I used to work hard to assume the best about right-wing narratives. That started to change when they refused to accepted the election results even after bringing it to SCOTUS.
Since January 6th I assume the opposite: Many of these people are working to destabilize our democracy. I have zero interest in accommodating them.
It does though. The election fraud narrative and covid anti-vaxx efforts are being driven by many of the same forces. One public point of nexus is "Faith and Freedom" and "Health and Freedom" Conferences which overlap each other and "Stop the Steal"/Jan6.
Because it's the basis of doing literally anything. Why did I walk out and get in my car? Because I assumed it would start and be capable of driving me somewhere.
I mean, it is "their" democracy too. Also, advocating for corporate censorship is not helping to stabilize democracy, it is eroding one of its foundations: the ability of citizens to freely express themselves.
My point is that those working to undermine or overturn democracy are using freedom to expression to undermine that
very freedom. That is outside the bounds of toleration.
A case in point is Christina Bobb, who works as a propagandist for OANN under 1st amendment journalistic protections, but showed her true colors on Jan 6 by working with Rudy G and John Eastman at the Willard to overturn the election result. At that point I think she is no longer entitled to legal protections afforded journalists.
Democrats have formally disputed every presidential election they have lost since 2000 (before, during, and after the official electoral tallying). Leftist mobs were rioting through every major city last year and storming plenty of government and federal buildings (even in DC).
If that is not working to overturn democracy, then neither are a handful of people running past the barricades at the Capitol building, who harmed nobody.
Hundreds of cases of Assault on Police Officer occurred there, bud, many captured on video. Many already charged, many more to come. Those assaults won't be forgotten.
Wrt to the rioting around the Floyd protests: what Federal building in DC was stormed? Crowds/mobs were close to the White House, but not into the actual grounds.
Its a bad song and I don't want to listen to it to get all the lyrics. [0]
>Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it, ayy, ayy (They just planned it)
>Biden said the jab stop the spread, it was lies (I remember)
That is all I can see as far as "medical information" goes. What a joke. This song is bad, it would have fallen off the charts if they just let things go.
>Biden said the jab stop the spread, it was lies (I remember)
Thing is, if I remember rightly Biden did spread outright misinformation that falsely claimed the vaccine was a lot more effective than it actually is using his platform as president, and got checked on it by the BBC (though maybe not the mainstream US media)...
Amen. I just wish that all politicians would remain more consistent in their views, or at the very least admit that they previously said the opposite but have since changed their mind.
I do not intend for this post to be anti Biden. Trump is also a hypocrite, just not on his pro covid vaccine stance.
You should also be open about when you choose to disagree - "I know my constituents believe Y, and I see their arguments. I have spent much time evaluating it and assigned some of my best staff to make arguments for and against, and will be voting X."
All they had to do was sit tight, leave it alone and let it be forgotten. Countless others and I would never have seen it. Thanks to Google's censorship, people will now know about this song.
Right? We (the US) have enough trouble planning meaningful infrastructure in our communities, let alone a global conspiracy in order to bring about some new world order, apparently coordinated with every other world government.
But, I’ve heard the “planned” argument levied against the CCP, and that it was a bio weapon, and this was a planned release. That argument, while still far fetched, is at least in the realm of possibility for me.
I should have worded my post better. I dont want to listen to the song (again) to find out exactly what was said.
After the reading the news article in full, I found the video and watched it once in full. After that, I searched and found the lyrics to the video. I'm over explaining, but I'm rate limited.
I dont see much that would support the reason YouTube gave for banning it.
Meh. It's a private platform. They don't have to give any excuses for blocking a video.
Is it de facto censorship? Maybe. But I think we as a society agree that social media platforms have a responsibly to censor harmful content in order to protect the public.
Would we have wanted social platforms to give a voice to the "American First" movement of the 1930s? [1]
> Would we have wanted social platforms to give a voice to the "American First" movement of the 1930s?
Of course, it's part of democratic debate. Remember America stayed out of World War 2 until Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh's argument from the video you link is completely reasonable.
I don't know a gentle, polite way to point out that you've hit every platitude in its most thoughtless, vacuous form:
- You can still disagree with a private company
- We as a society are thoroughly divided on that, and many disagree that issues of rights and morality are decided democratically
- Political speech you disagree with has value
They may have a right to do so, but given the importance of social media this gives those companies immense power. For right-wing Americans, simply shrugging off blatant targeting like this is politically suicidal. At this point, their only recourse is to use government power to push back, so we shouldn't be surprised if moves like this push red Americans further from libertarianism into more authoritarian views of government. To not do so is untenable.
Well there is the crowd chant which sort of kind of sounds like “Let’s go Brandon” if you have hearing problems, but insofar as I can tell they don’t also say “horse paste.”
I had to look up what the "Let's go Brandon" chant was; forgive me for being crass, English isn't my first language but it sounds like they're saying "Fuck Joe Biden". Judging by the comments in the video I saw, I think that is what they're actually saying rather than encouraging the young man being spoken to by the person with the microphone.
The actual Brandon thought it was funny, as the chant probably aligned with his personal feelings.
In case anyone else doesn't get the joke, the reporter (as most reporters do) was covering for Biden when she pretended his noisy opposition was something else [1]. In other words, it was an unusually obvious attempt at a tawdry cover-up. Thus, the mockery in calling Biden "Brandon".
If the reporter lacks credibility with the audience they should be fired
If a performer, a wrestler, a musician, an actor loses credibility with there audience, you should get a replacement.
You heard correctly. A reporter said it was "Lets go Brandon" in stark contrast to obvious reality, and the originally Ironic and now more widespread adoption of that has confused the situation further.
Yes, people said the reporter was "misreporting" the chant but she was barely containing her laughter and it was clearly a joke. Everyone knew what the crowd was chanting.
> The single line referencing COVID is this: "Green light, mandate
Inaccurate. The line "Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it" is also referencing COVID, and pushing a false and dangerous conspiracy theory about it.
Perhaps instead of censoring the song, YouTube could require that the uploader include at the end of it an explanation of what it means for a pandemic to not be "real". Does it mean that COVID doesn't exist, and people are just pretending to have symptoms? Is that what "they" planned?
By actually getting people to talk through their beliefs, and state them clearly, society might be able to consider all opinions and have a conversation, rather than accepting the idea that our technological gatekeepers can be trusted to evaluate them correctly on our behalf.
I could argue that this "pandemic" is not of actual severity sufficient to require the responses; and "it ain't real" is an opinion being voiced, which is more important than a duty to "protect the public from misinformation".
But I'm not. The proper counter argument to this Stalinist "you can't say that," bullshit is to keep saying it, louder.
I think it's childish to act like you're being wronged, and threatening a defiant tantrum "this is Stalinist bullshit, keep saying it, louder" in response to someone else deciding not to host some disinformation. Are you truly the victim today, in this pandemic?
He is being wronged, as are you. Each and every time a company takes freedom away from their users they are being wronged, and when the company is as big as Youtube then we all get wronged. The "defiant tantrum" is simply taking the stance that that is not admisible, how you consider that to be childish behavior I don't even know.
>Are you truly the victim today, in this pandemic?
So give up freedoms, for the common good. Now that's rich.
You don't have the freedom to murder, enslave, or kidnap. I don't think you should have the freedom to spread a deadly disease.
Especially since COVID-19 spreads without symptoms, we have to prioritize prevention.
Besides, we've had our freedoms eroded time and again since the World Trade Centre attacks. Why are some Americans choosing now to draw a line in the sand? Because previously the laws were targeting brown skinned people. And now there's a Democrat in charge, so Republicans want to cause strife and division to get elected in 2022 and 2024.
I've been saying things like this since 1991 and before; so its not just "choosing now to draw a line in the sand". Back then it was "Politically Correct is just being sensitive, it's nothing like censorship" ...
The goals keep creeping but the justifications are always the same: People have to be saved from themselves!
Agreed, it's never absolute, it's about if the measure that curtains freedom is appropriate to the threat. My personal belief is that in 2021, taking off your shoes at airport security isn't necessary (but I'll comply, of course), but refusing to host COVID disinformation is a good idea.
This attempt to make COVID control measure into a scare story about a slippery slope where the "freedom" is vanishing over time is IMHO wrong (COVID control measures are not that) and misdirecting (pay attention to what FaceBook does, voter suppression, etc, if real examples that slope is what you are looking for).
It's all about the effects of what is said. Fight the Power and Fuck the Police were published when there were no social networks around; The post-2K Web changed everything, and the chances of having more people rioting because some rapper want to become their idol (gigs, books, TV appearances, etc) isn't that dim.
If I wrote a rap song with "stick an artichoke in your butt" and magically a hundred people follow the advice and hurt themselves, someone for sure will at least attempt to censor my song. The imitation problem has been with us for thousands years, but social media made it a lot worse by dramatically augmenting the audience, then moving a lot faster than laws, and allowing some grey zones where a law prohibiting this and that would be too draconian and no law makes similar scenarios very possible. That's where we should be the ones who censor ourselves when we suspect that someone could be damaged by our words. That rapper didn't, because he pursuits fame and money, and Fox News by jumping in his defense acted exactly as one would expect from a source that has nothing to do with journalism.
I think the full lyric here is actually "pandemic ain't real, they just planned it."
The meaning and intent of the lyrics are open to interpretation, but I think the latter part of the lyric implies political commentary rather than medical commentary.
Also, I think we need a tighter definition of "medical misinformation." Is it to promote anything that is medically harmful? Well, then why can musicians sing endlessly about drugs and unsafe sex? What about videos on non-fda regulated vitamins and minerals, or weight loss solutions? Surely most doctors wouldn't advise taking recreational drugs, or jumping on to the latest weight loss magic pill.
And yes, YouTube is a private enterprise. But we can still, as a society, openly dialog on what we think is wrong with their practices.
People spread misinformation through memes or image macros. Why should songs be considered differently?
There's a segment of the US population that believes and spreads the harmful misinformation in memes and YouTube videos. That's all well and good when talking about aliens building pyramids or whatever. But currently we have this same segment of the population refusing to get vaccinated, mask up, wash their hands, etc etc. Those actions are harmful to society as a whole and should be treated like the attacks they are.
As someone with lung issues, it angers me deeply that there's millions of Americans who couldn't give the tiniest shit to take actions that might save my life.
Comedy, Music, The Arts - things I don't want the ruling class of the day to suspend and police.
The parties go back and forth every so often - it used to be the conservatives who wanted to censor music, now its the liberals. Its tiring. I want off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.
> we have this same segment of the population refusing to get vaccinated
As is their right. People should be able to make informed decisions about whether they get an injection. Especially right now in this pandemic. We're still studying the vaccines and their effects on people. Nobody knows for sure their risk/benefit profiles yet, there hasn't been enough time to draw definitive conclusions. It's entirely possible that these vaccines have risks we don't know about, or are only worth using on certain populations such as the elderly.
People who decide to take vaccines need to do so informed of these facts. Misleading the public about this will only strengthen conspiracy theories and lead to even worse outcomes.
> mask up, wash their hands, etc etc.
Yeah, I agree that's stupid. There's no risk to washing hands or wearing masks. Nothing wrong with refusing to associate with people who won't even practice basic hygiene.
> Those actions are harmful to society as a whole and should be treated like the attacks they are.
They may be harmful but that doesn't mean people should be oppressed because of it.
I only get my medical advice from rap music, so I for one am glad youtube has provided me with this safety net. I hope they target the misinfo on how to safely fuck hoes next - that could also use some correction.
The virus is real. "The pandemic" in popular culture includes both the actual virus and the response to it. "Ain't real" is also an incredibly interpret-able phrase. If somebody said to me "homosexuality isn't real" - I wouldn't think they meant nobody had ever had gay sex - I'd have to guess at their meaning, but it'd probably come out to something like "sexual preference isn't innate". Similarly, if somebody were to say to me that the pandemic wasn't real, I would understand that the concept they were trying to express is probably closer to the idea that the severity of government intervention or perhaps the intensity of media hype was unwarranted - not that the virus didn't exist. Whether or not the responses were appropriately sized aren't "medical" questions - they are political / sociological questions.
I'd prefer that, particularly in music, which has a rich history of slang, multiple meanings, and political commentary, we lean in the direction of permitting speech, to avoid censoring political commentary. In this particular case, when the chorus and title "Let's go Brandon" are CLEARLY political commentary, the chance that the work as a whole is political commentary (as opposed to "medical information") is further increased.
How does this apply to other rap songs? When they talk about killing people and selling drugs are we supposed to call the police?
Are we supposed to believe those lines as literally true as well?
Exactly what I thought. I disagree with the video and lyrics, but there's bigger rappers that have been peddling conspiratorial, third eye awakening wish-wash for at least 20 years.
This is a weird video to target, and I feel like there's bigger fish to fry w.r.t. harmful misinformation edit: about COVID. Mostly that the most dangerous misinformation is that which can actually convince people to believe untruths, something I doubt this video can do (it seems to preach to the choir). But who am I to know how their algorithm works?
The irony is that the incoming Streissand Effect will generally be meaningless. The increased exposure to this song is unlikely to convert people (there's really only one verse about COVID) and the outrage from the Right is unlikely to budge YT policy because there's a strong argument for it being misinformation. So it's pointless, circuitous outrage.
> This is a weird video to target, and I feel like there's bigger fish to fry w.r.t. harmful misinformation. Mostly that the most dangerous misinformation is that which can actually convince people to believe untruths, something I doubt this video can do (it seems to preach to the choir). But who am I to know how their algorithm works?
It's really simple. They took down the video because it's critical of Biden and the guy is wearing a MAGA hat. Someone at YT probably saw the video, said to themselves "fuck this guy", and then looked through the lyrics to find one offending word or phrase, and used that as an excuse to ban the guy.
> It's really simple. They took down the video because it's critical of Biden and the guy is wearing a MAGA hat. Someone at YT probably saw the video, said to themselves "fuck this guy", and then looked through the lyrics to find one offending word or phrase, and used that as an excuse to ban the guy.
Practicing for the mental gymnastics Olympics are you now
You’re free to listen to whatever you want. YouTube is free to decide not to host whatever content they want. You are free to buy a record and listen to it or whatever.
> but there's bigger rappers that have been peddling conspiratorial, third eye awakening wish-wash for at least 20 years.
> This is a weird video to target
So we can all agree that YT isn't arbitrarily censoring anti-authoritarian conspiracy theories, but is specifically censoring conspiracy theories related to COVID? This seems like a good thing, that they are casting a narrow net, no? Would you prefer they censor ALL anti-authoritarian conspiracy theories?
Of all the scenarios where censorship could be called for, fighting misinformation harmful to public health in a global pandemic seems like a reasonable fish to fry.
No, I think targeting COVID conspiracies makes sense. I think this video _specifically_ is small fry compared to some with 100k-1M views peddling the same nonsense in prettier packaging. I'm thinking about podcasts, radio show recordings, stuff like PragerU -- that are arguably not art or open for interpretation, but directly trying to convince viewers to believe bullshit surrounding the vaccine, safety, and COVID.
It's a pandemic. We're in a Public Health Crisis in which 700 000 people have died. We have medicine to give people which is safe, and almost guarantees they won't die, and material chunk of the population won't believe it, due to information like this.
I have 0 problem whatsoever with large, public information clearing houses suppressing anything that is counter factual during the emergency.
If they were taking down information about a doctor challenging Health Authorities in a very Scientific manner, that would be something else.
And of course, we have to make sure that we do come out of this 'crisis' and that institutions don't use it as a means for perennial control, but I'm not really worried about that. We're all sick of this and as COVID passes out of reality, people just won't care what people have to say about it, just like any other mundane subject.
So once COVID has passed, we can sing dumb songs about dumb things, if they take them down then, I suggest that would amount to undue censorship.
> I have 0 problem whatsoever with large, public information clearing houses suppressing anything that is counter factual during the emergency.
That's precisely the problem though. The rule at Youtube is any content that goes against CDC/WHO guidelines is considered "misinformation". So to your point:
> If they were taking down information about a doctor challenging Health Authorities in a very Scientific manner, that would be something else.
Yeah unless that doctor comes to the exact same conclusion as the CDC, and parrots the exact same info, that doctor is spreading misinformation according to Youtube. I've even seen instances where the CDC would say something, Youtuber would cover it, the next week the CDC reverses that policy and Youtube will hit the Youtuber for "misinformation".
The WHO/CDC positions are consistent with the prevailing science.
If someone went on YouTube to articulate the current scientific consensus of Ivermectin, which is that "There is no evidence to support it as a therapy for COVID, but that there are currently studies in progress which could yield important information, and in the meantime, people should definitely not be taking it as it can be dangerous unless administered by Health professionals" - I'm doubtful such a video would be taken down.
Anyone talking about COVID 'cures' in public forums for which there is no scientific consensus, during a pandemic, should definitely come under heavy scrutiny.
> Aren’t these the organizations that lied to the public in March 2020, saying masks were not effective?
A simpler explanation, that is consistent with data, is that community masking was never very effective, and that the current mask guidelines are 100% about politics and signaling.
The notion that 7 Billion people in the world are living under a 'Mask Policy' which have no material value, but exists only for the purposes of 'signalling' is conspiratorial nonsense.
At the start of the pandemic, the efficacy of masks in the commons was still debatable, more so than is now.
Public Health Policy issues around getting 100's of millions of Westerners, not acclimated to wearing masks (as they are in some Asian countries), was a daunting concern, as we can see with all the anti-mask idiots even to this day.
N95s in particular were acutely necessary in Healthcare settings and the supply chains from China towards the start of the pandemic in the US were not quite ramped-up, and were just becoming secure by the time the CDC switched to a pro-mask footing. Otherwise, any call by the CDC for 350M Americans to 'wear masks' would have likely overran the Healthcare supply chain.
As the availability of PPE to Healthcare became secure, as Asian health officials urged Westerners to adopt mask policies, as we understand a bit more about masks, the policy shifted towards mask wearing.
Obviously, masks are a marginal tactic in the fight against COVID, but there is a systematic benefit, especially over 350M people million people, wearing them when they are interacting wit others. If there is ambiguity in their efficacy, it's rational to err on the side of caution, not the other way. Because we are 'going with the policy' then it has to be supported and enforced, like anything else.
They didn't lie, they stated a policy valid for one context.
When the context shifted, they changed policy.
Public Health Policy is based on Science, but it's not the same as Science.
It's a strategy, a general policy and set of communication principles, based on facts, designed to get a large variety of people moving towards better health outcomes.
Some of those facts are not pretty, much of it is too complicated for public consumption, and necessarily not going to be directly part of the communication.
Obviously, in the interest of transparency, those facts and other bits of information (such as study results) are definitely publicly available to anyone who can Google - but what you're going to hear from Fauci, CNN, the 'papers of record' is the basis of a Public Policy.
If everyone acted conscientiously, in accordance with CDC guidelines, even while remaining vigilant to the extent they choose (i.e. verifying information as they so chose), this pandemic might very well have been already over.
You're having difficulty with reading comprehension it seems, as that is not the manner in which I applied the term 'consistent'.
WHO and CDC act in generally accordance with what we know i.e. 'consistent with the science'.
The science itself is of course fuzzy, moreover, your example ignores the fact that in different conditions (i.e. cultures, relative access to healthcare, % vaccinated), public policy is going to be different even if the science itself were clear.
So in varying conditions, it's reasonable that there's going to be varying policy implementations. Those implementations are not 'inconsistent' with the science, even if they are 'inconsistent' with one another.
This is not hard to understand, so it begs the question, what kind of person would make the conclusion:
"Different places have different public health policies, therefore these groups must be acting unscientifically"
We generally know what's going on, and have a good idea of what we don't know - so most of this inanity boils down to psychology, self awareness, antagonism, magical thinking etc.. The answer to our problems lies more in understanding why people believe 'QAnon' conspiracy theories than it does anything else.
> So in varying conditions, it's not unreasonable that there's going to be varying policy implementation which are not 'inconsistent' with the science, even if they are 'inconsistent' with one another.
Sure, but what we're discussing here is YouTube's single global standard that is being used to determine whether or not something is "misinformation" and should be prohibited on their platform.
You argued that what YouTube is doing is good, because they're following CDC and WHO guidelines. I gave you one example of where the WHO and the CDC and the ECDC are completely at odds with each other, so what should YouTube do in that case? Which science should they follow?
If I make a video on YouTube, talking about what a barbaric practice it is to force small children to wear masks, pointing out all the ways it is harmful for them, and talking about how little is gained from it, it would be seen as completely normal by most European viewers, because it is in line with public health recommendations from the ECDC.
If I make a video on YouTube, talking about what a barbaric practice it is to re-open schools without mask mandates, pointing out the risk to teachers and staff, and talking about how much is gained from it, it would be seen as completely normal by many American viewers, because it is in line with public health recommendations from the CDC.
Which video should be removed by YouTube for medical misinformation? The first? The second? Both? None? Or should YouTube apply different standards depending on your geolocation?
In that video, Pierre Kory uses his credibility as a medical doctor, to claim "mountains of data have emerged from all, from many centers and countries around the world, showing the miraculous effectiveness of ivermectin. It basically obliterates transmission of this virus. If you take it, you will not get sick."
Later, Pierre Kory himself contracted Covid, from his daughter. Both of them had been on Ivermectin, obviously. He doesn't mention this publicly. Only thanks to someone who was watching closely do we now have proof this even happened.
So no, this isn't "in a very scientific manner." He creates a good illusion of being scientific, but he's not.
These are dangerous falsehoods, that are used by millions as part of their justification for not getting vaccinated, which allows the virus to continue spreading. YouTube isn't perfect, but they are making an attempt to compensate for all the lies that are spread on their platform and others. This is important during a crisis that has already killed 700,000 Americans. I get the "freedom of speech" thing, I really do. But Americans are still dying at a rate of 2 fully loaded 747s a day crashing, and YouTube would prefer not be contributing to that.
If YouTube did take down such information, then I would be inclined to agree they made a mistake.
But the example you gave doesn't help make your case, just the opposite, Dr. Kory's information indicating that Ivermectin is helpful in treating COVID is not scientific and the net result of his communication is de facto misinformation, and can definitely cause harm.
If this Doctor wants to put information up on his own, personal website, that's a different story. He's free to do that. YouTube has no obligation to carry those videos. His liberties are not infringed.
What is your opinion on Dr Li Wenliang, who publically contradicted official health guidelines that they were certain that there was no new SARS variant spreading in Wuhan and encouraging mask usage was spreading a public panic?
The assumption that material like this is the reason people don't believe the government is just that: an assumption.
What evidence do you have that this is what drives people to not believe the things the public health establishment wants them to believe?
You don't have any evidence because it's not possible to prove this.
I should also point out that you have misinformation in your statement.
You are stating that covid will eventually pass. This virus is now endemic and is not going to go away. You do realize this, right?
The vaccine is very effective in minimizing the risk of hospitalization and/or death but it is a leaky vaccine. Leaky vaccines will never eradicate any virus and instead will simply promote various mutations.
Blame unvaccinated people for many things but you can't blame them for the persistence of this virus. It's not going to go away.
It's false to suggest that we can't develop an understanding of how people arrive at their conclusions.
If you work in the field of Marketing, PR or Communications for just a few days, it becomes pretty clear how people come to believe what they do.
What is 'impossible' - is for a material portion of the population to arrive at the specific conclusion that 'XYZ drug is beneficial for ABC disease' without having popular sources for that information: they have to hear it or read it somewhere. The greater the voice, the greater the credibility of the source in the mind of the recipient, the greater the likelihood that information becomes sticky. While there are other factors, the primary vehicle of the message is paramount. It's also measurable.
In fact it is your statement that miscommunicates the ongoing nature of the pandemic:
While COVID may linger for some time, there is no evidence as of yet that it will remain endemic - we don't know that.
Also - pandemic itself will definitely pass - as all pandemics in history.
COVID may or may not linger around in one form or another, but we will, at some point, back off from public health emergency status.
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
I can probably get on Google and find a few dozen hip hop songs where the artists claim that the US government invented the AIDS virus to kill Black people.
Let's not pretend that this is about lyrics that promote misinformation and instead admit that this is about lyrics which go against the current gated institutional narrative.
> Biden said the jab stop the spread, it was lies (I remember)
How you woke, but you haven't opened your eyes? (You ain't see)
I mean, I know there are pockets of people who believe that saying vaccines don’t work is telling the truth, but broadly speaking, saying that vaccines are fake and don’t work is considered misinformation related to medicine.
The jab does not stop the spread though. I cite the news for the past 3 months. I'm sure you've seen it. More cases now than same time last year, when there was no vaccine? Clearly the jab did not stop the spread. Oh it's the "delta variant"? Still didn't stop the spread. It was lies (I remember).
He didn't say they didn't work? He said it was lies that they stop the spread.
We now know of vaccinated people dying of covid, some right after being vaxxed, some months after, some after getting a second dose.
The lyrics can be interpreted a few ways. Was the vaccine then supposed to absolutely stop the spread and give absolute protection to a vaccinated person?
In specific cases, vaccines may not prevent you from contracting a disease.
In general, vaccines do work. Even if they didn't work in your specific case.
Now, to bring this back around to being on-topic to the thread it's in, whether or not vaccines "work" is actually irrelevant. Either they do work and therefore stop the spread, or they don't work and they therefore don't stop the spread. A vaccine can not work without doing its job.
Show me how any of the vaccines stop the spread. Go ahead and show the study that shows any of them stop it. And make sure you pay close attention to the word “stop” because I believe that’s where you’re getting confused.
I don't have time to argue with someone who's demanding to be told that vaccines work, and I have even less time for "not every car crash is stopped by a seatbelt so seatbelts are dumb"
I'm not getting confused. I'm discarding facile positions based around inappropriate literalism
Tech bros are now the gatekeepers of information for hundreds of millions of eyes (not just youtube, also google search manipulation, facebook algos, arguably outlets like netflix...maybe not Amazon yet) and here about half of the western world is cheering on the suppression.
How can someone place so much trust in this suppression without even seeing what's being censored? Is it just a deliberate blissful ignorance? Are these people really so naive from the comforts of modern western living?
Well, it's not tech bros so much as it's the people failing to know where to get their information. Tech bros gon' tech bro, why would you try to get your news from them?
Right, but I'm thoroughly unconvinced we should step in to decide how people consume information, one way or another. The arguments that rely on, "Most people are stupid and can't figure these things out for themselves." are really just riffs on, "We should control what people think."
Very sad... I guess this kind of censorship / denialism is becoming an accepted practice in certain circles. I would have thought the moderators here are bigger than that.
p.s. I don't know about age, but only about 10% of HN users were in the Bay Area, last time I ran the numbers, and that was for a much larger region than most people refer to as the Bay Area (a 200-mile diameter circle IIRC). The SF number would be well below that.
When songs promote robbing Asian people YouTube says “ In a memo to staff explaining the rationale for not barring the YG video, management wrote: “We’ll start by saying we find this video to be highly offensive and understand it is painful for many to watch, including many in Trust & Safety and especially given the ongoing violence against the Asian community. One of the biggest challenges of working in Trust & Safety is that sometimes we have to leave up content we disagree with or find offensive… Sometimes videos that otherwise violate our policies are allowed to stay up if they have Educational, Documentary, Scientific or Artistic context…
“In this case, this video receives an EDSA exception as a musical performance,” YouTube’s memo to staffers continued. “While EDSA is not a free pass for any content, there are likely thousands of music videos that would otherwise violate policies including Sex & Nudity, Violent or Graphic Content and Hate Speech were it not for these sorts of EDSA exceptions. As a result, removing this video would have far-reaching implications for other musical content containing similarly violent or offensive lyrics, in genres ranging from rap to rock. While we debated this decision at length amongst our policy experts, we made the difficult decision to leave the video up to enforce our policy consistently and avoid setting a precedent that may lead to us having to remove a lot of other music on YouTube.”
Assaulting Asian people isn't incompatible with an explicit whitehouse policy initiative and in that example the artist wasn't wearing an "impeach biden" shirt.
Edit: People keep responding to this comment claiming that the video didn't feature an impeach biden shirt, then deleting their comments when they realized what they saw was a video using the same name exploiting the fact that the real video is hidden. :) If you feel the urge to make that reply, instead just update this counter instead:
And govt. totally didn't push for that exceptional "policy", it arose from the first principles of free market competition. Any apparent similarity to moderation on Weibo, TikTok or Bilibili is purely coincidental.
I don't understand why you're mentioning the US government or policing speech, this article (and my analogy) is about youtube taking a video down. I think you may have misunderstood the analogy.
Search "Let's go brandon" and it should be the number 1 result, it's #23 on trending for music still, it was #1, and it peaked at #1 on itunes hiphop charts for US. But you don't get it unless you search for "let's go brandon song", which makes me think somebody messed with it.
Youtube instantly demonetized, put behind triple community warnings, and removed from search the video "The CIA is a Terrorist Organization" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI ) which was sourced only from things the CIA / US Government have formally admitted on the record as having done in the past.
Videos like this are only accessible in some countries if you provide YouTube with a government ID. In my country YouTube blocks a number of videos from public broadcasters this way.
It used to be that youtube-dl worked, but on that CIA video I now get:
[youtube] _2khAmMTAjI: Downloading webpage
[youtube] _2khAmMTAjI: Refetching age-gated info webpage
WARNING: unable to download video info webpage: HTTP Error 410: Gone
ERROR: Sign in to confirm your age
This video may be inappropriate for some users.
Meh.
The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.
Was it really "the community" though?
Anyway, that video doesn't seem very out there at all to me. That the CIA has committed various things most reasonable people would classify as "crimes" and "terrorism" seems like common knowledge to me.
Have you tried the YTBypass, 'youtubensfw' redirect? At first, the video won't load, but there is a notice to 'click this if the site won't load.' which brings up the video. It becomes possible to download the video then, although it is very slow.
There’s no major conspiracy here other than YouTube becoming increasingly hostile to the open web.
I would put money on Rumble becoming a major force in social media over the next ten years. It feels more like early YouTube than YouTube itself has felt for a long time.
Even Wikipedia engages in strategic censorship on behalf of the three letter agencies.
Case in point: this article[0] was removed from Wikipedia without good reasoning. It would seem that the name of the article itself was inflammatory enough to the powers that be.
Primarily because 'this "list" is inherently subjective and constitutes [synthesised conclusions]'; you'll also note on that page that "List of authoritarian regimes supported by the Soviet Union or Russia" was deleted at the same time - was that also at the behest of the US "powers that be"?
When I search for "Let's go brandon" (no quotes), it is number four in the search results... but with quotes, with or without apostrophe, I'm not sure because I don't see it... went down about 100 results...
Lyrics about the pandemic being planned. And this is a "free speech" cause célèbre now? It's trash, and it is toxic trash during a crisis that has at every turn exceeded the dangerousness that sober, informed people has said about it. Throttling the stupidity is itself a form of speech that needs to be defended.
Some things are not a matter of opinion. The "plandemic" reality you have constructed in your head is not actual reality. What the horse paste eaters are doing is like having an opinion against gravity and jumping from a height to show their faithfulness to an unreality.
i disagree with censoring. but i want to pose a question.
if i have q WordPress blog on a $5vps, and you post a comment saying my blog post is stupid. its my vps,im paying for it, i can delete the comment if i want right?
where do you draw the line? how big exactly does my blog have to get before this is considered big tech censorship?
Youtube in my eyes is no different to utilities and it is even more of a monopoly than many other utilities. Your blog is curated because you are the editor and as such it is just like any other publication.
You're falling victim to the sand heap fallacy. Sure, some sites would be gray areas, but it's obvious that a personal blog that can run on $5 per month is on one side of the line and YouTube is on the other.
Just create and apply better anti-trust laws and break up the monopolies. (Specially since most platforms got their almost monopolies by creating anti-competitive walled gardens with no inter-operation with other similar platforms a la Fediverse / ActivityPub / Diaspora / Friendica)
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
When you say “just do x,” you make it sound so simple. You’re missing out “just do all of this keeping in mind you’re trying to change the law using lawmakers who are personally invested in these companies that have more resources than many nation states.”
I mean in opposition of legislating on what "big tech" specifically can or cannot remove or host on their platforms in comparison to small blogs like the example up thread.
The most coherent plans in recent times to do exactly that came from Elizabeth Warren. It would have solved the problem elegantly. But people are too partisan (and too fractally partisan within their parties) to listen to a good idea from a person they don't like.
Many of us on different spectrums (libertarian here) did listen to what Elizabeth Warren said, and we agree with it.
I think there is a great deal of truth in what the anti-monopolist economic crusaders on the left (Sanders&Warren) have said. While I may not agree with everything they said about economics across the board, I do think they are correct in that we have permitted bigtech to become a monopoly. AND, I agree that overly favorable tax jurisdiction shopping is a massive problem.
We need to re-empower the DOJ to pursue antitrust again, and we need it now.
warren had a more coherent policy package than any other candidate, but from what i remember, some of her proposals showed clear detachment from actual on-the-ground issues vs. academic idealism. it's just like how 'progressivism' has been co-opted by ultra-liberal/socialist factions to mean 'spend as much as possible on social programs, consequences be damned', which we're seeing in the current stimulus package debate.
her proposals on how to deal with consolidated power and capital at the top are/were more reasonable, but that's because she's has a more visceral experience in that arena, rather than with poverty, housing, or immigration issues, for example.
The idea of treating as a monopoly problem is interesting, but I'm not sure how you prevent centralization like this from repeating itself in the future, given that it is built on network effects.
At the end of the day there will be a concentration of audiences somewhere, so I don't think this problem goes away.
What I wonder is whether at a certain point we actually need to protect people from themselves. I get how ominous that sounds, but OTOH if large swaths of the population, say, fall prey to senseless conspiracy theories, do we just watch it play out?
Network effects can happen in a federated or decentralized way:
- Email is useful regardless of the software, OS, server or owner of the address you are sending emails to.
- The fediverse benefits from network effects and interoperability between instances with both different software and different communities.
I would even go further and argue that centralized "network effects" are in reality "captive costs" of "not being inside the walled garden" rather than a true network to begin with.
Well, a lot of organizations use email for internal and external operations processes and I would be very skeptical about sending contracts or legal documents via facebook messenger.
Through the magic of interoperability entities can set up their own servers or contract to external providers their email services.
Fair point, but it has nothing to do with the context of the article. I was referring to the ability to influence societal and individual viewpoints. I don't think email comes anywhere near that.
>Network effects can happen in a federated or decentralized way
There's no technical reason they can't, but practically, a central, easily discernible destination appeals to those looking to monetize their content.
Email is a one-to-one (or few) channel vs broadcast. Completely different.
The arguments about decentralization/federation remind me of the early days of the Net, wherein there was so much talk of democratization, but here we are (unfortunately).
> There's no technical reason they can't, but practically, a central, easily discernible destination appeals to those looking to monetize their content.
That is very similar to what was mentioned up-thread:
> [..] we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration: Centralization is required to capture profit.
---
> Email is a one-to-one (or few) channel vs broadcast. Completely different.
ActivityPub / Diaspora / Friendica were also mentioned; email was about interop between software and service providers.
---
> The arguments about decentralization/federation remind me of the early days of the Net, wherein there was so much talk of democratization, but here we are (unfortunately).
Also mentioned up-thread:
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before.
>ActivityPub / Diaspora / Friendica were also mentioned
Yes, these are all examples of what's technically possible from a decentralization standpoint; yet have not flourished WRT adoption, relative to the centralized platforms.
>That is very similar to what was mentioned up-thread:
"[..] we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration: Centralization is required to capture profit.
I see the article you've quoted up-thread and the author's observation is so obvious as to add little to this discussion. That is, of course it's an issue of profit.
But, I suppose it does underscore that it's not the question of technology that advocates of Diaspora, etc. suggest.
So, sure, my original point that we'll always tend towards centralization on platforms that benefit from network effects relies on the assumption that we'll continue to have a capitalist economy.
Trillion dollar company won't allow better antitrust laws to happen, because they are allied with the currently ruling party.
This is a true symbiosis: the Party will see that no laws that harm the Company are passed, and Company will stop the spread of any information harmful to the Party.
> This is a true symbiosis: the Party will see that no laws that harm the Company are passed, and Company will stop the spread of any information harmful to the Party.
Probably no relation with the 2014 Princeton study published on the Cambridge University Press that determined the United States of America to be an Oligarchy rather than a Democracy.
> But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened
If the Presidency were an oligarchy, neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama could have become President. And Trump could have never won, since most of the power groups were overwhelmingly against him winning, and he won solely due to his populist voter base - democracy in action in fact. Trump also raised drastically less money than Hillary Clinton did; if there's an oligarchy trying to pick presidents it was against him, not for him. His win partially invalidates the Princeton premise.
Neither Bill Clinton or Obama came from or had money. Neither had fathers in their lives or immediate great families of consequence. Neither had long-tenured national political experience. Oh yeah, and Obama is half black. The oligarchy chose Obama over Hillary Clinton? They had no choice is what actually happened.
Just because the study came from Princeton, that doesn't mean it's not idiotic.
They are the puppets of the people who hold true power. People so fabulously wealthy that they would never need to hold public office to get what they want. They can just buy it.
you've just perhaps inadvertently explained why trump is/was so popular, despite being a self-centered idiot. he was able to stick a thumb in the eye of the american oligarchs, and that felt to many americans like a sliver of hope against the hegemonization of america.
but that our political system isn't a full-on autocratic aristocracy doesn't mean it isn't oligarchal. oligarchy implies an outsized influence by a small subset, not complete control, just as democracy doesn't mean complete control by the people. oligarchy seems a pretty apt characterization.
This is what I try to explain to people who don't understand how Trump got elected. Anyone who has little faith in the system can find something to like about Trump, and the establishment's hue and cry over him simply adds to their fervor.
A true countercultural president is rare, and the overlooked people in the country got one. His policy could be anything, as long as it makes the coastal folks angry.
A lot of "rights" should scale inversely with power, to counteract how their effectiveness scales positively with power. The idea behind universal Democracy is that you should have collective power over everyone who has meaningful authority over you.
The power weilded by a government should be kept in check democratically by their constituents. As your blog grows into YouTube, you gain more and more power over people's lives and livelihoods... more political and economic reach with your decisions. That power should thus grow proportionally more limited by mechanisms of user empowerment, rights, and direct control.
There isn't a cutoff... there should instead be a sliding scale.
However American law requires bakers to bake cakes for events they as an individual disagree with. An old lady florist was individuals fined for refusing to do an event she thought was morally questionable.
It seems the only 'people' with rights to conscience are multi billion dollar companies conveniently doing the bidding of the party in power. So that's strange.
Sure you can. Also, if I post a comment in your blog saying that you are so smart unlike, say, Joe Rogan, who is eating horse de-wormer trying to cure his covid and you don't delete that comment then Joe Rogan may sue you for defamation.
Compare with YouTube, where anyone can post a video saying the same and if Joe Rogan came after them, YouTube would claim section 230 protection, insisting it's not selecting content and hence it's not responsible for the user's content.
Many people would be fine with YouTube or any other social media company censoring whatever it wants if it also had been liable for the content it leaves uncensored. As of now, it's having the cake (censoring anything they want) and eating it too (not being liable for the content that's left).
Apparently the 'misinformation' trope has extended into art.
Many of you defending censorship in the last few years (and very much so on HN) on political grounds are going to be changing your minds in the coming years due to stuff like this.
I am 100% okay with this. YouTube has no obligation to be a champion of free speech. And promoting anything other than getting vaccinated, distancing and wearing masks where appropriate lead to unnecessary covid deaths. So... the math adds up for me -- take down content that needlessly leads to death.
Silencing people and pretending it’s OK is not going to work. It’s a double edge sword. Because one day they’re going to silence you. The math doesn’t work out long term.
Sure, "no obligation", I think their critics agree with you there. This isn't a conversation about rights, it's a conversation about values. This action shows that Youtube doesn't strongly value being a neutral platform, and people are disappointed.
Radios and newspapers also did not present themselves as a way for the average person to make themselves heard. But you are onto something here - the problem is that there is a massive disparity in the power of an individual's discourse versus a radio or newspaper.
Now look at YouTube and Twitter. They amplify the voices of many average people, but only those who tow their political line. This makes it appear as though some ideas are more widely supported than they actually are. It's the same problem as with radio and newspapers, but it is exacerbated more than 1000 fold.
I don't know. I agree that refusing to do business with someone is a finite source of political power, but the cost is short-lived. The video gets taken down, but once the news cycle completes the creator will upload to Youtube next time around, and the positive economies to scale (network effects) make limited, repeated application of this power sustainable.
I think it's counter-productive because of my politics, but I don't think it's ineffective or futile.
> It’s a double edge sword. Because one day they’re going to silence you.
This is true, but it is an important topic so here is another angle to consider:
YouTube doesn't have any tools to sift right from wrong that we don't already have, and their censors are probably only marginally more intelligent than average.
They are going to get stuff really wrong from time to time, and eventually are going to censor important information - if they haven't already, it is hard to tell.
Case in point, censors generally aren't bought in to hit stuff that is obviously wrong. Everyone knows that sort of content is garbage and only watches it for a laugh (think flat earthers). They are coming in for stuff where the available evidence makes it difficult to tell what is true or not (eg, ivermectin). They're going to make some horrible mistakes playing at that game, because by nature of what they are targeting, some of it is going to be factual content.
Deciding what is right or wrong is the issue. YouTube isn’t transparent nor consistent about this. Social Media are publications due to their extreme efforts in curating content and speech topics. They need to be regulated as such.
> YouTube doesn't have any tools to sift right from wrong that we don't already have, and their censors are probably only marginally more intelligent than average.
I thought Facebook & Google were outsourcing the censoring to low budget contracting firms in poorer states, so they could keep the spend at a minimum?
Deplatforming isn't the same as silencing. At no point in history before the 21st century did the average person think that they had a right to have their speech carried to the entire human race. We have a basic right to generally not be prevented from speaking, yes. (A right which does not extend to defamation, fraud, violent threats and other grossly harmful things) But have we ever had a basic human right to oblige any information channel of our choosing to carry our speech? Regardless of the import of our words? No.
And -- if I am similarly deplatformed for harmful speech, that's a good thing. Bad personal consequences are a just outcome of bad personal behavior, made more just if the same applies to everyone, friends and foes alike. It's an intrinsic aspect of the social contract.
As always, I invite people to look at Usenet as an example of what happens when a platform carries everything. People stopped going there because after the advent of bots, it was completely overrun with V1AGR4 ads. Try getting your speech heard when there's 99.999% noise to signal. It's silencing of a different sort.
To me, the internet is to the First Amendment as nuclear weapons are to the Second. Neither were anticipated when the Bill of Rights was written.
In the 18th century, no one knew people might invent weapons that could kill on such a scale and at such distance. No one knew people could make a beheading video and instantly share it with millions. No one anticipated algorithms that could amplify the worst human impulses to such a degree.
I'd love to see these problems solved in a better way. Here at Hacker New we have a half decent algorithm for promoting quality content based on upvotes and downvotes and flags and karma and such. When that fails, we have Dang's good judgement as a backup. That's censorship too, and it makes this a better place. It's not perfect, but if you were to take the approach of "any censorship is wrong" approach, Hacker News wouldn't be very pleasant.
YouTube is at a much larger scale, but they have a right to do something. Presumably you are ok with them disallowing beheading videos. What about videos encouraging suicide and providing "help"? What about videos telling people how to make chemical weapons? What about videos planning government overthrows? Where do you draw the line?
I don't necessarily have a long term solution, but I support them taking some short term measures.
It would be ironic if it were deleted by HN. The comment is still there and is generating a lot of healthy debate.
I've listened to the song and it's primary (only?) message is to call out a blatant lie from the news media and that we should all be critical consumers of that media.
If it is a medical doctor saying that there is science that says that smoking is good for you.... I'm taking a wild guess here, but I'm pretty sure that's getting taken down. At least if it starts getting lots of views. Because it would be a dangerous lie.
We are talking about the music video for a rap song, not anybody claiming to give legitimate medical advice. The song is pretty dumb IMO, but I do not like to see tech companies deplatforming art because of "misinformation". Who the hell gets their information from rap music?
> YouTube has no obligation to be a champion of free speech.
Unless we decide that they do, notwithstanding your declaration. I understand that you like censorship that you agree with, so it would probably be better to ask you about this when they start censoring things that state legislatures interpret as "critical race theory," or for claiming that a government official is being dishonest.
Sorry... I thought property rights, freedom of speech and freedom of association were inalienable, or at least important. My mistake. I keep forgetting to read the room.
Let me rephrase.. we shouldn't if we care about our principles. But I agree with you, inevitably we will abandon those principles, repeal the First Amendment (which is what such legislation would amount to) and cut off our nose to spite our face. The momentum and fury behind this new Red Scare is just too great to stop at this point.
But, after the dust has settled, the ashes of social media have cooled, the government regulates all speech on the web the way the FCC does television, and you need the resources of a corporation with a legal team just to handle the liability risk of publishing anything, I think we'll live to regret it.
Sure... keeping all the rap that promotes murder, gang membership, robbery, crack and heroin dealing literally numbering into the hundreds of thousands of tracks on Youtube, and millions of other videos promoting the same and worse are totally fine to stay up there and this censoring totally has nothing at all to do with politics, right? I'm not for censoring any of the available music on Youtube but you cannot try and sit here and tell anyone that removing a track like this one, has anything to do with "reducing harm."
This is silencing political free speech and I'd bet a ton of money the United States government has a line of communication with, and has told Google to remove content like this. "HackerNews" should consider changing the site name to something more along the lines of "LiberalGroupthinkingProgrammerNews"
This better not get to hosting providers or it all goes to shit.
Sure, big platforms censoring stuff is bad, but people still have the choice of renting a server and hosting whatever they want.
If your website, hosted on a dedicated machine that you rent from OVH or whatever (and probably Amazon, but I wouldn't trust them) or co-locate in a datacenter, can be taken down on claims of misinformation, that's it, RIP free Internet. It was nice knowing you.
You got me with this one. Actually threatening someone directly is worse than being an antivaxxer... Guess that's my cutoff point? Just shoot me in the head, I'm sick of this world.
People can't have too much freedom and these big corporations do the bidding for ruling political class. They are deep in tax avoidance and they don't want government to order IRS to start looking.
I don’t expect many minds to change. I predict the “‘private’ [misnomer] companies can do what they want [broadly false]” crowd to dig in and rationalize why art is not a special case. My own hypothesis is they personally identify with the corporations, e.g. they are entrepreneurs or might want to become entrepreneurs someday.
Honestly I don't think it's that they identify as entrepreneurs or business owners, I think it's just that they identify as progressives, and there is an incredibly prominent pro-censorship current in modern progressive ideology. I say this because I've definitely interacted with many people in real life who are not the "entrepreneur" or "pro corporate" types yet happily cheer on the censorship being practiced by big tech and the like
Progressives are not necessarily for censorship (though some are). But this "private censorship" is a consequence of not regulating new media industries.
So seeing some people complain about censorship after being against regulation has very much "you wanted this, serves you right" vibe.
I agree but would like to posit that that attitude is yet another issue of the current political landscape. The "your previous idea has turned out poorly, both this is your fault and I can now justify slightly this bad thing because it's happening to you" I probably phrased that poorly but I see lots of people who are against things, no longer being so strongly against that thing when it starts to hurt their 'enemies'. It's like a rule change in sport, I'm against it until it starts to give me a competitive advantage.
Which really just goes back to the two party, my enemy or my friend trope. Tribalism etc.
> My own hypothesis is they personally identify with the corporations,
I used to be like that and I remember defending YT censorship as I thought I would probably wanted to be able to do the same had my project took off. It took me a long time to realise I was wrong.
What do you think the people who now shout "censorship" would say if few years ago, someone sugested "the tech giants should be regulated with regards to what content they host and follow due process when removing content"?
The tech giants are unregulated. They can do what they want. They want this for some reason, so they do it.
Doing what random HNer's want, apparently. Disrupting industries by straight up breaking the law: totally ok. Choosing what content your website will and will not host: absolutely monstrous. That's tech culture in a nutshell.
I mean, "the tech giants have enormous control over society, monopolistic positions and levels of vertical integration and trilions of cash at hand that make it impossible to fight them in market, can we do something about it?" is definitely a good discussion to have.
Not sure if "they should be hosting dangerous antivaxx content during global pandemic" (that some people claim doest actually exist because of previous content) is a good way to kick that discussion off.
(I realize this particular video possibly isnt that dangerous.)
Censorship, to me, would be the government forcing these platforms to host content that isn't in their business interests, because it would be compelling speech. That's a much worse problem, in my mind, than private organizations removing content from their platforms.
I would rather live in this world than the alternative.
Why would the Conservatives suddenly change in the next administration? The past one made sure censoring was possible and legal. Why the sudden change of heart and wanting to undo what they just did?
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our request to stop.
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I'm not into politics, but really? When "conservatives" get into power? It's such a huge group that they're no better than the other side. I don't think anyone in such a huge party even gives half a fuck about the average citizen.
You say "we", but you're nothing to them. You support some huge party, does anyone there even know your name?
Fuck that kind of shit, might as well vote for some fringe group really.
Local news in the US is largely owned by Sinclair and/or ClearChannel. (Maybe the latter is only billboards and such. It's hard to keep up with the obfuscation.)
ClearChannel got out of the television game years ago (and has since changed its name to the even-more-awful IHeartCommunications).
And Sinclair really doesn't hold a candle to Nexstar and Gray Television, who have managed to buy up the vast majority of local affiliates over the past several years.
Fox News was a pioneer in this technique and unfortunately CNN and MSNBC have followed suit.
In the early 2000s I was always astonished by how utterly misinformed Fox News viewers were. In 2021 I am always astonished by how utterly misinformed MSNBC CNN and Fox News viewers are. On certain subjects like the statistical risk of a 35-year-old healthy person getting hospitalized for covid, Fox News viewers are actually the best informed. They still overestimate the risk but not by orders of magnitude that the other two sets of viewers succumb to. My father is a rabid MSNBC and CNN viewer, and like many of your typical resistance boomers is grossly ignorant about most things happening in the world. In December he was ranting to me about how the US could have had zero covid if someone else had been president. While I agreed with him that it had been mishandled I tried to explain to him that there wasn't any countries able to keep it out except for very isolated island nations. He was completely ignorant of this.
He also freaked out when I contracted covid in February before I could give vaxxed. I was trying to explain to him that I'm very fit and healthy and relatively young but he really thought I was going to have to get hospitalized. This is when I started learning about the statistics on actual hospitalizations versus what the public thought.
One difference between these groups of people who watch these utterly stupid channels is that Fox News viewers are pretty aware that they watch biased news. They weren't in the early 2000s though. MSNBC and CNN viewers think they're witnessing objective reporting in general. My father is always quick to say that he reads articles from the AP as if they are objective. They are absolutely not objective anymore. Ideological capture is a thing. And it was purely ideological when the AP told their reporters to call what was obviously rioting "mostly peaceful protests". The aftermath of that absurd line of thinking was me witnessing many family members who were right of center to completely lose any and all faith in journalistic institutions. It was a watershed moment in media becoming untrusted by most of the working class.
Less than 0.3% of the population watches prime time TV shows on any of the networks in your comment. Unfortunately despite a small initial audience they do have wide reach in terms of distributing short clips to various factions of the Twitter mob (which also happens to be comprised of an insignificant percentage of citizens).
In some populations, a person has a better chance of catching covid and dying than they do of saying they watched Chris Cuomo last night.
Does it really matter? Clearly it would be in the realm of satire or political humor, things liberals have historically been very vocal about protecting.
Why are you talking down to previous poster, rather than just disagreeing? This seems inappropriate for HN. Personally, I come here for differing viewpoints, expressed with a bit of maturity, or at least without toxicity of that sort.
The difference between lying and joking is always in context. If I dress as a police officer for Halloween it's fine, if I lead you to believe I actually am a police officer it is a crime. There's also a middle ground where someone could mistake my costume for impersonation.
I don't know what aspect of this video violated the terms of service, but I think political videos on all sides regularly make statements that aren't supported by 'mainstream' fact checking sources and therefore might fall outside the policies of services like Youtube.
If you want to argue that all speech with 'political intent' should be protected I am open to that conversation! But that is not the standard held by most services, including Youtube, which Bryson Gray agreed to when he uploaded his song.
Nascar is a sport where people drive cars in circles really fast. A reporter was interviewing a driver after he drove the fastest. The drivers name was Brandon. The crowd was chanting so loud it was louder than her interview. The reporter said that the crowd seemed very supportive because they were chanting "Let's go Brandon." The crowd was very obviously not chanting "Let's go Brandon." The crowd was chanting "Fuck Joe Biden." This reporter works for a news network that has a certain reputation for political bias. This event was seen as an obvious attempt to dissemble. This video went viral and had significant publicity.
One type of humor is known as "trolling". The basic idea is to see how much of a reaction you can get from something pointless and stupid. Now many people are making songs with the lyric "Let's go Brandon" and they are receiving hate mail, being banned, being demonitized, etc. This reaction is seen as outsized for a reference to a fairly well known piece of pop culture. Thus, to those who find outsized reactions funny, this is funny.
The lyrics don't say the vaccine would stop the pandemic, it says it would stop the spread, which it does. You are changing the wording to make it seem more reasonable than it is.
Fully vaccinated people are less likely to contract or spread the virus. There's no question about this currently with the present strains. However they do not at all halt the spread of the virus. Israel is a good example of this.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread I don't agree with the lyrics in that video. I find the video itself to be childish and silly but that would basically be 99% of rap and pop music in general.
The vaccination has been thoroughly shown to work. The pandemic isn't over because only about 50% of Americans are fully vaccinated. We should be at herd immunity by now and moving on, but yet here we are.
But is the pandemic over? It's clearly not, and that was the point of the lyric. Countries with 90%+ vaccination rates are still having lockdowns because of breakthrough cases.
You're acting as if your interpretation is the only valid one. Since not everyone will interpret "the jab stops the spread" as "the pandemic is over", the best we can do is interpret "the jab stops the spread" as ... wait for it ... "the jab stops the spread".
>The lyrics are just "the jab stops the spread." That is true.
I say this as someone who's vaccinated; that is not true. It can limit the spread by reducing the viral load you give off, but you can still be vaccinated, get the virus, be asymptomatic (or not) and transmit it.
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
So the first link is not a study. There isn't an examination or even a reference of studies that provide evidence to the contrary. Not to say that the article can be dismissed fully but keep in mind it's not painting a full picture.
The second link is about a study that looks at transmission of the Delta variant from a breakthrough infection. It did not look into wether the chances of getting infected after vaccination decreased.
Finally the vaccine dramatically reduced your chances of dying. I'd say that's some pretty good protection from symptomatic disease, not just some protection.
In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.
You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
It is a remarkable conclusion to suppose that studying individuals in the same society fewer got infected if they were vaccinated because of comparison between different societies.
It would be as if we proved that people didn't smoke in the USA got lung cancer far less than smokers but you sprung up with a study that showed that rates of smoking between societies wasn't highly correlated with lung cancer ergo smoking didn't cause lung cancer. One would logically suppose that your study didn't prove what you think it proved.
At limit you are supposing that if we got 100% vaccinated somehow we would see as much covid spread despite everyone having antibodies which are known to decrease chance of infection and extent of spread ergo effecting the time one remains infectious and how many virions are available to be spread.
Beware of anyone who doesn't feel the need to disprove that raindrops fall in buckets who nevertheless has proven that storms can't cause floods.
More importantly.
The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
> In comparative studies of populations it has been shown to still be substantially effective at preventing infection even after antibodies wane.
Source?
> You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective
I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.
> because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?
But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.
> The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:
The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:
Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.
A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.
The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.
> Killing hosts isn't beneficial to the virus survival, quite the opposite in fact. An infection that super aggressively reproduces but due to antibodies fails to gain a foothold beyond the nasopharynx in vaccinated people doing little damage to the host but spreading effectively to both vaccinated individuals who largely have the above experience and unvaccinated who get miserably sick and sometimes drown in their own mucus could be very fit in evolutionary terms in a mostly vaccinated population.
> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.
If we make it possible for everyone to be vaccinated if they so choose the only tragedy will be the innocent old and immunocompromised who die despite vaccination because they were effectively murdered by someone else's stupidity.
> The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
And sever disease needing hospitalization and death. And these indeed the things we want to avoid. Both as individuals and as a society. Because if/when hospitals fill up then you have a trouble. This is what people don't get. (They also don't get that they could end up in a hospital or a morgue with some probability, so I don't even mention that.)
One of my friend's father has been waiting for an operation for half a year here (in Hungary). They couldn't do it in the spring because the hospitals were overcrowded with covid patients. Then they couldn't do it because the waiting lists grew during that period. Then somehow he got in about a week ago with the help of a former high ranking official (yeah, gotta love Eastern Europe) just to be sent home the next morning, because there weren't enough free beds in the ICU any more. Yes, anecdotal, but this is the thing we try to avoid.
Italy is at 80% and they still see the need to ban unvaccinated people from places. New Zealand is planning to ban unvaccinated people form places after we reach 90% of over-12-year-olds. So even with a massive 80% vaccinated, the vaccine doesn't stop the spread. Maybe it would at 90%? 95%? Who knows.
In New Zealand, the unvaccinated are largely the indigenous Maori, not stereotypical anti-vaxxers.
I think you'd find that Māori are doing OK. Better than Pacific Islanders.
But yes, there's hard-to-reach people in every ethnicity. What I've enjoyed is the orgs who are vaccinating Māori and Pacific Islanders - always tell the community to come along even if you don't fit in either ethnicity, you'll still get a jab. I just love that. It's the way it should be!
You're probably getting flagged because the parent commentator is quoting the lyrics of the song (in quotation marks), as a response to someone asking what was in the video.
Your question should be directed at the creator of the video, not the HN user.
We're posting in a thread discussing why YouTube took down the song. The GP asked for what was objectionable about it. Your comment does not make sense.
The quote is calling the statement "the vaccine will stop the spread of covid" a lie. That statement can be a lie only if the vaccine can not stop the spread. An overly optimistic prediction wouldn't be a lie, so the quote must be calling the vaccine ineffective at best.
Regardless of whether the pandemic is over or not, the statement isn't a lie and therefore the quote is incorrect. The vaccine significantly slows ths spread and from both theory and past experience can fully stop it, given a high enough vaccination rate. At best it hasn't come to fruition yet and at worst it won't not because the statement is a lie but because people actively prevented it from coming true, despite all reason and logic.
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
Thank you for the links. I followed them and came to a different conclusion:
1) "The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate".
From the article: "The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated."
You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely), thus confounding the relationship between vaccination levels and reported Covid cases.
2) "And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people".
From the article: "The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab [Pfizer] was 42%, but increased to 58% with time."
Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
"Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine."
The word "significantly" has a specific statistical meaning. The paper discussed on the Nature article implies it is not a statistically significant difference between 67% and 58% (likely accounting for covariance and measurement error).
Unless you have a different source showing there is statistical significance between those two results?
> You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely)
You may interpret all you want, but I was just pointing out the lack of solid data supporting the claim: "The vaccine significantly slows the spread"
Almost 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and yet there is still no evidence that the vaccines have any effect at all in slowing the spread of the virus. I find this rather remarkable.
This situation could very well push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous strains. Like what happened with Marek's disease among chickens:
> Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
Pfizer buys you a bit more time, but the downward trend in your immunity is unmistakable too:
Too many confounding variables. As vaccines increase immunity, protective measures such as mask wearing and social distancing and travel restrictions are dropped, increasing spread. There’s also the inverse effect where increased spread leads to higher vaccination rates.
Across different countries the testing methodologies are too different to meaningfully compare with.
Finally your last paragraph only applies if the vaccinated person gets infected with delta in the first place (in other words has a breakthrough infection).
95% of COVID-19 deaths are happening among the unvaccinated right now, you’re spreading FUD about what’s basically a miracle.
If I recall correctly, the Biden administration and the CDC both made public statements telling everyone that they would no longer need to continue wearing masks once they were vaccinated.
Yes, vaccines prevent you from ending up in the ICU, but they aren't preventing the spread.
This portion of your comment in particular is false.
People who receive two COVID-19 jabs and later contract the Delta variant are less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta. Relevant Nature article (October 5, 2021).
However, good job on the masks part, please keep wearing them! :-)
> less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta
I don't see these as contradictory. Vaccines are more effective against transmissions, yet vaccines don't slow down transmissions in a significative way. As per the article:
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
> A reduction was also observed in people vaccinated with the jab made by US company Pfizer and German firm BioNTech. The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab was 42%, but increased to 58% with time.
Fully agree on the mask though. Plus social distancing, if possible.
The study contradicts his assumptions so he is unable to take this new information and update preexisting beliefs. Or he didn't read the new study. A bunch of people are living in denial.
"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. "
You could make the same argument about any commonly administered vaccine if only 58% of the population are vaccinated. There were a number of outbreaks of measles several years ago when the localized percentage of people vaccinated dropped below 95%.
And yet if you scroll just a bit further down you'll see a graph that shows significantly fewer cases in, say, counties with more than 60% fully vaccinated, compared to say, counties with 5-50%.
Almost like there's this spot where, once you have enough people vaccinated, the virus can no longer spread.
Hmm. Wonder why that could be. Certainly it couldn't possibly be exactly what experts have been telling us for the past century.
The study says exactly what the GP wrote and that you discounted. Read the first sentence of the Findings section.
"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days."
there is a Twitter video linked. it's truly nonsense and in glad it was banned tbh. he says the pandemic was planned and COVID vaccine didn't work amongst other misinformation
It is utterly nonsensical and foolish but I don't like the fact that it was banned.
When US media reports on activities like this in countries like China and Russia they call it censorship. When they report on the same activities in the US they call it "protecting the public from misinformation".
It's a very very slippery slope to ban things. Who gets to choose what gets banned? Who gets to say what is misinformation or not?
It blows my mind how shortsighted most of my left of center friends are on this topic. They seem to have this delusion that these levers of power are only ever going to be controlled by the people they agree with. In the early 2000s a lot of people I argued with were totally supportive of the Patriot act. They were generally conservatives and were just completely confident it would never be used against US citizens. Now those same people are witnessing calls from people on the left who wants opposed to Patriot act to use it against US citizens with right-wing politics.
I disagree that we’re talking about rights at all. I think the issue is really norms and expectations. Do we really need to invoke the heavy hand of law and government as the ubiquitous standard for what is acceptable?
YouTube makes opinionated decisions about what gets in their search results. They edit their search results and have a team that decides that goes on the front page. That's editing. YouTube is a publisher.
A publishing house publishes a book that an author writes.
Digital platforms want to have it both ways - they want to (in some cases manually!!!) curate and censor recommendations, search results, and plain uploads, while also retaining their platform protections.
The libertarian stance on this issue is completely untenable. I know an Olympic gymnast who can’t perform gymnastics that well.
The libertarian stance would be to repeal CDA 230. I don't know any libertarians that prefer statutory law to common law.
"Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems."
This isn't really about section 230, this is about the first amendment. You cannot, and will not, ever successfully pass an enforced law that requires private companies to maintain content they themselves did not produce on their website against their will.
You can repeal section 230, and the first amendment will still protect every company in the US from doing what you want them to do. There is no version of this where you win, and anti-vax or overtly hateful/conservative content sticks around on YouTube.
The point of repealing section 230 is to end YouTube as we know it. Basically, YouTube becomes the Washington Post and can carry fully moderated content that it selects and publishes. YouTube's current business model only exists by legislative fiat. It's time to give power back to the courts and reinstate the precedent of Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.
Literally impossible as long as the First Amendment exists. You cannot compel speech with legislation the way you apparently want to. Section 230 is just a way to shortcut litigation, the First Amendment is ultimately the protector of YouTube, and will remain so as long as the United States remains a country.
Repealing 230 would just trigger a new set of lawsuits, one of which would end up in front of the Supreme Court, who would then rule it as unconstitutional to force YouTube to publish content it doesn't want to, and we'll be right back where we started, just now with precedent in a Supreme Court case.
The idea isn’t repealing 230 - it’s to recognise any platform that’s manually curating content as a publisher. Then if that publisher hosts illegal content, they’re liable, because if they can curate some of the content, they should be responsible for all of it.
Also political feasibility in the USA isn’t the end-all be-all. YouTube certainly wants to do business in other countries/regions - such as the EU. Google is a public company, and as such it’s executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. Right now, since other megacorps want Google to censor content so their ads don’t run alongside XYZ content that you don’t like, Google is following their fiduciary duties. But if a regulator steps in, it becomes a matter if “oh shit doing business in the EU is more important than doing business with cocacola”
Curation is not, has not, and will never be, the bar for determining what is and isn't a platform or a publisher. Curation is an expression of free speech, which is different from the role a publisher plays in works it publishes.
Your entire argument hinges on people not realizing there's a specific legal definition of the word "publisher", which means that no matter what politicians you convince to do what you want, it will never function as expected in the judiciary.
I don't want to compel speech. I want to reattach a cost or liability to YouTube that was removed via state power.
Remember, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. "held that Prodigy was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on their bulletin boards in three ways: 1) by posting Content Guidelines for users, 2) by enforcing those guidelines with 'Board Leaders', and 3) by utilizing screening software designed to remove offensive language."
The State removed the above liability via Section 230, which paved the way for YouTube to become the monolith it is today. Reattaching liability to YouTube would force it to choose between an editorial model (Prodigy) or a platform model (CompuServe). It would not get the luxury of the editorial model without paying the corresponding costs of that model. In other words, it would put YouTube on the same playing field as the Washington Post and other traditional news sources.
That doesn't matter, because The First Amendment still prevents the US government from stopping YouTube from existing as a platform for content it does not produce. It's a simple concept of "who did this?" and if it's not YouTube, then it's not liable.
I notice you ignored completely the articles I linked, and didn't even bother to address the myriad arguments put forward by legal experts on this issue. I assume that's because you have no legal standing whatsoever, and would prefer to just say, "This is what I want and I don't care if the country has to cease to exist first."
Additionally, I find it highly hypocritical that you post such an opinion on a platform that would be shut down, were you to magically get your way. When you have to express your opinion in a way that wouldn't be allowed if your opinion were shared, you might want to rethink your position. It makes your position look wholly unconsidered, which it apparently is.
I can address your articles, but they're at odds with one another. More specifically, the Harvard one claims CDA 230 is superfluous, while the Notre Dame one argues it is essential (to the internet as currently structured). I would say the Notre Dame one is correct.
The big flaw is revealed in the Lawfare blog:
"[CDA 230] merely ensures that courts will quickly dismiss lawsuits that would have been dismissed anyway on First Amendment grounds—but with far less hassle, stress and expense. At the scale of the billions of pieces of content posted by users every day, that liability shield is essential to ensure that website owners aren’t forced to abandon their right to moderate content by a tsunami of meritless but costly litigation."
The principle here isn't whether all the cases have merit or not; it is that every individual gets their day in court. That is, it is up to the courts to decide the merit of a case based on fact, which, of course, is case-dependent [1].
Denying individuals access to the courts makes them bear a cost. That cost should, in truth, be borne by Big Tech and subtracted from its profits.
As for Hacker News, it might not survive in its present form should CDA 230 be repealed. That's OK, though. Perhaps it would become PG's blog, and I would have to start my own blog to comment on matters of the day. That's entirely acceptable, and I don't find it hypocritical.
The citations all agree that the 1st Amendment covers the part of Section 230 that you want to repeal. They disagree on the extent and impact, but they all fundamentally agree that Section 230 plays a role as a shortcut through litigation. You haven't addressed any of that, because it completely defeats your argument.
There would be one case, it would go to the Supreme Court, and would reinforce the key components of Section 230. YouTube, as a concept, will never go away, no matter what you want, because the 1st Amendment exists. Every individual would not get their day in court, as a precedent would be set and future lawsuits would be thrown out quickly, just as they are today.
Honestly, this smacks of bitter childishness; you want to hurt Google and you think this is the best way to do it. It is not, because it would not. It hurts no one, and would be re-resolved within the very next Supreme Court session, so no more than ~6 months. This childishness is reinforced by your acceptance that the platform you're writing on would not exist. You may not see that as hypocritical, but I and nearly everyone else who reads this does. It, alone, weakens your argument substantially.
Newspapers do not enjoy CDA 230 protection. They face actual liabilities and carry liability insurance, a cost. Without CDA 230, these liabilities will not disappear for Big Tech by one case going to the Supreme Court in 6 months. We've seen the opposite with the Supreme Court not hearing at least one letter-to-the-editor libel case for newspapers [1].
Finally, It is not guaranteed that Hacker News would cease to exist. It might need liability insurance or change in some other way. All I know is that things would be different and better.
I did read my citation. Ice cream trucks also don't have CDA 230 protection. What's your point? YouTube and the NYT are fundamentally different businesses, pretending otherwise is a waste of time, and further indulging your "This windmill is a dragon!" delusion.
This is a temper tantrum, and will never pass legislative or judicial muster. Enjoy YouTube, because its kind of site is sticking around forever.
This reminds me of a temper tantrum someone else threw on Twitter, claiming to leave the platform for an "a censorship-resistant technology: RSS". Did HN suddenly become exclusively based on RSS? No? Interesting. It's almost as if this is a post-hoc argument concocted to try and justify a childish fit.
Edit: You also shared propaganda on your Twitter feed about Hunter Biden's laptop, so it's pretty clear where your allegiances lie. Yet again, another conservative cries foul when an institution doesn't support his ideas.
I'm done here, I only engage with adults, which you clearly are not.
YouTube and the NYT are fundamentally different businesses BECAUSE of CDA 230.
You're right that YouTube will exist as long as CDA 230 exists. However, if CDA 230 is ever repealed, YouTube will have to change as its business model is not protected by the 1st Amendment but by an act of Congress.
Not an ad hominem. Your argument is bad because you don't support it with anything other than blind assertions. You also are clearly motivated by your political beliefs, which makes your selection of facts, should you choose to bring any facts to this discussion, suspect.
"But Section 230 substantively protects more speech than the First Amendment, and the First Amendment will not adequately backfill any reductions in Section 230’s protections."
— Your source, not mine (not that matters).
Your argument seems to be that CDA 230 doesn't matter, but it is imperative that it not be repealed, which is kind of a nonsensical position.
Thank you for demonstrating that you're not engaging in this conversation in good faith, considering I never said "CDA 230 doesn't matter", nor did any of the articles I cited say that.
At this point I'm giving you a way to respond further to demonstrate how unreasonable, fundamentally, people who hold your position actually are. It's clear from what you've written that this isn't a rational position you hold, and so then anyone reading this will have to guess at why, other than rationality, would you want YouTube, Twitter, and HN to cease to exist.
Your Twitter account, in your profile, should give anyone reading this all the information they need to understand your bias.
You said, "Section 230 is just a way to shortcut litigation." And that, "There would be one case, it would go to the Supreme Court, and would reinforce the key components of Section 230."
One of your sources says: No, that is wrong. CDA 230 is a superset of First Amendment protections. I agree with your source. However, I think these additional protections are a bad idea because they absolve YouTube and the like from certain responsibilities:
"Because we [YouTube] are not in a position to adjudicate the truthfulness of postings, we do not remove video postings due to allegations of defamation." [1]
And no, my source agrees with me, it literally does not say what you claim. Considering you have a track record of lying about citations, this is unsurprising.
Anything else you feel like lying about? Would prefer more lies that are immediately and obviously false, such as the Notre Dame article not agreeing that Section 230 provides a litigation shield.
Ha! Are you trying to defame me by calling me a liar?
I've quoted you twice and paraphrased your argument once by saying that it "seems to be that CDA 230 doesn't matter." Perhaps that was an oversimplification; however, let's be clear, CDA 230 is a stronger litigation shield than the First Amendment. For that reason, it needs to go.
You can easily lie while quoting someone, which you've clearly demonstrated, and your paraphrase was intentionally inaccurate so as to further your argument, at the expense of the truth.
It's not defamation if it's true, which it is. You have lied (made an untrue statement with intent to deceive) about what I've written, and what's been written in cited articles, to further your argument. That, definitionally, makes you a liar (a person who tells lies).
Section 230 being removed will not achieve the goal you desire, which is to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator. Any relevant protections that allow them to discretionarily host content that isn't produced by them without liability will remain. This is repeatedly explained in the above cited articles, as well as many additional articles easily found through a quick search of the topic.
As I said before, your opinion is not based in reality, and you are tilting at windmills. I will repeat this for as long as you reply, because bullies like you need to be stood up to and told no.
Besides, the two cases you keep citing are from 91' and '95. They're not relevant now because of how many of the facts are different (as I've said, YouTube and NYT are fundamentally different businesses, with or without Section 230), and could not be used as precedence even if Section 230 were repealed.
I don't think Big Tech is scared of little old me, the bully, LoL.
My goal isn't to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator, but to interject some responsibility.
That responsibility is coming as common law works through systems outside the USA. For instance, consider George Galloway, a far-left UK politician, and his push towards making Google pay for keeping defamatory videos online [1].
Hopefully, once people understand that, to quote the article, "an intrinsic part of freedom of speech is the right to be heard if one thinks one's character has been falsely impugned," the USA will take a serious look at either reforming or, ideally, repealing CDA 230.
> I don't think Big Tech is scared of little old me, the bully, LoL.
Again with the lies. Nobody said you were bullying Big Tech, I said you were bullying HN users (me, specifically). You're a bully, and I don't like bullies.
> My goal isn't to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator, but to interject some responsibility.
I literally do not believe you. It's clear you don't apply this consistently (hello HN user), and it's clear you have a specific political leaning that undermines your credibility here (Hunter Biden's laptop is something you apparently think is a credible news story, and not blatant propaganda to try and recreate the "Hillary's emails" for the 2020 election cycle).
You apparently want to hurt Big Tech because you are angry your team got censored.
> the USA will take a serious look at either reforming or, ideally, repealing CDA 230.
They will not, no matter how many times you state it as if it were fact.
You tried this "Repeat a bunch of nonsense long enough and hopefully people will eventually let your nonsense go." strategy with your claims about the efficacy of introducing fake rhino horn into the Asian black market to drive down prices, and that didn't work (though honestly wholly on brand, you wanted to lie to admittedly bad people about what you were selling, and as far as I can tell you were attempting to make a profit off of these illicit sales).
You tried again, when you attempted an ICO to (I assume) fund your company in 2017, and your state's government found out and seemingly shut you down, so that nonsense about whether PembiCoin qualified as a security or not (I guess it did qualify, despite your claims) didn't work either.
Now you try to misrepresent your way through a conversation about Section 230, and it's not working, either.
So effectively you just want people with money to have the ability to disseminate their speech, since they're the only ones who would be able to share their content via any of these platforms if Section 230 were repealed.
There is a valley of nuance between Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc. [1] and Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. [2]. All of this nuance was being worked out in the courts via common law principles before Congress short-circuited the process with CDA 230, which turned out to be one of the things that helped facilitate the rise of the Big Tech oligopoly that Congress now decries.
There's no such thing as nuance when it comes to corporate liability via third party participation. Companies are going to do the thing which reduces the surface area for litigation as much as possible. Youtube would nuke political speech entirely so fast from anyone not paying them a fee to be broadcast that heads would spin.
"X is a rapist." (Where X is a private figure for simplification.)
The nuance is as follows:
A) Under Cubby without proactive moderation.
The website is not liable for the above speech. All the website needs to do is remove the offending speech once it is made aware of its defamatory nature, maybe via a court order.
B) Under Stratton with proactive moderation.
The website is making an effort to determine the truthfulness of content. As such, letting a defamatory post go through subjects the website to liability.
C) Under CDA 230.
As per YouTube, "Because we are not in a position to adjudicate the truthfulness of postings, we do not remove video postings due to allegations of defamation." [1]
Option C is the worst. It is akin to letting an oil company pick and choose which spills are worth cleaning up. Websites can remove things they think are defamatory to certain people and leave up other things that are defamatory to others with no repercussions.
Ideally, we would live in a world governed by A and B. In that world, sites could choose between moderation and no moderation and the corresponding legal and financial burdens. What we have right now is a mess that works to the advantage of Big Tech.
There's a zero percent chance that a company like Youtube would allow its content to go completely unmoderated. It has to moderate its content. It has advertisers who are associated with content and it has to keep on the right side of copyright law. Also, no website operator wants the hassle of dealing with court orders because posters are engaging in verbal slapfights online. Your proposal of A would have an EXTREME chilling effect on speech.
Because Youtube exists in the real world, and because earning money through ads is a hell of a lot better for business than trying to get people to pay for content, C is always the best option for them and for every other content provider AND virtually all small and independent content producers.
Otherwise, companies like Youtube would be forced to gate entrance to supplying content by charging hosting fees for content. You are seeing the tree and missing the rest of the forest.
1.) A and B are not my proposals; They're case law that has been preempted by C.
2.) Copyright falls under the DMCA, which pretty much follows A's procedures (i.e., a takedown notice model) even though the DMCA is a statutory provision. Why are copyright holders so special?
3.) There is no constitutional right to an ad-based business model. Ad-based models evolved under rules similar to B's, but for newspapers, and B is what should govern said models online (unless someone can demonstrate a successful ad-based model under A).
4.) CDA 230 is the golden goose; hence, it won't be repealed. Everyone gets paid to the detriment of society and the individuals who are denied their day in court.
Just to provide context "NIH admits Fauci lied about funding Wuhan gain-of-function experiments" [1] If there's no one even making art with borderline lyrics, nobody may realize there's something besides the status quo. I'm not saying that I agree with all dissidents opinions, but I strongly disagree with messing with art. It's music for god's sake.
All art is political, even (especially) the CCP recognizes that power as it crushes art. What is really interesting, though, is the fact that the powers-that-be feel threatened by this art. Why would a mere rap video be so threatening?
What other public health crises are YouTube dealing with?
There's many counties that have high fentanyl or drug overdose death, higher than covid. Does YouTube ban rap songs that detail that drug use? That talk about how to make meth in a coke bottle or crack out of cocaine?
How about the public health crisis of single motherhood. If you look at life outcomes of kids with 1 parent instead of 2, not only are they more likely to die younger, they're more likely to not graduate highschool, more likely to end up in jail. Is YouTube banning videos that encourage sleeping around and not taking responsibility for your progeny?
Tech companies, controlling the distribution, now determine what is or isn't dissidence.
It may not be 1984, maybe something from Neuromancer or Snow Crash (I forget which) where big corps control the information that is considered acceptable for the plebs.
Distribution in platforms or platforms themselves. If platforms abuse their power the government can enforce standards on platforms or disallow them from their country/region. Distribution is not a right for either party.
Thank god there's 20 alternatives to YouTube then.
Daily reminder to use Peertube and that being able to reach people, centralization, and ad monetization are incompatible with freedom.
Use Peertube, you can't have freedom and reach+monetization.
I've grown pessimistic about distributed networks and the Fediverse. The Pareto distribution is this neverending bastard of a phenomena that creeps up into everything we touch.
If a distributed network ends up displacing Youtube, what's going to inevitably happen is one section of the network is going consume the vast majority of the viewership and content, and they're going to start repeating the same shit that Youtube is doing right now.
I'm not saying we shouldn't promote alternatives, but I am saying we haven't really figured out how to properly integrate social media into our society without it disintegrating into what we're seeing now (or worse).
I was sympathetic to this ethos, until parler was taken off the internet. Youtube is probably monetizing what would otherwise be public utilities. If its not a right, then maybe the citizens should be regulating youtube, instead of the other way around.
I'm out of the loop, but I've been seeing "Let's Go Brandon" posts on a certain subset of the internet that I keep my eye on, so this headline and source doesn't surprise me.
I think I'm better off judging this book by it's cover and not telling Youtube how to run their house.
There are many extraordinarily biased US media companies out there. In theory, YouTube can become one more. And that is fine.
But these companies are a lot less respectable than YouTube has been to date, and people know what they are getting.
The issue here is YouTube's standards are changing and that deserves to be discussed. And condemned, it is change for the worse (even if in some sense it is probably inevitable).
We have a treasure trove of the last few years of the internet (thanks to archive.org) showcasing that the majority opinion of HN and others is “someone I don’t like is being censored, therefore it’s OK.”
Combined with the usual "it's not censorship if it's a private company doing the censoring" but getting really upset when someone doesn't want to bake a custom cake..
I don't understand the allegories to feudalism when jesters who crossed a line weren't censored but executed. (I would guess specially if they expressed or supported any sort of anti-monarchy or anti-their-monarchs viewpoints)
maybe peasant is a better allegory; he works the lord's lands solely at the lord's discretion, keeps a tiny share of what is produced and is ejected at will
Apparently some jesters were used as messengers during campaigns / sieges and if the recipient didn't like the message they would be trebucheted back to whomever sent them.
Actually, it was a chief job of the jester to cross the line when other members of the court could not. Jesters, as all court members, had a natural fear of execution, but probably not any higher than any of the other courtiers.
You can't properly understand something if you can't question it. When you elevate any idea to unquestionable capital-T Truth, you blind yourself to the actual truth. You break the only mechanism we've ever discovered for figuring out how the world actually works. Censorship of anything is the enemy of human progress and always has been.
I can agree with you, but the issue is that this isn't an academic discussion on the merits of thorough vaccine trials. Here's the third verse:
"Let’s go, Brandon, we know he cappin’ Patriots out in the street takin’ action Huntin’ us down for speakin’ the truth (Huh) Beat down the PEDO, let’s save all the youth (Uh huh) Media lyin’, ignore all the cryin’ They buildin’ back better, but only the Taliban (What?) Pilots on strike, but to Joe, it’s irrelevant Open the border, lose all the order Divide us up so they know what we never win But we united, we here in the stadiums (Let’s go) Everyone chantin’ it, CNN slanderin’ (Let’s go) Biden collaspin’ and Democrats stealin’ it (Facts) Ayy, we look at Joe, can we get a refund? (Brandon) How ‘bout some mean tweets? (Facts) Joe is a crook, and he knows how to decieve F.J.B. is the motto in these streets, let’s go, Brandon sing it with me"
I see a lot of claims but no questions. This wasn't written to question, it was written to enforce ideas already held by the listener. I agree that the song shouldn't be censored, but I also think it doesn't have any right to be promoted or distributed by third parties. YouTube has as much of a right to take the song down as Sound Cloud has to leave it up, which is exactly equal to any venue that chooses to let him perform on stage.
YouTube certainly has that right, but they enforce it at the risk of losing any credibility on claims of impartiality or “holding free speech as a core value,” like their CEO bragged about last month.
But yes, I totally agree – the song “Fuck Donald Trump” has been on YouTube for 5+ years with millions of views, and YouTube has every right to take it down.
Well, if we talking about the idea of censoring misinformation that goes against the well established scientific consensus (and not this particular case that seems to be a misapplication of this idea), then actually nobody is saying you cannot question it.
Deliberately spreading misinformation to wide audiences is distinctly different from asking questions in order to improve your own understanding. First of all, if you are aware that you don't understand it, then don't form public opinion. Most people are f* unaware (or ignorant of the fact), of course. And these are never really questions even if formulated as ones (i.e. having a question mark at the end and using the according word order). Putting up a video on YT and discussing how e.g. masks don't work doesn't become questioning for understanding (for your own understanding) just because the idiot phrases it like "Yeah, but if vaccines work then why do vaccinated people still have to work masks? And why do they get into hostpitals? And why do they die? And if masks work then why do we still have a pandemic?" Etc.
You know this game. These are not questions and the format (again, a YT video broadcasted to potentially the masses) is not appropriate for gaining knowledge for the person who created it. The direction of the information flow is just wrong.
If you're referring to anything related to Covid there's no well-established scientific consensus it literally just happened around year and a half ago it's impossible to have scientific consensus.
Even the most respected scientists are saying they don't know about a lot of things related to covid.
also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post .
Galileo was excommunicated.
Labotomies won the Nobel prize.
Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty.
> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post
Genuinely asking, how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in if the standard of "what is general consensus among the people with doctorates in the subject" isn't reasonable?
What evidence is there that a general consensus on a thesis indicates that it is necessarily true? Is it rational simply to accept a consensus, effectively taking something on faith?
That was not an answer to his question, and I am really curious for an answer to it because I think it's a valid and reasonable point.
Also, as to whether believing scientific general consensus should count as "faith" or not, I invite you to read Issac Asimov's short essay "The Relativity of Wrong".
OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it.
Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence?
Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
> OP's question appears to invert the burden of proof in assuming that a consensus, even of experts, ought to be believed unless there are compelling reasons not to accept it.
Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative?
>Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
The scientific process IS a process of rational error elimination and criticism. Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse.
> Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence?
I think you have the causal chain backwards; the evidence of a good metric for the truth of a matter is what builds consensus. If the evidence is incompatible with consensus, and it holds up to scrutiny & reproduction, then the consensus changes to match. Either way, the end result is that consensus is an improving approximation to "the truth". If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
>Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative?
Again, this inverts the burden of proof. There is no obligation to provide any alternative, and no obligation to defer to a consensus in the absence of one.
>Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse.
I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true, and it is a very weak argument for taking consensus as a metric of truthfulness.
>If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
One does not require a better way of obtaining the truth in order to avoid committing oneself to accepting unjustified claims. Again, such a requirement inverts the burden of proof.
> There is no obligation to provide any alternative, and no obligation to defer to a consensus in the absence of one. ... One does not require a better way of obtaining the truth in order to avoid committing oneself to accepting unjustified claims.
In order to act on a claim (inaction is also an action; "avoid committing oneself to accepting" is just ornate wording for choosing inaction) one must evaluate the "probability of truth" of said claim. To my knowledge, scientific consensus is the most reliable source to inform that evaluation. Since you fail to provide a more effective alternative, then it seems that scientific consensus is at least non-inferior to any other method either of us is currently aware of. Thus it is the rational choice on which to base action; basing them on a less reliable source gives a higher probability of being "wrong", and thus would be irrational.
> I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true.
Honest answer: Then I invite you to attend a consensus conference, or enough of them for the p-value on your evaluation of how they run to reach whatever level is acceptable to you.
Tongue-in-cheek answer: You also have no evidence you aren't a simulated agent in an advanced species' super-computer (Descartes's "brain in a jar"). At some point, you have to choose some axioms and build your world-view from there.
>In order to act on a claim (inaction is also an action; "avoid committing oneself to accepting" is just ornate wording for choosing inaction) one must evaluate the "probability of truth" of said claim.
There is no requirement to evaluate the truth value of an ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory claim. In fact, a claim of that nature may as well be regarded as being meaningless. On those grounds, it makes no sense even to speak of probability in regard to such a claim.
>Honest answer: Then I invite you to attend a consensus conference
A 'consensus conference' may do one of two things:
1) It may dedicate itself to the evaluation of rational argument and evidence, in which case it is the argument and evidence that matters, and the consensus is irrelevant.
2) Some other means may be used to arrive at consensus, in which case it may be irrational, or at the very best, unscientific.
Note that the position that OP advanced, and which you appear to be defending is that the bare fact of the existence of a consensus should be treated as primary evidence on its own. At best, a consensus is secondary evidence, a pointer to the real crux of discussion, and treating it as primary evidence is a category error which is only compounded by the air of authority implied by a consensus which adds psychological coercion into the mix.
>There is no requirement to evaluate the truth value of an ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory claim.
Calling a claim "ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory" is already an evaluation of it's probable truth value.
> Note that the position that OP advanced, and which you appear to be defending is that the bare fact of the existence of a consensus should be treated as primary evidence on its own.
Actually, the person you responded to clearly stated: "how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in". For someone well-versed in the area, or at least with enough free time to become sufficiently acquainted with it, going to directly to primary evidence is the optimal approach. However, in the situation described by OP, were they are limited in the amount of time and cognitive capacity they can invest, then basing decisions on such "Secondary evidence" as expert consensus is the rational approach.
Nope. It's not that it's ought to be believed. The thing, in general, is that you always make a choice with your beliefs and decisions. When you make a decision (vaccinate or not to vaccinate, wear a mask, don't wear a mask) then you choose between two options and in the end who you believe.
A lot of people like to formulate this for themselves as being open and not accepting some kind of "dogma". Which sounds good, you stay open, what do you have to lose? (BTW, accepting the scientific consensus doesn't mean that you can't change your mind when new information comes in, but that's a tangent.)
But the thing is that when you have to make a decision then you have to accept some claims as being true (for at least the duration of making the decision). And that's when you have to ask yourself (as a layperson): who is more likely to be right? Which model is going to be more close to the reality? Science, the majority of scientists or some random dude? (Including maybe those few seemingly legit scientists who "speak up" in social media stating that all other scientists have gone completely wrong, including virologists and epidemiologists. But that one bloke is right.) And can that solo dude be right in theory? Yes, of course. Is he likely to be right? Well, looking back at the history of science it's rare, it doesn't last too long (until others realize and change their opinion) and it's getting more rare (as the scientific method evolves).
So yeah, no burden of proof on anyone, just a meaningful strategy for those outside of the field (any given field). Those doing research should always prove they are right. But, to get back to the original topic, that's not done in social media. That's done in scientific publications through peer reviewed papers. And, of course, the scientific consensus itself is supported by those so talking about shifting the burden of proof makes no sense at all. The proof is there for the consensus. That's the point.
A lot of parts of science and math are very different from the 60's while a lot of remains the same!
How do you make sense of all of this and wrangle objective truth from the chaos?
That's an epistomological question people have been asking since the dawn of mankind.
IS there even objective truth that our limited monkey/human mind can grasp?
I don't know the answer!...but I know censoring a multitude of opinions and claiming a monopoly on objective truth in an infinite world of chaos is not the way to do it.
It's not about censoring the opinions in general. Again, it's about censoring fake news on social media. Nobody wants to censor research (I know it's more complicated, because of what gets funded and what not) or publishing in peer reviewed papers. Heck, as a result of the pandemic, peer reviews got even quicker and a lot of research gets publicity when they get on pre-print servers (i.e. pre-review)! That doesn't sound like claiming monopoly on the truth to me.
You could argue that social media is an important outlet for new scientific ideas, results and discoveries but then you'd have to prove that not censoring there and letting the fakes run wild adds more value than the harm caused by the fakes. And the we know that the latter effect exists. I'd say that even if there is added value here (TBH, I don't see it at all), it's overwhelmed by the harm. Any scientifically valuable contribution that is only spread through the social media will be lost in the noise of nonsense.
Did you ever think to yourself maybe the reason so many people are anti-(Covid)-vaxxers is not that they're brainwashed? Its that the anti-vaxx people may have a point?
Many major scientific breakthroughs were made outside of the 'institution of science' and peer reviewed papers.
Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys.
Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science.
But both of their ideas won out in the end.
If you need censorship and coercion of any sort to force your ideas on people, if to need to limit the avenues which ideas are shared .. you need better ideas.
You keep repeating yourself and don't respond to what I'm saying (even though I do address your arguments). I didn't talk about whether I thought anti-vaxxers were brain washed, so it's a strawman. And I've already explained in detail what's the problem with bringing up individual examples especially from the far past where some scientists were right against the majority. So I see 0 point in you coming up with more and more examples.
> Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at
> first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys.
Just to mention an earlier, related case: there was a Hungarian guy called Ignaz Semmelweis [1] who figured out the importance of antiseptics before Lister. He had very tragic fate. He published his results then he was mocked by fellow doctors, he basically went crazy for not being able to make a change (though he may have had a condition too), put into an insane asylum, where he died after a short time at the age of 47.
He gets little credit outside of Hungary (where I'm from) because he didn't figure out the exact biological causes for the infections (he didn't connect these to bacteria) so some science historians think he was just right by accident. But that's not true. He used observations and statistics to identify that the cause of the relatively common death due to childbed fever of women after giving birth was infection by the doctors who also did autopsy. He had a wrong theory about how "cadaverous matter" would cause illness through decomposition which would make both dead bodies and doctors hand smell. And he found that chlorinated lime solution would remove the smell and thus he though the "cadaverous material" so he started using it to wash his hands and convinced colleagues in the hospital to do the same which resulted in a rapid and sharp improvements in the death statistics. (So again, while his theory was wrong, his method and results were right.)
But as I said above, science has built in these experiences and this knowledge, so science to day is built on much better foundations and better methods than in Semmelweis' or Lister's time. And it's not that just we know more because we accepted their discoveries. We know how to do science better, how to be right more often and wrong less frequently. And again: what's your alternative suggestion? Where's your proof that discussing all these "alternate opinions", which completely ignore the scientific method, on social media gives any better results (and, indeed not worse results)?
The "you need better ideas" assumption is not only unfounded it's also naive and wrong. We have experiments to show that people believe stupid things even if/when they do have access to the scientific truth. Because the former can be formulated in more attractive, easier to digest ways than the reality. (After all, they don't have to match reality so they are way more malleable.) Unfortunately it's not about having access to better information or "better" ideas. You can't have better ideas than what matches the reality (or, in other words, your best current knowledge) but considerable fraction people get attracted to ideas based on not how "good" (meaningful, accurate) they are.
> Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science.
Again, you already said that and I responded to that, which you 100% ignored, but I forgot to mention that:
a) Gallileo wasn't excommunicated, he was forced to retract his theories by the catholic church, not fellow scientists.
b) he was actually wrong. He thought the Sun was the center of the universe, which is clearly wrong. (But of course, less wrong and way more useful than the previous ideas. But that's the point: science evolves by getting things less wrong over time.)
Do you think Google and Facebook are putting every item that they ban through some sort of a scientific review were they carefully weigh the pros and cons of all the data of every side of a debate?
Like there's a bunch of older gentlemen with beards and pipes and philosophy phds sitting around a room discussing the cultural merits of the song wet ass pussy.
My best guess at how the censorship process works is there's a bunch of really low paid people that censor things based on a narrative page provided to them.
> Do you think Google and Facebook are putting every item that they ban through some sort of a scientific
> review were they carefully weigh the pros and cons of all the data of every side of a debate?
You're right, of course, they don't. OTOH, as I said earlier, there is very little scientific value (if any) in posting on social media, so this kind of censorship cannot hinder scientific advance/getting to know the reality better.
Also, they actually only seem to block pretty blatant cases (like if someone says that there is no pandemic or vaccines don't work) and most of the content is pretty primitive and low value anyway. I see a lot of this shit, either because the censorship is not too strict or because they put a lot less effort into the non-English corners of their networks. Actually, most things that FB marks with a warning that you should only trust official sources are scientifically correct posts (e.g. from research labs or experts posting valid research papers). And the stupidity, the "alternate view" seems to go undetected. I've reported quite a few blatantly stupid posts out of curiosity and none of them were taken down. Not even the "5G activates the vaccines" types.
> My best guess at how the censorship process works is there's a bunch of really low
> paid people that censor things based on a narrative page provided to them.
This seems pretty likely. That must be one of the reasons they don't act on most actual misinformation. Though they should be able to use technology, because a lot of the misinformation I see is either some post (or video) being shared a large number of times (they could give those special attention) or reposting of the same content (could be a video, but mostly copy&pasted text). Of course, there are stupid comments too, but those would be very hard to censor efficiently (without actually harming the discourse - even if not the scientific discourse).
There are also well known profiles that are dedicated to spreading misinformation that don't get censored at all. Again, here in Hungary there is a(n ex-)pharmacist who has been cranking out nonsense since the very beginning. He very likely is building his profile for the general elections next year (he did participate 4 and 8 years ago). But he might be simply just an idiot. He would be very easy to take down, given he's relatively high profile (as a denier by all means), FB could afford to have one of their more expensive collegaues to spend a few days on him. But they don't care. Actually, they are even motivated to keep him on the site because he generates a lot of interactions... So to me it seems that if anything, then we need more censorship, not less. (But it doesn't have to mean banning the discussion, even if they would just cut the obvious and blatant misinformation, that would help a lot.)
Try to understand as much as possible and make your call that way. Most of the scientific questions in this world don't require you to have an opinion (I don't much care which rocket fuel is better; I'll let others argue over that).
Covid and Climate Change are interesting because certain conclusions related to them have a direct impact on you and I. The ruling class would certainly like you to believe one conclusion over all the others and that conclusion might even be 'correct' in terms of being beneficial to you or humans as a whole, but asking people to believe that conclusion because of some 'consensus' is fraught with both logical and mortal peril as history has shown us time and time again.
"Well-established scientific consensus" may not be perfect, but may I challenge you to provide an alternative with a better track record? It generally takes in new information and self-corrects over time. As I mentioned to someone else in this threat, Issac Asimov's essay "The Relativity of Wrong" may be old but it's still very relevant today.
There is so much data involved with even the smallest thing in this world we're barely even scratching the surface with science.
An expert may have a PhD and know 5000% more than you about a subject but compared to the amount of knowledge required to understand how the universe or any scientific subject works...their knowledge is smaller than a rounding error..and our current knowledge as a human race is too.
Experts are poking at the world just as much as the rest of us, they just have bigger sticks, and are wrong ALL the time. But being wrong is the first step to being right. Elon had the worlds most highly trained and advanced rocket scientists working for him at SpaceX and they still crashed a bunch of rockets. You get a second opinion even though medial doctors have many years of education, don't you?
The problem is not science or education, it's how humans understand truth.
I could be wearing a red and black flannel shirt and one expert would say the shirt is red and another expert say the shirt is black and both would be telling the truth, but neither is correct.
Now pretend that flannel shirt has trillions to infinite numbers of colors and you have science.
Scientific consensus is data with strong statistical significance that all scientists agree on. The shirt is clearly red! But it's only a small subset of data among infinite amounts of data in this world much of which we don't even know about and the human race probably never will. So while a scientific theory may be true, it may not be correct. And highly informed scientists can see just one part of the whole and claim it's the truth.
And it's hubris to claim otherwise, especially looking at how often scientific consensus has been on the wrong side of human history, with Mengele, Galileo, Labotomies, etc.
Thalidomide, the drug, would calm morning sickness and the scientific consensus was that it was a good drug from the limited amount of data they knew about at the time...until more data came in....and the scientific consensus changed on a dime.
The problem is humans have a desperate need to provide some sort of order to this absolute chaos we live in because the world is scary and we're going to die and people want immediate answers they can rely on to make sense of it all.
So they create narratives like religion, or scientific consensus, or political party and claim those are the one true answers and justify their success with the rain dance working or scientific data curing an illness or how cheap they made gas prices..ad infinitum.
Scientific consensus, religion, politics, are all merely single narratives to explain this insanely complex world.
And while all are important to listen to and can be very informative, they should only be SINGLE data points in your own critical thinking. There is no single source of truth. And there is no shortcut to the truth.
Anyone who claims to have the objective 'truth' in a world as infinitely complex as ours is a religion person, and if you follow them unskeptically you are an acolyte, and if you censor people who are questioning you, you fall into an inquisition type situation.
Yeah, the social media and the internet is full of these claims and I see how these are pretty easy to believe when told with enough confidence. Which was an interesting revelation for me.
Since the average person doesn't know much about the background (me included!) and since a similar claim takes a lot of knowledge to disprove it just sounds plausible by default. Because if someone makes a more specific claim, like "this is how sars-cov-2 enters the cells" or "this drug works" (or doesn't work) that's easy to check and then, if not true, disprove with published papers. The "we don't know this" is harder. Even if you pull up a paper, the goal post indeed will be moved ever so slightly and if the claim is more broad then you need to be a knowledgable expert to be able to say where the gaps are in the knowledge and how likely, when discovered/understood that new knowledge would change the field substantially.
Since I became interested, I started learning a bit of virology online. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia has an online course on youtube. This semester he teaches it directly with a focus on the average layperson [1]. Each session is 2 hours long and you can ask questions which he answers. It's not about covid, it's about virology in general but he does include the relevant pieces of information abour sars-cov-2 into every lesson/topic. He actually has his previous courses taught to undergrad (or graduate?) students online as well. Those seem to be just 1 hour long each, but based on a quick look at the slides the content is identical.
Now what it teaches to everyone interested is that they know a lot. They have astonishingly detailed knowledge about how viruses work in general and they have learned a lot about sars-cov-2 very quickly. But given the general virology knowledge, you won't be surprised at the things they looked at first.
My undergrad is in biology and I got it many years ago. I can only imagine how much has changed since then.
Does anyone think that in the infinite complexity of the human body and the immune system that we think we have 'figured covid out' by discovering a single spike protein?
There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body.
We are just touching the surface of how the body works.
They just discovered a new organelle in cells this year.
So for any single group to claim a monopoly on truth and censor other views, especially with only a year and a half of study... is a major problem.
1., nobody said "we figured covid out". I said we learned a lot about it pretty quickly. (BTW, coronaviruses and SARS in particular have been researched pretty intensively since 2003, the first SARS pandemic.)
2., they didn't just discover a "single spike protein"
> There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body.
Actually, no. There are indeed very definitive ways SARS-CoV2 (or any virus, for that matter) can interact with the body. It's not a living thing. It needs to get into specific type of cells and it can only do it through the spike protein which will only bind to the ACE2 receptor. As long as/if it doesn't happen, the virus is an inert particle. E.g. it won't proliferate in mice (without genetically making them susceptible) or in most other animals. Also, we have a lot of virus particles in us that can't interact with the human cells, so we'll never know about them. One interesting comment from the above curse was that prof. Racaniello said that you can learn bout your "virome" by sequencing your stool and some experiment found that the most frequent virus in there is some plant virus (which don't even have the capability to enter even plant cells by themselves).
> also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post .
It indeed is. As a layperson who knows nothing about a field, not even a closely related field your best bet is to accept the scientific consensus. And by best bet I mean that that that is the choice that will give you the highest expected value of success.
People keep pointing at the cases from the past (sometimes from the very far past, like with Galileo) trying to disprove this strategy. There are at least two fatal flaws with this logic:
1. science has evolved a lot since then. And it doesn't just mean that we know more about those specific subjects (be it astronomy or neuroscience) but more importantly, the scientific method has evolved too. I.e. when we think we know something today, is very different from what it was a 100 or 500 years ago.
2. Of course, scientists can be wrong. Even en masse (i.e. the scientific consensus). (If it wasn't so, we may not need research any more after all because we'd know everything.) But going completely wrong is pretty rare and what is exactly your other option? Listening to lunatics? Because every lunatic will say "yeah, but the scientists are wrong all the time, so..." and go on with their 100% unfounded claims. No, it's not that they do research because they don't accept the consensus. That would be totally OK. They just make claims that they support with this very vague critique. "Lobotomy won a Nobel prize, which we know don't work, so who is to tell me that I'm wrong with my claims that I have nothing to support."
> Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty.
Nobody said it was. This is a big fat strawman. But just because (almost) nothing is 100% certain, it doesn't mean that we don't have more probable and less probable answers.
Given that there is no way to measure absolute scientific progress, this is a meaningless and baseless claim.
At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits. Thee equations worked extremely well. Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle. Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction.
There is no reason to believe science is somehow progressed perfectly today in every arena.
There are, of course ways we can measure progress. E.g. by measuring the results of applying science and scientific results to practical problems. Since we talk about medical sciences here, life expectancy is a good measure. So is being able to cure specific classes of diseases. And these are off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure someone into the philosophy of science could come up with much better and more general metrics.
> At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits.
Again, Galileo had a clash with the catholic church not really fellow scientists.
> Thee equations worked extremely well.
I'm not so sure. Galileo came up with his theory based on what geo-centric view couldn't explain.
> Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle.
> Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction.
Which was true. They indeed got ahead, because they also had to perfect the math and measurements, etc. Not just the descriptions of the orbits. Also, BTW, Galileo was wrong. He thought the Sun was the center of the freaking universe, which it isn't at all.
Also what are you then arguing for? If you can't say that science evolves and improves over time then what's wrong with censorship? Those ideas that you think would be censored (I didn't exactly say that, but let's go with it for now) would not improve science. Or, at least we wouldn't be able to measure it, according to you.
The way I like to think about it is that science is a machinery that constantly builds and improves itself. It not only gets 'bigger' but it constantly gets better and building itself by improving the scientific method itself. E.g. if you think about medical sciences again, 150 years ago doctors would experiment on themselves (n=1) and use their "experience" (i.e. a small amount of inaccurate measurements aggregated in their head). These days we do double blinded, randomized controlled trials and funky statistic checks to filter out errors, then other people look over the results multiple times (think peer reviews and meta-analysises). It's an iterative process that keeps correcting and perfecting itself. And we do know when we go in the wrong directions because results will be off from the reality.
Yet with that knowledge you have come to the conclusion that the mRNA vaccine is perfectly safe after being developed in 6 months and tested in humans for only a year-ish?
Oh, great. Yes, imperfect but improves iteratively. But I never said that the mRNA vaccine (or any vaccine, for that matter - we also have vector vaccines and even inactivated ones) is perfectly safe.
Indeed, what I was saying is that it's illogical to expect it to be perfectly safe. That would only make sense if contracting COVID was (proven to be) perfectly harmless. But the thing is that you are forced to make a decision and you don't have complete knowledge about the consequences of neither of your (two) choices. However, the (imperfect) experts say that the vaccines are way safer than contracting covid unvaccinated. And if anything, we both know that they have a lot better chance to be right than us.
> after being developed in 6 months
This doesn't really matter given the above (that you should listen to those who know a lot better), but the 6 months is far from being true. They started experimenting with the coronavirus vaccines back in 2003 and there was ongoing research ever since then. I've just seen a video from 5 years ago where a virologist guy talks about their bat coronavirus research at the local (Hungarian) science meetup.
The mRNA platform itself has been under development for over 3 decades, too. But again, you can go for adenovirus vector vaccines, which are a more tested technology. In some part of the world you can get inactivated vaccines (e.g. here, in Hungary we had one from Shinopharm), but they don't do that well against SARS-CoV2. However, the actual candidate for Pfizer's (well, BioNTech's) vaccine was done in something like 2 weeks, IIRC. But that was only possible because of the decades of earlier research. In part the mRNA technology itself, in part because they could skip the animal testing thanks to the SARS-CoV1 vaccines developed around 2003. (But the animal testing only protects the phase1 maybe phase2 participants, anyway. It's not that a vaccine sometimes takes years because they experiment on animals for years with a vaccine candidate that otherwise seems perfectly viable.)
>> However, the (imperfect) experts say that the vaccines are way safer than contracting covid unvaccinated.
False. SOME (imperfect) experts say this.
SOME experts say taking an unknown vaccine for a healthy person in an age group that is not at risk of Covid is creating an unnecessary (unknown) vaccine risk for themselves especially considering the vaccines are made by profit driven companies that haven't been particularly human welfare focused in the past.
>>They started experimenting with the coronavirus vaccines back in 2003
Thalidomide is based off of benzodiazepens which had been developed over a hundred years before Thalidomide was invented.
Still made unexpected flipper babies.
Have you even made a tiny tweak in a code base and the whole thing broke?
Now apply this to a biochemical system which is infinitely more complex.
Sure. As you don't have certainty but you have to make decisions.
> Science is not the ultimate source of truth,
Science is our current best approximation of reality. But yes, it's not ultimate and we indeed do know that it's inaccurate. But we don't know better. And that's also important to keep in mind.
> it is data with a risk reward attached that you can use for your own critical thinking
Yes, but there's a trap here. It's OK as long as you base your decisions on your best knowledge (i.e. science). You can say that based on your risk profile (which you can estimate using science) the best decision (bet! :) ) for you is X. That's rational. However, a lot of people interpret similar claims as if it would be rational use what they think is "critical thinking" to override science. And that's a huge difference.
To be more specific. E.g. there is huge difference in saying that I believe that (accept the assumption) mRNA vaccines are safe with a 99999/100000 probability (i.e. cause cause serious side effects at most 1 out of 100 000 times) but I estimate my COVID risk lower, because the way I isolate myself (let's say you do have the data). I don't meet anyone, don't go outside, I'm 25yo, I work out, I don't have a condition, etc.
Vs. if someone says that "yeah, they say it's safe, but I don't think so, because this and that". Because that's not critical thinking. That's actually the lack of self reflection/critique. Even if someone reads up on some literature and they base their opinion on that, that almost certainly will just be cherry picking (it's hard to do better in a field someone knows nothing about).
> But people now are treating as an infallible religion that
> you can outsource your critical thinking to...which is scary imo.
I don't see this. I probably see more people who are so afraid of making the wrong decision that they actually end up making the wrong decision :). Again, "critical thinking" sounds good, but a lot of time it's not critical thinking. Some people may feel insecure if they just accept someone else's decision or opinion even if that someone else knows lot better. And it may feel safe to make your own decision (which, almost by definition has to be different). But that's a bad intuition. If you have no better information to base your decision on than your best source (in this case, science) then your end results will just be worse by adding in your thinking (your inferior data sources and inference).
I heard a good definition of what it means to be rational the other day. If I remember correctly it was a simple as being open to error correction. Perhaps this is a statement by David Deutsch, I don’t remember right now. But I like the definition very much. If you can’t communicate how are you going to do error correction?
Both undefinable terms that are increasingly being used anytime the current Western establishment wishes to censor speech and silence their opponents.
When the Chinese or Russians do it, we call it out for what it is: censorship and abuse of power. It's even more insidious when it's done in supposedly free societies, because we wrap it up in a bow with these nebulous terms and feign noble intentions.
> It's even more insidious when it's done in supposedly free societies, because we wrap it up in a bow with these nebulous terms and feign noble intentions.
Yea they do that in China too. The Chinese have a particular knack IMO for flowery language that covers for various government shenanigans. Most censorship in China also takes place at whims of private enterprise, just like in the west.
When China is criticizing the US they call our abuses exactly what they are, while equivocating their own. Nothing new under the sun.
Did you really live through that whole Trump-era hate speech and harmful misinformation culture and not once stop to understand what that means? Did you do nothing more than repeat slogans without passing them through your human intellect first? I dare you to define those terms so that they mean anything other than "The enemy's tribe is bad because it's not the one I happened to fall into."
Not only can you not define the buzzwords you used, but you doubled down and used another ill-defined buzzword that you also won't know the meaning of.
You're a human being capable of far deeper thought than that. Why would you willfully cripple yourself so much? OK, that was a rhetorical question - you're intellectually crippling yourself to show allegiance to your tribe, membership in which satisfies some of your otherwise unmet emotional needs.
Honestly, I support the right of YouTube to not host content they don't want to host, given they own the data centers. This dude is free to get a record deal, play live on the street, or distribute music in any of the other thousands of ways that don't require uploading to YouTube.
But this is still silly. It's a song. Rage Against The Machine has a song claiming the FBI staged the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and it's the most popular song from The Matrix soundtrack. And an iconic, great song that I love, for what it's worth, even though I doubt the truth of that claim.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 429 ms ] threadIf it were F@ck Donald (whatever) and everything else the same it would still be up.
The rest is nothing but naked excuse.
There are so many medically misleading things on YouTube —just look at dieting. They cause harm. Let me see them pull those.
Nah, they won’t.
Honestly, I think “Pravda” would be proud of the gall.
Since January 6th I assume the opposite: Many of these people are working to destabilize our democracy. I have zero interest in accommodating them.
A case in point is Christina Bobb, who works as a propagandist for OANN under 1st amendment journalistic protections, but showed her true colors on Jan 6 by working with Rudy G and John Eastman at the Willard to overturn the election result. At that point I think she is no longer entitled to legal protections afforded journalists.
If that is not working to overturn democracy, then neither are a handful of people running past the barricades at the Capitol building, who harmed nobody.
Wrt to the rioting around the Floyd protests: what Federal building in DC was stormed? Crowds/mobs were close to the White House, but not into the actual grounds.
>Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it, ayy, ayy (They just planned it)
>Biden said the jab stop the spread, it was lies (I remember)
That is all I can see as far as "medical information" goes. What a joke. This song is bad, it would have fallen off the charts if they just let things go.
[0] https://mychords.net/en/bryson-gray/157414-bryson-gray-lets-...
Thing is, if I remember rightly Biden did spread outright misinformation that falsely claimed the vaccine was a lot more effective than it actually is using his platform as president, and got checked on it by the BBC (though maybe not the mainstream US media)...
It was rather cool to be anti vaccine 1 year ago. Now its verboten.
I do not intend for this post to be anti Biden. Trump is also a hypocrite, just not on his pro covid vaccine stance.
"I personally believe X, but my constituents overwhelmingly support Y, so I will be voting for Y."
But, I’ve heard the “planned” argument levied against the CCP, and that it was a bio weapon, and this was a planned release. That argument, while still far fetched, is at least in the realm of possibility for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Check this song out, it gives practical advice for carrying out burglaries. People have screamed and kicked but YouTube won't remove the song.
After the reading the news article in full, I found the video and watched it once in full. After that, I searched and found the lyrics to the video. I'm over explaining, but I'm rate limited.
I dont see much that would support the reason YouTube gave for banning it.
FWIW, I am against censorship.
Is it de facto censorship? Maybe. But I think we as a society agree that social media platforms have a responsibly to censor harmful content in order to protect the public.
Would we have wanted social platforms to give a voice to the "American First" movement of the 1930s? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4GyYPLHlwA
Of course, it's part of democratic debate. Remember America stayed out of World War 2 until Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh's argument from the video you link is completely reasonable.
I left out the "protecting our children" platitude. Thought it might be a little bit over the top. ;-)
In any case, I think Glenn Greenwald has the best take on internet censorship:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...
I agree about Greenwald's take there.
Definitely. Just because you disagree with something doesn't mean it should be censored.
In case anyone else doesn't get the joke, the reporter (as most reporters do) was covering for Biden when she pretended his noisy opposition was something else [1]. In other words, it was an unusually obvious attempt at a tawdry cover-up. Thus, the mockery in calling Biden "Brandon".
[1] It might remind some of this classic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Kpb8eu1pEY
When reporters lie then there careers should be over.
*edit- he doesn't seem to mind though
hahahahaha ... no but really, were you born yesterday?
I am kind of curious what the reporter who covered for dear leader thinks of all this, if she's even aware of anything (they rarely are).
Inaccurate. The line "Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it" is also referencing COVID, and pushing a false and dangerous conspiracy theory about it.
By actually getting people to talk through their beliefs, and state them clearly, society might be able to consider all opinions and have a conversation, rather than accepting the idea that our technological gatekeepers can be trusted to evaluate them correctly on our behalf.
It wasn't a dangerous stance to take at one time - lets not censor people. Its music.
probably that part?
But I'm not. The proper counter argument to this Stalinist "you can't say that," bullshit is to keep saying it, louder.
I would also like to quote NWA: "Fuck the Police"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmo3HFa2vjg
So you don't dispute that it is disinformation. Is idea that is that someone refusing to host disinformation is a good reason to disinform, louder?
And I dispute the repute of those labeling things "disinformation", specifically.
>Are you truly the victim today, in this pandemic?
So give up freedoms, for the common good. Now that's rich.
Especially since COVID-19 spreads without symptoms, we have to prioritize prevention.
Besides, we've had our freedoms eroded time and again since the World Trade Centre attacks. Why are some Americans choosing now to draw a line in the sand? Because previously the laws were targeting brown skinned people. And now there's a Democrat in charge, so Republicans want to cause strife and division to get elected in 2022 and 2024.
The goals keep creeping but the justifications are always the same: People have to be saved from themselves!
This attempt to make COVID control measure into a scare story about a slippery slope where the "freedom" is vanishing over time is IMHO wrong (COVID control measures are not that) and misdirecting (pay attention to what FaceBook does, voter suppression, etc, if real examples that slope is what you are looking for).
If I wrote a rap song with "stick an artichoke in your butt" and magically a hundred people follow the advice and hurt themselves, someone for sure will at least attempt to censor my song. The imitation problem has been with us for thousands years, but social media made it a lot worse by dramatically augmenting the audience, then moving a lot faster than laws, and allowing some grey zones where a law prohibiting this and that would be too draconian and no law makes similar scenarios very possible. That's where we should be the ones who censor ourselves when we suspect that someone could be damaged by our words. That rapper didn't, because he pursuits fame and money, and Fox News by jumping in his defense acted exactly as one would expect from a source that has nothing to do with journalism.
The meaning and intent of the lyrics are open to interpretation, but I think the latter part of the lyric implies political commentary rather than medical commentary.
Also, I think we need a tighter definition of "medical misinformation." Is it to promote anything that is medically harmful? Well, then why can musicians sing endlessly about drugs and unsafe sex? What about videos on non-fda regulated vitamins and minerals, or weight loss solutions? Surely most doctors wouldn't advise taking recreational drugs, or jumping on to the latest weight loss magic pill.
And yes, YouTube is a private enterprise. But we can still, as a society, openly dialog on what we think is wrong with their practices.
There's a segment of the US population that believes and spreads the harmful misinformation in memes and YouTube videos. That's all well and good when talking about aliens building pyramids or whatever. But currently we have this same segment of the population refusing to get vaccinated, mask up, wash their hands, etc etc. Those actions are harmful to society as a whole and should be treated like the attacks they are.
As someone with lung issues, it angers me deeply that there's millions of Americans who couldn't give the tiniest shit to take actions that might save my life.
The parties go back and forth every so often - it used to be the conservatives who wanted to censor music, now its the liberals. Its tiring. I want off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.
As is their right. People should be able to make informed decisions about whether they get an injection. Especially right now in this pandemic. We're still studying the vaccines and their effects on people. Nobody knows for sure their risk/benefit profiles yet, there hasn't been enough time to draw definitive conclusions. It's entirely possible that these vaccines have risks we don't know about, or are only worth using on certain populations such as the elderly.
People who decide to take vaccines need to do so informed of these facts. Misleading the public about this will only strengthen conspiracy theories and lead to even worse outcomes.
> mask up, wash their hands, etc etc.
Yeah, I agree that's stupid. There's no risk to washing hands or wearing masks. Nothing wrong with refusing to associate with people who won't even practice basic hygiene.
> Those actions are harmful to society as a whole and should be treated like the attacks they are.
They may be harmful but that doesn't mean people should be oppressed because of it.
I'd prefer that, particularly in music, which has a rich history of slang, multiple meanings, and political commentary, we lean in the direction of permitting speech, to avoid censoring political commentary. In this particular case, when the chorus and title "Let's go Brandon" are CLEARLY political commentary, the chance that the work as a whole is political commentary (as opposed to "medical information") is further increased.
This is a weird video to target, and I feel like there's bigger fish to fry w.r.t. harmful misinformation edit: about COVID. Mostly that the most dangerous misinformation is that which can actually convince people to believe untruths, something I doubt this video can do (it seems to preach to the choir). But who am I to know how their algorithm works?
The irony is that the incoming Streissand Effect will generally be meaningless. The increased exposure to this song is unlikely to convert people (there's really only one verse about COVID) and the outrage from the Right is unlikely to budge YT policy because there's a strong argument for it being misinformation. So it's pointless, circuitous outrage.
It's really simple. They took down the video because it's critical of Biden and the guy is wearing a MAGA hat. Someone at YT probably saw the video, said to themselves "fuck this guy", and then looked through the lyrics to find one offending word or phrase, and used that as an excuse to ban the guy.
Practicing for the mental gymnastics Olympics are you now
How about I listen to what I like and you fry your fish elsewhere?
> This is a weird video to target
So we can all agree that YT isn't arbitrarily censoring anti-authoritarian conspiracy theories, but is specifically censoring conspiracy theories related to COVID? This seems like a good thing, that they are casting a narrow net, no? Would you prefer they censor ALL anti-authoritarian conspiracy theories?
Of all the scenarios where censorship could be called for, fighting misinformation harmful to public health in a global pandemic seems like a reasonable fish to fry.
I have 0 problem whatsoever with large, public information clearing houses suppressing anything that is counter factual during the emergency.
If they were taking down information about a doctor challenging Health Authorities in a very Scientific manner, that would be something else.
And of course, we have to make sure that we do come out of this 'crisis' and that institutions don't use it as a means for perennial control, but I'm not really worried about that. We're all sick of this and as COVID passes out of reality, people just won't care what people have to say about it, just like any other mundane subject.
So once COVID has passed, we can sing dumb songs about dumb things, if they take them down then, I suggest that would amount to undue censorship.
That's precisely the problem though. The rule at Youtube is any content that goes against CDC/WHO guidelines is considered "misinformation". So to your point:
> If they were taking down information about a doctor challenging Health Authorities in a very Scientific manner, that would be something else.
Yeah unless that doctor comes to the exact same conclusion as the CDC, and parrots the exact same info, that doctor is spreading misinformation according to Youtube. I've even seen instances where the CDC would say something, Youtuber would cover it, the next week the CDC reverses that policy and Youtube will hit the Youtuber for "misinformation".
If someone went on YouTube to articulate the current scientific consensus of Ivermectin, which is that "There is no evidence to support it as a therapy for COVID, but that there are currently studies in progress which could yield important information, and in the meantime, people should definitely not be taking it as it can be dangerous unless administered by Health professionals" - I'm doubtful such a video would be taken down.
Anyone talking about COVID 'cures' in public forums for which there is no scientific consensus, during a pandemic, should definitely come under heavy scrutiny.
Aren’t these the organizations that lied to the public in March 2020, saying masks were not effective?
They later justified their deception, at the cost of how many lives (?), by suggesting it was to prevent a shortage of masks for medical personnel.
These organizations are not promoting the science to shape policy, they’re promoting policy with filtered science.
A simpler explanation, that is consistent with data, is that community masking was never very effective, and that the current mask guidelines are 100% about politics and signaling.
At the start of the pandemic, the efficacy of masks in the commons was still debatable, more so than is now.
Public Health Policy issues around getting 100's of millions of Westerners, not acclimated to wearing masks (as they are in some Asian countries), was a daunting concern, as we can see with all the anti-mask idiots even to this day.
N95s in particular were acutely necessary in Healthcare settings and the supply chains from China towards the start of the pandemic in the US were not quite ramped-up, and were just becoming secure by the time the CDC switched to a pro-mask footing. Otherwise, any call by the CDC for 350M Americans to 'wear masks' would have likely overran the Healthcare supply chain.
As the availability of PPE to Healthcare became secure, as Asian health officials urged Westerners to adopt mask policies, as we understand a bit more about masks, the policy shifted towards mask wearing.
Obviously, masks are a marginal tactic in the fight against COVID, but there is a systematic benefit, especially over 350M people million people, wearing them when they are interacting wit others. If there is ambiguity in their efficacy, it's rational to err on the side of caution, not the other way. Because we are 'going with the policy' then it has to be supported and enforced, like anything else.
When the context shifted, they changed policy.
Public Health Policy is based on Science, but it's not the same as Science.
It's a strategy, a general policy and set of communication principles, based on facts, designed to get a large variety of people moving towards better health outcomes.
Some of those facts are not pretty, much of it is too complicated for public consumption, and necessarily not going to be directly part of the communication.
Obviously, in the interest of transparency, those facts and other bits of information (such as study results) are definitely publicly available to anyone who can Google - but what you're going to hear from Fauci, CNN, the 'papers of record' is the basis of a Public Policy.
If everyone acted conscientiously, in accordance with CDC guidelines, even while remaining vigilant to the extent they choose (i.e. verifying information as they so chose), this pandemic might very well have been already over.
CDC: Masks should be worn by children aged 2 and up: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-...
WHO: In general, children aged 5 years and under should not be required to wear masks: https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-children-and-ma...
ECDC: In primary schools, the use of face masks is recommended for teachers and other adults when physical distancing cannot be guaranteed, but it is not recommended for students: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/questions-answers/que...
Doesn't seem very consistent to me.
WHO and CDC act in generally accordance with what we know i.e. 'consistent with the science'.
The science itself is of course fuzzy, moreover, your example ignores the fact that in different conditions (i.e. cultures, relative access to healthcare, % vaccinated), public policy is going to be different even if the science itself were clear.
So in varying conditions, it's reasonable that there's going to be varying policy implementations. Those implementations are not 'inconsistent' with the science, even if they are 'inconsistent' with one another.
This is not hard to understand, so it begs the question, what kind of person would make the conclusion:
"Different places have different public health policies, therefore these groups must be acting unscientifically"
We generally know what's going on, and have a good idea of what we don't know - so most of this inanity boils down to psychology, self awareness, antagonism, magical thinking etc.. The answer to our problems lies more in understanding why people believe 'QAnon' conspiracy theories than it does anything else.
Sure, but what we're discussing here is YouTube's single global standard that is being used to determine whether or not something is "misinformation" and should be prohibited on their platform.
You argued that what YouTube is doing is good, because they're following CDC and WHO guidelines. I gave you one example of where the WHO and the CDC and the ECDC are completely at odds with each other, so what should YouTube do in that case? Which science should they follow?
If I make a video on YouTube, talking about what a barbaric practice it is to force small children to wear masks, pointing out all the ways it is harmful for them, and talking about how little is gained from it, it would be seen as completely normal by most European viewers, because it is in line with public health recommendations from the ECDC.
If I make a video on YouTube, talking about what a barbaric practice it is to re-open schools without mask mandates, pointing out the risk to teachers and staff, and talking about how much is gained from it, it would be seen as completely normal by many American viewers, because it is in line with public health recommendations from the CDC.
Which video should be removed by YouTube for medical misinformation? The first? The second? Both? None? Or should YouTube apply different standards depending on your geolocation?
YouTube has already done exactly this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-cancels-the-u-s-senate-...
Later, Pierre Kory himself contracted Covid, from his daughter. Both of them had been on Ivermectin, obviously. He doesn't mention this publicly. Only thanks to someone who was watching closely do we now have proof this even happened.
So no, this isn't "in a very scientific manner." He creates a good illusion of being scientific, but he's not.
These are dangerous falsehoods, that are used by millions as part of their justification for not getting vaccinated, which allows the virus to continue spreading. YouTube isn't perfect, but they are making an attempt to compensate for all the lies that are spread on their platform and others. This is important during a crisis that has already killed 700,000 Americans. I get the "freedom of speech" thing, I really do. But Americans are still dying at a rate of 2 fully loaded 747s a day crashing, and YouTube would prefer not be contributing to that.
So I support YouTube's decision on that one.
But the example you gave doesn't help make your case, just the opposite, Dr. Kory's information indicating that Ivermectin is helpful in treating COVID is not scientific and the net result of his communication is de facto misinformation, and can definitely cause harm.
If this Doctor wants to put information up on his own, personal website, that's a different story. He's free to do that. YouTube has no obligation to carry those videos. His liberties are not infringed.
What evidence do you have that this is what drives people to not believe the things the public health establishment wants them to believe?
You don't have any evidence because it's not possible to prove this.
I should also point out that you have misinformation in your statement.
You are stating that covid will eventually pass. This virus is now endemic and is not going to go away. You do realize this, right?
The vaccine is very effective in minimizing the risk of hospitalization and/or death but it is a leaky vaccine. Leaky vaccines will never eradicate any virus and instead will simply promote various mutations.
Blame unvaccinated people for many things but you can't blame them for the persistence of this virus. It's not going to go away.
If you work in the field of Marketing, PR or Communications for just a few days, it becomes pretty clear how people come to believe what they do.
What is 'impossible' - is for a material portion of the population to arrive at the specific conclusion that 'XYZ drug is beneficial for ABC disease' without having popular sources for that information: they have to hear it or read it somewhere. The greater the voice, the greater the credibility of the source in the mind of the recipient, the greater the likelihood that information becomes sticky. While there are other factors, the primary vehicle of the message is paramount. It's also measurable.
In fact it is your statement that miscommunicates the ongoing nature of the pandemic:
While COVID may linger for some time, there is no evidence as of yet that it will remain endemic - we don't know that.
Also - pandemic itself will definitely pass - as all pandemics in history.
COVID may or may not linger around in one form or another, but we will, at some point, back off from public health emergency status.
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=false+pandemic...
Let's not pretend that this is about lyrics that promote misinformation and instead admit that this is about lyrics which go against the current gated institutional narrative.
I haven't been able to find it myself but maybe worth considering.
Ew. I just defended YouTube.
Mostly just the rappers waving their hands around and showing their guns.
https://genius.com/Bryson-gray-lets-go-brandon-lyrics
I mean, I know there are pockets of people who believe that saying vaccines don’t work is telling the truth, but broadly speaking, saying that vaccines are fake and don’t work is considered misinformation related to medicine.
But that's not what he's saying, is it?
— Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind
We now know of vaccinated people dying of covid, some right after being vaxxed, some months after, some after getting a second dose.
The lyrics can be interpreted a few ways. Was the vaccine then supposed to absolutely stop the spread and give absolute protection to a vaccinated person?
He said vaccines don't work. You also said vaccines don't work. And that's just simply not true.
But they work often enough and to a high enough degree of efficacy that we still should bother.
In specific cases, vaccines may not prevent you from contracting a disease.
In general, vaccines do work. Even if they didn't work in your specific case.
Now, to bring this back around to being on-topic to the thread it's in, whether or not vaccines "work" is actually irrelevant. Either they do work and therefore stop the spread, or they don't work and they therefore don't stop the spread. A vaccine can not work without doing its job.
> Biden said the jab stop the spread, it was lies (I remember)
That's medical disinformation.
I'm not getting confused. I'm discarding facile positions based around inappropriate literalism
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/14/joe-biden/...
https://rumble.com/vnxsm5-lets-go-brandon-rapper-loza-alexan...
How can someone place so much trust in this suppression without even seeing what's being censored? Is it just a deliberate blissful ignorance? Are these people really so naive from the comforts of modern western living?
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I don't know about age, but only about 10% of HN users were in the Bay Area, last time I ran the numbers, and that was for a much larger region than most people refer to as the Bay Area (a 200-mile diameter circle IIRC). The SF number would be well below that.
This place is no democracy, though, so dang sometimes brings them back. And that’s ok.
When songs promote robbing Asian people YouTube says “ In a memo to staff explaining the rationale for not barring the YG video, management wrote: “We’ll start by saying we find this video to be highly offensive and understand it is painful for many to watch, including many in Trust & Safety and especially given the ongoing violence against the Asian community. One of the biggest challenges of working in Trust & Safety is that sometimes we have to leave up content we disagree with or find offensive… Sometimes videos that otherwise violate our policies are allowed to stay up if they have Educational, Documentary, Scientific or Artistic context…
“In this case, this video receives an EDSA exception as a musical performance,” YouTube’s memo to staffers continued. “While EDSA is not a free pass for any content, there are likely thousands of music videos that would otherwise violate policies including Sex & Nudity, Violent or Graphic Content and Hate Speech were it not for these sorts of EDSA exceptions. As a result, removing this video would have far-reaching implications for other musical content containing similarly violent or offensive lyrics, in genres ranging from rap to rock. While we debated this decision at length amongst our policy experts, we made the difficult decision to leave the video up to enforce our policy consistently and avoid setting a precedent that may lead to us having to remove a lot of other music on YouTube.”
Edit: People keep responding to this comment claiming that the video didn't feature an impeach biden shirt, then deleting their comments when they realized what they saw was a video using the same name exploiting the fact that the real video is hidden. :) If you feel the urge to make that reply, instead just update this counter instead:
Search "Let's go brandon" and it should be the number 1 result, it's #23 on trending for music still, it was #1, and it peaked at #1 on itunes hiphop charts for US. But you don't get it unless you search for "let's go brandon song", which makes me think somebody messed with it.
The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.
Was it really "the community" though?
Anyway, that video doesn't seem very out there at all to me. That the CIA has committed various things most reasonable people would classify as "crimes" and "terrorism" seems like common knowledge to me.
I would put money on Rumble becoming a major force in social media over the next ten years. It feels more like early YouTube than YouTube itself has felt for a long time.
Case in point: this article[0] was removed from Wikipedia without good reasoning. It would seem that the name of the article itself was inflammatory enough to the powers that be.
[0] https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/List_of_authoritarian_re...
There's a discussion of why it was deleted here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Primarily because 'this "list" is inherently subjective and constitutes [synthesised conclusions]'; you'll also note on that page that "List of authoritarian regimes supported by the Soviet Union or Russia" was deleted at the same time - was that also at the behest of the US "powers that be"?
Censorbeast hit again.
if i have q WordPress blog on a $5vps, and you post a comment saying my blog post is stupid. its my vps,im paying for it, i can delete the comment if i want right?
where do you draw the line? how big exactly does my blog have to get before this is considered big tech censorship?
When you have lobbyists working for you.
Or better yet, promote counter-anti-desintermediation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before. If we are to understand the consequences of an increasingly centralized Internet, we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration. Centralization is required to capture profit. Disintermediating platforms were ultimately reintermediated by way of capitalist investors dictating that communications systems be designed to capture profit.
https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
Many of us on different spectrums (libertarian here) did listen to what Elizabeth Warren said, and we agree with it.
I think there is a great deal of truth in what the anti-monopolist economic crusaders on the left (Sanders&Warren) have said. While I may not agree with everything they said about economics across the board, I do think they are correct in that we have permitted bigtech to become a monopoly. AND, I agree that overly favorable tax jurisdiction shopping is a massive problem.
We need to re-empower the DOJ to pursue antitrust again, and we need it now.
her proposals on how to deal with consolidated power and capital at the top are/were more reasonable, but that's because she's has a more visceral experience in that arena, rather than with poverty, housing, or immigration issues, for example.
At the end of the day there will be a concentration of audiences somewhere, so I don't think this problem goes away.
What I wonder is whether at a certain point we actually need to protect people from themselves. I get how ominous that sounds, but OTOH if large swaths of the population, say, fall prey to senseless conspiracy theories, do we just watch it play out?
Network effects can happen in a federated or decentralized way:
- Email is useful regardless of the software, OS, server or owner of the address you are sending emails to.
- The fediverse benefits from network effects and interoperability between instances with both different software and different communities.
I would even go further and argue that centralized "network effects" are in reality "captive costs" of "not being inside the walled garden" rather than a true network to begin with.
Through the magic of interoperability entities can set up their own servers or contract to external providers their email services.
There's no technical reason they can't, but practically, a central, easily discernible destination appeals to those looking to monetize their content.
Email is a one-to-one (or few) channel vs broadcast. Completely different.
The arguments about decentralization/federation remind me of the early days of the Net, wherein there was so much talk of democratization, but here we are (unfortunately).
That is very similar to what was mentioned up-thread:
> [..] we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration: Centralization is required to capture profit.
---
> Email is a one-to-one (or few) channel vs broadcast. Completely different.
ActivityPub / Diaspora / Friendica were also mentioned; email was about interop between software and service providers.
---
> The arguments about decentralization/federation remind me of the early days of the Net, wherein there was so much talk of democratization, but here we are (unfortunately).
Also mentioned up-thread:
> The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before.
Yes, these are all examples of what's technically possible from a decentralization standpoint; yet have not flourished WRT adoption, relative to the centralized platforms.
>That is very similar to what was mentioned up-thread:
"[..] we need to start by addressing the root cause of this concentration: Centralization is required to capture profit.
I see the article you've quoted up-thread and the author's observation is so obvious as to add little to this discussion. That is, of course it's an issue of profit.
But, I suppose it does underscore that it's not the question of technology that advocates of Diaspora, etc. suggest.
So, sure, my original point that we'll always tend towards centralization on platforms that benefit from network effects relies on the assumption that we'll continue to have a capitalist economy.
This is a true symbiosis: the Party will see that no laws that harm the Company are passed, and Company will stop the spread of any information harmful to the Party.
Probably no relation with the 2014 Princeton study published on the Cambridge University Press that determined the United States of America to be an Oligarchy rather than a Democracy.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
> But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened
Neither Bill Clinton or Obama came from or had money. Neither had fathers in their lives or immediate great families of consequence. Neither had long-tenured national political experience. Oh yeah, and Obama is half black. The oligarchy chose Obama over Hillary Clinton? They had no choice is what actually happened.
Just because the study came from Princeton, that doesn't mean it's not idiotic.
Additionally it is a very weird presidentialist take to criticize a study on only the presidential election outcomes of a two-party state.
but that our political system isn't a full-on autocratic aristocracy doesn't mean it isn't oligarchal. oligarchy implies an outsized influence by a small subset, not complete control, just as democracy doesn't mean complete control by the people. oligarchy seems a pretty apt characterization.
A true countercultural president is rare, and the overlooked people in the country got one. His policy could be anything, as long as it makes the coastal folks angry.
The power weilded by a government should be kept in check democratically by their constituents. As your blog grows into YouTube, you gain more and more power over people's lives and livelihoods... more political and economic reach with your decisions. That power should thus grow proportionally more limited by mechanisms of user empowerment, rights, and direct control.
There isn't a cutoff... there should instead be a sliding scale.
However American law requires bakers to bake cakes for events they as an individual disagree with. An old lady florist was individuals fined for refusing to do an event she thought was morally questionable.
It seems the only 'people' with rights to conscience are multi billion dollar companies conveniently doing the bidding of the party in power. So that's strange.
Compare with YouTube, where anyone can post a video saying the same and if Joe Rogan came after them, YouTube would claim section 230 protection, insisting it's not selecting content and hence it's not responsible for the user's content.
Many people would be fine with YouTube or any other social media company censoring whatever it wants if it also had been liable for the content it leaves uncensored. As of now, it's having the cake (censoring anything they want) and eating it too (not being liable for the content that's left).
Many of you defending censorship in the last few years (and very much so on HN) on political grounds are going to be changing your minds in the coming years due to stuff like this.
I also have a great deal of dread that we will not. We are not guaranteed to have nice things, and a few bad actors can do quite a lot of harm.
Nobody is stopping him from touring the country to spread his message. Same as it always was.
I personally post 0 on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube and I manage to get by in life just fine.
Now look at YouTube and Twitter. They amplify the voices of many average people, but only those who tow their political line. This makes it appear as though some ideas are more widely supported than they actually are. It's the same problem as with radio and newspapers, but it is exacerbated more than 1000 fold.
I think it's counter-productive because of my politics, but I don't think it's ineffective or futile.
This is true, but it is an important topic so here is another angle to consider:
YouTube doesn't have any tools to sift right from wrong that we don't already have, and their censors are probably only marginally more intelligent than average.
They are going to get stuff really wrong from time to time, and eventually are going to censor important information - if they haven't already, it is hard to tell.
Case in point, censors generally aren't bought in to hit stuff that is obviously wrong. Everyone knows that sort of content is garbage and only watches it for a laugh (think flat earthers). They are coming in for stuff where the available evidence makes it difficult to tell what is true or not (eg, ivermectin). They're going to make some horrible mistakes playing at that game, because by nature of what they are targeting, some of it is going to be factual content.
I thought Facebook & Google were outsourcing the censoring to low budget contracting firms in poorer states, so they could keep the spend at a minimum?
And -- if I am similarly deplatformed for harmful speech, that's a good thing. Bad personal consequences are a just outcome of bad personal behavior, made more just if the same applies to everyone, friends and foes alike. It's an intrinsic aspect of the social contract.
As always, I invite people to look at Usenet as an example of what happens when a platform carries everything. People stopped going there because after the advent of bots, it was completely overrun with V1AGR4 ads. Try getting your speech heard when there's 99.999% noise to signal. It's silencing of a different sort.
YouTube's criteria of what is and is not harmful is the issue.
Sometimes it's more important to remember what happened than our right to free speech.
To me, the internet is to the First Amendment as nuclear weapons are to the Second. Neither were anticipated when the Bill of Rights was written.
In the 18th century, no one knew people might invent weapons that could kill on such a scale and at such distance. No one knew people could make a beheading video and instantly share it with millions. No one anticipated algorithms that could amplify the worst human impulses to such a degree.
I'd love to see these problems solved in a better way. Here at Hacker New we have a half decent algorithm for promoting quality content based on upvotes and downvotes and flags and karma and such. When that fails, we have Dang's good judgement as a backup. That's censorship too, and it makes this a better place. It's not perfect, but if you were to take the approach of "any censorship is wrong" approach, Hacker News wouldn't be very pleasant.
YouTube is at a much larger scale, but they have a right to do something. Presumably you are ok with them disallowing beheading videos. What about videos encouraging suicide and providing "help"? What about videos telling people how to make chemical weapons? What about videos planning government overthrows? Where do you draw the line?
I don't necessarily have a long term solution, but I support them taking some short term measures.
When they come for your honest thoughts, no one will be there to save you.
Platforms should be neutral. But it's kinda nice they aren't. Fuck them, hopefully new ones will gain traction thanks to their actions.
I've listened to the song and it's primary (only?) message is to call out a blatant lie from the news media and that we should all be critical consumers of that media.
Unless we decide that they do, notwithstanding your declaration. I understand that you like censorship that you agree with, so it would probably be better to ask you about this when they start censoring things that state legislatures interpret as "critical race theory," or for claiming that a government official is being dishonest.
No, they're a private company. "We" don't get to decide what their obligations are.
Let me rephrase.. we shouldn't if we care about our principles. But I agree with you, inevitably we will abandon those principles, repeal the First Amendment (which is what such legislation would amount to) and cut off our nose to spite our face. The momentum and fury behind this new Red Scare is just too great to stop at this point.
But, after the dust has settled, the ashes of social media have cooled, the government regulates all speech on the web the way the FCC does television, and you need the resources of a corporation with a legal team just to handle the liability risk of publishing anything, I think we'll live to regret it.
/kill fake hackers.
Sure, big platforms censoring stuff is bad, but people still have the choice of renting a server and hosting whatever they want.
If your website, hosted on a dedicated machine that you rent from OVH or whatever (and probably Amazon, but I wouldn't trust them) or co-locate in a datacenter, can be taken down on claims of misinformation, that's it, RIP free Internet. It was nice knowing you.
Why Parler didn't use a "normal" hosting provider, I don't know.
https://gizmodo.com/godaddy-is-giving-texas-abortion-snitchi...
So seeing some people complain about censorship after being against regulation has very much "you wanted this, serves you right" vibe.
Which really just goes back to the two party, my enemy or my friend trope. Tribalism etc.
I used to be like that and I remember defending YT censorship as I thought I would probably wanted to be able to do the same had my project took off. It took me a long time to realise I was wrong.
The tech giants are unregulated. They can do what they want. They want this for some reason, so they do it.
What is the alternative?
Not sure if "they should be hosting dangerous antivaxx content during global pandemic" (that some people claim doest actually exist because of previous content) is a good way to kick that discussion off.
(I realize this particular video possibly isnt that dangerous.)
I would rather live in this world than the alternative.
It's beyond parody. If this was twitter, I'd be bringing out the clown emoji.
Congratulations.
Did I trigger you?
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You say "we", but you're nothing to them. You support some huge party, does anyone there even know your name?
Fuck that kind of shit, might as well vote for some fringe group really.
I don’t feel safe now should I report you?
And Sinclair really doesn't hold a candle to Nexstar and Gray Television, who have managed to buy up the vast majority of local affiliates over the past several years.
In the early 2000s I was always astonished by how utterly misinformed Fox News viewers were. In 2021 I am always astonished by how utterly misinformed MSNBC CNN and Fox News viewers are. On certain subjects like the statistical risk of a 35-year-old healthy person getting hospitalized for covid, Fox News viewers are actually the best informed. They still overestimate the risk but not by orders of magnitude that the other two sets of viewers succumb to. My father is a rabid MSNBC and CNN viewer, and like many of your typical resistance boomers is grossly ignorant about most things happening in the world. In December he was ranting to me about how the US could have had zero covid if someone else had been president. While I agreed with him that it had been mishandled I tried to explain to him that there wasn't any countries able to keep it out except for very isolated island nations. He was completely ignorant of this. He also freaked out when I contracted covid in February before I could give vaxxed. I was trying to explain to him that I'm very fit and healthy and relatively young but he really thought I was going to have to get hospitalized. This is when I started learning about the statistics on actual hospitalizations versus what the public thought. One difference between these groups of people who watch these utterly stupid channels is that Fox News viewers are pretty aware that they watch biased news. They weren't in the early 2000s though. MSNBC and CNN viewers think they're witnessing objective reporting in general. My father is always quick to say that he reads articles from the AP as if they are objective. They are absolutely not objective anymore. Ideological capture is a thing. And it was purely ideological when the AP told their reporters to call what was obviously rioting "mostly peaceful protests". The aftermath of that absurd line of thinking was me witnessing many family members who were right of center to completely lose any and all faith in journalistic institutions. It was a watershed moment in media becoming untrusted by most of the working class.
In some populations, a person has a better chance of catching covid and dying than they do of saying they watched Chris Cuomo last night.
lying about vaccines is against them, no matter what you want to say about politics
Regardless, YT doesn't want that anti-vax shit on their platform, so they removed it. There's absolutely no controversy here.
The difference between lying and joking is always in context. If I dress as a police officer for Halloween it's fine, if I lead you to believe I actually am a police officer it is a crime. There's also a middle ground where someone could mistake my costume for impersonation.
I don't know what aspect of this video violated the terms of service, but I think political videos on all sides regularly make statements that aren't supported by 'mainstream' fact checking sources and therefore might fall outside the policies of services like Youtube.
If you want to argue that all speech with 'political intent' should be protected I am open to that conversation! But that is not the standard held by most services, including Youtube, which Bryson Gray agreed to when he uploaded his song.
One type of humor is known as "trolling". The basic idea is to see how much of a reaction you can get from something pointless and stupid. Now many people are making songs with the lyric "Let's go Brandon" and they are receiving hate mail, being banned, being demonitized, etc. This reaction is seen as outsized for a reference to a fairly well known piece of pop culture. Thus, to those who find outsized reactions funny, this is funny.
Ours not to reason why.
Note: Just curious. Didn't even know about this "Let's Go Brandon" thing until now.
As I have said elsewhere in this thread I don't agree with the lyrics in that video. I find the video itself to be childish and silly but that would basically be 99% of rap and pop music in general.
They have not halted the spread because of vaccine misinformation like this very video which you are defending.
Are you implying that the pandemic is over?
Edit: and while we're here, here is politifact's take:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/oct/14/joe-biden/...
Concluding it's "half true" fits this thread well :)
I say this as someone who's vaccinated; that is not true. It can limit the spread by reducing the viral load you give off, but you can still be vaccinated, get the virus, be asymptomatic (or not) and transmit it.
How has this been shown?
Countries with a high vaccination rate don't have a lower infection rate than other countries:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, whatever level of immunity you had is completely gone by then:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
The only thing that remains, is some protection against symptomatic disease.
The second link is about a study that looks at transmission of the Delta variant from a breakthrough infection. It did not look into wether the chances of getting infected after vaccination decreased.
Finally the vaccine dramatically reduced your chances of dying. I'd say that's some pretty good protection from symptomatic disease, not just some protection.
You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
It is a remarkable conclusion to suppose that studying individuals in the same society fewer got infected if they were vaccinated because of comparison between different societies.
It would be as if we proved that people didn't smoke in the USA got lung cancer far less than smokers but you sprung up with a study that showed that rates of smoking between societies wasn't highly correlated with lung cancer ergo smoking didn't cause lung cancer. One would logically suppose that your study didn't prove what you think it proved.
At limit you are supposing that if we got 100% vaccinated somehow we would see as much covid spread despite everyone having antibodies which are known to decrease chance of infection and extent of spread ergo effecting the time one remains infectious and how many virions are available to be spread.
Beware of anyone who doesn't feel the need to disprove that raindrops fall in buckets who nevertheless has proven that storms can't cause floods.
More importantly.
The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7038e1.htm
This is even more important than decreasing spread.
Source?
> You are trying to make a statement about a counterfactual what if ___ country didn't vaccinate the imputation being that the vaccines aren't effective
I linked to an analysis by a Harvard professor. Who uses official government data of the respective countries. So I think I have good reason to take that seriously.
> because 2 different countries with dozens of confounding factors doesn't show a high enough correlation.
Yes there must be many confounding factors. But your phrase: "doesn't show a high enough correlation" is putting it mildly. How about: no correlation at all?
But I would love to see data that shows a population-level effect of mass vaccination on the covid infection rate.
> The MRNA vaccinations are 95% effective at keeping you out of the hospital or the grave.
This is the sort of percentage that got thrown around a lot at the start of the vaccination campaign. But for protection against infection/transmission. Just one of many examples:
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...
The idea that the vaccinated have become (mostly) asymptomatic spreaders of the viruses, is nothing to celebrate. This is a scenario that can push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous variants:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
A mutation which increased its spread slightly among vaccinated individuals by 10% while increasing the mortality of the unvaccinated by 10x would be fitter yet. This isn't fate because the space the virus explores is driven by its actual difficult to predict particulars not hypothetical thought experiments but I wouldn't bet on covid going away, I wouldn't bet on people choosing to be more likely to die and abandoning vaccination, and I wouldn't bet on covid becoming safer for the unvaccinated in the short term.
The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse. So if you choose to stay among the unvaccinated I would expect your prospects in the next several years range from bad to worse. Make your own decisions accordingly.
Yes. This is what that Quanta article was all about. Here's the link once more: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
> The odds are overwhelming that if covid does get worse despite our work in developing increasingly effective therapies the unvaccinated will have it much worse.
Agreed. There's a tragedy of the commons there.
And sever disease needing hospitalization and death. And these indeed the things we want to avoid. Both as individuals and as a society. Because if/when hospitals fill up then you have a trouble. This is what people don't get. (They also don't get that they could end up in a hospital or a morgue with some probability, so I don't even mention that.)
One of my friend's father has been waiting for an operation for half a year here (in Hungary). They couldn't do it in the spring because the hospitals were overcrowded with covid patients. Then they couldn't do it because the waiting lists grew during that period. Then somehow he got in about a week ago with the help of a former high ranking official (yeah, gotta love Eastern Europe) just to be sent home the next morning, because there weren't enough free beds in the ICU any more. Yes, anecdotal, but this is the thing we try to avoid.
Sorry to hear about your friends' father.
In New Zealand, the unvaccinated are largely the indigenous Maori, not stereotypical anti-vaxxers.
Given enough time, all populations will eventually attain herd immunity.
But yes, there's hard-to-reach people in every ethnicity. What I've enjoyed is the orgs who are vaccinating Māori and Pacific Islanders - always tell the community to come along even if you don't fit in either ethnicity, you'll still get a jab. I just love that. It's the way it should be!
We're all people, let's look after each other.
Your question should be directed at the creator of the video, not the HN user.
Regardless of whether the pandemic is over or not, the statement isn't a lie and therefore the quote is incorrect. The vaccine significantly slows ths spread and from both theory and past experience can fully stop it, given a high enough vaccination rate. At best it hasn't come to fruition yet and at worst it won't not because the statement is a lie but because people actively prevented it from coming true, despite all reason and logic.
Based on what data do you come to that conclusion?
The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
From the article:
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
1) "The vaccination rate of a country is not correlated with its covid infection rate". From the article: "The lack of a meaningful association between percentage population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases is further exemplified, for instance, by comparison of Iceland and Portugal. Both countries have over 75% of their population fully vaccinated and have more COVID-19 cases per 1 million people than countries such as Vietnam and South Africa that have around 10% of their population fully vaccinated." You can interpret this as either the vaccine not working (unlikely) or that high-income countries such as Iceland and Portugal test a larger share of their population than low-income countries such as Vietnam and South Africa (very likely), thus confounding the relationship between vaccination levels and reported Covid cases.
2) "And after 3 months of being fully vaccinated, people are just as likely to spread the virus as unvaccinated people". From the article: "The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab [Pfizer] was 42%, but increased to 58% with time." Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
The word "significantly" has a specific statistical meaning. The paper discussed on the Nature article implies it is not a statistically significant difference between 67% and 58% (likely accounting for covariance and measurement error).
Unless you have a different source showing there is statistical significance between those two results?
You may interpret all you want, but I was just pointing out the lack of solid data supporting the claim: "The vaccine significantly slows the spread"
Almost 3 billion people have been fully vaccinated worldwide and yet there is still no evidence that the vaccines have any effect at all in slowing the spread of the virus. I find this rather remarkable.
This situation could very well push the evolution of the virus towards more dangerous strains. Like what happened with Marek's disease among chickens:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-vaccines-can-drive-pathog...
> Your quote shows that the AstraZeneca vaccine loses effectiveness over time. However, the chance of an unvaccinated person passing on the virus is 67%, which is significantly higher than the 58% for a person who received the Pfizer vaccine.
Pfizer buys you a bit more time, but the downward trend in your immunity is unmistakable too:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1626980447-vaccin...
https://imgur.com/zt0wrOo
https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/reports/vaccine-efficacy-safet...
Across different countries the testing methodologies are too different to meaningfully compare with.
Finally your last paragraph only applies if the vaccinated person gets infected with delta in the first place (in other words has a breakthrough infection).
95% of COVID-19 deaths are happening among the unvaccinated right now, you’re spreading FUD about what’s basically a miracle.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
If I recall correctly, the Biden administration and the CDC both made public statements telling everyone that they would no longer need to continue wearing masks once they were vaccinated.
——
The first sentence of the very article you cite states:
Vaccines currently are the primary mitigation strategy to combat COVID-19 around the world.
Did you think the vaccines would prevent you from contracting covid?
Wear your masks people.
This portion of your comment in particular is false.
People who receive two COVID-19 jabs and later contract the Delta variant are less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta. Relevant Nature article (October 5, 2021).
However, good job on the masks part, please keep wearing them! :-)
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
> less likely to infect their close contacts than are unvaccinated people with Delta
I don't see these as contradictory. Vaccines are more effective against transmissions, yet vaccines don't slow down transmissions in a significative way. As per the article:
> Unfortunately, the vaccine’s beneficial effect on Delta transmission waned to almost negligible levels over time. In people infected 2 weeks after receiving the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, both in the UK, the chance that an unvaccinated close contact would test positive was 57%, but 3 months later, that chance rose to 67%. The latter figure is on par with the likelihood that an unvaccinated person will spread the virus.
> A reduction was also observed in people vaccinated with the jab made by US company Pfizer and German firm BioNTech. The risk of spreading the Delta infection soon after vaccination with that jab was 42%, but increased to 58% with time.
Fully agree on the mask though. Plus social distancing, if possible.
Seems like you’ve successfully done just that.
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Cambridge, MA USA
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA USA
Turner Fenton Secondary School, Brampton, ON Canada
"The study shows that people who become infected with the Delta variant are less likely to pass the virus to their close contacts if they have already had a COVID-19 vaccine than if they haven’t1. But that protective effect is relatively small, and dwindles alarmingly at three months after the receipt of the second shot. "
> Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
Almost like there's this spot where, once you have enough people vaccinated, the virus can no longer spread.
Hmm. Wonder why that could be. Certainly it couldn't possibly be exactly what experts have been telling us for the past century.
"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days."
When US media reports on activities like this in countries like China and Russia they call it censorship. When they report on the same activities in the US they call it "protecting the public from misinformation".
It's a very very slippery slope to ban things. Who gets to choose what gets banned? Who gets to say what is misinformation or not?
It blows my mind how shortsighted most of my left of center friends are on this topic. They seem to have this delusion that these levers of power are only ever going to be controlled by the people they agree with. In the early 2000s a lot of people I argued with were totally supportive of the Patriot act. They were generally conservatives and were just completely confident it would never be used against US citizens. Now those same people are witnessing calls from people on the left who wants opposed to Patriot act to use it against US citizens with right-wing politics.
Welcome 1984!
As Chesterton argues to the contrary "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
Digital platforms want to have it both ways - they want to (in some cases manually!!!) curate and censor recommendations, search results, and plain uploads, while also retaining their platform protections.
The libertarian stance on this issue is completely untenable. I know an Olympic gymnast who can’t perform gymnastics that well.
"Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power, but some libertarians diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems."
You can repeal section 230, and the first amendment will still protect every company in the US from doing what you want them to do. There is no version of this where you win, and anti-vax or overtly hateful/conservative content sticks around on YouTube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
Repealing 230 would just trigger a new set of lawsuits, one of which would end up in front of the Supreme Court, who would then rule it as unconstitutional to force YouTube to publish content it doesn't want to, and we'll be right back where we started, just now with precedent in a Supreme Court case.
https://harvardlawreview.org/2018/05/section-230-as-first-am...
https://www.lawfareblog.com/wall-street-journal-misreads-sec...
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr_online/vol95/iss1/3/
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/section-230-critics-are-...
You are tilting at a windmill, friend.
Also political feasibility in the USA isn’t the end-all be-all. YouTube certainly wants to do business in other countries/regions - such as the EU. Google is a public company, and as such it’s executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. Right now, since other megacorps want Google to censor content so their ads don’t run alongside XYZ content that you don’t like, Google is following their fiduciary duties. But if a regulator steps in, it becomes a matter if “oh shit doing business in the EU is more important than doing business with cocacola”
Your entire argument hinges on people not realizing there's a specific legal definition of the word "publisher", which means that no matter what politicians you convince to do what you want, it will never function as expected in the judiciary.
Remember, Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. "held that Prodigy was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on their bulletin boards in three ways: 1) by posting Content Guidelines for users, 2) by enforcing those guidelines with 'Board Leaders', and 3) by utilizing screening software designed to remove offensive language."
The State removed the above liability via Section 230, which paved the way for YouTube to become the monolith it is today. Reattaching liability to YouTube would force it to choose between an editorial model (Prodigy) or a platform model (CompuServe). It would not get the luxury of the editorial model without paying the corresponding costs of that model. In other words, it would put YouTube on the same playing field as the Washington Post and other traditional news sources.
I notice you ignored completely the articles I linked, and didn't even bother to address the myriad arguments put forward by legal experts on this issue. I assume that's because you have no legal standing whatsoever, and would prefer to just say, "This is what I want and I don't care if the country has to cease to exist first."
Additionally, I find it highly hypocritical that you post such an opinion on a platform that would be shut down, were you to magically get your way. When you have to express your opinion in a way that wouldn't be allowed if your opinion were shared, you might want to rethink your position. It makes your position look wholly unconsidered, which it apparently is.
The big flaw is revealed in the Lawfare blog:
"[CDA 230] merely ensures that courts will quickly dismiss lawsuits that would have been dismissed anyway on First Amendment grounds—but with far less hassle, stress and expense. At the scale of the billions of pieces of content posted by users every day, that liability shield is essential to ensure that website owners aren’t forced to abandon their right to moderate content by a tsunami of meritless but costly litigation."
The principle here isn't whether all the cases have merit or not; it is that every individual gets their day in court. That is, it is up to the courts to decide the merit of a case based on fact, which, of course, is case-dependent [1].
Denying individuals access to the courts makes them bear a cost. That cost should, in truth, be borne by Big Tech and subtracted from its profits.
As for Hacker News, it might not survive in its present form should CDA 230 be repealed. That's OK, though. Perhaps it would become PG's blog, and I would have to start my own blog to comment on matters of the day. That's entirely acceptable, and I don't find it hypocritical.
[1] https://www.rcfp.org/supreme-court-will-not-hear-letter-edit...
There would be one case, it would go to the Supreme Court, and would reinforce the key components of Section 230. YouTube, as a concept, will never go away, no matter what you want, because the 1st Amendment exists. Every individual would not get their day in court, as a precedent would be set and future lawsuits would be thrown out quickly, just as they are today.
Honestly, this smacks of bitter childishness; you want to hurt Google and you think this is the best way to do it. It is not, because it would not. It hurts no one, and would be re-resolved within the very next Supreme Court session, so no more than ~6 months. This childishness is reinforced by your acceptance that the platform you're writing on would not exist. You may not see that as hypocritical, but I and nearly everyone else who reads this does. It, alone, weakens your argument substantially.
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr_online/vol95/iss1/3/
Newspapers do not enjoy CDA 230 protection. They face actual liabilities and carry liability insurance, a cost. Without CDA 230, these liabilities will not disappear for Big Tech by one case going to the Supreme Court in 6 months. We've seen the opposite with the Supreme Court not hearing at least one letter-to-the-editor libel case for newspapers [1].
Finally, It is not guaranteed that Hacker News would cease to exist. It might need liability insurance or change in some other way. All I know is that things would be different and better.
[1] https://www.rcfp.org/supreme-court-will-not-hear-letter-edit...
This is a temper tantrum, and will never pass legislative or judicial muster. Enjoy YouTube, because its kind of site is sticking around forever.
This reminds me of a temper tantrum someone else threw on Twitter, claiming to leave the platform for an "a censorship-resistant technology: RSS". Did HN suddenly become exclusively based on RSS? No? Interesting. It's almost as if this is a post-hoc argument concocted to try and justify a childish fit.
Edit: You also shared propaganda on your Twitter feed about Hunter Biden's laptop, so it's pretty clear where your allegiances lie. Yet again, another conservative cries foul when an institution doesn't support his ideas.
I'm done here, I only engage with adults, which you clearly are not.
You're right that YouTube will exist as long as CDA 230 exists. However, if CDA 230 is ever repealed, YouTube will have to change as its business model is not protected by the 1st Amendment but by an act of Congress.
Ad hominem arguments are ignored.
— Your source, not mine (not that matters).
Your argument seems to be that CDA 230 doesn't matter, but it is imperative that it not be repealed, which is kind of a nonsensical position.
At this point I'm giving you a way to respond further to demonstrate how unreasonable, fundamentally, people who hold your position actually are. It's clear from what you've written that this isn't a rational position you hold, and so then anyone reading this will have to guess at why, other than rationality, would you want YouTube, Twitter, and HN to cease to exist.
Your Twitter account, in your profile, should give anyone reading this all the information they need to understand your bias.
One of your sources says: No, that is wrong. CDA 230 is a superset of First Amendment protections. I agree with your source. However, I think these additional protections are a bad idea because they absolve YouTube and the like from certain responsibilities:
"Because we [YouTube] are not in a position to adjudicate the truthfulness of postings, we do not remove video postings due to allegations of defamation." [1]
That absolution is ridiculous.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6154230?hl=en&co=G...
And no, my source agrees with me, it literally does not say what you claim. Considering you have a track record of lying about citations, this is unsurprising.
Anything else you feel like lying about? Would prefer more lies that are immediately and obviously false, such as the Notre Dame article not agreeing that Section 230 provides a litigation shield.
I've quoted you twice and paraphrased your argument once by saying that it "seems to be that CDA 230 doesn't matter." Perhaps that was an oversimplification; however, let's be clear, CDA 230 is a stronger litigation shield than the First Amendment. For that reason, it needs to go.
It's not defamation if it's true, which it is. You have lied (made an untrue statement with intent to deceive) about what I've written, and what's been written in cited articles, to further your argument. That, definitionally, makes you a liar (a person who tells lies).
Section 230 being removed will not achieve the goal you desire, which is to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator. Any relevant protections that allow them to discretionarily host content that isn't produced by them without liability will remain. This is repeatedly explained in the above cited articles, as well as many additional articles easily found through a quick search of the topic.
As I said before, your opinion is not based in reality, and you are tilting at windmills. I will repeat this for as long as you reply, because bullies like you need to be stood up to and told no.
Besides, the two cases you keep citing are from 91' and '95. They're not relevant now because of how many of the facts are different (as I've said, YouTube and NYT are fundamentally different businesses, with or without Section 230), and could not be used as precedence even if Section 230 were repealed.
My goal isn't to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator, but to interject some responsibility.
That responsibility is coming as common law works through systems outside the USA. For instance, consider George Galloway, a far-left UK politician, and his push towards making Google pay for keeping defamatory videos online [1].
Hopefully, once people understand that, to quote the article, "an intrinsic part of freedom of speech is the right to be heard if one thinks one's character has been falsely impugned," the USA will take a serious look at either reforming or, ideally, repealing CDA 230.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/colum-kenny-george-gallow...
Again with the lies. Nobody said you were bullying Big Tech, I said you were bullying HN users (me, specifically). You're a bully, and I don't like bullies.
> My goal isn't to hurt Google/Twitter/YCombinator, but to interject some responsibility.
I literally do not believe you. It's clear you don't apply this consistently (hello HN user), and it's clear you have a specific political leaning that undermines your credibility here (Hunter Biden's laptop is something you apparently think is a credible news story, and not blatant propaganda to try and recreate the "Hillary's emails" for the 2020 election cycle).
You apparently want to hurt Big Tech because you are angry your team got censored.
> the USA will take a serious look at either reforming or, ideally, repealing CDA 230.
They will not, no matter how many times you state it as if it were fact.
You tried this "Repeat a bunch of nonsense long enough and hopefully people will eventually let your nonsense go." strategy with your claims about the efficacy of introducing fake rhino horn into the Asian black market to drive down prices, and that didn't work (though honestly wholly on brand, you wanted to lie to admittedly bad people about what you were selling, and as far as I can tell you were attempting to make a profit off of these illicit sales).
You tried again, when you attempted an ICO to (I assume) fund your company in 2017, and your state's government found out and seemingly shut you down, so that nonsense about whether PembiCoin qualified as a security or not (I guess it did qualify, despite your claims) didn't work either.
Now you try to misrepresent your way through a conversation about Section 230, and it's not working, either.
Maybe stop lying? It isn't working for you.
There is a valley of nuance between Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc. [1] and Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. [2]. All of this nuance was being worked out in the courts via common law principles before Congress short-circuited the process with CDA 230, which turned out to be one of the things that helped facilitate the rise of the Big Tech oligopoly that Congress now decries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc%...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
There's no such thing as nuance when it comes to corporate liability via third party participation. Companies are going to do the thing which reduces the surface area for litigation as much as possible. Youtube would nuke political speech entirely so fast from anyone not paying them a fee to be broadcast that heads would spin.
"X is a rapist." (Where X is a private figure for simplification.)
The nuance is as follows:
A) Under Cubby without proactive moderation.
The website is not liable for the above speech. All the website needs to do is remove the offending speech once it is made aware of its defamatory nature, maybe via a court order.
B) Under Stratton with proactive moderation.
The website is making an effort to determine the truthfulness of content. As such, letting a defamatory post go through subjects the website to liability.
C) Under CDA 230.
As per YouTube, "Because we are not in a position to adjudicate the truthfulness of postings, we do not remove video postings due to allegations of defamation." [1]
Option C is the worst. It is akin to letting an oil company pick and choose which spills are worth cleaning up. Websites can remove things they think are defamatory to certain people and leave up other things that are defamatory to others with no repercussions.
Ideally, we would live in a world governed by A and B. In that world, sites could choose between moderation and no moderation and the corresponding legal and financial burdens. What we have right now is a mess that works to the advantage of Big Tech.
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6154230?hl=en&co=G...
Because Youtube exists in the real world, and because earning money through ads is a hell of a lot better for business than trying to get people to pay for content, C is always the best option for them and for every other content provider AND virtually all small and independent content producers.
Otherwise, companies like Youtube would be forced to gate entrance to supplying content by charging hosting fees for content. You are seeing the tree and missing the rest of the forest.
1.) A and B are not my proposals; They're case law that has been preempted by C.
2.) Copyright falls under the DMCA, which pretty much follows A's procedures (i.e., a takedown notice model) even though the DMCA is a statutory provision. Why are copyright holders so special?
3.) There is no constitutional right to an ad-based business model. Ad-based models evolved under rules similar to B's, but for newspapers, and B is what should govern said models online (unless someone can demonstrate a successful ad-based model under A).
4.) CDA 230 is the golden goose; hence, it won't be repealed. Everyone gets paid to the detriment of society and the individuals who are denied their day in court.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972283
YouTube is fighting a problem with disinformation that has significant implications on a public health crisis.
I don't see why they should respond any differently, simply because someone is singing the disinformation.
You didn't answer my question.
For example, should Youtube start banning all modeling videos because is taking the life of young teeneagers with eating disorders?
What about smoking, drinking and illegal drugs on musical videos by very, very popular singers? Should Youtube start banning them too?
As far as I know, the example issues are taking way more lives than the current ONE. It's a double standard just to comply with the status quo.
Don't mess with art, it's just art, we all agree.
All art is political, even (especially) the CCP recognizes that power as it crushes art. What is really interesting, though, is the fact that the powers-that-be feel threatened by this art. Why would a mere rap video be so threatening?
Ban me if needed dang.
It may not be 1984, maybe something from Neuromancer or Snow Crash (I forget which) where big corps control the information that is considered acceptable for the plebs.
neither of those cover this. nobody takes neal stephenson seriously that way. take a class
If a distributed network ends up displacing Youtube, what's going to inevitably happen is one section of the network is going consume the vast majority of the viewership and content, and they're going to start repeating the same shit that Youtube is doing right now.
I'm not saying we shouldn't promote alternatives, but I am saying we haven't really figured out how to properly integrate social media into our society without it disintegrating into what we're seeing now (or worse).
I think I'm better off judging this book by it's cover and not telling Youtube how to run their house.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28683575
But these companies are a lot less respectable than YouTube has been to date, and people know what they are getting.
The issue here is YouTube's standards are changing and that deserves to be discussed. And condemned, it is change for the worse (even if in some sense it is probably inevitable).
It's also within people's rights to criticize them for it.
They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders.
Sadly even reasonable opinions are quickly squashed on this site. e.g. from this thread: https://i.imgur.com/e5i9BzE.png
Owners: Agnelli families (43.40%) Rothschild, Cadbury, Schroder Layton
This is supposed to be a group that abhors manipulation?
"Let’s go, Brandon, we know he cappin’ Patriots out in the street takin’ action Huntin’ us down for speakin’ the truth (Huh) Beat down the PEDO, let’s save all the youth (Uh huh) Media lyin’, ignore all the cryin’ They buildin’ back better, but only the Taliban (What?) Pilots on strike, but to Joe, it’s irrelevant Open the border, lose all the order Divide us up so they know what we never win But we united, we here in the stadiums (Let’s go) Everyone chantin’ it, CNN slanderin’ (Let’s go) Biden collaspin’ and Democrats stealin’ it (Facts) Ayy, we look at Joe, can we get a refund? (Brandon) How ‘bout some mean tweets? (Facts) Joe is a crook, and he knows how to decieve F.J.B. is the motto in these streets, let’s go, Brandon sing it with me"
I see a lot of claims but no questions. This wasn't written to question, it was written to enforce ideas already held by the listener. I agree that the song shouldn't be censored, but I also think it doesn't have any right to be promoted or distributed by third parties. YouTube has as much of a right to take the song down as Sound Cloud has to leave it up, which is exactly equal to any venue that chooses to let him perform on stage.
But yes, I totally agree – the song “Fuck Donald Trump” has been on YouTube for 5+ years with millions of views, and YouTube has every right to take it down.
Deliberately spreading misinformation to wide audiences is distinctly different from asking questions in order to improve your own understanding. First of all, if you are aware that you don't understand it, then don't form public opinion. Most people are f* unaware (or ignorant of the fact), of course. And these are never really questions even if formulated as ones (i.e. having a question mark at the end and using the according word order). Putting up a video on YT and discussing how e.g. masks don't work doesn't become questioning for understanding (for your own understanding) just because the idiot phrases it like "Yeah, but if vaccines work then why do vaccinated people still have to work masks? And why do they get into hostpitals? And why do they die? And if masks work then why do we still have a pandemic?" Etc.
You know this game. These are not questions and the format (again, a YT video broadcasted to potentially the masses) is not appropriate for gaining knowledge for the person who created it. The direction of the information flow is just wrong.
If you're referring to anything related to Covid there's no well-established scientific consensus it literally just happened around year and a half ago it's impossible to have scientific consensus.
Even the most respected scientists are saying they don't know about a lot of things related to covid.
also well-established scientific consensus is not an ideal goal post .
Galileo was excommunicated.
Labotomies won the Nobel prize.
Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty.
Genuinely asking, how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in if the standard of "what is general consensus among the people with doctorates in the subject" isn't reasonable?
Also, as to whether believing scientific general consensus should count as "faith" or not, I invite you to read Issac Asimov's short essay "The Relativity of Wrong".
Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence?
Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
Again, I pose the question, what is a reasonable alternative?
>Asimov seems to be arguing that there are degrees of wrongness, and one can become less wrong by a process of rational error elimination and criticism. How does the mere fact of a consensus have any bearing on this process?
The scientific process IS a process of rational error elimination and criticism. Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse.
> Where is the evidence that a consensus is a good metric for the truth of a matter? Has there been any work done to establish such a correspondence?
I think you have the causal chain backwards; the evidence of a good metric for the truth of a matter is what builds consensus. If the evidence is incompatible with consensus, and it holds up to scrutiny & reproduction, then the consensus changes to match. Either way, the end result is that consensus is an improving approximation to "the truth". If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
Again, this inverts the burden of proof. There is no obligation to provide any alternative, and no obligation to defer to a consensus in the absence of one.
>Scientific consensus is the result of the majority of experts in a field using the scientific process to agree on the "least wrong" information possible given the data available at that time. If you claim not to see the bearing on this process, you're being dishonestly obtuse.
I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true, and it is a very weak argument for taking consensus as a metric of truthfulness.
>If you have a better way of obtaining "the truth", I would be very glad to learn about it.
One does not require a better way of obtaining the truth in order to avoid committing oneself to accepting unjustified claims. Again, such a requirement inverts the burden of proof.
In order to act on a claim (inaction is also an action; "avoid committing oneself to accepting" is just ornate wording for choosing inaction) one must evaluate the "probability of truth" of said claim. To my knowledge, scientific consensus is the most reliable source to inform that evaluation. Since you fail to provide a more effective alternative, then it seems that scientific consensus is at least non-inferior to any other method either of us is currently aware of. Thus it is the rational choice on which to base action; basing them on a less reliable source gives a higher probability of being "wrong", and thus would be irrational.
> I see no evidence that this narrative is generally true.
Honest answer: Then I invite you to attend a consensus conference, or enough of them for the p-value on your evaluation of how they run to reach whatever level is acceptable to you. Tongue-in-cheek answer: You also have no evidence you aren't a simulated agent in an advanced species' super-computer (Descartes's "brain in a jar"). At some point, you have to choose some axioms and build your world-view from there.
There is no requirement to evaluate the truth value of an ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory claim. In fact, a claim of that nature may as well be regarded as being meaningless. On those grounds, it makes no sense even to speak of probability in regard to such a claim.
>Honest answer: Then I invite you to attend a consensus conference
A 'consensus conference' may do one of two things:
1) It may dedicate itself to the evaluation of rational argument and evidence, in which case it is the argument and evidence that matters, and the consensus is irrelevant.
2) Some other means may be used to arrive at consensus, in which case it may be irrational, or at the very best, unscientific.
Note that the position that OP advanced, and which you appear to be defending is that the bare fact of the existence of a consensus should be treated as primary evidence on its own. At best, a consensus is secondary evidence, a pointer to the real crux of discussion, and treating it as primary evidence is a category error which is only compounded by the air of authority implied by a consensus which adds psychological coercion into the mix.
Calling a claim "ill defined, nonsensical or self-contradictory" is already an evaluation of it's probable truth value.
> Note that the position that OP advanced, and which you appear to be defending is that the bare fact of the existence of a consensus should be treated as primary evidence on its own.
Actually, the person you responded to clearly stated: "how should I evaluate truth in a subject matter that I myself don't have a doctorate in". For someone well-versed in the area, or at least with enough free time to become sufficiently acquainted with it, going to directly to primary evidence is the optimal approach. However, in the situation described by OP, were they are limited in the amount of time and cognitive capacity they can invest, then basing decisions on such "Secondary evidence" as expert consensus is the rational approach.
A lot of people like to formulate this for themselves as being open and not accepting some kind of "dogma". Which sounds good, you stay open, what do you have to lose? (BTW, accepting the scientific consensus doesn't mean that you can't change your mind when new information comes in, but that's a tangent.)
But the thing is that when you have to make a decision then you have to accept some claims as being true (for at least the duration of making the decision). And that's when you have to ask yourself (as a layperson): who is more likely to be right? Which model is going to be more close to the reality? Science, the majority of scientists or some random dude? (Including maybe those few seemingly legit scientists who "speak up" in social media stating that all other scientists have gone completely wrong, including virologists and epidemiologists. But that one bloke is right.) And can that solo dude be right in theory? Yes, of course. Is he likely to be right? Well, looking back at the history of science it's rare, it doesn't last too long (until others realize and change their opinion) and it's getting more rare (as the scientific method evolves).
So yeah, no burden of proof on anyone, just a meaningful strategy for those outside of the field (any given field). Those doing research should always prove they are right. But, to get back to the original topic, that's not done in social media. That's done in scientific publications through peer reviewed papers. And, of course, the scientific consensus itself is supported by those so talking about shifting the burden of proof makes no sense at all. The proof is there for the consensus. That's the point.
You're still prodding into the infinite.
CERN and Yerkes Observatory are just peeling off the surface layer of the onion.
To claim anything is objective truth is also claiming you know the universe in it's entirety.
How do you make sense of all of this and wrangle objective truth from the chaos?
That's an epistomological question people have been asking since the dawn of mankind.
IS there even objective truth that our limited monkey/human mind can grasp?
I don't know the answer!...but I know censoring a multitude of opinions and claiming a monopoly on objective truth in an infinite world of chaos is not the way to do it.
You could argue that social media is an important outlet for new scientific ideas, results and discoveries but then you'd have to prove that not censoring there and letting the fakes run wild adds more value than the harm caused by the fakes. And the we know that the latter effect exists. I'd say that even if there is added value here (TBH, I don't see it at all), it's overwhelmed by the harm. Any scientifically valuable contribution that is only spread through the social media will be lost in the noise of nonsense.
Many major scientific breakthroughs were made outside of the 'institution of science' and peer reviewed papers.
Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys.
Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science.
But both of their ideas won out in the end.
If you need censorship and coercion of any sort to force your ideas on people, if to need to limit the avenues which ideas are shared .. you need better ideas.
> Joseph Lister discovered antiseptic theory during routine medical practice and was mocked at > first by other doctors who didn't want to switch instruments between surgurys.
Just to mention an earlier, related case: there was a Hungarian guy called Ignaz Semmelweis [1] who figured out the importance of antiseptics before Lister. He had very tragic fate. He published his results then he was mocked by fellow doctors, he basically went crazy for not being able to make a change (though he may have had a condition too), put into an insane asylum, where he died after a short time at the age of 47.
He gets little credit outside of Hungary (where I'm from) because he didn't figure out the exact biological causes for the infections (he didn't connect these to bacteria) so some science historians think he was just right by accident. But that's not true. He used observations and statistics to identify that the cause of the relatively common death due to childbed fever of women after giving birth was infection by the doctors who also did autopsy. He had a wrong theory about how "cadaverous matter" would cause illness through decomposition which would make both dead bodies and doctors hand smell. And he found that chlorinated lime solution would remove the smell and thus he though the "cadaverous material" so he started using it to wash his hands and convinced colleagues in the hospital to do the same which resulted in a rapid and sharp improvements in the death statistics. (So again, while his theory was wrong, his method and results were right.)
But as I said above, science has built in these experiences and this knowledge, so science to day is built on much better foundations and better methods than in Semmelweis' or Lister's time. And it's not that just we know more because we accepted their discoveries. We know how to do science better, how to be right more often and wrong less frequently. And again: what's your alternative suggestion? Where's your proof that discussing all these "alternate opinions", which completely ignore the scientific method, on social media gives any better results (and, indeed not worse results)?
The "you need better ideas" assumption is not only unfounded it's also naive and wrong. We have experiments to show that people believe stupid things even if/when they do have access to the scientific truth. Because the former can be formulated in more attractive, easier to digest ways than the reality. (After all, they don't have to match reality so they are way more malleable.) Unfortunately it's not about having access to better information or "better" ideas. You can't have better ideas than what matches the reality (or, in other words, your best current knowledge) but considerable fraction people get attracted to ideas based on not how "good" (meaningful, accurate) they are.
> Galileo was excommunicated for going against mainstream science.
Again, you already said that and I responded to that, which you 100% ignored, but I forgot to mention that: a) Gallileo wasn't excommunicated, he was forced to retract his theories by the catholic church, not fellow scientists. b) he was actually wrong. He thought the Sun was the center of the universe, which is clearly wrong. (But of course, less wrong and way more useful than the previous ideas. But that's the point: science evolves by getting things less wrong over time.)
[1] nickthemagicman ↗ Do you think Google and Facebook are putting every item that they ban through some sort of a scientific review were they carefully weigh the pros and cons of all the data of every side of a debate? atleta ↗ > Do you think Google and Facebook are putting every item that they ban through some sort of a scientific
Like there's a bunch of older gentlemen with beards and pipes and philosophy phds sitting around a room discussing the cultural merits of the song wet ass pussy.
My best guess at how the censorship process works is there's a bunch of really low paid people that censor things based on a narrative page provided to them.
> review were they carefully weigh the pros and cons of all the data of every side of a debate?
You're right, of course, they don't. OTOH, as I said earlier, there is very little scientific value (if any) in posting on social media, so this kind of censorship cannot hinder scientific advance/getting to know the reality better.
Also, they actually only seem to block pretty blatant cases (like if someone says that there is no pandemic or vaccines don't work) and most of the content is pretty primitive and low value anyway. I see a lot of this shit, either because the censorship is not too strict or because they put a lot less effort into the non-English corners of their networks. Actually, most things that FB marks with a warning that you should only trust official sources are scientifically correct posts (e.g. from research labs or experts posting valid research papers). And the stupidity, the "alternate view" seems to go undetected. I've reported quite a few blatantly stupid posts out of curiosity and none of them were taken down. Not even the "5G activates the vaccines" types.
> My best guess at how the censorship process works is there's a bunch of really low
> paid people that censor things based on a narrative page provided to them.
This seems pretty likely. That must be one of the reasons they don't act on most actual misinformation. Though they should be able to use technology, because a lot of the misinformation I see is either some post (or video) being shared a large number of times (they could give those special attention) or reposting of the same content (could be a video, but mostly copy&pasted text). Of course, there are stupid comments too, but those would be very hard to censor efficiently (without actually harming the discourse - even if not the scientific discourse).
There are also well known profiles that are dedicated to spreading misinformation that don't get censored at all. Again, here in Hungary there is a(n ex-)pharmacist who has been cranking out nonsense since the very beginning. He very likely is building his profile for the general elections next year (he did participate 4 and 8 years ago). But he might be simply just an idiot. He would be very easy to take down, given he's relatively high profile (as a denier by all means), FB could afford to have one of their more expensive collegaues to spend a few days on him. But they don't care. Actually, they are even motivated to keep him on the site because he generates a lot of interactions... So to me it seems that if anything, then we need more censorship, not less. (But it doesn't have to mean banning the discussion, even if they would just cut the obvious and blatant misinformation, that would help a lot.)
Covid and Climate Change are interesting because certain conclusions related to them have a direct impact on you and I. The ruling class would certainly like you to believe one conclusion over all the others and that conclusion might even be 'correct' in terms of being beneficial to you or humans as a whole, but asking people to believe that conclusion because of some 'consensus' is fraught with both logical and mortal peril as history has shown us time and time again.
The Scientific Method, rigorous debate and freedom of speech and association. "Scientific consensus" is just a media invention.
An expert may have a PhD and know 5000% more than you about a subject but compared to the amount of knowledge required to understand how the universe or any scientific subject works...their knowledge is smaller than a rounding error..and our current knowledge as a human race is too.
Experts are poking at the world just as much as the rest of us, they just have bigger sticks, and are wrong ALL the time. But being wrong is the first step to being right. Elon had the worlds most highly trained and advanced rocket scientists working for him at SpaceX and they still crashed a bunch of rockets. You get a second opinion even though medial doctors have many years of education, don't you?
The problem is not science or education, it's how humans understand truth.
I could be wearing a red and black flannel shirt and one expert would say the shirt is red and another expert say the shirt is black and both would be telling the truth, but neither is correct.
Now pretend that flannel shirt has trillions to infinite numbers of colors and you have science.
Scientific consensus is data with strong statistical significance that all scientists agree on. The shirt is clearly red! But it's only a small subset of data among infinite amounts of data in this world much of which we don't even know about and the human race probably never will. So while a scientific theory may be true, it may not be correct. And highly informed scientists can see just one part of the whole and claim it's the truth.
And it's hubris to claim otherwise, especially looking at how often scientific consensus has been on the wrong side of human history, with Mengele, Galileo, Labotomies, etc.
Thalidomide, the drug, would calm morning sickness and the scientific consensus was that it was a good drug from the limited amount of data they knew about at the time...until more data came in....and the scientific consensus changed on a dime.
The problem is humans have a desperate need to provide some sort of order to this absolute chaos we live in because the world is scary and we're going to die and people want immediate answers they can rely on to make sense of it all.
So they create narratives like religion, or scientific consensus, or political party and claim those are the one true answers and justify their success with the rain dance working or scientific data curing an illness or how cheap they made gas prices..ad infinitum.
Scientific consensus, religion, politics, are all merely single narratives to explain this insanely complex world.
And while all are important to listen to and can be very informative, they should only be SINGLE data points in your own critical thinking. There is no single source of truth. And there is no shortcut to the truth.
Anyone who claims to have the objective 'truth' in a world as infinitely complex as ours is a religion person, and if you follow them unskeptically you are an acolyte, and if you censor people who are questioning you, you fall into an inquisition type situation.
Since the average person doesn't know much about the background (me included!) and since a similar claim takes a lot of knowledge to disprove it just sounds plausible by default. Because if someone makes a more specific claim, like "this is how sars-cov-2 enters the cells" or "this drug works" (or doesn't work) that's easy to check and then, if not true, disprove with published papers. The "we don't know this" is harder. Even if you pull up a paper, the goal post indeed will be moved ever so slightly and if the claim is more broad then you need to be a knowledgable expert to be able to say where the gaps are in the knowledge and how likely, when discovered/understood that new knowledge would change the field substantially.
Since I became interested, I started learning a bit of virology online. Vincent Racaniello, a professor of virology at Columbia has an online course on youtube. This semester he teaches it directly with a focus on the average layperson [1]. Each session is 2 hours long and you can ask questions which he answers. It's not about covid, it's about virology in general but he does include the relevant pieces of information abour sars-cov-2 into every lesson/topic. He actually has his previous courses taught to undergrad (or graduate?) students online as well. Those seem to be just 1 hour long each, but based on a quick look at the slides the content is identical.
Now what it teaches to everyone interested is that they know a lot. They have astonishingly detailed knowledge about how viruses work in general and they have learned a lot about sars-cov-2 very quickly. But given the general virology knowledge, you won't be surprised at the things they looked at first.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGhmZX2NKiNnVlm_lAvk5...
Does anyone think that in the infinite complexity of the human body and the immune system that we think we have 'figured covid out' by discovering a single spike protein?
There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body.
We are just touching the surface of how the body works.
They just discovered a new organelle in cells this year.
So for any single group to claim a monopoly on truth and censor other views, especially with only a year and a half of study... is a major problem.
1., nobody said "we figured covid out". I said we learned a lot about it pretty quickly. (BTW, coronaviruses and SARS in particular have been researched pretty intensively since 2003, the first SARS pandemic.)
2., they didn't just discover a "single spike protein"
> There's such an endless possibility of how Covid can interact with the body.
Actually, no. There are indeed very definitive ways SARS-CoV2 (or any virus, for that matter) can interact with the body. It's not a living thing. It needs to get into specific type of cells and it can only do it through the spike protein which will only bind to the ACE2 receptor. As long as/if it doesn't happen, the virus is an inert particle. E.g. it won't proliferate in mice (without genetically making them susceptible) or in most other animals. Also, we have a lot of virus particles in us that can't interact with the human cells, so we'll never know about them. One interesting comment from the above curse was that prof. Racaniello said that you can learn bout your "virome" by sequencing your stool and some experiment found that the most frequent virus in there is some plant virus (which don't even have the capability to enter even plant cells by themselves).
>>>the virus is an inert particle.
Couldn't the same thing be said about the thinking about Thalidomide though?
It indeed is. As a layperson who knows nothing about a field, not even a closely related field your best bet is to accept the scientific consensus. And by best bet I mean that that that is the choice that will give you the highest expected value of success.
People keep pointing at the cases from the past (sometimes from the very far past, like with Galileo) trying to disprove this strategy. There are at least two fatal flaws with this logic: 1. science has evolved a lot since then. And it doesn't just mean that we know more about those specific subjects (be it astronomy or neuroscience) but more importantly, the scientific method has evolved too. I.e. when we think we know something today, is very different from what it was a 100 or 500 years ago. 2. Of course, scientists can be wrong. Even en masse (i.e. the scientific consensus). (If it wasn't so, we may not need research any more after all because we'd know everything.) But going completely wrong is pretty rare and what is exactly your other option? Listening to lunatics? Because every lunatic will say "yeah, but the scientists are wrong all the time, so..." and go on with their 100% unfounded claims. No, it's not that they do research because they don't accept the consensus. That would be totally OK. They just make claims that they support with this very vague critique. "Lobotomy won a Nobel prize, which we know don't work, so who is to tell me that I'm wrong with my claims that I have nothing to support."
> Nothing is certain in life when human beings are involved no matter how comforting that thought is. There is only a narrative of certainty.
Nobody said it was. This is a big fat strawman. But just because (almost) nothing is 100% certain, it doesn't mean that we don't have more probable and less probable answers.
Given that there is no way to measure absolute scientific progress, this is a meaningless and baseless claim.
At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits. Thee equations worked extremely well. Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle. Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction.
There is no reason to believe science is somehow progressed perfectly today in every arena.
> At the time of Galileo, scientists had, after many centuries, perfected their means of calculating geocentric orbits.
Again, Galileo had a clash with the catholic church not really fellow scientists.
> Thee equations worked extremely well.
I'm not so sure. Galileo came up with his theory based on what geo-centric view couldn't explain.
> Experts at the time would have told you that science had progressed significantly since the time of Aristotle.
> Yet it had progressed in a completely wrong direction.
Which was true. They indeed got ahead, because they also had to perfect the math and measurements, etc. Not just the descriptions of the orbits. Also, BTW, Galileo was wrong. He thought the Sun was the center of the freaking universe, which it isn't at all.
Also what are you then arguing for? If you can't say that science evolves and improves over time then what's wrong with censorship? Those ideas that you think would be censored (I didn't exactly say that, but let's go with it for now) would not improve science. Or, at least we wouldn't be able to measure it, according to you.
The way I like to think about it is that science is a machinery that constantly builds and improves itself. It not only gets 'bigger' but it constantly gets better and building itself by improving the scientific method itself. E.g. if you think about medical sciences again, 150 years ago doctors would experiment on themselves (n=1) and use their "experience" (i.e. a small amount of inaccurate measurements aggregated in their head). These days we do double blinded, randomized controlled trials and funky statistic checks to filter out errors, then other people look over the results multiple times (think peer reviews and meta-analysises). It's an iterative process that keeps correcting and perfecting itself. And we do know when we go in the wrong directions because results will be off from the reality.
Science is imperfect and iterative.
Yet with that knowledge you have come to the conclusion that the mRNA vaccine is perfectly safe after being developed in 6 months and tested in humans for only a year-ish?
I follow your thesis but not your conclusion.
Indeed, what I was saying is that it's illogical to expect it to be perfectly safe. That would only make sense if contracting COVID was (proven to be) perfectly harmless. But the thing is that you are forced to make a decision and you don't have complete knowledge about the consequences of neither of your (two) choices. However, the (imperfect) experts say that the vaccines are way safer than contracting covid unvaccinated. And if anything, we both know that they have a lot better chance to be right than us.
> after being developed in 6 months
This doesn't really matter given the above (that you should listen to those who know a lot better), but the 6 months is far from being true. They started experimenting with the coronavirus vaccines back in 2003 and there was ongoing research ever since then. I've just seen a video from 5 years ago where a virologist guy talks about their bat coronavirus research at the local (Hungarian) science meetup.
The mRNA platform itself has been under development for over 3 decades, too. But again, you can go for adenovirus vector vaccines, which are a more tested technology. In some part of the world you can get inactivated vaccines (e.g. here, in Hungary we had one from Shinopharm), but they don't do that well against SARS-CoV2. However, the actual candidate for Pfizer's (well, BioNTech's) vaccine was done in something like 2 weeks, IIRC. But that was only possible because of the decades of earlier research. In part the mRNA technology itself, in part because they could skip the animal testing thanks to the SARS-CoV1 vaccines developed around 2003. (But the animal testing only protects the phase1 maybe phase2 participants, anyway. It's not that a vaccine sometimes takes years because they experiment on animals for years with a vaccine candidate that otherwise seems perfectly viable.)
False. SOME (imperfect) experts say this.
SOME experts say taking an unknown vaccine for a healthy person in an age group that is not at risk of Covid is creating an unnecessary (unknown) vaccine risk for themselves especially considering the vaccines are made by profit driven companies that haven't been particularly human welfare focused in the past.
>>They started experimenting with the coronavirus vaccines back in 2003
Thalidomide is based off of benzodiazepens which had been developed over a hundred years before Thalidomide was invented.
Still made unexpected flipper babies.
Have you even made a tiny tweak in a code base and the whole thing broke?
Now apply this to a biochemical system which is infinitely more complex.
you got it right.. it's a bet
Science is not the ultimate source of truth, it is data with a risk reward attached that you can use for your own critical thinking
I do agree with you though that it should be heavily weighted in your thinking.
But people now are treating as an infallible religion that you can outsource your critical thinking to...which is scary imo.
Sure. As you don't have certainty but you have to make decisions.
> Science is not the ultimate source of truth,
Science is our current best approximation of reality. But yes, it's not ultimate and we indeed do know that it's inaccurate. But we don't know better. And that's also important to keep in mind.
> it is data with a risk reward attached that you can use for your own critical thinking
Yes, but there's a trap here. It's OK as long as you base your decisions on your best knowledge (i.e. science). You can say that based on your risk profile (which you can estimate using science) the best decision (bet! :) ) for you is X. That's rational. However, a lot of people interpret similar claims as if it would be rational use what they think is "critical thinking" to override science. And that's a huge difference.
To be more specific. E.g. there is huge difference in saying that I believe that (accept the assumption) mRNA vaccines are safe with a 99999/100000 probability (i.e. cause cause serious side effects at most 1 out of 100 000 times) but I estimate my COVID risk lower, because the way I isolate myself (let's say you do have the data). I don't meet anyone, don't go outside, I'm 25yo, I work out, I don't have a condition, etc.
Vs. if someone says that "yeah, they say it's safe, but I don't think so, because this and that". Because that's not critical thinking. That's actually the lack of self reflection/critique. Even if someone reads up on some literature and they base their opinion on that, that almost certainly will just be cherry picking (it's hard to do better in a field someone knows nothing about).
> But people now are treating as an infallible religion that > you can outsource your critical thinking to...which is scary imo.
I don't see this. I probably see more people who are so afraid of making the wrong decision that they actually end up making the wrong decision :). Again, "critical thinking" sounds good, but a lot of time it's not critical thinking. Some people may feel insecure if they just accept someone else's decision or opinion even if that someone else knows lot better. And it may feel safe to make your own decision (which, almost by definition has to be different). But that's a bad intuition. If you have no better information to base your decision on than your best source (in this case, science) then your end results will just be worse by adding in your thinking (your inferior data sources and inference).
Tell that to the people who decided against getting a labotomy after labotomies won the Nobel prize. ;)
Both undefinable terms that are increasingly being used anytime the current Western establishment wishes to censor speech and silence their opponents.
When the Chinese or Russians do it, we call it out for what it is: censorship and abuse of power. It's even more insidious when it's done in supposedly free societies, because we wrap it up in a bow with these nebulous terms and feign noble intentions.
Yea they do that in China too. The Chinese have a particular knack IMO for flowery language that covers for various government shenanigans. Most censorship in China also takes place at whims of private enterprise, just like in the west.
When China is criticizing the US they call our abuses exactly what they are, while equivocating their own. Nothing new under the sun.
You're a human being capable of far deeper thought than that. Why would you willfully cripple yourself so much? OK, that was a rhetorical question - you're intellectually crippling yourself to show allegiance to your tribe, membership in which satisfies some of your otherwise unmet emotional needs.
Why are ... why are we quoting Fox News credlously again?
Has HN not learned, yet?
I see that for shorthand that the whole response wasn’t managed properly as the “spread” still happened.
I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of Biden, but it’s a rap song, which tends to encourage a bit of hyperbole.
> Pandemic ain't real, they just planned it
Banning alternative points of view is a slippery slope.
But this is still silly. It's a song. Rage Against The Machine has a song claiming the FBI staged the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and it's the most popular song from The Matrix soundtrack. And an iconic, great song that I love, for what it's worth, even though I doubt the truth of that claim.