I will pay anyone here thousands of dollars to inject merely the so-called "inactive" ingredients into themselves every week for a year... I doubt you'll last that long though.
One have to admit this is a major anti-vax move being performed by USA and EU.
If the government get to discriminate which vaccines are good and which are not, why their citizens won't do the same, even if they leave the 'good' bucket empty?
When I travelled to South America I had to do "the" vaccine shot (yellow fever I believe), but nobody would inquire me "which one" and whether it is on some white list.
The Sputnik V vaccine might be good. But there’s a fair bit of evidence that it’s mass manufacture has some problems. Which makes it difficult to say with certainty that what’s injected into peoples arms, is effective as what was tested during clinical trials.
I only recently learned that this was a myth. The core of S230 is:
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
As long as YouTube isn't creating the content they are protected.
YouYube is a publisher, but it's not a publication. A newspaper hires employees that are paid by the company to produce a publication, YouTube is a platform that allows individuals to publish arbitrary video content, there is a very obvious difference between the two, playing on "publisher" semantics to imply that they should be held liable for uploads by random people makes no sense.
If you selectively censor views you're taking on an editorial function. With that comes the responsibilities of being a publisher. Or that's how it ought to be.
I get that this is what you think would be ideal, but this isn't true. Having a content policy is not "editorializing". Using that logic Facebook is "editorializing" by not allowing nude photos on the site. This isn't what editorializing means, this is just abuse of semantics to shoe-horn the idea that YouTube should be held legally responsible for content produced by independent 3rd parties.
It's a continuum though. Platforms and service providers can and do limit who can use their infrastructure, or how it is used. It's not as black and white as people like to make it.
§230 says that YouTube is not liable for any content that users post to its site, regardless of how much moderation of that content YouTube does or doesn't do.
Everything after the comma in that sentence is actually the entire point of why §230 was passed; prior case law held that YouTube would be liable for all content if it did the barest amount of moderation.
Not in the USA. [0] The Supreme Court, in Pruneyard v Robbins, expressly rejected the claim "that a private property owner has a First Amendment right not to be forced by the State to use his property as a forum for the speech of others." Turner v. FCC and Rumsfeld v. FAIR rejected similar claims.
Pruneyard is inapposite here. The facts in Pruneyard turn on two crucial elements:
* The California state constitution granted a broader right than the US constitution, and the speech in question was required to be permitted under California, but not US, rules.
* The speech in question was admitted by both parties to not reflect upon the shopping center's views, nor was the speech disruptive to its activities. Thus, freedom of association isn't going to kick in.
That last part in particular is key. For social media platforms, it is DEFINITELY the case that the content they host is imputed onto their own views. Alternative sites like Parler or Gab are invariably referred to with a note that they host predominantly far-right content--these sites are known almost entirely by what they carry, not the principles the sites claim to espouse. Even for larger sites like YouTube or Facebook, the ability to find certain kinds of negative content on these sites periodically blows up into major media furors.
A more appropriate precedent is Miami Herald v Tornillo, which held that a Florida state law requiring newspapers to publish candidate replies to articles was unconstitutional.
Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want. Hell, they can even set up their own video site, and publish thousands, millions, tens of millions of videos championing their cause. Why does a private company has to feature every agenda, every viewpoint, even ones they deem to be extremely harmful to society? Just because they got big enought to be global? If I set up my own youtube-like website, and I only have one thousand visits a day, will anyone argue that I'm obliged to show stuff I don't want? Is anyone saying the same thing about Vimeo? Youtube doesn't have to show isis beheadings, why should it be forced to show unscientific propaganda? If there were a movement claiming the polio and smallpox vaccines destroyed our immune systems, and we should re-introduce these diseases to the public at large so we could develop our natural defenses, should Youtube be force to publish their videos?
I'm sorry, but what you're saying is not censorship.
I feel like this always gets brought up, as if the slippery slope is a natural inevitability. What if it isn’t? What if you can ban actively harmful content without that ban spreading?
You are right, we need to ban the actively harmful content. Let's start with the stuff you like and want to hear that is problematic. You like cooking content? Well cooking unapproved dishes is associated with obesity. Banned! You like hiking and being outdoors? Well, it disturbs animal habitat and ecosystems. Banned! You oppose and want to speak out about the mandatory microphones and cameras in every room of your house? Well, that clearly interferes with the greater good of catching people trying to commit suicide, avert domestic harm, make sure you are raising your child properly and in accordance with expert approved government requirements, and to make sure you are getting your mandatory amount of exercise of the required energy expenditure every day in order to not be a burden on society ……
But those are all obviously, patently absurd. You’re proving my point. The slippery slope argument immediately descends into hysteria and pretends like people aren’t capable of understanding context.
You are literally sliding down the slope where the government is mandating the injection of untested corporate concoctions that it gave the manufacturers blanket immunity from liability for and you have been under prison lockdown home confinement for essentially 18 months now to "flatten the curve" for 2 weeks.
You seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
The rather anemic response to the tyrannical state descending on all of us is hardly "hysteria". You think that after we "flatten the curve" for two weeks we are going back to normal … as all kinds of draconian and oppressive laws are being rammed through all legislatures at the same time?
You may think yourself as safe since you were an obedient little citizen to Government Inc., but they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
You're embarrassing yourself now and you've proving the point about utter hysteria.
> the government is mandating the injection of untested corporate concoctions
They've been tested. Thoroughly. The results of those tests are public. And what's with the "corporate" scare word, there? Am I suppose to want my vaccine to have been brewed up by my neighbor or my local mom and pop drug store?
> you have been under prison lockdown home confinement for essentially 18 months now
No I haven't. No-one has. The lockdown lasted longer than two weeks but it finished last summer. Since then I've been shopping, eating at restaurants (usually outdoors, but indoors is available) and seeing friends. My children are at school, many people are back in their offices.
> they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
I'm going to go ahead and quote yourself back to you: you seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
But yeah, yeah, I know. We're all idiot sheep, you're the only one with the 20:20 vision to see what the rest of us idiots don't. It couldn't possibly be that we're all informed and came to a different conclusion to you. Nope, not possible.
But no one is saying these contents should be banned. You can publish it, everywhere! Create a hundred sites and post it, feel free! Now, if I don't want it on my site, why can't I take it down?
You're saying that if I create a video site for videos of healthy dishes, that I should not be able to take down a video recipe for something that I think is very unhealthy.
London, circa 1830. Nobody is saying you have to work 70 hours weeks in a cotton factory. You can grow your own cotton, feel free to process it any way you want! As long as the attention market concentrates in the hands of a handful of megacorporations by virtue of economies of scale, the freedom you talk about is not very tangible.
I wish I didn't have to work 40 hours a week. Can I just go to some random plot of arable land that isn't cultivated and start farming? Can I just process it any way I want? US, circa 2021.
The problem is, who decides what actively harmful content is? For anyone in favor of this ban, imagine if Google had an anti-vaccine CEO, and was banning all pro-vaccine content for being "actively harmful" instead.
Then pro-vaccine people everywhere could start using google less and start talking about how Google has harmful/unscientific stances toward content, etc.
So what? Let them curate whatever they want. There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others. I can create a mailing list and send to everyone on it. Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
So, I presume you would be totally okay if Youtube one day decided they just wanted to deplatform anything such as "tax the rich" or "defund the police" or "no child left behind" or any talk about Mark Zuckerberg, just because they can?
What if one day FB is under investigation and FB decides it will only carry FB propaganda and not let any dissenting voices, would that be totally cool?
Yes, I'd be okay, and I would stop using them, as I have done with FB, and start looking elsewhere. Like I said before, I don't agree with Youtube taking anti-vaxx videos down, but I do think they, as a private company, should be allowed to. If they take enough content down, they'll end up losing users.
> Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
It certainly is censorship, but users opt in.
> There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others.
Its not just YouTube. Its their platform, and your hosting provider, and your DNS provider, and your payment processor, and your bank. Consider what happened to Parler.
Lets not cheer on the loss of a public good because we could theoretically replace it some day.
I've long said, Flickr's solution works pretty well. They have groups, you can form any group you want and set your own group rules. You can set filters and you can opt to view "adult" content or not (take me back to kittens").
It's all about opting-in.
You have certain taste, go find that group or found your own.
You don't like certain groups, don't become a member of such group.
You want to have your own private invite only group, go ahead, create your own invite only group.
Flickr never achieved the prominence of FB or IG, or flash in the pan like Tumblr, but I think they built it from the ground up to provide a decent service for everyone with a light touch. For illegal stuff, yeah, you get kicked out, that's legit. Need to escalate to site admins, that's possible too but only if the group admins are acting in bad faith.
If spam filtering didn't let recipients opt out, and permanently deleted emails instead of putting them in a spam folder, then it would be censorship too.
> What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?
Social Justice. Your very existence as part of society affects others, therefore anything that you say or think must conform to the standards of Social Justice the Platform has deemed necessary. If you don't like it, go found your own Platform.
Yep, that's definitely hypocrisy. If you think a law or court ruling should be repealed or overturned, you shouldn't be advocating for other things using it as precedent in the meantime.
How is this hypocrisy? The cake was about whether or not places should be able to restrict access based on protected classes (and in particular sexual orientation).
YouTube can take the videos down, I don't think many people are arguing against that. The issue is that it is a bad idea to. This is one of many rather urgent signals to people who don't agree with Google that they should be setting up or looking for alternatives, and rather urgently.
Oh, I agree that it is a bad idea to do it. I just don't think a private company not putting a video on their site is what censorship is. I wish Youtube would not take those videos down, as they're not illegal. Anti-vaxxers will diminish with better public education, more focused on critical thinking and science literacy, and not because there are no more videos about it on Youtube. The videos will always find their way to reach their audience's screens.
Your argument is that censorship is good in certain situations. That is true, especially in the beginning. The reason why censorship is a four letter word is scope creep. There are little reasons to believe that Youtube is somehow immune to scope creep, once the mechanisms and the precedent are set.
I'm not for Youtube taking the videos down, I just don't think a private company taking a video down from their site is censorship.
And my take is, if Youtube starts limiting content too much, it will end up losing viewership, which will migrate to competing sites/apps.
"Youtube censors antivax content" is a true statement. It is not state censorship, but censorship nonetheless. Good thing / bad thing, for Youtube / for society at large, short term / long term, we can argue that. But let's get our facts & terminology straight.
This is semantics. In this case HN is censoring opinions right now through its moderation. Every forum on the internet censors. Your spam filter blocks others speech from reaching you etc.
While HN would kindly steer us towards polite curious conversation, the range of topics themselves is wide open. I have yet to see a site-wide blanket ban on, for example, adblockers. It is a contentious topic in the industry, there are entrenched trillion dollar interests that would rather have adblockers dissapear, and yet we can have a hopefully polite and informative conversation about the relative merits of subtopics in this area.
You are not getting the point and that you have such a naive mentality towards it is disconcerting because the consequences of your mindset breaking through as it seems to be has dire consequences for everyone, you included. You think dissidents have the ability to "post their videos anywhere else they want" but in reality the system that YouTube is deeply entrenched in and even essentially plays a leading role in actively attacks and sabotages and undermines those very alternatives you claim people can post things to.
This is not at all about the freedom of YouTube, it is about suppression of dissent and really the surreptitious persecution of dissidents.
What is really going on here is no different than when any other tyrannical regime disappears people in the real world, or even when the internet cries out in pain when, e.g., China silences people online. You may think they are being sent off to post and live on the internet somewhere else, but when they leave your sight form the bubble you live in, they are only then even more persecuted and attacked on a constant basis where you aren't even paying attention and are none the wiser to what is really going on.
In the end, "i told you so" will be utterly useless and worthless when the trap snaps shut and they come after you too once they have snuffed out and silenced everyone else they don't like, because this tyrannical authoritarian mindset is never satisfied and will always actively seek out new "dissidents" to persecute and one day you will find yourself on the wrong side too. It's just a matter of time, not whether it will happen.
I'd say yes, this is why. I think that since the FAANG's are so successful that they replaced the public square with themselves, they should have to preserve the freedom of speech just like the old public square used to.
> Anti-vaccine activists, or any activists for that matter, are completely free to post their videos anywhere else they want.
Really? Youtube happens to be the only platform that is restricting content? Even if that were true, the reason this matters is Youtube is a virtual monopoly when it comes to online video. Forget the technicalities. Yes, it's privately owned. Yes, there are other site. Yes, users could set up their own competing website. But, in practice, which is all that matters, Youtube is the one place people go for videos.
There is nothing credible about anti-vax. Not a single thing.
Opinions of the uninformed are worthless. I have yet to speak with a single anti vaxxer who did research and not “research” on the subject (that is did clinical trials or even is able to read an abstract of one). I will repeat it again: if anyone ever finds an actual problem with a vaccine safety study I will personally drop everything and go help them get this information in front of the FDA, the CDC, and the media. Not a single person has taken me up on this offer yet.
So going forward (by your definition) anyone with any differing opinion needs to setup their own video sharing website and server infrastructure just to share their ideas.
What happens when something you care about is being censored, are you going to go through the effort of recreating YouTube just to share a video?
> I have yet to speak with a single anti vaxxer who did research and not “research” on the subject (that is did clinical trials or even is able to read an abstract of one).
> Malone received criticism for propagating COVID-19 misinformation, including making unsupported claims about the alleged toxicity of spike proteins generated by some COVID-19 vaccines;[6][10][22] using interviews on mass media to popularize self-medication with ivermectin;[23] and tweeting a study by others questioning vaccine safety that was later retracted.[6] He said LinkedIn suspended his account over what he claimed were posts he had made questioning the efficacy of some COVID-19 vaccines.[24] Malone has also claimed that the Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines could worsen COVID-19 infections.[25]
> With another researcher, Malone successfully proposed to the publishers of Frontiers in Pharmacology a special issue featuring early observational studies on existing medication used in the treatment of COVID-19, for which they recruited other guest editors, contributors, and reviewers. The journal rejected two of the papers selected: one on famotidine co-authored by Malone and another submitted by physician Pierre Kory on the use of ivermectin.[21] The publisher rejected the ivermectin paper due to what it claimed were “a series of strong, unsupported claims” which they determined did “not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution.”[21] Malone and most other guest editors resigned in protest in April 2021, and the special issue has been pulled from the journal's website.[21]
> Malone was criticized for falsely claiming that the FDA had not granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine in August 2021.
No. But the person in question here worked on the subject at hand decades ago, not during the development of these vaccines. In the meantime he seems to have developed a political rather than a scientific view of the issue AND had a conflict of interest.
So if you have a video site like Youtube, you can take down whatever content you like, and that's cool. However, if you become very successful, and attract many viewers, than it's no longer like that. Now you can choose what you let on your site.
Is HN pro censorship? I mean, stuff HN doesn't want posted here can, and does get taken down by its moderators. You're just not complaining because HN isn't huge?
Let's say someone starts a video site where users post vegan recipes. It's a vegan video site. People create an account and can post what they want. Some users post barbecue videos, video on how to skin game, and the site owners remove these videos. If somehow a high percentage of society become vegan and this site blows up, becomes the biggest recipe site in the world, a quasi-monopoly of recipe videos. Do they now have to allow meat videos?
Complaints about HN editorial policy are not encouraged on HN.
You do raise an interesting point though. Historically, the production & distribution of content intended for mass consumption was expensive, often requiring entire teams to collaborate. The mere existence of a piece of content was subject to filtering, from conception to production to distribution. Most of this filtering was invisible and possibly unconscious, intrinsic to the moral norms of society at large.
The Internet changed that. Content creation and distribution costs have cratered. A solo creator can spam hours of content every week. We are drowning in a quantity and variety of content unimaginable 30 years ago. Media distribution organisations now rely on soft distribution shaping ('boosting' / 'deboosting') and are starting to craft explicit censorship policies. It is very unclear how this will all play out in the long term, though I would caution that explicit legalism can only go so far.
People have incredibly short memories, but media conglomerates have ALWAYS been in the business of curating and censoring content.
Sometimes it’s about agenda, but more often than not, it’s about ad revenue and shielding themselves from risk.
This is more about spending themselves from risk because YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for actively spreading misinformation with their recommendation engine, which goes beyond merely hosting it.
If Google REALLY had an agenda, why did they let their recommendation engine push these videos while millions of people around the world died?
The truth is Internet media companies chose to profit from the engagement that misinformation was providing.
All of this censorship you see today is a big meaningless public relations show.
Conglomerates don’t care about free speech and they definitely don’t care about misinformation.
Yes - Those were my supporting points. It should go without saying that popular things are often not true.
My main point is they’re not doing this out of some agenda. They’re doing this to deflect that their algorithms PROMOTED misinformation via their recommendation engine.
That’s a step beyond hosting content.
Honestly, this PR strategy is working too. Look at how many dopes are arguing whether YouTube should or shouldn’t censor their content.
> Misinformation researchers have for years said the popularity of anti-vaccine content on YouTube was contributing to growing skepticism of lifesaving vaccines in the United States and around the world. Vaccination rates have slowed and about 56 percent of the U.S. population has had two shots...
I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, maybe because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.
Also, the mandate part of vaccine mandate is legitimately scary. It is reasonable not to trust a big pharma-big government alliance actively controlling our medical life with no ability of the patient to opt out. It is easy to see this ending badly, US healthcare is not known for being full of angelic, selfless and friendly actors. These opinions should be aired.
> I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.
Are you counting those children as political opponents? I don't think they have a political interest because they can't get it due to regulation yet, and they're also children.
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognized as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations."
It is hard to sympathize with people who sow disinformation that costs people lives.
But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
Principles are tested not when it is convenient for you to follow them.
What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.
"In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.[1]
(...)
Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech."
So in short. There are existing laws that can be used to decide what is and what is not protected by freedom of speech.
These laws should in my opinion be applied by judicial system, not invented on the spot by corporations.
People should understand they are responsible for what they say online just as if they used other methods of communication.
And if the exceptions to free speech are incorrect or incomplete, we should demand that the law is corrected in a democratic process rather than having companies act on their own.
I wish freedom of expression were GPL-style freedom instead of MIT-style freedom, e.g., "You're free to express whatever opinions you want. You may not keep others from expressing whatever opinions they want."
> But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.
If one were charitable to this action, you'd say they're blowing up a silo full of rat poison and disallowing people from adding poison back in.
The balance between "free speech" in the moral, not legal, sense and disinformation is going to be just like "security v. privacy" has been, but perhaps even harder to draw lines for.
If you accept as a premise that most anti-vax sentiment is driven by charlatan media outlets and influencers (and probably nation-state adversaries), and that much of what is repeated by laypeople is an echo of this intentional drivel, and that this drivel is immediately costing not only their own lives, but the lives of others, what do you do? It's literally a disease.
Which the Chinese would say about "people talking about democracy". So there it is: Where, if at all, do we in a "free society" draw the line where harmful disinformation campaigns get cut out?
I argued several years back that the "app layer" of the internet should have more freedom of control over their content, but that the "infrastructure" layer should be expected to be more neutral. In other words, if an anti-vax website or social network got hosted on AWS, it would be a different thing for AWS or a registrar to kick them out.
Well I reject your premise, but on a more fundamental level I simply do not believe (on the basis of overwhelming evidence) that the gargantuan tech monopolies and the people pulling their strings care at all about the public health, disease prevention, or human life, so I am left looking for other motives.
During the debate over Covid vaccines a common refrain has been "any safety issues have always shown up within a few months of administration." This is straight up misinformation: the Pandemix vaccine is a very high profile counterexample where symptoms first appeared about a year after the first shots were given, and it took another year after that for authorities to acknowledge the link. I only know about this because I occasionally peruse sources which would probably be labeled as "anti-vax," whereas the people repeating the false claim ad nauseam have often picked it up from sources which would be considered "authoritative," including public health authorities. But especially on this issue we have to pretend that there is one "side" which has a monopoly on accurate information.
I wonder how much longer YouTube will even allow you to point out that the manufacturers of the completely-safe-beyond-any-doubt-whatsoever Covid vaccines have been blanket exempted from liability for any injuries caused by their products.
> What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.
Simple: The right to free speech doesn't mean people have to listen, or guarantee access to a publisher. You can self-publish all you want.
> Ability to work with companies is no longer an option if you want any message through.
It never has been. Publishers refusing to publish speech isn’t a new phenomenon. Newspapers, radio and TV stations have been doing it since their inceptions.
What do you think an “editor” does?
> If you can't post on any social media you are as good as being completely censored.
That’s hardly true either. You can run your own websites, mailing lists, or just send stuff in the post. There are plenty of people that don’t use social media, I doubt they feel censored.
Thought experiment: how would you feel if YouTube banned all pro-trans content? ...or pro-choice, or anti-Isreal/Jewish material?
It doesn't matter to me if you're against companies censoring any of these things. Be aware that it means you're fine with authoritarianism, so long as it aligns with your politics...
I think you are attempting to move goal posts here.
This is specifically the phase 3 results. I won’t be your search engine: go look for whatever results you want yourself. You can also find the FDA and CDC committee opinions with all the supporting documents and rationale for the granted authorizations which will have even more information on exact what criteria was used to approve the COVID vaccine usage. You can then find similar info from both agencies on other vaccines. If you spot a mistake that does jeopardize the integrity of the studies or the decisions please let me know and I’ll help you contact these agencies and the media. Outside of that, please keep the goalposts where they are.
I’m not moving the goalposts. I asked for “The Clinical Trial Studies”, the link is to the “Incomplete Clinical Trial Studies”. I’m not taking issue with you about that, you did a polite thing to further a discussion.
My entire point (go up the comment tree a bit) is the studies are incomplete and therefore inconclusive at this point in time. And you haven’t displayed this attitude, but is a common attitude that they are golden at this point in time.
But no drug is approved with phase 4 studies because phase 4 cannot happen until the drug is approved. You need phases 1-3. What do you make of the fact that everyone involved, manufactures, the CDC, the FDA, and independent experts, all say that not a single step was skipped in developing and studying the COVID vaccines?
Can you imagine if the previous generation had this opinion?
"Television isn't the place to learn about the flaws in astrology, or about astronomy, the big bang, conflicting visions of human progress, galileo, and the like... we are totally fine in banning Cosmos and keeping children from learning any alternative to jesus christ our lord and savior"
I can. The previous generation is largely racist, sexist, homophobic, and bent on going back to the good old days when violence anyone who wasn’t a fist het white man was ok. They aren’t heroes for being born before YouTube.
Moreover, whoever grabs power in future will be able to do the same by argumenting that this has been done before and their opponents said it is right back then.
For context, Michael Osterholm runs the Center for Infectious Disease Reasearch and Policy at the University of Minnesota and was a member of Biden’s COVID advisory board during the presidential transition.
They're a private company and can do whatever they want. However, one only needs to see the trending page in any country to see the kind of crap YouTube promotes and profits from. So, please spare me of the corporate propaganda for YouTube's rationale of this decision.
> "They're a private company and can do whatever they want."
Flies in the face of jurisprudence accross industrialized nations, as many courts again and again ruled that a platform cannot "do whatever they wan't" if they dominate the market and thus effectively are a public space of opinion.
This is not about "disagreeing with what you say". This is about people literally dying. Not just the people spreading the information either, innocent bystanders that get killed by the disease.
So this is your opportunity! Go make VaxxTube. The mistake they are making, if you are to be believed, is that they are leaving money on the table. Go pick it up.
Imagine the government decided that you go to prison for speaking against vaccines. That would be a mistake. This is the same kind of mistake, but on a smaller scale.
Imagine a straw man argument that has nothing to do with the current situation.
Better yet, imagine if the government told you that you must post a sign in your front yard that says “vaccines are good” or “vaccines are bad”. That’s a much more relevant analogy here.
Your right to not be prosecuted by the government for what you say is protected by the first amendment. YouTube’s right is similarly protected: they can say or not say what they want on their website without criminal consequences. So which is it, do you want the government to curtail YT’s free speech or not?
I am for liberty. I don't like when governments censor their citizens and I don't like when corporations censor their users or customers. There is no contradiction. The fact that google and co can censor others is just thanks to the government being liberal and allowing action that goes against this value. This is similar to the paradox of tolerance except for liberty: "do we allow free expression for those who use it to restrict others?". And I say we do, but I don't pretend to be happy when they do.
The contradiction is that you are saying the government can censor Google, just not you. So in other words you want to give the government the ability to tell Google “put this on your home page” for any value of “this”.
The only way to prevent a corporation from exercising their right to free speech is to have the government interfere. So the part where you said you don’t like Google censoring people is where you said you want the government to censor Google.
"Your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins". This anti-vaxx BS is already posing, or at least aggrevating, a serious public health issue. If it was just for the anti-vaxxers, I wouldn't care. It is affecting their children and people that simply cannot get the vaccine. At which point their freedom of reach (not necessarily expression, as far as I know their demonstrations are allowed) has to take the backseat when it comes to other people's health.
“ YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective”
So speaking truth can get me banned from YouTube?
• Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant. When these infections occur among vaccinated people, they tend to be mild.
• If you are fully vaccinated and become infected with the Delta variant, you can spread the virus to others.
What's your point? "Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant" does suggest the vaccine is effective. You can still spread the virus, nobody's pretending it's 100% effective, but that doesn't make it ineffective
It's an antivaxxer classic, for them effective means 100% effective under all conditions, otherwise it's ineffective.
It's called fallacy of composition[0] when they cherry pick the cases where it's less effective to infer it's not effective as a whole, and fallacy of division[1] when trying to do reductio ad absurdum by claiming that, if it's effective as a whole, it should also be so under all underlying metrics.
A reasonable definition of effectiveness would be that it stops the virus from spreading through a population. Even in the case of Israel with the highest vaccination rate in the world, it has failed this test. I personally would say that it is effective because it has prevented a lot of deaths. But a reasonable person could disagree.
> Most vaccines do fully stop the spread, even for measles,
No, they don't. [0][1]
From [1]
> Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Obviously those 3% and 7% do spread, even though the symptoms are milder. For the 97 and 93% ones there's indeed very limited (if any) shedding [3].
Now that's holding different bars, because asymptomatic measles infections are less contagious by themselves, regardless of vaccination status, unlike COVID-19 which is still relatively contagious while asymptomatic. So you're attributing a positive point of measles infections as a fault of the COVID-19 vaccines, which is, as you might see, a pretty misinformed take.
Also, sterilizing immunity as you seem to understand doesn't really exist, in case that's the misconception you have [2]. In the end it's all about viral load, route of exposure, and level and type of immunity. A mucosal vaccine would behave more in the way your expecting intramuscular ones to work[4].
The fact is that the efficiency of the vaccine is being understood as we go. We started with the initial dose and are now considering second and third boosters because the efficiency diminished faster than expected
That’s beside the point of the WaPo article. YouTube is making the decision to remove any content that goes against vaccines, based in truth or not.
We started with 2 doses. Nobody talked about second or third boosters, because only a first booster has been recommended for those most at risk.
Is this the kind of information you're worried will be deleted, that is, gross misunderstandings of reality in the best case, outright lies to generate engagement in the worst?
Imagine, for a moment, a world in which 1 out of 15,000 fully vaccinated against measles are getting hospitalized from measles and an additional 1 out of 50,000 fully vaccinated against measles are dying from measles. And these numbers are increasing.
That is the case for the COVID19 vaccines. Visualization here[1]. The domain might be banned, but the code, snapshots, and the chart output here[2].
The rates are increasing because the cases/deaths are increasing as of the latest reported date you have. Now it's starting to decrease so your graph will show a decrease once you update it with the latest week data.
At least compare with a previous wave to see if there's a change according to vaccination rates (spoiler: there is), because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
It is hard to make the comparisons I would like to make mostly because of the piss poor way the data are disseminated (or not disseminated).
For example, the CDC overwrites the previous information with every week's update. That is why the repo exists. To preserve any time series information in one place with a verifiable way to extract it out of ever-changing HTML pages and put it in a table.
In theory, the CDC ought to be able to put the relevant information in a table. At a minimum, we'd need `date`, `locality`, age distributions of fully, partially, and never vaccinated populations, age distribution of people who are hospitalized due to COVID19, and age distribution of people who died from COVID19.
Ideally, we'd have a data set consisting of one row per hospitalization/death with relevant dimensions such as age, sex, first shot date, second shot date, type of vaccine, locality, other conditions etc.
But, we do not. Because the bureaucracy has not deemed it appropriate to collect or share that information.
Instead, we need to rely on free form HTML pages where the provenance of the data are not clear.
What I have done is made visible one bit of information that would otherwise not be available: The normalized rate of fully vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying from the disease against which they are fully vaccinated has been steadily increasing over time.
The main reason is that the vaccines are not as effective as the 95% number that has been flouted time and again. Of course, it takes time for a person to be exposed, diagnosed, hospitalized, and maybe die, so the revelation has been happening over time instead of instantaneously.
> because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
If I hadn't taken the snapshots and extracted the information from those pages, there would be no time series of breakthrough hospitalization and death rates anywhere. It seems to me it is worth something to save that information.
Plus, Biden told us the rate of hospitalization from COVID19 among the fully vaccinated was 1/160,000. The real number is 10 times that[1]. Isn't it worth something to know this?
I think "effective" there is being used to mean "effective enough that once you're vaccinated, you don't need to take any other precautions against that disease in particular in everyday life".
Is there a typo in your comment? Claiming that the vaccines are "ineffective" is not "truth". As you point out, infections happen in only a small portion of the fully vaccinated population. That is, by definition, "effective".
>• Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant. When these infections occur among vaccinated people, they tend to be mild.
And this is the actual misinformation. Recent study done in the UK with 100k subjects randomly sampled from the population found that two vaccines only reduce the amount of infections by about 55%: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/english-study-finds-50-60-r...
The problem witch vaccines is that makes YOU more resistant to the virus, while other people around can still be infected
So as long as people are not getting vaccinated everyone should keep using masks and keep social distance. Following that idea anti vax movements are more dangerous than we initially think.
Time for repeat showing of the free speech debate we’ve already had a dozen times, whoopee!
As ever, IMO, the problem isn’t the hosting or the banning, it’s the algorithms. I don’t care whether YouTube hosts anti-vaccine activists, I care that they actively promote anti-vaccine content to users simply because it’s proven to get clicks and earn them money. Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube itself is responsible for this disinformation getting so much traction.
Let me reframe: let’s say that YouTube hosts anti-vax content and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not vaccinate themselves or their children. Some percentage of them dies. Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10,000 people. Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
Two wrongs don’t make a right, do they? Also this is one of the most misquoted incidents in this saga, you don’t seem to know exactly what happened there.
That was a special case. They messed up and retracted it. They thought the N95 mask shortage would harm healthcare workers and wanted to save the top masks for those most at risk. They realized they were wrong and changed their views.
Can as much be said for anti vaxxers? Did they make the mistake and recant it? Did they change their view with new evidence? No, they're misinformed and close-minded. They ignored millions upon millions of safe vaccine uses, pointing to unsubstantiated edge cases and ridiculous conspiracies. The CDC was not buying into such rubbish and I hope they never do.
Right. But what happens before it's retracted? The incorrect position of the authority is repeated, and now in this case is basically denied distribution by Youtube.
Now in this case youtube is probably right "scientifically", but what if they weren't like with masks? You basically have 0 discussion or challenge allowed to the authorities position.
And lets just bring in the recent controversy here, a panel of scientists said third shots shouldn't be administered. Yet the government decided they should. Which position will youtube censor?
What if ISIS was right about the nature of God and we will all suffer hellfire in the afterlife?
There’s no obligation for YouTube to give terrorists a platform. Regarding a booster shot, I’m sure they will make reasonable calls, nearly exclusively only silencing bad-faith actors. Much like their policy towards CP or terrorist content.
Seems like your basic point is that no trusted authority should ever be wrong about something. I'm sure you would say, "No, that's not what I meant." But that seems like the only thing that could be implied by what you're saying.
You didn't address a very important point that the parent comment made which is that trusted authorities like the CDC are more likely to correct their mistakes whereas anti-vax propagandists will never retract their statements. That's part of what makes the CDC trustworthy compared to the propagandists.
The fact that the CDC or any other trusted public organization has technically made a mistake in the past seems like an irrelevant distraction. Haven't you ever had an argument with a spouse or family member where you called out something they were doing and they came back with, "Look who's taking."? And that felt like a bullshit tactic, right?
Accusations of hypocrisy are a really common fallacy in debate. They contribute nothing to the discussion at hand and are basically just an appeal to emotion. And what you're doing is just a version of that.
Well good thing that'll never happen again, right? /s
Given the repeated failings and intentional or unintentional misinformation we've seen thus far, why do you believe them messing up is a "special case"?
There were other "special cases". Here in California and many other places in the U.S. committees were formed by non-medical people to decide who should get the vaccine first. Decisions were made not by whose more likely to catch/spread it first, but who was most worthy.
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
In fact, if there was a supply problem, the best populations to give vaccines to first may have been some of the most "privileged" people in our society (even if we don't like them). Frequent travelers, college kids who are going to party anyway, etc. (Of course, people who work in retail stores, or front like health workers were obvious groups that nobody disagreed with.)
The point is, _who_ got the vaccine first wasn't decided by science, but by politics.
I admit to fudging my eligibility in order to get the vaccine early. I may do this again to get the booster if I decide I need it.
The government lied to their citizens because they weren't prepared enough and didn't stockpile enough N95 masks for their healthcare workers. That's what I'm reading.
That's okay to you?
I think it's absolutely abhorrent. Governments technically have a full monopoly on violence/power and to have them lie to you for what - the "greater good?"
You're also putting the entirely of all people hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccination into a large group which you can then generalize (albeit foolishly)
I hate that the CDC did that action, only because it gave skeptics another reason to distrust them. But it is 100% clear to anyone who, you know, was alive when it happened that they did that to prevent a mask shortage for those who needed them most.
I would rather have seen some emergency declaration that N95s must be seized from stores and go to healthcare workers, but that would have caused perhaps an even bigger panic. Because then, everyone would have freaked out, vs. what they did. Now, we only have people who were already going to distrust government giving a shit about the mask declaration last year.
Back to good-faith vs. bad-faith: I'm not certain there is more than a hair's worth of anti-vaccine content that is produced with good intention or even attempted to be backed by statistics. Put simply, I wager there is no anti-vaccine content produced out of a legitimate, well-founded public interest. It's charlatans, fools, anti-science and anti-authority interests.
What's your position on the current third shot issue? Should we listen to the scientist panel that said no, or the government that said yes?
What is youtube's position? Will it delete all government communications because the scientists said on, or will it delete all scientific discussion because the government said yes?
Let’s not add misinformation here. It was a panel of researches at the CDC that said the evidence for boosters for under 65 at risk individuals was marginal that the thought it wasn’t worth it. A similar panel of researches at the FDA said it was a close call but they said it was worth it. The CDC panel is advisory to the FDA panel, not the other way around. The debate here is specifically for under 65 at risk individuals.
Besides, the official recommendation was more on the line of "a 3rd dose is much less useful than applying those vaccines on the antivaxers". What is very clearly correct, but is of a laughable political naivety, because the preferred goal is practically impossible to reach.
That's irrelevant, as I understand it. The debate wasn't about the scientific merits of a third shot - the debate was on the prioritization of whether the limited resource (the vaccine) was best allocated for a larger set of boosters, or if they should be used for others who are not yet vaccinated (perhaps worldwide).
Anyway, like I've said in another post and in a blog before, I think Youtube has less responsibility to be a neutral platform than ISPs and registrars do. If you want to host content, you should be able to do it yourself with Internet connectivity and DNS - IMO those should be "common carriers" that don't get the privilege of bias the same way platforms like Youtube do.
Think swallowing a tube of veterinary-grade medicine is safer than an injection that hundreds of millions of people have gotten with few problems? Go for it, on your home server with a domain name.
> What's your position on the current third shot issue? Should we listen to the scientist panel that said no, or the government that said yes?
We should listen to ourselves. If we don't have enough information to make an informed decision, then study and acquire that information. No one is responsible for you except for you - with the caveats of children/dependents being not responsible for themselves.
What Youtube or any other internet information says is irrelevant until you decide otherwise.
Or this way, let’s say that YouTube hosts earlier anti-mask content from Dr. Fauci/CDC and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not wear mask. Some percentage of them dies.
Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
Yes, because back then (as much as a communications fuck-up that was) this was scientific consensus. What Youtube is banning is pure propaganda and falsehoods.
The scientific consensus was that there was no evidence that mask would work (or not work) for 2019-nCoV. There's plenty of evidence that it helps prevent transmission of other respiratory viruses.
So which hypothesis would have most likely been true at the time? Not to mention that Dr. Fauci himself had admitted that it was a noble lie (aka pure propaganda and falsehoods).
Not directed at you, just to get that out of the way. But I am quite fed up that the masks-don't-help meme is constantly brought up. That was in early 2020, a lot of mistakes were made back then because nobody really knew what they were doing.
Especially because it usually brought up by people that are consistently wrong about pretty much everything, while propagating active lies, as a defense against anyone pointing out the utter BS they are spreading. That gets tiresome.
The problem is that on the one hand, you're saying the WHO and CDC are made up of humans, and all humans make mistakes once in a while, but on the other hand, you're saying the current positions of the WHO and CDC are 100% correct, and anyone who disagrees with them needs to be silenced.
Ah, I didn't say that, did I? I am just tired of having the mask debacle from early 2020, and that is the only real issue that is constantly brought up to discredit the WHO/CDC.... because as you said, people make mistakes. I, for what it's worth, trust people that correct their mistakes over people that never do. because the latter never learn. And they have the tendency to put as much theories out as they can. Because then they have a high chance of being right at least once. Doing that long enough and they can claim to be right all the time. Which, obviously, they aren't. But it's incredibly hard to call them out on it.
> Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
They didn't do a good or a bad thing - they were a blank canvas someone put their art(video) on. Recently, that blank canvas is only willing to have certain art present on it - that's not a good thing. The only thing keeping it going is an inertial mass of subscribers, which over [possibly a long] time will dissipate.
IMO one of the reasons these debates go back and forth forever is because it’s impossible to come up hard and fast rules that cover every scenario.
Maybe a poorly thought out analogy but think about cars. There are a ton of car accidents every year, a good number of which result in death. But we don’t ban cars because they’re essential for the way many people live. But if 50% of all car journeys resulted in accidents? Maybe we’d be having a different conversation.
That is a moral argument and has no place in a discussion of the laws of a modern western country. We are a system of law, not a system of justice.
Although I do agree with you that anti-vaxers should be treated no different than common terrorists; as Americans, under the law, they have a right to declare that they are terrorists and give their little illogical terrorist rants. The First Amendment is very clear on what is not covered, and the courts have repeatedly confirmed that being wrong, being disingenuous, and lying is covered (as long as you are not committing perjury or other similar, actual, crimes).
Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they penned this: in their day, they also had their form of denialism. The first amendment is, essentially, "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubts.", but weaponized against the idiots that shall forever plague us.
That said, if a rational adult, one that we have, as a society, cannot tell the difference between the truth and the lies, then we have both failed as a society, but also have trusted an adult to actually act like one and they, personally, made the choice to act like a spoiled brat; acting like a spoiled brat is not a victimless crime, and sometimes, but not always, they are punished like an adult for violating the trust of the society that they live in.
It almost seems as if you believe you can't be lied to by the people you agree with. In this case, we'll call them "vaxxers" since you seem to believe only "anti-vaxers" are capable of duplicity.
Nope, because that's the beauty of science. I personally run on a "trust, but verify" basis: science allows society to come together and verify many aspects of claims: can it be done, can it be replicated, what's the likelihood of the replication actually measuring a real effect, etc.
"Vaxxers", as you have so put it, (or as I like to call them, normal human beings) have reached a level of proof that vaccines are safe, and that, specifically, the COVID-19 vaccines currently in deployment are several magnitudes safer than, say, contracting COVID-19 itself.
"Anti-Vaxxers", however, have (un?)intentionally proved that vaccines work, performing one of the largest voluntary human drug trials in history as the placebo group. Their sacrifice shall, hopefully, not be forgotten (lest we repeat it).
Their opinion lacks the ability to be classified as political, to be honest. It is a scientific "opinion" that has been proven wrong, repeatedly, by actual scientific research, but also by mere observational fact.
No one has a right to harm another person. Knowingly transmitting an infectious disease, after being repeatedly informed that it is, indeed, an infectious disease, and that the victims, worldwide, total almost 5 million worldwide and continues to climb, and they still continue to spread it, that is what makes someone a terrorist: you harm, maim, and kill people to spread discord. Why you do it is immaterial, "I didn't know", "I didn't understand", "I was following orders", are not excuses in a court of law.
You're only "knowingly transmitting an infectious disease" if you leave your house with COVID symptoms or a recent positive test result, not just if you aren't vaccinated against it.
The whole thing is a "correlation does not imply causation" fallacy because you just assume that changing one thing lead to the change of something else while ignoring all the other effect it has. For example by leaving the content and being a neutral platform the subjective value of the content on the platform is higher. More people who are not sure about something can listen both sides and choose based on that. However by removing it you exclude these people (for a million of other topics too) even trough they could very well end up on the "right" side after doing their own research.
They wont do this if its clear that the platform already removed one side and the other therefore is propaganda.
So by removing it, how many additional death would this actually cause? You just leave this out.
What if it causes thousands of deaths too? Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10000 people.
You can now make a non-emotionally decision whether removing it or not is actually a good idea because the arbitrary appeal to emotion evens out.
This is the way think about such stuff, not by making arbitrary emotional "arguments" which can not be proven or disproved and may as well be completely irrelevant or even in reverse.
Whenever the "logic" of "X people (less) die if we do Y" is used its an attempt to make it emotional instead of rational it should ring some bells and raise some flags. You can see this with autonomous driving or gun control an many other topics. Its some kind of appeal to emotion fallacy combined with false cause fallacy. And instead of convincing anyone or find common ground it just pushes people to more extreme opposition. Because you "literally kill people if you disagree with X".
The pragmatic thing is to remove the blatantly false content to prevent deaths. That’s not an emotional argument, that’s a logical one. Some percentage of people will watch anti-vax videos on YouTube, will believe them, will not vaccinate, and some percentage will die. Not having that content there would mean more people get vaccinated and fewer die. Nobody is dying from getting vaccinated.
Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
The damage to the "value of the content" is done anyway even if you "just" "remove blatantly false content". Also instead of an arbitrator of truth you need an arbitrator of "blatantly false" which is exactly as impossible and comes with the same risk of abuse of power, bias and all that.
Anyway you missed the point where I assumed the death evens out aka try make an argument that isn't based on emotion an "backed" by numbers we can not know.
>Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I'm p sure the common ground for most of them would be to let people decide. Anti-vaxxers who want to remove pro-vaccine information to prevent people from dying form the vaccine seem to be rather rare. As far as I know most are perfectly fine with anyone voluntary injecting toxic and dying. They might be wrong on almost everything but that doesn't mean common ground can not be found.
Also by picking the furthest away extreme position to proof no common ground is possible is kind silly. We wan common ground for the majority on both sides not with the extremists.
If we were talking about tetanus I would agree. People who refuse tetanus vaccines place nobody but themselves in danger. I don’t care if you choose to forego that vaccine as it will not affect me.
People who refuse vaccines for dangerous contagious diseases directly affect others: they may pass that disease to me, to my children, to my elderly family members, etc. At this point their choice is causing me harm. What is my remedy if this happens? I can’t sue them for the death of a loved one, I can’t hold them accountable criminally.
The only path forward I see is that if you choose to not vaccinate, that you also choose to fully isolate yourself until the pandemic is over: no going to work, school, social gatherings, etc. I would be comfortable with that common ground. But that’s not what is being offered by you or even those who refuse to get vaccinated. It is always the pro-vaccine/science/reason people that must give something up for the benefit of those refusing to get vaccinated, which is less common ground and more of a one sided demand.
The "put other people in danger" fallacy is the same appeal to emotion again. Its nonsense, you would never apply this kind of "logic" anywhere else.
Do you ban cars because you dont need one and all others put you, your children their grandparents in danger? No you dont.
If you dont want to be run over at any cost its your task to stay away form cars.
Similarly if you dont wanna get covid at any cost its your task to hide in the basement and dont let anyone in vaccinated or not.
Alternatively you can accept that life is a deadly risk and do the common sense things to reduce the risk for you and your loved ones and move on.
This may be taking the vaccine, putting on a mask, avoiding crowded places or even ware a warn west so you are less likely to be run over by a car. All of that is fine. It stops being fine if you demand others to do something so you can feel safe. Especially if what you demand infringed basic rights and/or is not solving the problem but just lowers the risk by an unknown possibly insignificant amount.
Its reasonable to demand that cars have working breaks because they need them anyway. The breaks aren't there to protect you from cars. Its however not reasonable to demand that all cars have advanced pedestrian detection that makes in impossible to run over people. It doesn't matter if you would feel safer that way or that it would safe X numbers of lives. Not because we dont care about lives but because making such a requirement would simply make most car driving people criminals and not actually save lives. Similarly if you demand unvaccinated people to stay at home, all you get is that you criminalizing people for leaving their home. It wont make them take the vaccine and it wont protect you from covid.
What a canard. Should YouTube leave up ISIS recruiting videos so those so-tempted can examine “both sides” of the issue?
There is no both sides to the vaccine debate. COVID-19 vaccine information led to one of the first rabies deaths in a long time because the treatment involves a vaccine given after a bite, and all this anti-vaxx propaganda is doing nothing but sowing FUD about one of the most obvious cost-benefit analysis’s that can be done in the field of medicine. And during a pandemic no less. YouTube has no obligation to suffer these fools.
No one claims ISIS recruiting videos are removed to save lives. The comparison doesn't make any sense. There are actual reasons why these videos are removed that aren't appeal to emotion fallacies.
It's an interesting question, but keep in mind that Youtube allows junk food advertising targeted towards children, which contributes to the obesity epidemic, and obese people have much higher medical needs and tend to die earlier (and are much more sensitive to COVID). Clearly, this contributes to untimely death, right?
So should we ban all junk food advertising on Youtube? Also, how about a ban on all pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube (which is the norm in most countries)?
I'd imagine most of this type of thing (prominent anti-vaccine personalities) is externally monetized via donations, as opposed to directly through YouTube.
It's all very simple, considering Youtube has had a feature to keep videos out of their search indexes since, I don't know, forever...? It's effectively a form of voluntary shadowbanning, used by people who just want to embed videos somewhere else or, y'know, simply keep them somewhat private. YT could just say "right, anything we object to, gets removed from the search index." Two-minutes job. If you want to be more proactive, stop them from embedding too, so they can't be reposted elsewhere. The videos are then effectively neutered and only the already-nutcase will see them, limiting the virality.
That affects only content creator. YouTube, even if not directly profiting from ads, profits indirectly from you staying on the site and moving on to other 'monetized' videos eventually.
We don’t live in the reality where the local book store and media owner keeping information away actually had an impact.
This only effects YouTube. Of the millions of other sites out there.
I think even the smart people are a bit stuck on YouTubes marketing effects on their limbic brain versus the reality; the bad info is just a Google search or friend posting in private away for anyone still.
I might suggest we avoid using superlatives. I have seen disinformation about vaccines both from mainstream media presumptions that breakthrough infections won't happen at all, and also from other mainstream media publishing entire segments that the vaccine might cause infertility in women or somehow affect the fetus (a spreading of FUD basically).
It's proven that the spike protein accumulates in the ovaries after vaccine injection. As the FDA claims, there is no long term data. Anecdotally I've heard many pregnancies ended from the shot.
It's not FUD to be concerned about female fertility. We have no long term data and we know the spike protein accumulates in the ovaries from mRNA injections.
> A study shows the vaccine accumulating in the ovaries - False
> This theory comes from a misreading of a study submitted to the Japanese regulator. The study involved giving rats a much higher dose of vaccine than that given to humans (1,333 times higher).
> Only 0.1% of the total dose ended up in the animals' ovaries, 48 hours after injection. Far more - 53% after one hour and 25% after 48 hours - was found at the injection site (in humans, usually the arm). The next most common place was the liver (16% after 48 hours), which helps get rid of waste products from the blood.
> And those promoting this claim cherry-picked a figure which actually referred to the concentration of fat found in the ovaries.
"Anecdotally I've heard many pregnancies ended from the shot."
No you haven't. You've heard of pregnancies ending in people that happen to also have been vaccinated but you have no proof connecting the two. The reality is that a lot more pregnancies fail than anyone cares to admit in public because couples tend to be private it about it. This is nothing new. It's heartbreaking for everyone that experiences it and anti-vaxxers latching onto it to serve their agenda is incredibly sad.
I might be wrong but maybe the point is that it's not proven safe long term.
While a good majority(like me) had it and it worked out well for us (risk vs reward wise), some might not be so lucky and it pissed me off that some people are like frogs in a well with a very narrow viewpoint.
It's now proven that it can cause death. 1 death is more than enough to justify not having it. Neither you or anyone have the right to force people to take that risk for the benefit of others. I only took it because I covered all most my bases and my chances of survival in case of Covid were pretty bad.
It wouldn't be the first time that problems appear after a long time and take ages to be proven. The most extreme example of that that I think is thalidomide.
EDIT: If you are going to reduce it to a game of numbers. Some risk side effects so that the majority goes on with their lives, then... when communists were leveling a church and the houses of 500 people could use the same justification since they were building blocks of flats for 10000 people on that area it was justified?
I've seen videos where drivers peacefully waiting at red lights were crushed by careening tractor trailers in freak accidents. Waiting at the red light literally got them killed. By your standards, we shouldn't force people to obey traffic signals since it"s proven that doing so can in rare cases lead to death.
> “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
Not to defend Biden, but the vaccine decreases the probabilities of getting COVID. You still get infected with sars-cov-2, and you are probably still contagious, but it's unlikely you get COVID (as in COronaVIrus Disease, the disease produced by sars-cov-2 virus (or coronavirus), that is the thing that eventually kills you and/or jeopardizes the public health system).
Ha. I think part of this struggle, to borrow your analogy, is that YouTube and Facebook are organizationally blind to the fact that they built a gun.
Or maybe Google is concerned. And Facebook just doesn't care.
But the root cause is "algorithms for increasing engagement will prefer shock content." Solve that, and they wouldn't need to band-aid issues like this.
Dude, the "root cause" is that profit is part of the equation. There is no "right algorithm" for controlling the public conversation. All fascism is bad fascism.
Fascism is governmental power (ie dictatorial control over the public conversation.) in the hands of the corporation. Which is exactly what we have here.
There seems to be an AI safety problem here: The youtube algorithm is optimizing for engagement at the cost of some other less-quantifiable human value like social trust.
I am gonna go out on a limb and say Google's product dashboards likely all have engagement metrics and probably close to zero have "social trust" metrics.
I'm really curious if it would be possible for Youtube / Google etc. to expose their algorithmic interface to their public users so that they could twiddle with the settings themselves - or is that just technologically impossible given the internal structure of their systems? I really have no idea, but I've been wondering about it for some time.
I personally really preferred old Youtube, where your subscriptions were the main thing you saw along with the absolute "most popular viewed today" kinds of things.
The algorithm has only made the site worse in my experience and I always go directly to my subscriptions to be able to at least see things I'm subbed to.
I'm of the same opinion. A user's subscriptions seemingly matter very little nowadays, I've noticed. The focus on recommendations is so heavy I'm very often recommended videos I've already watched, some of them multiple times; very few recommendations are videos (old or new) from channels I'm subscribed to.
I've also noticed that many content creators are now offering email newsletters (such as Tom Scott) and encouraging subscribers to connect outside of YouTube, presumably as a response to this.
Why would YouTube recommend videos from people you're subscribed to? You already have a reliable feed of those videos on the subscriptions feed. They are trying to get you to subscribe to other channels to increase your watch time.
I agree. This is actually my chief complaint about YouTube's front page. I wish there were options to categorically remove videos from channels I'm subscribed to and videos I've already watched from the recommendation feed.
The feed on the home page is recommendations. That may, by chance, include things you're subscribed to but it will also include other recommended content and possibly not recommend things you are subscribed to as it's not meant to be a second copy of the subscription feed.
That still doesn't give reliable recommendations of your subscribed channels, it's just a chronological list of their new content.
If I subscribe to a youtuber with a back-catalog of several years of videos, I want recommendations of those prior videos, not only their brand new ones.
It did use to overwhelmingly recommend videos from channels you were subscribed to. Such videos made up a major portion of your recommendations.
And yes, there is the subscriptions feed, but it only shows new videos from subscribed-to channels; it doesn't function as a 'recommended' list for your subscriptions, which is what I miss and want.
I'm not sure that 'banning' and 'changing the algorithm so that it doesn't pop up' is meaningfully different. We can just assume that YT hasn't banned this content, but it never ever shows up in recommendations. The effect would be practically the same.
Banning means the content is not accessible at all.
Changing the Algorithm would mean the content is less discoverable but could still spread outside the platform via alternative methods, such as Tweets, Links, emails, slack, etc.
There is a difference, and the effect is not the same
Techno-fascism rears its ugly head once more. These mRNA shots aren't flawless medications with zero side effects. People are getting strokes. People are getting heart inflammation. It's not even working against new variants. The emperor really doesn't have clothes. I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes. You need 3 booster shots apparently in less than 9 months and you'll probably still get Covid. But meanwhile lets throw out all human rights that hundreds of millions died for and many more suffered for.
The reason freedom of speech is a must in a free society is that speaking is the same as thinking. Who watches the watchmen? There is no amount of "misinformation" that could ever hold a candle to the absolute evil that has been perpetrated throughout history by outlawing or banning or shunning free speech.
> I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes.
Funny thing about those other vaccines. They protect against viruses that we already have collective heard immunity for.
As it happens, it turns out that herd immunity substantial reduces community transmission, and thus makes vaccines appear more effective. Without that, you’re pretty much always gonna get breakthrough infections.
So you want the COVID vaccine to be as effective as other vaccines. Then get vaxxed, and get everyone in your community vaxxed.
Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.
Great in theory, but if you've ever debated someone who is not acting in good faith online it's near impossible. Their energy input is an order of magnitude lower than yours. And yes, in this specific context it IS misinformation, disinformation, or just flat out false.
With these specific therapies:
1) Myocarditis (long term heart damage)
2) general inflammation and clot risk
3) long term risks of brand new mRNA technology
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
> But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
Then again, those 1/500 are old age or with existing debilitating health conditions. The rest of the people have a close to zero chance of dying from Covid. It is not a great idea to expose them to that 1/17000 chance of getting an unnecessary heart condition that will affect them for life. And remember, myocarditis and blood clot issues are secondary effects we know about now. The vaccine was invented and released very recently and there is no way to know the long term effects. And don't forget, this vaccine works with a brand-new genetic technology never before released to the public.
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
The thing is that death is not the only strongly negative outcome of CV19. It's not uncommon for young and formerly healthy individuals to experience long term effects, sometimes with debilitating severity. That is just as much worth avoiding as death is and needs to be factored into risk calculations.
Refusing to do something purely because somebody is trying to make you do it still means you're letting other people control your actions. That's not liberty either.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
You assume the policy of pushing vaccination is sound, so the methods of its implementation are not totalitarian or it isn't a concern. But even if it was a sound policy from the standpoint of the state, the methods employed (censorship of communications on COVID and vaccines, restricting freedoms of unvaccinated) is still a totalitarian method.
> At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? I mean that in of itself proves nothing.
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
> Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform?
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
He died last year. He also had successful launches previously. And those didn't halt anything.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
Dozens of books have been written documenting the absolute, unmitigated travesty of the Trump administration. 70 million people still voted for him, and a majority of those did so as a positive review of his performance!
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
It's not possible to embarrass someone with no shame. It's easy to lie and debate dishonestly[1]. Engaging in such a debate would only legitimize a position that may have no legitimacy to begin with.
> If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
Pro tip: if you declare any and all "serious attempts to address the concerns" as "disinformation", then the only thing left is ostracism and censorship.
I have and I still think so. First of all, it is not realistic to assume that you will convince everyone; you won't. Second, practice is necessary and bad faith counterparts will help you get better.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
You’re wrong, several Oxford and Harvard studies show that misinformation is best fought with more misinformation. Either that, or your own personal beliefs, which are _way_ more true than something studied for years by ivory tower academics who are always changing their mind. Like and subscribe to my podcast and buy my T-Shirts……
Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater.
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
> I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
> there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
Right, the risks of the disease only apply if you actually catch it, and you might get lucky and avoid it. But choosing to get vaccinated means you take on whatever the tiny tiny risk of the vaccine is to you.
> But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
> The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
One thing that is hard to quantify is the risk of long-term effects, which are unknown.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
I don't think spreading misinformation about vaccines is in anyway comparable to the examples of hollywood or the moon landing, and I do in fact think it's a perfect fit for the analogy:
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
Every one of the people you describe had time to consider the information they got and to look for more information to confirm or contradict. Again, that is nothing like sitting in a crowded theater and hearing someone shout, "Fire!"
I have different definitions of a crisis to be honest. And I also think the crisis of misinformation is blown out of proportion and is in the interest of some established forms of media, which make quite a good buck with clickable headlines that sell the apocalypse.
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
This is an outmoded concept based on the idea that humans are purely rational creatures, which we already know is false. Just providing better information does not sway individuals. People are far more swayed by information from their “tribe”, even if that information is patently false, than they are by quantitatively better information, because it makes them feel good. That’s why actions like this seem to be necessary.
Why do we always assume that it's "misinformation" and that if people were told or shown better, they would want better. Many times, people actually want the bad thing. I can't help but see the "Free Speech" alarmism on HN originating from the fact that the market of ideas is no longer participating in arguments about right-wing viewpoints, but is actively moving against them and taking them off the shelf.
If this is correct, then why would you believe you've ascertained truth? The very hallmark of truth as we know it is that 'better' information, meaning more and more clarified data consistently resolve on the same conclusion.
The reasoning behind understand that “correct” and “persuasive” are two adjectives that aren’t synonyms and describe different values is fairly simple to communicate
The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.
There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
People are not little machines that accept information as input, apply impartial rules of logic, and then spit out a correct answer. People are social-emotional animals with a carefully guarded sense of self, a basic need to belong, and all kinds of nervous system structures that, when activated, prevent rational thought.
This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
Many people siding with "anti-vaxxers" are anti-mandate pro-vaccine activists. If they were given a voice in the current conversation then there would be a lot fewer disagreements.
No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications.
I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.
...or you just do some actual moderating instead of offloading your workload on machines. People worry about idiots and disinformation yet ignore and allow way more non conspiracy nutjobs all the time. Big Tech has such a cognitive dissonance its dizzying
This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply.
I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.
> A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.
> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.
The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
>I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.
53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
> I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.
The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.
I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.
Ahh the old paradox of tolerance. What you preach has failed literally every time it has been tried throughout history. You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop. And the irony of preaching tolerance while downvoting me is ripe.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
I'm not proposing full tolerance of the intolerant. Rather, as Karl Popper explained, political institutions within a liberal democratic society are the most appropriate scope within which the people's will regarding what to tolerate is expressed. In other words, contact your representatives about what needs to be outlawed, and until something is outlawed, show liberal tolerance—which absolutely includes refuting bad ideas in public debate.
Regarding YouTube, their choice to deplatform people is their choice -- and it's not against the law, since they own the platform. I certainly disagree with the wisdom behind their choice. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves; but I'm tolerating it even as I argue against it in public debate.
At first pass, I don't see how this applies to people sharing information about vaccines whether personal experience, science, or misunderstood science.
How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?
How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
[citation needed]. Popper's personal opinion that you linked to (and that is now used in a much more absolutist way that originally intended by its author, who never intended to cheer for censorship and crackdowns in name of democracy) isn't data and Full stop isn't a proof. Yes, Popper was smart. No, he wasn't an oracle of unquestionable wisdom.
Tell me, how was legalization of marijuana in the U.S. won? After all, chucking people into prison for decades is quite some intolerance. Did the MJ lovers stage an insurrection?
No, they won at the ballot box, which is the tolerant way. Not by reverse oppression of their enemies.
To disprove a sentence that says "every time", one example to the contrary is enough. This is your example. For another, take gay rights. There wasn't a gay revolution that would smite the religious conservatives and crush them.
So we need to apply heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent so that we don’t turn into an authoritarian country like China or Russia where they use heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent.
Exactly. You don't uphold democracy by silencing its critics, either.
Democracy and liberal freedom is best upheld when (a) the government is founded on the principles of liberty and rule-of-law, and (b) the people treasure those principles and refuse to tolerate a government that fails to uphold them.
I am not an American. I actually live in a country that was a kicking baloon of totalitarian powers for decades.
The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.
For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.
As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.
And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.
It gave newspapers and magazines the ability to do exactly that, and some absolutely have. It's pretty easy to draw parallels between those and "content creators".
Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.
I think their point is that being algorithmically induced makes the general rule not hold (which I don't agree - algorithms can be pretty damn bad at achieving what one wants).
Mind you, damn thank you for saying that out loud. People on the internet sure love to jump on the wagon of pointing out the differences of instances from a general case that often aren't even relevant for the argument.
Yes, they are. Almost every one has one or more mobile devices that we carry with us at all times.
These devices have various messaging/social media services that due to social expectations we use to interact with friends, family.
It's very, very hard to laser curate the kind of messaging you get, even if you know how to do it and are willing to do it (for example for some stuff you have to mute friends and family or otherwise block them).
Newspapers were much more hit and miss. You'd have to go out and buy a newspaper, their region was at best national, etc.
In absolute terms, you're right. We interact with media more than we ever have before.
The printing press was huge in relative terms, though. There was no mass media before that. The average person was unlikely to be able to read, much less to own any books. Communicating across even relatively short distances was infeasible. Most of the media they consumed was either from the church or at least regulated by the church.
The printing press was huge because the normal person's sphere of possible influence grew 100x. Much in the way that we've 100x-ed again with things like YouTube. The relative increase in sphere of influence is similar, the absolutes are massively different.
True, but I think there's a saying about quantity having a quality all its own.
The printing press was still running at humanly achievable speeds. The new stuff is super sonic. We can't cope with it. Plus with people living longer and longer and the natural neuroplasticity decrease that comes with age, more and more people are vulnerable.
It's the kind of thing that will need to be regulated very carefully and very strongly, because that's what laws are: barriers for when the human psyche fails. Imperfect barriers, but better than nothing.
Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?
It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:
More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:
The question isn't "was this specific level of capabilities available previously" but "did the introduction of new media technologies significantly disrupt the cultures into which they emerged?"
And the case that Eisenstein makes, at book length, is "yes".
She's building off earlier work (notably McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy), and you can find numerous prior and subsequent references.
>Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation
Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course.
Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem.
You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business.
"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.
So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.
Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
The problem with climate change is that the average person can't see the effects until long past the point when the problem can be easily solved. It's not at all comparable to social media.
> Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.
This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).
Not at all, we also shipped our garbage halfway across the world while pretending we were recycling; and we turned the taps off while we were brushing our teeth.
Funny that you mention that since this is a real problem with combating climate change. You need to focus on the meat of the problem, not grasping at (plastic) straws (sensible policy, but not conductive to a solution regarding this case).
It is a very public example of the result of limited moderation.
Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.
In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.
What’s wrong with 4chan? I for one think it’s awesome, one of the few outlets that haven’t gave in to censorship.
I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
they had done a lot of debate at there, about whether this behaviour is acceptable.
I just want to direct that the original purpose of this forums is try warn people what is the result of choice.
That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan
>That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?
There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.
This thread was discussing whether moderation was needed or not for a forum and 4chan was brought up as a forum without moderation and all the issues with that.
You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.
Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.
The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum
Doesn't 4chan kind of disprove this though? I mean sure /pol/ can be a bit of a cesspool, but that's not all of 4chan. It was designed as a toxic waste storage facility and it has done that job fairly well.
You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.
A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.
The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.
In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.
4chan is infinitely more enjoyable than the majority of social media and forums out there, precisely because of how lax the rules are and because of the lack of perverse incentives for users trying to one-up eachother for internet points. The only real rules are that you can't post anything illegal and that you have to stay vaguely on-topic, and it works great.
Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.
The irony is that even /pol is more "diverse" than the groups commonly requesting content control.
I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.
Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.
As people already mentioned here, try running a free-for-all moderation-free discussion board and see what happens.
Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?
The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.
"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.
> Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.
In Alberta, the <20% of individuals who remain unvaccinated make up >90% of ICU admissions. ICUs are so full surgeries are being postponed, resources are being diverted to COVID ICUs, and they may have to start triaging ICU patients soon because of the lack of capacity, all of which affects not only the unvaccinated but everyone needing medical care in the province. Letting the situation run its course will kill and has killed way more than just the anti-vax.
The case numbers in Alberta are half of the peak earlier this year (when Delta started ramping up). And yet 70% are vaccinated but only 3% were earlier this year (May).
Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.
First of all, your assrtion about case numbers being half is not correct. The third wave peaked at 25k active cases. The current peak is at 21k active cases.
Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.
So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.
And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.
But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?
And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.
The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
I agree. The reasons for the situation in Alberta are
1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.
2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest Delta produces all that much more severe disease.[1] The CDC says "it might be". Much more infectious, yes, but not more deadlier or at least not so much deadlier as to explain the Alberta numbers (especially comparing a population that is 70% vaccinated now versus 5% in the last wave).
And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.
US's death and ICU rates are higher than Alberta though, which can be explained by the difference in vaccination rates. So Alberta's current wave is not out of ordinary.
Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:
Alberta: 2.3
United States: 3.01
Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.
I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
I think the problem is less what YouTube is doing here and more that YouTube has this kind of power. If every country had 10 video Websites like Youtube that each had a 10th of the users from that country, and maybe some international users, then one portal taking a total ban-all hard-ass stance on misinformation wouldn't be a big deal.
Okay so you have your wish, there are 10 major video sites in the US who all have 5-20% market share. The forces that push one service moderate content will push the others.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
There is government pressure (more correctly just social pressure) but the government hasn't given a mandate that these platforms must take this censorship stance.
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
What type of power do they really have? If you don't like their policies, don't use their services, it's that simple. The only power is in their user base. YouTube is not some necessary utility, neither is Facebook, Twitter, etc. None of these services are worth anything without users.
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
> Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
Post offices, libraries, and telephone calls all transmit misinformation every day. Shoot, misinformation gets spread across tables at Dunkin Donuts as people talk about life.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
>* The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.*
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.
I don't have numbers, but there's a substantial population of people wary of the covid vaccines that aren't wary of polio, measles, or even flu vaccines.
I don't know why this is downvoted, because I have also found it to be true (within my immediate family).
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
side effects of a two dose vaccine are almost certainly going to show up in the near term of less than 6 weeks. it's not something like a drug you take daily for years and years and get a side effect from years down the line due to prolonged use.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
> The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
>But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system?
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
Sure, all of this is possible. Really improbable, but possible.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
they aren't even sure that the tick is the cause of that syndrome. they suspect it but there hasn't been a definitive link yet. also, people are allergic to all sorts of things like almonds or bees and can get new allergies later on in life.
>I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways.
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
> What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
Israel's Health Ministry has clearly stated that the vaccine is 39% effective against Delta strain [0] at preventing disease. Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version. The Gamma and Mu strains are known to be even more resistant to the vaccine.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
> Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version.
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
Regardless of why this was downvoted, it deserves an upvote for being correct.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
And it's utter BS in the real world - did they even stop to think that some countries have given out millions of doses of Pfizer over the last 8 months, and if "all cause mortality was unaffected" compared to the pandemic situation in 2020, it would be obvious as hell. It's therefor a very extra-ordinary claim, no proof whatsoever.
Yeah it's complete bullshit... vaccines are working and working well. the only people dying and taking up the ICU beds right now in any large numbers are the unvaccinated.
> Why are they pushing this disinformation?
either one of the following groups: russian/china disinformation bots or paid shills. people that like to be "in on the know" and take contrary viewpoints that are not mainstream. people that have fully bought into the above misinformation schemes. people that have taken to it like a political fight where reason goes out the window unless you are "winning".
I ultimately think that a lot of people "broke" during the pandemic looking for some "enemy" to fight since the reality of a wild virus that just happened was too scary a thought. many people need the world to make sense and want control. some control of that is making up enemies like china releasing the virus intentionally and all the world governments working together in tandem to somehow control everyone.
"During the blinded, placebo-controlled period, 15 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 14 in the placebo group died; during the open-label period, 3 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 2 in the original placebo group who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered to be related to BNT162b2 by the investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4)."
Look into statins if you want to understand bias and corruption in clinical studies.
Giving a medication to over 20,000 people and not saving a single life in 6 months is pretty weak. An NNT of over 20k is unheard of. Anything above 10-20 (not 10k) should make people at least be allowed to ask questions.
They did save two lives if you look at the death causes. 2 died of covid that were in the placebo group. There is also the numerous numbers of cases that didn't get severe covid and have long term negative side effects. Two people in the placebo group died of covid... that means they died fairly quickly and of covid directly meaning the illness was more severe. one person in the pfizer group died of covid pneumonia which means they were likely older and had a less severe infection but they still got pneumonia and died.
The number of people that got covid or severe covid in the control group were many, many times more as the vaccine protected many from getting it in the first place.
It's funny how people seem to be far more wary of their cells being subjected to a controlled dose of a carefully selected strand of mRNA than they are wary of their cells being subjected to a much larger bundle of mRNA that happens to include some variation of that carefully selected strand amongst many other things that together turn the cell into a weapon producing more copies of itself, and that will eventually kill every carrier whose immune system does not come up with a countermeasure fast enough. If the mRNA vaccine that contains a tiny subset of the virus is scary, how can the full version not be far more scary?
Actually that's what convinced me to get the vaccine, the fact of how the new bioengineering for mRNA worked. I was convinced that it would be highly successful and effective. And I honestly don't believe the theories that it's effectiveness is somehow wearing off. It's much more likely that it's just not effective against Delta+mutations as that is so far from the original variant the vaccine was designed for. I don't plan to get any booster shots until a new delta variant vaccine is available.
Don't forget the obvious merely logical counter argument:
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
I don't think the average person can (or will, especially) really source reliable information on how mRNA works, let alone think through the potential risks.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
>It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
I fully agree with all of this, yes. Disbelieving experts is wrong unless you are an expert or other experts also disagree, and I think that is a symptom of social media. SM, to me, is the real problem.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
I think that much of the distrust is not so much caused by lack of knowledge, but ultimately by inability to accept that sometimes shit just happens. They spent an entire year frantically making up culprits to blame for a virus that quite likely just happened, like a meteor strike. Making up culprits from thin air, but decidedly. Because their minds had never been confronted with tragedy lacking a scapegoat.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
I drove for an hour into the countryside to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for this reason. I got it three days before the blood clots thing came out, and was in the ER the day before the news came out with the most terrible headache I’ve ever had in my life.
I think his point very much means youtube should have done this sooner. There are tons of ppl that are 'anti- this vax only' because of the misinformation of youtube.
Vaccines do not always work. Vaccination is something you do as much for yourself or your own dependents (where it usually works) as for everyone else (where it might help protect someone for who it did not work well). This is the reason why antivaxx sentiment and "it should be my own choice" is antisocial and wrong.
Yes, exactly. It's just so similar to forum spam. Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.
Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.
> Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.
Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form.
I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.
Fortunately the First Amendment doesn't allow the US government to regulate such activities just because elitist authoritarians consider them harmful. This is an area where fundamental rights overrule cost-benefit analysis.
The FCC has no legal authority to regulate anti-vaccine content on TV. (I don't support such content, just explaining the law.) The FCC has some limited authority to regulate obscenity and indecency on over-the-air broadcast channels only. Congress gave them this authority because broadcast spectrum is a scarce public resource that reaches into everyone's home whether they want it or not. However the FCC generally has no authority over cable, Internet, or satellite content. Those systems aren't subject to spectrum scarcity and have effectively infinite capacity.
That makes sense, thanks! I'm wondering if there is some sort of regulation possibility on their processing of content or algorithms. In other words, similar to the cookie law in EU (which has an abysmal implementation) whereby individuals have more control on what they can and can't see and what gets promoted to them.
In general content promotion algorithms can't be regulated because a recommendation on which videos to watch is legally considered an opinion and thus Constitutionally protected free speech. The Supreme Court would probably only allow regulations in two narrow areas. The first would be where the promoted content is itself not Constitutionally protected due to obscenity or incitement of violence. The second would be commercial speech targeting children, who are legally considered as needing additional protection. For example the FTC can regulate some aspects of online services for minors under COPPA.
(I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)
YouTube's algorithm actively pushes people down rabbit holes towards fringe content.
The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did.
Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there.
> Just a no win situation
I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.
A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".
I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent.
But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
Another simple question: if actions were ineffective like you describe, why would people take them? There isn't some cosmic homeostasis keeping the world the way you percieve it. If you get rid of anti-vax videos, fewer people are going to be exposed to that, and fewer people will be resultantly anti-vax.
I didn't describe anything as ineffective. On the contrary: those who vaccinated are now very effectively avoiding being seriously sick or even dead. What was ineffective is an information campaign about vaccines, their direct and side short and long term effects. At least in US, I believe.
If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? And did you grow up in the United States?
If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.
But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.
I am 46 and I was born and living all my life in Soviet Union and now Russia. So you don't tell me what a significant free speech suppression feels like)
YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.
And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.
That is true but I am not as disillusioned that giving everyone a megaphone was positively conductive to spread more interesting art, discussions and general content. I would not want to go back to Youtube TV.
I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.
This seems incredibly naive. The present proliferation of anti-vaccine sentiment is almost entirely the result of propaganda pushed by a tiny number of people being amplified by social media. You can argue about whether or not it's right to suppress information on principle, but I don't see how you can argue it's ineffective. It's ineffective at combating actual truth when things like the Supreme Soviet just lie about meeting their five year plan goals and imprison anyone who presents real data, but scientific journals and newspapers introducing some editorial curation in what they were willing to amplify worked perfectly fine at actually suppressing fringe pseudoscience and false conspiracy theories for centuries.
I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.
The heart of any anti-* sentiment is DOUBT. And in case of covid vaccines part of that doubt is totally legit. Yes, in a history of mankind there was never a medical substance so rushed to the market. And yes, our current covid vaccines are far from perfect. All you can do to counter these facts are bring another facts. And not shutting down intelligent reasonable people discussing all those facts.
We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.
There was a huge lie about Russian election interference that was heavily pushed by media companies.
I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.
Very tricky, embedding an assumption - that a particular example conforming to long recognized free-speech exceptions is the same as general suppression of free speech - in your question. Have you stopped beating your wife? Maybe, if you're acting in good faith and really are prepared to consider an answer other than the one you've ordained, you could try phrasing the question in a less prejudicial way.
> because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".
Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.
0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.
Principles aren't worth anything if people don't stick by them when expediency would recommend another course of action.
... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.
> How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method?
Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics.
YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be).
> Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results.
The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
If you have a formula to infallibly decide that A is a "bad actor" for any A in actual practice, you have solved the organizational problem of the past few millennia.
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own.
Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.
Provide a better education for the poor. I don’t mean education about a particular subject; better education in general.
In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”
How on earth is YouTube supposed to do that? They have no control over the however many thousands of public school systems exist in the United States, let alone education in the rest of the world.
Education is only a part of it. One of other parts is trust in the system. Countries with more trustworthy politicians and more humane social policy have better response both to lockdown measures and vaccines.
Agreed, and I'm not OP, but I'd define "general education" to include concepts like effective fact-checking and media literacy, and not just for our children but for older folks as well.
I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube?
Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
Covid vaccine hesitancy does not seem to be about poor education, nor about poverty. The visible antivaxx activists are well-to-do people.
Distrust of government and authorities is a big factor. You have much more vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. than in Nordics (high-trust societies); Russians and Bulgarians are extremely sceptic of their governments, and extremely sceptic of vaccines.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I'd argue it's even more specific than distrust of government; I think it's mostly tribalism, at least in the U.S. I imagine if Trump had reacted differently to the pandemic (acknowledged it was a thing at the beginning and urged or mandated vaccines) I think you'd see a high vaccination rate within his base and a different demographic altogether showing their distrust of government.
Surely it is tribalism, but are you now giving a demonstration?
I have seen Trump boast about vaccines, in his usual distasteful way. I have seen him recommend vaccines. I have not seen him disparage or discourage vaccinations (though he's been extremely clumsy, as he was with everything).
It seemed to me that originally, when Trump boasted about the vaccines, his political opponents (the Democrats in US, and others elsewhere) were the ones who were sceptical about vaccine development - simply because of this tribalism.
I don't know myself; however Steven Pinker published yesterday a new book called "Rationality". He promises to give the readers tools to cope with exactly this type of situations. I don't know if he delivers on it, I just started the book, but I really hope he does.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.
The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.
Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?
The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.
Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.
I would argue it's much, much, worse than what you're saying. I mean this part:
> Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc.
Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support.
If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%.
They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.
Thats the biggest problem with all of this stuff. They designed their whole business to not pay people. Not only their margins would shrink, but the perceived value of the company would shrink _a lot_. They will never do it.
I agree that adding human reviewers could help; but it will not resolve the root cause of YT being designed to boost disinformation in the name of engagement.
It’s encoded in their business model: the paying customer and the source of revenue is the advertiser. Thus, their interests are radically different from those of the users.
I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about such models, especially applied at scale, that I would not even oppose some light, focused regulation that brings it in check.
Otherwise, adding human moderation could maybe help in short term but the business model with find its way to ruin things again.
It may be an outcome, but it certainly wasn’t ”designed to boost disinformation.” If you watch a pro-vaccine videos, it will suggest more videos portraying the vaccine positively.
My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.
I agree it’s imprecise to say it is designed to boost disinformation (which I quoted from the parent); it is more precise to say it was designed to maximise revenue.
Which, due to the business model, is more or less incompatible with presenting the truth. Truth is often uncomfortable, full of caveats and subject to change; rarely does it make for a good story. If it turns out that presenting outright false information (including lying by omission, etc.) as established fact keeps eyeballs for longer and engages more people, then the algorithm would be doing just that.
Sure, if you watch technical content and train the algorithm by watching videos from solid, trusted sources, you can (for now) get it to give you sound recommendations, but I doubt this is reliable or representative. Thus, I believe acting as if YouTube was designed to boost misinformation is not necessarily wrong, and may be more or less an approximation of the average case.
And the problem is not quite people. If people are expected to constantly counteract the efforts of a sophisticated machine that doesn’t have their interests in mind and can spend a million dollars just optimizing its GUI and algorithms, which are then deployed against each individual user (who comes alone, tired after work, low on willpower and with lowered defences from the safety of their home) to exploit the darkest in them in order to show them more ads, then the problem is not quite people—the problem is that we are dealing with an adversary.
I got the vaccine and I'm pro-vaccine in general (for vaccines that are long term preventative, not single-year preventative, ex: never gotten flu vaccine) however I keep finding myself wanting to defend the anti-covid-vaxxers as they're fighting a fight I sort of feel like I understand.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.
Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.
This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories.
You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online?
And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
First, I don't think governments should be banning the speech across the entire internet. But companies with large social platforms can and probably should do so in certain situations, such as a pandemic when conspiracy theories are being spread which make controlling the pandemic more difficult, and can lead to more deaths.
As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.
For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.
Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it.
The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).
People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.
But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.
I believe that tradeoffs between individual freedom and the common good are necessary. So I am biased in favour of intervening when it's necessary.
But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected..
Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform.
It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it.
The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder.
What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.
The covid disinformation is like a religion; no amount of researched data is going to change peoples minds. Believe me, I've been patient in explaining facts and referring to data, but people just report fabricated data memes and click the laughing emoji (which in fact should be removed from Facebook...)
The problem is that bullshit takes significantly less effort to produce than a well-researched counter-argument.
With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
Yeah, fighting ignorance isn't easy. But the alternatives are much worse, ineffective in the long run, and by damaging your credibility, impair your ability to fight rationally in the future.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
> De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?
Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm.
What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic.
The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb.
By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation.
What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.
Squeezing something into a yes-no when the entire argument is in the question's premise is an unreasonable tactic.
"[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided.
And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
If somebody asks for solutions better than X, giving constraints that preclude X is no better than a red herring. Contrary to your claim, MrYellowP never cast doubt on the importance of fighting disinformation, or even tried. It's just a distraction, a derailment, and a favorite tactic of disinformation enablers since forever.
> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.
I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
> I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".
Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.
I think a big part of vaccine resistance is because of the insane levels of propaganda and censorship.
Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden.
Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.
I was quiet about it until the mandate and planning to get vaccinated once everything child out.
After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 735 ms ] threadI will pay anyone here thousands of dollars to inject merely the so-called "inactive" ingredients into themselves every week for a year... I doubt you'll last that long though.
But why be surprised? They grow a lot of greens out of such content. Why kill the golden cow unless you need to (because forced to)?
The fact remains that FB were 7 months earlier to this decision, however well they're delivering on that goal.
If the government get to discriminate which vaccines are good and which are not, why their citizens won't do the same, even if they leave the 'good' bucket empty?
When I travelled to South America I had to do "the" vaccine shot (yellow fever I believe), but nobody would inquire me "which one" and whether it is on some white list.
Remember when they discontinued the control groups? I thought Randomized controlled trials were the gold standard for science
Color me surprised.
Can put it many ways.
Everything after the comma in that sentence is actually the entire point of why §230 was passed; prior case law held that YouTube would be liable for all content if it did the barest amount of moderation.
[0] https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/09/the-first-amendment-and...
* The California state constitution granted a broader right than the US constitution, and the speech in question was required to be permitted under California, but not US, rules.
* The speech in question was admitted by both parties to not reflect upon the shopping center's views, nor was the speech disruptive to its activities. Thus, freedom of association isn't going to kick in.
That last part in particular is key. For social media platforms, it is DEFINITELY the case that the content they host is imputed onto their own views. Alternative sites like Parler or Gab are invariably referred to with a note that they host predominantly far-right content--these sites are known almost entirely by what they carry, not the principles the sites claim to espouse. Even for larger sites like YouTube or Facebook, the ability to find certain kinds of negative content on these sites periodically blows up into major media furors.
A more appropriate precedent is Miami Herald v Tornillo, which held that a Florida state law requiring newspapers to publish candidate replies to articles was unconstitutional.
its just another example of "soft language" https://youtu.be/-m-zHjZ011I
Right now it’s “science”. What will be the next frontier they take on a their responsibility to curate?
Maybe they’ll come for diets?
Maybe they’ll come for social behavior (so called “challenges”)
Maybe they’ll come for political beliefs…
Who knows what they will take on as their responsibility to supervise for the greater good.
I think there is a big difference between quackery and skepticism. Skepticism in moderation is a healthy habit.
You seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
The rather anemic response to the tyrannical state descending on all of us is hardly "hysteria". You think that after we "flatten the curve" for two weeks we are going back to normal … as all kinds of draconian and oppressive laws are being rammed through all legislatures at the same time?
You may think yourself as safe since you were an obedient little citizen to Government Inc., but they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
> the government is mandating the injection of untested corporate concoctions
They've been tested. Thoroughly. The results of those tests are public. And what's with the "corporate" scare word, there? Am I suppose to want my vaccine to have been brewed up by my neighbor or my local mom and pop drug store?
> you have been under prison lockdown home confinement for essentially 18 months now
No I haven't. No-one has. The lockdown lasted longer than two weeks but it finished last summer. Since then I've been shopping, eating at restaurants (usually outdoors, but indoors is available) and seeing friends. My children are at school, many people are back in their offices.
> they will come for you too one day, they always do once you have outlived your usefulness.
I'm going to go ahead and quote yourself back to you: you seem to have lost all ability to objectively see what is going on.
But yeah, yeah, I know. We're all idiot sheep, you're the only one with the 20:20 vision to see what the rest of us idiots don't. It couldn't possibly be that we're all informed and came to a different conclusion to you. Nope, not possible.
When you do that, then they come for your hosting providers and payment processors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_Great_Britain_during_t...
So what? Let them curate whatever they want. There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others. I can create a mailing list and send to everyone on it. Are we going to argue wether spam filtering is censorship too?
What if one day FB is under investigation and FB decides it will only carry FB propaganda and not let any dissenting voices, would that be totally cool?
It certainly is censorship, but users opt in.
> There are other platforms to post my video to. Hell, I can create another one. I can create 50 others.
Its not just YouTube. Its their platform, and your hosting provider, and your DNS provider, and your payment processor, and your bank. Consider what happened to Parler.
Lets not cheer on the loss of a public good because we could theoretically replace it some day.
It's all about opting-in.
You have certain taste, go find that group or found your own.
You don't like certain groups, don't become a member of such group.
You want to have your own private invite only group, go ahead, create your own invite only group.
Flickr never achieved the prominence of FB or IG, or flash in the pan like Tumblr, but I think they built it from the ground up to provide a decent service for everyone with a light touch. For illegal stuff, yeah, you get kicked out, that's legit. Need to escalate to site admins, that's possible too but only if the group admins are acting in bad faith.
Social Justice. Your very existence as part of society affects others, therefore anything that you say or think must conform to the standards of Social Justice the Platform has deemed necessary. If you don't like it, go found your own Platform.
Being an anti-vaxxer isn't a protected class.
This is not at all about the freedom of YouTube, it is about suppression of dissent and really the surreptitious persecution of dissidents.
What is really going on here is no different than when any other tyrannical regime disappears people in the real world, or even when the internet cries out in pain when, e.g., China silences people online. You may think they are being sent off to post and live on the internet somewhere else, but when they leave your sight form the bubble you live in, they are only then even more persecuted and attacked on a constant basis where you aren't even paying attention and are none the wiser to what is really going on.
In the end, "i told you so" will be utterly useless and worthless when the trap snaps shut and they come after you too once they have snuffed out and silenced everyone else they don't like, because this tyrannical authoritarian mindset is never satisfied and will always actively seek out new "dissidents" to persecute and one day you will find yourself on the wrong side too. It's just a matter of time, not whether it will happen.
I'd say yes, this is why. I think that since the FAANG's are so successful that they replaced the public square with themselves, they should have to preserve the freedom of speech just like the old public square used to.
Really? Youtube happens to be the only platform that is restricting content? Even if that were true, the reason this matters is Youtube is a virtual monopoly when it comes to online video. Forget the technicalities. Yes, it's privately owned. Yes, there are other site. Yes, users could set up their own competing website. But, in practice, which is all that matters, Youtube is the one place people go for videos.
There is nothing credible about anti-vax. Not a single thing.
Opinions of the uninformed are worthless. I have yet to speak with a single anti vaxxer who did research and not “research” on the subject (that is did clinical trials or even is able to read an abstract of one). I will repeat it again: if anyone ever finds an actual problem with a vaccine safety study I will personally drop everything and go help them get this information in front of the FDA, the CDC, and the media. Not a single person has taken me up on this offer yet.
What happens when something you care about is being censored, are you going to go through the effort of recreating YouTube just to share a video?
How about the pioneer of mRNA vaccines? [1] [2]
[1]: https://thehighwire.com/videos/mrna-vaccine-inventor-calls-f...
[2]: https://news.yahoo.com/single-most-qualified-mrna-expert-173...
> With another researcher, Malone successfully proposed to the publishers of Frontiers in Pharmacology a special issue featuring early observational studies on existing medication used in the treatment of COVID-19, for which they recruited other guest editors, contributors, and reviewers. The journal rejected two of the papers selected: one on famotidine co-authored by Malone and another submitted by physician Pierre Kory on the use of ivermectin.[21] The publisher rejected the ivermectin paper due to what it claimed were “a series of strong, unsupported claims” which they determined did “not offer an objective nor balanced scientific contribution.”[21] Malone and most other guest editors resigned in protest in April 2021, and the special issue has been pulled from the journal's website.[21]
> Malone was criticized for falsely claiming that the FDA had not granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine in August 2021.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Malone
Sounds to me like he took a hard right turn at some point, and had a conflict of interest besides. Am I missing something?
Allowing this garbage to be spread has been massively, incredibly negligent and reckless, and has caused many, many avoidable deaths.
You do raise an interesting point though. Historically, the production & distribution of content intended for mass consumption was expensive, often requiring entire teams to collaborate. The mere existence of a piece of content was subject to filtering, from conception to production to distribution. Most of this filtering was invisible and possibly unconscious, intrinsic to the moral norms of society at large.
The Internet changed that. Content creation and distribution costs have cratered. A solo creator can spam hours of content every week. We are drowning in a quantity and variety of content unimaginable 30 years ago. Media distribution organisations now rely on soft distribution shaping ('boosting' / 'deboosting') and are starting to craft explicit censorship policies. It is very unclear how this will all play out in the long term, though I would caution that explicit legalism can only go so far.
Sometimes it’s about agenda, but more often than not, it’s about ad revenue and shielding themselves from risk.
This is more about spending themselves from risk because YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for actively spreading misinformation with their recommendation engine, which goes beyond merely hosting it.
If Google REALLY had an agenda, why did they let their recommendation engine push these videos while millions of people around the world died?
The truth is Internet media companies chose to profit from the engagement that misinformation was providing.
All of this censorship you see today is a big meaningless public relations show.
Conglomerates don’t care about free speech and they definitely don’t care about misinformation.
They care about revenue.
popular != true
My main point is they’re not doing this out of some agenda. They’re doing this to deflect that their algorithms PROMOTED misinformation via their recommendation engine.
That’s a step beyond hosting content.
Honestly, this PR strategy is working too. Look at how many dopes are arguing whether YouTube should or shouldn’t censor their content.
Then they came for the antivaxers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an antivaxer.
Then they came for the antimaskers, and I did not speak out— Because I was not an antimasker.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— adapted from Martin Niemöller
I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, maybe because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.
Also, the mandate part of vaccine mandate is legitimately scary. It is reasonable not to trust a big pharma-big government alliance actively controlling our medical life with no ability of the patient to opt out. It is easy to see this ending badly, US healthcare is not known for being full of angelic, selfless and friendly actors. These opinions should be aired.
Are you counting those children as political opponents? I don't think they have a political interest because they can't get it due to regulation yet, and they're also children.
Plus some will have gotten the vaccine despite political opposition to the mandates. Being vaccinated is a good idea in a pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/principle
It is hard to sympathize with people who sow disinformation that costs people lives.
But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.
Principles are tested not when it is convenient for you to follow them.
What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
"In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.[1]
(...)
Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech."
So in short. There are existing laws that can be used to decide what is and what is not protected by freedom of speech.
These laws should in my opinion be applied by judicial system, not invented on the spot by corporations.
People should understand they are responsible for what they say online just as if they used other methods of communication.
And if the exceptions to free speech are incorrect or incomplete, we should demand that the law is corrected in a democratic process rather than having companies act on their own.
EDIT:
elliekelly, I can't answer because I am being rate limited and can't write new comments on HN.
You have surprised me, but it is sadly true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.
If one were charitable to this action, you'd say they're blowing up a silo full of rat poison and disallowing people from adding poison back in.
The balance between "free speech" in the moral, not legal, sense and disinformation is going to be just like "security v. privacy" has been, but perhaps even harder to draw lines for.
If you accept as a premise that most anti-vax sentiment is driven by charlatan media outlets and influencers (and probably nation-state adversaries), and that much of what is repeated by laypeople is an echo of this intentional drivel, and that this drivel is immediately costing not only their own lives, but the lives of others, what do you do? It's literally a disease.
Which the Chinese would say about "people talking about democracy". So there it is: Where, if at all, do we in a "free society" draw the line where harmful disinformation campaigns get cut out?
I argued several years back that the "app layer" of the internet should have more freedom of control over their content, but that the "infrastructure" layer should be expected to be more neutral. In other words, if an anti-vax website or social network got hosted on AWS, it would be a different thing for AWS or a registrar to kick them out.
During the debate over Covid vaccines a common refrain has been "any safety issues have always shown up within a few months of administration." This is straight up misinformation: the Pandemix vaccine is a very high profile counterexample where symptoms first appeared about a year after the first shots were given, and it took another year after that for authorities to acknowledge the link. I only know about this because I occasionally peruse sources which would probably be labeled as "anti-vax," whereas the people repeating the false claim ad nauseam have often picked it up from sources which would be considered "authoritative," including public health authorities. But especially on this issue we have to pretend that there is one "side" which has a monopoly on accurate information.
I wonder how much longer YouTube will even allow you to point out that the manufacturers of the completely-safe-beyond-any-doubt-whatsoever Covid vaccines have been blanket exempted from liability for any injuries caused by their products.
Simple: The right to free speech doesn't mean people have to listen, or guarantee access to a publisher. You can self-publish all you want.
Ability to work with companies is no longer an option if you want any message through.
If you can't post on any social media you are as good as being completely censored.
It never has been. Publishers refusing to publish speech isn’t a new phenomenon. Newspapers, radio and TV stations have been doing it since their inceptions.
What do you think an “editor” does?
> If you can't post on any social media you are as good as being completely censored.
That’s hardly true either. You can run your own websites, mailing lists, or just send stuff in the post. There are plenty of people that don’t use social media, I doubt they feel censored.
It doesn't matter to me if you're against companies censoring any of these things. Be aware that it means you're fine with authoritarianism, so long as it aligns with your politics...
Here is an example. Just search the web for “[name of vaccine] phase 3 pdf”
This is specifically the phase 3 results. I won’t be your search engine: go look for whatever results you want yourself. You can also find the FDA and CDC committee opinions with all the supporting documents and rationale for the granted authorizations which will have even more information on exact what criteria was used to approve the COVID vaccine usage. You can then find similar info from both agencies on other vaccines. If you spot a mistake that does jeopardize the integrity of the studies or the decisions please let me know and I’ll help you contact these agencies and the media. Outside of that, please keep the goalposts where they are.
My entire point (go up the comment tree a bit) is the studies are incomplete and therefore inconclusive at this point in time. And you haven’t displayed this attitude, but is a common attitude that they are golden at this point in time.
"Television isn't the place to learn about the flaws in astrology, or about astronomy, the big bang, conflicting visions of human progress, galileo, and the like... we are totally fine in banning Cosmos and keeping children from learning any alternative to jesus christ our lord and savior"
It’s also getting more and more difficult to look up their arguments, if only for the purpose of developing and reasoning about the counterarguments.
Finally, it can lead to banning legitimate questions, such as the ones about alternative origin theories.
Your whole host getting banned when you make your own youtube is the issue at hand, methinks.
I hope they can survive this.
Flies in the face of jurisprudence accross industrialized nations, as many courts again and again ruled that a platform cannot "do whatever they wan't" if they dominate the market and thus effectively are a public space of opinion.
This is the information version of "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
Better yet, imagine if the government told you that you must post a sign in your front yard that says “vaccines are good” or “vaccines are bad”. That’s a much more relevant analogy here.
Your right to not be prosecuted by the government for what you say is protected by the first amendment. YouTube’s right is similarly protected: they can say or not say what they want on their website without criminal consequences. So which is it, do you want the government to curtail YT’s free speech or not?
So speaking truth can get me banned from YouTube?
• Infections happen in only a small proportion of people who are fully vaccinated, even with the Delta variant. When these infections occur among vaccinated people, they tend to be mild.
• If you are fully vaccinated and become infected with the Delta variant, you can spread the virus to others.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/fully-vac....
It's called fallacy of composition[0] when they cherry pick the cases where it's less effective to infer it's not effective as a whole, and fallacy of division[1] when trying to do reductio ad absurdum by claiming that, if it's effective as a whole, it should also be so under all underlying metrics.
Two sides of the same nonsense coin.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_division
"It doesn't fully stop spread, so it doesn't work as a whole". Thanks for giving another example for my comment.
No, they don't. [0][1]
From [1]
> Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Obviously those 3% and 7% do spread, even though the symptoms are milder. For the 97 and 93% ones there's indeed very limited (if any) shedding [3].
Now that's holding different bars, because asymptomatic measles infections are less contagious by themselves, regardless of vaccination status, unlike COVID-19 which is still relatively contagious while asymptomatic. So you're attributing a positive point of measles infections as a fault of the COVID-19 vaccines, which is, as you might see, a pretty misinformed take.
Also, sterilizing immunity as you seem to understand doesn't really exist, in case that's the misconception you have [2]. In the end it's all about viral load, route of exposure, and level and type of immunity. A mucosal vaccine would behave more in the way your expecting intramuscular ones to work[4].
[0] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/67/9/1315/5034094?login...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/vaccination.html
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/steriliz...
[3] https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/189/Supplement_1/S165/8...
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00583-2
The fact is that the efficiency of the vaccine is being understood as we go. We started with the initial dose and are now considering second and third boosters because the efficiency diminished faster than expected
That’s beside the point of the WaPo article. YouTube is making the decision to remove any content that goes against vaccines, based in truth or not.
Is this the kind of information you're worried will be deleted, that is, gross misunderstandings of reality in the best case, outright lies to generate engagement in the worst?
That is the case for the COVID19 vaccines. Visualization here[1]. The domain might be banned, but the code, snapshots, and the chart output here[2].
[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/vaccine-breakthrough/
[2]: https://github.com/nanis/covid19-breakthrough
At least compare with a previous wave to see if there's a change according to vaccination rates (spoiler: there is), because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
For example, the CDC overwrites the previous information with every week's update. That is why the repo exists. To preserve any time series information in one place with a verifiable way to extract it out of ever-changing HTML pages and put it in a table.
In theory, the CDC ought to be able to put the relevant information in a table. At a minimum, we'd need `date`, `locality`, age distributions of fully, partially, and never vaccinated populations, age distribution of people who are hospitalized due to COVID19, and age distribution of people who died from COVID19.
Ideally, we'd have a data set consisting of one row per hospitalization/death with relevant dimensions such as age, sex, first shot date, second shot date, type of vaccine, locality, other conditions etc.
But, we do not. Because the bureaucracy has not deemed it appropriate to collect or share that information.
Instead, we need to rely on free form HTML pages where the provenance of the data are not clear.
What I have done is made visible one bit of information that would otherwise not be available: The normalized rate of fully vaccinated people being hospitalized or dying from the disease against which they are fully vaccinated has been steadily increasing over time.
The main reason is that the vaccines are not as effective as the 95% number that has been flouted time and again. Of course, it takes time for a person to be exposed, diagnosed, hospitalized, and maybe die, so the revelation has been happening over time instead of instantaneously.
> because as it is it's a worthless, albeit pretty, representation of data.
If I hadn't taken the snapshots and extracted the information from those pages, there would be no time series of breakthrough hospitalization and death rates anywhere. It seems to me it is worth something to save that information.
Plus, Biden told us the rate of hospitalization from COVID19 among the fully vaccinated was 1/160,000. The real number is 10 times that[1]. Isn't it worth something to know this?
[1]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-4NQBFWEAMzATQ?format=png
And this is the actual misinformation. Recent study done in the UK with 100k subjects randomly sampled from the population found that two vaccines only reduce the amount of infections by about 55%: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/english-study-finds-50-60-r...
So as long as people are not getting vaccinated everyone should keep using masks and keep social distance. Following that idea anti vax movements are more dangerous than we initially think.
As ever, IMO, the problem isn’t the hosting or the banning, it’s the algorithms. I don’t care whether YouTube hosts anti-vaccine activists, I care that they actively promote anti-vaccine content to users simply because it’s proven to get clicks and earn them money. Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube itself is responsible for this disinformation getting so much traction.
How many people died because of increased infections? Is that Youtube's fault or anyone else who repeated the CDCs guidelines?
Can as much be said for anti vaxxers? Did they make the mistake and recant it? Did they change their view with new evidence? No, they're misinformed and close-minded. They ignored millions upon millions of safe vaccine uses, pointing to unsubstantiated edge cases and ridiculous conspiracies. The CDC was not buying into such rubbish and I hope they never do.
Now in this case youtube is probably right "scientifically", but what if they weren't like with masks? You basically have 0 discussion or challenge allowed to the authorities position.
And lets just bring in the recent controversy here, a panel of scientists said third shots shouldn't be administered. Yet the government decided they should. Which position will youtube censor?
There’s no obligation for YouTube to give terrorists a platform. Regarding a booster shot, I’m sure they will make reasonable calls, nearly exclusively only silencing bad-faith actors. Much like their policy towards CP or terrorist content.
You didn't address a very important point that the parent comment made which is that trusted authorities like the CDC are more likely to correct their mistakes whereas anti-vax propagandists will never retract their statements. That's part of what makes the CDC trustworthy compared to the propagandists.
The fact that the CDC or any other trusted public organization has technically made a mistake in the past seems like an irrelevant distraction. Haven't you ever had an argument with a spouse or family member where you called out something they were doing and they came back with, "Look who's taking."? And that felt like a bullshit tactic, right?
Accusations of hypocrisy are a really common fallacy in debate. They contribute nothing to the discussion at hand and are basically just an appeal to emotion. And what you're doing is just a version of that.
Well good thing that'll never happen again, right? /s
Given the repeated failings and intentional or unintentional misinformation we've seen thus far, why do you believe them messing up is a "special case"?
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-firs...
From that article:
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
In fact, if there was a supply problem, the best populations to give vaccines to first may have been some of the most "privileged" people in our society (even if we don't like them). Frequent travelers, college kids who are going to party anyway, etc. (Of course, people who work in retail stores, or front like health workers were obvious groups that nobody disagreed with.)
The point is, _who_ got the vaccine first wasn't decided by science, but by politics.
I admit to fudging my eligibility in order to get the vaccine early. I may do this again to get the booster if I decide I need it.
That's okay to you?
I think it's absolutely abhorrent. Governments technically have a full monopoly on violence/power and to have them lie to you for what - the "greater good?"
You're also putting the entirely of all people hesitant or unwilling to get the vaccination into a large group which you can then generalize (albeit foolishly)
I hate that the CDC did that action, only because it gave skeptics another reason to distrust them. But it is 100% clear to anyone who, you know, was alive when it happened that they did that to prevent a mask shortage for those who needed them most.
I would rather have seen some emergency declaration that N95s must be seized from stores and go to healthcare workers, but that would have caused perhaps an even bigger panic. Because then, everyone would have freaked out, vs. what they did. Now, we only have people who were already going to distrust government giving a shit about the mask declaration last year.
Back to good-faith vs. bad-faith: I'm not certain there is more than a hair's worth of anti-vaccine content that is produced with good intention or even attempted to be backed by statistics. Put simply, I wager there is no anti-vaccine content produced out of a legitimate, well-founded public interest. It's charlatans, fools, anti-science and anti-authority interests.
What is youtube's position? Will it delete all government communications because the scientists said on, or will it delete all scientific discussion because the government said yes?
Anyway, like I've said in another post and in a blog before, I think Youtube has less responsibility to be a neutral platform than ISPs and registrars do. If you want to host content, you should be able to do it yourself with Internet connectivity and DNS - IMO those should be "common carriers" that don't get the privilege of bias the same way platforms like Youtube do.
Think swallowing a tube of veterinary-grade medicine is safer than an injection that hundreds of millions of people have gotten with few problems? Go for it, on your home server with a domain name.
Now, I'm gonna get some coffee.
We should listen to ourselves. If we don't have enough information to make an informed decision, then study and acquire that information. No one is responsible for you except for you - with the caveats of children/dependents being not responsible for themselves.
What Youtube or any other internet information says is irrelevant until you decide otherwise.
Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?
So which hypothesis would have most likely been true at the time? Not to mention that Dr. Fauci himself had admitted that it was a noble lie (aka pure propaganda and falsehoods).
Especially because it usually brought up by people that are consistently wrong about pretty much everything, while propagating active lies, as a defense against anyone pointing out the utter BS they are spreading. That gets tiresome.
Or I would suggest that thought police should lock those with the above-mentioned opinions up.
They didn't do a good or a bad thing - they were a blank canvas someone put their art(video) on. Recently, that blank canvas is only willing to have certain art present on it - that's not a good thing. The only thing keeping it going is an inertial mass of subscribers, which over [possibly a long] time will dissipate.
Maybe a poorly thought out analogy but think about cars. There are a ton of car accidents every year, a good number of which result in death. But we don’t ban cars because they’re essential for the way many people live. But if 50% of all car journeys resulted in accidents? Maybe we’d be having a different conversation.
Although I do agree with you that anti-vaxers should be treated no different than common terrorists; as Americans, under the law, they have a right to declare that they are terrorists and give their little illogical terrorist rants. The First Amendment is very clear on what is not covered, and the courts have repeatedly confirmed that being wrong, being disingenuous, and lying is covered (as long as you are not committing perjury or other similar, actual, crimes).
Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they penned this: in their day, they also had their form of denialism. The first amendment is, essentially, "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubts.", but weaponized against the idiots that shall forever plague us.
That said, if a rational adult, one that we have, as a society, cannot tell the difference between the truth and the lies, then we have both failed as a society, but also have trusted an adult to actually act like one and they, personally, made the choice to act like a spoiled brat; acting like a spoiled brat is not a victimless crime, and sometimes, but not always, they are punished like an adult for violating the trust of the society that they live in.
"Vaxxers", as you have so put it, (or as I like to call them, normal human beings) have reached a level of proof that vaccines are safe, and that, specifically, the COVID-19 vaccines currently in deployment are several magnitudes safer than, say, contracting COVID-19 itself.
"Anti-Vaxxers", however, have (un?)intentionally proved that vaccines work, performing one of the largest voluntary human drug trials in history as the placebo group. Their sacrifice shall, hopefully, not be forgotten (lest we repeat it).
No one has a right to harm another person. Knowingly transmitting an infectious disease, after being repeatedly informed that it is, indeed, an infectious disease, and that the victims, worldwide, total almost 5 million worldwide and continues to climb, and they still continue to spread it, that is what makes someone a terrorist: you harm, maim, and kill people to spread discord. Why you do it is immaterial, "I didn't know", "I didn't understand", "I was following orders", are not excuses in a court of law.
You can now make a non-emotionally decision whether removing it or not is actually a good idea because the arbitrary appeal to emotion evens out.
This is the way think about such stuff, not by making arbitrary emotional "arguments" which can not be proven or disproved and may as well be completely irrelevant or even in reverse.
Whenever the "logic" of "X people (less) die if we do Y" is used its an attempt to make it emotional instead of rational it should ring some bells and raise some flags. You can see this with autonomous driving or gun control an many other topics. Its some kind of appeal to emotion fallacy combined with false cause fallacy. And instead of convincing anyone or find common ground it just pushes people to more extreme opposition. Because you "literally kill people if you disagree with X".
Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
Anyway you missed the point where I assumed the death evens out aka try make an argument that isn't based on emotion an "backed" by numbers we can not know.
>Also, I would love to see what common ground looks like with anti-vaxxers. I don’t think they are willing to give an inch on this, but willing to be proven wrong.
I'm not an anti-vaxxer but I'm p sure the common ground for most of them would be to let people decide. Anti-vaxxers who want to remove pro-vaccine information to prevent people from dying form the vaccine seem to be rather rare. As far as I know most are perfectly fine with anyone voluntary injecting toxic and dying. They might be wrong on almost everything but that doesn't mean common ground can not be found.
Also by picking the furthest away extreme position to proof no common ground is possible is kind silly. We wan common ground for the majority on both sides not with the extremists.
People who refuse vaccines for dangerous contagious diseases directly affect others: they may pass that disease to me, to my children, to my elderly family members, etc. At this point their choice is causing me harm. What is my remedy if this happens? I can’t sue them for the death of a loved one, I can’t hold them accountable criminally.
The only path forward I see is that if you choose to not vaccinate, that you also choose to fully isolate yourself until the pandemic is over: no going to work, school, social gatherings, etc. I would be comfortable with that common ground. But that’s not what is being offered by you or even those who refuse to get vaccinated. It is always the pro-vaccine/science/reason people that must give something up for the benefit of those refusing to get vaccinated, which is less common ground and more of a one sided demand.
If you dont want to be run over at any cost its your task to stay away form cars. Similarly if you dont wanna get covid at any cost its your task to hide in the basement and dont let anyone in vaccinated or not.
Alternatively you can accept that life is a deadly risk and do the common sense things to reduce the risk for you and your loved ones and move on. This may be taking the vaccine, putting on a mask, avoiding crowded places or even ware a warn west so you are less likely to be run over by a car. All of that is fine. It stops being fine if you demand others to do something so you can feel safe. Especially if what you demand infringed basic rights and/or is not solving the problem but just lowers the risk by an unknown possibly insignificant amount.
Its reasonable to demand that cars have working breaks because they need them anyway. The breaks aren't there to protect you from cars. Its however not reasonable to demand that all cars have advanced pedestrian detection that makes in impossible to run over people. It doesn't matter if you would feel safer that way or that it would safe X numbers of lives. Not because we dont care about lives but because making such a requirement would simply make most car driving people criminals and not actually save lives. Similarly if you demand unvaccinated people to stay at home, all you get is that you criminalizing people for leaving their home. It wont make them take the vaccine and it wont protect you from covid.
There is no both sides to the vaccine debate. COVID-19 vaccine information led to one of the first rabies deaths in a long time because the treatment involves a vaccine given after a bite, and all this anti-vaxx propaganda is doing nothing but sowing FUD about one of the most obvious cost-benefit analysis’s that can be done in the field of medicine. And during a pandemic no less. YouTube has no obligation to suffer these fools.
Bravo, YouTube.
So should we ban all junk food advertising on Youtube? Also, how about a ban on all pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube (which is the norm in most countries)?
Aren't they already 'demonetised' (as Youtube terms its withdrawal of adverts and hence money)?
I agree though, simply not recommending them (i.e. you can be linked to them, or get them from search results only) would be better.
That affects only content creator. YouTube, even if not directly profiting from ads, profits indirectly from you staying on the site and moving on to other 'monetized' videos eventually.
It’s just not on YouTube.
We don’t live in the reality where the local book store and media owner keeping information away actually had an impact.
This only effects YouTube. Of the millions of other sites out there.
I think even the smart people are a bit stuck on YouTubes marketing effects on their limbic brain versus the reality; the bad info is just a Google search or friend posting in private away for anyone still.
YouTube is not the center of the internet.
“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” - Joe Biden
there was never a basis for this statement, making it clear disinformation. Grass roots research doesn't fit the bill of what that word means.
It's proven that the spike protein accumulates in the ovaries after vaccine injection. As the FDA claims, there is no long term data. Anecdotally I've heard many pregnancies ended from the shot.
It's not FUD to be concerned about female fertility. We have no long term data and we know the spike protein accumulates in the ovaries from mRNA injections.
> This theory comes from a misreading of a study submitted to the Japanese regulator. The study involved giving rats a much higher dose of vaccine than that given to humans (1,333 times higher).
> Only 0.1% of the total dose ended up in the animals' ovaries, 48 hours after injection. Far more - 53% after one hour and 25% after 48 hours - was found at the injection site (in humans, usually the arm). The next most common place was the liver (16% after 48 hours), which helps get rid of waste products from the blood.
> And those promoting this claim cherry-picked a figure which actually referred to the concentration of fat found in the ovaries.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57552527
"Anecdotally I've heard many pregnancies ended from the shot."
No you haven't. You've heard of pregnancies ending in people that happen to also have been vaccinated but you have no proof connecting the two. The reality is that a lot more pregnancies fail than anyone cares to admit in public because couples tend to be private it about it. This is nothing new. It's heartbreaking for everyone that experiences it and anti-vaxxers latching onto it to serve their agenda is incredibly sad.
While a good majority(like me) had it and it worked out well for us (risk vs reward wise), some might not be so lucky and it pissed me off that some people are like frogs in a well with a very narrow viewpoint.
It's now proven that it can cause death. 1 death is more than enough to justify not having it. Neither you or anyone have the right to force people to take that risk for the benefit of others. I only took it because I covered all most my bases and my chances of survival in case of Covid were pretty bad.
It wouldn't be the first time that problems appear after a long time and take ages to be proven. The most extreme example of that that I think is thalidomide.
EDIT: If you are going to reduce it to a game of numbers. Some risk side effects so that the majority goes on with their lives, then... when communists were leveling a church and the houses of 500 people could use the same justification since they were building blocks of flats for 10000 people on that area it was justified?
Not to defend Biden, but the vaccine decreases the probabilities of getting COVID. You still get infected with sars-cov-2, and you are probably still contagious, but it's unlikely you get COVID (as in COronaVIrus Disease, the disease produced by sars-cov-2 virus (or coronavirus), that is the thing that eventually kills you and/or jeopardizes the public health system).
Or maybe Google is concerned. And Facebook just doesn't care.
But the root cause is "algorithms for increasing engagement will prefer shock content." Solve that, and they wouldn't need to band-aid issues like this.
Is that overboard?
There are simpler explanations.
https://youtu.be/L5pUA3LsEaw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
The algorithm has only made the site worse in my experience and I always go directly to my subscriptions to be able to at least see things I'm subbed to.
hell I would not be surprised if with in 5 years they remove the subscribe button completely, replacing it with just the notification bell
I've also noticed that many content creators are now offering email newsletters (such as Tom Scott) and encouraging subscribers to connect outside of YouTube, presumably as a response to this.
This is obnoxious since I tend to watch series of documentaries, and I prefer to watch many episodes in a row. Stuff just poofs out of existence.
The feed on the home page is recommendations. That may, by chance, include things you're subscribed to but it will also include other recommended content and possibly not recommend things you are subscribed to as it's not meant to be a second copy of the subscription feed.
If I subscribe to a youtuber with a back-catalog of several years of videos, I want recommendations of those prior videos, not only their brand new ones.
And yes, there is the subscriptions feed, but it only shows new videos from subscribed-to channels; it doesn't function as a 'recommended' list for your subscriptions, which is what I miss and want.
It's a hard problem to solve.
Changing the Algorithm would mean the content is less discoverable but could still spread outside the platform via alternative methods, such as Tweets, Links, emails, slack, etc.
There is a difference, and the effect is not the same
People keep repeating that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and more speech is more money for YouTube.
Unsurprisingly, more speech on this subject has not managed to drown out the nonsense, but it has done a great job of amplifying it.
The reason freedom of speech is a must in a free society is that speaking is the same as thinking. Who watches the watchmen? There is no amount of "misinformation" that could ever hold a candle to the absolute evil that has been perpetrated throughout history by outlawing or banning or shunning free speech.
Funny thing about those other vaccines. They protect against viruses that we already have collective heard immunity for.
As it happens, it turns out that herd immunity substantial reduces community transmission, and thus makes vaccines appear more effective. Without that, you’re pretty much always gonna get breakthrough infections.
So you want the COVID vaccine to be as effective as other vaccines. Then get vaxxed, and get everyone in your community vaxxed.
Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.
Plus a healthy dose of disinformation about the safety and efficacy profiles of these therapies.
If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
As someone with a pre-existing heart condition I'd like to read that research. Do you have any links?
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
There are roughly 53,300,000 people aged 18-29 and ~3400 deaths (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...), which works out to 1 in 16,000. Of course, you say, that's assuming all 18-29 year-olds have had COVID, which is wrong. There's only been 7,400,000 cases among that age group (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254271/us-total-number-...), giving a 1 in 2200 risk.
Which has the amusing paragraph:
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34237049/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34473684/
>At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
I don't think I'll ever be able to understand vaccine skeptics.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
Problem: TOTALITARIANISM!
No shirt, no shoes, no service.
TOTALITARIANISM!!!
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Hughes_(daredevil)
Conjecture is as conjecture does
You didn't see it so it must not exist?
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
That doesn't work. It didn't work for climate change and it won't work for vaccines.
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
BTW, ever heard of Duane Gish?
And No. never heard of him.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
Kids living with their grandparents should definitely get vaccinated.
> The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness.
4.5 million dead people later ...
> I find myself in the conservative camp
... peteradio somehow comes to the wrong conclusion.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
The analogy simply does not hold.
Not only is it misused, the doctrine Holmes established was walked back (by Holmes himself!) and hasn't been the standard since 1969.
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.
There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."
This is not as simple as putting more information out there.
Censorship can keep good information out.
No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications.
I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.
I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.
We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.
Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?
> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.
> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.
The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.
53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.
The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.
I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I'm not proposing full tolerance of the intolerant. Rather, as Karl Popper explained, political institutions within a liberal democratic society are the most appropriate scope within which the people's will regarding what to tolerate is expressed. In other words, contact your representatives about what needs to be outlawed, and until something is outlawed, show liberal tolerance—which absolutely includes refuting bad ideas in public debate.
Regarding YouTube, their choice to deplatform people is their choice -- and it's not against the law, since they own the platform. I certainly disagree with the wisdom behind their choice. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves; but I'm tolerating it even as I argue against it in public debate.
(also, I didn't downvote you)
How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?
How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
[citation needed]. Popper's personal opinion that you linked to (and that is now used in a much more absolutist way that originally intended by its author, who never intended to cheer for censorship and crackdowns in name of democracy) isn't data and Full stop isn't a proof. Yes, Popper was smart. No, he wasn't an oracle of unquestionable wisdom.
Tell me, how was legalization of marijuana in the U.S. won? After all, chucking people into prison for decades is quite some intolerance. Did the MJ lovers stage an insurrection?
No, they won at the ballot box, which is the tolerant way. Not by reverse oppression of their enemies.
To disprove a sentence that says "every time", one example to the contrary is enough. This is your example. For another, take gay rights. There wasn't a gay revolution that would smite the religious conservatives and crush them.
Democracy and liberal freedom is best upheld when (a) the government is founded on the principles of liberty and rule-of-law, and (b) the people treasure those principles and refuse to tolerate a government that fails to uphold them.
The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.
For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.
As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.
And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.
Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.
Mind you, damn thank you for saying that out loud. People on the internet sure love to jump on the wagon of pointing out the differences of instances from a general case that often aren't even relevant for the argument.
These devices have various messaging/social media services that due to social expectations we use to interact with friends, family.
It's very, very hard to laser curate the kind of messaging you get, even if you know how to do it and are willing to do it (for example for some stuff you have to mute friends and family or otherwise block them).
Newspapers were much more hit and miss. You'd have to go out and buy a newspaper, their region was at best national, etc.
It's the proverbial drinking from a firehose.
The printing press was huge in relative terms, though. There was no mass media before that. The average person was unlikely to be able to read, much less to own any books. Communicating across even relatively short distances was infeasible. Most of the media they consumed was either from the church or at least regulated by the church.
The printing press was huge because the normal person's sphere of possible influence grew 100x. Much in the way that we've 100x-ed again with things like YouTube. The relative increase in sphere of influence is similar, the absolutes are massively different.
The printing press was still running at humanly achievable speeds. The new stuff is super sonic. We can't cope with it. Plus with people living longer and longer and the natural neuroplasticity decrease that comes with age, more and more people are vulnerable.
It's the kind of thing that will need to be regulated very carefully and very strongly, because that's what laws are: barriers for when the human psyche fails. Imperfect barriers, but better than nothing.
Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?
A bit different eh? It's unaccountable bad actors on the other side of the world.
It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848
More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eisenstein#The_Print...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
Stuff like this was impossible before.
And the case that Eisenstein makes, at book length, is "yes".
She's building off earlier work (notably McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy), and you can find numerous prior and subsequent references.
I've copiled a few here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course.
Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem.
Why do we always have to be Doing Something(TM)?
"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?
So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.
Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).
This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).
And even 4chan has moderation.
Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.
In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.
I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan
So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?
There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.
You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.
Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.
The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum
You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.
A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.
The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.
In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.
>4chan has moderation
Please, elaborate
Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.
I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.
Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.
4.5 Million Deaths Later...
Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.
This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?
The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.
"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.
Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.
Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.
And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/alberta-childrens-...
But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?
And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.
The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.
2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.
And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/delta-var...
Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:
Alberta: 2.3
United States: 3.01
Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:
Alberta: 268 / 4.421 = 60.6
United States: 62.5
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths...
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-icu-patients-per-mi...
https://globalnews.ca/news/8244271/delta-variant-covid-19-st...
You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.
I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.
tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
- Jen Psaki 7/15/2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0aWGsxyYPg
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-v...
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
https://immunizebc.ca/ask-us/questions/are-there-long-term-s....
Is there some common knowledge that counters this that I'm missing?
And it's utter BS in the real world - did they even stop to think that some countries have given out millions of doses of Pfizer over the last 8 months, and if "all cause mortality was unaffected" compared to the pandemic situation in 2020, it would be obvious as hell. It's therefor a very extra-ordinary claim, no proof whatsoever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699864
Why are they pushing this disinformation?
> Why are they pushing this disinformation?
either one of the following groups: russian/china disinformation bots or paid shills. people that like to be "in on the know" and take contrary viewpoints that are not mainstream. people that have fully bought into the above misinformation schemes. people that have taken to it like a political fight where reason goes out the window unless you are "winning".
I ultimately think that a lot of people "broke" during the pandemic looking for some "enemy" to fight since the reality of a wild virus that just happened was too scary a thought. many people need the world to make sense and want control. some control of that is making up enemies like china releasing the virus intentionally and all the world governments working together in tandem to somehow control everyone.
"During the blinded, placebo-controlled period, 15 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 14 in the placebo group died; during the open-label period, 3 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 2 in the original placebo group who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered to be related to BNT162b2 by the investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4)."
Look into statins if you want to understand bias and corruption in clinical studies.
Giving a medication to over 20,000 people and not saving a single life in 6 months is pretty weak. An NNT of over 20k is unheard of. Anything above 10-20 (not 10k) should make people at least be allowed to ask questions.
The number of people that got covid or severe covid in the control group were many, many times more as the vaccine protected many from getting it in the first place.
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
I’m fine now but it was scary.
Do you have any principles when it comes to freedom of information? Just curious how far authoritarian you are.
Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.
Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).
Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form.
I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.
https://www.reuters.com/article/entertainment-us-usa-televsi...
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/privacy-and-...
Individuals can always control what they see by not using YouTube.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2110475
(I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)
The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did.
Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there.
> Just a no win situation
I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.
In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
It's not necessarily that simple, although it probably is under current state laws.
But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.
But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.
YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.
And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.
I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.
wildly wrong take on what the first amendment means....
I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.
We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.
I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.
Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.
0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.
... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.
Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics.
YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be).
> Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results.
The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own.
Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.
In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”
I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube?
Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
And in what timescale, 2 generations?
Distrust of government and authorities is a big factor. You have much more vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. than in Nordics (high-trust societies); Russians and Bulgarians are extremely sceptic of their governments, and extremely sceptic of vaccines.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I have seen Trump boast about vaccines, in his usual distasteful way. I have seen him recommend vaccines. I have not seen him disparage or discourage vaccinations (though he's been extremely clumsy, as he was with everything).
It seemed to me that originally, when Trump boasted about the vaccines, his political opponents (the Democrats in US, and others elsewhere) were the ones who were sceptical about vaccine development - simply because of this tribalism.
(Note: I'm not American, not in either tribe.)
https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters...
Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.
The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.
Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?
The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.
Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.
This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.
> Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.
Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc.
Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support.
If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust.
Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%.
They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.
While I'm not privy to YouTube's organizational structure, I'd be very surprised if their customers don't receive plenty of human support.
Note that you are not their customer. Advertisers are.
And I am a customer, I pay for their services.
It’s encoded in their business model: the paying customer and the source of revenue is the advertiser. Thus, their interests are radically different from those of the users.
I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about such models, especially applied at scale, that I would not even oppose some light, focused regulation that brings it in check.
Otherwise, adding human moderation could maybe help in short term but the business model with find its way to ruin things again.
My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.
Which, due to the business model, is more or less incompatible with presenting the truth. Truth is often uncomfortable, full of caveats and subject to change; rarely does it make for a good story. If it turns out that presenting outright false information (including lying by omission, etc.) as established fact keeps eyeballs for longer and engages more people, then the algorithm would be doing just that.
Sure, if you watch technical content and train the algorithm by watching videos from solid, trusted sources, you can (for now) get it to give you sound recommendations, but I doubt this is reliable or representative. Thus, I believe acting as if YouTube was designed to boost misinformation is not necessarily wrong, and may be more or less an approximation of the average case.
And the problem is not quite people. If people are expected to constantly counteract the efforts of a sophisticated machine that doesn’t have their interests in mind and can spend a million dollars just optimizing its GUI and algorithms, which are then deployed against each individual user (who comes alone, tired after work, low on willpower and with lowered defences from the safety of their home) to exploit the darkest in them in order to show them more ads, then the problem is not quite people—the problem is that we are dealing with an adversary.
I don't think this is a good takeaway, they can always replace bans with deprioritizing, so banning is a conscious choice.
Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.
Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.
You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.
And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.
For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.
The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).
People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.
If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.
But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.
But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected..
Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform.
It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it.
The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder.
What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.
Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.
With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
Better to have it out in public.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time, so in a way deplatforming worked.
And I believe that it's better than the alternative of letting disinformation run amok in a pandemic.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
Got any ideas that might actually have a non-zero chance of working?
Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm.
What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic.
The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb.
By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation.
What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.
"[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided.
And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.
I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).
Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.
Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden.
Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.
This is called "spite". Turns out that the aphorism about one cutting of their nose to spite their face is incredibly apt.
After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.
A large media company like Google banning content that is heavily politicized by partisan politics is a big threat.