going.
Well, don’t known about your neck of the woods, but things are opening up here in two days.
So, so I was a few days off in my estimate.
Statistically insignificant deaths, no overwhelmed hospitals, no body bags in the hallways or rationing of ventilators. No millions of deaths now any other of the nonsense being predicted here two months ago.
The talk now, as evidenced by the front page, is other topics... stimulus checks and the like.
Thank you, logged in to upvote this.
These docs are committing basic errors.
6.6% infected has to be wrong. That just shows we're not testing enough to see the true, much lower, number. It's also biased because we're not randomly sampling--instead we're testing people that are already showing symptoms.
Then when that inflated number goes in the denominator, it makes it look like the fatality rate is much lower.
It very well could have been. As someone pointed out in another comment, these guys talk very strongly about how someones "opinions about the data" might change when they aren't getting a paycheck. These two guys co-own several urgent care clinics are and thus probably suffering due to Covid-19 shelter-in-place orders.
This is taken out of context. Those doctors were using aggregate testing and mortality statistics in New York and California and extrapolating. Sample sizes in the hundred of thousands. This Tweet is taking an anecdote about what they were seeing in their own practices out of context.
> "If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu," Erickson said. "And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545"
For comparison, 1 million Americans (50x less) have had covid, and so far 59,225 have died (1.4x more) [0]. Their conclusion is that this is no worse than the flu, even though those numbers show it being more than 60x more deadly.
edit: Bringing this up from lower discussion: Even if you assume 10x more cases than reported, with 2x observed excess deaths [1], that's 10 million people sick and 100,000 dead; 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.
Yeah sorry I only have access to data that exists, as mentioned in the original comment.
Weird how no one who brings up under-reported cases has any opinion about under-reported deaths, since the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify.
the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify.
Find any serious expert who does not believe that. Estimates have always been that cases are underreported by 10-20x, and that's consistent with recent serology tests.
From this source [0] it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus. If you assume deaths would decrease with less people driving / going in public, that could be even more.
Cases are obviously under-reported. I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.
Even if there were 10x as many cases, that would be 10 million people and 100,000 deaths (based on the above 2x excess number). That's 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.
From this source it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus.
Sure, that's plausible.
I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.
That's not plausible. The current case fatality rate (known deaths divided by known cases) is 5.7% according to https://infection2020.com/#. Nobody seriously believes that 5% of infected people end up dying; the most pessimistic estimates are between 1 and 2 percent. (Which would of course still be extremely bad).
To your point, cbc reported this week that some ~25 people are suspected of dying due to postponed heart surgeries. Not a lot of people, but still sad.
This is lazy reporting. It's not wrong, but there's no insight here. No critical assessment of the claims made in the video nor the Youtube T&C, just a few clickbaity excerpts and some reaction comments.
Compare with this excellent piece by the CBC on a somewhat similar viral video in Canada:
Is CBC known to question the position of Canadian government, especially the majority opinion there? They are a state-owned entity, as far as I know, but I'm not Canadian so I know little about how independently they operate.
Like the British BBC and the Australian ABC, (and more?), the CBC is at arms length from the currently serving government, and was setup intentionally to be independent.
One of the reasons why the liberals (the Australian Conservative party) have been trying to gut and defund them.
They are much happier with the murdoch press, who had headlines like "vote this bastards out" (don't remember the exact phrase but it was direct like that) as a headline some years ago arguing to vote out the Labour government.
It's always interesting to see how some people always argue that news sources should be neutral and report only on facts if there are some left leaning opinions published, but completely ignore the blatant electioneering that goes on in the murdoch press.
Living in Canada for about two years, so make whatever of my opinion. They seem very fond of the current government, they remind me of US media with Obama but way more subdued.
But that misses the point. The very fact that a few people at Google/Youtube have the power to censor whomever they want for whatever reason they choose is a problem in itself.
Are the doctors in the video saying untruths or misrepresenting data? I think what they said in the video was eminently reasonable. But perhaps I'm wrong. Luckily we have the freedom to publicly critique their claims - assuming our critiques aren't censored by major internet companies - which is how falsehoods and untruths should be dealt with, not with censorship.
Is this an honest comment or one you hope won't be challenged? There are NO video hosting services with the popularity or reach of YouTube, by a very long shot. Customers of ours have lost their entire livelihood because content that was present on YouTube for a decade was suddenly politically incorrect and their accounts got banned.
That wouldn't be the case if they had more than one reasonable option.
There are hundreds if not thousands of video sharing platforms. Plus a shared web host cost very little, and there is always BitTorrent too. No one is forcing anyone to use YouTube for videos. Anyone that lost their livelihood because of YouTube should have read the TOS.
So in order to have a business, you believe that you should have to cater to everyone regardless of what they do or say because otherwise you are censoring them?
> There are hundreds if not thousands of video sharing platforms.
You keep trying to gloss over the fact that RandomVideo has nowhere near the size or reach of YouTube. Monopolies DO NOT REQUIRE zero competitors, that has never been part of their definition. Some videos on YT have BILLIONS of views. There's literally no meaningful competitor.
Yep. The video was a news conference from Dr. Dan Erickson, who along with Dr. Artin Massihi, own the largest testing site in Kern County, Accelerated Urgent Care, California. It wasn't some random joe making claims.
Imbalance. There has always been the assumption in media that all sides will have their champions, and this has traditionally been the case.
Unfortunately that no longer holds as certain entities have a stranglehold on online communication.
Perhaps the free market will fix this. Perhaps not. Are we willing to allow a small cadre of like minded individuals manipulate the internet in the meantime?
I believe that's an intolerant situation and am not willing to wait.
> Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time.
And that's why newspapers are classified as publishers and therefore are able to be sued. "Platforms" like YouTube are can't be sued because they are supposed to act like platforms - which they are not. Right now YouTube is acting like publishers while using the advantage of being called a platform. This is the Communications Decency Act section 230.
That would mean compelling them to host all content, including child pornography and calls to commit terrorism.
That is clearly nonsense.
The CDA doesn’t say “in order to not be liable you must host everything regardless of what it is” it allows you to host potentially anything that is uploaded without being considered directly liable for that (which would be far more censorious)
Ok, pornography then, that’s legal. Content that promotes terrorism is (to my understanding) not illegal, because that we shut down all those freedom loving “militias”.
> One of the first legal challenges to Section 230 was the 1997 case Zeran v. America Online, Inc., in which a Federal court affirmed that the purpose of Section 230 as passed by Congress was "to remove the disincentives to self-regulation created by the Stratton Oakmont decision".[8] Under that court's holding, computer service providers who regulated the dissemination of offensive material on their services risked subjecting themselves to liability, because such regulation cast the service provider in the role of a publisher. Fearing that the specter of liability would therefore deter service providers from blocking and screening offensive material, Congress enacted § 230's broad immunity "to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children's access to objectionable or inappropriate online material."
[. . .]
> Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44, 49-53 (D.D.C. 1998).[71]
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
Pretty sure you can't successfully sue a newspaper for printing an interview where misleading facts are promulgated either. They may dispute those facts or choose not to publish the interview, but if the newspaper prints the interview as is, you can't win a lawsuit over the interviewee having the data wrong. Likewise, a newspaper's editorial page is free to post incorrect opinions, or not, according to their editorial discretion. Are there any instances you're aware of where newspapers were successfully sued for incorrect reporting, except in the case of slander?
It's that youtube, reddit take on more of a public forum than TV, radio at least that was the feeling in the past.
The idea that anyone can be a content creator is, it's supposed to be as neutral as possible. Let the world battle it out against itself. Once you start taking sides of opinions (as opposed to legal ones) then you become a content curator.
For better or worse, America was built on the idea that I can have an absolutely stupid idea and that's my right. We'll fight to my death but it is my right to hold said stupid idea and voice it with youtube being my megaphone.
That's a core tenant of free speech and youtube was supposed to be able to help that. Now they're taking sides and it's not comforting
> America was built on the idea that I can have an absolutely stupid idea and that's my right.
Was it though? First Amendment says:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”
Until YouTube joins the Senate, I think they’re fine doing whatever they want.
> Until YouTube joins the Senate, I think they’re fine doing whatever they want.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the American government contains the same kind of people that are in governments the world over and throughout history. And governments have always attempted to suppress speech: that's why the First Amendment was written.
Given Snowden's revelations, can you be sure that Youtube's censoring is simply a business decision by executives and not a result of government influence? How would things be different if the government were pressuring the big platforms to squelch speech?
It's certainly their right under ownership laws to censor on their platform. But just because it's your legal right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The question isn't "do social media platforms have the right to censor?". The question is, "given social media platforms have the legal right to censor, should they censor?".
The bill of rights is a legal document, and it can only govern the actions of government. But I don't think that there's any debate that the first amendment came about because the founding fathers believed free speech was an inalienable human right. I don't think the founding fathers would say that inalienable rights are suddenly alienated because you put a corporation in charge of your communications platform.
Do you believe free speech is a human right? If so, then why do you care when it's violated by a government, but not care when it's violated by corporations who are arguably more powerful in the field of communication?
Are bookstores required to stock every book ever published?
Are fraud and defamation free speech?
Must newspapers post every classified ad submitted to them?
Is medical advice free speech?
Are government clerks required to serve verbally abusive clients?
No, no, no... there are plenty of examples where the right to free speech is found to have limits. Especially when that speech violates other freedoms.
You have the right to make videos and distribute them. You do not have the right to compel anybody to watch them, receive them or redistribute them. A platform such as youtube has the right to curate -- otherwise it would be a useless mass of SEO'd spam.
Nothing's stopping you from making ChanTube, GabTube, or whatever you find "acceptable". But, if it gets popular, be prepared to take down illegal content, filter spam, get sued by copyright holders, etc. until it looks a lot more like youtube than you intended. Or, y'know, break under the weight of the consequences of harmful speech without substantial ad income since most advertisers won't want to associate with your toxic platform.
You're right: this is a great example of the free market not solving a problem. Which is only a relevant point if you think the free market is the only way to solve problems.
A decentralized video platform not under the control of a centralized company would bypass all the issues you mention. There are technological challenges, but we've made slow progress toward solutions over the past few decades.
Did you actually read the post you're responding to? I'm confused on why you would view this as a response to what I said.
Again, the question isn't "do social media platforms have the right to censor?". The question is, "given social media platforms have the legal right to censor, should they censor?".
If you don't understand that there might be reasons to do something beyond legal obligation or profit, you're not equipped to participate in this conversation.
> Did you actually read the post you're responding to?
> ... you're not equipped to participate in this conversation.
Please review the site guidelines and take a more charitable approach to this conversation. There's some irony that your argument around ideologically pure free speech is punctuated by insinuation that I should self-censor because I'm not ideologically pure enough.
I provided a handful of reasons where speech can do harm, and where forced publication impinges other rights. I'm saying that yes, "platforms" (which are also publishers / promoters / marketers due to features such search, recommendation, featured content etc.) have an obligation, ethical or legal, to take certain content down. In the case of spam, that content is taken down or shadowbanned for the greater good. That's a free ethical choice, not a legal obligation.
By all means, there are cases where publishers should resist external pressure to censor, and I fully agree that Congress shall make no law. But youtube isn't the government. They have a right to curate the content that they distribute that is just as important as your right to produce and self-publish your content.
> There's some irony that your argument around ideologically pure free speech is punctuated by insinuation that I should self-censor because I'm not ideologically pure enough.
I said, "[J]ust because it's your legal right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do."
Sure, you're allowed to say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean saying it was the right thing to do. Saying that you said the wrong thing isn't ironic: it's exactly what one would expect given what I actually said.
There can be no irony with regards to my argument around ideologically pure free speech, because I didn't make any such argument.
Additionally, there's a difference between me censoring you by force, and me asking you to say things that are relevant.
> I provided a handful of reasons where speech can do harm, and where forced publication impinges other rights.
I never suggested forced publication, so these cases are not a response to my post.
> They have a right to curate the content that they distribute that is just as important as your right to produce and self-publish your content.
I specifically said that YouTube has this right. I said, "It's certainly their right under ownership laws to censor on their platform."
> For better or worse, America was built on the idea that I can have an absolutely stupid idea and that's my right.
> That's a core tenant of free speech
I'd disagree heavily with this assessment based on these two points.
The founding fathers drew much of their inspiration from Hobbes who wrote that liberty involved ceding some "sovereign power" (liberty) to a state so that we could be free to do things without worrying about survival of the fittest.
I believe it was Jefferson that was vehemently against government officials making false claims / lying...which is a limitation of free speech, but results in a net surplus of free speech.
The idea that all speech should be free is a fairly ignorant one.
> and voice it with youtube being my megaphone.
And this is ABSOLUTELY against any sort of semblance of the ideas America was founded on. YouTube is a private platform. They can (and SHOULD) police their speech, because it is a private platform.
YouTube is ultimately socially responsible for the outcomes of what people say on it's platform. If someone is denying or minimizing a VERY REAL and VERY SERIOUS global pandemic, YouTube had a social obligation to curtail their free speech.
> If someone is denying or minimizing a VERY REAL and VERY SERIOUS global pandemic
Look, most people on HNews agree with you, myself included. That stupid speech and stupid acts are costing very real lives.
But the whole point of this thread is that protected speech does cost lives as well. That we should be debating, identifying and responding to bad/poor speech. It should not be simply removed.
> YouTube had a social obligation to curtail their free speech.
Put a banner up. Identify it with Mr Yuck sticker. Don't remove it as if it never existed. That's dangerous, no?
If you don't believe it's dangerous, is it because the thing that's being censored is in your favor/belief/alignment?
Tomorrow, if Youtube said, "We'll remove all content that does not agree with the POTUS." That's only a few letters away from the WHO, right? POTUS is authority.
But that's insane. That's absurd.
That's what this debate is about. Censoring goes both ways.
> Put a banner up. Identify it with Mr Yuck sticker.
I would consider this a form of censorship as well, and I would absolutely support it.
> That we should be debating, identifying and responding to bad/poor speech. It should not be simply removed.
I suppose I could agree in this particular circumstance that YouTube having some sort of banner over this content would suffice, I think it's the same thing as just removing it.
> If you don't believe it's dangerous, is it because the thing that's being censored is in your favor/belief/alignment?
(I think you mixed your words up here, but I am interpreting this as you asking I'm ok with censorship if furthers my beliefs, if I'm wrong please correct me)
I'm ok with any censorship/curtailing of free speech that: results in a net-surplus of free speech, endangers others ("fire" in a crowded theater), or incites violence.
> Censoring goes both ways.
Censorship that is used to silence legitimate opinions that do not cause harm to others is a terrible thing and shouldn't exist. This has nothing to do with "both ways" or any "way"
> Maybe not in the author's circles, but in this particular scenario, that point was in dispute.
Sure, but that's not a useful thing to know. I recall when Ken compared saying that to something akin to the following conversation, which I'm reconstructing from memory:
Help! I've been bitten by a snake and I want to know if it's poisonous!
Unless you're eating the snake, it only matters if the snake is venomous.
Okay, so can you tell me if the snake is venomous then?
Not all snakes are venomous.
So the important point is not to dispute over whether any speech can be banned, but whether the speech in question fits one of the categories of unprotected speech:
Yea, you're right, but thanks for getting the spirit.
> Censorship that is used to silence legitimate opinions that do not cause harm to others is a terrible thing and shouldn't exist.
That's your belief because "legitimate opinions". What is "legitimate opinions"? That is the crux.
Your sense of justice is driving your opinions. Someone else's is going to be slightly different. Okay that's obvious, but the high level is how do you decide what is right/wrong? It's a spectrum, a very wide and diverse one. What's simply stupid vs outright dangerous?
> I'm ok with any censorship/curtailing of free speech that: results in a net-surplus of free speech, endangers others ("fire" in a crowded theater), or incites violence.
FWIW, that's a contradictory statement. You cannot have a net-surplus of free speech by censoring. They're mutually exclusive ideas. You can have a net-surplus of "good done" via censorship. But what is "good done"? More lives? More freedom?
All I'm trying to get you to see is that censorship is one of the most powerful tools that exist for a society. A concrete example is Singapore's fake news law.
> You cannot have a net-surplus of free speech by censoring
Of course you can. The government banning a platform from moderating content is a form of government censorship. Yet you believe that this would lead to more free speech.
Either a platform moderating is more free speech, or not moderating is more free speech. In either case, someone is being censored. So some form of censorship leads to more free speech.
> That's your belief because "legitimate opinions". What is "legitimate opinions"? That is the crux.
I'd say this was a poor choice of words. All opinions are "legitimate" in that people actually hold them and believe in them.
> What's simply stupid vs outright dangerous?
I don't think this is hard to measure, especially since we already have tests for what is protected speech and what is not in the US. For instance, we have federal laws that stop employers or landlords from exercizing their right to free speech when it involves discrimination against certain protected classes of people. Or slander/libel, or inciting violence.
> FWIW, that's a contradictory statement. You cannot have a net-surplus of free speech by censoring. They're mutually exclusive ideas.
This is not the case, as explained above and in an earlier comment. In the US we already have laws that limit free speech, yet result in a more free society.
> But what is "good done"? More lives? More freedom?
Yes, both of these things are good and would be considered good under just about any normative ethical framework.
> All I'm trying to get you to see is that censorship is one of the most powerful tools that exist for a society. A concrete example is Singapore's fake news law.
I agree with this fully, and would condemn anyone using censorship to remove free speech that isn't harmful. I advocate for similar positions in that I am generally ok with the government jailing people (which is an act of violence) that commit crimes. The right to jail people is an even more powerful tool than censorship, but most people are ok with this being done.
Pointing out something is false either has no effect, or makes people double down on wrong ideas / beliefs. Continuing to host said ideas will cause them to spread.
The responsible thing was removal, but perhaps with more transparency around how and why.
Conversely, America was also founded on the rights of private property, and the shareholders of Google has delegated the power to control their property to the management team at Google, who have then implemented this policy to remove this content from their property.
Its arguable just as important for the concept of America to let owners of private property not be deprived of their freedom and liberties.
> they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service. Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?
Newspapers, TV programs, and radio programs are publishers. In contrast, Youtube, Facebook, and other services like them are platforms. They are more like the theater building, the radio/TV station, or a telephone company. This gives them some legal protection against being held responsible for the conduct of their users. See [1]. Without this distinction, these services could not have taken off, because Youtube and Facebook would have had to sign off on each user's post.
But advancing technology is making it possible to police speech automatically. So the distinction between the publisher and platform is fading. Because platforms can regulate their users' speech now in almost real time, very cheaply, they are kind of forced to do it. Some speech is very hard to defend. The best, and easiest argument for allowing offensive speech on these platforms has been that the offensive speech could not be technically prevented without squelching a lot of acceptable speech. But now that argument is going away.
In what sense is a radio station a platform? Most commercial radio is just piped playlists from a corporate office and a few DJs on top. Newspapers don't have to publish your letter to the editor and your local TV station won't publish your sternly worded letter either...
> They aren't stopping them voicing their opinions or views... they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service.
It's certainly their right under ownership laws to censor on their platform. But just because it's your right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The question isn't "do social media platforms have the right to censor?". The question is, "given social media platforms have the right to censor, should they censor?".
Like it or not, these platforms make up a significant portion of how our society communicates, and if you believe that free speech is a human right that's important for a free society, I don't see how you can say that it suddenly doesn't matter because we put a corporation in charge of a huge portion of our communications.
I don't think that social media platforms should allow free speech because they're obligated to, I think that social media platforms should allow free speech because free speech has importance and inherent value.
> Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?
Newspapers, TV, and radio didn't sell themselves as platforms for conversation. They've always created their content (or paid someone else to create it) and curated it. Op/eds and viewer/listener calls are only a small fraction of the service these media channels provide, and frankly, these are usually more valuable for the producers of the media than the consumers in most cases. And even op/eds and viewer/listener calls are curated, with no pretense of anything else.
Social media initially gained traction on the false idea that they were platforms where anyone could have a conversation. Many people (myself included) warned that we shouldn't be giving up so much of our communications to corporations, but here we are decades later and everyone is using these as communications platforms.
But the endgame is to have an organization, such as the AMA or the ABA, for the delegation of responsible judgment. Google and YouTube just grew up too fast without the FCC catching up, but in a society where we felt that Google and YouTube shouldn't be in a position of deciding whether youths might come into contact with swear words, that ultimately means we want delegation to another trustworthy body such as the FCC.
In this case Google choose the WHO. We can argue that there's a better choice on the table, but what?
How is it fundamentally dubious? If you don't trust Google to make a category of social or moral judgments, you're either trusting the market or you have another institution do the job.
Or you could just not do the censorship in the first place and give people the freedom to make their own personal judgments whenever they’re presented with conflicting perspectives.
You’re assuming that some global institution has to be The Arbiter Of Truth because common people are too stupid to think for themselves and I find that assumption disgusting.
> Or you could just not do the censorship in the first place and give people the freedom to make their own personal judgments whenever they’re presented with conflicting perspectives.
> You’re assuming that some global institution has to be The Arbiter Of Truth because common people are too stupid to think for themselves and I find that assumption disgusting.
The market is the sharpest vote the people may give for companies. Next would be holding businesses liable, which Google is in various ways. If Google is accountable for the content it serves, and it is in various ways, then that is the people's will in motion.
I find it alarming that you think you understand my thoughts without getting into a conversation with me, to the point of announcing your disgust over a forum.
If Google is liable, then HN will be liable for comments, and any website with user submitted content will die except Google, which has the money to fight lawsuits.
> I find it alarming that you think you understand my thoughts without getting into a conversation with me, to the point of announcing your disgust over a forum.
You’ve been expressing your thoughts on that same forum, and if I’ve misunderstood them I am sorry, but as far as I did understand them I am disgusted by them. You are free to clarify anything you think I have misunderstood, of course. But I would advise you to be more careful publicly sharing your thoughts on any forum if you’re going to go clutching pearls at how they are received. Failing that, let me clarify that I am merely disgusted at what you actually wrote, which may have nothing to do with the ineffable inner workings of your mind.
Did you not mean to imply, as a premise, that Google (specifically YouTube) should be censoring user-submitted content on the basis that it disagrees with the “responsible judgment” of some institutional authority? If so, please inform me what you meant in the first place. Because even in the best of faith I can’t find any other way to interpret your comment.
Specifically:
> If you don't trust Google to make a category of social or moral judgments, you're either trusting the market or you have another institution do the job.
If someone posts a video on YouTube, anyone who watches that video will make their own “social and moral judgments” about the content of that video, and in most circumstances that’s enough for me. Why are you assuming that some “institution” will inevitably make those judgments for us, and decide based on those judgments whether we’re allowed to see the video in the first place? Why is that something you accept, and seemingly advocate? Because that is the premise that I question, reject, and express my disgust at.
It's fine to have a trusted organization to make decisions. It's not fine to place that organization above all criticism.
I think their statistical methods are suspect and likely wrong. I don't think they should be censored and the act of censoring them is actively harmful if you don't want people taken in by misinformation, then we need to actively produce good information. There is not and cannot be some way to absolve a free society of that burden. Censorship only helps to convince people that you know you're wrong and you're hiding from criticism. This is especially bad when you're right.
having an independent organization does not imply being above criticism. even the government is not above criticism. what matters is how likely it is that the criticism will actually result in a change if there was a wrong decision made.
as it stands, google is already above all criticism because they are to big to be approached by any individual wronged by their decisions. an independent organization would be much more approachable, even if that approach ends up being a lawsuit.
any other organization would be better. the key issue is to remove the financial incentive from the decision. google as a profit making entity needs to not care either way. it can only do that when the responsibility for the content is out of its hands.
any third party would be easier to approach, even if they need to be sued to see the error of their ways (if there is a decision in dispute).
ideally such an institution is directly answerable to the public and to lawmakers for their decisions and it could be properly funded to handle those decisions.
such an institution could work with multiple companies, especially smaller ones who can not afford this amount scrutiny to their content, and who would already are affected by the ever increasing requirements to police content.
> But public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.
> The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates in reality are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.
> In a rare statement late today, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”
Many studies across the world are showing infection rates for Covid-19 are far higher than official numbers indicate. These studies appear to support the spirit of their statements.
AFAIK, there is not a single study that "[shows] infection rates for Covid-19 are far higher than official numbers indicate". There is no place in the world (again, afaik) that is attempting to report the number of infected people, all the "official numbers" are roughly either "confirmed infected" or clinically-confirmed infected. All health experts (as far back as early january when we just had numbers from Wuhan) were saying that the actual number of infected will be much higher than those confirmed infected. There are a lot of studies that indicate that those experts are correct (and I am, maybe unfairly, assuming that those are the studies that you are misrepresenting).
Confirmed infected is being used for the mortality rate. Confirmed infected is not being updated to take advantage of serological data which shows percentage prevalence tens of times higher than the official confirmed count.
If we were talking an order of double, I think people would be a bit less ruffled. We're not though. We're talking 50-85 times in places like Santa Clara.
ofc you shouldn´t trust experts wtf!!! Blindly trusting someone because they have a piece of paper on their wall? are you nuts? What is it with people and willingly accept argument from authority just because there is a PhD or MD next to the name?
Make your arguments, present your data, and let us peel through it and see if all works out as it should or if it is all just a bunch of bullshit. I don´t give a fuck if you are an expert or not. I care about ideas and results. Experts can go fuck themselves for all I care. I care about truth not some stupidly mind numbing notion of imbued institutional authority!
That´s pure kaka. That´s how it has worked for the past 50 years at most and this revisionist history in favor of some high and mighty self-serving position is a no-go for me.
In all these cases, the medical experts were right and trustworthy, and the politicians and public were WRONG AND MISLEADING, and that resulted in more deaths.
"Experts" in 2020 are merely washed up mathematicians and Ethiopian politicians who have no incentive to be correct, only to speak, and who have spent a lot of time publicly arguing with each other and producing completely contradictory advice and predictions. Of those predictions they all had severe and deep flaws, like the Imperial paper that assumed hospital capacity was entirely static and couldn't increase at all. That's an assumption any working nurse could have corrected immediately but the team responsible didn't bother asking them.
There are no experts in this disease, only people trying to control other people through false proclamations of authority.
The problem is that the people who made this video are by definition experts. Experts are often wrong and disagree, so if the public listens to the wrong experts and silence the right experts we have a problem. Therefore it is better to not try to decide which experts are right or wrong so we can silence them, since chances are that the people doing the evaluation are the ones in the wrong.
> The problem is that the people who made this video are by definition experts.
They are experts in an entirely different field.
You don't need any training in statistics, epidemiology, public health, etc. to be an urgent care doc. They're experts in diagnosing and fixing ailments (at an individual level) that don't require a full-blown ER visit or hospitalization.
Same with the death rate. Covid is most always a co-factor in the death along with other reasons. Like a smoker with emphysema who was dying anyway and the virus is the trigger. They really died from smoking their whole life. Another virus or bacteria could've killed them.
I don't understand what's wrong with the data they presented. That article doesn't explain it, it just says it's wrong. There applications of data make perfect sense to me, that's how I'd use the data they presented.
That article makes inaccurate statements like, "basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods" which is not true. There were 100% transparent about where there information was from and how they were presenting it.
> I don't understand what's wrong with the data they presented.
They took stats from a massively self-selecting population - people seeking out COVID-19 testing at their facilities - and extrapolated to the general public.
That's inexcusably dumb.
As the bit I quoted states, that's like "estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court".
Did you watch the video? That is not what they did. What you're describing is a brief anecdote they shared about what they were seeing on the ground. Their statistics are based on state level aggregates for New York and California.
People will always put their fingers in their ears and not read/watch the source because it is easier to bash someone than to actually do the work that may change your beliefs
Well, it’s also hard to watch the source video when YouTube goes out of their way to delete it. So here in this very thread, is a great example of the harms of taking down the content. It makes it hard to even have a discussion about its merits.
I don’t understand why YouTube couldn’t leave the video up, and put some kind of warning or interstitial advising of problems with the content. I would have problems with that approach too, but certainly less so than I do with the wholesale deletion of the video.
It isn't exactly what they did but it is fairly close. They consistently incorrectly extrapolate the covid positive test rate from a biased sample (biased by both the testing guidelines and self-selection) to the general population, not just for their county, but also for California, New York, the United States, Italy, Sweden and Norway.
They then use this to massively misrepresent the lethality of Covid 19.
State level data is collected using the exact same methods. In many places people with symptoms are told to self isolate until they have difficulty breathing etc. This makes state level data a highly biased sample.
There are a few population studies for very specific areas, but no widespread statewide sampling anywhere.
PS: The US has ~50,000 Coronavirus deaths. Assuming a very optimistic mortality rate of 0.5% suggests at most 10 million infections out of 330 million people or 3.3%. A higher mortality rate of say 5% would mean total infections are possibility as low as 0.3% of the US population.
I'm not saying these doctors are correct in their statistical extrapolations. What I am saying is the Kern County anecdote being spread around to discredit them by people who haven't even seen the video are practicing in the disinformation that they accuse these doctors of perpetrating.
I was including that for my optimistic 0.5%. South Korea with a younger population, good healthcare system far from maximum capacity, and very good but not perfect testing has a CFR of 2.3% and rising. Diamond Princess has 14deaths out of 712cases, while not a representative sample it’s still conformation that a high percentage of even young healthy people need hospitalization.
The biggest question IMO is how much we are undercounting fatalities. NYC lists Confirmed deaths at 11,820 plus Probable deaths at 5,395. They also add: Due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete.https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Your 'very optimistic mortality rate' makes a number of assumptions about the rate of asymptomatic cases, the population which experiences asymptomatic cases, etc. It ignores data coming out which suggest that interventions like ventilators may be harming more than helping.
Making any assumptions about the mortality rate with the abysmal state of testing in the US and around the world is guesswork.
Making assumptions based on the horrific codebase that's spawned our most cited models should also give anyone in software at least a twinge of anxiety.
Diamond Princess had a slightly older population but healthy population, tested everyone, provided good medical care. They still hit 14 deaths out of 712 infected or ~2% and only had 20% asymptotic cases. South Korea has very good testing, a younger than US population, similar rates of hospitalization to DP and a slightly worse mortality rate likely due to missing some people but having a more at risk population.
The US has an older and sicker population than SK, and in NYC an overworked healthcare system. So, a 1% US mortality rate discounted to 0.5% due to recent infections not having time to die is extremely optimistic. It would also mean testing was only discovering 10% of cases.
PS: Many more people are exposed without having sufficient infections to trigger long term immunity. But, it’s herd immunity or deaths/long term issues we care about making such cases irrelevant as their still at risk.
I watched the videos. Just like many others have said in this thread, the doctors took the percent of people who tested positive for covid and assumed that percent of people overall in the whole state had covid. Then they took the total number of deaths from covid, and divided that number by the population of the state.
Even if that’s true, what does it have to do with banning the video and preventing the public from making their own decision?
Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain. By picking and choosing like they’re doing, it leads one to distrust the company which will ultimately hurt them.
Come on. Rap videos are often grotesque but it’s entertainment, like a horror film.
This video was more like yelling fire in a theater. I’m willing believe the doctors were sincere, but they were gravely wrong, and their misinformation was endangering the public.
YouTube was correct to turn off the alarm they erroneously turned on.
Granted, YouTube’s method of throwing up a standard “violation of community guidelines” message is crude, and leads to suspicion. Then again, so was ABC’s editorial judgment. It’s a hard problem.
can you or anyone factually prove that they’re wrong? 99% of the internet and “experts” said HCQ is dangerous and ineffective, then it just came out that a leading group of ER docs say it’s effective in ~90% of cases.
The point is that even if they’re wrong, youtube and others are playing a dangerous Orwellian game and it’s going to harm their reputability in the end.
"Even if that’s true, what does it have to do with banning the video and preventing the public from making their own decision?"
Research done on fake news illustrates why ordinary consumers of news cannot be trusted to make informed judgements.
"Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain."
Exactly this. This is why it is irresponsible for a global platform to promote this tripe.
People should be able to see all the opinions of various experts; doctors in NYC, doctors in Minnesota. Just them on their merits and examine the evidence.
By pulling videos, YouTube/Google is saying they don't trust people to be able to discern anything or do research among several dissenting opinions. And yes, it's their platform and yada yada .. they still allow a lot of content to be uploaded and they have become the most typical/standard centralized source of videos.
I will admit, they might be right to not trust people ... at which point why do we even care about humanity anymore? Are those with more power and influence always going to think the rest of the world are sheep who can't think for themselves and need to be led around?
This time sets all kinds of dangerous prescients. I wish Orwell was still alive.
"People should be able to see all the opinions of various experts; doctors in NYC, doctors in Minnesota. Just them on their merits and examine the evidence."
Most people are not qualified to "examine the evidence" and make public health policy decisions. This is why we rely upon the experts. Otherwise you have measles outbreaks in Beverly Hills.
You mean the experts that said no human to human transmission? or the experts that called for maska being ineffective? or the experts that didnt know how to store and deploy resources as they needed? or the experts that miscalculated projected infection rates?
> You mean the experts that said no human to human transmission?
Perfect example, no expert said there was no human to human nor is there any chance of it. The only language close to that was "there isn't any proof of it now" which might have been informed by CCP misinformation.
Even though they were misinformed, any true expert should have known not to make any definitive statement either way. If you have such a quote, it was not made by an expert.
So doctors aren't experts in health now. That's what it's come to?
Do you think epidemiologists are? The people who have apparently never predicted a disease outbreak successfully, ever? Why are they experts but not these doctors?
And what makes YouTube employees believe they're qualified to decide who's right? They're experts in HTML5 video serving, not health.
Even doctors generally recognize that public health (of which epidemiology is only a part) is a separate domain of expertise. There are doctors who specialize in infectious disease who need some public-health training, but there's no reason to expect that e.g. a oncologist or trauma surgeon would know more than the average scientifically-literate person about a different profession.
> That article makes inaccurate statements like, "basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods" which is not true. There were 100% transparent about where there information was from and how they were presenting it.
I can vouch for their transparency. The speed with which I was able to see that their statistical methods were totally wrong was almost entirely due to their transparency. The only fact I had to find outside of what they said was the criteria for testing in the county for which they cited statistics, which I found at https://kernpublichealth.com/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-...
"Testing is NOT indicated for asymptomatic persons."
The doctors' statistics in the quote below don't work because of sampling bias.
“In Kern County, we’ve tested 5,213 people and we have 340 positive COVID cases. Well, that’s 6.5 percent of the population. Which would indicate a widespread viral infection similar to the flu,”
Did you watch the video or are you just basing this on out of context quotes? What you're quoting was a brief anecdote about what those doctors were seeing on the ground. Their extrapolations are based on state-level aggregates in New York and California. Sample sizes of 300-650K patients.
They use the same logic for Kern County, California, and New York. Their logic is, that if you test N people and find M positive cases, that in the population at large you'll have an infection rate of M/N. This would be true if the N tests were performed on random members of the population. But because the tests are only performed when there's reason to suspect infection, M/N is a higher infection rate than in the population at large. Their inflated number for total infected persons makes the death rate appear smaller.
Thanks. 51 minutes is too long for me to watch. Anybody who knows of anything in there that addresses the sampling bias issue, please point me to how far in it is.
Because, I’m Youtube, why would I ever lie to you. I have your best interest in mind, and trust me, this shits gonna get us all killed if we watch this.
I did watch the video and I can safely say that these doctors make massive and very convenient statistic mistakes throughout.
Sample size doesn't help if the sampling method is biased. Even if tests were available to everyone regardless of symptoms, you would still have a selection bias that would skew the numbers. The only way to accurately estimate overall infection rates in the general population is to test a random sampling.
Then there is the "comparison" of Sweden (no lock down) and Norway/California. They mention the death counts and population of these countries in another attempt to show that the "number of cases is high and the number of deaths is small regardless of lockdown" but completely gloss over the fact that Sweden has more that 5x the covid deaths per capita that Norway and California have.
Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.
> Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.
This is the exact reason why it shouldn't be censored. Because if their science is bad then it needs to be available for people who know better to tear it to shreds.
If you take it down then the story can't be "this is why they're wrong" because what they said isn't available anymore, so a rebuttal isn't believable because you can't tell if it's an accurate representation of the original presentation.
So then the story becomes about censorship and you're making it all too easy for motivated people to spin a conspiracy theory about how these scientists are speaking truth to power and getting oppressed, even if they are in actual fact totally wrong.
Yet if you look at the comment sections for this video, there isn't anyone tearing it to shreds.
This isn't something I have been able to confidently form an opinion on; it's a hard topic. I think we will be strugging with how to balance bias, deliberate misinformation and freedom of speech for a long time.
But I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.
> I count several detailed criticisms of it just in this thread. Do none of them have a YouTube account?
I did post a rebutal in some of the duplicates I found on YouTube. YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.
So, given the (artificial) choice between leaving the video up as is and taking it down, I suspect that in this particular case, the practically beneficial choice for society (in the short term at least) is to take it down precisely because of how YouTube works as a platform and community.
> Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.
Yes, I am a big fan of free speech. However it has become increasingly clear that simply making speech as free as possible in as many places as possible is not enough (by itself) to solve the problems of misinformation, partisanship and radicalization that we are facing as a society. We can't just dismiss those problems, so as advocates for free speech, we need to find non-censorship ways to help solve those problems.
> YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.
This seems like a YouTube-specific problem that should have solutions not involving censorship.
I did watch the video. At about the 5-minute mark, they make a huge error in extrapolating the percent positive of tests to the general population (in California, 12% positive test rate). As many others have pointed out, that is an inexcusable error that leads them to an wildly erroneous conclusion about the mortality rate of COVID-19. Recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County and Los Angeles showed a rate around 2-4%, and those studies were criticized because those percentages are close to the levels of false positives one could expect in the antibody tests. So at best, the conclusions in the video are off by a factor of three, and most likely, more.
I'm not saying these doctors are correct in their statistical extrapolations. What I am saying is the Kern County anecdote being spread around to discredit them by people who haven't even seen the video are practicing in the disinformation that they accuse these doctors of perpetrating.
As I fully explained in a nearby comment, the logic in their Kern County anecdote is representative of their logic for California and New York statistics as well. I am not misrepresenting anything or practicing any form of disinformation.
> The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19.
I did watch it. Their extrapolations were wrong. You can't just multiply positivity rate found in a biased sample by the whole population. That's not a meaningful extrapolation. Then using that extrapolation to say the death rate is low is just building up the error even more.
And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.
That puts you in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop territory, where watching hours of video and an epidemiology and stats degree is needed to tease out the truth.
And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.
No, lockdowns are the public health hazard. The data is quite clear at this point that what's going on here is no worse than the flu. Here's a simple graphic from the UK to make that point clear:
And if you look at when lockdowns could have possibly started working given incubation and death lags, you'll see that most countries seem to have peaked before the lockdowns could have started working. Implication: they weren't responsible for the peak and decline.
But the more important point is that it's critical such things can be debated. Simply assuming you're right and anyone who disagrees is a "public health hazard" is totalitarianism. You won't have any ability to defend yourself, or even any right to, next time someone erases you because e.g. Trump declared your views to be dangerous.
Well, i don't know about the us you probably have more hospital beds than us, but in france it was absolutely criticla to enforce a lockdown at the time we did. Even with this timely lockdown, we still had to stop intubating >90 yo patients for two weeks (it's getting better). And bear in mind that only a part of one region (1/13th of France basically, not really true but...), not even the whole area, and all the hospital in the region (not the hot area) were so full they had to transfert arounf 20 patients abroad and hundreds to hospital in other regions. My cousin in Colmar, eastern France (SMUR chief) has transfered around 20 people to my other cousin (intensive care anesthetist) in western Brittany. If you have a map: its basically the longest East-West travel you can do in France. In Colmar they also had to close almost all of their non-maternity, non-urgency service, and the number of people dying of overdoses or of too much alcohol (don't have the english word sorry) is at least twice as high (we will have the true numbers in a few months).
Also i've said it here before, but young, healthy people who did not had to have invasive respiration (so no ICU) still got out of their sickness with lingering asthma, possibly caused by a pulmonary fibrosis. I found this [0] in English if you don't know what it is. In five to seven years (assuming we find a vaccine for sras-cov2 in two year) we will really start counting our dead, unless we find a non-chirurgical fibrosis cure.
> 33,865 COVID cases out of a total of 280,900 total tested--that's 12% of Californians were positive for COVID.
This would only be true if those tested were randomly selected. Even in the most optimistic Santa Clara County study prevalence was estimated at under 5%. 1
Why does the UW doctor's opinion supercede that of the doctors in the removed videos?
The answer of course is ideology. These are two experts giving two different opinions based on different sets of similarly poor evidence. The fact that a doctor goes against consensus does not necessarily mean he's wrong and it certainly does not warrant censorship, all else considered.
> The fact that a doctor goes against consensus does not necessarily mean he's wrong and it certainly does not warrant censorship, all else considered.
It's not the unpopularity of the views of the doctors in the video that makes them wrong, it is their complete misapplication of statistics. The analogy of “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” is very apt.
It may not mean that they should be censored, but at a minimum they deserve to be called out and ridiculed.
It has nothing to do with opinions, and it has nothing to do with ideology, except insofar as these two doctors were motivated by their ideology to profoundly misunderstand or misrepresent statistical sampling.
It’s not one side thinks this, the other side thinks that, it’s that their video is factually wrong, and in being wrong encourages dangerous behavior.
Really? Are you really so arrogant as to ignore that YouTube is far more likely to be making an ideological decision here?
An expert made a statement. YouTube went out of its way to find a doctor who supported YouTube's ideological slant and used that as justification for taking action.
This obliviousness. This is why we must restrict power. This is why we can't have nice things.
Do you really trust YouTube to make that decision? That's the whole point. I'm not actually interested in the credentials on either side - merely pointing out that YouTube is doing far more harm than good in choosing a side. Society would be far better off without their curation.
No, you claimed "an expert made a statement". I want to clarify. No expert made a statement on youtube. Two nonexperts made statements, and Youtube removed them, presumably at the behest of experts (like the WHO, whom youtube is using to set guidelines on removable content).
A doctor on the frontlines is an expert. He may not specialize in epidemiology or virology, but his credentials are sufficient that the difference between credibility between the scientists and the doctors is too small for youtube to reliably choose one over the other. YouTube is not an accreditation agency or an arbiter of credibility.
YouTube has no authority to suppress credible doctors from going against the consensus. The fact that this particular decision agrees with what the majority of us think is right doesn't mean that YouTube is right to choose.
Great, and the WHO is welcome to keep the doctors video off of their platform.
Ignoring ramifications of politicization, How many developments will be missed if we embark on a campaign to suppress all dissenting opinions?
You don't think a doctor on the front line is qualified to make inferences about the disease that he is literally treating en masse? You don't think direct observation and experimentation with hundreds of patients could provide valuable insight into the properties of this disease or potential working treatments and/or best practices? How far backwards are you going to bend to defend this position?
Again, the fact that this particular decision agrees with your preconceived notions does not mean that YouTube's emerging practice of choosing truth is good for society. The WHO is also not the only qualified body, nor is it a final authority, yet here YouTube is suddenly treating it as one and, conveniently, YouTube's political slant is aligned with this particular decision. If we allow this behavior, it won't be the last time that YouTube picks a winner and shapes the reality perceived by millions of people. This is a possibly unprecedented amount of soft power and it is being used without oversight or control by the society that is being influenced by it.
I'm not suggesting we make it illegal but educated citizens should be at least resistant to the idea, not welcoming of it because it happens to agree with their politics now. The same goes for Google and FB and any other platform that acts as a window to information - these corporations are not authorities and should not be gatekeeping information. Long term that's a far greater danger to society than COVID19.
> You don't think a doctor on the front line is qualified to make inferences about the disease that he is literally treating en masse?
About symptoms or specific treatment plans, perhaps. About government response? No. It's the difference between macro and micro scale approaches. The front line doctors are experts at mirco-scale treatment. Epidemiologists are best at macro-scale treatments. The two skillsets are not the same. An expert at one is not an expert at the other, and no amount of repeating that belief will change that.
> Again, the fact that this particular decision agrees with your preconceived notions does not mean that YouTube's emerging practice of choosing truth is good for society.
Correct. I just happen to believe that suppressing lies that can kill people if they believe them is also a good thing. Or do you think that "take Hydroxychloroquine, it's a miracle drug" should be posted on the youtube homepage?
> The WHO is also not the only qualified body, nor is it a final authority, yet here YouTube is suddenly treating it as one and, conveniently, YouTube's political slant is aligned with this particular decision
What is the political slant you're describing? The WHO, CDC, and pretty much every expert body on epidemiology in the world, in every nation, from Iran to Argentina to Germany to China are doing approximately the same thing. The political spectrums in those nations cross the gamut. Yet they're all following the same treatment plan for the pandemic response. What is the political slant?
> If we allow this behavior, it won't be the last time that YouTube picks a winner and shapes the reality perceived by millions of people.
They already do that. They're just doing so with a bit of morality instead of hoping that unmonitored algorithms will lead to the best outcomes for society.
> these corporations are not authorities and should not be gatekeeping information.
Information is relative. Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". So which is more in line with that mission: providing a platform for lies, or curating correct information?
Is "up is down" information? Or is it something else? I don't think lies (or perhaps less aggressively, falsehoods) are "information", they're something else. If the doctors are correct (they aren't, but assuming they were), they'd have evidence they could share and that actual experts would agree with. Then the expert consensus would change.
Either that or you think there's a worldwide conspiracy to keep us in our homes, hurting the economy and millions, or even billions, so that...as far as I can tell, the best guess is so that governments can replace the batteries in the birds. There's nothing for the WHO or CDC to gain by suppressing these guys. There's nothing for Google to gain by suppressing these guys. And yet, they do because it's morally right to keep people safe from disinformation.
>And yet, they do because it's morally right to keep people safe from disinformation.
This is literally why we have the first amendment. Because, as you say, information is relative; that also means it is relative in time. And we can only come to a correct consensus if we allow all voices to be heard.
This is an excellent example of a time not to suppress dissidents. The doctors on the front line are just as likely, if not moreso, to come up with potential treatments or policies, because this is happening in real time and the information arbitrage lends extra credibility to the doctor's words. Do you see how subjective this decision of censorship is? And any subjective decision is subject to bias, political or otherwise.
>There's nothing for Google to gain by suppressing these guys.
It's no secret Google leans left. It's no secret that protestors of the lockdown lean right. You don't see a conflict of interest here?
What if the WHO and CDC are in conflict? Who decides then? YouTube? What about platforms that are partly owned by China? Conflict of interest?
What about elections? You think it's OK for a platform like Google or YouTube to pull ads that fail "fact checks"? What about viral posts? You don't think it'll be a partisan shitshow?
If not then we have no reason to continue this discussion because we will not agree.
> It's no secret Google leans left. It's no secret that protestors of the lockdown lean right. You don't see a conflict of interest here?
No. I'd see a conflict of interest if this were a political issue. But it's not. Making something political by spouting a bunch of lies until people believe them doesn't change the science.
>What if the WHO and CDC are in conflict?
But they're not. So we're well into the realm of irrelevant hypotheticals.
> treatments or policies
Treatments, yes. Policies, no. Because as I keep saying, they're different things. You're comparing, in essence, the skills of a software engineer and a CEO. Drop either into the others' chair and they'll flounder.
> What about elections? You think it's OK for a platform like Google or YouTube to pull ads that fail "fact checks"?
> It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died.
> You don't think it'll be a partisan shitshow?
I mean, I expect that no matter what people will complain that it'll be a partisan shitshow. Given that like I said these policies already exist and I didn't notice any obvious political shitshow, only the usual suspects complaining, no.
> What about platforms that are partly owned by China?
They can make their own policies, and I'm free to use them, or not.
> This is literally why we have the first amendment.
And I fully support both the doctor's right to exercise it by spouting bullshit, and Youtube's right to exercise it by removing said bullshit from their platform.
I don't think you understand that in a reality with limited information, it is impossible for humans to know objective truth. And further you underestimate the degree of uncertainty regarding lockdown measures.
This uncertainty is an avenue for bias. I don't think you understand the dangers of giving a handful of people the power to censor and curate the material that reaches a majority of the eyes in the US. You'll change your mind when they bend against your own leanings though, I guarantee that. It's the spirit of the first amendment, because this is an enormous power that affects all of us, without our consent.
The CDC and the WHO were in conflict at one point regarding mask usage. As it happens, they are arguably in conflict today, as the WHO has praised Sweden's model which, in case you're not aware, is not a lockdown. So what now? Will you be expecting YouTube to remove any videos from the WHO suggesting people adopt the policy of Sweden?
How can you even put faith in authority right now after so many nations, organizations, hospitals, the world over, totally failed in responding to or preparing for this pandemic? And you think YouTube is in a position to choose? It's bad for society.
It's equally impossible for humans to know objective truth if all information is presented with no way to determine authority. If I present you with all possible 25 word sentences containing "covid-19", you have all of the conceivable information at your fingertips, but you can't draw any conclusions.
But that's mostly beside the point. No one is preventing these two doctors from determining the truth. If they think they have a breakthrough, they can present it in a paper, to other experts, who are capable of analyzing it.
> I don't think you understand that in a reality with limited information, it is impossible for humans to know objective truth. And further you underestimate the degree of uncertainty regarding lockdown measures.
Conventional news is far worse than Google both in terms of the things and, at least currently, in terms of reach. I'd much prefer if Fox news presented actual experts on subjects, instead of political pundits or "Dr. Phil" when discussing COVID-19. I am not and have not taken any political side anywhere in this conversation. I've been on the side of scientific consensus. I don't expect that will change.
> As it happens, they are arguably in conflict today, as the WHO has praised Sweden's model which, in case you're not aware, is not a lockdown.
Let's talk when the WHO releases official guidance to end lockdowns. Until then you're just trying to create conflict where there isn't any.
> How can you even put faith in authority right now after so many nations, organizations, hospitals, the world over, totally failed in responding to or preparing for this pandemic?
Because I trust the institutions of government (and their access to experts) more than I trust hucksters on the internet. While I don't expert the average person to be able to discern an expert from a huckster on the internet, especially due to the actions of certain politicians.
The point here is that youtube is not a harbinger of scientific truth. These doctors present their findings with their collected data to come to this conclusion that the according to them, this virus is not dangerous and the quarantine should end.
Does Youtube also censor videos where plumbers present an incorrect way to install a toilet that can lead to backflow and flooding.
The point to make here is that Youtube is NOT the New England Journal of Science and should not act like one for just one topic - Coronavirus.
If anybody feels that their data or interpreation of the data is incorrect, they should post their own video on Youtube, refuting their claims.
Instead what Youtube is doing is just silencing them.
Does Youtube also censor videos where plumbers present an incorrect way to install a toilet that can lead to backflow and flooding.
1) They probably would censor the plumber, if they received enough complaints about it, and 2) an incorrectly installed toilet doesn't have the potential to kill tens of thousands of people, whereas erroneous information about the danger of COVID-19 very well could. So they're not waiting for the complaints.
Is that analogy sincere? YouTube itself has channels, no? Youtube is the TV. Wouldn’t it be fair to say you can exercise editorial control over your channel, but television manufacturers shouldn’t come with it’s own defined restrictions on content?
It would suck if a firmware upgrade goes out to all LG TVs disabling certain content. It’s within LG’s right, but what a betrayal of the customer who was sold a non universal television.
The point here is that youtube is not a harbinger of
scientific truth.
The point to make here is that Youtube is NOT the New
England Journal of Science and should not act like one
for just one topic - Coronavirus.
If anybody feels that their data or interpreation of the
data is incorrect, they should post their own video on
Youtube, refuting their claims.
But this interpretation is wrong.
A scientific journal has a panel, which are qualified experts in the field or related fields, that read and pick up on statistical errors, and other errors, and decide whether or not to publish the paper. Youtube does not.
Peer review as a whole, means that your work gets assessed by experts, and they decide before publication if your paper is of the right quality to enter the journal.
'Peer Review' =/= 'Allowing everyone to post and the truth will be found out or agreed upon in the end'
'Peer Review' == 'Having your work assessed by equally or more skilled people, who then decide if your work is good enough to publish'
Youtube operates in a fundamentally different way to peer review, it allows anyone to post, then retroactively decides if that work meets guidelines. This means that not only is it not possible to immediately filter work that is submitted, it also does not go through proper assessment of it's validity by a panel of specialists and experts. Youtube could not operate with it's current business model using that method, and so is forced to choose another. Just because it's retroactive enforcement, doesn't mean that the terms of the service and guidelines are not in force, or should be considered censorship. Nobody is actually censoring these people, they are free to post their video literally anywhere else, but they broke the terms of the Youtube service.
As many other people have pointed out, the work produced and hosted on Youtube does contain errors, these are statistical errors that would have been caught had they submitted this to an academic journal, however the video's makers explicitly decidedin to publish it on Youtube. There is very little reason to do that, other than to market this information to others.
As this information is dubious at best, it is fundamentally and ethically irresponsible of them, as scientists, as medical workers who have taken an oath to do no harm, to publish this work on Youtube and to the public without going through the basic step that is peer review. The comments section does exist, but has no value, because you cannot count on the general public to be as informed in the subject matter as a peer review panel would be.
What about evidence that the Jews created and disseminated Covid-19? Should I be able to present that evidence even though it's flawed and full of incorrect data?
Youtube owns the platform, we allowed it to become the largest and most powerful platform but there are others out there. Youtube (and google, and bing) have no reason to have to host misleading, wrong, or hurtful opinions/websites.
Without remarking on the quality of the video in this specific instance I will note that Dr. John Campbell's videos were contradicting WHO advice while WHO was asleep at the wheel.
By the current standards, would they have been removed?
> Was he advocating a course of action that would cause people to die?
I thought the censorship was about the Coronavirus. There are a lot of videos that advocate a course of action that would cause someone, somewhere to die, that aren't being censored.
Doesn't the WHO advocate a course of action that will cause people to die? Of course they do, it is just that different people will die at a different time. It is more fuzzy and diffuse rather than a data driven counter.
There have been several lawsuits about this over the past few years and they always fail. Google is a commercial company and not a public institution. There are no first amendment protections here and they can remove any content they wish. The commonality of the platform does not make it a public institution. If that bothers you then boycott them.
That is not how it works. It’s a complete legal myth that there is some sort of “Platform” v “Publisher” distinction in the law.
Section 230 of the CDA was created 25 years ago to avoid this being the case. It gives companies the ability to moderate user generated content on their platforms without being held responsible for other UGC posted to them.
> One of the first legal challenges to Section 230 was the 1997 case Zeran v. America Online, Inc., in which a Federal court affirmed that the purpose of Section 230 as passed by Congress was "to remove the disincentives to self-regulation created by the Stratton Oakmont decision".[8] Under that court's holding, computer service providers who regulated the dissemination of offensive material on their services risked subjecting themselves to liability, because such regulation cast the service provider in the role of a publisher. Fearing that the specter of liability would therefore deter service providers from blocking and screening offensive material, Congress enacted § 230's broad immunity "to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children's access to objectionable or inappropriate online material."[8] In addition, Zeran notes "the amount of information communicated via interactive computer services is . . . staggering. The specter of tort liability in an area of such prolific speech would have an obviously chilling effect. It would be impossible for service providers to screen each of their millions of postings for possible problems. Faced with potential liability for each message republished by their services, interactive computer service providers might choose to severely restrict the number and type of messages posted. Congress considered the weight of the speech interests implicated and chose to immunize service providers to avoid any such restrictive effect."[8]
IMO, this is a matter of public health and should be treated as such (as much as some politicians want to cast this as a partisan issue for political gain).
If you were a bit more self aware you would realise how hypocritical you are.
You want your freedom to communicate what you want. But you don't want Google/Youtube to have their freedom. They are a private website who should have the right to host whatever content they choose and free to look after their own interests.
And remember nobody is stopping you from exercising your freedom to host whatever content you like on your private website.
AWS has all of the components e.g. hosting, CDN, transcoding, live streaming, analytics, ML. You could easily put together an MVP in a weekend.
Of course you would have to convince people to visit and pay for the content to cover your traffic costs. But since I am sure this content is so incredibly popular and valuable there will be no shortage of people willing to do this.
I hate this argument because it breaks down at the scale at what YouTube is. Viemo and Daily Motion don't even begin to compare in scale and reach. At what point is a company's reach so big they control the means of distribution? How many people even know what a PeerTube instance is?
I think the current scenario has to be treated as a special case. Spreading falsehoods on this topic can do too much damage to the whole community. We should separate the general discussion of companies having too much power vs. what needs to be done right now.
Your comment misses the point of why they did this.
These doctors were in no way qualified or licensed to provide the opinions they did and they had huge undisclosed conflicts of interest.
1. Their medical practice is an Urgent Care.
1a. They own said Urgent Care. They have a vested monetary interest in claiming these things so people start using them more.
2. They are not licensed to practice epidemiology - nor are they properly trained in Epidemiology.
3. They are not licensed to practice emergency medicine - nor are they properly trained in emergency medicine.
These guys misquoted the facts at every step and misled millions with their improper application of statistics. This viewpoint is harmful and incorrect.
This is telling everyone that “there is no fire” and to sit down and keep watching the movie in a theater that is on fire. They do not deserve a platform on which to spread these lies and misinformation.
Now, their medical licenses are in jeopardy. For the misinformation the presented, not the truths. If they understood statistics and still said the crap they did, the board is going to want to talk to them about gross negligence. If they didn’t understand statistics and still said what they did, the medical board is going to want to talk to them about practicing without a license.
These two idiots are going down for this. Good for YouTube. In this instance, this is disinformation, and they were correct.
Fuck this reply and everything it represents. I truly detest this madness and everyone who believe in such warped nonsense. One giant pile of argument from authority bullcrap.
This idea that only narrow set of domain experts can speak up about something is blatantly insane. You are not an epidemiologist either, so by the same token, you don´t have the right to criticize anything anyone says, yet here you are. So maybe you should heed your own advise you damn hypocrite.
I can do the same dance and say epidemiologists are not statisticians so Fauci should never EVER talk about numbers. Similarly, Trump has no PhD in economics so he should never EVER talk about money. Ooh, also, you´re not an NBA player so you should never EVER talk about how a game should have unfolded.
This is nuts man. You make your arguments, we listen and we assess based on the level of evidence and logic you presented. The piece of paper on your wall does not tell me shit about fuck. I couldn´t care less about who makes an argument. If credibility is a function of imbued institutional authority in the form of a piece of paper, and that´s all it takes to convince you that someone´s opinion should be heard but not others, then YOU are the problem.
For anyone wondering, a quick google search suggested that while "epidemiology" isn't a degree program anywhere, most epidemiologists have biostatistics degrees or background, which are a thing and do, in fact, involve statistics.
I have no issue with this argument when what is being discussed is presented from the authority of "this is like, just my opinion, man." And if it's a well constructed argument based on evidence I may even be convinced. Dude.
You know how qualified lawyers frequently say "not legal advice" when talking about hypothetical application of the law? Eg Matt Levine and his amusing "money stuff" column.
That.
I'm a doctor. Look at the credentials on my wall. I treat these patients. Believe me. I am saying this with the authority of all those credentials.
(But those credentials are total nonsense in making that decision, it turns out, and should provide zero weight to an argument that is literally life and death). Yeah, i have a problem with that. If their argument was solid and well supported, no need to point at the authority, right?
Yes we live in a world where an option has vastly more weight with the authority of a Hollywood actor. Great. The authority of a pretty person whose only skill is lying convincingly counts.
Your opinion. Well expressed and argued if a little sweary. I don't care about your credentials, nor you mine. No problem. Examine the argument. Address the evidence. Great.
You missed all the points by turning this into some strawman crying fit of moral outrage about "appealing to authority".
These doctors did not have proper training the statistics they horrifically misrepresented. They also made it sound like they had substantial knowledge in the field of Epidemiology. They don't.
Both of these doctors are now going before the California Medical Board because they got the facts wrong and they were wrong to give this advice. They misrepresented their data and exaggerated - because their urgent care is having a low patient turnout and they want to end the lockdown.
> This idea that only narrow set of domain experts can speak up about something is blatantly insane.
Your couple of hours on Google is not equivalent to a medical degree. When we are talking about medicine, you do not get a seat at the table because you think you are smart.
A standard Medical School only includes 1 semester in Virology and 1 more semester in Microbiology. An Epidemiologist goes through 4 YEARS of detailed training in Statistics, Microbiology, and Biochem. This is before years of experience in the field.
Those are NOT equivalent bases of knowledge.
> You are not an epidemiologist either...
What the fuck do you know? My degrees are in Mathematics with a specialization in Statistics. So, yeah, I know A LOT more than they do in this area.
> If credibility is a function of imbued institutional authority...
Doctors have to demonstrate their skills by getting licensed for the areas of their practice. We have a licensure process for a reason - to demonstrate competence in a field. These guys are going to lose theirs.
End of story.
> epidemiologists are not statisticians
You don't know a single fact that you are talking about. You are the fucking problem - along with everyone else who thinks their Google search is as good as a medical degree.
I am sorry to inform you that you do not have a PhD in online commenting and therefor are not a domain expert in online communication. For that reason your comment and opinions in the previous reply are invalid and should be de-platformed.
> I am sorry to inform you that you do not have a PhD in
> online commenting and therefor are not a domain expert in
> online communication. For that reason your comment and
> opinions in the previous reply are invalid and should be
> de-platformed.
>
> Yours truly,
>
> Hypocrisy
Oooooooh. This comment is so deliciously stupid that I am going to quote it verbatim in case you delete it. I would hate deprive future readers of the ability to marvel in the grandeur of its laughable dimwitted glory.
If you're saying that it's a problem that something that has become of great public utility is a de facto monopoly entirely in the hands of private interests, sure. But given that, the unfettered censorship is a feature, not a bug.
If there were a public utility similar to Youtube, it would have to have a clear policy for censorship, and some means for a public review of any decision to censor. And then you might have a legitimate complaint (though in this case there was a pretty clear case of a material factual misrepresentation, regarding the mortality rate of COVID-19). But since that is not the case, Youtube/Google is pretty much free to censor anyone on any basis they choose, and they owe no one any particular explanation for their decisions.
A few people at Google/Youtube should absolutely have the power to allow/disallow what they want on their platform for whatever reason they choose. That is as much a freedom of speech issue as is the doctors' right to public speech.
The real problem is that Google/Youtube has special legal protections related to not having editorial controls, yet here they are exercising editorial control. That they can play it both ways is the greater tragedy.
> The very fact that a few people at Google/Youtube have the power to censor whomever they want for whatever reason they choose is a problem in itself.
In the US, the media is almost entirely run by private corporations.
If you feel that is a mistake it's probably a better use of your time advocating for better funding and more independence for public media than criticizing corporations for exercising oversight of their platforms.
> censor whomever they want for whatever reason they choose
As long as "whomever they want" includes only people pushing cherry-picked and dangerous bullshit, and "whatever reason" includes saving the lives that would have otherwise been spent had that bullshit spread further, then I have absolutely zero qualms about this bending of the free-speech rules, the same way I have zero qualms about there being rules against someone yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.
You're missing the forest for the trees, man.
Perhaps they need to leave it but flag it extremely visibly with something like this: "The information this video purports to be true has been in dispute due to <reason> and <reason>, as pointed out by <rebuttal> and <rebuttal>." But doing that for every single video would be extremely laborious, and during the week it might take for the work behind such a change to take effect, hundreds of people might die who might not otherwise.
This is their math. See if you can see whats wrong...
39,500,000 -- Pop. of California
12.00% -- Pct. of people who tested positive for covid
4,740,000 -- Estimated cases (Pop. * Pct.)
1,227 -- Reported deaths
0.03% -- Estimated chance of dying from covid in California (deaths/estimated cases)
The positive cases aren't a representative sample, as has been said 30 times in this thread. So line 3 is bad statistical reasoning, and completely invalidates their conclusion.
The only people who are getting tested are those who believe they have symptoms. This is beginning to change as we get more tests, and as a result, the % infected by their reasoning is decreasing day by day.
You ask, "Are the doctors in the video saying untruths or misrepresenting data? I think what they said in the video was eminently reasonable."
> The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.
> COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of AAEM and ACEP are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. AAEM and ACEP strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.
I agree that it’s not the job of news media to herd their audience into thinking the right things. However, it is their duty to uncover and report the truth.
“If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the [expletive] window and find out which is true”
-Jonathan Foster
I really disagree with this. Sometimes the important thing to know is just that a debate is happening. Then the reader can view both sides and make up their own mind. More often than not, the supposed responsibility to "uncover the truth" results in journalists inserting their own bias.
I share your concern about journalists inserting their own bias. A good journalist would investigate the factuality of claims by all parties in a story, not just the ones they agree with. Of course, bias does happen even with the best intentions, and that is why it is a good idea to read multiple news sources with good journalistic ethics (https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp).
Lazy “he said, she said” journalism, sometimes called “bothesidesism”, is dangerous to a free society because it enables propaganda and disinformation. Lay public do not have time or resources to debunk lies and find out which side in a public debate is telling the truth (if any). That is the sacred duty of a free press.
And this press has proven time and again to be in the aggregate incompetent in this duty. Perhaps it's the fault of the changing landscape, with media chasing clickbait and online ads all the time. I'm a lot more skeptical of journalists today than I would've been a few decades ago, and there's plenty of evidence that the game is up and the political class if fully aware of how these people are unable to do this job in a way that doesn't enable propaganda and disinformation.
>“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
The author of this article probably doesn't have the expertise to find and interpret the data to make a judgment about what the doctors in question are saying. Quoting others is really the best can do. Sometimes there really is just no window look through.
And even if they did that it wouldn't really serve what the author here is trying to cover. This is an article about Youtube censoring two doctors. The reason why is relevant (and they quote Youtube's reasoning) but it's not the main story.
Not that the article is amazing, but it's just frustrating people are piling on because it's not the story they wanted the author to write.
If this were a story about the Kardashians, it might not matter, but journalists have a responsibility to do better than this when lives are on the line. This article does not meet basic standards for ethical journalism:
>And really, the idea that news media need to herd their audience into thinking the right things is ridiculous.
No, but they need to determine which story is based on the best possible information at the time, and which isn't. Which is a massive service for everyone else that doesn't have time do research everything they read.
A massive service not only gone unthanked, but actively attacked in the days of Trump.
> there's no insight here
I think that is great, I'm tired of articles that start by poisoning the well. Just tell me what happened, who said what when and let me try to reach my own conclusions.
Many writers nowadays think they are some sort of missionary on a mission to save the pagans(us).
What kind of argument is that? Political views are unimportant in this case and even if they were, Glenn has been more left and right leaning. Also YouTube removing the videos from 2 highly credentialed doctors is a verifiable fact, not some subjective theory.
I think you have trust working backwards. This is a media company that was founded only two years ago by a talk radio and television host who holds no journalism degree or higher education accreditation of any kind, who already runs a conservative media personality cult.
And I’m expected to just keep an open mind about it and assume that this dude isn’t being disingenuous.
People have started labelling anything they disagree with as "far right" now a days. How exactly is wanting to work to be able to pay the bills and take care for ones family a "far right" thing? How is calling out the rise in domestic abuse, child abuse, suicides, mental health issues a "far right" thing? I have many friends both left and right leaning who are struggling to pay the bills and have businesses shutdown with massive losses wanting to return back to work.
Also one could say the same thing about left leaning media (95% of the mainstream media and tech companies). When we start labelling everything we disagree with as "BAD NAME", we are living in a sad world.
And in case it matters (I feel like it does to you), I am a brown immigrant myself.
It's not a case of right or left leaning bias here - Glenn Beck pushes conspiracy theories and things that just aren't true. There's a difference between political leanings and full on crackpot journalism.
Congratulations to you for avoiding the Glen Beck hysteria, but if you have to ask for Glen Beck examples of him pushing conspiracy theories, you’re really out of the loop.
This guy used to sit on Fox News prime time and draw elaborate web of connections on a chalkboard. On national network television. He lost advertisers for the stuff he was doing, and his program was jet fuel for the Tea Party movement (which became the modern alt right).
Feel free to Youtube Glen Beck on Fox News, hopefully none of it is censored because it’s a real trip if it’s the first time you’re watching it.
> Also YouTube removing the videos from 2 highly credentialed doctors is a verifiable fact, not some subjective theory.
Those 2 "highly credentialed doctors" just got an unprecedentedly strong and universal condemnation from the two main American medical associations. Just because you like what they are saying doesn't mean they are right. Think critically instead of seeking your evidence to support your opinions.
Can someone address the claim that death certificates coerce doctors to list COVID as the cause of death even if it hasn't been shown definitively to be the case? Is this a thing?
Also the number of deaths being reported in US includes "probable deaths" which are not confirmed COVID cases. It's even more than the actual confirmed cases.
Look at the graph on the last page for NYC for example:
We can make a pretty good estimate of COVID deaths by comparing against past years. There's a clear, large spike - NYC's death rate is six times the average for this time of year.
Giving that we're still low on tests, if someone dies before a test of COVID-like symptoms, it makes sense to consider them a probable (and save the test for someone alive) if deaths are 6x normal - you've got a roughly 5/6 chance of being correct.
This is interesting. I'm a little confused though. Life expectancy has been on a consistent decline for the last few years, particularly in the US. On top of the declining life expectancy, there should presumably be more people dying as a result of a growing population. In the graphs, they show multiple years. Why do weekly deaths from the last several years, broken out by year, basically look the same?
It's gone from 78.8 to 78.5 for males over the last few years, most people think due primarily to the opioid epidemic. And the population of NYC is barely growing, maybe a percent or two a year. These factors you mention aren't even in the same neighborhood as being large enough to explain the data you're reacting to.
The proportion of the NY population that is over 60 looks like it generally trends higher as time passes. I would imagine a greater proportion are near death as time proceeds because of this.
So, this is an anti-pattern in conversation, where you come up with an alternate hypothesis to explain something, and then someone tells you your hypothesis is wrong, and then you just jump to another one, and make them work to disprove that as well. What do you have against the obvious explanation?
If you have another hypothesis, it would be better to at least do the napkin math and show that you've put in a tiny amount of work, rather than just tossing out random far-fetched stuff. For example, this new hypothesis of yours is even more absurd than the last one, because the relative demographics of New York have not changed much in the past year. It could not explain a large spike in deaths this year.
Couldn’t the spike in nyc deaths be inflated due to the standard operating procedure of using mechanical ventilators for which 9 of 10 patients die [1]? Wasn’t there a big fuss (several articles posted here) about how mechanical ventilators were overused when less invasive methods produced better outcomes, therefore reducing mortality[2]?
That's kind of incompatible with the critique 2 posts up. They asked if we could have "false positive" deaths because dead people with covid-like symptoms are labeled as covid deaths even when they are not tested (e.g. after dying at home). The people on ventilators were ones in hospitals that were treated as covid patients, those were likely to be tested - and the problem that people on ventilators have a low chance to make it is specific to covid (which is why we are seeing this, ventilators have existed for a long time, usually they don't kill people which is why it became standard operating procedure, unfortunately with covid they seem to trigger something bad ...)
Given that the federal government is paying hospitals between $13,000 (covid patient) and $39,000 (patient on ventilator) for every Coronavirus patient [0], you can see how the incentives might cause hospitals to coerce doctors into listing COVID as cause of death.
It could be, but the numbers still seem to indicate that covid deaths are under reported, not over reported. The reported number of covid deaths is 30-50% lower than overall increase in mortality compared to historical data.
Of all the "facts" flying around, this one is not only one of the most powerful by itself, but is also (even if it is in some way false) a great distilled example of all the unimaginably strong incentives pulling at the world right now, which I hope gives people an appreciation of how little they can actually know for sure.
Even with such a fact slapping you in the face, I mentioned this to someone and the response was basically "hospitals and doctors exist to help people, they would never take advantage of the system like that". There was no continuing the conversation from there. Who knows how reality works, but at the least we've had radically different life experiences if you don't think this could cause the case count to be pulled strongly in the upwards direction away from the actual number. And I'm sure there are other influences pulling it back down, so maybe all the forces are balancing themselves out.
People will point out the handful of facts that have convinced them that the situation leans one way, without realizing there's likely a boatload of facts on both sides that are simply too numerous for any one person to gather and make sense of. This is fine, but when people start acting as if the evidence is settled, one way or another, I can't help but despair.
Hello fellow seeker! Seriously it's always refreshing to find people who don't KNOW things. And despair not, this crisis is making our numbers grow faster than any virus. We will soon take back the world. :)
I really really like it, just like I really really like what's his name being deplatformed. I like it even more that I can't readily remember his name, right, Alex Jones. YouTube has no duty to be a platform for Diamond and Silk in scrubs.
It has no legal duty to be a platform, nor to deplatform. It arguably has moral duties: to facilitate free discussion, and to remove harmful material. In this case there's a clear clash between the two that will make a lot of readers nervous.
Why does it have the moral duty, when you signed it away in the TOS when you used their service? Host your own videos if you don't like it or better yet build a better platform that is censorship-resistant.
HONK HONKs love saying this tripe line everywhere online, but whenever someone tries and gains traction The Cancel Squad deplatforms them through their incestuous in-group.
I'm not super familiar with YouTube's policy on this, but apparently they decided to curb what they deem to be COVID-19 misinformation. I completely agree that what these two are doing is spreading misinformation, this is not anywhere in the range of a seasonal flu, the numbers are clear on that.
It's very naive to think that what these two are doing is a good faith attempt to present a dissenting opinion. If someone wants to use this tragedy as an opportunity to launch their right-wing media career I don't think YouTube is obliged to be an accomplice.
As for my opinions being silenced, if I ever yell fire in a theater, or tell people to drink poison laced Kool-Aid, or tell them to ignore this pandemic, I hope I get what's coming to me.
Have you seen Trump’s press conferences? You’d have to censor half the stuff he says, or half the stuff the right wing pushes. The Heritage Foundation is literally on a media blitz right now on Youtube pushing the Wuhan Lab outbreak theory (which I entertain as something that needs inspection, but I’m rethinking the whole thing now that I know one of the lying think-tanks that propagated the Iraq War narrative is cooking up some new bullshit).
Censoring misinformation on YouTube is like censoring porn. Wait, I guess something as absurd as that actually exists in Japan.
Alright, never mind, humanity has no bounds, continue on in your paradoxical ways.
Censor the flat-earthers while you’re at it at, at least we know that’s bullshit for sure.
And what happens when you yell fire in a movie theater and they silence you when it's true? It's not just about the "incorrect" content that's posted on Youtube, it's also the correct content that gets censored. How else would we learn about the water that makes the frogs gay?
Censorship is a fickle friend. It's great, until you inevitably find that you hold a minority, unpopular opinion on an issue.
Your flippant remark indicates a lack of deep thinking on this issue, and once I googled Diamond and Silk, I realize that your probably a bit of a partisan as well.
The removal of Alex Jones didn't help anything. It just helped reinforce the paranoia he and his supporters have, which is that a vast conspiracy exists to silence him and others who believe his theories.
Those supporters now listen to him on whatever alternate platform (my brother in law is one of them) and it's even harder to talk to them now due to the Youtube cancellation.
You feel better emotionally because he's off Youtube. Feels like a victory for you, doesn't it? It's hollow.
My brother-in-law just listens even more rabidly, and he votes. Enjoy your false victory. Jones is stronger than ever now. Censorship doesn't work. It never will.
I would prefer if youtube could organize their channel so dubious opinions had a voice and rebuttal. That would be better than just removing them.
Even more, Youtube has the problem that it's algorithms push people TOWARDS the most dubious, conspiracy-driven views until and unless youtube actually removes the video.
So Youtube has multiple things to balance and removing harmful bullshit is the best of the triage they seem to be able to do on their platform.
And I had a couple of my less-informed, more mentally unstable Facebook friends sharing those videos along with angry screams about the shutdown being unnecessary - one friend prefaced the video with "that does, I'm not wearing a mask any more" (he works at a hospital, I kid you not).
Seems like if you can remove it, you should be able to justify why you’re removing it. And if you can do that, why not put the justification in an interstitial that must be clicked through to view the video? Why delete it outright?
This edges a little close to state media. Of course it’s not the same, but if the guiding philosophy is ‘we cannot trust the public with certain information, for it’s own good’, then we’ve adopted whatever the hell they do in non-free countries.
Very bad precedent, very Un-American.
Edit: As an arrogant American, I forgot to consider that this might be a global Youtube policy.
That’s like saying the MTA is some independent platform that New Yorkers can choose to use or not use. Another example would be saying cable companies that have a monopoly over your region (once upon a time) provide real choice to customers that want to switch.
Youtube is the de facto video platform that the masses use, so much so that Youtube finds it necessary to enact something like this.
To bring it back to your point - If we don’t like YouTube’s policies, we can’t just simply ignore Youtube and move on from it. How it controls things is a big deal, especially if it is similar to how non-free governments censor stuff. We have to be vigilant of this, it ain’t some niche video site.
There's a difference between YT and a monopoly that matters in the law. You aren't paying anything to use or consume YT, no matter if you're a viewer or a content creator. It sounds like the ones who have standing are the advertisers, and I think advertisers would be fine with YT being more curated.
Un-American? There's nothing more "American" than having the right to do whatever you want with your personal property.
The free market answer here isn't forcing them to adhere to your tastes, it's to make or promote a competitor that can actually compete with YT.
Let’s just stick to the facts then for a second. In this particular case, Youtube has decided I can’t watch a video with dubious facts and make up my own mind whether it’s bullshit or not.
American values are not all about capitalism. We have some ideas on the individual in America.
But, I’m with you on the need for YouTube competitors, but I lack the imagination to see how it can happen. That’s why I’m advocating for the jamming of American values into a what is essentially becoming an institution as opposed to a company that operates against market forces.
> Youtube has decided I can’t watch a video with dubious facts and make up my own mind whether it’s bullshit or not.
That is not factually true since the video is available in other places. What Youtube has done is decided to try to make it harder to view and share the video by removing it from their platform.
Youtube hasn't decided you can't watch, they have decided not to spend resources allowing you to watch it on their platform or to accept sponsorship for the content because they feel that it would cost their brand money or otherwise be against their collective shareholder interests.
> That’s why I’m advocating for the jamming of American values into a what is essentially becoming an institution as opposed to a company that operates against market forces.
Do you also feel this way about historically monopolistic media companies? They also exercise editorial control. NBC, NewsCorp, Sinclair, ClearChannel, AT&T, Disney...
Not every conspiracy theorist gets an oped or interview on any other platform.
I’ll say that old school television had a real scheduling and demographic constraint, they really had to hone in on their programming.
Our modern internet media landscape doesn’t have these constraints, so we really are curating on certain criteria where the overwhelming deciding factor isn’t just ‘do we have enough time for this’ and ‘is this what most of our viewers want’.
Youtube can get content to exactly the right demo, and scheduling is a non factor. So, what is editorial control in this landscape?
"State media" except not directed by a state, the state where YouTube is headquarted has announced cutting funding and has otherwise assigned blame to the organization whose guidelines they are following.
So in no way "state".
It's less "state" than if Walt Disney World had rules about family appropriate clothing (since the Florida granted them municipal control)
State media, which was mostly a reference to non-free countries with state controlled television, largely broadcasts what the state deems suitable for broadcasting. If they don’t think you need to know something, it’s hidden from you.
Youtube thinks I don’t need to know anything about this video.
Replace WHO with CDC, what’s the difference? Now you officially have the US censoring Youtube. The pattern is not good.
At least with state censorship, there’s a formal hierarchy of authority. There’s the law, and some semblance of duty to the public.
With corporate censorship, it’s ethereal, anarchic, and less accountable. The rules are opaque, the deciders are unknown, and the only duty is maximizing shareholder profit.
I believe once upon a time we used to just call this ‘blaming the man’.
Edit:
Anyway, I’ll add to your point. As a company, Google has no issue censoring it’s product in China as opposed to other countries. It sounds almost trite to bring up, but Google censors the Tiananmen Square massacre for the CCP.
With this in mind, what sincere values does Google hold on censorship?
So ya, you’re right, corporate accountability on censorship is basically non existent (and you can trace it back to the fact that they probably don’t have values to even hold accountable).
I wonder why Google's decision-makers decided to censor stuff that doesn't follow WHO guidelines. Is it because they actually care about the mass of the population? Is it because they want to minimize the economic damage caused by the crisis? Is it because they're scared to get sick themselves? Is it because they want to avoid possible legal liability? Is it due to political pressure on them? Is it because they want to exploit the crisis for reasons of politics and social engineering? Some combination of the above?
Because dominant media platforms have a huge crosshairs on their backs, with different groups criticizing they aren’t doing enough to remove misinformation, and at the same time, they are too heavy handed.
The consensus is that the platforms have to do SOMETHING, because if not, it becomes a national security issue and regulation is going sweep through the industry.
At the same time, the platforms can’t be seen as enforcing government censorship, so they choose WHO, an independent international organization as the information fact checker.
Who knows, maybe they also want to win some brownie points with china. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Sure, but the WHO is still ostensibly a global organization that dispenses credible medical advice. Whatever I may think of the WHO, I'm not sure what org could possibly be a better choice to follow for a multinational service.
> Because dominant media platforms have a huge crosshairs on their backs, with different groups criticizing they aren’t doing enough to remove misinformation, and at the same time, they are too heavy handed.
> The consensus is that the platforms have to do SOMETHING, because if not, it becomes a national security issue and regulation is going sweep through the industry.
Personally, I think that education is always better than suppression. Rather than remove these videos, a better option would simply be to inform users that the video contains false information and where they can find the truth.
Not only does this avoid the problem of being accused of doing nothing or leaving misinformation uncorrected, but it also prevents the persecution complex people will get when information is suppressed and allow us to take advantage of the useful information we can get from misinformation.
It's beneficial to be able to see what misinformation people are being exposed to, the specific rhetoric, lies, and facilities being commonly employed to mislead, and the number and types of people who are creating it, falling for it, or just passing it around. Companies like Facebook and Google are in a unique position to get us that kind of data. It could ultimately help us develop ways to identify vulnerable people and where we need to educate them so they are inoculated against this type of manipulation. It could also help us assess how we craft and deliver factual data so that it clearer to these vulnerable groups and less likely to be misinterpreted or misrepresented.
There is no doubt a confluence of the factors you’ve put forth. Also, I’d imagine if videos like these encouraged some kind of anti-lockdown rioting, that would be very bad for business; there’s an incentive to maintain social stability. During this time I’d be willing to bet people are watching YouTube more than ever before.
I wish one reporter in that room would have pointed out that there was no random sample. But it is very disturbing that YouTube pulled it down. Classic Barbra Streisand effect.
There was a guy that tries to sort of bring it up when the doctor first starts talking about the New York numbers, but he doesn't do a very good job and the doctor just sort of claims that the sample bias doesn't matter because the sample size is large.
They said they're culling misinformation and they're doing it. I don't see what's terrifying about this. Maybe unsettling if you're aggressively pro-free speech, but 'terrifying' is very hyperbolic.
Take one afternoon of your time and just google information on how China identifies videos on their platforms for a variety of reasons and pulls them. Heck, if you make a dumb enough video saying certain things in China, they’ll pull it and give you a little visit. It’s a super slippery slope once you decide ‘we have to do this because we need to protect the public, we know better’.
Here is a larger scenario. I personally think a lab oversight in the Wuhan region could have led to a virus outbreak, enough to at least discuss it. This theory could be deemed by WHO, which could be heavily influenced by Chinese investment, to be lies. With YouTube’s blanket policy, they would be doing the Chinese government’s bidding by getting rid of this lab virus narrative from Youtube (all under the guise of following WHO guidelines).
Anyway, you cannot censor based on an organization or a government’s guidelines.
What’s terrifying about this is that this is the one you heard about. It’s like seeing two bugs in your house: are there 20 more, or 20,000 more?
The insidious part about sometimes-censorship is that it is invisible and deniable. Everyone knows the press in China or under the USSR is/was censored 24/7.
YouTube is only censored sometimes. It’s like a seatbelt that works every day except the day you crash (emergencies/crises are the times when open and free communications systems are most critical to the functioning of society).
I believe this poses an existential threat to a free society, because everyone flocks to these censorship platforms
in peacetime, and they pose a mortal danger in war/crisis. I wrote at length about this failure mode recently:
Yes - get banned on YouTube for disagreeing with WHO
No - go against the data we have so far
The thing with not valuing free speech is that eventually you will find that a rational position you hold (regardless of whether it is actually rational or if you just feel it is) will run afoul of the censors and you will be left without a voice.
"Misinformation" may seem obvious at times. But its classification can very be easily be bent towards any kind of political agenda.
Before WHO was saying there's no human to human transmission and masks don't help. So anyone who created a video opposing that would get their video taken down.
Later, WHO started claiming the exact opposite. Now anyone who created a video previously will also get taken down.
How exactly do you propose deciding what's misinformation and what's not?
We should also point out that the WHO is once removed from a state body. Youtube could have easily adopted CDC guidelines as their measuring stick, in which case Youtube would be censored by the United States government.
Then the question becomes, hows does the government decide what is and what isn’t misinformation? The overwhelming answer should be ‘government shouldn’t be determining that’.
> WHO was saying there's no 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.
"At this stage, there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in the novel #coronavirus (2019-nC0V) outbreak in #Wuhan, #ChinaFlag of China. However, the Chinese authorities continue intensive surveillance and follow-up measures, including environmental investigations."
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1216397232427147264
"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🇨🇳."
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.
Countries must inform WHO about travel measures taken, as required by the IHR. Countries are cautioned against actions that promote stigma or discrimination, in line with the principles of Article 3 of the IHR."
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...
> We're actually seeing the patients. Dr. Fauci hasn't seen a patient
for 20 years... it's like the general contractor vs the sub. He's not seeing
patients, he's in an ivory tower, and we have a world of respect for him, he's a
world reknown immunologist, two different, he's an academic, and we've dealt
with academics all of our lives... but academics and reality are two different
things.
> Coronavirus lasts on plastics for 3 days, and we're all sheltering in
place. Where'd you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where'd you get that
plastic shovel from? Home Depot. Those are fomites and carries of disease...
and if I swab things in your home, I would likely find COVID-19.
> When you go to Del Taco and you get a plastic bag or piece on your burrito from
someone not wearing a mask who's just wiping their arm on your thing, do you
think you're protected from COVID?
> We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We're not wearing masks, why
is that? 'Cuz we understand microbiology, we understand immunology, and we want
strong immune systems. I don't want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune
system, and come out and get diseased.
> Is the flu less dangerous than COVID? Let's look at the death rates, no it's
not. They're similar in prevalence and in death rate. So we're saying that our
response now, now that we know the facts, it's time to get back to work, it's
time to test people. But again, testing gives you a moment in time...
Also they seem to either intentionally or because of negligence take a sample of confirmed cases that has hard bias (general populations are excluded from eligibility -- you must have sometimes severe indications of infection to be eligible for the limited tests) to simply equate to a random sample of the state enough to conclude a state wide infection rate. Further they use those poor statistics to claim the mortality rate of covid-19 is similar or less than the flu.
Dr Daniel Erickson and Dr Artin Massihi have since been condemned by the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP):
Videos like this not only spread false info, they do something more pernicious by distorting or distracting an already partially-numerate public from understanding growth rates and scale. Eg, the important thing about an outbreak is its second and third derivatives, rate of growth and rate of rate of growth.
Here they claim SARS-NCOV-2 is "similar in prevalance and death rate" to flu, somehow missing the fact that the former reached that point in one month and keeps going unless extensive social distancing, lockdowns and mask wearing is put in place.
I hate censorship, but I support censoring information sourced from the idiocracy (or malevolent foreign power as the case may be).
i am almost with you there, but i see youtube as a biased actor
also, when experts themselves (not these 2 guys) have come up with different recommendations - and cant agree with themselves, youtube should allow a free exchange of ideas.
they are free (and should) to add a notice that says that it is potentially false, etc.
Yes YouTube and Google appear to have deprioritized neutrality in recent years, which I think is a mistake for them.
But I also think this particular instance is not the right hill for people who care about that to die on. It’s a form of falsely or mistakenly crying wolf and will cost them credibility.
I'm still kind of conflicted on this particular case, but if someone yells "fire" in a crowded theater should the theater owner be able to kick them out? What if the fire alarm is going off, but a so-called "expert" is claiming that the fire alarm is just malfunctioning? Should the theater owner be able to silence them? Deep down I think I still believe that free speech should be protected even if it costs lives, but it's getting harder to hold onto this philosophy in recent years. Misinformation and propaganda is a plague that is nearly impossible to beat since it takes an order of magnitude more effort to refute a lie than to spread it. The only ways I can think of to solve this problem are either to restrict free speech or to spend huge resources on teaching the public critical thinking skills and the scientific method. The second option will take decades to work, if it's even possible at all.
now, what if the theatre owner has no way to know if there is a fire or not (lets assume he is locked in a room), some guy screams fire, a bunch of people run out, another guy says running out will make it worse, some should sit down, some should walk out, etc.
i am just making this up to tell that the theatre owner (youtube) simply has no way to tell. In this case, he is not even responsible for the theatre ( as youtube has argued in courts before)
That depends. How much liability and risk is Google taking on by being more hands-off? From this perspective, it's understandable why Google would wish to delegate medical judgments to a known institution, similar to how the rest of the video content industry delegates to the FCC.
I'm sure Google would like to have no risk and simply host pirated content like they used to.
> Coronavirus lasts on plastics for 3 days, and we're all sheltering in place. Where'd you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where'd you get that plastic shovel from? Home Depot. Those are fomites and carries of disease... and if I swab things in your home, I would likely find COVID-19.
> When you go to Del Taco and you get a plastic bag or piece on your burrito from someone not wearing a mask who's just wiping their arm on your thing, do you think you're protected from COVID?
The point isn't that chance of infection goes to zero. Yes of course there are still transmission vectors, the point is to reduce the transmission rate. Even if there is a small chance of catching covid from your water bottles or dell taco, those chances are also reduced relative to no lockdown because the people who would be transmitting that virus to you are less also less likely to be sick.
> We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We're not wearing masks, why is that? 'Cuz we understand microbiology, we understand immunology, and we want strong immune systems. I don't want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and come out and get diseased.
Then these guys are selfish, putting their own desire for health above the needs of their more vulnerable familty, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens.
> Is the flu less dangerous than COVID? Let's look at the death rates, no it's not. They're similar in prevalence and in death rate.
Covid outpaced the standard flu season's death total in less than half the time and did it in the face of the most draconian public health measures in a century (or ever depending on your location).
A reminder that The Blaze is a conservative mouthpiece founded by Glenn Beck. I’m astounded at the number of comments here that don’t seem to be considering that.
The article is not worth clicking on based on that fact alone. It may or may not be factual, but we can rest assured that it’s written in service of a very specific agenda.
That agenda is the typical “we are being silenced” message pushed by the regressive, extremist conservative faction of the Republican Party.
I don’t listen to people like Bill Maher, either, nor TV sensationalists like Jake Tapper.
I would prefer this country mostly get back to being centrist. I would prefer we not continually be pitched against each other in a left vs right battle that’s encouraged by the elite class (including middle-men profiteers like Glenn Beck that earn based on outrage).
I don't care about left or right when it comes to listening to viewpoints. I listen/read to Vox, Vice, Salon, Slate, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NYTimes, WaPo, TheHill, WSJ, Fox, Breitbart, Tim Pool, David Packman, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan etc which covers a wide variety of viewpoints. I think it's important for people to listen to both sides to have a balanced viewpoint. As long as the person/news is providing me with the original source of their info which I can read and verify myself, I will listen.
I don't simply trust what the media tells me, I look for the actual source and verify that what the media says is actually what the original source says. I also often wait 2-7 days when some breaking news comes out to actually make a decision about the news as often things turn out to be wrong now a days. We live in a clickbait era where there's an incentive for media to spout nonsensical headlines - therefore verifying it myself is important.
I do this too. I find the best way to get close to “the truth” (when it even exists) is to read diametrically opposed sources. I accept that every source is biased, if not outright, then at least by selection.
You can learn a lot about agendas and infer biases by seeing what stories one source is publishing, and another source is choosing not to publish.
Blaze media is an overtly ideological outlet. In my experience when any such outlet (regardless of the particular persuasion) makes a headline out of a 'viral' video or social media post, it's as part of a structured social media campaign: put the media up, drive some traffic to it, run a story about how it's 'going viral' leveraging people's preference for social proof, and so on.
With anything where there's significant political, economic, or social capital riding on the outcome, astroturfing is a sad reality that must be considered. One way to mitigate its effects is to look for reports from some disinterested source and see if you can find the same facts presented with less urgency and the determination of significance being left to the reader.
Here is a link to the news site which originally uploaded the press conference to YouTube, along with a statement from YouTube, and re-hosted version of the video:
Are you OK with Google and other coorporations curating The Truth? Think about your kids! Do you want these people shaping what your children think? Put your money where your mouth is. Stop using them.
The time has come for a youtube alternative that can scale and is decentralized.
Youtube has actually been censoring content it does not agree with for quite a while, and unless it hurts us in some personal way, we have been ok with it getting away.
eg., Youtube has been censoring a lot of conservative content. They won in court[1]
Youtube cannot have it both ways. Either they are a publisher and if so, must be fully responsible for the content they host. Or they are a platform, and they need to be neutral.
Out of curiosity, has there ever been a case where a government has demanded that Youtube remove a video and it has not done so? I may be wrong, but I actually believe that they are fully responsible for the content that they are carrying. They do actually go to considerable lengths to remove content that they think is in violation of their terms of service as promptly as they can. I don't believe they are required by any law to review every submission for possible problems; only to remove content that they are aware is not compliant. I believe they do that. If they don't, I'm sure some enterprising lawyer could fashion a lucrative class action suit. It's not like they aren't sitting on a mountain of cash.
Just to be clear, they are not a common carrier and I have never seen any evidence that they claim to be one. I don't think they have to both ways. I understand (and have sympathy with the idea) that it would be nice if they were, but I really don't think they are.
> Youtube cannot have it both ways. Either they are a publisher and if so, must be fully responsible for the content they host. Or they are a platform, and they need to be neutral.
As demonstrated by the court case you mention, that is false. I am surprised how tightly people cling to this notion, which has no basis in reality.
I’ve seen people in conservative forums using BitChute. I’m not super familiar with it, but it’s somehow peer to peer. Streamable also seems to be popular.
Now it is more important than ever to choose alternatives for YouTube. Vote with your wallet by refusing to use their platform, or if you do, use adblocking so they bleed financially.
The problem with with freedom to just post whatever by whoever, even if with credentials (perhaps more so) is that it can influence people in the wrong way, before it is criticized or debunked. Even so, there is ample evidence that plenty of people take any info that supports their point or worldview and stick with it and repeat it, even after it has been critiqued or shown to be wrong, etc. So I don’t think complete freedom of speech is a good thing. You have to consider the negative effects, as long as there are negative effects, you can’t say it’s unanimously “good”. That being said, there already is a channel for Doctors and researchers to publish: peer reviewed journals. Key words here “peer review”, this is when other professionals in your field of research review your work. And it’s not youtube or a blog post or social media. The fact that they went around the peer review process should Make you suspicious about their agenda.
The Internet needs a novel way of establishing legitimacy since it’s much harder to verify things seen online. I don’t know the solution but it seems salient in today’s world where there’s so many fake news articles, etc. used to influence the public for the sake of private interests.
We need to ask about the unprecedented censorship at this time: what is At Stake? Is Google planning a new healthcare division that is invested in specific viewpoints?
For decades, the US has provided the average citizen with limited/no healthcare but freedom of speech and thought. In sudden weeks, this has been inverted.
What is the prize hidden in the party cracker which justifies censorship of speech and thought with the (implausible six months ago) claim by social media companies to care about the health and wellness of the average person?
The prize of reducing the scenario where a tiny minority of people can legally cause the deaths of thousands of people if their fantasies are fed by the media they seek.
We have laws for murder. And for constitutional protection of speech.
It's even more ludicrous that the alleged crime is statistics. Meanwhile, Imperial College statistical models were proven wrong almost immediately by Oxford University, but they are still allowed to speak after triggering hasty decisions that affected millions of lives.
We are leaving unaccountable the people who literally yelled "Fire!!" to billions of people, but it's suddenly imperative to suppress speech that informs collective decisions that are complex, regional and contextual? What does Google have against learning?
It would take little effort to prepend a correction to the original video and/or publish a revised version. This is Hacker News: surprise, someone is wrong on the internet! They get corrected. It's better than being wrong offline and never being corrected.
Some people will now work to minimize damage to society by private platforms.
Google can apply arbitrary rules, but they can't claim that their decisions represent "society". There was no consultative process where society elected Google or society was asked for their opinion on censoring this particular video. In fact, "society" has immediately republished the video elsewhere.
In fact, the Streisand effect will guarantee more attention to the video (e.g. this thread). Google destroyed a huge number of comments debating the merits of the video. Previously, such destruction would have been done by book burning.
Now the debate is scattered and it is harder to address any confused people, instead of going to the number one web property for video. Way to miss the point of both speech and censorship, Google.
You’re likening the deletion of a video on a private free video hosting site to state-sponsored book burning?
The Streisand effect is a blip in popularity here. The point is to not validate dangerous fantasies of people who are unwilling or incapable of behaving in a safe and logical manner. Google succeeded in this endeavor, despite what people paying close attention to things might argue about in side channels.
When a large private organization or a few of them control virtually all public discourse (the digital public square), their choices are in effect as dangerous and impactful as the government taking the same action.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 353 ms ] threadhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dr-erickson-covid-19...
"...noted relevant comments regarding censorship that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had recently made.
"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy ... [removal] is another really important part of of our policy," Wojcicki reportedly said."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586
Now it can of course still be that the WHO reasoning will at a later time be officially quoted for the removal of this video, but that is pure speculation. And also it would be a huge stretch. There is no official reason given for the removal.
Sounds like YouTube is blindly following the WHO. I am so sick of big tech and all the censorship, privacy invasion, etc. Wish there was more alternatives but everyone will flock to what’s popular...
Wish I had the resources to start alternatives, maybe headquarters in Texas where I bet they have a more freedom mindset compared to all the Californian tech companies that’s just a bunch of followers instead of leaders.
Seems all the stuff they preach about connecting the world, accessing all the worlds information and diversity is just some sort of double speak. Like censoring Alex Jones, sure people disagree with him maybe Just some things or even everything he says but if you don’t agree with him, don’t watch his channel, don’t follow him. This whole deplatformig thing is like something from 1984.
I enjoy using YouTube for tech talks, tutorials, following vloggers but a lot of stuff about YouTube is disappointment... and then don’t even get me started mentioning all the automated copyright stuff that doesn’t even consider fair use or is abused.
that guy should be in jail.
Alex Jones was successfully sued because of his videos and repeatedly warned. YouTube like any business has a right to legally protect themselves. If YT continues to host Jones's content they could be held legally liable. I'm no fan of YouTube but they're clearly in the right in Alex Jones's case.
I never really watched his full shows which is a few hours daily I think. Don't really have the attention span to listen to all the people who call in and stuff. I seen just clips and hilights here and there. He recently built a new website which is sorta like his own little private YouTube.
I'd imagine YouTube would be covered under Section 230 immunity would cover them.
Personally I think as long as something isn't illegal, let them publish it... However I bet if you had that policy your hosting company would shut you down unless you owned your own datacenter and peering agreements...
But I heard on YouTube you can't even say the C word right now without the algorithm messing with your videos... Like some travel vlogger was talking about how it disrupted his travel plans, so he called it the current unicorn instead. Not some conspiracy theory video either, just telling his true story. So I think YouTube is going overboard right now with their censorship... and more and more censorship, people start censoring themselves and are scared to speak out about things... I think this is a dangerous and dark path we're going down - regardless if people think there's some conspiracy with a global elite or deep state or whatever you want to call it is apart of it or not...
I think this underscores why I'm so uncomfortable with YouTube doing censorship (or anyone doing it). The official narrative is not always right.
In fact anytime we have a new discovery in science it starts out in contrary to the official accepted explanation and only gradually and often grudgingly gains acceptance over time. If you silence dissenting voices you also silence progress. Which is maybe why China struggles to innovate compared to the West.
WHO is still lying, CDC has done a 180 and now recommends masks. So I suppose we should expect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPx1yqvJgf4 to get taken down anytime now.
Cry wolf when this actually happens. I try not to be dismissive, but the repeated harping about masks strikes me as a lack of original thought at best and a coordinated smear campaign at face value.
We get it: the WHO should've recommended masks full-throatedly. But your interpretation that a YouTube policy will be applied maliciously without any justification for why doesn't convince me.
I don't like censorship. It's dangerous. It's the tool of choice of authoritarians everywhere. Free speech, even of opinions we find distasteful or downright ugly, is still worth upholding.
Look at deplatforming of people like Steven Pinker or Jordan Peterson to see how actually quite moderate, well reasoned, well spoken people are getting censored. That's a disturbing trend.
Flat Earth. Pizzagate. Soros conspiracies. Chemtrails. Anti-vaccers. These were all laughable fringe things that the disturbed came up with. Then YouTube came along and suddenly the stupid were discovering one another, confirming each other's idiocy.
YouTube is probably a little tired of this. The fringe can of course create their own video sites, just as they made their own "Twitter" and their own "Reddit" (all abysmal failures when they learn how miserable and deplorable they are).
LOL, dang -the enabler of right-wing asshats- has hellbanned me. ROFL. Eat a big ol' donkey dick, dang. You have turned HN into a AGW denying shithole.
Obviously, though, if you keep posting like this then we will have to ban you. If we don't, people will complain about us privileging you, as we ban other accounts for less and you're breaking the site guidelines badly: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Comments such as "dang -the enabler of right-wing asshats", "HN is a cesspool of anti-intellectual MAGA blowhards" (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hn_check), "only far-right anti-science, anti-intellectual noise" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014140) are helpful in a way. They go nicely with "The mods here are radical liberals", "left-wing propaganda", "dang is an SJW cunt", etc. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22920602) and are handy for balancing the binary tree (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22784216).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
But yes, there are some very perverse incentives in medicine.
https://youtu.be/cmjYRJXKixY?t=3761
Something tells me the medical angle isn't the only one these guys are pushing.
A simple check of excess mortality shows that something has already killed more people than would normally die during a bad flu season in areas affected by the virus, and we're nowhere near the end of the infection. And that's with lockdown measures that obviously suppress a bunch of common causes of death.
To successfully argue that covid-19 is less bad than the flu, you would have to show that all these extra dead people died of something other than covid-19. Good luck with that.
Which means that covid-19 is deadlier than the flu.
Just look at the excess mortality statistics for a bunch of European countries: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
Many are seeing sharp increases in mortality, higher than normal flu years. If covid-19 isn't deadlier than a normal flu, then death rates must have spiked in all these countries because of something else. That is one extraordinary claim if I ever saw one.
(In addition, it's false that Sweden isn't doing a lockdown. Sweden is simply one of the countries that have enacted the least harsh lockdown measures. It's a grayscale, not binary.)
We accept people dying from the flu every year, because vaccines and other measures have pushed the death rate low enough. It is also very rare that young people die from the flu, and since there is a vaccine there is an element of personal responsibility.
In comparison, unmitigated covid-19 seems to be 5x-10x deadlier than a regular mitigated flu, and covid-19 cases requires a lot more healthcare resources in the form of ICU beds and ventilators, which is a very limited resource. If we run out of ICU beds, people will start dying of other preventable things like heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. In addition, covid-19 kills far more young people than the flu does.
It is very probable that we'll live with a mitigated coronavirus for a long time ahead, either by getting vaccines, or by discovering treatments that reduce the fatality rate. But as long as we don't have those mitigation strategies, lockdowns are all we have to reduce the fatality rate low enough for us to accept it.
Right now covid-19 is excessively deadly, and that is why we are in lockdown, and will remain in lockdown until it isn't, or until economic desperation changes the tolerance for its fatality rate.
I've already had the virus and known several friends to have it, we're not spring chickens, but were otherwise healthy. Our daughters didn't even get it, sons were mild. So fear mongering about the young is not very compelling.
Lockdowns are useful in big dense cities, they make a lot less sense in sparser areas. One size does not fit all.
We really have no idea what the results of US vs Sweden or Tennessee vs Virginia will hold up by looking at it now. We need to wait 12 months, look back, add some margins of error, find correlations and debate about the potential causes.
I can understand everyone being upset and wanting things now. People are dying. Other people are 2 months behind on all their bills and going to food banks for the first time in their lives to feed their families. Despite the contrary, most States are still denying unemployment to independent contractors and business owners like hair dressers.
But making any type of prediction at this point is irrational. We need to weight everything. It's not as simple as Lives vs Economy .. the economy provides for lives.
It’s somewhat incredible to see how the “just the flu” crowd doubled down on their views despite the failure of containment in NYC (and high death tolls overseas in the UK and elsewhere) making it clear how many more people would have died if their plan of just letting the virus rip through the entire country had been enacted in March.
Regarding the removal of the video from YouTube, i don’t like this. Even though it’s clearly wrong, and is being used to push for something bad, YouTube exercising this type of censorship over legal content worries me.
To some extent I think using the word "censorship" is disingenuous here as well. No one is censoring this video, they can post the video on their own website wherever they please. Just because you can't post the video on someone else's website doesn't mean you are being censored.
It’s YouTube’s legal right to remove this, but I do recognize that the more YouTube exercises censorship and editorial judgment over the content, the more likely they are to remove content I like and agree with as well, so that is what concerns me.
And I also wonder if removing this specific video might do more harm than good, because it lets the authors cry out that the establishment is censoring them and helps promote their conspiracy-theory-level thinking. In certain cases speech suppression can be very effective, but since powerful elements of US society (e.g. Fox News) are engaging in motivated reasoning to agree with the contents of this video, it could provide an additional plank to convince those who aren’t capable of evaluating the scientific arguments themselves.
It is not unreasonable to dislike the trend of a company named "YouTube" increasingly favoring large state-sponsored and corporate organizations both in hard policy and soft algorithms.
The same exact accusation is being made by the other side towards the "doomers". That the doomsday crows is doubling down because they can't admit their fault. I'm not siding with anyone here, just noticing.
For instance, here is Elon claiming on march 18 that by the end of April, the USA would have followed the same pattern as China and cases would have dropped to near zero. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1240483296347181057?s=20 (Never mind that china achieved this by a massive shutdown and quarantine regime stricter than any US state has done). His prediction was way off but he doesn’t seem to have learned.
In order to reconcile that, you have to justify the lockdowns, and one way of doing that is to shout from the top of your lungs that if we hadn't gone into lockdown, everyone would be dead, dead, dead.
The truth of the matter is probably incredibly complicated. Yes, some lockdown measures have an effect, but we don't actually know which ones are most effective, which measures gives us the best bang for the buck, and which measures are useless and therefore harmful in the long run.
So any places that have less severe lockdown measures than what the doomers are advocating, and that are seeing decent results at stopping the spread, those places are a threat to the doomer side of the argument, and therefore those places have to fail.
And that's on top of the fact that statistics is hard, and everyone is spouting bullshit every other way, myself included.
[1] Roussel et al., “SARS-CoV-2: fear versus data.”, Int J Antimicrob Agents. 2020 Mar 19:105947, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32201354
“Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.”
“Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.”
“Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”
Now, today, we are at 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths just in the USA, and an analysis of excess mortality data already shows that a significant % of COVID-19-related deaths are not included in that count.
This is with a massive mitigation campaign and nationwide social distancing. The only place where the virus seems to have established itself is in NYC (20% of people infected according to a recent study) where we have seen incredible death tolls and overwhelmed morgues. (Edit, needless to say, none of the 4 common cold coronaviruses do this, ever.)
At this point, how can you look at the number of people who died from COVID-19 in just the last month in NYC and claim this is no worse than the flu? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
The last flu to cause such a severe spike in mortality statistics was the devastating 1918 Spanish flu. Even the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu pandemics didn’t do this.
Edit: corrected the Spanish flu year. My bad :-)
The second wave of the 1918 flu killed between 17 to 50 million people, perhaps as high as 100 million people, during the fall of 1918, with a higher than expected mortality rate for the young and healthy. It killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world's population.
So far 200,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
The current coronavirus is 1/100 as deadly as the flu of 1918.
It feels like you didn’t engage with the data I presented at all. (Edit: removed sentences that would only apply if you had read my other post)
Edit 2: if your only argument is that COVID-19 is not worse than Spanish flu, that’s something that is reasonable. It’s worse than any pandemic flu since Spanish flu though, this is a once in a century occurrence.
Plus, as someone pointed out, drawing conclusions from the numbers we have so far in comparison with the 1918 flu is difficult.
I've been working with NYC numbers. The link you gave was for NY State deaths. NYC has reported about 12.3k deaths [1], has a population of about 8.4 million [2] and 21% of people appear to have antibodies at this time.
Doing some math with the above numbers I end up with .14% dead so far with 1/5th of people exposed. From there I assume the amount of dead would quadruple before we reach herd immunity. I also assume that antibodies provide at least a handful of years of immunity, just like for other coronaviruses, reducing the severity of future infections. A likely outcome is that this becomes another variant of several coronaviruses that circulate with the common cold.
I guess even for those who might agree with all of the above there still exists differences in opinion on what actions should be taken. I personally understand some people's comparison with the yearly flu, but realize that is most definately not an apples to apples comparison.
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
Yes I believe your rough math is matching others that are reported by the scientific literature which is estimating around 0.7% infection fatality ratio (IFR) for this virus, 4*0.14 would be on the low end of estimates but within the consensus estimate. Seasonal Flu IFR is estimated to be between 0.04% and 0.1%, so by your numbers the coronavirus is, at a minimum, 5 times more deadly than seasonal flu.
I also agree this virus will become a part of life in the future. Although some Asia-Pacific countries seem to have successfully controlled the spread (Vietnam, Taiwan, etc) the only way for them to keep it from spreading will be to maintain a border closure until a vaccine can be developed to safely give their populations herd immunity.
In the west, we let the virus run free for two months and it’s probably too late to get it under control no matter what we do now.
Wow: you are saying the final death rate from Covid19 will be from 0.01% to 0.06%.
You are making irrelevant comparisons: we don’t yet know how many people will die from Covid19; we have no idea of numbers of deaths in many poorer countries where deaths can’t even be counted; comparing number of deaths in a world with 7 billion people against number of deaths for 1918 population is pointless.
In fact I will admit that thinking further about the numbers we have so far I am sobered by how they may add up across the world.
But back on topic, talking about lockdowns: The stated purpose of the lockdown was to flatten the curve so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, which has been successful so far. Do you think lockdowns lower the number of deaths when all is said and done? How long can lockdowns be sustained? Would it be more effective for vulnerable folks to self-isolate? Unless we can mass produce a vaccine in the next couple of months won't this continue moving through the population regardless of what we do?
No. We don't know the numbers because most countries don't have the numbers yet. This 200,000 number includes data from countries like the UK or US who are only counting confirmed covid-19 deaths. We know that deaths outside hospital make up about half the total, so we'd expect about 400,000 deaths.
Also, bear in mind that you're being very selective with your data: you're picking out one of (the?) most densely populated centers, which also happens to be an international travel hub
NYC is an excellent example to look at precisely because of what you said - it’s a dense population center and international travel hub, so it was seeded with quite a few coronavirus cases early on and unfortunately the virus seems to have infected up to 20% of the residents of the city (as shown by a new serology survey), despite social distancing having begun mid-March.
Other regions outside NYC weren’t as affected in terms of mortality, and we have no indication that’s because of anything other than that not as many people outside NYC fell ill with the virus.
The drop in deaths after the spike is because of data reporting (deaths are commonly revised upward as the data trickles in) and also because 6 weeks of social distancing and school closures would have greatly reduced the spread of the virus, this is just common sense as we know the virus spreads through physical proximity of an infected person with non-infected persons, and social distancing has greatly reduced the number of those situations.
Faster infection doesn't directly result in higher total fatalities, unless medical care lacks capacity. This is a bigger problem for places like New York where the infection rates did put significant burden on healthcare facilities. On the flip side, places less dense than NYC can go without restrictions and this will not impact the overall health outcomes.
Deaths nation-wide have peaked more than a week ago. Deaths among developed countries have also mostly peaked over the last few weeks. Testing almost always under counts, both by virtue of not counting asymptomatic people, and by delays in forming antibodies in the infected. The latter also affects random studies. New York's 20% indicated infection rate likely means that the infection rate today is approaching the 50% or more required to achieve herd immunity.
1. To be more specific, it's estimated that the virus will spread to 50-70% of people before herd would diminish the ability of the virus to spread much further.
Yes, if by approaching you mean at least twice the number of people who have already died from the virus would have to die to achieve this, since 20% is less than half of 50%. I’ve seen scientific experts estimating that with this specific virus, due to its high R0, 50-70% is not the threshold for herd immunity anyway and it could be up to 84% or higher (Polio = 80%, Measles = 95% thresholds, for comparison). That could mean up to 4x the amount of deaths we’ve already seen.
The total number of people who would be affected by a herd immunity strategy could also be changed by a social distancing intervention around the time the threshold is reached. Otherwise, models indicate there would be an overshoot and a higher % of people would end up being infected than is necessary for herd immunity. No country or region seems to have reached this threshold yet though since they all engaged in social distancing first. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1252078649827667968
The other option would have been to do what several countries in the Asia Pacific region did - Taiwan, Vietnam, and apparently China, for instance. Instead of allowing the virus to run free, they have worked toward eliminating it within their borders. Many lives will be saved if that plan can succeed and they can avoid a “herd immunity” result until a safe vaccine is available to provide the herd immunity.
Where much of the western world is seeing cases peak, China has been seeing them rise again [1]. The idea that the virus has been eliminated is incorrect. China aggressively flattened its curve, but concluding that they will eliminate infections without herd immunity is not a certainty at this point.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
"We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses."
Since early Feb we've seen ~54K deaths from Coronavirus alone (excluding influenza deaths) [0]. The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case....
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1252616296891465729
The level of deaths/week we are seeing is like nothing that has occurred in decades of recorded vital statistics. (The 1968 flu pandemic shows on the 2nd chart, but is small beans compared to COVID).
I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it is something important like medical care.
And on the flip side, there are people who might have died of things like car accidents if the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had not taken place.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
No amount of Hacker News Mental Gymnastics(tm) is going to explain that away.
[1]:https://twitter.com/BraveTheWorld/status/1254232498122428416
But this is what happens for flu too. You want to count them using the same methodology. You either use confirmed cases (Covid-19 kills more people than a bad flu year, and yes we do test for flu); or you use confirmed and suspected cases (again, covid-19 kills more than a bad flu year); or you use excess mortality (and this year we have huge increase in excess mortality).
There's no way to look at the data and come up with anything other than "covid-19 kills a lot of people".
Even if the current estimate is undercounting by half, COVID-19 will still have killed 2x as many people as last flu season. It's inherently speculative to compare against the death toll of what would have happened without a total economic shutdown. Figures ranging from 1-2 million have been tossed around here on HN. NPR ran a story with a claim of 1.3 million. However the experiences of countries that did not adopt distancing restrictions or adopted much less drastic ones, including denser and more populated ones like Japan, are not seeing anything close to these death rates. We'll be able to glean better information once testing becomes more widespread and comparisons can be made more reliably, but the 10-20x increase in deaths without social distancing that was initially claimed doesn't seem to be happening.
It's not "just the flu", its "just 3-4x deadlier than the flu, and spreads twice as fast". How scared are people of the flu? How scared are people of COVID-19? The latter is way more than 3 to 4 times larger than the former. If you asked people in 2019 "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can stop a virus that will probably kill ~4x as many people as the last flu season[1]. Should we do it?" How many people would say yes? Probably not very many.
Phrase the same question differently: "If we sacrifice 25% of the economy and make 25 million people unemployed, then we can halve cancer deaths for this year. Should we do it?" Again, people would balk at this.
This is why the coronavirus panic is dumb in a lot of people's views. People are experiencing fear that is orders of magnitude off from the actual threat. Much in the same vein that people fear shark attacks when they are incredibly rare.
1. This is assuming a death toll of a quarter million, all of which are prevented in this scenario by economic shutdown. In reality, we'd only be saving the delta between the deaths with the shutdown and without.
What is the world coming to that people are so afraid of opinions that they don’t agree with?
First note that this video is more than just "opinions that they don't agree with" as the doctors are claiming and framing as fact some blatantly false ideas (like their statistical nonsense where they extrapolate their testing data to get a .03 IFR).
Now note that a lot of people are using this video to justify their desire to not social distance. I know older at-risk people who are using this video to try and convince other older at-risk people to stop social distancing. What if some of those at-risk people were people you cared about? Then you might be afraid about these opinions.
Whether the answer is calling on Twitter and Youtube to curate people's tweets and videos, I'm not sure (and I want to believe the answer is no, but I'm very much not sure that it is).
"We always have between 37,000 and 60,000 deaths in the United States, every single year. No pandemic talk. No shelter in place. No shutting down businesses."
Since early Feb we've seen ~54K deaths from Coronavirus alone (excluding influenza deaths) [0]. The argument that this is just part of the normal flu cycle doesn't make any sense.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...
The idea that we can hide out until the virus completely disappears is a fantasy. The only sustainable path forward is targeted lockdown and isolation for the most vulnerable along with mustering our energies for testing and treatment.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/europe/sweden-coronavirus-loc...
Comparing to its geographical and cultural neighbors helps deal with differences in city structure, public health system, trust in government, population density, etc.
Even if we take Sweden's case at face value this is still 1/4 the multiplier that people seem to think it is. Furthermore, Sweden is pursuing a strategy of herd immunity: let people get infected so that the populace becomes immune. They should see a higher rise in deaths, but also a faster decline as the virus runs out of viable hosts. A tall, narrow spike versus a wide, shorter curve. The area under the final curve is what we're looking for.
But in general, yes. Areas with stronger restrictions have significantly fewer deaths, and areas that enacted restrictions saw deaths drop by 3-5x already, with continued downward trends as opposed to upward exponential ones.
See Figure S3 here: https://t.co/JYf1F5GnYu?amp=1
I'm not saying it will be that way, but it's worth considering.
Link to something a bit more credible.
Sorry but there are other paths to containing the virus without resorting to draconian measures, especially when those measures are indiscriminate blunt instruments (for example applying same restrictions to urban and rural areas).
Despite that Sweden has the same per capita infection rate and a per capita death rate of around 3x Germany's.
And that's still with some social distancing requests, there just isn't a stay at home order.
So yes, unless Sweden tightens restrictions, I'd expect to see it hit an order of magnitude harder than nations doing more restrictions, despite still having some.
The fact that we're delusional enough to think that we're somehow safe from the same thing occurring here is absurd. And this is in a country that's far better about following shelter orders and mask-wearing guidance!
There might be people who died from Covid-19 who weren't tested post-mortem, especially in February when the virus was flying under the radar.
NYTimes had an article which showed a number of places around the world have had a surge in deaths compared to the same time period in previous years. And even if you subtract the known Covid-19 cases, there's still a sharp increase in the count.
Look at the graph on the last page for NYC for example:
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
Excess death data so far suggests that they are indeed undercounting true deaths. While it is certainly possible lockdown has caused some additional immediate deaths, it is also likely other deaths (eg decreased car accidents) have gone down. So it will require further analysis once this is all said and done and more data is available, but my money is that the US has undercounted deaths thus far.
To highlight the spike in deaths being significantly higher than even the worst flu over the last years look at the data from Euromono https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ It's even worse if one considers that so far the deaths have been quite localised compared to e.g. the flu.
those deaths are after the seasonal flu is heavily vaccinated against. in 2017-2018, flu vaccine generation was at a record high [0] (in the US).
its heavily vaccinated against (with many sectors like military and healthcare requiring vaccination) exactly because its dangerous.
isnt this a normal flu? what would happen if we stopped producing normal flu vaccines? in other words, what if a new flu came out that ignored our current vaccines - a novel virus?
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht...
The pattern is so transparent too - telling us to listen to "both sides", and implying we're being biased when we dismiss obvious misinformation. I can't help that the American right is so detached from reality.
There's a global pandemic. This bullshit will literally kill people. YouTube is a private company, and they have every right to remove this from their system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
Flu season is vaccinated against.
Also it has been known that cv has a larger multiple death rate.
But of course people who want to believe what they say will eat it right up and point to their credentials as proof of what they believe.
The belief of dishonesty could be applied both ways.
The video was a news conference from Dr. Dan Erickson, who along with Dr. Artin Massihi, own the largest COVID testing site in Kern County, Accelerated Urgent Care, California. They have done more than half the testing there. It wasn't some random joe making claims.
> What they did was simple: they looked at the fraction of patients who tested positive for #COVID19 at the clinics they own. They found 340 out of 5213 tests were postive, about 6.6%
> Then they assume the same fraction of the whole population are infected.
Not surprising, though.
Idiotic (and, yes, such an error IS idiotic) fumbling with statistics is displayed on a daily basis.
It doesn't matter what 'side' you are on: idiots abound.
Doomer fallacies: Charts showing exponential growth of positives, without taking into account the exponential growth of tests...
Flu-Bro fallacies: Antibody surveys that don't take into account false positives and make no mention of the expected number of positives in a population (both needed to make ANY sense of the results.)
Doomer fallacies: No distinction between dying 'with' versus dying 'from'.
Flu-Bro fallacies: Relying on death counts from the Chinese Communist Party.
Doomer fallacies: Comparing 'positive' test rates between populations and countries with utterly different criteria for administering tests.
etc.
One thing you can count on, though: You will usually get a downvote on Hacker News if you deviate from the mainstream.
Previously you were in a discussion with me arguing with great confidence that the virus outbreak would be a distant memory in two months. I just looked it up; it was 61 days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22434499
You were using terms like "chicken littles" then. I'm all for reading different viewpoints, but if you're going to throw around insults like "doomer", you're not likely to get a civilised discussion going.
So, so I was a few days off in my estimate.
Statistically insignificant deaths, no overwhelmed hospitals, no body bags in the hallways or rationing of ventilators. No millions of deaths now any other of the nonsense being predicted here two months ago.
The talk now, as evidenced by the front page, is other topics... stimulus checks and the like.
Are things as you feared two months ago?
6.6% infected has to be wrong. That just shows we're not testing enough to see the true, much lower, number. It's also biased because we're not randomly sampling--instead we're testing people that are already showing symptoms.
Then when that inflated number goes in the denominator, it makes it look like the fatality rate is much lower.
Are you really prepared to say a claim of 6.6% is so misleading it needs to be removed?
* http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/phcommon/public/media/media...
The sensitivity is the issue, but that would tend to push the true infected % up not down.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v...
For comparison, 1 million Americans (50x less) have had covid, and so far 59,225 have died (1.4x more) [0]. Their conclusion is that this is no worse than the flu, even though those numbers show it being more than 60x more deadly.
edit: Bringing this up from lower discussion: Even if you assume 10x more cases than reported, with 2x observed excess deaths [1], that's 10 million people sick and 100,000 dead; 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
Weird how no one who brings up under-reported cases has any opinion about under-reported deaths, since the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify.
Find any serious expert who does not believe that. Estimates have always been that cases are underreported by 10-20x, and that's consistent with recent serology tests.
Cases are obviously under-reported. I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.
Even if there were 10x as many cases, that would be 10 million people and 100,000 deaths (based on the above 2x excess number). That's 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/04/27/cov...
Sure, that's plausible.
I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.
That's not plausible. The current case fatality rate (known deaths divided by known cases) is 5.7% according to https://infection2020.com/#. Nobody seriously believes that 5% of infected people end up dying; the most pessimistic estimates are between 1 and 2 percent. (Which would of course still be extremely bad).
You can't make that assumption because of things like suicides and people delaying treatment for serious acute health issues.
Compare with this excellent piece by the CBC on a somewhat similar viral video in Canada:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/u-of-r-biology-p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporat...
They are much happier with the murdoch press, who had headlines like "vote this bastards out" (don't remember the exact phrase but it was direct like that) as a headline some years ago arguing to vote out the Labour government.
It's always interesting to see how some people always argue that news sources should be neutral and report only on facts if there are some left leaning opinions published, but completely ignore the blatant electioneering that goes on in the murdoch press.
Are the doctors in the video saying untruths or misrepresenting data? I think what they said in the video was eminently reasonable. But perhaps I'm wrong. Luckily we have the freedom to publicly critique their claims - assuming our critiques aren't censored by major internet companies - which is how falsehoods and untruths should be dealt with, not with censorship.
Because it's almost a monopoly. It's not one of roughly equal dozens video hosting services. It's freaking youtube.
The crux is people wanting to spread their views but who don’t want to pay to do that.
Is this an honest comment or one you hope won't be challenged? There are NO video hosting services with the popularity or reach of YouTube, by a very long shot. Customers of ours have lost their entire livelihood because content that was present on YouTube for a decade was suddenly politically incorrect and their accounts got banned.
That wouldn't be the case if they had more than one reasonable option.
You keep trying to gloss over the fact that RandomVideo has nowhere near the size or reach of YouTube. Monopolies DO NOT REQUIRE zero competitors, that has never been part of their definition. Some videos on YT have BILLIONS of views. There's literally no meaningful competitor.
In other words, no one has the "right" to Youtube's distribution and promotion. Put you video on another site and promote it yourself.
https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
They aren't stopping them voicing their opinions or views... they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service.
Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?
https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
Unfortunately that no longer holds as certain entities have a stranglehold on online communication.
Perhaps the free market will fix this. Perhaps not. Are we willing to allow a small cadre of like minded individuals manipulate the internet in the meantime?
I believe that's an intolerant situation and am not willing to wait.
And that's why newspapers are classified as publishers and therefore are able to be sued. "Platforms" like YouTube are can't be sued because they are supposed to act like platforms - which they are not. Right now YouTube is acting like publishers while using the advantage of being called a platform. This is the Communications Decency Act section 230.
That is clearly nonsense.
The CDA doesn’t say “in order to not be liable you must host everything regardless of what it is” it allows you to host potentially anything that is uploaded without being considered directly liable for that (which would be far more censorious)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
> One of the first legal challenges to Section 230 was the 1997 case Zeran v. America Online, Inc., in which a Federal court affirmed that the purpose of Section 230 as passed by Congress was "to remove the disincentives to self-regulation created by the Stratton Oakmont decision".[8] Under that court's holding, computer service providers who regulated the dissemination of offensive material on their services risked subjecting themselves to liability, because such regulation cast the service provider in the role of a publisher. Fearing that the specter of liability would therefore deter service providers from blocking and screening offensive material, Congress enacted § 230's broad immunity "to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children's access to objectionable or inappropriate online material."
[. . .]
> Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44, 49-53 (D.D.C. 1998).[71]
> The court upheld AOL's immunity from liability for defamation. AOL's agreement with the contractor allowing AOL to modify or remove such content did not make AOL the "information content provider" because the content was created by an independent contractor. The Court noted that Congress made a policy choice by "providing immunity even where the interactive service provider has an active, even aggressive role in making available content prepared by others."
The idea that anyone can be a content creator is, it's supposed to be as neutral as possible. Let the world battle it out against itself. Once you start taking sides of opinions (as opposed to legal ones) then you become a content curator.
For better or worse, America was built on the idea that I can have an absolutely stupid idea and that's my right. We'll fight to my death but it is my right to hold said stupid idea and voice it with youtube being my megaphone.
That's a core tenant of free speech and youtube was supposed to be able to help that. Now they're taking sides and it's not comforting
Was it though? First Amendment says:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”
Until YouTube joins the Senate, I think they’re fine doing whatever they want.
I think it's reasonable to assume that the American government contains the same kind of people that are in governments the world over and throughout history. And governments have always attempted to suppress speech: that's why the First Amendment was written.
Given Snowden's revelations, can you be sure that Youtube's censoring is simply a business decision by executives and not a result of government influence? How would things be different if the government were pressuring the big platforms to squelch speech?
The text of the amendment looks pretty clear to me. Pressuring big platforms is a world away from passing a law.
What did Snowden reveal about government influence over private sector censorship? I must have missed it.
The bill of rights is a legal document, and it can only govern the actions of government. But I don't think that there's any debate that the first amendment came about because the founding fathers believed free speech was an inalienable human right. I don't think the founding fathers would say that inalienable rights are suddenly alienated because you put a corporation in charge of your communications platform.
Do you believe free speech is a human right? If so, then why do you care when it's violated by a government, but not care when it's violated by corporations who are arguably more powerful in the field of communication?
Are bookstores required to stock every book ever published?
Are fraud and defamation free speech?
Must newspapers post every classified ad submitted to them?
Is medical advice free speech?
Are government clerks required to serve verbally abusive clients?
No, no, no... there are plenty of examples where the right to free speech is found to have limits. Especially when that speech violates other freedoms.
You have the right to make videos and distribute them. You do not have the right to compel anybody to watch them, receive them or redistribute them. A platform such as youtube has the right to curate -- otherwise it would be a useless mass of SEO'd spam.
We’re going to need a Youtube clone that has a better charter for content creators, and viewers alike.
A decentralized video platform not under the control of a centralized company would bypass all the issues you mention. There are technological challenges, but we've made slow progress toward solutions over the past few decades.
Again, the question isn't "do social media platforms have the right to censor?". The question is, "given social media platforms have the legal right to censor, should they censor?".
If you don't understand that there might be reasons to do something beyond legal obligation or profit, you're not equipped to participate in this conversation.
> ... you're not equipped to participate in this conversation.
Please review the site guidelines and take a more charitable approach to this conversation. There's some irony that your argument around ideologically pure free speech is punctuated by insinuation that I should self-censor because I'm not ideologically pure enough.
I provided a handful of reasons where speech can do harm, and where forced publication impinges other rights. I'm saying that yes, "platforms" (which are also publishers / promoters / marketers due to features such search, recommendation, featured content etc.) have an obligation, ethical or legal, to take certain content down. In the case of spam, that content is taken down or shadowbanned for the greater good. That's a free ethical choice, not a legal obligation.
By all means, there are cases where publishers should resist external pressure to censor, and I fully agree that Congress shall make no law. But youtube isn't the government. They have a right to curate the content that they distribute that is just as important as your right to produce and self-publish your content.
I said, "[J]ust because it's your legal right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do."
Sure, you're allowed to say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean saying it was the right thing to do. Saying that you said the wrong thing isn't ironic: it's exactly what one would expect given what I actually said.
There can be no irony with regards to my argument around ideologically pure free speech, because I didn't make any such argument.
Additionally, there's a difference between me censoring you by force, and me asking you to say things that are relevant.
> I provided a handful of reasons where speech can do harm, and where forced publication impinges other rights.
I never suggested forced publication, so these cases are not a response to my post.
> They have a right to curate the content that they distribute that is just as important as your right to produce and self-publish your content.
I specifically said that YouTube has this right. I said, "It's certainly their right under ownership laws to censor on their platform."
Now that we've got that out of the way, care to discuss the question I asked?
> That's a core tenant of free speech
I'd disagree heavily with this assessment based on these two points.
The founding fathers drew much of their inspiration from Hobbes who wrote that liberty involved ceding some "sovereign power" (liberty) to a state so that we could be free to do things without worrying about survival of the fittest.
I believe it was Jefferson that was vehemently against government officials making false claims / lying...which is a limitation of free speech, but results in a net surplus of free speech.
The idea that all speech should be free is a fairly ignorant one.
> and voice it with youtube being my megaphone.
And this is ABSOLUTELY against any sort of semblance of the ideas America was founded on. YouTube is a private platform. They can (and SHOULD) police their speech, because it is a private platform.
YouTube is ultimately socially responsible for the outcomes of what people say on it's platform. If someone is denying or minimizing a VERY REAL and VERY SERIOUS global pandemic, YouTube had a social obligation to curtail their free speech.
Look, most people on HNews agree with you, myself included. That stupid speech and stupid acts are costing very real lives.
But the whole point of this thread is that protected speech does cost lives as well. That we should be debating, identifying and responding to bad/poor speech. It should not be simply removed.
> YouTube had a social obligation to curtail their free speech.
Put a banner up. Identify it with Mr Yuck sticker. Don't remove it as if it never existed. That's dangerous, no?
If you don't believe it's dangerous, is it because the thing that's being censored is in your favor/belief/alignment?
Tomorrow, if Youtube said, "We'll remove all content that does not agree with the POTUS." That's only a few letters away from the WHO, right? POTUS is authority.
But that's insane. That's absurd.
That's what this debate is about. Censoring goes both ways.
I would consider this a form of censorship as well, and I would absolutely support it.
> That we should be debating, identifying and responding to bad/poor speech. It should not be simply removed.
I suppose I could agree in this particular circumstance that YouTube having some sort of banner over this content would suffice, I think it's the same thing as just removing it.
> If you don't believe it's dangerous, is it because the thing that's being censored is in your favor/belief/alignment?
(I think you mixed your words up here, but I am interpreting this as you asking I'm ok with censorship if furthers my beliefs, if I'm wrong please correct me)
I'm ok with any censorship/curtailing of free speech that: results in a net-surplus of free speech, endangers others ("fire" in a crowded theater), or incites violence.
> Censoring goes both ways.
Censorship that is used to silence legitimate opinions that do not cause harm to others is a terrible thing and shouldn't exist. This has nothing to do with "both ways" or any "way"
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
> First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute.
Maybe not in the author's circles, but in this particular scenario, that point was in dispute.
Sure, but that's not a useful thing to know. I recall when Ken compared saying that to something akin to the following conversation, which I'm reconstructing from memory:
Help! I've been bitten by a snake and I want to know if it's poisonous!
Unless you're eating the snake, it only matters if the snake is venomous.
Okay, so can you tell me if the snake is venomous then?
Not all snakes are venomous.
So the important point is not to dispute over whether any speech can be banned, but whether the speech in question fits one of the categories of unprotected speech:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Yea, you're right, but thanks for getting the spirit.
> Censorship that is used to silence legitimate opinions that do not cause harm to others is a terrible thing and shouldn't exist.
That's your belief because "legitimate opinions". What is "legitimate opinions"? That is the crux.
Your sense of justice is driving your opinions. Someone else's is going to be slightly different. Okay that's obvious, but the high level is how do you decide what is right/wrong? It's a spectrum, a very wide and diverse one. What's simply stupid vs outright dangerous?
> I'm ok with any censorship/curtailing of free speech that: results in a net-surplus of free speech, endangers others ("fire" in a crowded theater), or incites violence.
FWIW, that's a contradictory statement. You cannot have a net-surplus of free speech by censoring. They're mutually exclusive ideas. You can have a net-surplus of "good done" via censorship. But what is "good done"? More lives? More freedom?
All I'm trying to get you to see is that censorship is one of the most powerful tools that exist for a society. A concrete example is Singapore's fake news law.
Of course you can. The government banning a platform from moderating content is a form of government censorship. Yet you believe that this would lead to more free speech.
Either a platform moderating is more free speech, or not moderating is more free speech. In either case, someone is being censored. So some form of censorship leads to more free speech.
I'd say this was a poor choice of words. All opinions are "legitimate" in that people actually hold them and believe in them.
> What's simply stupid vs outright dangerous?
I don't think this is hard to measure, especially since we already have tests for what is protected speech and what is not in the US. For instance, we have federal laws that stop employers or landlords from exercizing their right to free speech when it involves discrimination against certain protected classes of people. Or slander/libel, or inciting violence.
> FWIW, that's a contradictory statement. You cannot have a net-surplus of free speech by censoring. They're mutually exclusive ideas.
This is not the case, as explained above and in an earlier comment. In the US we already have laws that limit free speech, yet result in a more free society.
> But what is "good done"? More lives? More freedom?
Yes, both of these things are good and would be considered good under just about any normative ethical framework.
> All I'm trying to get you to see is that censorship is one of the most powerful tools that exist for a society. A concrete example is Singapore's fake news law.
I agree with this fully, and would condemn anyone using censorship to remove free speech that isn't harmful. I advocate for similar positions in that I am generally ok with the government jailing people (which is an act of violence) that commit crimes. The right to jail people is an even more powerful tool than censorship, but most people are ok with this being done.
You misunderstand how wrong information, identified as such, is received.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/11/facebook-fake-news...
Pointing out something is false either has no effect, or makes people double down on wrong ideas / beliefs. Continuing to host said ideas will cause them to spread.
The responsible thing was removal, but perhaps with more transparency around how and why.
Its arguable just as important for the concept of America to let owners of private property not be deprived of their freedom and liberties.
Newspapers, TV programs, and radio programs are publishers. In contrast, Youtube, Facebook, and other services like them are platforms. They are more like the theater building, the radio/TV station, or a telephone company. This gives them some legal protection against being held responsible for the conduct of their users. See [1]. Without this distinction, these services could not have taken off, because Youtube and Facebook would have had to sign off on each user's post.
But advancing technology is making it possible to police speech automatically. So the distinction between the publisher and platform is fading. Because platforms can regulate their users' speech now in almost real time, very cheaply, they are kind of forced to do it. Some speech is very hard to defend. The best, and easiest argument for allowing offensive speech on these platforms has been that the offensive speech could not be technically prevented without squelching a lot of acceptable speech. But now that argument is going away.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+publisher+or+platfor...
It's certainly their right under ownership laws to censor on their platform. But just because it's your right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. The question isn't "do social media platforms have the right to censor?". The question is, "given social media platforms have the right to censor, should they censor?".
Like it or not, these platforms make up a significant portion of how our society communicates, and if you believe that free speech is a human right that's important for a free society, I don't see how you can say that it suddenly doesn't matter because we put a corporation in charge of a huge portion of our communications.
I don't think that social media platforms should allow free speech because they're obligated to, I think that social media platforms should allow free speech because free speech has importance and inherent value.
> Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?
Newspapers, TV, and radio didn't sell themselves as platforms for conversation. They've always created their content (or paid someone else to create it) and curated it. Op/eds and viewer/listener calls are only a small fraction of the service these media channels provide, and frankly, these are usually more valuable for the producers of the media than the consumers in most cases. And even op/eds and viewer/listener calls are curated, with no pretense of anything else.
Social media initially gained traction on the false idea that they were platforms where anyone could have a conversation. Many people (myself included) warned that we shouldn't be giving up so much of our communications to corporations, but here we are decades later and everyone is using these as communications platforms.
In this case Google choose the WHO. We can argue that there's a better choice on the table, but what?
You’re assuming that some global institution has to be The Arbiter Of Truth because common people are too stupid to think for themselves and I find that assumption disgusting.
> You’re assuming that some global institution has to be The Arbiter Of Truth because common people are too stupid to think for themselves and I find that assumption disgusting.
The market is the sharpest vote the people may give for companies. Next would be holding businesses liable, which Google is in various ways. If Google is accountable for the content it serves, and it is in various ways, then that is the people's will in motion.
I find it alarming that you think you understand my thoughts without getting into a conversation with me, to the point of announcing your disgust over a forum.
Hello first amendment.
You’ve been expressing your thoughts on that same forum, and if I’ve misunderstood them I am sorry, but as far as I did understand them I am disgusted by them. You are free to clarify anything you think I have misunderstood, of course. But I would advise you to be more careful publicly sharing your thoughts on any forum if you’re going to go clutching pearls at how they are received. Failing that, let me clarify that I am merely disgusted at what you actually wrote, which may have nothing to do with the ineffable inner workings of your mind.
Did you not mean to imply, as a premise, that Google (specifically YouTube) should be censoring user-submitted content on the basis that it disagrees with the “responsible judgment” of some institutional authority? If so, please inform me what you meant in the first place. Because even in the best of faith I can’t find any other way to interpret your comment.
Specifically:
> If you don't trust Google to make a category of social or moral judgments, you're either trusting the market or you have another institution do the job.
If someone posts a video on YouTube, anyone who watches that video will make their own “social and moral judgments” about the content of that video, and in most circumstances that’s enough for me. Why are you assuming that some “institution” will inevitably make those judgments for us, and decide based on those judgments whether we’re allowed to see the video in the first place? Why is that something you accept, and seemingly advocate? Because that is the premise that I question, reject, and express my disgust at.
It's fine to have a trusted organization to make decisions. It's not fine to place that organization above all criticism.
I think their statistical methods are suspect and likely wrong. I don't think they should be censored and the act of censoring them is actively harmful if you don't want people taken in by misinformation, then we need to actively produce good information. There is not and cannot be some way to absolve a free society of that burden. Censorship only helps to convince people that you know you're wrong and you're hiding from criticism. This is especially bad when you're right.
as it stands, google is already above all criticism because they are to big to be approached by any individual wronged by their decisions. an independent organization would be much more approachable, even if that approach ends up being a lawsuit.
It will be if we have no problem deplatforming all criticism.
any third party would be easier to approach, even if they need to be sued to see the error of their ways (if there is a decision in dispute).
ideally such an institution is directly answerable to the public and to lawmakers for their decisions and it could be properly funded to handle those decisions.
such an institution could work with multiple companies, especially smaller ones who can not afford this amount scrutiny to their content, and who would already are affected by the ever increasing requirements to police content.
Yes, they are.
https://www.dailynews.com/2020/04/28/california-doctors-with...
> But public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.
> The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates in reality are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.
> In a rare statement late today, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”
If we were talking an order of double, I think people would be a bit less ruffled. We're not though. We're talking 50-85 times in places like Santa Clara.
But you're now asking people to trust experts, which in 2020 is apparently crazy-talk
Make your arguments, present your data, and let us peel through it and see if all works out as it should or if it is all just a bunch of bullshit. I don´t give a fuck if you are an expert or not. I care about ideas and results. Experts can go fuck themselves for all I care. I care about truth not some stupidly mind numbing notion of imbued institutional authority!
Because this is how it worked for literally hundreds of years and it seemed to work just fine, and only NOW does it seem we have a problem
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1191141
Or let's go back even further to the bubonic plague:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/04/bubonic-p...
In all these cases, the medical experts were right and trustworthy, and the politicians and public were WRONG AND MISLEADING, and that resulted in more deaths.
There are no experts in this disease, only people trying to control other people through false proclamations of authority.
They are experts in an entirely different field.
You don't need any training in statistics, epidemiology, public health, etc. to be an urgent care doc. They're experts in diagnosing and fixing ailments (at an individual level) that don't require a full-blown ER visit or hospitalization.
That article makes inaccurate statements like, "basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods" which is not true. There were 100% transparent about where there information was from and how they were presenting it.
They took stats from a massively self-selecting population - people seeking out COVID-19 testing at their facilities - and extrapolated to the general public.
That's inexcusably dumb.
As the bit I quoted states, that's like "estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court".
I don’t understand why YouTube couldn’t leave the video up, and put some kind of warning or interstitial advising of problems with the content. I would have problems with that approach too, but certainly less so than I do with the wholesale deletion of the video.
Anyway, you can find it hosted here: https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
They then use this to massively misrepresent the lethality of Covid 19.
There are a few population studies for very specific areas, but no widespread statewide sampling anywhere.
PS: The US has ~50,000 Coronavirus deaths. Assuming a very optimistic mortality rate of 0.5% suggests at most 10 million infections out of 330 million people or 3.3%. A higher mortality rate of say 5% would mean total infections are possibility as low as 0.3% of the US population.
So, no I don’t see how it’s misinformation.
This could mean that substantially more Americans have it. (Though on current projections, less than a factor of 2.)
The biggest question IMO is how much we are undercounting fatalities. NYC lists Confirmed deaths at 11,820 plus Probable deaths at 5,395. They also add: Due to delays in reporting, recent data are incomplete. https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Making any assumptions about the mortality rate with the abysmal state of testing in the US and around the world is guesswork.
Making assumptions based on the horrific codebase that's spawned our most cited models should also give anyone in software at least a twinge of anxiety.
The US has an older and sicker population than SK, and in NYC an overworked healthcare system. So, a 1% US mortality rate discounted to 0.5% due to recent infections not having time to die is extremely optimistic. It would also mean testing was only discovering 10% of cases.
PS: Many more people are exposed without having sufficient infections to trigger long term immunity. But, it’s herd immunity or deaths/long term issues we care about making such cases irrelevant as their still at risk.
Even if that’s true, what does it have to do with banning the video and preventing the public from making their own decision?
Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain. By picking and choosing like they’re doing, it leads one to distrust the company which will ultimately hurt them.
This video was more like yelling fire in a theater. I’m willing believe the doctors were sincere, but they were gravely wrong, and their misinformation was endangering the public.
YouTube was correct to turn off the alarm they erroneously turned on.
Granted, YouTube’s method of throwing up a standard “violation of community guidelines” message is crude, and leads to suspicion. Then again, so was ABC’s editorial judgment. It’s a hard problem.
The point is that even if they’re wrong, youtube and others are playing a dangerous Orwellian game and it’s going to harm their reputability in the end.
Research done on fake news illustrates why ordinary consumers of news cannot be trusted to make informed judgements.
"Right this moment I can go on youtube and look up a million rap videos that talk about guns, violence, murder, and more. I can look at videos that would lead me to harm myself in all sorts of ways if I didn’t have a brain."
Exactly this. This is why it is irresponsible for a global platform to promote this tripe.
By pulling videos, YouTube/Google is saying they don't trust people to be able to discern anything or do research among several dissenting opinions. And yes, it's their platform and yada yada .. they still allow a lot of content to be uploaded and they have become the most typical/standard centralized source of videos.
I will admit, they might be right to not trust people ... at which point why do we even care about humanity anymore? Are those with more power and influence always going to think the rest of the world are sheep who can't think for themselves and need to be led around?
This time sets all kinds of dangerous prescients. I wish Orwell was still alive.
Most people are not qualified to "examine the evidence" and make public health policy decisions. This is why we rely upon the experts. Otherwise you have measles outbreaks in Beverly Hills.
Perfect example, no expert said there was no human to human nor is there any chance of it. The only language close to that was "there isn't any proof of it now" which might have been informed by CCP misinformation.
Even though they were misinformed, any true expert should have known not to make any definitive statement either way. If you have such a quote, it was not made by an expert.
Do you think epidemiologists are? The people who have apparently never predicted a disease outbreak successfully, ever? Why are they experts but not these doctors?
And what makes YouTube employees believe they're qualified to decide who's right? They're experts in HTML5 video serving, not health.
Even doctors generally recognize that public health (of which epidemiology is only a part) is a separate domain of expertise. There are doctors who specialize in infectious disease who need some public-health training, but there's no reason to expect that e.g. a oncologist or trauma surgeon would know more than the average scientifically-literate person about a different profession.
I can vouch for their transparency. The speed with which I was able to see that their statistical methods were totally wrong was almost entirely due to their transparency. The only fact I had to find outside of what they said was the criteria for testing in the county for which they cited statistics, which I found at https://kernpublichealth.com/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-...
"Testing is NOT indicated for asymptomatic persons."
The doctors' statistics in the quote below don't work because of sampling bias.
“In Kern County, we’ve tested 5,213 people and we have 340 positive COVID cases. Well, that’s 6.5 percent of the population. Which would indicate a widespread viral infection similar to the flu,”
They use the same logic for Kern County, California, and New York. Their logic is, that if you test N people and find M positive cases, that in the population at large you'll have an infection rate of M/N. This would be true if the N tests were performed on random members of the population. But because the tests are only performed when there's reason to suspect infection, M/N is a higher infection rate than in the population at large. Their inflated number for total infected persons makes the death rate appear smaller.
https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
I suppose that’s the real problem, in so many words...
Because you have a basic understanding of statistics.
> Why can't we watch and make our own judgements?
You can. The video is available in many places.
Sample size doesn't help if the sampling method is biased. Even if tests were available to everyone regardless of symptoms, you would still have a selection bias that would skew the numbers. The only way to accurately estimate overall infection rates in the general population is to test a random sampling.
Then there is the "comparison" of Sweden (no lock down) and Norway/California. They mention the death counts and population of these countries in another attempt to show that the "number of cases is high and the number of deaths is small regardless of lockdown" but completely gloss over the fact that Sweden has more that 5x the covid deaths per capita that Norway and California have.
Regardless of if this video should be censored, these guys are awful scientists.
This is the exact reason why it shouldn't be censored. Because if their science is bad then it needs to be available for people who know better to tear it to shreds.
If you take it down then the story can't be "this is why they're wrong" because what they said isn't available anymore, so a rebuttal isn't believable because you can't tell if it's an accurate representation of the original presentation.
So then the story becomes about censorship and you're making it all too easy for motivated people to spin a conspiracy theory about how these scientists are speaking truth to power and getting oppressed, even if they are in actual fact totally wrong.
This isn't something I have been able to confidently form an opinion on; it's a hard topic. I think we will be strugging with how to balance bias, deliberate misinformation and freedom of speech for a long time.
But I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.
I count several detailed criticisms of it just in this thread. Do none of them have a YouTube account?
Why don't the people proposing to censor it post their own rebuttal?
> I think at the very least, YouTube needed to put up prominent disclaimers and links to limit the harm that this content can cause.
Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.
I did post a rebutal in some of the duplicates I found on YouTube. YouTube comments are not really a great platform for debate and the way their algorithm works tends pull videos like this into an echo chamber that avoids the exact types of critical discussion you are calling for.
So, given the (artificial) choice between leaving the video up as is and taking it down, I suspect that in this particular case, the practically beneficial choice for society (in the short term at least) is to take it down precisely because of how YouTube works as a platform and community.
> Which is totally different. Leaving the video up while posting a prominent link to a rebuttal isn't censorship, it's more speech.
Yes, I am a big fan of free speech. However it has become increasingly clear that simply making speech as free as possible in as many places as possible is not enough (by itself) to solve the problems of misinformation, partisanship and radicalization that we are facing as a society. We can't just dismiss those problems, so as advocates for free speech, we need to find non-censorship ways to help solve those problems.
This seems like a YouTube-specific problem that should have solutions not involving censorship.
I'm not saying that you are misrepresenting or disinforming people. But, how would you know unless someone told you?
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
And then, comparing that to the flu and saying this isn't much worse, we're now well into the "this video is a potentially a public health hazard" territory.
No, lockdowns are the public health hazard. The data is quite clear at this point that what's going on here is no worse than the flu. Here's a simple graphic from the UK to make that point clear:
http://inproportion2.talkigy.com/
And if you look at when lockdowns could have possibly started working given incubation and death lags, you'll see that most countries seem to have peaked before the lockdowns could have started working. Implication: they weren't responsible for the peak and decline.
But the more important point is that it's critical such things can be debated. Simply assuming you're right and anyone who disagrees is a "public health hazard" is totalitarianism. You won't have any ability to defend yourself, or even any right to, next time someone erases you because e.g. Trump declared your views to be dangerous.
Also i've said it here before, but young, healthy people who did not had to have invasive respiration (so no ICU) still got out of their sickness with lingering asthma, possibly caused by a pulmonary fibrosis. I found this [0] in English if you don't know what it is. In five to seven years (assuming we find a vaccine for sras-cov2 in two year) we will really start counting our dead, unless we find a non-chirurgical fibrosis cure.
[0] https://lungdiseasenews.com/2017/06/16/12-facts-pulmonary-fi...
> 33,865 COVID cases out of a total of 280,900 total tested--that's 12% of Californians were positive for COVID.
This would only be true if those tested were randomly selected. Even in the most optimistic Santa Clara County study prevalence was estimated at under 5%. 1
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v...
The answer of course is ideology. These are two experts giving two different opinions based on different sets of similarly poor evidence. The fact that a doctor goes against consensus does not necessarily mean he's wrong and it certainly does not warrant censorship, all else considered.
Youtube is making a dangerous mistake.
It's not the unpopularity of the views of the doctors in the video that makes them wrong, it is their complete misapplication of statistics. The analogy of “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” is very apt.
It may not mean that they should be censored, but at a minimum they deserve to be called out and ridiculed.
It’s not one side thinks this, the other side thinks that, it’s that their video is factually wrong, and in being wrong encourages dangerous behavior.
An expert made a statement. YouTube went out of its way to find a doctor who supported YouTube's ideological slant and used that as justification for taking action.
This obliviousness. This is why we must restrict power. This is why we can't have nice things.
YouTube has no authority to suppress credible doctors from going against the consensus. The fact that this particular decision agrees with what the majority of us think is right doesn't mean that YouTube is right to choose.
Exactly, so he should not be speaking on epidemiology. And it's even more dangerous because people, like you, believe he could be an expert.
> YouTube has no authority to suppress credible doctors from going against the consensus.
But the WHO does.
Ignoring ramifications of politicization, How many developments will be missed if we embark on a campaign to suppress all dissenting opinions?
You don't think a doctor on the front line is qualified to make inferences about the disease that he is literally treating en masse? You don't think direct observation and experimentation with hundreds of patients could provide valuable insight into the properties of this disease or potential working treatments and/or best practices? How far backwards are you going to bend to defend this position?
Again, the fact that this particular decision agrees with your preconceived notions does not mean that YouTube's emerging practice of choosing truth is good for society. The WHO is also not the only qualified body, nor is it a final authority, yet here YouTube is suddenly treating it as one and, conveniently, YouTube's political slant is aligned with this particular decision. If we allow this behavior, it won't be the last time that YouTube picks a winner and shapes the reality perceived by millions of people. This is a possibly unprecedented amount of soft power and it is being used without oversight or control by the society that is being influenced by it.
I'm not suggesting we make it illegal but educated citizens should be at least resistant to the idea, not welcoming of it because it happens to agree with their politics now. The same goes for Google and FB and any other platform that acts as a window to information - these corporations are not authorities and should not be gatekeeping information. Long term that's a far greater danger to society than COVID19.
Let's not. It's relevant to real world actions.
> You don't think a doctor on the front line is qualified to make inferences about the disease that he is literally treating en masse?
About symptoms or specific treatment plans, perhaps. About government response? No. It's the difference between macro and micro scale approaches. The front line doctors are experts at mirco-scale treatment. Epidemiologists are best at macro-scale treatments. The two skillsets are not the same. An expert at one is not an expert at the other, and no amount of repeating that belief will change that.
> Again, the fact that this particular decision agrees with your preconceived notions does not mean that YouTube's emerging practice of choosing truth is good for society.
Correct. I just happen to believe that suppressing lies that can kill people if they believe them is also a good thing. Or do you think that "take Hydroxychloroquine, it's a miracle drug" should be posted on the youtube homepage?
> The WHO is also not the only qualified body, nor is it a final authority, yet here YouTube is suddenly treating it as one and, conveniently, YouTube's political slant is aligned with this particular decision
What is the political slant you're describing? The WHO, CDC, and pretty much every expert body on epidemiology in the world, in every nation, from Iran to Argentina to Germany to China are doing approximately the same thing. The political spectrums in those nations cross the gamut. Yet they're all following the same treatment plan for the pandemic response. What is the political slant?
> If we allow this behavior, it won't be the last time that YouTube picks a winner and shapes the reality perceived by millions of people.
They already do that. They're just doing so with a bit of morality instead of hoping that unmonitored algorithms will lead to the best outcomes for society.
> these corporations are not authorities and should not be gatekeeping information.
Information is relative. Google's mission statement is "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". So which is more in line with that mission: providing a platform for lies, or curating correct information?
Is "up is down" information? Or is it something else? I don't think lies (or perhaps less aggressively, falsehoods) are "information", they're something else. If the doctors are correct (they aren't, but assuming they were), they'd have evidence they could share and that actual experts would agree with. Then the expert consensus would change.
Either that or you think there's a worldwide conspiracy to keep us in our homes, hurting the economy and millions, or even billions, so that...as far as I can tell, the best guess is so that governments can replace the batteries in the birds. There's nothing for the WHO or CDC to gain by suppressing these guys. There's nothing for Google to gain by suppressing these guys. And yet, they do because it's morally right to keep people safe from disinformation.
This is literally why we have the first amendment. Because, as you say, information is relative; that also means it is relative in time. And we can only come to a correct consensus if we allow all voices to be heard.
This is an excellent example of a time not to suppress dissidents. The doctors on the front line are just as likely, if not moreso, to come up with potential treatments or policies, because this is happening in real time and the information arbitrage lends extra credibility to the doctor's words. Do you see how subjective this decision of censorship is? And any subjective decision is subject to bias, political or otherwise.
>There's nothing for Google to gain by suppressing these guys.
It's no secret Google leans left. It's no secret that protestors of the lockdown lean right. You don't see a conflict of interest here?
What if the WHO and CDC are in conflict? Who decides then? YouTube? What about platforms that are partly owned by China? Conflict of interest?
What about elections? You think it's OK for a platform like Google or YouTube to pull ads that fail "fact checks"? What about viral posts? You don't think it'll be a partisan shitshow?
If not then we have no reason to continue this discussion because we will not agree.
No. I'd see a conflict of interest if this were a political issue. But it's not. Making something political by spouting a bunch of lies until people believe them doesn't change the science.
>What if the WHO and CDC are in conflict?
But they're not. So we're well into the realm of irrelevant hypotheticals.
> treatments or policies
Treatments, yes. Policies, no. Because as I keep saying, they're different things. You're comparing, in essence, the skills of a software engineer and a CEO. Drop either into the others' chair and they'll flounder.
> What about elections? You think it's OK for a platform like Google or YouTube to pull ads that fail "fact checks"?
They already have policies that disallow lying in political ads: https://www.blog.google/technology/ads/update-our-political-...
> It’s against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim—whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died.
> You don't think it'll be a partisan shitshow?
I mean, I expect that no matter what people will complain that it'll be a partisan shitshow. Given that like I said these policies already exist and I didn't notice any obvious political shitshow, only the usual suspects complaining, no.
> What about platforms that are partly owned by China?
They can make their own policies, and I'm free to use them, or not.
> This is literally why we have the first amendment.
And I fully support both the doctor's right to exercise it by spouting bullshit, and Youtube's right to exercise it by removing said bullshit from their platform.
This uncertainty is an avenue for bias. I don't think you understand the dangers of giving a handful of people the power to censor and curate the material that reaches a majority of the eyes in the US. You'll change your mind when they bend against your own leanings though, I guarantee that. It's the spirit of the first amendment, because this is an enormous power that affects all of us, without our consent.
The CDC and the WHO were in conflict at one point regarding mask usage. As it happens, they are arguably in conflict today, as the WHO has praised Sweden's model which, in case you're not aware, is not a lockdown. So what now? Will you be expecting YouTube to remove any videos from the WHO suggesting people adopt the policy of Sweden?
How can you even put faith in authority right now after so many nations, organizations, hospitals, the world over, totally failed in responding to or preparing for this pandemic? And you think YouTube is in a position to choose? It's bad for society.
But that's mostly beside the point. No one is preventing these two doctors from determining the truth. If they think they have a breakthrough, they can present it in a paper, to other experts, who are capable of analyzing it.
> I don't think you understand that in a reality with limited information, it is impossible for humans to know objective truth. And further you underestimate the degree of uncertainty regarding lockdown measures.
Conventional news is far worse than Google both in terms of the things and, at least currently, in terms of reach. I'd much prefer if Fox news presented actual experts on subjects, instead of political pundits or "Dr. Phil" when discussing COVID-19. I am not and have not taken any political side anywhere in this conversation. I've been on the side of scientific consensus. I don't expect that will change.
> As it happens, they are arguably in conflict today, as the WHO has praised Sweden's model which, in case you're not aware, is not a lockdown.
Let's talk when the WHO releases official guidance to end lockdowns. Until then you're just trying to create conflict where there isn't any.
> How can you even put faith in authority right now after so many nations, organizations, hospitals, the world over, totally failed in responding to or preparing for this pandemic?
Because I trust the institutions of government (and their access to experts) more than I trust hucksters on the internet. While I don't expert the average person to be able to discern an expert from a huckster on the internet, especially due to the actions of certain politicians.
Does Youtube also censor videos where plumbers present an incorrect way to install a toilet that can lead to backflow and flooding.
The point to make here is that Youtube is NOT the New England Journal of Science and should not act like one for just one topic - Coronavirus.
If anybody feels that their data or interpreation of the data is incorrect, they should post their own video on Youtube, refuting their claims.
Instead what Youtube is doing is just silencing them.
1) They probably would censor the plumber, if they received enough complaints about it, and 2) an incorrectly installed toilet doesn't have the potential to kill tens of thousands of people, whereas erroneous information about the danger of COVID-19 very well could. So they're not waiting for the complaints.
Nor is cnn, fox news, msnbc, etc. They all exercise editorial control over what goes on their channel however.
The rules by which youtube exercises its editor control is its guidelines and policies from my understanding.
Which may be the result of its execs being dragged before congress about "fake news" -- hence the allegations of censorship.
It would suck if a firmware upgrade goes out to all LG TVs disabling certain content. It’s within LG’s right, but what a betrayal of the customer who was sold a non universal television.
Exactly! So why are the doctors using it as a platform when they should be going through reputable peer-reviewed channels?
A scientific journal has a panel, which are qualified experts in the field or related fields, that read and pick up on statistical errors, and other errors, and decide whether or not to publish the paper. Youtube does not.
Peer review as a whole, means that your work gets assessed by experts, and they decide before publication if your paper is of the right quality to enter the journal.
'Peer Review' =/= 'Allowing everyone to post and the truth will be found out or agreed upon in the end'
'Peer Review' == 'Having your work assessed by equally or more skilled people, who then decide if your work is good enough to publish'
Youtube operates in a fundamentally different way to peer review, it allows anyone to post, then retroactively decides if that work meets guidelines. This means that not only is it not possible to immediately filter work that is submitted, it also does not go through proper assessment of it's validity by a panel of specialists and experts. Youtube could not operate with it's current business model using that method, and so is forced to choose another. Just because it's retroactive enforcement, doesn't mean that the terms of the service and guidelines are not in force, or should be considered censorship. Nobody is actually censoring these people, they are free to post their video literally anywhere else, but they broke the terms of the Youtube service.
As many other people have pointed out, the work produced and hosted on Youtube does contain errors, these are statistical errors that would have been caught had they submitted this to an academic journal, however the video's makers explicitly decidedin to publish it on Youtube. There is very little reason to do that, other than to market this information to others.
As this information is dubious at best, it is fundamentally and ethically irresponsible of them, as scientists, as medical workers who have taken an oath to do no harm, to publish this work on Youtube and to the public without going through the basic step that is peer review. The comments section does exist, but has no value, because you cannot count on the general public to be as informed in the subject matter as a peer review panel would be.
This is more akin to YouTube removing a “I’m a plumber, trust me, clean your bathroom by mixing bleach and ammonia in your toilet” video.
Youtube owns the platform, we allowed it to become the largest and most powerful platform but there are others out there. Youtube (and google, and bing) have no reason to have to host misleading, wrong, or hurtful opinions/websites.
Without remarking on the quality of the video in this specific instance I will note that Dr. John Campbell's videos were contradicting WHO advice while WHO was asleep at the wheel.
By the current standards, would they have been removed?
I thought the censorship was about the Coronavirus. There are a lot of videos that advocate a course of action that would cause someone, somewhere to die, that aren't being censored.
Section 230 of the CDA was created 25 years ago to avoid this being the case. It gives companies the ability to moderate user generated content on their platforms without being held responsible for other UGC posted to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
> One of the first legal challenges to Section 230 was the 1997 case Zeran v. America Online, Inc., in which a Federal court affirmed that the purpose of Section 230 as passed by Congress was "to remove the disincentives to self-regulation created by the Stratton Oakmont decision".[8] Under that court's holding, computer service providers who regulated the dissemination of offensive material on their services risked subjecting themselves to liability, because such regulation cast the service provider in the role of a publisher. Fearing that the specter of liability would therefore deter service providers from blocking and screening offensive material, Congress enacted § 230's broad immunity "to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children's access to objectionable or inappropriate online material."[8] In addition, Zeran notes "the amount of information communicated via interactive computer services is . . . staggering. The specter of tort liability in an area of such prolific speech would have an obviously chilling effect. It would be impossible for service providers to screen each of their millions of postings for possible problems. Faced with potential liability for each message republished by their services, interactive computer service providers might choose to severely restrict the number and type of messages posted. Congress considered the weight of the speech interests implicated and chose to immunize service providers to avoid any such restrictive effect."[8]
In context: they don’t want to be responsible for harm to others and they certainly don’t want to pay to broadcast that content.
If people really want to spew nonsense they can pay to do it themselves. No one is stopping them.
You want your freedom to communicate what you want. But you don't want Google/Youtube to have their freedom. They are a private website who should have the right to host whatever content they choose and free to look after their own interests.
And remember nobody is stopping you from exercising your freedom to host whatever content you like on your private website.
AWS has all of the components e.g. hosting, CDN, transcoding, live streaming, analytics, ML. You could easily put together an MVP in a weekend.
Of course you would have to convince people to visit and pay for the content to cover your traffic costs. But since I am sure this content is so incredibly popular and valuable there will be no shortage of people willing to do this.
These doctors were in no way qualified or licensed to provide the opinions they did and they had huge undisclosed conflicts of interest.
1. Their medical practice is an Urgent Care.
1a. They own said Urgent Care. They have a vested monetary interest in claiming these things so people start using them more.
2. They are not licensed to practice epidemiology - nor are they properly trained in Epidemiology.
3. They are not licensed to practice emergency medicine - nor are they properly trained in emergency medicine.
These guys misquoted the facts at every step and misled millions with their improper application of statistics. This viewpoint is harmful and incorrect.
This is telling everyone that “there is no fire” and to sit down and keep watching the movie in a theater that is on fire. They do not deserve a platform on which to spread these lies and misinformation.
Now, their medical licenses are in jeopardy. For the misinformation the presented, not the truths. If they understood statistics and still said the crap they did, the board is going to want to talk to them about gross negligence. If they didn’t understand statistics and still said what they did, the medical board is going to want to talk to them about practicing without a license.
These two idiots are going down for this. Good for YouTube. In this instance, this is disinformation, and they were correct.
This idea that only narrow set of domain experts can speak up about something is blatantly insane. You are not an epidemiologist either, so by the same token, you don´t have the right to criticize anything anyone says, yet here you are. So maybe you should heed your own advise you damn hypocrite.
I can do the same dance and say epidemiologists are not statisticians so Fauci should never EVER talk about numbers. Similarly, Trump has no PhD in economics so he should never EVER talk about money. Ooh, also, you´re not an NBA player so you should never EVER talk about how a game should have unfolded.
This is nuts man. You make your arguments, we listen and we assess based on the level of evidence and logic you presented. The piece of paper on your wall does not tell me shit about fuck. I couldn´t care less about who makes an argument. If credibility is a function of imbued institutional authority in the form of a piece of paper, and that´s all it takes to convince you that someone´s opinion should be heard but not others, then YOU are the problem.
Err... what was it you think epidemiologists do?
You know how qualified lawyers frequently say "not legal advice" when talking about hypothetical application of the law? Eg Matt Levine and his amusing "money stuff" column.
That.
I'm a doctor. Look at the credentials on my wall. I treat these patients. Believe me. I am saying this with the authority of all those credentials.
(But those credentials are total nonsense in making that decision, it turns out, and should provide zero weight to an argument that is literally life and death). Yeah, i have a problem with that. If their argument was solid and well supported, no need to point at the authority, right?
Yes we live in a world where an option has vastly more weight with the authority of a Hollywood actor. Great. The authority of a pretty person whose only skill is lying convincingly counts.
Your opinion. Well expressed and argued if a little sweary. I don't care about your credentials, nor you mine. No problem. Examine the argument. Address the evidence. Great.
These doctors did not have proper training the statistics they horrifically misrepresented. They also made it sound like they had substantial knowledge in the field of Epidemiology. They don't.
Both of these doctors are now going before the California Medical Board because they got the facts wrong and they were wrong to give this advice. They misrepresented their data and exaggerated - because their urgent care is having a low patient turnout and they want to end the lockdown.
> This idea that only narrow set of domain experts can speak up about something is blatantly insane.
Your couple of hours on Google is not equivalent to a medical degree. When we are talking about medicine, you do not get a seat at the table because you think you are smart.
A standard Medical School only includes 1 semester in Virology and 1 more semester in Microbiology. An Epidemiologist goes through 4 YEARS of detailed training in Statistics, Microbiology, and Biochem. This is before years of experience in the field.
Those are NOT equivalent bases of knowledge.
> You are not an epidemiologist either...
What the fuck do you know? My degrees are in Mathematics with a specialization in Statistics. So, yeah, I know A LOT more than they do in this area.
> If credibility is a function of imbued institutional authority...
Doctors have to demonstrate their skills by getting licensed for the areas of their practice. We have a licensure process for a reason - to demonstrate competence in a field. These guys are going to lose theirs.
End of story.
> epidemiologists are not statisticians
You don't know a single fact that you are talking about. You are the fucking problem - along with everyone else who thinks their Google search is as good as a medical degree.
I am sorry to inform you that you do not have a PhD in online commenting and therefor are not a domain expert in online communication. For that reason your comment and opinions in the previous reply are invalid and should be de-platformed.
Yours truly,
Hypocrisy
>
> I am sorry to inform you that you do not have a PhD in
> online commenting and therefor are not a domain expert in
> online communication. For that reason your comment and
> opinions in the previous reply are invalid and should be
> de-platformed.
>
> Yours truly,
>
> Hypocrisy
Oooooooh. This comment is so deliciously stupid that I am going to quote it verbatim in case you delete it. I would hate deprive future readers of the ability to marvel in the grandeur of its laughable dimwitted glory.
What am I supposed to do now? I don´t have a PhD in quick rebuttals. Fuck!!! what DO I DO NOW?!
If there were a public utility similar to Youtube, it would have to have a clear policy for censorship, and some means for a public review of any decision to censor. And then you might have a legitimate complaint (though in this case there was a pretty clear case of a material factual misrepresentation, regarding the mortality rate of COVID-19). But since that is not the case, Youtube/Google is pretty much free to censor anyone on any basis they choose, and they owe no one any particular explanation for their decisions.
A few people at Google/Youtube should absolutely have the power to allow/disallow what they want on their platform for whatever reason they choose. That is as much a freedom of speech issue as is the doctors' right to public speech.
The real problem is that Google/Youtube has special legal protections related to not having editorial controls, yet here they are exercising editorial control. That they can play it both ways is the greater tragedy.
In the US, the media is almost entirely run by private corporations.
If you feel that is a mistake it's probably a better use of your time advocating for better funding and more independence for public media than criticizing corporations for exercising oversight of their platforms.
As long as "whomever they want" includes only people pushing cherry-picked and dangerous bullshit, and "whatever reason" includes saving the lives that would have otherwise been spent had that bullshit spread further, then I have absolutely zero qualms about this bending of the free-speech rules, the same way I have zero qualms about there being rules against someone yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.
You're missing the forest for the trees, man.
Perhaps they need to leave it but flag it extremely visibly with something like this: "The information this video purports to be true has been in dispute due to <reason> and <reason>, as pointed out by <rebuttal> and <rebuttal>." But doing that for every single video would be extremely laborious, and during the week it might take for the work behind such a change to take effect, hundreds of people might die who might not otherwise.
The only people who are getting tested are those who believe they have symptoms. This is beginning to change as we get more tests, and as a result, the % infected by their reasoning is decreasing day by day.
Also, I fixed the space on the fourth line.
> The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.
> COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. Members of AAEM and ACEP are first-hand witnesses to the human toll that COVID-19 is taking on our communities. AAEM and ACEP strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Massihi as a basis for policy and decision making.
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
And really, the idea that news media need to herd their audience into thinking the right things is ridiculous. It's a news article, not an editorial.
“If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the [expletive] window and find out which is true” -Jonathan Foster
Lazy “he said, she said” journalism, sometimes called “bothesidesism”, is dangerous to a free society because it enables propaganda and disinformation. Lay public do not have time or resources to debunk lies and find out which side in a public debate is telling the truth (if any). That is the sacred duty of a free press.
And this press has proven time and again to be in the aggregate incompetent in this duty. Perhaps it's the fault of the changing landscape, with media chasing clickbait and online ads all the time. I'm a lot more skeptical of journalists today than I would've been a few decades ago, and there's plenty of evidence that the game is up and the political class if fully aware of how these people are unable to do this job in a way that doesn't enable propaganda and disinformation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-officia...
>“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
And even if they did that it wouldn't really serve what the author here is trying to cover. This is an article about Youtube censoring two doctors. The reason why is relevant (and they quote Youtube's reasoning) but it's not the main story.
Not that the article is amazing, but it's just frustrating people are piling on because it's not the story they wanted the author to write.
https://www.spj.org/pdf/spj-code-of-ethics.pdf
No, but they need to determine which story is based on the best possible information at the time, and which isn't. Which is a massive service for everyone else that doesn't have time do research everything they read.
A massive service not only gone unthanked, but actively attacked in the days of Trump.
Many writers nowadays think they are some sort of missionary on a mission to save the pagans(us).
And I’m expected to just keep an open mind about it and assume that this dude isn’t being disingenuous.
People have started labelling anything they disagree with as "far right" now a days. How exactly is wanting to work to be able to pay the bills and take care for ones family a "far right" thing? How is calling out the rise in domestic abuse, child abuse, suicides, mental health issues a "far right" thing? I have many friends both left and right leaning who are struggling to pay the bills and have businesses shutdown with massive losses wanting to return back to work.
Also one could say the same thing about left leaning media (95% of the mainstream media and tech companies). When we start labelling everything we disagree with as "BAD NAME", we are living in a sad world.
And in case it matters (I feel like it does to you), I am a brown immigrant myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck#Barack_Obama_and_th...
Glenn Beck is not a reliable source for factual information.
This guy used to sit on Fox News prime time and draw elaborate web of connections on a chalkboard. On national network television. He lost advertisers for the stuff he was doing, and his program was jet fuel for the Tea Party movement (which became the modern alt right).
Feel free to Youtube Glen Beck on Fox News, hopefully none of it is censored because it’s a real trip if it’s the first time you’re watching it.
Those 2 "highly credentialed doctors" just got an unprecedentedly strong and universal condemnation from the two main American medical associations. Just because you like what they are saying doesn't mean they are right. Think critically instead of seeking your evidence to support your opinions.
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fac...
Also the number of deaths being reported in US includes "probable deaths" which are not confirmed COVID cases. It's even more than the actual confirmed cases.
Look at the graph on the last page for NYC for example:
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/27/upshot/corona...
Giving that we're still low on tests, if someone dies before a test of COVID-like symptoms, it makes sense to consider them a probable (and save the test for someone alive) if deaths are 6x normal - you've got a roughly 5/6 chance of being correct.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNLE00INUSA
http://alloveralbany.com/images/capital_region_population_ag...
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/planning-l...
If you have another hypothesis, it would be better to at least do the napkin math and show that you've put in a tiny amount of work, rather than just tossing out random far-fetched stuff. For example, this new hypothesis of yours is even more absurd than the last one, because the relative demographics of New York have not changed much in the past year. It could not explain a large spike in deaths this year.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-22/almost-9-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/apr/21/facebook-p...
Even with such a fact slapping you in the face, I mentioned this to someone and the response was basically "hospitals and doctors exist to help people, they would never take advantage of the system like that". There was no continuing the conversation from there. Who knows how reality works, but at the least we've had radically different life experiences if you don't think this could cause the case count to be pulled strongly in the upwards direction away from the actual number. And I'm sure there are other influences pulling it back down, so maybe all the forces are balancing themselves out.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
YouTube here has decided what the “correct” messaging is for the many based on the decisions of a few. Is there no room for dissenting opinion?
Perhaps more dangerous are the people who now are firmly convinced the lockdown should be over simply because the video was taken down.
When is the proper approach to discuss and counter instead of suppress?
It's very naive to think that what these two are doing is a good faith attempt to present a dissenting opinion. If someone wants to use this tragedy as an opportunity to launch their right-wing media career I don't think YouTube is obliged to be an accomplice.
As for my opinions being silenced, if I ever yell fire in a theater, or tell people to drink poison laced Kool-Aid, or tell them to ignore this pandemic, I hope I get what's coming to me.
Censoring misinformation on YouTube is like censoring porn. Wait, I guess something as absurd as that actually exists in Japan.
Alright, never mind, humanity has no bounds, continue on in your paradoxical ways.
Censor the flat-earthers while you’re at it at, at least we know that’s bullshit for sure.
Your flippant remark indicates a lack of deep thinking on this issue, and once I googled Diamond and Silk, I realize that your probably a bit of a partisan as well.
The removal of Alex Jones didn't help anything. It just helped reinforce the paranoia he and his supporters have, which is that a vast conspiracy exists to silence him and others who believe his theories.
Those supporters now listen to him on whatever alternate platform (my brother in law is one of them) and it's even harder to talk to them now due to the Youtube cancellation.
You feel better emotionally because he's off Youtube. Feels like a victory for you, doesn't it? It's hollow.
My brother-in-law just listens even more rabidly, and he votes. Enjoy your false victory. Jones is stronger than ever now. Censorship doesn't work. It never will.
The article isn’t recent, and I challenge you to find a more recent record that paints a less gloomy picture for him, but I doubt you’ll find it.
Alex Jones is a non-entity now compared to his heyday. Deplatforming works, your extended family notwithstanding.
Even more, Youtube has the problem that it's algorithms push people TOWARDS the most dubious, conspiracy-driven views until and unless youtube actually removes the video.
So Youtube has multiple things to balance and removing harmful bullshit is the best of the triage they seem to be able to do on their platform.
And I had a couple of my less-informed, more mentally unstable Facebook friends sharing those videos along with angry screams about the shutdown being unnecessary - one friend prefaced the video with "that does, I'm not wearing a mask any more" (he works at a hospital, I kid you not).
Very bad precedent, very Un-American.
Edit: As an arrogant American, I forgot to consider that this might be a global Youtube policy.
Youtube is the de facto video platform that the masses use, so much so that Youtube finds it necessary to enact something like this.
To bring it back to your point - If we don’t like YouTube’s policies, we can’t just simply ignore Youtube and move on from it. How it controls things is a big deal, especially if it is similar to how non-free governments censor stuff. We have to be vigilant of this, it ain’t some niche video site.
There are indeed two summers on this planet every year.
Also, when people write date examples with the day and month both being values <= 12... that is especially annoying
American values are not all about capitalism. We have some ideas on the individual in America.
But, I’m with you on the need for YouTube competitors, but I lack the imagination to see how it can happen. That’s why I’m advocating for the jamming of American values into a what is essentially becoming an institution as opposed to a company that operates against market forces.
That is not factually true since the video is available in other places. What Youtube has done is decided to try to make it harder to view and share the video by removing it from their platform.
Do you also feel this way about historically monopolistic media companies? They also exercise editorial control. NBC, NewsCorp, Sinclair, ClearChannel, AT&T, Disney...
Not every conspiracy theorist gets an oped or interview on any other platform.
Our modern internet media landscape doesn’t have these constraints, so we really are curating on certain criteria where the overwhelming deciding factor isn’t just ‘do we have enough time for this’ and ‘is this what most of our viewers want’.
Youtube can get content to exactly the right demo, and scheduling is a non factor. So, what is editorial control in this landscape?
So in no way "state".
It's less "state" than if Walt Disney World had rules about family appropriate clothing (since the Florida granted them municipal control)
Youtube thinks I don’t need to know anything about this video.
Replace WHO with CDC, what’s the difference? Now you officially have the US censoring Youtube. The pattern is not good.
At least with state censorship, there’s a formal hierarchy of authority. There’s the law, and some semblance of duty to the public.
With corporate censorship, it’s ethereal, anarchic, and less accountable. The rules are opaque, the deciders are unknown, and the only duty is maximizing shareholder profit.
As a serf, I’d be happier knowing who to blame.
Edit: Anyway, I’ll add to your point. As a company, Google has no issue censoring it’s product in China as opposed to other countries. It sounds almost trite to bring up, but Google censors the Tiananmen Square massacre for the CCP.
With this in mind, what sincere values does Google hold on censorship?
So ya, you’re right, corporate accountability on censorship is basically non existent (and you can trace it back to the fact that they probably don’t have values to even hold accountable).
The consensus is that the platforms have to do SOMETHING, because if not, it becomes a national security issue and regulation is going sweep through the industry.
At the same time, the platforms can’t be seen as enforcing government censorship, so they choose WHO, an independent international organization as the information fact checker.
Who knows, maybe they also want to win some brownie points with china. I wouldn’t be surprised.
> The consensus is that the platforms have to do SOMETHING, because if not, it becomes a national security issue and regulation is going sweep through the industry.
Personally, I think that education is always better than suppression. Rather than remove these videos, a better option would simply be to inform users that the video contains false information and where they can find the truth.
Not only does this avoid the problem of being accused of doing nothing or leaving misinformation uncorrected, but it also prevents the persecution complex people will get when information is suppressed and allow us to take advantage of the useful information we can get from misinformation.
It's beneficial to be able to see what misinformation people are being exposed to, the specific rhetoric, lies, and facilities being commonly employed to mislead, and the number and types of people who are creating it, falling for it, or just passing it around. Companies like Facebook and Google are in a unique position to get us that kind of data. It could ultimately help us develop ways to identify vulnerable people and where we need to educate them so they are inoculated against this type of manipulation. It could also help us assess how we craft and deliver factual data so that it clearer to these vulnerable groups and less likely to be misinterpreted or misrepresented.
All censorship is failure and missed opportunity
Here is a larger scenario. I personally think a lab oversight in the Wuhan region could have led to a virus outbreak, enough to at least discuss it. This theory could be deemed by WHO, which could be heavily influenced by Chinese investment, to be lies. With YouTube’s blanket policy, they would be doing the Chinese government’s bidding by getting rid of this lab virus narrative from Youtube (all under the guise of following WHO guidelines).
Anyway, you cannot censor based on an organization or a government’s guidelines.
The insidious part about sometimes-censorship is that it is invisible and deniable. Everyone knows the press in China or under the USSR is/was censored 24/7.
YouTube is only censored sometimes. It’s like a seatbelt that works every day except the day you crash (emergencies/crises are the times when open and free communications systems are most critical to the functioning of society).
I believe this poses an existential threat to a free society, because everyone flocks to these censorship platforms in peacetime, and they pose a mortal danger in war/crisis. I wrote at length about this failure mode recently:
https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
Yes - get banned on YouTube for disagreeing with WHO
No - go against the data we have so far
The thing with not valuing free speech is that eventually you will find that a rational position you hold (regardless of whether it is actually rational or if you just feel it is) will run afoul of the censors and you will be left without a voice.
"Misinformation" may seem obvious at times. But its classification can very be easily be bent towards any kind of political agenda.
Later, WHO started claiming the exact opposite. Now anyone who created a video previously will also get taken down.
How exactly do you propose deciding what's misinformation and what's not?
Then the question becomes, hows does the government decide what is and what isn’t misinformation? The overwhelming answer should be ‘government shouldn’t be determining that’.
We have to be careful with this kind of stuff.
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://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/updated-who-re...
"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🇨🇳." https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
"WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the information currently available on this event." https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
"The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.
Countries must inform WHO about travel measures taken, as required by the IHR. Countries are cautioned against actions that promote stigma or discrimination, in line with the principles of Article 3 of the IHR." https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/30-01-2020-statement-on...
> Coronavirus lasts on plastics for 3 days, and we're all sheltering in place. Where'd you get your water bottles from? Costco. Where'd you get that plastic shovel from? Home Depot. Those are fomites and carries of disease... and if I swab things in your home, I would likely find COVID-19.
> When you go to Del Taco and you get a plastic bag or piece on your burrito from someone not wearing a mask who's just wiping their arm on your thing, do you think you're protected from COVID?
> We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We're not wearing masks, why is that? 'Cuz we understand microbiology, we understand immunology, and we want strong immune systems. I don't want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and come out and get diseased.
> Is the flu less dangerous than COVID? Let's look at the death rates, no it's not. They're similar in prevalence and in death rate. So we're saying that our response now, now that we know the facts, it's time to get back to work, it's time to test people. But again, testing gives you a moment in time...
ER doctors are not virologists or epidemiologists. So, to use their own example, you don't want a plumber to do your roof!
[0]: https://kernpublichealth.com/covid-19_dashboard/
https://www.aaem.org/resources/statements/joint-endorsed/phy...
That statement alone is justification for removing their video as a public health hazard.
if so, why this, and not others?
Here they claim SARS-NCOV-2 is "similar in prevalance and death rate" to flu, somehow missing the fact that the former reached that point in one month and keeps going unless extensive social distancing, lockdowns and mask wearing is put in place.
I hate censorship, but I support censoring information sourced from the idiocracy (or malevolent foreign power as the case may be).
also, when experts themselves (not these 2 guys) have come up with different recommendations - and cant agree with themselves, youtube should allow a free exchange of ideas.
they are free (and should) to add a notice that says that it is potentially false, etc.
But I also think this particular instance is not the right hill for people who care about that to die on. It’s a form of falsely or mistakenly crying wolf and will cost them credibility.
now, what if the theatre owner has no way to know if there is a fire or not (lets assume he is locked in a room), some guy screams fire, a bunch of people run out, another guy says running out will make it worse, some should sit down, some should walk out, etc.
i am just making this up to tell that the theatre owner (youtube) simply has no way to tell. In this case, he is not even responsible for the theatre ( as youtube has argued in courts before)
I'm sure Google would like to have no risk and simply host pirated content like they used to.
"If people can go to Costco, then why can't they go to church".
> When you go to Del Taco and you get a plastic bag or piece on your burrito from someone not wearing a mask who's just wiping their arm on your thing, do you think you're protected from COVID?
The point isn't that chance of infection goes to zero. Yes of course there are still transmission vectors, the point is to reduce the transmission rate. Even if there is a small chance of catching covid from your water bottles or dell taco, those chances are also reduced relative to no lockdown because the people who would be transmitting that virus to you are less also less likely to be sick.
> We wear masks in an acute setting to protect us. We're not wearing masks, why is that? 'Cuz we understand microbiology, we understand immunology, and we want strong immune systems. I don't want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system, and come out and get diseased.
Then these guys are selfish, putting their own desire for health above the needs of their more vulnerable familty, friends, neighbors and fellow citizens.
> Is the flu less dangerous than COVID? Let's look at the death rates, no it's not. They're similar in prevalence and in death rate.
Covid outpaced the standard flu season's death total in less than half the time and did it in the face of the most draconian public health measures in a century (or ever depending on your location).
The article is not worth clicking on based on that fact alone. It may or may not be factual, but we can rest assured that it’s written in service of a very specific agenda.
That agenda is the typical “we are being silenced” message pushed by the regressive, extremist conservative faction of the Republican Party.
Trusting Glenn Beck to report news to me would be like trusting Disney press releases for all my info on copyright law.
It's understandable to prefer one side over the other. But ignore your least favorite side at your intellectual peril.
I don’t listen to people like Bill Maher, either, nor TV sensationalists like Jake Tapper.
I would prefer this country mostly get back to being centrist. I would prefer we not continually be pitched against each other in a left vs right battle that’s encouraged by the elite class (including middle-men profiteers like Glenn Beck that earn based on outrage).
I don't simply trust what the media tells me, I look for the actual source and verify that what the media says is actually what the original source says. I also often wait 2-7 days when some breaking news comes out to actually make a decision about the news as often things turn out to be wrong now a days. We live in a clickbait era where there's an incentive for media to spout nonsensical headlines - therefore verifying it myself is important.
You can learn a lot about agendas and infer biases by seeing what stories one source is publishing, and another source is choosing not to publish.
With anything where there's significant political, economic, or social capital riding on the outcome, astroturfing is a sad reality that must be considered. One way to mitigate its effects is to look for reports from some disinterested source and see if you can find the same facts presented with less urgency and the determination of significance being left to the reader.
https://www.turnto23.com/news/coronavirus/video-interview-wi...
Hopefully this solves your problem with the “overtly ideological outlet.”
(Edit: originally had copy pasted wrong link)
The time has come for a youtube alternative that can scale and is decentralized.
https://lbry.tv/Dr.-Erickson-COVID-19-Briefing:e1
eg., Youtube has been censoring a lot of conservative content. They won in court[1]
Youtube cannot have it both ways. Either they are a publisher and if so, must be fully responsible for the content they host. Or they are a platform, and they need to be neutral.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-google-censor-court-...
Just to be clear, they are not a common carrier and I have never seen any evidence that they claim to be one. I don't think they have to both ways. I understand (and have sympathy with the idea) that it would be nice if they were, but I really don't think they are.
As demonstrated by the court case you mention, that is false. I am surprised how tightly people cling to this notion, which has no basis in reality.
Do you think youtube is a platform? even, a monopoly of sorts?
For decades, the US has provided the average citizen with limited/no healthcare but freedom of speech and thought. In sudden weeks, this has been inverted.
What is the prize hidden in the party cracker which justifies censorship of speech and thought with the (implausible six months ago) claim by social media companies to care about the health and wellness of the average person?
It's even more ludicrous that the alleged crime is statistics. Meanwhile, Imperial College statistical models were proven wrong almost immediately by Oxford University, but they are still allowed to speak after triggering hasty decisions that affected millions of lives.
We are leaving unaccountable the people who literally yelled "Fire!!" to billions of people, but it's suddenly imperative to suppress speech that informs collective decisions that are complex, regional and contextual? What does Google have against learning?
It would take little effort to prepend a correction to the original video and/or publish a revised version. This is Hacker News: surprise, someone is wrong on the internet! They get corrected. It's better than being wrong offline and never being corrected.
Nobody is saying they have a crystal ball, but everyone is making decisions to minimize damage to society, including private platforms.
Google can apply arbitrary rules, but they can't claim that their decisions represent "society". There was no consultative process where society elected Google or society was asked for their opinion on censoring this particular video. In fact, "society" has immediately republished the video elsewhere.
In fact, the Streisand effect will guarantee more attention to the video (e.g. this thread). Google destroyed a huge number of comments debating the merits of the video. Previously, such destruction would have been done by book burning.
Now the debate is scattered and it is harder to address any confused people, instead of going to the number one web property for video. Way to miss the point of both speech and censorship, Google.
The Streisand effect is a blip in popularity here. The point is to not validate dangerous fantasies of people who are unwilling or incapable of behaving in a safe and logical manner. Google succeeded in this endeavor, despite what people paying close attention to things might argue about in side channels.
I'm likening the effect on the respective audiences. The book burning aspect is for the video's comments, a.k.a. debate by many members of society.
As for Google being private, they employ a sizable number of lobbyists to influence public policy.
Additionally, these tech platforms currently enjoy Section 230 protection. If they’re now in the business of curating what they publish, they should no longer be granted that protection. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...