Even if he's a raving insane person, he should be left online.
Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
> Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
Regarding his relation to WHO, according to his own claims (dead link on wikipedia) he was "Chief of the Cancer Program from 1997" (to 1999, just two years, two decades ago). But we also know that he falsely claimed to be professor on Imperial College, see also posts here.
"Dr Karol Sikora is Chief of the WHO Programme on Cancer Control" as per the magazine from "September--October 1998"
1) obviously not equivalent to "ex director at the WHO"
2) obviously more than 20 years ago
3) and "on cancer control", not on epidemiology
still not anything to allow him to misrepresent his relation to Imperial College as late as 2020 (!) or to give a credence to his current epidemiological policy views.
> Sikora and the School of Medicine at Buckingham have in the past been supportive of alternative medicine. For a short time, Buckingham offered a diploma in "integrated medicine" (a relatively recent euphemism for alternative medicine). Sikora was a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health[24] and Chair of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, which is unaffiliated with any university; it includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who led Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course.
>
> Sikora is also a "professional member" of the College of Medicine, a patient-oriented healthcare lobby group also linked to the Prince of Wales that appeared shortly after the collapse of the Prince's Foundation. The College has been criticised extensively in the British Medical Journal for its promotion of alternative medicine. These claims have been contested by the College. He is on the advisory panel of complementary cancer care charity Penny Brohn Cancer Care (formerly the Bristol Cancer Help Centre) of whom Prince Charles is a patron, and is a patron of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Statements by Sikora have been critical of unproven methods of alternative medicine, after Parliament member Lord Maurice Saatchi proposed a bill allowing doctors to use unproven experimental therapies, and he has spoken out against claims that an alkaline diet can cure cancer.
It sounds like he might actually have infringed Youtube's "Harmful or dangerous content" guidelines:
> Harmful or dangerous content
>
> Don't post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids. Videos showing such harmful or dangerous acts may get age-restricted or removed depending on their severity.
Alternative medicine is mostly bunk, but I absolutely don't agree that it constitutes "harmful or dangerous countent" or should be banned from Youtube. Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.
That depends what the alternative medicine asks the patient to do. Anecdote: my mother was told to do coffee enemas in Tijuana to get rid of her colorectal cancer. She very seriously debated it with me.
The patient's, sadly. The one person whose problem-solving abilities are impaired. Quackwatch.org did help my mother decide things and move away from the treatments above.
> Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.
I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.
Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]
Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.
A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.
> Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
You've completely misunderstood this.
It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
We've reduced the numbers of people going onto vents. This has not reduced the numbers of people dying. Now they're dying with nasal oxygen in a care home, not on a vent in an ICU. It's a better death, but they're still dead.
> It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
I'm not a professional with years of slinging the lingo. But I think Kyle-Sidell's retweet of "Barotrauma is a real phenomenon" [0] implies [edit] that aggressive ventilation was actually what was killing people. Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?
Dr. @erikfreyrMD's earlier tweet said "I don't know where this dogma of 'intubate early' came from. Intubation is a death sentence. " [1] (emphasis added).
Do you have sources for any of your claims?
My understanding is that there is a real medical discussion about when and under what circumstances it is appropriate to ventilate a covid patient. Some patients certainly die from ventilation who would otherwise have survived Covid. Some patients live due to venilation who would would otherwise have died.
"Blister agents" refers to obsolete medications such as the extract from Spanish fly [0], which was used to try to help President George Washington recover from his cold:
"other treatments they gave [George Washington] during that period were enemas and drugs to make him vomit and something called blisters, where they applied Spanish fly onto his throat, which raises a painful blister, again to remove these terrible humors that are caution the inflammation."
I have no doubt that believing dumb things can cause you to make bad decisions. I just don't agree that being wrong is "dangerous" in the normal sense of the word, and I don't think that banning people from saying dumb things is a good or effective solution.
It's another story when people are actively running interference. I've seen messages like "don't go to the doctor for your cancer", and I agree those should be suppressed. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.
Imagine a population of 1 user. A user puts of a video advertised as instructions for doing a dangerous task while leaving out vitally important steps necessary to the user actually performing the task safely. The user follows instructions and promptly dies. The user was responsible for their own actions but nonetheless its hard to argue that if we left the video up after we had identified the issue led we and the author are both complicit. We should have taken down the video. The user is still free to host their own videos but it wont achieve as much of an audience without the benefit of the platform.
Imagine a population of 1 million users. In one timeline evil, stupid misinformation isn't spread around and 1000 people die.
In another timeline it is spread around and 10000 people die. Warning labels can't help here because most of the people negatively effected are multiple steps removed from such a label. Like the first example we should have reduced its audience by taking it down entirely not added a warning label that 50-80% wont attend to.
I just wanted to put in a nice word for Penny Brohn. They very careful position themselves as complementary, not alternative, to conventional cancer treatment.
There was some work that looked at the outcomes of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre that showed poor outcomes, but that research didn't correct for the illness of the patients. Lots of people using the service were on palliative care pathways and were expected to die. They were using the service to get the death they wanted.
With this reasoning, all food videos showing desserts with high calories and high sugar content should be banned, since obesity is an epidemic that kills and is harmful.
The guidelines are obviously written by a lawyer so Google can have it both ways. (To be fair, most content platforms would have similar lawyerly policies)
Not a bad idea. At least direct advertisement or false information about unhealthy food should be banned. This has already happened with tobacco or high caloric drinks in some countries like Singapore in physical stores.
These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically, I'm not really sure why these kinds of arguments are presented like some sort of self-evident zinger against censoring dangerous content.
I think it’s because people are uncomfortable with the idea that information can be harmful to the masses who might not be able to process it ‘correctly.’
> These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically
And nuking a city stops all crime in it. If you only look at one tiny aspect and ignore everything else, just about anything can be made to seem sensible.
Nudge theory agrees with you, and as such they would maybe not ban them outright, but just like cigarettes packs have a warning stating exactly as you said, high sugar, high fructose foods are a health hazard before the video plays
I don't really care the content at all, but I really wish these platforms took the "phone company" approach, in which they considered themselves neutral carriers of information. In the US, I don't know an obvious issue besides legislative change to enforce this.
However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.
>, but I really wish these platforms took the "phone company" approach, in which they considered themselves neutral carriers of information.
This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice. See "advertiser friendly content"[1] and Adpocalypse[2][3].
Land line phones and cell phones are funded by subscriptions and they are also point-to-point communication between 2 private individuals. Phones (barring small-scale exceptions such as conference calls) are not a "broadcasting" medium.
There is no broadcasting medium in the world that acts as a neutral carrier. Not newspapers. And not tv like NBC/CBS/ABC. Even the government funded broadcasters like American PBS or UK BBC are not neutral carriers.
Ok, let's say you this ambitious idealism to create a new broadcasting website that allows anything except for child pornography. How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma. Subscriptions? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee for user-generated-content. Yes some die-hard web surfers pay for Youtube Red/Premium to avoid ads but they are a small minority that's not enough to pay for the entire Youtube infrastructure. So far, only funding based on advertising seems to be viable.
>This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice.
It should be as well.
Disallow advertising companies from paying for ads on specific content only.
They should have a blanket agreement to show N ads, to user demographics, interests, etc. But not the ability to not have their ads shown on particular channels/videos. That just gives the ad companies censorship power.
>How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma
Ban by law "a la cart content/ad choice" across all platforms. Customers/Ad companies either sign to show their ads the platform or they don't. No selection of channels/videos they'll be shown on (except if they have a deal with a specific channel as sponsors). If that's the case for all platforms by law, they can't go to another platform to have it cater to their demands...
That way a platform doesn't have to cater for specific "ad friendly" content. Just to have popular content, that draws ads in general.
Why shouldn’t I as an advertiser not be allowed to choose which content I want my products to be associated with? It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
>Why shouldn’t I as an advertiser not be allowed to choose which content I want my products to be associated with?
That's easy, because the law I propose will decree so.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
>It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
If anything, my problem with government is that enough of it is dictated by those same interests (lobbys, private interests, advertisers, etc) as opposed by the voters directly. But that's another thing to solve, and giving more power to those interests is the opposite of the solution.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
Honestly I think politicians are bigger scum and they have the power of the state to impose their will. Do you really think if you gave the state power they would use it fairly?
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
Elected officials don’t get into the minutiae of enforcing those types of laws. Unelected committees like the FTC do and most of your recourse if you don’t like it is to file lawsuits that are decided by unelected judges that have lifetime appointments.
Not to mention that even those appointments are made by the Senate where the flyover states in “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” have power far more than their populations would call for thanks to them having two seats in the Senate just like the more populous states. Those are both the last people I want to give more power to.
Yes I’m well aware that the other side is just as bad.
>Why should ad companies be forced to subsidize the spread of bullshit and hateful content?
They are not forced to do anything. They can always NOT advertise.
What I propose is not forcing them to subsidise anything, it is about taking away from them the power to dictate terms to platforms.
Moreover, the "bullshit and hate" is your strawman.
Traditionally, and I'm not some Gen Z to not remember this, it has been the right that was pushing advertisers and platforms to assist in censoring tv shows, music videos, records, etc with non-approved messages (pro-gay, anti-religion, pro-choice, etc).
That the tables have turned for a while doesn't mean the tables will always be this way (we're already 4 years into Trump for one), and I don't even believe the tables have turned as in "it's just bullshit and hateful stuff that's demonetized". I think that all kinds of good content is demonetized all the time, both left and right wing.
Any cause you personally might like can easily be labeled "bullshit" and or "hateful".
Advertisers are ultimately pulling ads because of the will of the people, so if you're going to follow this one step further you see that the public has censorship power and that's what we want
I think if you want to separate YouTube into separate stacks (eg fundamental infrastructure for hosting videos & a publisher / curator of those videos) you could imagine the infra part not being picky about what is uploaded (as long as it is legal) but the publisher part de listing videos except to be shared by link
>Advertisers are ultimately pulling ads because of the will of the people, so if you're going to follow this one step further you see that the public has censorship power and that's what we want
They only pull ads because they can. If all platforms are banned from allowing removal of ads on specific videos, then those advertisers will have the option to (a) advertise, or (b) not advertise.
Will the opt-out of YouTube (and every major platform) altogether?
In fact, the public will also understand it's not up to the advertisers and the story will end there. The people can then try to boycot YouTube itself for having a specific video, but that wont go very far either, especially if it doesn't touch the advertising money.
This is such a bad idea. Also, you seemed to miss my points about why advertisers pull ads.
It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
>It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
For one, I don't want anybody "making censorship decisions". We're not that far from the time the majority would like pro-integration/black, gay friendly, or atheist e.g content censored.
Second, they don't vote with their wallet on the actual content. They could always vote by not watching the video they don't like, and if enough people did that, the video would naturally not have advertising revenue.
But no, while they hate on the video, they don't target it, but target the company making some totally irrelevant to it advertised product, using their complain to negatively affect the video creators.
Third, and more important, this is not actual voting, nobody counts and there are no official rules and limits. A 20% or even 10% of customers can make the companys, and throu that, the content creators' life miserable (cut ad revenue, deplatform, censor, lose display space, etc), even if a bigger majority has no problem or even likes it. In fact, you don't even need that (10-20%), just enough determined hardcore complainers creating a fuzz, even if they're like 1% of customers, many companies just don't care to suffer them, and cave in.
Fourth, advertising companies also take pressure from their customers, the advertised companies, not just the public. Even more pressure there. So companies can also have leverage to stop them giving ads to content they don't like (whistleblowers, critical videos, etc).
>This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
Since the problem is advertisers having too much power by being able to choose the videos they advertise in, of course more regulation disallowing that will fix it!
Advertisers will always have power, and platforms will always decide to publish different types of content.
If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube
I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Now advertisers are effectively still making the same decisions that they were, YouTube is still the preferred advertising backend, and nothing changed except that you made it harder for smaller sites like Vimeo to attract advertisers
Your regulation idea is reckless because you haven't thought it through
>If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube. I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
It's only obvious within a certain puritan culture. In Europe nobody would bat an eye if an advertiser for a, say, fast food store, advertised in pornhub. People wouldn't want to take them down.
>One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Adults are not kids - they don't need or should require special segmentation from different content (aside from their chosing what they like to view/read).
So we'd just needs a kids and an adults YouTube.
Plus making advertising on the adults YouTube wholesale: you buy impressions/views/clicks/etc - and that's it. You don't get a say which video they appear on.
Legislation can't possibly prevent YouTube from sharding into a bunch of disparate publishing entities
In fact, the "break up big tech" groups might laud such a thing
There is no way of framing your regulation so that it does something useful.
Instead it will only ever be a burden on smaller distributers and hurt their chances of advertising (because in order to find advertisers, those advertisers will either have to not care about the content or be convinced that the content is pg -- an incredibly onerous technical burden)
This idea that the regulation wouldn't have consequences you don't like because you don't like them is a fantasy
Why not? Even today an advertiser can choose where and in which type of videos to put their advertising, they can keep doing it and just stop their ads appearing in content they don't like.
Also, if they do curate they need to have the same implications as any other publisher which they don't.
So should YouTube not be allowed to have any standards about what they want on their platform? Should they be forced to allow porn?
YouTube does not have a monopoly on video streaming. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying for the bandwidth and streaming anything they want by renting computer hardware and bandwidth from a colo.
The entire idea behind monopoly for legal reasons is that it harms consumers and it takes away choice. How does Youtube dominating stop anyone else from distributing video?
Heck, I can set up a bandwidth adaptive video stream and put it behind a CDN.
> However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status
They're already that. Youtwitgrambook's front-page and suggestion algorithms are forms of curation, specifically designed to maximize some form of engagement metric.
Their respective content policies are really just an attempt to correct the failings of algorithmic curation.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
We had this debate 250 years ago and decided that society is better off with free expression than with someone deciding what speach is and is not OK. It seems to have worked out pretty damn well so far. If we are going to change course, the impetus is on the pro-censorship side to make the case for the change.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
What myth are you reading? There are lots of things we forbid
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
Did people 250 years ago decide that newspapers must run articles written by anyone?
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
When I end a phone call, Verizon does not call me back with suggested other calls I should listen to next.
The opportunity to be a neutral carrier is sacrificed by any platform that deploys a recommendation engine. Recommending content is a form of curation, which makes them a publisher, conceptually. It does not matter if the content curation is done by hand or by an algorithm that was built by hand.
According to this guy's Wikipedia page, he has claimed many times to be a professor of oncology at Imperial College: but he is not, and Imperial College has sought legal options to stop him from making this claim.
The page is full of other fairly astonishing stuff, not the least of which is apparent fraud connected with the Lockerbie Bombing.
"Sikora told The Guardian that he did not know he would be used in the ad campaign, and that he agreed with Obama about the American health care system. In the attack ad, Sikora was referred to as professor of oncology at Imperial College. This led Imperial to seek legal advice to stop Sikora from claiming to be a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial; a claim that he was understood to have made repeatedly over the previous five years."
"Although the US advert did not state a link to Imperial, at the end of piece written by Sikora on the day it was first aired, 12 May, for UnionLeader.com, he was described as professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College school of medicine, London.
...
"I'm very careful not to involve either my NHS contract with Hammersmith or Imperial in anything that's political," he said. "I'm a consultant at Hammersmith hospital, nobody would dispute that. It's true I can't call myself professor of cancer medicine at Imperial, but I can at Buckingham. The trouble is when I get quoted somewhere, they just use the old stuff."
However, on 29 January, Sikora gave evidence to the Commons health select committee. Introducing himself, he said: "I am Karol Sikora, professor of oncology at Imperial College for 22 years.""
.
I believe it is possible the advertisement made this association without his consent; however I agree it is problematic if he represented to the Commons health select committee that he is a professor at Imperial. Personally, I don't find this damning evidence enough to eradicate his credibility.
> The serology results around the world (and forthcoming in Britain) don’t necessarily reveal the percentage of people who have had the disease
> He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
Here's the Office for National Statistics household survey results. This is only people living in households. (It doesn't include hospital patients, or people living in care or nursing homes).
> Our latest estimates indicate that at any given time during the two weeks from 4 May to 17 May 2020, an average of 137,000 people in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19) (95% confidence interval: 85,000 to 208,000). This equates to 0.25% (95% confidence interval: 0.16% to 0.38%) of the population in England. This estimate is based on tests performed on 14,599 people in 7,054 households.
Frustratingly they haven't said yet how many people in total they think have ever had covid-19, but it's not going to be anywhere near 15million people in the UK.
Yes. You have the right to say whatever you want but you don’t have the right to force someone else to publish it. If you want to publish what you want free of interference, pay for your own servers and bandwidth.
I prefer the way that FB does it. If you share information that is false, they overlay it with a warning saying that the post is probably false and let you click on it and view it.
Yes, I fully agree with you that they have the right to remove whatever content they want. And I absolutely don't want that right to be taken away from them. However, I disagree with how they are currently utilizing that power, even though they have full rights to do so.
It's kind of similar to how I support the 2nd amendment rights and don't want them to be taken away from people (including open carry). But I disagree with how certain people use it during protests by open-carrying at the airports or in front of the city council building.
I can see that. But the same reason that I am against the government regulating tech is similar to why my position on gun control has gone from being pro gun control to anti-gun control.
The government would probably go out of it’s way to make sure “Focus on the Family” content would be allowed but not “Black Lives Matter” just like they shut down the government in Michigan but the same conservatives passed laws for stricter gun control when minorities started exercising their 2nd amendment rights (the Mulliford Act).
Fully in agreement with you on the actual legal positions regarding both tech and gun control. I am also against government regulating either.
But it doesn't mean that I cannot be upset at youtube for exercising their rights in ways that I disagree with. Mind you, I am not calling for a legal action against them or to change laws pertaining to those rights. I am just expressing that they shouldn't be exercising their rights in such a way, but they should still have the legal right to do so. Mostly because I believe that the unintended consequences of regulating that will be much worse (same with gun control).
I think that's a much broader question than whether one content distribution company has the right to ban a person from their own channel--which is actually what's happening here.
Passive voice makes the situation seem more universal and nefarious than it actually is.
"Do you think that such people should be banned from sleeping in houses"? No, but I think I should be allowed to decide who sleeps in my house.
You know that anyone can edit a wikipedia page right? I think it's telling that this man is an ex director at the WHO with over 50 years experience as an Oncologist and rather than listen to what he is saying, people are continually trying to discredit him.
Is there any way if I can find out why my submission is flagged? The last thing I submitted was also flagged (and then unflagged), but I have tried to abide by the submission guidelines.
Yeah, I don't even think it has to be mob, it's just one of those things that happens as a site becomes more mainstream. Ironically it's related to the same issue as the submission: people equate permitting something to condoning it.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I suppose it might have been a combination of users who are fatigued by this general topic having been repeated so frequently in recent weeks, and users who agree with the decision to take down the interview and don't think HN should have a thread about it. As I said, though—those are just guesses.
In the meantime, someone else reposted it and it was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258432. But since this post was first, I've turned off the flags on it and merged those comments hither.
1. No, people weren't predicting that the virus would "get tired".
2. Even if we generously interpret this as meaning that the virus would be less infectious in warmer weather, the only evidence we had pointed to this as only a possibility, rather than something we could predict.
3. As summer has begun in the Northern hemisphere, we still don't have any good evidence that the virus is less infectious in warmer weather--certainly not in the Southern US where the disease continues to spread unchecked.
All predictions about seasonality were made using analogy to similar viruses which have shown that sort of behavior. I am not aware of any high quality scientific evidence supporting seasonality (or nonseasonality). I think that only really becomes available after several seasons; predictions aren't super helpful here.
I don't think it is generous to believe "getting tired" was used metaphorically. On the other hand, perhaps you are right and this medical doctor really thinks the virus is a singular entity, with thoughts and feelings.
Especially if the more deadly variants are stuck in bodies of people being isolated. With quarantine measures in place, the less aggressive variants (if different variants with varying degrees of aggressiveness exist) will spread more.
This isn't the first time it happened nor will it be the last. Here in my country (Brazil) they invited an actual toxicologist, professor and ambassador of medical facility in São Paulo (since 2009) to speak live at CNN but when he mentioned that there's an over-exageration in terms of deadlyness and started putting actual data, studies and past examples in his speech, he was promptly and unapologetically interupted, we can even hear someone say "cut" in the broadcast, before the newswomans interupts him by saying, I kid you not, "We cannot continue the interview because the doctor is not able to listen to us..." all while the doctor was made silent by this statement. Makes me wonder who makes these decisions.
Hardly surprising that a video full of dangerous misinformation has been pulled. It would be worth reading about this particular professor on Wikipedia, particularly his support for alternative medicine, his false claim to have been a professor at Imperial college, and his claim that the UK's NHS is "the last bastion of communism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
So what is so dangerous about it? Perhaps you need to consult a dictionary as to what danger really is. I don't know these people that made the video and I don't subscribe to magic crystals or whatever they are pushing/saying but I do know what Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson from Imperial college created in his flawed modeling - a world wide panic. That is what has been dangerous. Google is a private company I suppose and they can do whatever they want but it would be better to leave their videos up so they can be "peer reviewed" and mocked if what they are saying is farcical. Just like we do with these ladies: https://youtu.be/B4s9GLWiUJM
If you have a specific reason to believe that the model resulted in an incorrect conclusion, feel free to share it, instead of casting aspersions with cryptic nothings.
It looked very wonky. I cannot judge if the code does not actually produce something worthwhile, but it certainly doesn't pass any smell tests. In no profession would work looking as sloppy as that be trusted. And for the critical decision it was used for I would expect something more robust.
Also Neil's other predictions have been completely wrong on the Swine Flu and Bird flu. Why this "expert in his field" is still listened to is a mystery to me.
If you're talking about that first graph on the page, I think that it is not very helpful. Comparing total number of deaths can be misleading, especially for small countries like Sweden. If my state had a Coronavirus death rate as high as Sweden's 15,000 more people would be dead. Still not "millions", but it wouldn't be an ideal outcome.
Sweden is pitched as as some kind of example of handling the pandemic correctly, when their numbers[1] don't look good at all. From their numbers[2] 44% of people diagnosed ends up dead, implying they are way under tested or they have ridiculously deadly strain (I think it is the former). Because of that the most reliable indicator from them is number of deaths.
Now compare number of deaths with countries that reacted quickly, for example: South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and others.
So this is your source? An opinion piece in a right leaning columnist in a biased NY Post, where author couldn't even help himself but include other unrelated tidbits, like how is Joe Biden and Tara Reade related to corona virus? There's nothing there to verify that even the characters in the story are real not to mention the story.
This is just the first article I found at of many from many sources - I heard about it on MSNBC or somewhere like that when a reporter was asking him about it. This happened - it is a fact; the same thing occurred in Britain resulting in the same high death toll of elderly people. But bury your head - fine with me.
I welcome Youtube to ban every member of the press and Congress who publicly supported our various wars, which are government policies leading to "unnecessary deaths." Cherry picking a nobody with no power who is into crystals is bs.
Are you serious? The orginally predicted death number was over 250,000 in Britain. How do you explain the numbers in Sweden which had a much different policy compared UK? Yes Sweden has a higher mortality/million pop rate, but estimates are showing that the number of people dying in UK from non-covid-19 health issues as a result of covid-19, (not going to hospital or getting treatment), would put those numbers on par.
The shape of your argument is why we are doomed to censorship. You could have kept to the abstract point about information itself not being dangerous, but instead you invoked the opposing team's narrative about what constitutes dangerous information. Eventually, we all lose.
No, that is not how the timeline went. As to who created the panic - it was Neil, Fauci and their ilk along with the media. The media, instead of reporting that the data shows old and sick people are the ones dying chose to hide that relevant fact and just report the death toll ad nauseam with no context - as a matter of fact they are still doing it.
what’s missing is the conversation of how many deaths we’re going to see from the lockdown itself in the form of suicide, alcoholism, drug overdose, domestic violence, mental health etc
Nobody is advocating to throw them under the bus. But the fact is since the virus is essentially unstoppable in its transmission rate everyone will be exposed to it...and what will be of those people will be of them. Their best hope is hospital care if they need it; our hospitals are not overwhelmed and neither are Sweden's...so these quarantine measures are an unnecessary burden.
> what Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson from Imperial college created in his flawed modeling
Why do you say that? The reputation of the Imperial College team seems to have become a lightning rod for disgruntled right-wingers but the team is one of the world's most respected.
Imperial is one of the world's top universities. That's probably why Sikora falsely claimed on multiple occasions to be employed there.
There's nothing in the Imperial report that caused the UK government to change course that has been shown to be false. The prediction from the report was that the UK would suffer 20,000 deaths from the virus if extensive distancing measures were employed. The current total is 36,000 confirmed, so if anything the report was too optimistic.
1. Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field. Sikora is also a fellow of The Princes Foundation For Integrated Health and a professional member of the generically-named College Of Medicine. Both of these organizations are lobbyists which promote alternative medicine.
2. Censorship: rather than allow conversation where real scientists can respond to Sikora's nonsense with facts, YouTube decided to push his followers into their own echo chambers where pieces like this which represents him as a martyr go unchallenged.
Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
Sakora is the latter, and the problem with this viewpoint is publishing the truth elsewhere doesn't stop people from absorbing the lies here. Somebody consuming this content is not likely to seek out alternative viewpoints to correct themselves. The information is dangerous, it should not be available.
> Which is why it's important that we present the truth right next to it, so people don't have to look elsewhere.
This still assumes that people will be willing to watch it.
> Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation. Now nobody browsing YouTube will happen upon this video by chance and start believing something that is false and dangerous. Of course, those who are already embedded in these communities will still be able to access the information elsewhere. It is not a perfect solution, I don't think there is a perfect solution, but it does reduce the impact.
> It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation.
Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
If kicking Sakora off YouTube causes his followers to become angry and go share his personal site through a bunch of different channels, that could easily outpace the impact of a YouTube channel where refutations are included.
If someone censored your views, what would you do? Why do you think people who disagree with you won't do all the same things?
YouTube is one of the largest disseminators of information in the world. No amount of small replacements with an existing audience of gullible fools can make up for the loss of audience of hundreds of millions of not-yet-introduced-to-this-garbage victims.
None of his videos are on this page[1]. The idea that just being on YouTube gets you an audience of "hundreds of millions" is completely false. In fact, I have friends who make great content that is lucky to hit 1000 views.
Meanwhile, Fox News is the most popular news network in America.
> Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
I explained in the comment you replied to. You seem to be deliberately ignoring that people who are not predisposed to the viewpoint could also be exposed. I do not believe that censoring on YouTube will prevent anyone who already believes this stuff from finding the content elsewhere, and I already admitted as such.
If two groups of people (those who actively seek the misinformation, and those who encounter it by chance) could access the misinformation, it stands to reason that preventing one of those groups from accessing the misinformation results in a lower overall spread of misinformation, even if the other group is unaffected.
I agree with the idea of truth being the answer to lies, and echo chambers being dangerous for society in the long term. But I disagree with the notion that no one has business speaking outside their field of expertise. Experts can be wrong or change their views over time and they should be open to being challenged by others. No one has a monopoly on data or logic or free thought. If the line of correctness between specialists and others is so clear, then surely it must be easy to counter others views.
No, complex topics that aren't simple and sometimes are counterintuitive are exactly the cases when deferral to experts is important because countering other views in lay explanations may not be possible.
Two questions: did the Canadian government actively recommend against mask wearing? Do you live in Canada?
Note the difference between "we can't condone masks because there is limited evidence that they are helpful" and "we recommend against masks because they are harmful" and "the lockdown is a government consipracy to subjugate us".
I live in Canada and they actively recommended against cloth mask wearing for the general public on the grounds that it leads to a "false sense of security" and "increases touching of one's face" and that asymptomatic persons do not spread COVID-19. "Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial".
I think any reasonable person who defers to authority would have listened to this and come to the conclusion that there is no reason to wear a mask if they're asymptomatic and had no connection to a sick individual. They could even reasonably conclude that it would be dangerous as they would be touching their face and virus particles would accumulate on the outside of the mask.
- Prioritizing supply to healthcare workers is of the utmost priority
- Current evidence supports wearing a mask if you're sick to prevent spreading droplets, also wearing a mask if you're in close contact with a symptomatic person
- Masks can provide a false sense of security.
Her final statement is "if people try to use these measures, they have to be really, really careful and wash their hands, absolutely. That's the key. So we're also worried about the potential negative impacts."
All of that is sound advice, and it is dangerous to think that a mask will protect you without any other precautions. But it isn't a statement that one should not wear a mask, fullstop. It's a statement that one should still follow other cautions. IOW, a mask isn't a magical solution.
"Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial", followed by a list of dangers posed by masks.
It was a statement that masks are a placebo for the general public and actually require one to take extra precautions so that they don't make things worse.
It couldn't have been more discouraging towards people on the fence about wearing a mask in late March.
Good for them (not sarcastically). My point is that if the experts were wrong then, it’s certainly possible that some of what they are saying now is wrong too, and it should be acceptable to criticize them on YouTube and explore different possibilities and models.
There exist (clearly functional) processes to improve the scientific consensus. The government changed its recommendation. Do you think they were convinced by a YouTube videos or perhaps did some other process cause then to amend their recommendations?
If so, why not steer people toward that process, especially when the harm of wearing a mask is low, while the harm oh reopening the economy due to a lack of understanding the covid dangers is much greater?
Those Canadian experts haven't been telling you not to wear a mask, have they? I can't find evidence of that - I just find them saying they don't have scientific evidence (yet) that wearing masks prophetically is necessary. Which is a very different thing.
The National Post are not experts, and they aren't reporting what experts say accurately. And while there's a video in there where an actual expert speaks, you're not reporting what that expert said accurately.
Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth. The US and Canadian recommendations against medical masks for the general public were part of a strategy based on reserving medical masks. So yes, you should have followed the recommendations of health officials and not worn a medical mask, because healthcare workers needed them.
As far as I know, neither the US nor Canada has ever taken a stance against non-medical masks. They haven't taken a stance for medical masks either, but this was likely due to concerns that people would be confused about medical versus non-medical masks. Your own post is an example of this being a very legitimate concern: you have completely failed to differentiate between medical and non-medical masks.
If you look at what experts have been saying who aren't part of governments, the messaging has been fairly consistent: masks prevent illness at varying rates, and we need to prioritize healthcare workers when allocating the most effective masks.
So when you say, "Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask?" I have to say, no, it would have been impossible to do that, because deferring to expert opinions and waiting until yesterday to start wearing a mask are mutually exclusive actions.
> Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth.
So there's a narrative that may or may not have my best interest at heart but demands my compliance for some nebulous greater good?
No.
If sacrifice is required on the part of collective, you honour them by allowing them to engage with informed consent. If you don't, you have no credibility the next time some ambiguity arises where collective sacrifice is needed to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
> Experts can be wrong or change their views over time and they should be open to being challenged by others. No one has a monopoly on data or logic or free thought.
Experts discover they are wrong and change their views based on evidence, not based on what other experts or non-experts say.
Non-experts, like the majority of HN users, really can only go off the word of experts at some point, unless we decide to spend the time studying a field to become experts.
And to be clear, I'm not saying "experts" only meaning people who got a degree in a field. A degree is only the most obvious way to show expertise in a field. But it's quite possible to study a field for a long time without getting a degree. But it's not at all apparent that Sakora has done that--in fact, all evidence I see seems to be trying to gloss over his lack of expertise.
I wish this was true. I hope it was true. But I'm losing faith. People have a hard time believing truth if it goes against what they want to believe if the lies can be framed in any plausible way at all. This applies to everything from cults to businesses to abusive spouses to, of course, politics.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky and tired of playing the long game of truth. Part of the problem is the liars are sometimes highly motivated to continue with the lies, and it takes a greater army of equally motivated truth "warriors" to come behind them and put out the fires. It's just so damn easy to spread bullshit.
The other issue is that smart people are way outnumbered- and the others now have a helluva voice.
I think one of the dynamics that we need to look at is the formation of cults. Cults are dangerous literally because persuasion is asymmetrical. It's not a matter of "Oh this guy persuaded these people of this stuff, and you just need to set them straight", once someone is in a cult it's close to impossible to pull them out of it.
One key to the formation of cults, is the control of information: instead of group decisions being arrived upon by informed discussion, there are ideas which are allowed and others which are not. Maybe the ideas are good (like "brush your teeth") but the enforcement is totally irrational and over the top (like "Sister Emily didn't brush her teeth, so no one will speak to her for 3 days"). This is because these ideas are beyond question so anyone who disagrees with them must be evil.
Truth may not be the answer to lies (in any straightforward way), but bureaucratic committees deciding what's true is hella not the answer to lies. This is so obvious that the weird part is smart people acting otherwise. I'm surprised it has happened so easily. It seems that all that is needed are the right labels (words like 'science', 'public health', 'misinformation', and 'disinformation') to generate a high level of conformity. That this is a time of mass fear must be making a difference too.
did you watch the piece? what exactly was "insane" about it? and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel. so what's important is having a guide to truth. and that guide is scientific thinking -- the scientific method. experts are dead wrong all the time. but they dont stay wrong.
Yes because doctors are licensed by their specialty. Which is only achieved by years of direct subject matter training...coupled with continuous education.
The doctor in question is not licensed for infectious disease.
You should never trust a doctor speaking outside of his expertise.
However most of the celebrity doctors do that every single day which is an insult to the entire medical profession.
In the US at least that isn't how physician credentialing works. Doctors are licensed by state medical boards. In addition, some go on to earn certification from specialty medical boards but those certifications are not legal licenses.
In general we shouldn't blindly trust any single doctor about an important or risky topic, even within their own specialty. Always get a second or even third opinion if practical. (I agree that most celebrity doctors are little more than quacks.)
I didn't watch the piece, but I've read enough of what Sakora has written to conclude that Sakora is a consistent liar. Even if a liar tells the truth, he's not a valuable source of information because you don't know whether what he says is true or not.
> and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel.
If nobody knows what's true with corona, then shouldn't claim to know what's true with corona, which is what Sakora is doing.
ive never heard the name sakora before. genuine question -- just curious how/why you've come across their writing, when it seems the claim is that they are some kind of quack?
When the Libyan government was trying to get the Lockerbie bomber out of jail, they paid Sikora off to say that the bomber was going to keel over in a few weeks from cancer. He admitted that the Libyans let him know what prognosis would be most helpful when they hired him. Lo and behold that's the prognosis that he came up with (which also ended up being completely wrong)
> he's not a valuable source of information because you don't know whether what he says is true or not
How do I know what anyone says is true? Why should I trust what you're saying about Sikora?
I should be able to watch a video on youtube and decide for myself because censorship is inimical to free thought.
You should take a moment to consider that most of the examples throughout history of censorship were carried out by decidedly bad people. Truth can stand on its own!
I am definitely NOT pro-censorship, so I don't know why you're saying this to me. Please read a few comments up. The entire reason censorship is a topic on this subthread is that I brought it up as a problem.
They are people, and they can make mistakes or miss something, like everyone else.
A clear example is an Italian virologist that called the hypothesis of thrombosis in the alveoli that came out from autopsies and the suggestion of using heparin in treatment protocols "a colossal idiocy".
Then other data, including the recent Lancet paper and the Hamburg study came out.
The mere fact one is an expert does not make him or her always right. So weigh opinions more, but don't trust them blindly.
Allowing conversation isn't tough: FB and Twitter would literally have to do less than they do now.
Creating a culture where people are willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of trying to silence anyone they disagree with is the hard part.
I agree but it isn’t a general solution. “Allowing conversation” is what Facebook did in 2016, letting people attend fake rallies created by fake Facebook groups disseminating fake facts.
I agree with everything you wrote, except the above. He is a doctor, speaking on health issues, so he isn't speaking from outside the field of medicine. And I'd challenge that a specialist within the field of medicine can only offer valuable information or insight with their own speciality. Specialists on all fields are prone to group think, so people with related training from the outside should be welcomed to challenge the orthodoxy.
That's all fine and good if you're knowledgeable in the field enough to evaluate his claims. But I'm not, and most of HN is not, so how do we know the difference between an outsider with the vision to see what the orthodoxy can't, and a charlatan trying to profit off lies?
The the fact is, charlatans are far more common than visionary outsiders.
And in Sikora's case, there are a lot of red flags indicating he's a charlatan and not a visionary outsider. The virus is "getting tired"? Really?
> calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Then why is Bill Gates the de facto lead on curing covid?
Your own comment says "if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field."
Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
>It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
I disagree with your reasoning for the entire first half of your post regarding BillG, but I can absolutely agree with you on the last part.
The power to decide who is or isn't an expert, as well as the ability to restrict speech based on those decisions, is a pretty dangerous and scary path that I am vehemently opposed to taking.
> Your own comment says "if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field."
> Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
Because there's a big difference between presenting yourself as an expert and saying things that disagree with experts, and repeating what experts say.
If Bill Gates starts spouting off stuff without evidence that disagrees with what all the experts are saying, he'll absolutely be disqualified according to my reasoning.
> And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
Well, everyone has to determine that for themselves, based on what limited ability they have.
It seems like you think I'm one of the pro-censorship people here, but I assure you I'm not, please follow the comment chain up to where I started it and read my comment there. On the contrary, I believe Sikora's video should have been left on YouTube, and responded to by experts.
Bill Gates has spent decades on the front lines of various wars against infectious diseases. He may not have a university degree on the subject but he is as much an expert as anyone who does - not to mention, he mostly defers to the expertise of his many qualified colleagues when speaking publicly.
White people who have never been around black people are more likely to hold racist views. Straight people who have never been around out gay people are more likely to hold homophobic views. MLK understood that to change the image of black people as dangerous, he had to get black people shown behaving peaceably on TV. Harvey Milk understood that to change the image of homosexuals as foreign and strange, he had to show people that gays were their siblings, their children, their neighbors. What makes you think that social media has so fundamentally changed humanity?
Trump is president, the American Nazi party is growing, the most popular news network in America is Fox News, the anti-vax movement is growing; and the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time. If you want evidence, where's yours?
>the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time.
Deplatforming leaves people with a smaller audience. Only a fraction of the audience follows a banned person to another platform. Voat is nothing compared to Reddit.
Meta: This is a very low quality post. It is accusing Karol Sikora of being 'either 'an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar' without a shred of evidence of such behavior. Assassinate the character of the messenger with no proof, then add insult to injury and wholly fail to address the message. What was so objectionable about content of the interview in question?
>Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
> Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Can you provide us with an image of your degree and job experience to prove you have the expertise to tell us "he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed."? Or at least admit you're being hypocritical.
Google is not a government organization is a private platform. It generally does not get involved in things like that, but the amounts of misinformation is staggering.
I have family members affected by this and it looks like it is a targeted misinformation attack. It starts with Facebook posts, which then often direct you to youtube channels which are condition people into crazier and crazier theories.
It is so weird, because many of these theories even contradict themselves, yet people still believe them.
The guy in article is also an oncologist and he talks about subject that is not his expertise. It's like asking a front end engineer how to best design the a new data center.
This is especially dangerous since we are currently in middle of pandemic and many people will trust his advice.
There's a relevant engineering axiom, that a sufficient quantitative difference amounts to a qualitative difference (sometimes phrased as "quantity has a quality all its own").
At some ineffable point, a "private platform" of sufficient scope becomes a Commons, resembling a social substrate more than a mere voluntary exchange between individuals. A historical equivalent would be "company towns", with goods only available from company stores, exchanged in company scrip, etc. [0]
Obviously, from a purely legal perspective, you are 100% correct. Google is under no obligation to uphold a principle of free speech, non-favoritism, etc., and it would take significant new legislation or regulation to change that.
Nonetheless, in terms of the role that is being played in society and culture, tech giants in general, and Google/Facebook in particular, are wielding disproportionate (and arguably ideologically biased) influence, bordering on an attempt to control narratives and ideas. It's perfectly legitimate to find this trend concerning without supporting the particular ideas being suppressed (I think Plandemic/InfoWars/etc, are utter nonsense).
I believe such actions tend to be counter-productive: (a) isolating and ostracizing those who are falling for bad ideas only reinforces their beliefs and persecution complex, while obstructing the path back to better ideas; and (b) every once in a while a seemingly-crazy idea turns out to be true (it's instructive the extent to which it was a fight uphill for germ theory to be accepted by the experts of the day [1]).
There simply isn't a magic wand that sifts good ideas from bad, a priori; and if the power to make that decision is centralized, even with the best of intentions, whoever wields it will inevitably make mistakes.
You misunderstand what "totalitarian" means. Per Wikipedia:
> Totalitarianism is a political system or a form of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
Also, free speech is not absolute.
Reasonable people can disagree how rights are balanced against the need for public safety. It helps not to throw around words unfairly.
I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web services, they shouldn’t be in charge of things like sound epidemiology.
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.
Youtube isn't in charge of what is credible or not. Youtube is in charge of what shows up on youtube or not. There are many categories of things that can't be on youtube, not just things youtube thinks are incorrect.
Should youtube overstep its bounds, that makes it easier for competitors to enter the video streaming market. It seems like libertarian leaning people forget half of their philosophy on this issue.
This gets a bit into monopolies. YouTube is Google and Google prioritizes its own properties. Google is the most widely used search engine and works hard to keep it that way.
Is there a way to easily have popular interviews online outside of YouTube?
Their monopoly is meaningless in the context of all the knowledge freely available within the entirety of the internet, not to mention all the knowledge freely available outside the internet in the form of books which still happen to be the definitive medium to learn about anything with any type of serious rigor.
> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not
This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product and we should not encourage the narrative that this product is the zenith of knowledge even though there are knowledgeable people who put content on YouTube.
I’ll reiterate a point I’ve made before: the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier. They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
The problem we face is that social media is about echoing information, not validity, which is how misinformation spreads so rapidly, because it sounds like what people want to hear.
There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion.
Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moderator problem. YT will either moderate or die.
The reason YT could get so popular is because they neither have to moderate, nor fact check, but still get the benefits of being informational. This is true for ALL social media, unfortunately. How would one go about moderating the thousands of hours of content produced every hour in TikTok? Etc.
For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.
What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.
Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.
That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.
I don't think this is true in the long run, any more than genes which favor their propagation are bad in the long run. In the short term, viruses, cancers, shitty memes, doomsday cults and other low-sophistication replicators are favored.
But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
It's "bad" for us as individuals with our cultural background. It's not necessarily "bad" for the memes themselves, especially since the ultimate score in this game is to have an entire civilization proactively spreading the meme to others. Christianity, Islam, and other proselytizing religions are a good example.
> If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.
Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.
> the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier
I disagree that this is the ultimate question or that this is in any way a problem that merits a changing of the laws (as current law explicitly permits this). Websites aren't common carriers, and I don't see a compelling reason to force websites to host content that they disagree with for any reason. I don't see any connection between the idea between popularity and the loss of editorial control of your own website.
> They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
Moderation is part of the product. I would argue that the idea that we can effectively constrict companies into a specific type of moderation behavior is what's untenable because it strikes at the heart of the creative freedom to build a website and online community with respect to your own ideals.
To be clear, I think either position is fine. If you want control over what people say that's okay - but maybe then you should be accountable for what they say like a publisher.
If you don't want to be accountable for what people say, that's fine - but maybe then like a traditional common carrier you shouldn't get to control what people say.
The asymmetry of "I control everything you can say but am accountable for none of it" is wrong, in my eyes.
> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product
This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting, which today comprises a large proportion of all information transfer between humans. Companies like Facebook and YouTube are central to social discourse, at least in the west. When a medium of communication is that ubiquitous, the fact that it is owned by a private company is not an excuse to throw up one's hands and say "Well, I guess they own it - they can censor what they want".
The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are other video sites out there. Just because youtube is popular doesn't prevent people from hosting content on other platforms.
One thing that really bothered me was how Australian ISPs handled censorship of the Christchurch shooting videos. They have started proactively blocking not just websites that hosted it, but also those that linked to it - even forums, where it was posted by the users, and the moderators have a general hands-off policy.
It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.
It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.
Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...
We could have antitrust enforcement that prevents companies like Alphabet and Facebook from becoming so dominant in our society, but if we are going to have such dominant corporations, we cannot allow unbridled censorship of speach on their platforms without undermining a pillar of societal strength, prosperity, and happiness: the marketplace of ideas.
And just because your house is already hooked up to your electric utility doesn't mean you can't build your own generator and and source your own fuel! Clearly the utility should have near complete immunity and let an automated algorithm cut off your power indefinitely for vague, unspecified reasons.
> This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting
Far from it. You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part. A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
This whole argument has been repeated many, many times on HN. Can we stop letting this stuff devolve into generic honest discourse vs corporate nihilism debates? At least mention something about COVID so I know which thread I'm in.
> A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
I'm not sure about this. Besides removing obvious hate speech, which sort of content curation do you mean? I thought its success was due to everyone being able to upload and share video clips. I don't think curation was an important feature.
Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but Youtube is a Google company now, and their entire business model is based on (mostly) algorithmic curation. The business model of every content creator depends upon catering to the preferences of that algorithm, and their success at doing so determines their value to advertisers. Entire genres of content have come into being and have been destroyed overnight because of the algorithm.
Youtube's success mostly comes from driving discovery of new content through recommended channels and videos.
YouTube is perceived as a family-friendly, PG to PG-13 brand. It would be a very different, and much more niche, environment if it were a free-for-all of pornography, obscene language and graphic violence.
I agree, but notice that except for pornography, which I forgot to include, I covered all of the others (sort of) with "hate speech". Banning violence/insults/pornography/harassment is an obviously useful filter for a PG-13 site, but I don't think it qualifies as curation. To me curation implies something related to the selection of quality.
> You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part.
Maybe not "nefarious" exactly. But YouTube does have a virtual monopoly. And that's arguably illegal in the US. Or at least, it exposes them to additional government oversight.
Instead of arguing about the semantics of "monopoly," it could be fun to ask "does YouTube have power that we as a self-governing people should regulate?"
I think it does. Others disagree. Sometimes it's an interesting discussion.
According to what though? Walmart is ubiquitous; do they have to let people protest inside stores? No. Do they have to sell antivax books? No. You could maybe argue youtube is closer to a pseudo public place like a mall, but even there you couldn’t force a mall to protest on behalf of someone else or sell something. What exactly is your end game? Create a new type of forum (like physical forum) where private companies are compelled to act according to someone else’s standards?
By the way, you might know that in California, shopping centers may have to allow people to engage in some expressive activity on their private property, even when they don't endorse the speakers' message:
Thanks! That’s what I was trying to refer to. But that seems different in a few ways. First, there’s actually physical open spaces in malls where the public is invited—you don’t have to shop. Second, the protest in a mall is ephemeral. Youtube is like a store in the mall, not the open forum (I don’t think Macy’s would be required to have a protest in its store); the internet is like that open space. Second, extending this to YouTube would require YouTube to proactively host a video on its servers, pay for costs to play it, and host it forever (until the protestor takes it down).
Walmart is not ubiquitous in terms of property the same way Youtube is in terms of streaming video. If you want to protest you can easily avoid Walmart. Likewise if you want to publish a book you can easily avoid Walmart.
If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably established on Youtube).
I don’t follow. When you protest at Walmart you aren’t guaranteed an audience either (people can ignore you and walk away). And when you make a video you don’t get granted an audience either. Why should YouTube have to help you out?
You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.
"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."
Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!
More and more social interaction becomes intermediated. And especially during this time of quarantine. It's not as easy as convincing people. Because people are now all on ban-happy platforms. And these platforms synchronize their bans.
Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.
As a contrarian view, do our rights require it to be _cheap_? AWS + a domain name (`www.the-moon-really-is-made-of-cheese.com`) seems like something that is available to everyone.
- It's not cheap
- It's not easy
However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.
> ... discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day
No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.
I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.
We’ve already covered discoverability: you have no right to an “audience”.
As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.
If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.
I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.
> it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform
This is very obviously false based on countless examples, but you're baking in the assertion that exposure to the YouTube audience is a necessary criteria to be considered a video platform, yet you haven't justified that belief. YouTube's ubiquity is an accolade afforded to it by the public on a completely voluntarily basis that can be effortlessly revoked at any time. The reason it is not revoked is because it costs users nothing to use YouTube and for the overwhelming majority of its users YouTube is just a small and generally unimportant slice of their day akin to watching netflix or playing video games.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
Why? I don't see the connection between the quantity of eyeballs freely gazing and the need for the owner to abdicate their editorial prerogatives. What is your justification for this? If the eyeballs have a problem with how those prerogatives are expressed they can look away to another website and they actually do that quite frequently.
YouTube/Google/Alphabet have repeatedly said they are removing things about COVID19 from non-government sources. They cannot simply be written off as a private agents who can do what they want with their platform, considering their dominance and monopoly on content.
This is textbook definition of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Google is either becoming the Ministry of Truth, or by its policy, allowing governments to be the Ministers of Truth, with no room of any dissent.
YouTube is not the ministry of truth, it is a popular entertainment website that people visit voluntarily. People very incorrectly treating YouTube like it's some kind of authoritative source of knowledge is the problem, not YouTube.
They're not doing this for marketing reasons. They're doing it because they believe by controlling YouTube they control what people think. Even if they're wrong it's dystopian and suggests a megalomanic attitude.
Remember this is the same company that controls Chrome. It's all fun and games right up until people start discovering their Chromebooks and Androids are blocking web sites on the grounds of "misinformation"
> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility.
There is a difference between morality and legality. It might be legal for ATT to cut your Internet because they don't like you but it will be immoral for sure.
Do you really not see the critical differences between having your internet cut off and having a website owner remove something you posted to their website? I am honestly having difficulty believing that.
The essential, underlying problem here is that YouTube is a corporate product, just as you say, and yet still has a major influence on the population's aggregate belief, due to its scale of adoption. This is an emergent phenomenon, not a narrative.
Considering the content of YouTube's top channels I think the evidence isn't in favor of that suggestion that YouTube has a noteworthy impact on "the population's aggregate belief"
There's only one grocery store in town and I need to buy food, but their prices are too high!! Oh well, guess I will just have to drive to this other town to buy food where the prices aren't so high.
..walks outside to car
..sees local grocery store owner has flattened his tire
Well, they roll out a platform where people can upload content. That is the one of the main services they offer, YT should be subject to the local regulations for uploaders and viewers, applying no other discretionary/arbitrary limits than those imposed by regulations or by technical reasons. Imagine a content platform would consider that videos created by <insert group of people> do not align with their values.
The fact there is a global pandemic going on that requires the cooperation of virtually everyone is important context here.
Meanwhile, YouTube does little moderation of zany philosophical, conspiratorial, or otherwise disruptive, unconventional content. The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I don't agree with censorship, but your analogy is off base.
> That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I think the figures running the Inquisition and the counter-reformation at the time of Galileo might have disagreed. Remember the 30 Years War was also ongoing from 1618-1648 during the whole time, a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict that engulfed all of Europe and resulted in 8 million deaths.
Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
BTW, I strongly disagree with the this video, but really not sure if YouTube removing it is the right way to do this or will be effective in suppressing virus truthers.
True, but Galileo's work was not a direct commentary on said crisis (30 Years War). On the other hand, this "professor" is presenting an analysis of an ongoing crisis and suggesting concrete actions on how it should be handled.
> Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
Exactly my point. You can criticize the powers and be and the social order today with impunity on YouTube.
>The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands before they eat."
(...)
Jesus called the crowd to Him and said, "Listen and understand. A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it. (...) For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him."
In my view from the ten minutes I watched he didn’t state anything any more off base than the WHO has over the time the pandemic has been spreading. There is uncertainty and we’re yet to understand it thoroughly.
Given that, I think this is gross overreach by YT in establishing narrative. What happens if their management becomes a bunch of anti-vaxxers, do they get to set the tone?
And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? It wasn't QAnon. It was the state -- and it looks like YouTube is aligned with the pro-shutdown folks who don't want their wisdom questioned.
Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.
Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.
Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work?
Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself.
Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions.
Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops.
You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
Even if they had 30% immunity, that still leaves the majority of the population exposed. I'm sure 30% would be very much preferable (if it's even true), but probably not good enough to allow things like concerts or maybe even sit down restaurants to reopen.
There are estimates that herd-immunity is achievable at 43%
"The disease-induced herd immunity level is 43% ... when immunity is induced by disease spreading, the proportion infected in groups with high contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates"
Unlike most other European countries, Sweden is not increasing its sovereign debt load by 15+% of GDP to keep the citizenry afloat. That’ll feel a lot more important than Covid in 5 years.
I think this is likely a biased view. If you ask the families of the 300+k people who died from Covid-19 they probably won't consider the economic impact to be the most significant.
I think it’s fair to say that both numbers represent a measure of different ways that the pandemic has caused pain and suffering, whether it’s in terms of lives or livelihoods impacted.
We obviously need to deal with both problems concurrently. There are a lot of actions that can be taken which can help one which doesn’t come at the expense of the other, so it’s not purely a either-or decision.
It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to either effect. The death toll is an immediate concern, but so is a functioning food supply chain, and indeed a healthy economy is critically important to everyone.
No having lived through an economic collapse or a hyper inflation event, for example, it may be hard to appreciate how difficult (and deadly) that situation can be.
People are worried about economies not for some abstract reasons.
Bad economies literally kill and have a potential to kill much more people than Covid-19.
From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2].
Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.
Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].
Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].
I don't think anyone said worry about the economy was an abstract idea. It obviously has a very real effect on people and their health, it has been well studied. I was simply pointing out that what people will consider more significant in five years time (the effect of the pandemic itself or the subsequent harm to the economy due to the response) depends on who you ask. Furthermore, since we don't know the full extent of the pandemic or the ensuing economic impact it doesn't make sense to claim one way or the other right now.
Also, the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim.
"I was simply pointing out that what people will consider more significant in five years time"
Yes, I think I understand what you're saying.
My point is the harm to the economy directly translates to lives lost too. Bad economy leads to surge in violent crime, opiods addictions, gang violence, lost access to health care...
"... the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim."
It wasn't the only cause, sure. But it was a huge one, afaik. History isn't a hard science, of course, and I'm not a historian (not even an amateur historian) but this quote from Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly controversial:
"The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party... Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery."[1]
Thankfully, that's both not how democracy works - we don't ask a biased sample - and exactly how it works - we ask everyone what they think of the government's performance and they vote for or against.
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
I agree with you, that was basically my point. At this point in time we don't know enough about how this will play out to make any claim about what was the more important aspect to consider: the effects on the economy or the effects on population-level health due to Covid-19.
Without lockdowns, it just means that everyone with the means to stay home does so, and the people not able to stay home disproportionately face the disease. Government lockdowns reduce the incentive for desperate people to continue exposing themselves to the disease.
Lockdowns are causing the majority of economic damage.
Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.
Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.
"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]
It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.
Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:
"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."
So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.
Frankly those people are just dumb, and there's nothing we can do to truly protect society from them. So, you might as well allow such content to exist.
This doesn't directly answer your question of "violent" (and it seems on the whole the QAnon protests have been non-violent), but the FBI assessed QAnon Extremists as a domestic terrorism threat[0]. (The qualification here is "QAnon Extremists" which appears to, probably correctly, separate the extremist element from the majority).
> There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.
It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
Active information campaigns. Deprioritizing in search/related results rather than banning. Partitioning verified from unverified information and always showing a minimum number of factual content when showing unverified content.
That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
That's a fine point, but YouTube isn't restricted to the option of taking down videos. They could stop recommending these videos, and they could pull them from search results. Actually, YouTube might be a better place if new videos were unlisted by default and teams of curators were responsible for approving new channels. But then maybe someone would just build their own YouTube index and search engine.
I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch.
Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain.
By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
This is a great point and is also true of Facebook and a number of other platforms. Roger McNamee spoke at length about this issue with Sam Harris on his podcast back when it was called Making Sense. His point was essentially that the AI that controls the recommendations is trained to maximize clickthrough rates, and so it learns in its own way to feed us articles that make us angry, because we click and share more that way. Hence the tendency to lead people down rabbit holes of extremism.
The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.
Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
> Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book?
Yes exactly.
> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.
In what context?
> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.
From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.
> Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume.
But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.
You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?
I want to experience media in the format and order in which the creator of the media wants it to be watched. The episodic content that I watch, I watch because I have faith in the creators of it that the next one will be of the same calibre as the previous. Not faith in the publishers. 99% of the time, this is in the order or is released. There are exceptions, which is why we have the concept of creator-defined playlists. To present the content to the user in an order which is not defined by the creator is at the publisher's discretion, and the publisher should therefore take responsibility for presenting it that way.
WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.
I don't disagree. But what you (or the prior posters) are saying is that the law should prevent companies from trying to optimize for the best user experience. If only showing things in time-order is "safe" for the company, but filtering out spam becomes "unsafe", then I as a consumer am forced to endure a crappy experience for solely legal reasons. Neato.
Laws don't have to be philosophically pure. A law can define or describe what counts as an editorial algorithm and what does not, and it could exclude simple sorting while including the complicated thing Youtube does to keep you watching.
What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.
Indeed, but (at least in the US), you can't really do that without running afoul of the first amendment, presenting content is just a form of speech. Government restrictions on speech are the thing that everyone's afraid of, right?
Currently, platform immunity means the platform can't be sued or criminally charged because a user hosts something for which the user can be. The proposed change would expose the operator of an editorial algorithm to liability for the algorithm recommending things that are already illegal.
I don't think the concern with rolling back platform immunity is government restrictions on free speech, exactly. In the US, the first amendment provides the same protections it always has. Instead, concerns include that the risk of liability will hamper innovation, that only companies with a lot of resources will be able to take the risk, and that companies will overreact with their own proactive censorship to stay well clear of areas with potential liability.
We've seen the latter with FOSTA/SESTA weakening platform immunity, which is arguably what its creators intended, but I suspect not what everyone in congress who voted for it expected.
Right, but the "platform immunity" thing applies equally to all platforms. You're instead proposing to extend immunity to some platforms and not others based on how they choose to recommend things. If you (like I do) believe that recommendation is a form of speech, this creates government favored classes of speech.
To word it differently: "Platforms that recommend/aggregate speech in government sanctioned ways are protected from liability, while those that do not are not". That's, while not open and shut perhaps, certainly spooky.
The law already does something like that. If I run the hypothetical blog host conspiracy-blogs.com, and I manually select ten posts I like to put on the front page every day, I can be prosecuted if I select a post for that saying something like:
Tomorrow at 10 AM, join me on the steps of the capitol. Bring your gun and a sign that says "we will shoot you unless you vote no on bill 123.".
The action described is a crime, soliciting others to participate in it is a crime, and my deliberate choice to show it to a larger audience is likely enough to subject me to accomplice liability that virtually any criminal lawyer would recommend against it. If violence actually occurred, there would be an ever lower bar for the victims to clear to sue me. Planning crimes is unambiguously not protected speech.
The proposal described would subject any sufficiently editorial algorithm to similar liability.
Censorship isn’t the answer to the things you fear. YouTube banning these things won’t stop them from spreading. YouTube not banning these things won’t cause people to commit violence.
Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing.
You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire.
Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt.
Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts.
- Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes
- Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content
Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
Nationally, the clearance rate for arson is typically under 23%, meaning the vast majority of arsonists get away with it.
In general, clearance rates are pretty bad across most crimes. The homicide clearance rate is typically below 62%, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings is typically below 55%, clearance rates for reported rape is typically below 40%, clearance rates for motor vehicle theft is typically below 20%.
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
> If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
The last bit sounds like the plot of Minority Report.
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
> What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far ...
You've just given a bunch of evidence that those things are happening despite our benevolent censors' best efforts.
I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
Let's not forget why idea censorship exists. We are ruled by those we are not allowed to criticized. Even the guys setting fire to cell towers, can we believe that a video is going to convince anyone reasonable of actually doing it? Do you yourself feel tempted?
It is. There are books on all kind of things, are we going to burn books we don't like, next?
The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.
If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.
Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.
Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.
People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.
It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.
I have been following unherd for a bit and while they are on the let's do as the Swedes side of things, this is wellreasoned long form interviews with established experts and opinion makers.
I don't understand mechanism on why something like this gets censored. I think it is obvious that this sort of "overcensoring" will come back on youtube in a negative way; and possibly even hurt the case for lockdowns and careful reopening.
> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not.
YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.
You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.
Unfortunately it isn't always cut and dry. As the GP pointed out, once upon a time the heliocentric model was "disinformation".
In more modern times, suggesting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was misrepresented would be "disinformation". Suggesting that we didn't need to invade Iraq to prevent another 9/11 would be "disinformation". Sometimes yesterday's "harmful disinformation" is simply today's "information".
I think the ethical question you presented is multifaceted. On another axis, do the people who control the most prolific video platform also have a moral responsibility to ensure a free society has the tools to ask difficult questions?
What I love about comments like this is that "we" (the citizens) are demanding that websites filter out X, Y, and Z, and then at same time come back yelling at them when they do. Censorship and lack of censorship come at a cost and you have to be willing to pay one of them.
You act like information isn't constantly being curated in all forms of knowledge delivery. The same way we don't tolerate students attempting to derail professors in class with unfounded hypothesis or flawed logical arguments, Youtube doesn't have to tolerate the same on its platform.
There's a lot of difference between preventing a student shouting down a professor in class with some crap argument and the college telling the student they're not allowed to quietly discuss an "unfounded hypothesis" in some corner with another student.
The beauty (theoretically) of platforms like YouTube is that we can watch what we like and skip what we don't without harming any other user.
And as for qualifications, if an oncologist isn't qualified to have an opinion on COVID-19, YouTube sure as hell isn't.
This is a bad trend. If scientists in China contradicted the government (and directly - the WHO), it seems like YouTube would have censored them. Debate is what sustains free society and free society will perish when certain narratives become unquestionable.
YouTube consistently followed their policy of removing videos which promote misinformation, disinformation, and policy proposals that contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic.
I have my problems with YouTube, but this isn't censorship, and it isn't a conspiracy to silence anyone. It's an effort to be responsible to public health and safety. The hysteria I see here is completely unwarranted.
But YouTube is not deciding on the credibility of the video. They are simply saying that in this emergency, in the interests of public safety, they will not allow videos that contradict World Health Organization information and policy guidelines. And they removed a video that violated that policy. It's a very narrowly defined exception to their normally open platform. I don't see what is scary or sinister about that.
Please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar. This is a big step in the wrong direction, regardless of how you feel about issues with the WHO.
Who decided this at YouTube? What's their name? They weren't elected and they have no accountability to society for making decisions in our best interest. The WHO states that healthy people should "only wear a mask if [they] are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection."[1] This is contrary to current guidance in the US. In a democracy, as in science, no one gets to say what is true and what is false. We have allowed Alphabet to grow into a sprawling corporation that pervades our everyday lives. We cannot now allow them to dictate what is good and bad, true and false, venerable and deplorable. This is dystopic.
> But YouTube is not deciding on the credibility of the video. They are simply saying that in this emergency, in the interests of public safety, they will not allow videos that contradict World Health Organization information and policy guidelines.
No, YouTube still is determining credibility. YouTube is still saying, "this video is misinformation and we are removing it." The fact that it's treating the WHO information as the baseline does not change the fact that YouTube is deciding credibility, and removing videos that do not meet it's criteria for credibility.
So let me get this straight, you don't see how the largest most influential form of public communication( youtube) deciding to moderate the public interest via a 3rd partly that is governed more by politics than actual health is somehow not a problem. In your last sentence you said "I don't see", it's because you must be blind.
Until February, WHO was saying COVID does not spread human to human and travel restrictions won't help. So anyone who said "it does spread human to human" and "travel restrictions will help" was considered misinformation and conspiracy theorist.
February onwards, WHO did a full 180. But everyone who got censored before then was the victim.
Same thing about effectiveness of wearing masks.
So anyone pointing out the obvious that "China cannot have lesser deaths than Canada" is considered a "misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorists" because they "contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic".
How people don't see the clear danger of such censorship is beyond me. WHO also says China has been transparent.
> WHO was saying COVID does not spread human to human
The WHO said there had been no reports of it spreading human to human. And that was true, there hadn’t.
The reason your favourite conspiracy sources are taken offline is because they lie - they make you, an otherwise intelligent person, believe something that wasn’t true.
A favoured argument by one section of the internet is that “it doesn’t spread from
Children to Adults”. An extraordinary claim.
They interpret the statement “there have been limited cases of it spreading from children” and treat that absense of evidence as an evidence of absence.
Note that in January, in a QA dated 9th, they did say
“Yes, some coronaviruses can be transmitted from person to person, usually after close contact with an infected patient, for example, in a household workplace, or health care centre.”
I.e coronaviruses in general spread, we haven’t seen this one spread yet.
I understand the theoretical basis for removing misinformation and disinformation, but policy proposals is an entirely different ballpark.
Two reasonable people can agree on the underlying facts but disagree on policy.
Additionally, this is absolutely censorship and an effort to silence people. It is not an illegal act of censorship. similarly, you can agree that it is legal, but still not like the censorship.
I hope YouTube only removes a little bit. It seems so to me. A lot of similar information is still available.
Also, the videos that should be deleted before any others are the videos about the claim that it's better to be too afraid than too little, for instance. If people deliberately increase their fear, they become irrational like Francis E. Dec, who believed in the "Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God". The difference is that Dec had no doubts, and didn't choose to ignore doubts and to deliberately be afraid the most.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Internet threads can't handle denunciatory rhetoric without collapsing. It's the way the medium works, and we have to consciously compensate for it, if we're going to keep curious conversation going here.
I think flamewar is for when people will have polarized views on a particular topic and the poster posts only to bring the people to fight each other.
My post is what I think a necessary reminder in a topic that I honestly don't think is very polarizing. It just needs to be repeated, over, and over again. The same way it gets taught to kids at school so they teach it to their kids, and so on.
Because it is important.
Think about this: if something is taught to kids at school, how can you justify objecting to it on HN (I mean unless it is a topic that is obviously incorrectly taught, which I suppose this is not one of them)?
I doubt that you would want other commenters to drill you like a schoolchild, but even if I'm wrong about that, please don't do it to others on this site. We're trying for entirely the opposite sort of discussion. Basically, if it's predictable, it is off topic here.
Lots of great points made in this thread. Question is, what can we do about it as a collection of individuals? Hackers often like to pretend to be apolitical, when faced with political issues. No wonder, escaping from the turmoils of the real world in technology has always been a sweet sweet delusion. Now the technology itself becomes an instrument of politics, and there's no place left to hide.
Libertarian leaning myself, sad to say, this is the first time I am now in full realization that monopolies do in fact exist and are very dangerous. Platforms like Youtube are beyond ubiquitous and we all depend on them. The companies behind them have more money than countries. That, combined with the tax free private foundations their founders nearly all have, is taking us down some very bad roads. Of course, those roads are always paved with the best intentions and for our own good. I think it is well past time government step in and limit the power and control mega corporations flex on their platforms and on our public policy in nearly all matters.
> Libertarian leaning myself, sad to say, this is the first time I am now in full realization that monopolies do in fact exist and are very dangerous.
YouTube is not a monopoly. There are other websites where you can post or watch video. Not as many people choose to use them, but you're not entitled to their attention anyway.
Existence of competition doesn't stop courts from considering a company to be a monopoly. You could have used a Mac and Netscape in the 90s, but the US went after Microsoft anyway.
On top of that, you have to realize that these countries (YT, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are completely obedient to the government of China. Not because it's their biggest market, but because China will shut them out if they don't toe the line. Whereas the US and Europe have never indicated a willingness to sanction these companies no matter what. It's a tyranny of the minority.
The video seems to be back up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2YZfnsOPg. Probably got caught up in some sort of automated COVID misinformation algorithm. Given the content of the video, I'm not inclined to place much weight on their side of the story here. This feels like fake outrage to drive views.
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadHe's being deplatformed for even slightly questioning the conventional wisdom.
Wow! These tech companies hold way too much power.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora
Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
Alex Jones?
Regarding his relation to WHO, according to his own claims (dead link on wikipedia) he was "Chief of the Cancer Program from 1997" (to 1999, just two years, two decades ago). But we also know that he falsely claimed to be professor on Imperial College, see also posts here.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331393/WH-1...
"Dr Karol Sikora is Chief of the WHO Programme on Cancer Control" as per the magazine from "September--October 1998"
1) obviously not equivalent to "ex director at the WHO"
2) obviously more than 20 years ago
3) and "on cancer control", not on epidemiology
still not anything to allow him to misrepresent his relation to Imperial College as late as 2020 (!) or to give a credence to his current epidemiological policy views.
what we can do is suing them. censorship became too popular recently.
> Promotion of alternative medicine
> Sikora and the School of Medicine at Buckingham have in the past been supportive of alternative medicine. For a short time, Buckingham offered a diploma in "integrated medicine" (a relatively recent euphemism for alternative medicine). Sikora was a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health[24] and Chair of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, which is unaffiliated with any university; it includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who led Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course. > > Sikora is also a "professional member" of the College of Medicine, a patient-oriented healthcare lobby group also linked to the Prince of Wales that appeared shortly after the collapse of the Prince's Foundation. The College has been criticised extensively in the British Medical Journal for its promotion of alternative medicine. These claims have been contested by the College. He is on the advisory panel of complementary cancer care charity Penny Brohn Cancer Care (formerly the Bristol Cancer Help Centre) of whom Prince Charles is a patron, and is a patron of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Statements by Sikora have been critical of unproven methods of alternative medicine, after Parliament member Lord Maurice Saatchi proposed a bill allowing doctors to use unproven experimental therapies, and he has spoken out against claims that an alkaline diet can cure cancer.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora#Promotion_of_alte...
It sounds like he might actually have infringed Youtube's "Harmful or dangerous content" guidelines:
> Harmful or dangerous content > > Don't post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids. Videos showing such harmful or dangerous acts may get age-restricted or removed depending on their severity.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/#community-guidelines
I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.
Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]
Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.
A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.
[0] https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246765252307533825 / https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246762772400148480 - These two tweets from April 5th announced the Doctor's uploading his video to Vimeo and YouTube. Dr. Kyle-Sidell's video seem to have been the catalyst for the abandonment of the former consensus of proactively ventilating SARS-CoV-2 patients. [483]
You've completely misunderstood this.
It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
We've reduced the numbers of people going onto vents. This has not reduced the numbers of people dying. Now they're dying with nasal oxygen in a care home, not on a vent in an ICU. It's a better death, but they're still dead.
I'm not a professional with years of slinging the lingo. But I think Kyle-Sidell's retweet of "Barotrauma is a real phenomenon" [0] implies [edit] that aggressive ventilation was actually what was killing people. Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?
Wikipedia has a page about Barotrauma, which is damage to bodies caused by pressure differentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma
Dr. @erikfreyrMD's earlier tweet said "I don't know where this dogma of 'intubate early' came from. Intubation is a death sentence. " [1] (emphasis added).
[0] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243775103071973376
[1] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243697159037259776
[edit1: means -> implies]
Yes, because we've stopped intubating people so early and they're still dying.
"other treatments they gave [George Washington] during that period were enemas and drugs to make him vomit and something called blisters, where they applied Spanish fly onto his throat, which raises a painful blister, again to remove these terrible humors that are caution the inflammation."
-Bloodletting and blisters: Solving the medical mystery of George Washington’s death, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bloodletting-blisters-solv...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_fly [473]
That should give you a better idea of what harms alternative medicine quackery can cause.
It's another story when people are actively running interference. I've seen messages like "don't go to the doctor for your cancer", and I agree those should be suppressed. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.
Imagine a population of 1 million users. In one timeline evil, stupid misinformation isn't spread around and 1000 people die.
In another timeline it is spread around and 10000 people die. Warning labels can't help here because most of the people negatively effected are multiple steps removed from such a label. Like the first example we should have reduced its audience by taking it down entirely not added a warning label that 50-80% wont attend to.
I just wanted to put in a nice word for Penny Brohn. They very careful position themselves as complementary, not alternative, to conventional cancer treatment.
There was some work that looked at the outcomes of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre that showed poor outcomes, but that research didn't correct for the illness of the patients. Lots of people using the service were on palliative care pathways and were expected to die. They were using the service to get the death they wanted.
These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically, I'm not really sure why these kinds of arguments are presented like some sort of self-evident zinger against censoring dangerous content.
And nuking a city stops all crime in it. If you only look at one tiny aspect and ignore everything else, just about anything can be made to seem sensible.
However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.
The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
> The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
> The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
This assumes they don't have the legal resources to fend off such a case.
For example: They could easily - but actively choose not to - host pornography.
They do not want to host everything that is legal.
This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice. See "advertiser friendly content"[1] and Adpocalypse[2][3].
Land line phones and cell phones are funded by subscriptions and they are also point-to-point communication between 2 private individuals. Phones (barring small-scale exceptions such as conference calls) are not a "broadcasting" medium.
There is no broadcasting medium in the world that acts as a neutral carrier. Not newspapers. And not tv like NBC/CBS/ABC. Even the government funded broadcasters like American PBS or UK BBC are not neutral carriers.
Ok, let's say you this ambitious idealism to create a new broadcasting website that allows anything except for child pornography. How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma. Subscriptions? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee for user-generated-content. Yes some die-hard web surfers pay for Youtube Red/Premium to avoid ads but they are a small minority that's not enough to pay for the entire Youtube infrastructure. So far, only funding based on advertising seems to be viable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...
[3] https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...
It should be as well.
Disallow advertising companies from paying for ads on specific content only.
They should have a blanket agreement to show N ads, to user demographics, interests, etc. But not the ability to not have their ads shown on particular channels/videos. That just gives the ad companies censorship power.
>How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma
Ban by law "a la cart content/ad choice" across all platforms. Customers/Ad companies either sign to show their ads the platform or they don't. No selection of channels/videos they'll be shown on (except if they have a deal with a specific channel as sponsors). If that's the case for all platforms by law, they can't go to another platform to have it cater to their demands...
That way a platform doesn't have to cater for specific "ad friendly" content. Just to have popular content, that draws ads in general.
That's easy, because the law I propose will decree so.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
>It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
If anything, my problem with government is that enough of it is dictated by those same interests (lobbys, private interests, advertisers, etc) as opposed by the voters directly. But that's another thing to solve, and giving more power to those interests is the opposite of the solution.
Honestly I think politicians are bigger scum and they have the power of the state to impose their will. Do you really think if you gave the state power they would use it fairly?
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
Elected officials don’t get into the minutiae of enforcing those types of laws. Unelected committees like the FTC do and most of your recourse if you don’t like it is to file lawsuits that are decided by unelected judges that have lifetime appointments.
Not to mention that even those appointments are made by the Senate where the flyover states in “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” have power far more than their populations would call for thanks to them having two seats in the Senate just like the more populous states. Those are both the last people I want to give more power to.
Yes I’m well aware that the other side is just as bad.
If someone wants to spread bullshit and hate, let them do it on their own dime, or find someone wanting to do spread it.
They are not forced to do anything. They can always NOT advertise.
What I propose is not forcing them to subsidise anything, it is about taking away from them the power to dictate terms to platforms.
Moreover, the "bullshit and hate" is your strawman.
Traditionally, and I'm not some Gen Z to not remember this, it has been the right that was pushing advertisers and platforms to assist in censoring tv shows, music videos, records, etc with non-approved messages (pro-gay, anti-religion, pro-choice, etc).
That the tables have turned for a while doesn't mean the tables will always be this way (we're already 4 years into Trump for one), and I don't even believe the tables have turned as in "it's just bullshit and hateful stuff that's demonetized". I think that all kinds of good content is demonetized all the time, both left and right wing.
Any cause you personally might like can easily be labeled "bullshit" and or "hateful".
I think if you want to separate YouTube into separate stacks (eg fundamental infrastructure for hosting videos & a publisher / curator of those videos) you could imagine the infra part not being picky about what is uploaded (as long as it is legal) but the publisher part de listing videos except to be shared by link
Do you take issue with that?
They only pull ads because they can. If all platforms are banned from allowing removal of ads on specific videos, then those advertisers will have the option to (a) advertise, or (b) not advertise.
Will the opt-out of YouTube (and every major platform) altogether?
In fact, the public will also understand it's not up to the advertisers and the story will end there. The people can then try to boycot YouTube itself for having a specific video, but that wont go very far either, especially if it doesn't touch the advertising money.
It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
For one, I don't want anybody "making censorship decisions". We're not that far from the time the majority would like pro-integration/black, gay friendly, or atheist e.g content censored.
Second, they don't vote with their wallet on the actual content. They could always vote by not watching the video they don't like, and if enough people did that, the video would naturally not have advertising revenue.
But no, while they hate on the video, they don't target it, but target the company making some totally irrelevant to it advertised product, using their complain to negatively affect the video creators.
Third, and more important, this is not actual voting, nobody counts and there are no official rules and limits. A 20% or even 10% of customers can make the companys, and throu that, the content creators' life miserable (cut ad revenue, deplatform, censor, lose display space, etc), even if a bigger majority has no problem or even likes it. In fact, you don't even need that (10-20%), just enough determined hardcore complainers creating a fuzz, even if they're like 1% of customers, many companies just don't care to suffer them, and cave in.
Fourth, advertising companies also take pressure from their customers, the advertised companies, not just the public. Even more pressure there. So companies can also have leverage to stop them giving ads to content they don't like (whistleblowers, critical videos, etc).
>This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
Since the problem is advertisers having too much power by being able to choose the videos they advertise in, of course more regulation disallowing that will fix it!
If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube
I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Now advertisers are effectively still making the same decisions that they were, YouTube is still the preferred advertising backend, and nothing changed except that you made it harder for smaller sites like Vimeo to attract advertisers
Your regulation idea is reckless because you haven't thought it through
Not if laws lessen it. Which is my whole point.
>If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube. I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
It's only obvious within a certain puritan culture. In Europe nobody would bat an eye if an advertiser for a, say, fast food store, advertised in pornhub. People wouldn't want to take them down.
>One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Adults are not kids - they don't need or should require special segmentation from different content (aside from their chosing what they like to view/read).
So we'd just needs a kids and an adults YouTube.
Plus making advertising on the adults YouTube wholesale: you buy impressions/views/clicks/etc - and that's it. You don't get a say which video they appear on.
In fact, the "break up big tech" groups might laud such a thing
There is no way of framing your regulation so that it does something useful. Instead it will only ever be a burden on smaller distributers and hurt their chances of advertising (because in order to find advertisers, those advertisers will either have to not care about the content or be convinced that the content is pg -- an incredibly onerous technical burden)
This idea that the regulation wouldn't have consequences you don't like because you don't like them is a fantasy
None of your ideas make any sense here
Actually it can. That's the whole point, legislation can do anything, In the US case it can even change the constitution with a new amendment...
Also, if they do curate they need to have the same implications as any other publisher which they don't.
YouTube does not have a monopoly on video streaming. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying for the bandwidth and streaming anything they want by renting computer hardware and bandwidth from a colo.
Heck, I can set up a bandwidth adaptive video stream and put it behind a CDN.
They're already that. Youtwitgrambook's front-page and suggestion algorithms are forms of curation, specifically designed to maximize some form of engagement metric.
Their respective content policies are really just an attempt to correct the failings of algorithmic curation.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
The opportunity to be a neutral carrier is sacrificed by any platform that deploys a recommendation engine. Recommending content is a form of curation, which makes them a publisher, conceptually. It does not matter if the content curation is done by hand or by an algorithm that was built by hand.
According to this guy's Wikipedia page, he has claimed many times to be a professor of oncology at Imperial College: but he is not, and Imperial College has sought legal options to stop him from making this claim.
The page is full of other fairly astonishing stuff, not the least of which is apparent fraud connected with the Lockerbie Bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
I get the feeling that there's more to this story than this article suggests.
"Sikora told The Guardian that he did not know he would be used in the ad campaign, and that he agreed with Obama about the American health care system. In the attack ad, Sikora was referred to as professor of oncology at Imperial College. This led Imperial to seek legal advice to stop Sikora from claiming to be a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial; a claim that he was understood to have made repeatedly over the previous five years."
.
Here is The Guardian source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/may/22/karol-sikora...
"Although the US advert did not state a link to Imperial, at the end of piece written by Sikora on the day it was first aired, 12 May, for UnionLeader.com, he was described as professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College school of medicine, London.
...
"I'm very careful not to involve either my NHS contract with Hammersmith or Imperial in anything that's political," he said. "I'm a consultant at Hammersmith hospital, nobody would dispute that. It's true I can't call myself professor of cancer medicine at Imperial, but I can at Buckingham. The trouble is when I get quoted somewhere, they just use the old stuff."
However, on 29 January, Sikora gave evidence to the Commons health select committee. Introducing himself, he said: "I am Karol Sikora, professor of oncology at Imperial College for 22 years.""
.
I believe it is possible the advertisement made this association without his consent; however I agree it is problematic if he represented to the Commons health select committee that he is a professor at Imperial. Personally, I don't find this damning evidence enough to eradicate his credibility.
Lets not resolve to flame wars using factually false info which nobody ever said.
The problem is that there is no counterargument to an argument made in bad faith.
> He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
Here's the Office for National Statistics household survey results. This is only people living in households. (It doesn't include hospital patients, or people living in care or nursing homes).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
> Our latest estimates indicate that at any given time during the two weeks from 4 May to 17 May 2020, an average of 137,000 people in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19) (95% confidence interval: 85,000 to 208,000). This equates to 0.25% (95% confidence interval: 0.16% to 0.38%) of the population in England. This estimate is based on tests performed on 14,599 people in 7,054 households.
Frustratingly they haven't said yet how many people in total they think have ever had covid-19, but it's not going to be anywhere near 15million people in the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
He can be his own distributor that’s the power of the internet.
Yes, I fully agree with you that they have the right to remove whatever content they want. And I absolutely don't want that right to be taken away from them. However, I disagree with how they are currently utilizing that power, even though they have full rights to do so.
It's kind of similar to how I support the 2nd amendment rights and don't want them to be taken away from people (including open carry). But I disagree with how certain people use it during protests by open-carrying at the airports or in front of the city council building.
The government would probably go out of it’s way to make sure “Focus on the Family” content would be allowed but not “Black Lives Matter” just like they shut down the government in Michigan but the same conservatives passed laws for stricter gun control when minorities started exercising their 2nd amendment rights (the Mulliford Act).
But it doesn't mean that I cannot be upset at youtube for exercising their rights in ways that I disagree with. Mind you, I am not calling for a legal action against them or to change laws pertaining to those rights. I am just expressing that they shouldn't be exercising their rights in such a way, but they should still have the legal right to do so. Mostly because I believe that the unintended consequences of regulating that will be much worse (same with gun control).
That wasn't the question. The question was should they be banned?
I'd say no.
Passive voice makes the situation seem more universal and nefarious than it actually is.
"Do you think that such people should be banned from sleeping in houses"? No, but I think I should be allowed to decide who sleeps in my house.
However I do think there are "flag mobs" which increasingly flag posts they don't agree with.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I suppose it might have been a combination of users who are fatigued by this general topic having been repeated so frequently in recent weeks, and users who agree with the decision to take down the interview and don't think HN should have a thread about it. As I said, though—those are just guesses.
In the meantime, someone else reposted it and it was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258432. But since this post was first, I've turned off the flags on it and merged those comments hither.
2. Even if we generously interpret this as meaning that the virus would be less infectious in warmer weather, the only evidence we had pointed to this as only a possibility, rather than something we could predict.
3. As summer has begun in the Northern hemisphere, we still don't have any good evidence that the virus is less infectious in warmer weather--certainly not in the Southern US where the disease continues to spread unchecked.
Neil Ferguson's model was not flawed (at least, not in a significant way that would invalidate its conclusions)
Also Neil's other predictions have been completely wrong on the Swine Flu and Bird flu. Why this "expert in his field" is still listened to is a mystery to me.
Now compare number of deaths with countries that reacted quickly, for example: South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and others.
[1] https://covidgraph.com/
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
https://nypost.com/author/michael-goodwin/
"Susan Rice's email exposes Team Obama's 'by the book' treachery"
"Shameful media still slamming Donald Trump during coronavirus crisis"
"Trump passes coronavirus test with flying colors"
"Deep State snakes slither back after FBI, CIA swamp draining"
yeah, definitely not a right leaning columnist.
You don't think the tens of thousands of deaths in Italy, Spain, France, and the US had already caused that panic by the time his model was released?
Why do you say that? The reputation of the Imperial College team seems to have become a lightning rod for disgruntled right-wingers but the team is one of the world's most respected.
Imperial is one of the world's top universities. That's probably why Sikora falsely claimed on multiple occasions to be employed there.
There's nothing in the Imperial report that caused the UK government to change course that has been shown to be false. The prediction from the report was that the UK would suffer 20,000 deaths from the virus if extensive distancing measures were employed. The current total is 36,000 confirmed, so if anything the report was too optimistic.
1. Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field. Sikora is also a fellow of The Princes Foundation For Integrated Health and a professional member of the generically-named College Of Medicine. Both of these organizations are lobbyists which promote alternative medicine.
2. Censorship: rather than allow conversation where real scientists can respond to Sikora's nonsense with facts, YouTube decided to push his followers into their own echo chambers where pieces like this which represents him as a martyr go unchallenged.
Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
Which is why it's important that we present the truth right next to it, so people don't have to look elsewhere.
> The information is dangerous, it should not be available.
Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
This still assumes that people will be willing to watch it.
> Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation. Now nobody browsing YouTube will happen upon this video by chance and start believing something that is false and dangerous. Of course, those who are already embedded in these communities will still be able to access the information elsewhere. It is not a perfect solution, I don't think there is a perfect solution, but it does reduce the impact.
Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
If kicking Sakora off YouTube causes his followers to become angry and go share his personal site through a bunch of different channels, that could easily outpace the impact of a YouTube channel where refutations are included.
If someone censored your views, what would you do? Why do you think people who disagree with you won't do all the same things?
Meanwhile, Fox News is the most popular news network in America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
I explained in the comment you replied to. You seem to be deliberately ignoring that people who are not predisposed to the viewpoint could also be exposed. I do not believe that censoring on YouTube will prevent anyone who already believes this stuff from finding the content elsewhere, and I already admitted as such.
If two groups of people (those who actively seek the misinformation, and those who encounter it by chance) could access the misinformation, it stands to reason that preventing one of those groups from accessing the misinformation results in a lower overall spread of misinformation, even if the other group is unaffected.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/national-directive-on-w...
Note the difference between "we can't condone masks because there is limited evidence that they are helpful" and "we recommend against masks because they are harmful" and "the lockdown is a government consipracy to subjugate us".
You can listen to Theresa Tam's (Canada's version of Dr. Fauci) exact words here: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/watch/tam-on-why-canadians-d...
I think any reasonable person who defers to authority would have listened to this and come to the conclusion that there is no reason to wear a mask if they're asymptomatic and had no connection to a sick individual. They could even reasonably conclude that it would be dangerous as they would be touching their face and virus particles would accumulate on the outside of the mask.
And they would have been wrong.
- Prioritizing supply to healthcare workers is of the utmost priority
- Current evidence supports wearing a mask if you're sick to prevent spreading droplets, also wearing a mask if you're in close contact with a symptomatic person
- Masks can provide a false sense of security.
Her final statement is "if people try to use these measures, they have to be really, really careful and wash their hands, absolutely. That's the key. So we're also worried about the potential negative impacts."
All of that is sound advice, and it is dangerous to think that a mask will protect you without any other precautions. But it isn't a statement that one should not wear a mask, fullstop. It's a statement that one should still follow other cautions. IOW, a mask isn't a magical solution.
It was a statement that masks are a placebo for the general public and actually require one to take extra precautions so that they don't make things worse.
It couldn't have been more discouraging towards people on the fence about wearing a mask in late March.
Since then, the understanding about asymptomatic carriers has changed. And in response, the government updated it's suggestion.
If so, why not steer people toward that process, especially when the harm of wearing a mask is low, while the harm oh reopening the economy due to a lack of understanding the covid dangers is much greater?
Have you seen different statements?
Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth. The US and Canadian recommendations against medical masks for the general public were part of a strategy based on reserving medical masks. So yes, you should have followed the recommendations of health officials and not worn a medical mask, because healthcare workers needed them.
As far as I know, neither the US nor Canada has ever taken a stance against non-medical masks. They haven't taken a stance for medical masks either, but this was likely due to concerns that people would be confused about medical versus non-medical masks. Your own post is an example of this being a very legitimate concern: you have completely failed to differentiate between medical and non-medical masks.
If you look at what experts have been saying who aren't part of governments, the messaging has been fairly consistent: masks prevent illness at varying rates, and we need to prioritize healthcare workers when allocating the most effective masks.
So when you say, "Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask?" I have to say, no, it would have been impossible to do that, because deferring to expert opinions and waiting until yesterday to start wearing a mask are mutually exclusive actions.
So there's a narrative that may or may not have my best interest at heart but demands my compliance for some nebulous greater good?
No.
If sacrifice is required on the part of collective, you honour them by allowing them to engage with informed consent. If you don't, you have no credibility the next time some ambiguity arises where collective sacrifice is needed to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
Experts discover they are wrong and change their views based on evidence, not based on what other experts or non-experts say.
Non-experts, like the majority of HN users, really can only go off the word of experts at some point, unless we decide to spend the time studying a field to become experts.
And to be clear, I'm not saying "experts" only meaning people who got a degree in a field. A degree is only the most obvious way to show expertise in a field. But it's quite possible to study a field for a long time without getting a degree. But it's not at all apparent that Sakora has done that--in fact, all evidence I see seems to be trying to gloss over his lack of expertise.
I wish this was true. I hope it was true. But I'm losing faith. People have a hard time believing truth if it goes against what they want to believe if the lies can be framed in any plausible way at all. This applies to everything from cults to businesses to abusive spouses to, of course, politics.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky and tired of playing the long game of truth. Part of the problem is the liars are sometimes highly motivated to continue with the lies, and it takes a greater army of equally motivated truth "warriors" to come behind them and put out the fires. It's just so damn easy to spread bullshit.
The other issue is that smart people are way outnumbered- and the others now have a helluva voice.
Sound familiar?
Infectious disease is a distinct specialty in medicine.
The doctor in question is not licensed for infectious disease.
You should never trust a doctor speaking outside of his expertise.
However most of the celebrity doctors do that every single day which is an insult to the entire medical profession.
In general we shouldn't blindly trust any single doctor about an important or risky topic, even within their own specialty. Always get a second or even third opinion if practical. (I agree that most celebrity doctors are little more than quacks.)
> and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel.
If nobody knows what's true with corona, then shouldn't claim to know what's true with corona, which is what Sakora is doing.
The Wikipedia article looks very unbalanced to me, but there is definitely some smoke there too.
How do I know what anyone says is true? Why should I trust what you're saying about Sikora?
I should be able to watch a video on youtube and decide for myself because censorship is inimical to free thought.
You should take a moment to consider that most of the examples throughout history of censorship were carried out by decidedly bad people. Truth can stand on its own!
The only opinions that matter are infectious disease and respiratory doctors.
A clear example is an Italian virologist that called the hypothesis of thrombosis in the alveoli that came out from autopsies and the suggestion of using heparin in treatment protocols "a colossal idiocy".
Then other data, including the recent Lancet paper and the Hamburg study came out.
The mere fact one is an expert does not make him or her always right. So weigh opinions more, but don't trust them blindly.
Creating a culture where people are willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of trying to silence anyone they disagree with is the hard part.
"A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots" - not sure who actually said this
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
I agree with everything you wrote, except the above. He is a doctor, speaking on health issues, so he isn't speaking from outside the field of medicine. And I'd challenge that a specialist within the field of medicine can only offer valuable information or insight with their own speciality. Specialists on all fields are prone to group think, so people with related training from the outside should be welcomed to challenge the orthodoxy.
The the fact is, charlatans are far more common than visionary outsiders.
And in Sikora's case, there are a lot of red flags indicating he's a charlatan and not a visionary outsider. The virus is "getting tired"? Really?
Then why is Bill Gates the de facto lead on curing covid?
It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
>It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
The power to decide who is or isn't an expert, as well as the ability to restrict speech based on those decisions, is a pretty dangerous and scary path that I am vehemently opposed to taking.
> Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
Because there's a big difference between presenting yourself as an expert and saying things that disagree with experts, and repeating what experts say.
If Bill Gates starts spouting off stuff without evidence that disagrees with what all the experts are saying, he'll absolutely be disqualified according to my reasoning.
> And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
Well, everyone has to determine that for themselves, based on what limited ability they have.
It seems like you think I'm one of the pro-censorship people here, but I assure you I'm not, please follow the comment chain up to where I started it and read my comment there. On the contrary, I believe Sikora's video should have been left on YouTube, and responded to by experts.
I haven't actually seen evidence that this is effective in the modern social media era.
Trump is president, the American Nazi party is growing, the most popular news network in America is Fox News, the anti-vax movement is growing; and the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time. If you want evidence, where's yours?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
Deplatforming leaves people with a smaller audience. Only a fraction of the audience follows a banned person to another platform. Voat is nothing compared to Reddit.
> Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Can you provide us with an image of your degree and job experience to prove you have the expertise to tell us "he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed."? Or at least admit you're being hypocritical.
I have family members affected by this and it looks like it is a targeted misinformation attack. It starts with Facebook posts, which then often direct you to youtube channels which are condition people into crazier and crazier theories.
It is so weird, because many of these theories even contradict themselves, yet people still believe them.
The guy in article is also an oncologist and he talks about subject that is not his expertise. It's like asking a front end engineer how to best design the a new data center.
This is especially dangerous since we are currently in middle of pandemic and many people will trust his advice.
At some ineffable point, a "private platform" of sufficient scope becomes a Commons, resembling a social substrate more than a mere voluntary exchange between individuals. A historical equivalent would be "company towns", with goods only available from company stores, exchanged in company scrip, etc. [0]
Obviously, from a purely legal perspective, you are 100% correct. Google is under no obligation to uphold a principle of free speech, non-favoritism, etc., and it would take significant new legislation or regulation to change that.
Nonetheless, in terms of the role that is being played in society and culture, tech giants in general, and Google/Facebook in particular, are wielding disproportionate (and arguably ideologically biased) influence, bordering on an attempt to control narratives and ideas. It's perfectly legitimate to find this trend concerning without supporting the particular ideas being suppressed (I think Plandemic/InfoWars/etc, are utter nonsense).
I believe such actions tend to be counter-productive: (a) isolating and ostracizing those who are falling for bad ideas only reinforces their beliefs and persecution complex, while obstructing the path back to better ideas; and (b) every once in a while a seemingly-crazy idea turns out to be true (it's instructive the extent to which it was a fight uphill for germ theory to be accepted by the experts of the day [1]).
There simply isn't a magic wand that sifts good ideas from bad, a priori; and if the power to make that decision is centralized, even with the best of intentions, whoever wields it will inevitably make mistakes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease#John_Sn...
> Totalitarianism is a political system or a form of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
Also, free speech is not absolute.
Reasonable people can disagree how rights are balanced against the need for public safety. It helps not to throw around words unfairly.
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.
Should youtube overstep its bounds, that makes it easier for competitors to enter the video streaming market. It seems like libertarian leaning people forget half of their philosophy on this issue.
Because they are "drunk" on theory. To grind out a new video hosting platform is a lot of work.
Is there a way to easily have popular interviews online outside of YouTube?
This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product and we should not encourage the narrative that this product is the zenith of knowledge even though there are knowledgeable people who put content on YouTube.
There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion.
Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moderator problem. YT will either moderate or die.
The reason YT could get so popular is because they neither have to moderate, nor fact check, but still get the benefits of being informational. This is true for ALL social media, unfortunately. How would one go about moderating the thousands of hours of content produced every hour in TikTok? Etc.
What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.
Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.
That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.
I disagree that this is the ultimate question or that this is in any way a problem that merits a changing of the laws (as current law explicitly permits this). Websites aren't common carriers, and I don't see a compelling reason to force websites to host content that they disagree with for any reason. I don't see any connection between the idea between popularity and the loss of editorial control of your own website.
> They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
Moderation is part of the product. I would argue that the idea that we can effectively constrict companies into a specific type of moderation behavior is what's untenable because it strikes at the heart of the creative freedom to build a website and online community with respect to your own ideals.
If you don't want to be accountable for what people say, that's fine - but maybe then like a traditional common carrier you shouldn't get to control what people say.
The asymmetry of "I control everything you can say but am accountable for none of it" is wrong, in my eyes.
This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting, which today comprises a large proportion of all information transfer between humans. Companies like Facebook and YouTube are central to social discourse, at least in the west. When a medium of communication is that ubiquitous, the fact that it is owned by a private company is not an excuse to throw up one's hands and say "Well, I guess they own it - they can censor what they want".
The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are other video sites out there. Just because youtube is popular doesn't prevent people from hosting content on other platforms.
We could see it the same way we see banks. Banks are private entities but tightly regulated and their activity is overseen by their operating country.
Applying a given set of restrictions and requiremnts to services used by more than 50% of the population for instance could be a thing.
In the US I know people would call bloody murder, but other countries could do with sensible rules of that kind.
It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.
It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.
Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...
Far from it. You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part. A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
I'm not sure about this. Besides removing obvious hate speech, which sort of content curation do you mean? I thought its success was due to everyone being able to upload and share video clips. I don't think curation was an important feature.
Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but Youtube is a Google company now, and their entire business model is based on (mostly) algorithmic curation. The business model of every content creator depends upon catering to the preferences of that algorithm, and their success at doing so determines their value to advertisers. Entire genres of content have come into being and have been destroyed overnight because of the algorithm.
Youtube's success mostly comes from driving discovery of new content through recommended channels and videos.
I'm not sure the discovery/recommendation algorithm is the same as curation. It seems to me these are related but distinct fields.
Maybe not "nefarious" exactly. But YouTube does have a virtual monopoly. And that's arguably illegal in the US. Or at least, it exposes them to additional government oversight.
I think it does. Others disagree. Sometimes it's an interesting discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
(I don't mean to suggest that this provides some kind of obvious solution to Internet content moderation disputes.)
If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably established on Youtube).
Having an audience and Youtube not taking it away, is not the same thing as Youtube intentionally helping you build your audience.
You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.
"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."
Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!
Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.
It's a nice little proxy arrangement.
Vimeo
Name the next five that are discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day.
- It's not cheap - It's not easy
However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.
Have fun with that egress bill when your video goes viral.
No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.
I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.
As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.
If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.
I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.
This is very obviously false based on countless examples, but you're baking in the assertion that exposure to the YouTube audience is a necessary criteria to be considered a video platform, yet you haven't justified that belief. YouTube's ubiquity is an accolade afforded to it by the public on a completely voluntarily basis that can be effortlessly revoked at any time. The reason it is not revoked is because it costs users nothing to use YouTube and for the overwhelming majority of its users YouTube is just a small and generally unimportant slice of their day akin to watching netflix or playing video games.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
Why? I don't see the connection between the quantity of eyeballs freely gazing and the need for the owner to abdicate their editorial prerogatives. What is your justification for this? If the eyeballs have a problem with how those prerogatives are expressed they can look away to another website and they actually do that quite frequently.
This is textbook definition of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Google is either becoming the Ministry of Truth, or by its policy, allowing governments to be the Ministers of Truth, with no room of any dissent.
This should be greatly troubling.
Remember this is the same company that controls Chrome. It's all fun and games right up until people start discovering their Chromebooks and Androids are blocking web sites on the grounds of "misinformation"
There is a difference between morality and legality. It might be legal for ATT to cut your Internet because they don't like you but it will be immoral for sure.
What is your evidence for this? There are so many other sources of influence in this world that I find this idea completely at odds with reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...
Considering the content of YouTube's top channels I think the evidence isn't in favor of that suggestion that YouTube has a noteworthy impact on "the population's aggregate belief"
..walks outside to car ..sees local grocery store owner has flattened his tire
Meanwhile, YouTube does little moderation of zany philosophical, conspiratorial, or otherwise disruptive, unconventional content. The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I don't agree with censorship, but your analogy is off base.
I think the figures running the Inquisition and the counter-reformation at the time of Galileo might have disagreed. Remember the 30 Years War was also ongoing from 1618-1648 during the whole time, a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict that engulfed all of Europe and resulted in 8 million deaths.
Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
BTW, I strongly disagree with the this video, but really not sure if YouTube removing it is the right way to do this or will be effective in suppressing virus truthers.
> Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
Exactly my point. You can criticize the powers and be and the social order today with impunity on YouTube.
Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands before they eat."
(...)
Jesus called the crowd to Him and said, "Listen and understand. A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it. (...) For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him."
(Matthew 15:1-2, 10-11, 19-20)
Given that, I think this is gross overreach by YT in establishing narrative. What happens if their management becomes a bunch of anti-vaxxers, do they get to set the tone?
Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
QAnon is an FBI-registered domestic terror organization: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-...
They've been connected to multiple attempted acts of violence. They aren't just talk.
The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.
Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.
Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...
Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops.
You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
Exactly.
In most countries, people are willingly staying mostly at home. More, they continue to restrain from shopping and eating out after the lockdown ended.
I don't think this is the case for Germany, Switzerland, or Denmark either.
What countries do you have in mind where lock downs ended and most people are staying at home?
If you believe the disease is rampant in Sweden, it’ll be much higher now. If it’s not, then the hard lockdowns elsewhere were superfluous.
"The disease-induced herd immunity level is 43% ... when immunity is induced by disease spreading, the proportion infected in groups with high contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.03085
We obviously need to deal with both problems concurrently. There are a lot of actions that can be taken which can help one which doesn’t come at the expense of the other, so it’s not purely a either-or decision.
It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to either effect. The death toll is an immediate concern, but so is a functioning food supply chain, and indeed a healthy economy is critically important to everyone.
No having lived through an economic collapse or a hyper inflation event, for example, it may be hard to appreciate how difficult (and deadly) that situation can be.
From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2]. Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.
Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].
Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/unemployment-today-vs-the-gr...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-economic-cost-and-hum...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MGbyLUCw5k
[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-52747659
Also, the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim.
Yes, I think I understand what you're saying.
My point is the harm to the economy directly translates to lives lost too. Bad economy leads to surge in violent crime, opiods addictions, gang violence, lost access to health care...
"... the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim."
It wasn't the only cause, sure. But it was a huge one, afaik. History isn't a hard science, of course, and I'm not a historian (not even an amateur historian) but this quote from Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly controversial:
"The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party... Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.
Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.
"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]
[A pedestrian street in Stockholm on Apr. 1](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/04/01/TELE...)
[A market in Malmo during the pandemic (no exact date)](http://archive.is/2siwt/5d1b19d61fd21d052c2cc190f13f722c0bf8...)
[Pubs, eating out](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/newsbeat-52618788/coronavirus-ho...)
It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.
Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:
"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."
So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4...
Isn't QAnon directly promoted by some people directly related to the president of the state?
Don Jr. wears it:
https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/716574473/the-official-q-...
The President himself reused their hashtag:
https://www.businessinsider.de/international/trump-retweeted...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#FBI_domestic_terrorism_a...
It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain.
By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
Yes exactly.
> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.
In what context?
> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.
From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.
But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.
You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?
WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.
Any "editorial algorithm", by the standards you have put forth, can be abused.
What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.
I don't think the concern with rolling back platform immunity is government restrictions on free speech, exactly. In the US, the first amendment provides the same protections it always has. Instead, concerns include that the risk of liability will hamper innovation, that only companies with a lot of resources will be able to take the risk, and that companies will overreact with their own proactive censorship to stay well clear of areas with potential liability.
We've seen the latter with FOSTA/SESTA weakening platform immunity, which is arguably what its creators intended, but I suspect not what everyone in congress who voted for it expected.
To word it differently: "Platforms that recommend/aggregate speech in government sanctioned ways are protected from liability, while those that do not are not". That's, while not open and shut perhaps, certainly spooky.
Tomorrow at 10 AM, join me on the steps of the capitol. Bring your gun and a sign that says "we will shoot you unless you vote no on bill 123.".
The action described is a crime, soliciting others to participate in it is a crime, and my deliberate choice to show it to a larger audience is likely enough to subject me to accomplice liability that virtually any criminal lawyer would recommend against it. If violence actually occurred, there would be an ever lower bar for the victims to clear to sue me. Planning crimes is unambiguously not protected speech.
The proposal described would subject any sufficiently editorial algorithm to similar liability.
That's actually a great comparison. I wonder if it will ever gain traction.
Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing.
You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire.
Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt.
Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts.
Censorship is not the solution.
"Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, you give love <sic:censorship> a bad name"
- Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes
- Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content
Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4zTt8oLD44
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoult-hy...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroq...
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v...
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far ...
I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.
If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.
Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
....... Hillary
..... Chuck
Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.
Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.
People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.
It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23112787
What are the other options? Is there any good_or_not(url) API youtube service can call? They are forced to moderate content.
I don't understand mechanism on why something like this gets censored. I think it is obvious that this sort of "overcensoring" will come back on youtube in a negative way; and possibly even hurt the case for lockdowns and careful reopening.
YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.
You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.
In more modern times, suggesting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was misrepresented would be "disinformation". Suggesting that we didn't need to invade Iraq to prevent another 9/11 would be "disinformation". Sometimes yesterday's "harmful disinformation" is simply today's "information".
I think the ethical question you presented is multifaceted. On another axis, do the people who control the most prolific video platform also have a moral responsibility to ensure a free society has the tools to ask difficult questions?
Does YouTube remove flat earth idiots?
Disclaimer: Work at Google, thoughts are my own.
The beauty (theoretically) of platforms like YouTube is that we can watch what we like and skip what we don't without harming any other user.
And as for qualifications, if an oncologist isn't qualified to have an opinion on COVID-19, YouTube sure as hell isn't.
I have my problems with YouTube, but this isn't censorship, and it isn't a conspiracy to silence anyone. It's an effort to be responsible to public health and safety. The hysteria I see here is completely unwarranted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1. https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coro...
No, YouTube still is determining credibility. YouTube is still saying, "this video is misinformation and we are removing it." The fact that it's treating the WHO information as the baseline does not change the fact that YouTube is deciding credibility, and removing videos that do not meet it's criteria for credibility.
February onwards, WHO did a full 180. But everyone who got censored before then was the victim.
Same thing about effectiveness of wearing masks.
So anyone pointing out the obvious that "China cannot have lesser deaths than Canada" is considered a "misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorists" because they "contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic".
How people don't see the clear danger of such censorship is beyond me. WHO also says China has been transparent.
The WHO said there had been no reports of it spreading human to human. And that was true, there hadn’t.
The reason your favourite conspiracy sources are taken offline is because they lie - they make you, an otherwise intelligent person, believe something that wasn’t true.
A favoured argument by one section of the internet is that “it doesn’t spread from Children to Adults”. An extraordinary claim.
They interpret the statement “there have been limited cases of it spreading from children” and treat that absense of evidence as an evidence of absence.
Note that in January, in a QA dated 9th, they did say
“Yes, some coronaviruses can be transmitted from person to person, usually after close contact with an infected patient, for example, in a household workplace, or health care centre.”
I.e coronaviruses in general spread, we haven’t seen this one spread yet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200129195709/https://www.who.i...
Two reasonable people can agree on the underlying facts but disagree on policy.
Additionally, this is absolutely censorship and an effort to silence people. It is not an illegal act of censorship. similarly, you can agree that it is legal, but still not like the censorship.
Also, the videos that should be deleted before any others are the videos about the claim that it's better to be too afraid than too little, for instance. If people deliberately increase their fear, they become irrational like Francis E. Dec, who believed in the "Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God". The difference is that Dec had no doubts, and didn't choose to ignore doubts and to deliberately be afraid the most.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My post is what I think a necessary reminder in a topic that I honestly don't think is very polarizing. It just needs to be repeated, over, and over again. The same way it gets taught to kids at school so they teach it to their kids, and so on.
Because it is important.
Think about this: if something is taught to kids at school, how can you justify objecting to it on HN (I mean unless it is a topic that is obviously incorrectly taught, which I suppose this is not one of them)?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Multiply that 10x when the repetition is indignant or inflammatory.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I doubt that you would want other commenters to drill you like a schoolchild, but even if I'm wrong about that, please don't do it to others on this site. We're trying for entirely the opposite sort of discussion. Basically, if it's predictable, it is off topic here.
YouTube is not a monopoly. There are other websites where you can post or watch video. Not as many people choose to use them, but you're not entitled to their attention anyway.