> Pleased that Youtube has reinstated my interview. I appreciate all of the support. Nobody knows what's going to happen with this pandemic - debate is always a good thing! I think preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best is a sensible strategy.
It's widely known that Google/Youtube took down any videos where the name of the supposed whistleblower were being mentioned, at least according to a lot of regular content creators who had videos deleted or shadow banned.
> According to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the disclosure of a whistleblower's name could be a criminal offense if it is intentional, unauthorized and "the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal the covert agent's foreign intelligence relationship to the United States."
But as many pages about the Whistleblower Act will tell you, this kind of thing is uncharted territory and presumably the exact kind of uncharted territory that gives expensive lawyers for large media companies extreme willies.
Their automated system has a non-zero false-positive rate. It will from time to time accidentally take down legitimate videos, which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review, such as in this case.
Yet people still jump to conclusion and assume malintent, posting headlines which imply Youtube is intentionally removing these videos. Clickbait.
I've heard enough of these machine learning buzzword bingos every week when things like this happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again.
This is akin to saying "I've heard enough of these NHTSA reports every week when car accidents happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again."
A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.
Except that these takedowns aren't "accidents." It's more of a catch-all filter that's designed to proactively censor content that even slightly touches on certain matters.
Near zero (not actual 0%) is definitely achievable and within grasp. We just end up playing funding politics because we don't like the price-tag and liberty-curtailment associated with the value of human life and these things we're trying to solve.
Car accidents? Drunk driving? Murders? Dark-web illegal activities? Domestic violence? Those and many others are all solvable problems that we can get very close to zero instances. But right now we're quibbling and putting measures in place that don't get the numbers anywhere close to zero, they just "incrementally" reduce instances and we all applaud and find those meaningful whilst 99% solutions are ignored.
Then we should shut down videos on the internet entirely, because 500 hours of video per minute is not something anyone can manually moderate. We would all love to live in an utopia where everything works perfectly and there's a solution to every problem, but that's not realistic.
Constantly cracking down on videos that slightly mentions a certain topic goes way too far. Do we really want GFW style censoring to maintain an artificial utopia where harmful content™️ won't exist?
No, that isn't what's happening. You're probably not aware of this if you only read particular media outlets but YouTube keep doing this and they keep defending it. It's absolutely intentional and the headlines aren't misleading people, you are.
Read the article: "They rejected our appeal to have the video reinstated." - appeals are at least looked at by humans and the humans are affirming they made the right call. Most likely the only reason this one got fixed is someone internally caused a stink and got it looked at by someone higher up, as usual for Google. But most of the time that isn't happening.
Here's another example of them erasing a video by an actual epidemiologist:
Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told The Post in a statement: “We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
Note: you aren't allowed to disagree with or even dispute the efficacy of government policy. Period.
There's no difference at this point in policy between a Chinese video site and YouTube, just that the latter are censoring criticism of the state because they've been internally taken over by authoritarians loyal to generic "authority", not because they're forced to. But in the end how does Chinese censorship work? Well, it's not like Xi individually orders people to kill individual stories. It works by ensuring that information services are run by people loyal to the state, who then take decisions autonomously to defend the state.
I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web services, they shouldn’t be in charge of things like sound epidemiology.
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.
And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.
I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch.
Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain.
By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.
Laws don't have to be philosophically pure. A law can define or describe what counts as an editorial algorithm and what does not, and it could exclude simple sorting while including the complicated thing Youtube does to keep you watching.
What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.
Indeed, but (at least in the US), you can't really do that without running afoul of the first amendment, presenting content is just a form of speech. Government restrictions on speech are the thing that everyone's afraid of, right?
Currently, platform immunity means the platform can't be sued or criminally charged because a user hosts something for which the user can be. The proposed change would expose the operator of an editorial algorithm to liability for the algorithm recommending things that are already illegal.
I don't think the concern with rolling back platform immunity is government restrictions on free speech, exactly. In the US, the first amendment provides the same protections it always has. Instead, concerns include that the risk of liability will hamper innovation, that only companies with a lot of resources will be able to take the risk, and that companies will overreact with their own proactive censorship to stay well clear of areas with potential liability.
We've seen the latter with FOSTA/SESTA weakening platform immunity, which is arguably what its creators intended, but I suspect not what everyone in congress who voted for it expected.
Right, but the "platform immunity" thing applies equally to all platforms. You're instead proposing to extend immunity to some platforms and not others based on how they choose to recommend things. If you (like I do) believe that recommendation is a form of speech, this creates government favored classes of speech.
To word it differently: "Platforms that recommend/aggregate speech in government sanctioned ways are protected from liability, while those that do not are not". That's, while not open and shut perhaps, certainly spooky.
The law already does something like that. If I run the hypothetical blog host conspiracy-blogs.com, and I manually select ten posts I like to put on the front page every day, I can be prosecuted if I select a post for that saying something like:
Tomorrow at 10 AM, join me on the steps of the capitol. Bring your gun and a sign that says "we will shoot you unless you vote no on bill 123.".
The action described is a crime, soliciting others to participate in it is a crime, and my deliberate choice to show it to a larger audience is likely enough to subject me to accomplice liability that virtually any criminal lawyer would recommend against it. If violence actually occurred, there would be an ever lower bar for the victims to clear to sue me. Planning crimes is unambiguously not protected speech.
The proposal described would subject any sufficiently editorial algorithm to similar liability.
Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
> Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book?
Yes exactly.
> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.
In what context?
> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.
From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.
> Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume.
But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.
You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?
I want to experience media in the format and order in which the creator of the media wants it to be watched. The episodic content that I watch, I watch because I have faith in the creators of it that the next one will be of the same calibre as the previous. Not faith in the publishers. 99% of the time, this is in the order or is released. There are exceptions, which is why we have the concept of creator-defined playlists. To present the content to the user in an order which is not defined by the creator is at the publisher's discretion, and the publisher should therefore take responsibility for presenting it that way.
WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.
I don't disagree. But what you (or the prior posters) are saying is that the law should prevent companies from trying to optimize for the best user experience. If only showing things in time-order is "safe" for the company, but filtering out spam becomes "unsafe", then I as a consumer am forced to endure a crappy experience for solely legal reasons. Neato.
This is a great point and is also true of Facebook and a number of other platforms. Roger McNamee spoke at length about this issue with Sam Harris on his podcast back when it was called Making Sense. His point was essentially that the AI that controls the recommendations is trained to maximize clickthrough rates, and so it learns in its own way to feed us articles that make us angry, because we click and share more that way. Hence the tendency to lead people down rabbit holes of extremism.
- Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes
- Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content
Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
Censorship isn’t the answer to the things you fear. YouTube banning these things won’t stop them from spreading. YouTube not banning these things won’t cause people to commit violence.
Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing.
You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire.
Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt.
Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts.
That's a fine point, but YouTube isn't restricted to the option of taking down videos. They could stop recommending these videos, and they could pull them from search results. Actually, YouTube might be a better place if new videos were unlisted by default and teams of curators were responsible for approving new channels. But then maybe someone would just build their own YouTube index and search engine.
Frankly those people are just dumb, and there's nothing we can do to truly protect society from them. So, you might as well allow such content to exist.
Let's not forget why idea censorship exists. We are ruled by those we are not allowed to criticized. Even the guys setting fire to cell towers, can we believe that a video is going to convince anyone reasonable of actually doing it? Do you yourself feel tempted?
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? It wasn't QAnon. It was the state -- and it looks like YouTube is aligned with the pro-shutdown folks who don't want their wisdom questioned.
Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work?
Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself.
Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions.
Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops.
You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
Without lockdowns, it just means that everyone with the means to stay home does so, and the people not able to stay home disproportionately face the disease. Government lockdowns reduce the incentive for desperate people to continue exposing themselves to the disease.
Lockdowns are causing the majority of economic damage.
Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.
Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.
"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]
It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.
Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:
"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."
So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.
Even if they had 30% immunity, that still leaves the majority of the population exposed. I'm sure 30% would be very much preferable (if it's even true), but probably not good enough to allow things like concerts or maybe even sit down restaurants to reopen.
There are estimates that herd-immunity is achievable at 43%
"The disease-induced herd immunity level is 43% ... when immunity is induced by disease spreading, the proportion infected in groups with high contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates"
Unlike most other European countries, Sweden is not increasing its sovereign debt load by 15+% of GDP to keep the citizenry afloat. That’ll feel a lot more important than Covid in 5 years.
I think this is likely a biased view. If you ask the families of the 300+k people who died from Covid-19 they probably won't consider the economic impact to be the most significant.
Thankfully, that's both not how democracy works - we don't ask a biased sample - and exactly how it works - we ask everyone what they think of the government's performance and they vote for or against.
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
I agree with you, that was basically my point. At this point in time we don't know enough about how this will play out to make any claim about what was the more important aspect to consider: the effects on the economy or the effects on population-level health due to Covid-19.
I think it’s fair to say that both numbers represent a measure of different ways that the pandemic has caused pain and suffering, whether it’s in terms of lives or livelihoods impacted.
We obviously need to deal with both problems concurrently. There are a lot of actions that can be taken which can help one which doesn’t come at the expense of the other, so it’s not purely a either-or decision.
It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to either effect. The death toll is an immediate concern, but so is a functioning food supply chain, and indeed a healthy economy is critically important to everyone.
No having lived through an economic collapse or a hyper inflation event, for example, it may be hard to appreciate how difficult (and deadly) that situation can be.
People are worried about economies not for some abstract reasons.
Bad economies literally kill and have a potential to kill much more people than Covid-19.
From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2].
Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.
Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].
Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].
I don't think anyone said worry about the economy was an abstract idea. It obviously has a very real effect on people and their health, it has been well studied. I was simply pointing out that what people will consider more significant in five years time (the effect of the pandemic itself or the subsequent harm to the economy due to the response) depends on who you ask. Furthermore, since we don't know the full extent of the pandemic or the ensuing economic impact it doesn't make sense to claim one way or the other right now.
Also, the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim.
"I was simply pointing out that what people will consider more significant in five years time"
Yes, I think I understand what you're saying.
My point is the harm to the economy directly translates to lives lost too. Bad economy leads to surge in violent crime, opiods addictions, gang violence, lost access to health care...
"... the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim."
It wasn't the only cause, sure. But it was a huge one, afaik. History isn't a hard science, of course, and I'm not a historian (not even an amateur historian) but this quote from Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly controversial:
"The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party... Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery."[1]
The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.
Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.
Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
You've just given a bunch of evidence that those things are happening despite our benevolent censors' best efforts.
I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
> There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.
It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
Active information campaigns. Deprioritizing in search/related results rather than banning. Partitioning verified from unverified information and always showing a minimum number of factual content when showing unverified content.
That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
It is. There are books on all kind of things, are we going to burn books we don't like, next?
The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.
If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.
Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.
Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.
People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.
It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.
Nationally, the clearance rate for arson is typically under 23%, meaning the vast majority of arsonists get away with it.
In general, clearance rates are pretty bad across most crimes. The homicide clearance rate is typically below 62%, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings is typically below 55%, clearance rates for reported rape is typically below 40%, clearance rates for motor vehicle theft is typically below 20%.
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
The last bit sounds like the plot of Minority Report.
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
> What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far less frequently and lead to far less destruction.
> The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected)
No, it's not normal, and the protests have been very small and sparsely attended, but they've been massively amplified by the media [6]. As of May 7th, 68% of Americans (10957 people surveyed) were more worried about restrictions being lifted too early vs 31% that were worried about the lifting too late. And saying you're more worried about the economic harms than the virus is way more normal than actually going into public and gathering in a group with other people who are all intentionally rejecting safety recommendations.
> For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities.
Yeah, it's not possible to change a conspiracy theorist's mind with facts, because any inconvenient fact can just be interpreted as another part of the conspiracy. To those susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is no known cure to the infection. The only way to avoid outbreaks is to stop transmission.
> If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
This doesn't directly answer your question of "violent" (and it seems on the whole the QAnon protests have been non-violent), but the FBI assessed QAnon Extremists as a domestic terrorism threat[0]. (The qualification here is "QAnon Extremists" which appears to, probably correctly, separate the extremist element from the majority).
> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not
This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product and we should not encourage the narrative that this product is the zenith of knowledge even though there are knowledgeable people who put content on YouTube.
> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product
This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting, which today comprises a large proportion of all information transfer between humans. Companies like Facebook and YouTube are central to social discourse, at least in the west. When a medium of communication is that ubiquitous, the fact that it is owned by a private company is not an excuse to throw up one's hands and say "Well, I guess they own it - they can censor what they want".
The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
> it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform
This is very obviously false based on countless examples, but you're baking in the assertion that exposure to the YouTube audience is a necessary criteria to be considered a video platform, yet you haven't justified that belief. YouTube's ubiquity is an accolade afforded to it by the public on a completely voluntarily basis that can be effortlessly revoked at any time. The reason it is not revoked is because it costs users nothing to use YouTube and for the overwhelming majority of its users YouTube is just a small and generally unimportant slice of their day akin to watching netflix or playing video games.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
Why? I don't see the connection between the quantity of eyeballs freely gazing and the need for the owner to abdicate their editorial prerogatives. What is your justification for this? If the eyeballs have a problem with how those prerogatives are expressed they can look away to another website and they actually do that quite frequently.
You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.
"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."
Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!
More and more social interaction becomes intermediated. And especially during this time of quarantine. It's not as easy as convincing people. Because people are now all on ban-happy platforms. And these platforms synchronize their bans.
Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.
If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.
I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.
> ... discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day
No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.
I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.
We’ve already covered discoverability: you have no right to an “audience”.
As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.
As a contrarian view, do our rights require it to be _cheap_? AWS + a domain name (`www.the-moon-really-is-made-of-cheese.com`) seems like something that is available to everyone.
- It's not cheap
- It's not easy
However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.
> This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting
Far from it. You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part. A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
This whole argument has been repeated many, many times on HN. Can we stop letting this stuff devolve into generic honest discourse vs corporate nihilism debates? At least mention something about COVID so I know which thread I'm in.
> You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part.
Maybe not "nefarious" exactly. But YouTube does have a virtual monopoly. And that's arguably illegal in the US. Or at least, it exposes them to additional government oversight.
Instead of arguing about the semantics of "monopoly," it could be fun to ask "does YouTube have power that we as a self-governing people should regulate?"
I think it does. Others disagree. Sometimes it's an interesting discussion.
> A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
I'm not sure about this. Besides removing obvious hate speech, which sort of content curation do you mean? I thought its success was due to everyone being able to upload and share video clips. I don't think curation was an important feature.
YouTube is perceived as a family-friendly, PG to PG-13 brand. It would be a very different, and much more niche, environment if it were a free-for-all of pornography, obscene language and graphic violence.
I agree, but notice that except for pornography, which I forgot to include, I covered all of the others (sort of) with "hate speech". Banning violence/insults/pornography/harassment is an obviously useful filter for a PG-13 site, but I don't think it qualifies as curation. To me curation implies something related to the selection of quality.
Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but Youtube is a Google company now, and their entire business model is based on (mostly) algorithmic curation. The business model of every content creator depends upon catering to the preferences of that algorithm, and their success at doing so determines their value to advertisers. Entire genres of content have come into being and have been destroyed overnight because of the algorithm.
Youtube's success mostly comes from driving discovery of new content through recommended channels and videos.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are other video sites out there. Just because youtube is popular doesn't prevent people from hosting content on other platforms.
One thing that really bothered me was how Australian ISPs handled censorship of the Christchurch shooting videos. They have started proactively blocking not just websites that hosted it, but also those that linked to it - even forums, where it was posted by the users, and the moderators have a general hands-off policy.
It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.
It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.
Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...
And just because your house is already hooked up to your electric utility doesn't mean you can't build your own generator and and source your own fuel! Clearly the utility should have near complete immunity and let an automated algorithm cut off your power indefinitely for vague, unspecified reasons.
We could have antitrust enforcement that prevents companies like Alphabet and Facebook from becoming so dominant in our society, but if we are going to have such dominant corporations, we cannot allow unbridled censorship of speach on their platforms without undermining a pillar of societal strength, prosperity, and happiness: the marketplace of ideas.
According to what though? Walmart is ubiquitous; do they have to let people protest inside stores? No. Do they have to sell antivax books? No. You could maybe argue youtube is closer to a pseudo public place like a mall, but even there you couldn’t force a mall to protest on behalf of someone else or sell something. What exactly is your end game? Create a new type of forum (like physical forum) where private companies are compelled to act according to someone else’s standards?
By the way, you might know that in California, shopping centers may have to allow people to engage in some expressive activity on their private property, even when they don't endorse the speakers' message:
Thanks! That’s what I was trying to refer to. But that seems different in a few ways. First, there’s actually physical open spaces in malls where the public is invited—you don’t have to shop. Second, the protest in a mall is ephemeral. Youtube is like a store in the mall, not the open forum (I don’t think Macy’s would be required to have a protest in its store); the internet is like that open space. Second, extending this to YouTube would require YouTube to proactively host a video on its servers, pay for costs to play it, and host it forever (until the protestor takes it down).
Walmart is not ubiquitous in terms of property the same way Youtube is in terms of streaming video. If you want to protest you can easily avoid Walmart. Likewise if you want to publish a book you can easily avoid Walmart.
If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably established on Youtube).
I don’t follow. When you protest at Walmart you aren’t guaranteed an audience either (people can ignore you and walk away). And when you make a video you don’t get granted an audience either. Why should YouTube have to help you out?
YouTube/Google/Alphabet have repeatedly said they are removing things about COVID19 from non-government sources. They cannot simply be written off as a private agents who can do what they want with their platform, considering their dominance and monopoly on content.
This is textbook definition of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Google is either becoming the Ministry of Truth, or by its policy, allowing governments to be the Ministers of Truth, with no room of any dissent.
YouTube is not the ministry of truth, it is a popular entertainment website that people visit voluntarily. People very incorrectly treating YouTube like it's some kind of authoritative source of knowledge is the problem, not YouTube.
They're not doing this for marketing reasons. They're doing it because they believe by controlling YouTube they control what people think. Even if they're wrong it's dystopian and suggests a megalomanic attitude.
Remember this is the same company that controls Chrome. It's all fun and games right up until people start discovering their Chromebooks and Androids are blocking web sites on the grounds of "misinformation"
I’ll reiterate a point I’ve made before: the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier. They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
The problem we face is that social media is about echoing information, not validity, which is how misinformation spreads so rapidly, because it sounds like what people want to hear.
There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion.
Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moderator problem. YT will either moderate or die.
The reason YT could get so popular is because they neither have to moderate, nor fact check, but still get the benefits of being informational. This is true for ALL social media, unfortunately. How would one go about moderating the thousands of hours of content produced every hour in TikTok? Etc.
For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.
What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.
Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.
That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.
> If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history.
Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.
I don't think this is true in the long run, any more than genes which favor their propagation are bad in the long run. In the short term, viruses, cancers, shitty memes, doomsday cults and other low-sophistication replicators are favored.
But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
It's "bad" for us as individuals with our cultural background. It's not necessarily "bad" for the memes themselves, especially since the ultimate score in this game is to have an entire civilization proactively spreading the meme to others. Christianity, Islam, and other proselytizing religions are a good example.
> the ultimate question is whether YouTube (and other social media platforms) should be permitted both the power to control on their platform as well as the freedom from liability of a common carrier
I disagree that this is the ultimate question or that this is in any way a problem that merits a changing of the laws (as current law explicitly permits this). Websites aren't common carriers, and I don't see a compelling reason to force websites to host content that they disagree with for any reason. I don't see any connection between the idea between popularity and the loss of editorial control of your own website.
> They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
Moderation is part of the product. I would argue that the idea that we can effectively constrict companies into a specific type of moderation behavior is what's untenable because it strikes at the heart of the creative freedom to build a website and online community with respect to your own ideals.
To be clear, I think either position is fine. If you want control over what people say that's okay - but maybe then you should be accountable for what they say like a publisher.
If you don't want to be accountable for what people say, that's fine - but maybe then like a traditional common carrier you shouldn't get to control what people say.
The asymmetry of "I control everything you can say but am accountable for none of it" is wrong, in my eyes.
> they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility.
There is a difference between morality and legality. It might be legal for ATT to cut your Internet because they don't like you but it will be immoral for sure.
Do you really not see the critical differences between having your internet cut off and having a website owner remove something you posted to their website? I am honestly having difficulty believing that.
The essential, underlying problem here is that YouTube is a corporate product, just as you say, and yet still has a major influence on the population's aggregate belief, due to its scale of adoption. This is an emergent phenomenon, not a narrative.
Considering the content of YouTube's top channels I think the evidence isn't in favor of that suggestion that YouTube has a noteworthy impact on "the population's aggregate belief"
Well, they roll out a platform where people can upload content. That is the one of the main services they offer, YT should be subject to the local regulations for uploaders and viewers, applying no other discretionary/arbitrary limits than those imposed by regulations or by technical reasons. Imagine a content platform would consider that videos created by <insert group of people> do not align with their values.
There's only one grocery store in town and I need to buy food, but their prices are too high!! Oh well, guess I will just have to drive to this other town to buy food where the prices aren't so high.
..walks outside to car
..sees local grocery store owner has flattened his tire
> I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not.
YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.
You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.
I have been following unherd for a bit and while they are on the let's do as the Swedes side of things, this is wellreasoned long form interviews with established experts and opinion makers.
I don't understand mechanism on why something like this gets censored. I think it is obvious that this sort of "overcensoring" will come back on youtube in a negative way; and possibly even hurt the case for lockdowns and careful reopening.
Unfortunately it isn't always cut and dry. As the GP pointed out, once upon a time the heliocentric model was "disinformation".
In more modern times, suggesting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was misrepresented would be "disinformation". Suggesting that we didn't need to invade Iraq to prevent another 9/11 would be "disinformation". Sometimes yesterday's "harmful disinformation" is simply today's "information".
I think the ethical question you presented is multifaceted. On another axis, do the people who control the most prolific video platform also have a moral responsibility to ensure a free society has the tools to ask difficult questions?
Youtube isn't in charge of what is credible or not. Youtube is in charge of what shows up on youtube or not. There are many categories of things that can't be on youtube, not just things youtube thinks are incorrect.
Should youtube overstep its bounds, that makes it easier for competitors to enter the video streaming market. It seems like libertarian leaning people forget half of their philosophy on this issue.
This gets a bit into monopolies. YouTube is Google and Google prioritizes its own properties. Google is the most widely used search engine and works hard to keep it that way.
Is there a way to easily have popular interviews online outside of YouTube?
Their monopoly is meaningless in the context of all the knowledge freely available within the entirety of the internet, not to mention all the knowledge freely available outside the internet in the form of books which still happen to be the definitive medium to learn about anything with any type of serious rigor.
In my view from the ten minutes I watched he didn’t state anything any more off base than the WHO has over the time the pandemic has been spreading. There is uncertainty and we’re yet to understand it thoroughly.
Given that, I think this is gross overreach by YT in establishing narrative. What happens if their management becomes a bunch of anti-vaxxers, do they get to set the tone?
The fact there is a global pandemic going on that requires the cooperation of virtually everyone is important context here.
Meanwhile, YouTube does little moderation of zany philosophical, conspiratorial, or otherwise disruptive, unconventional content. The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I don't agree with censorship, but your analogy is off base.
> That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I think the figures running the Inquisition and the counter-reformation at the time of Galileo might have disagreed. Remember the 30 Years War was also ongoing from 1618-1648 during the whole time, a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict that engulfed all of Europe and resulted in 8 million deaths.
Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
BTW, I strongly disagree with the this video, but really not sure if YouTube removing it is the right way to do this or will be effective in suppressing virus truthers.
True, but Galileo's work was not a direct commentary on said crisis (30 Years War). On the other hand, this "professor" is presenting an analysis of an ongoing crisis and suggesting concrete actions on how it should be handled.
> Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
Exactly my point. You can criticize the powers and be and the social order today with impunity on YouTube.
>The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands before they eat."
(...)
Jesus called the crowd to Him and said, "Listen and understand. A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it. (...) For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him."
These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent. The practical consequences are the same as well.
In China information censorship is due to the government trying to promote peace and harmony. Aka, the government thinks it knows what’s best for people and forces it on people.
Facebook et al also encounter these same problems, where they see people spreading “misinformation.” It’s a hard problem to solve, but they essentially resort to taking the same types of censorship as China that everyone so easily criticizes.
The irony is Google is now doing it too after claiming to have left the market due to forced censorship.
Some people may cite China’s censorship/banning of Falun Gong. What people don’t bother to look into is that Falun Gong is an anti-gay, really out there cult. Their censorship justifications of that is not unlike censoring “fake news” like this “doctor.” While it may be right (of course their methodology may be questionable), it completely short circuits the ability for critical thinkers to actually analyze all content. It’s done supposedly for the greater good.
As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same. If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want. Now if your government will try to fine or arrest you because you hosted some video on your website, that's censorship. You can avoid youtube, but you can't avoid your government.
That said, I agree that huge websites like youtube, facebook, instagram are something more than just another web resource and probably some regulations should be applied to them. But it's very sensitive subject.
> As long as you can host your video on your own website, that's not the same.
Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day).
If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And that's before you consider the network effects of YouTube.
Then they don't need to use video, they can use written words.
There's no reason why they should be able to use the infrastructure of private companies to scale their message as much as they want.
Or they can just pay for a CDN as you say. This just highlights the differences between the West and China even more. In the west, harmful messages need to stand on their own two feet. If they don't have support, then they can be kicked off private platforms. No need for the government to intervene.
> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.
> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.
So CF bans even remotely right leaning content but claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:
CloudFlare is under no obligation to follow a policy you find logical. If you dislike their business practices or find them problematic you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation. Otherwise you’ll have to wait and see if the magic of the free market changes anything.
All I am pointing out is the hypocrisy and false statements CF and others make. CF's actions are much different from their words. They say they need to allow dangerous terrorists because of free speech but then ban other speech which they don't like.
> you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation
Voicing my opinion on a public forum is one way to do that.
And then the CDNs no platform them and and then someone who agrees with the Wojcickis of the world DoS attacks you and then you're gone.
This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.
This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.
Video hosting scalability is not the problem it was if you use a technology like Webtorrent, allowing peer-to-peer distribution of your video files. See PeerTube for a relatively easy platform for your private video hosting.
Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly getting more than that, you can surely afford a CDN or a proper infrastructure.
I do agree that the network effects of YouTube are very hard to compete with, however.
I'm not a lawyer; but, relentlessly downloading and then assisting in the distribution of content I've not personally validated sounds like a legal minefield filled mostly with mines and very little green space.
That's actually a really interesting thought. I wonder if you can just serve a tiny JS torrent client and a magnet link and automatically download the content. You would need to have a way for visitors to seed the content too, otherwise you still have to serve everything anyway.
> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.
The case of the baker refusing to decorate cake for the gay couple comes to mind. He's in court for the third time. Same people who talk about "private company can do whatever they like" attack the baker.
Soon this will evolve into letting private companies being able to censor minority opinions. Don't forget, just few decades ago, LGBT rights opinions weren't mainstream and would therefore have been banned from private companies.
Someone I know rather well is their sysadmin, and their site is still up: https://dailystormer.su/
Admittedly, they’ve had a hell of a time, but the hard data is that it continues to run. I don’t condone domain names or hosting accounts getting shut down based on content (ANY content) but it appears that it is still at least a little bit possible to host the most extreme of incorrect/offensive content, it’s just not convenient.
I imagine they might even still be on Cloudflare if they hadn’t promoted the (incorrect) theory that Cloudflare not canceling them was actually a dogwhistle endorsement of their content. Cloudflare cited this incorrect claim as the reason for their termination.
That said, large hosting platforms used by majorities of the population (eg YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) should absolutely have to carry data uncritically, just like the phone company, or at least as long as they are actively trying to kill the federated open web with things like censored native app stores, censored browser extension indices, censored and surveilled messaging platforms, and AMP. Things would be quite a bit different if our hardware didn’t forcibly opt us in to dictatorial censorship of native apps.
It also grinds my gears that they call it “community standards”, which are weasel words to pretend that their userbase likes being forced to watch only what their dictator approves of. They’re unilateral, and invoking the term “community” is a dishonest, unprofessional move.
> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want.
I absolutely agree with you here, but we also have the right to criticize and/or stop using platforms that use this. Your parent post said it was wrong, not that you tube didn't have the right to do this.
These huge web sites are using public right-of-ways and wireless spectrum to transmit their data. It'd be like the phone company censoring your speech. The 1st amendment ought to apply to them unless they are using a fully private means of distributing their information.
Everyone uses public right of ways to communicate. There's nothing stopping someone from setting up their own site using the same public infrastructure.
> The practical consequences are the same as well.
Is YouTube sending people to "re-education camps" now?
If a private platform kicks you out, you can host your stuff elsewhere. If a state censors you, it can use lethal force to silence you. Pretty big difference.
In the good old times of Soviet power, there were other oppression mechanisms besides lethal force. In fact lethal force was only rarely used, especially after Stalin. A couple of examples:
* Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some remote small city with little impact on the national scale. Technically, the Gulag itself was an application of this strategy, with a particularly harsh destination and a particularly dangerous occupation.
* House arrest. Keep dissenters in their homes, and carefully control whom they get into contact.
The end effect is the same: drastically limit the platform available to dissenters, without outright murdering them.
There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.
I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.
No, you are just playing word games. "Free speech" does not and has never meant "the right to get any letter to the editor published in the New York Times" and therefore does not mean "the right to get any video I want on YouTube." So it is not a "simple observation" that deinfrastructring -> depersoning is a spectrum. There is no such spectrum. There is an enormous gap between "society thinks you're icky and big corporations won't host your content" and "the state sends you to Siberia," since one is clearly a human rights violation and one is clearly not. Likewise there is an enormous gap between "Simon and Schuster rejected my novel!" and "the FBI busted the printing shop I hired to print my novel." YouTube removing this guy's video is very clearly in the former category. I am aware that it is out-of-reach for many individuals to create their own website which can host videos. But a right to free speech does not mean a right to any content distribution platform you want.
It also whitewashes the issue at hand: this professor is a notorious crank and has been a notorious crank long before COVID-19. This is not a free-thinker taking a bold stand against a sclerotic public health bureaucracy. This is a con artist spreading dangerous misinformation during the worst public health emergency in 100 years. YouTube removing his content is not just them suppressing views they politically disagree with, it's also individual employees at YouTube viewing this interview as a imminent threat to their family's health and safety. This is a very reasonable view for private individuals and private corporations running private infrastructure to take.
Look: if he starts his own website self-hosting COVID quackery, and the government shuts it down, then that really is Soviet-level and I will take your argument more seriously (though given the vicious threat COVID-19 poses, I am open to the idea that this is an extreme but necessary use of the government's emergency powers). But it is simply ridiculous to say that YouTube can't moderate their own content, especially when 99% of the world's doctor's and public health officials would describe the video as dangerous misinformation.
But your self-pitying shtick about how you're a lone voice of moderation in a sea of adversarial extremes is nice. It's not quite as nice as bringing back 90,000 Americans from the dead but it probably made you feel nice about yourself.
I'm sympathetic to Chinese-style censorship, at least in theory before it degenerates into the state trying to suppress anything it considers embarrassing to itself. "The government thinks it knows what’s best for people" because it does know better than most people. Facebook, as the lowest common denominator for American public discourse, is a cesspool of misinformation, pseudoscience, hate, deceptive advertising, and people losing their skin in MLM scams. In India, fake stories on WhatsApp have whipped up violent mobs into a frenzy of xenophobia, resulting in tragic murders of innocent migrants. We should be more aware of the enormous costs associated with a lassie-faire attitude toward speech, even if we decide it's worth the cost. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
All that being said, the practical consequences of YouTube moderation are not even remotely the same as those of the Chinese censorship that everyone criticizes. The worst thing that can happen to you on YouTube is that you can't comment or upload videos anymore. YouTube is not sending people to prison or calling up your employer to tell them you're a dangerous agitator.
Why on earth does this have to be compared to China? And Falun Gong?!
This is long form journalism with establishment figures such as university professors.
YouTube censors clearly overstepped their "mandate" here. And Unherd has other ways of publicising this particular interview and drawing attention to YouTube's censorship.
Yep. It seems to have started with the 2016 election which left popular opinion being that there's a huge part of the population who are too stupid to think for themselves and must be shielded from bad ideas in case they believe them and harm the rest of us with them. Now that such an idea is readily accepted, censorship is easily seen as the morally right thing to do in lots of cases. The feeling is that we're protecting ourselves from real harm by people who really don't have the ability to correctly evaluate the information they receive. Just like China doing it for social harmony. It's not just terrorism and child porn that people tolerate censorship for anymore, it's for 5G and flat earth conspiracy theories, anti-religious ideas, nationalism, and all sorts of "misinformation".
That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious. But the real, longterm solution is education, not censorship. But we have to admit that we are in an ultra-connected world like never before and fake, easy news are even more easily spread. So, critical thinking is a necessary skill to be taught.
> That a huge part of the population choose unwisely and footgun themselves and the rest it's quite obvious.
Twitter and media hyperbole aside how exactly is the current admin that much different than the previous? Bush #2 had fake WMDs and leveraged that to go to war. A war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and a ridiculous amount of money. The last admin bailed out Wall Street (with few concessions), re-signed and expanded the Patriot Act, floated the Paris Climate Accord as a victory (but Naomi Klein tells otherwise). Over both of these admins and prior income inequality has increased.
We've been getting shot in the foot, the head, the arse, etc. I'm not a DJT voter or fan but the idea that he's the problem is naive. If W.DC had been doing their job there would have been no opportunity for DJT to rise. Trump is a symptom. Let's not be foolish and blame the symptom.
I didn't dismiss them. I asked how those are so much worse than the transgressions of the previous two admins? I'd like to remind everyone that an estimated 100,000+ non-white skineed _civilians_ were killed in Iraq. Alledged hate crimes vs real war crimes.
Bush caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with the Iraq war, and you're upset about some tweets?! Why do people have such a distorted view of right and wrong?
Agreed. As for why, it's obvious. It's the media. It's going to be interesting to see what happens when Trump signs off on extending the Patriot Act. A law that was renewed and expanded by the previous admin.
Maybe they shouldn't have been forced to choose between Hillary/Biden or Trump if you wanted them to choose "wisely". The responsibility for losing to Trump falls solely on the Democratic Party, and the talk of footguns and education comes off as extremely snobbish. Stop blaming others for your failures.
Consider that it is far easier to spread misinformation/disinformation than it is to educate, and that over time there are going to be even more powerful forms of disinformation in the form of deep fakes. People have a hard time distinguishing real from fake now, it's only going to get worse from here.
On one hand you can say that nothing should be censored and the onus is on the viewer to critically evaluate information. But the reality is that misinformation/disinformation is causing real harm to people, populations, and civilization itself.
For example, propaganda on Facebook in Myanmar has fueled mass killings against the Rohingya. Anti-vax misinformation is lowering vaccination rates and causing a resurgence of diseases that were almost eradicated. Should companies like Google and Facebook just turn a blind eye to all of that and watch brutality and backwardness thrive and tear down progress? At what point should the line be drawn?
Make no mistake, there are malign actors out there who are weaponizing misinformation as we speak. If we choose not to do anything about it, they will have an out-sized role in shaping the future to their ends.
It certainly is a very difficult question to figure out where the line should be drawn, and even then it's a moving target. But it's a question worth wrangling over, and ultimately if mankind is going to meet the challenges of now and the future, the threat of disinformation has to be met one way or another.
>These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent.
At the end of the day, Youtube's intent is to make as much money as possible. If Youtube didn't censor a lot of misinformation videos, people would get mad and demand advertisers to stop advertising on Youtube.
> These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent. The practical consequences are the same as well.
True, if you ignore the fact that China is a government and YouTube is an internet video portal. And that there are sites like HN that can point it out. And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
But yeah, let's compare the policing of bad information in a pandemic that gets people killed, where YouTube doesn't benefit from the "censorship", to what China's government is doing. At least you get to feel good about your purity when you're posting comments on HN, secure in the knowledge that you don't have a teenager or a parent that might die as a result.
This comment breaks the site guidelines by being snarky, crossing into personal attack, and taking the thread further into flamewar. That's not cool here, regardless of how right you are (or feel) or how wrong someone else is (or you feel they are), so please don't.
> At least you get to feel good about your purity when you're posting comments on HN, secure in the knowledge that you don't have a teenager or a parent that might die as a result.
What's this ad hominem crap doing here?
I don't know anything about the poster you're replying to, but I think I'm safe in assuming that they don't want your teenager or parent to die either. It's acceptable--essential, even--to be concerned about more than one thing at a time, even during a pandemic.
> as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting.
But that's not actually true. It's nearly impossible to express concern for children in any context on the internet without being mocked and dismissed for having invoked a "won't someone think of the children" ad hominem.
It's strange how deeply that particular meme has dug into the psyche of internet culture, and has become almost an unwritten rule.
> True, if you ignore the fact that China is a government and YouTube is an internet video portal.
That's the way the west perceives the situation - although over there they might see this as 'powerful unelected corporation which is legally mandated to maximise profits arbitrarily censors with no oversight, in a country where these unelected corporations control parts of the government'.
Firstly, I agree with rcoveson; there are a lot of complaints to be made about your second paragraph. Including that "a teenager ... that might die" is emotional misinformation - they almost surely won't.
The difference between governments doing it and YouTube doing it is that people do have the practical choice of leaving YouTube if the situation is deemed intolerable. Up until that point there isn't a practical difference between YouTube and China if they employ the same censorship methods.
> And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
The Chinese government isn't exactly subtle; they are promoting peace and harmony through censorship. A lot of people died in the last Chinese revolution & aftermath - they do have a reasonable argument that unstable government will kill people. It is just we know from experience in the west that transparent democracies are more stable because problems tend to get dealt with when they affect large groups of people.
> where YouTube doesn't benefit from the "censorship"
Of course they do. You think they're spending all that money out of the kindness of their hearts?
Way to dodge actually engaging with the principles at play here. You can certainly assert your consequentialist/utilitarian arguments, but not everyone agrees with that ethical framework.
Consequentialism also yields insane results. Look up "the repugnant conclusion". If ethics were settled, it would no longer be a philosophy but a science.
Stop this "bad information gets people killed" nonsense. You can justify any kind of censorship with that. That's what China does too. If they allow protests, they'll get violent and people will get killed. If the government is overthrown, millions of people will probably be killed or die from the ensuing chaos.
Youtube, Facebook, etc. in some ways have more power than the government because they can influence public opinion. They also set the standard for what's morally acceptable and people carry that standard with them elsewhere in their lives. Eventually, they'll probably vote for the government to enforce it because it's so popular.
I once met an American who believed hate speech was a crime. It turns out that a lot of young people believe that. No doubt because it is a "crime" on all their social media platforms. Some of them already want to make it a real crime when the discover it isn't yet.
Given Google's size and power it's only natural the Chinese and plenty of others would have insiders. How far up the influence ladder they've climbed is another matter.
Just the same, the US is doing it as well, abroad as well as at home.
It's impossible to produce a search engine compatible with the Chinese market without having some fairly high-placed contacts in the Chinese government, because it would take some very high-level approval to allow such a product.
Legislators puts pressure on them. E.g. by threatening to repeal CDA or bring other regulation if they do not self-regulate and "do something" about content they deem problematic for one reason or another.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. Politicians ask for things that make them look good, companies ask for things that benefit their bottom line. As long as conspiracy theorists are not youtube's cashcow and tax cuts can be sold as improving the economy for everyone both sides benefit.
According to this guy's Wikipedia page, he has claimed many times to be a professor of oncology at Imperial College: but he is not, and Imperial College has sought legal options to stop him from making this claim.
The page is full of other fairly astonishing stuff, not the least of which is apparent fraud connected with the Lockerbie Bombing.
"Sikora told The Guardian that he did not know he would be used in the ad campaign, and that he agreed with Obama about the American health care system. In the attack ad, Sikora was referred to as professor of oncology at Imperial College. This led Imperial to seek legal advice to stop Sikora from claiming to be a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial; a claim that he was understood to have made repeatedly over the previous five years."
"Although the US advert did not state a link to Imperial, at the end of piece written by Sikora on the day it was first aired, 12 May, for UnionLeader.com, he was described as professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College school of medicine, London.
...
"I'm very careful not to involve either my NHS contract with Hammersmith or Imperial in anything that's political," he said. "I'm a consultant at Hammersmith hospital, nobody would dispute that. It's true I can't call myself professor of cancer medicine at Imperial, but I can at Buckingham. The trouble is when I get quoted somewhere, they just use the old stuff."
However, on 29 January, Sikora gave evidence to the Commons health select committee. Introducing himself, he said: "I am Karol Sikora, professor of oncology at Imperial College for 22 years.""
.
I believe it is possible the advertisement made this association without his consent; however I agree it is problematic if he represented to the Commons health select committee that he is a professor at Imperial. Personally, I don't find this damning evidence enough to eradicate his credibility.
> Sikora and the School of Medicine at Buckingham have in the past been supportive of alternative medicine. For a short time, Buckingham offered a diploma in "integrated medicine" (a relatively recent euphemism for alternative medicine). Sikora was a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health[24] and Chair of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, which is unaffiliated with any university; it includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who led Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course.
>
> Sikora is also a "professional member" of the College of Medicine, a patient-oriented healthcare lobby group also linked to the Prince of Wales that appeared shortly after the collapse of the Prince's Foundation. The College has been criticised extensively in the British Medical Journal for its promotion of alternative medicine. These claims have been contested by the College. He is on the advisory panel of complementary cancer care charity Penny Brohn Cancer Care (formerly the Bristol Cancer Help Centre) of whom Prince Charles is a patron, and is a patron of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Statements by Sikora have been critical of unproven methods of alternative medicine, after Parliament member Lord Maurice Saatchi proposed a bill allowing doctors to use unproven experimental therapies, and he has spoken out against claims that an alkaline diet can cure cancer.
It sounds like he might actually have infringed Youtube's "Harmful or dangerous content" guidelines:
> Harmful or dangerous content
>
> Don't post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids. Videos showing such harmful or dangerous acts may get age-restricted or removed depending on their severity.
With this reasoning, all food videos showing desserts with high calories and high sugar content should be banned, since obesity is an epidemic that kills and is harmful.
Not a bad idea. At least direct advertisement or false information about unhealthy food should be banned. This has already happened with tobacco or high caloric drinks in some countries like Singapore in physical stores.
These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically, I'm not really sure why these kinds of arguments are presented like some sort of self-evident zinger against censoring dangerous content.
> These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically
And nuking a city stops all crime in it. If you only look at one tiny aspect and ignore everything else, just about anything can be made to seem sensible.
I think it’s because people are uncomfortable with the idea that information can be harmful to the masses who might not be able to process it ‘correctly.’
Nudge theory agrees with you, and as such they would maybe not ban them outright, but just like cigarettes packs have a warning stating exactly as you said, high sugar, high fructose foods are a health hazard before the video plays
The guidelines are obviously written by a lawyer so Google can have it both ways. (To be fair, most content platforms would have similar lawyerly policies)
Alternative medicine is mostly bunk, but I absolutely don't agree that it constitutes "harmful or dangerous countent" or should be banned from Youtube. Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.
I have no doubt that believing dumb things can cause you to make bad decisions. I just don't agree that being wrong is "dangerous" in the normal sense of the word, and I don't think that banning people from saying dumb things is a good or effective solution.
It's another story when people are actively running interference. I've seen messages like "don't go to the doctor for your cancer", and I agree those should be suppressed. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.
Imagine a population of 1 user. A user puts of a video advertised as instructions for doing a dangerous task while leaving out vitally important steps necessary to the user actually performing the task safely. The user follows instructions and promptly dies. The user was responsible for their own actions but nonetheless its hard to argue that if we left the video up after we had identified the issue led we and the author are both complicit. We should have taken down the video. The user is still free to host their own videos but it wont achieve as much of an audience without the benefit of the platform.
Imagine a population of 1 million users. In one timeline evil, stupid misinformation isn't spread around and 1000 people die.
In another timeline it is spread around and 10000 people die. Warning labels can't help here because most of the people negatively effected are multiple steps removed from such a label. Like the first example we should have reduced its audience by taking it down entirely not added a warning label that 50-80% wont attend to.
That depends what the alternative medicine asks the patient to do. Anecdote: my mother was told to do coffee enemas in Tijuana to get rid of her colorectal cancer. She very seriously debated it with me.
The patient's, sadly. The one person whose problem-solving abilities are impaired. Quackwatch.org did help my mother decide things and move away from the treatments above.
> Disputing the consensus should not by itself be forbidden, even when the consensus is accurate and important.
I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.
Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]
Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.
A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.
> Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
You've completely misunderstood this.
It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
We've reduced the numbers of people going onto vents. This has not reduced the numbers of people dying. Now they're dying with nasal oxygen in a care home, not on a vent in an ICU. It's a better death, but they're still dead.
Do you have sources for any of your claims?
My understanding is that there is a real medical discussion about when and under what circumstances it is appropriate to ventilate a covid patient. Some patients certainly die from ventilation who would otherwise have survived Covid. Some patients live due to venilation who would would otherwise have died.
> It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
I'm not a professional with years of slinging the lingo. But I think Kyle-Sidell's retweet of "Barotrauma is a real phenomenon" [0] implies [edit] that aggressive ventilation was actually what was killing people. Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?
Dr. @erikfreyrMD's earlier tweet said "I don't know where this dogma of 'intubate early' came from. Intubation is a death sentence. " [1] (emphasis added).
"Blister agents" refers to obsolete medications such as the extract from Spanish fly [0], which was used to try to help President George Washington recover from his cold:
"other treatments they gave [George Washington] during that period were enemas and drugs to make him vomit and something called blisters, where they applied Spanish fly onto his throat, which raises a painful blister, again to remove these terrible humors that are caution the inflammation."
I just wanted to put in a nice word for Penny Brohn. They very careful position themselves as complementary, not alternative, to conventional cancer treatment.
There was some work that looked at the outcomes of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre that showed poor outcomes, but that research didn't correct for the illness of the patients. Lots of people using the service were on palliative care pathways and were expected to die. They were using the service to get the death they wanted.
Even if he's a raving insane person, he should be left online.
Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
> Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
Regarding his relation to WHO, according to his own claims (dead link on wikipedia) he was "Chief of the Cancer Program from 1997" (to 1999, just two years, two decades ago). But we also know that he falsely claimed to be professor on Imperial College, see also posts here.
"Dr Karol Sikora is Chief of the WHO Programme on Cancer Control" as per the magazine from "September--October 1998"
1) obviously not equivalent to "ex director at the WHO"
2) obviously more than 20 years ago
3) and "on cancer control", not on epidemiology
still not anything to allow him to misrepresent his relation to Imperial College as late as 2020 (!) or to give a credence to his current epidemiological policy views.
I don't really care the content at all, but I really wish these platforms took the "phone company" approach, in which they considered themselves neutral carriers of information. In the US, I don't know an obvious issue besides legislative change to enforce this.
However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.
>, but I really wish these platforms took the "phone company" approach, in which they considered themselves neutral carriers of information.
This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice. See "advertiser friendly content"[1] and Adpocalypse[2][3].
Land line phones and cell phones are funded by subscriptions and they are also point-to-point communication between 2 private individuals. Phones (barring small-scale exceptions such as conference calls) are not a "broadcasting" medium.
There is no broadcasting medium in the world that acts as a neutral carrier. Not newspapers. And not tv like NBC/CBS/ABC. Even the government funded broadcasters like American PBS or UK BBC are not neutral carriers.
Ok, let's say you this ambitious idealism to create a new broadcasting website that allows anything except for child pornography. How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma. Subscriptions? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee for user-generated-content. Yes some die-hard web surfers pay for Youtube Red/Premium to avoid ads but they are a small minority that's not enough to pay for the entire Youtube infrastructure. So far, only funding based on advertising seems to be viable.
>This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice.
It should be as well.
Disallow advertising companies from paying for ads on specific content only.
They should have a blanket agreement to show N ads, to user demographics, interests, etc. But not the ability to not have their ads shown on particular channels/videos. That just gives the ad companies censorship power.
>How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma
Ban by law "a la cart content/ad choice" across all platforms. Customers/Ad companies either sign to show their ads the platform or they don't. No selection of channels/videos they'll be shown on (except if they have a deal with a specific channel as sponsors). If that's the case for all platforms by law, they can't go to another platform to have it cater to their demands...
That way a platform doesn't have to cater for specific "ad friendly" content. Just to have popular content, that draws ads in general.
Advertisers are ultimately pulling ads because of the will of the people, so if you're going to follow this one step further you see that the public has censorship power and that's what we want
I think if you want to separate YouTube into separate stacks (eg fundamental infrastructure for hosting videos & a publisher / curator of those videos) you could imagine the infra part not being picky about what is uploaded (as long as it is legal) but the publisher part de listing videos except to be shared by link
>Advertisers are ultimately pulling ads because of the will of the people, so if you're going to follow this one step further you see that the public has censorship power and that's what we want
They only pull ads because they can. If all platforms are banned from allowing removal of ads on specific videos, then those advertisers will have the option to (a) advertise, or (b) not advertise.
Will the opt-out of YouTube (and every major platform) altogether?
In fact, the public will also understand it's not up to the advertisers and the story will end there. The people can then try to boycot YouTube itself for having a specific video, but that wont go very far either, especially if it doesn't touch the advertising money.
This is such a bad idea. Also, you seemed to miss my points about why advertisers pull ads.
It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
>It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
For one, I don't want anybody "making censorship decisions". We're not that far from the time the majority would like pro-integration/black, gay friendly, or atheist e.g content censored.
Second, they don't vote with their wallet on the actual content. They could always vote by not watching the video they don't like, and if enough people did that, the video would naturally not have advertising revenue.
But no, while they hate on the video, they don't target it, but target the company making some totally irrelevant to it advertised product, using their complain to negatively affect the video creators.
Third, and more important, this is not actual voting, nobody counts and there are no official rules and limits. A 20% or even 10% of customers can make the companys, and throu that, the content creators' life miserable (cut ad revenue, deplatform, censor, lose display space, etc), even if a bigger majority has no problem or even likes it. In fact, you don't even need that (10-20%), just enough determined hardcore complainers creating a fuzz, even if they're like 1% of customers, many companies just don't care to suffer them, and cave in.
Fourth, advertising companies also take pressure from their customers, the advertised companies, not just the public. Even more pressure there. So companies can also have leverage to stop them giving ads to content they don't like (whistleblowers, critical videos, etc).
>This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
Since the problem is advertisers having too much power by being able to choose the videos they advertise in, of course more regulation disallowing that will fix it!
Advertisers will always have power, and platforms will always decide to publish different types of content.
If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube
I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Now advertisers are effectively still making the same decisions that they were, YouTube is still the preferred advertising backend, and nothing changed except that you made it harder for smaller sites like Vimeo to attract advertisers
Your regulation idea is reckless because you haven't thought it through
>If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube. I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
It's only obvious within a certain puritan culture. In Europe nobody would bat an eye if an advertiser for a, say, fast food store, advertised in pornhub. People wouldn't want to take them down.
>One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Adults are not kids - they don't need or should require special segmentation from different content (aside from their chosing what they like to view/read).
So we'd just needs a kids and an adults YouTube.
Plus making advertising on the adults YouTube wholesale: you buy impressions/views/clicks/etc - and that's it. You don't get a say which video they appear on.
Legislation can't possibly prevent YouTube from sharding into a bunch of disparate publishing entities
In fact, the "break up big tech" groups might laud such a thing
There is no way of framing your regulation so that it does something useful.
Instead it will only ever be a burden on smaller distributers and hurt their chances of advertising (because in order to find advertisers, those advertisers will either have to not care about the content or be convinced that the content is pg -- an incredibly onerous technical burden)
This idea that the regulation wouldn't have consequences you don't like because you don't like them is a fantasy
Why shouldn’t I as an advertiser not be allowed to choose which content I want my products to be associated with? It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
>Why shouldn’t I as an advertiser not be allowed to choose which content I want my products to be associated with?
That's easy, because the law I propose will decree so.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
>It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
If anything, my problem with government is that enough of it is dictated by those same interests (lobbys, private interests, advertisers, etc) as opposed by the voters directly. But that's another thing to solve, and giving more power to those interests is the opposite of the solution.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
Honestly I think politicians are bigger scum and they have the power of the state to impose their will. Do you really think if you gave the state power they would use it fairly?
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
Elected officials don’t get into the minutiae of enforcing those types of laws. Unelected committees like the FTC do and most of your recourse if you don’t like it is to file lawsuits that are decided by unelected judges that have lifetime appointments.
Not to mention that even those appointments are made by the Senate where the flyover states in “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” have power far more than their populations would call for thanks to them having two seats in the Senate just like the more populous states. Those are both the last people I want to give more power to.
Yes I’m well aware that the other side is just as bad.
>Why should ad companies be forced to subsidize the spread of bullshit and hateful content?
They are not forced to do anything. They can always NOT advertise.
What I propose is not forcing them to subsidise anything, it is about taking away from them the power to dictate terms to platforms.
Moreover, the "bullshit and hate" is your strawman.
Traditionally, and I'm not some Gen Z to not remember this, it has been the right that was pushing advertisers and platforms to assist in censoring tv shows, music videos, records, etc with non-approved messages (pro-gay, anti-religion, pro-choice, etc).
That the tables have turned for a while doesn't mean the tables will always be this way (we're already 4 years into Trump for one), and I don't even believe the tables have turned as in "it's just bullshit and hateful stuff that's demonetized". I think that all kinds of good content is demonetized all the time, both left and right wing.
Any cause you personally might like can easily be labeled "bullshit" and or "hateful".
So should YouTube not be allowed to have any standards about what they want on their platform? Should they be forced to allow porn?
YouTube does not have a monopoly on video streaming. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying for the bandwidth and streaming anything they want by renting computer hardware and bandwidth from a colo.
The entire idea behind monopoly for legal reasons is that it harms consumers and it takes away choice. How does Youtube dominating stop anyone else from distributing video?
Heck, I can set up a bandwidth adaptive video stream and put it behind a CDN.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
We had this debate 250 years ago and decided that society is better off with free expression than with someone deciding what speach is and is not OK. It seems to have worked out pretty damn well so far. If we are going to change course, the impetus is on the pro-censorship side to make the case for the change.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
Did people 250 years ago decide that newspapers must run articles written by anyone?
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
What myth are you reading? There are lots of things we forbid
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
When I end a phone call, Verizon does not call me back with suggested other calls I should listen to next.
The opportunity to be a neutral carrier is sacrificed by any platform that deploys a recommendation engine. Recommending content is a form of curation, which makes them a publisher, conceptually. It does not matter if the content curation is done by hand or by an algorithm that was built by hand.
> However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status
They're already that. Youtwitgrambook's front-page and suggestion algorithms are forms of curation, specifically designed to maximize some form of engagement metric.
Their respective content policies are really just an attempt to correct the failings of algorithmic curation.
I think that we often get hung up on the what-ifs of censorship while misinformation is doing damage right this second.
The problem is that people don't evaluate 2 narratives equally based on the information in them. If that was the case, you would just have to make sure that for every bogus report there is a reliable report, but once misinformation takes hold it takes a lot more than that to dislodge. The analogy I think of is that when presented with a table full of junk food, its hard to get people to pay attention to the veggie platter.
This study[1] indicates more success could be had with a new narrative that doesn't just refute the misinformation, but crafts a new narrative with additional information that can dislodge the other one, like a flank attack instead a head on one. Anecdotally I've seen that work and I've also been guilty of the lazy head on approach and seen it fail.
IMHO, this is an incredibly authoritarian point of view. It makes the assumption that the content being censored or banned is both wrong and damaging. I am not only referring to this specific case, but the interviewee here is ostensibly someone of expertise being a professor of medicine. That doesn't mean what they say is correct but at the very least they have direct knowledge of the topic.
In the grand scheme of things, there isn't much that is universally agreed upon even in professional/academic circles.
I would submit that limiting discussion because it doesn't fit the most wideley accepted or palatable narrative is a magnitude more dangerous than instead relying on people to take in all sides and decide for themselves.
Recall how Galileo Galilei was treated. History can and does repeat itself.
It is always authoritarian, yes. People do have the right to be wrong and make mistakes, that's part of an indivials personal sovereignty
That said, having tens of thousands die bringing innocent people with them to the grave is a matter of public policy and the very reason why governments are not direct democracies but republics instead
I am happy that this video was removed, not because I trust YouTube, but because I don't want to see people continue to die needlessly. Governments have other tools to provide economic sustenance to those that require it. And no, I won't go to the cinema, a mall or a restaurant simply "because they are open" as I don't have the brain of a child to risk myself and my family for it
There are many actors that want to convince you something bad, is good. Historically, cigarettes, sugar, even cocaine were advertised as healthy, or as better substitutes to things. Hell, even grain is still pushed by industry and government, when low-carb has a lot of evidence backing it.
Guess what happened when we decided "telling people sugar is great for kids" was bad? The government now regulates the information people are provided regarding nutritional content in food.
Speech isn't so easy, which is why the analogy still doesn't work.
I do agree, I wish we could live in such a world, but we indeed do not. That's why economics professionals receive nobel prices for their investigations into nudge economics and imperfect trade systems
Cows are not perfect spheres, and people are not perfect rational agents and that won't change for the foreseeable future so policy makers need to handle things with their avaliable policy tools, not the tools they wish they had
Should probably ban NHK to be broadcast in US while we are at it, maybe compel ISPs to do it, Great American Firewall we can call it. Japan not implementing any sort of western style lockdown at all. Ids going to school, people moving around shops open..
And THAT is exactly the issue. "Misinformation" uses the prefix "Mis", which is "...a prefix applied to various parts of speech, meaning “ill,” “mistaken,” “wrong,” “wrongly,” “incorrectly,” or simply negating: mistrial; misprint; mistrust."
As the Covid-19 situation, prognoses, diagnoses, testing procedures, and far more are PUBLICLY ADMITTED to be flawed, it is RIDICULOUS to silence ANYONE, let alone legitimate experts, even if they are engaging in WILD speculation.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH ONLY MATTERS WHEN THE SPEECH IS DISLIKED.
Think over that...deeply...speculation and experimentation may save your life....or not.
This is a bad trend. If scientists in China contradicted the government (and directly - the WHO), it seems like YouTube would have censored them. Debate is what sustains free society and free society will perish when certain narratives become unquestionable.
It's probably about time we start discussing as a developer community how to take meaningful actions to curb this behavior. Putting the particular topic details here aside, I think everyone can agree it's very troubling that a platform with as much power as Google is actively censoring speech they do not agree with.
Not sure what the best action points would be, but I'm thinking we start by speaking with our companies about redirecting ad-spending away from Google, pausing any active development related to integrating Google products and seek out alternatives, removing/replacing Google analytics (since this is where tons of value is created for Google and allows them to follow users basically everywhere), and seriously talk about unionization next-steps. Thoughts?
You know that anyone can edit a wikipedia page right? I think it's telling that this man is an ex director at the WHO with over 50 years experience as an Oncologist and rather than listen to what he is saying, people are continually trying to discredit him.
Yes. You have the right to say whatever you want but you don’t have the right to force someone else to publish it. If you want to publish what you want free of interference, pay for your own servers and bandwidth.
Yes, I fully agree with you that they have the right to remove whatever content they want. And I absolutely don't want that right to be taken away from them. However, I disagree with how they are currently utilizing that power, even though they have full rights to do so.
It's kind of similar to how I support the 2nd amendment rights and don't want them to be taken away from people (including open carry). But I disagree with how certain people use it during protests by open-carrying at the airports or in front of the city council building.
I can see that. But the same reason that I am against the government regulating tech is similar to why my position on gun control has gone from being pro gun control to anti-gun control.
The government would probably go out of it’s way to make sure “Focus on the Family” content would be allowed but not “Black Lives Matter” just like they shut down the government in Michigan but the same conservatives passed laws for stricter gun control when minorities started exercising their 2nd amendment rights (the Mulliford Act).
Fully in agreement with you on the actual legal positions regarding both tech and gun control. I am also against government regulating either.
But it doesn't mean that I cannot be upset at youtube for exercising their rights in ways that I disagree with. Mind you, I am not calling for a legal action against them or to change laws pertaining to those rights. I am just expressing that they shouldn't be exercising their rights in such a way, but they should still have the legal right to do so. Mostly because I believe that the unintended consequences of regulating that will be much worse (same with gun control).
I prefer the way that FB does it. If you share information that is false, they overlay it with a warning saying that the post is probably false and let you click on it and view it.
I think that's a much broader question than whether one content distribution company has the right to ban a person from their own channel--which is actually what's happening here.
Passive voice makes the situation seem more universal and nefarious than it actually is.
"Do you think that such people should be banned from sleeping in houses"? No, but I think I should be allowed to decide who sleeps in my house.
He is a oncologist so not an expert in the field of epidemiology.
The virus is getting "tired" ... really.
Lots of these contrarian "experts" popping up in youtube channels with rather slick production values (wonder who is funding them) about social distancing and lock down policies.
YouTube consistently followed their policy of removing videos which promote misinformation, disinformation, and policy proposals that contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic.
I have my problems with YouTube, but this isn't censorship, and it isn't a conspiracy to silence anyone. It's an effort to be responsible to public health and safety. The hysteria I see here is completely unwarranted.
I understand the theoretical basis for removing misinformation and disinformation, but policy proposals is an entirely different ballpark.
Two reasonable people can agree on the underlying facts but disagree on policy.
Additionally, this is absolutely censorship and an effort to silence people. It is not an illegal act of censorship. similarly, you can agree that it is legal, but still not like the censorship.
Until February, WHO was saying COVID does not spread human to human and travel restrictions won't help. So anyone who said "it does spread human to human" and "travel restrictions will help" was considered misinformation and conspiracy theorist.
February onwards, WHO did a full 180. But everyone who got censored before then was the victim.
Same thing about effectiveness of wearing masks.
So anyone pointing out the obvious that "China cannot have lesser deaths than Canada" is considered a "misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorists" because they "contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic".
How people don't see the clear danger of such censorship is beyond me. WHO also says China has been transparent.
> WHO was saying COVID does not spread human to human
The WHO said there had been no reports of it spreading human to human. And that was true, there hadn’t.
The reason your favourite conspiracy sources are taken offline is because they lie - they make you, an otherwise intelligent person, believe something that wasn’t true.
A favoured argument by one section of the internet is that “it doesn’t spread from
Children to Adults”. An extraordinary claim.
They interpret the statement “there have been limited cases of it spreading from children” and treat that absense of evidence as an evidence of absence.
Note that in January, in a QA dated 9th, they did say
“Yes, some coronaviruses can be transmitted from person to person, usually after close contact with an infected patient, for example, in a household workplace, or health care centre.”
I.e coronaviruses in general spread, we haven’t seen this one spread yet.
But YouTube is not deciding on the credibility of the video. They are simply saying that in this emergency, in the interests of public safety, they will not allow videos that contradict World Health Organization information and policy guidelines. And they removed a video that violated that policy. It's a very narrowly defined exception to their normally open platform. I don't see what is scary or sinister about that.
Who decided this at YouTube? What's their name? They weren't elected and they have no accountability to society for making decisions in our best interest. The WHO states that healthy people should "only wear a mask if [they] are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection."[1] This is contrary to current guidance in the US. In a democracy, as in science, no one gets to say what is true and what is false. We have allowed Alphabet to grow into a sprawling corporation that pervades our everyday lives. We cannot now allow them to dictate what is good and bad, true and false, venerable and deplorable. This is dystopic.
> But YouTube is not deciding on the credibility of the video. They are simply saying that in this emergency, in the interests of public safety, they will not allow videos that contradict World Health Organization information and policy guidelines.
No, YouTube still is determining credibility. YouTube is still saying, "this video is misinformation and we are removing it." The fact that it's treating the WHO information as the baseline does not change the fact that YouTube is deciding credibility, and removing videos that do not meet it's criteria for credibility.
Please don't take HN threads further into political or nationalistic flamewar. This is a big step in the wrong direction, regardless of how you feel about issues with the WHO.
> The serology results around the world (and forthcoming in Britain) don’t necessarily reveal the percentage of people who have had the disease
> He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
Here's the Office for National Statistics household survey results. This is only people living in households. (It doesn't include hospital patients, or people living in care or nursing homes).
> Our latest estimates indicate that at any given time during the two weeks from 4 May to 17 May 2020, an average of 137,000 people in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19) (95% confidence interval: 85,000 to 208,000). This equates to 0.25% (95% confidence interval: 0.16% to 0.38%) of the population in England. This estimate is based on tests performed on 14,599 people in 7,054 households.
Frustratingly they haven't said yet how many people in total they think have ever had covid-19, but it's not going to be anywhere near 15million people in the UK.
I can't help but wonder if there is a generational divide occurring in these censorship debates. Some contributors to the discussion seem to believe that everyone has a natural right to post a video and have it available to (if not see by) a global audience. As someone who grew up in the 1980s this is a strange point-of-view to me, but I can see how it might feel more natural to someone who came of age in the 2010s.
>Maybe it's because I grew up on the Internet in places where there was always a sysop, and so I take for granted that whoever runs the server has certain responsibilities. Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam). Maybe because I grew up in that wide open space where the freedom that mattered was the freedom to choose a well-kept garden that you liked and that liked you, as if you actually could find a country with good laws. Maybe because I take it for granted that if you don't like the archwizard, the thing to do is walk away (this did happen to me once, and I did indeed just walk away).
I think many people coming to the internet nowadays have had their formative internet experiences on large social media sites, where moderation is both impersonal and rare, to the point that users don't bother understanding it because it's unlikely to affect them, and then if it does affect them, the reasons for it aren't understood and they feel singled out. When these people hear someone talk about smaller better-moderated places, they can't understand the appeal, as if it were proposed to them that a site would be better with more boogeymen.
“[t]he more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” -- Justice Hugo Black, majority opinion in Marsh Vs Alabama.
Youtube et al certainly encourage the free and public flow of traffic. Their business model depends on it. So their responsibility to the public would seem to obviously overshadow the perceived protections as a "private company".
Appalling behaviour by YouTube.
Until recently I admired Google, no longer, this kind of opinion based censorship (facts have yet to be established re covid), makes my blood boil, Google must be urgently regulated to protect free speech.
The video seems to be back up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2YZfnsOPg. Probably got caught up in some sort of automated COVID misinformation algorithm. Given the content of the video, I'm not inclined to place much weight on their side of the story here. This feels like fake outrage to drive views.
This isn't the first time it happened nor will it be the last. Here in my country (Brazil) they invited an actual toxicologist, professor and ambassador of medical facility in São Paulo (since 2009) to speak live at CNN but when he mentioned that there's an over-exageration in terms of deadlyness and started putting actual data, studies and past examples in his speech, he was promptly and unapologetically interupted, we can even hear someone say "cut" in the broadcast, before the newswomans interupts him by saying, I kid you not, "We cannot continue the interview because the doctor is not able to listen to us..." all while the doctor was made silent by this statement. Makes me wonder who makes these decisions.
Censorship kills. The whole COVID pandemic could arguably be avoided if China haven't decided to silence another doctor who disagreed with the official point of view.
I used to get upset with untruths being published. But then I found that humans are evolving and it is an individual evolution, not really a herd evolution, and each individual must learn to discern what is true and what is false. It is Life Course 110. Imagine what wimps humans would be if everything were sanitized, there were no challenges. How would the human race grow strong? Challenges are there to make you strong, one not easily manipulated by Youtube, governments, religions, "experts" and so on. So stay awake, and see if you are being manipulated. Would Life be useful if it didn't challenge you? A certain amount of life's challenges are a blessing, too many challenges...well we don't want that.
I tried to add that Japan's test on Favipiravir is showing no efficacy for COVID. It's news all over Japan on May 20th. Wikipedia rejected the edit. Google "Avigan" (the brand name for Favipiravir) in news and it will come up but TPTB at wikipedia decided it was fake news and reverted the edit.
The article used to say "Japan to start trials of Favipiravir for treatment of COVID-19". Changed to "Japan tests showing Favipiravir not effective against COVID-19". Removed.
Among other things, social media facilitate exchanges between scientists. Unherd has a series of very good interviews with various viewpoints on the disease. Youtube should be ashamed
Youtube can do what they want but let's not forget that they use WHO as a guideline for what is considered within the Overton window. WHO has repeatedly been wrong on a number of occasions not the least mask, travel bans, and very slow to call this a pandemic.
The is btw zero evidence that having fake prophets on youtube is endangering public health and this is unfortunately an excuse for people who like to tell others what to do, to pretend they are doing it for the public good.
Ok but then how are we to distinguish Corporate Censorship from Corporation Chooses Not To Publish My Opinion?
If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?
If it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?
If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”
I agree that there is a blurry line between corporate censorship and corporate choice. One way to draw a distinction is if the the corporation is typically in the business of publishing opinions, and intentionally suppressing of a specific idea to meet a goal or objective.
>If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?
Censorship does not have to be universal. For example, some speech is banned in churches but permissible in public.
>f it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?
In your example. if the New York Times normally allowed the public to post gallery reviews, but refused yours specifically because it fell into a category they want to suppressed, this would be considered censorship.
>If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”
I agree that many places enforce censorship with severe punishments, but punishment is not central to the idea of censorship. For example, an effort could be made to destroy all evidence of Oscar Wilde's Homosexuality. This would certainly be an act of censorship, even if Wilde is not harmed, or even if those who resist are not punished.
>If I’ve got it wrong, please, enlighten me.
Wikipedia has a decent summary of different types of censorship if you scroll past the political section [1]. Some examples of corporate, religious, and self censorship. This utilization of the word is not new and consistent with what I have said.
I think that the idea that censorship can only be imposed by a state under threat of punishment is an inaccurate and restrive view. That said, if you feel strongly that this is the wrong definition, you can just substitute the word censor with suppress when whenever you read it.
But I don’t see why that matters. If I can’t get published in the mainstream media, but I have plenty of options in the alternative media, is that censorship?
Media can either be evil and censor information to potentially save life, or respect freedom of speech which could lead to severe consequences. Which side are you in? There is no correct answer and we just have to admit we are in a bad situation which does not exist an win-win solution.
YouTube has been deleting the excellent MedCram series and then recommending videos with titles like “China lied!” In my feed...because I subscribe to MedCram.
Total censorship doesn't happen overnight. The gates slowly close little by little.
Let no good catastrophe go to waste. With each, we lose a little freedom and the populace resounds in joy. Not because they want less freedom, no, it's because they think they've triumphed over a common evil: the dissenters. These cycles always include labeling the enemy, and it's usually the ones who disagree or challenge the state.
The common man isn't an expert in virology, world politics, or terrorism. Yet, if you look at the ones upholding and defending the position of the state, they're just laymen. Their opinions are fiercely held without question and expertise.
All you have to do is label the enemy, make that label an adjective that the average-person would reject at first glance (conspiracy theorist, extremist, etc.), then assign that label to anyone who dissents from the state's position. After that, it's just policymaking for the "greater good".
Do you really think there's someone at YouTube with the goal of increasing censorship for the sake of it, and looking for catastrophes to capitalize on? (Have you ever known anyone in your life that has "censorship" as a hobby, specifically as a terminal end-goal not in service of something else?)
Or do you think that maybe the people working at YouTube might be worried about this specific issue -- that their platform could amplify dangerous misinformation about the pandemic -- and they want to reduce the harm they're participating in on this specific issue? (Have you ever known anyone in your life that learned that something they were doing had a bad effect on someone else, and then got worried about that and changed their behavior?)
If people at YouTube really liked censorship for the sake of censorship, they would just dive straight into it, or would have done it from the start.
Boiling a frog slowly is a sound argument against any form of heating even while you are freezing to death.
Existing platforms could be misused by private actors in a way that negatively effects the populace. Arguably most of the people presently concerned are either a majority of bad actors or a minority of idealists concerned about future potential.
To the worthy minority I would suggest that difficult to censor platforms are probably trivially realizable in mid term especially if substantially desirable or needed.
I don't think censorship by platforms like YouTube is being misused now and the massive risk remains censorship by state actors. I suggest we in the short term we encourage people like YouTube to censor more evil idiocy not less while working on maturing decentralized options to the net benefit in the short to mid term as a hedge against tyranny that will virtually certainly primarily remain the province of state actors.
> the massive risk remains censorship by state actors
the state actors are to an extent, elected by the people. The big corporates have no accountability.
> I suggest we in the short term we encourage people like YouTube to censor more evil idiocy
You say that because in this narrow issue, you agree with youtube.
What is the short term?
Have you thought through all the consequences? and still, things will happen that you have not accounted for.
everyone is against evil or idiocy. The question is who decides what is?
The media's propaganda can and is being used to brainwash the people, and the results are clearly out for all to see.
Find me something of import to society that is getting suppressed on platforms like YouTube that is deleterious to society? If you say this doctor I will be rather disappointed.
PragerU got a whole bunch of videos blocked. One of them was about the 10 commandments. about 10 minutes long.
One of the commandments was 'Do not murder'
the reason youtube gave was that hate words were used. (I am paraphrasing).
you really should watch that video with a open mind, look at all the rap videos that exist that talk about murder, violence etc, and make a case for it.
--
>"import to society"
Again, who decides what is important to society? To me, the pragerU series is very important to my worldview, to you, it could be nonsense.
Youtube is clearly biased against it.
It is important for you to be able to seek out alternative view points. Currently, these are being buried.
There are several points that contradict the consensus opinion, at this time. Such as the statement "More schools should reopen in June as ‘children are not the transmitters of this virus’" is totally refuted at this point. There is plenty of evidence that children transmit the disease like any other human.
The latest research indicates that younger children are not significant transmitters of this virus. There is little scientific basis to support keeping primary schools closed. The risk may be higher with older children.
tl;dr: There are millions of videos about COVID-19 being uploaded to Youtube and they have a non-zero false-positive rate. This was accidentally removed and promptly restored upon manual review. Basically nothing to see here.
Exactly. What else aren't we hearing about that's being arbitrarily censored by YouTube? And can we really trust it as a platform? I'm losing more trust in Google every day. 10 years ago was "don't be evil." Now, they're just, "be only as evil as you can get away with."
The situation is very similar to what's happening with a lot of Android developers. Many incidents where their app gets banned or removed for silly things. One I remember was getting removed because they had the word "windows" in their play store metadata and Google banned it because of having third party platform name. Except the app was using the term "windows" in reference to a house window, not the OS. Emailing play store support is pretty much useless unless you are a big company or can generate enough viral outrage on social media for them to notice.
I develop apps for both iOS and Android. There's pros and cons to both. I prefer developing for iOS as there's more money in it plus I enjoy the platform more but if people want more customization, Android is definitely better.
Google does not have the rights to any of those videos it is censoring? It is like academic publishing. Google is gatekeeper charging a fee (user privacy).
Not sure if anyone has noticed but when logging in to a Gmail account, Google is trying to access a YouTube domain. Not too many weeks ago they announced a change in the YouTube terms of service. Sad to think every video you watch could be used to help online advertisers. Google is not like the public library. The public library does not use the list of every book or other item you borrowed to try to help the ad industry. Of course it is much more than just a list of videos. They probably record data such when you watched, what portions you watched, etc.
If we're going to tie this to college campus censorship, a better analogy would be the tendency of many schools to ban speakers who might criticize the US foreign policy orthodoxy on Israel/Palestine. That would have a different ideological narrative attached, though. But I think, fundamentally, the motivations for a big tech company are different from those of a university. Universities are most interested in preventing disruption on campus that might lead to bad press (and less donations). Big tech platform owners tolerate all sorts of flamewars and offensive or misleading content until governments start talking about regulating them, at which point they try to "self-regulate" by purging everything related to whatever the governments are getting worked up about. So you have at least two types of incentives that lead to censorship of various views, and it's inaccurate to claim that the college campuses are somehow the root of both.
> If we're going to tie this to college campus censorship, a better analogy would be the tendency of many schools to ban speakers who might criticize the US foreign policy orthodoxy on Israel/Palestine.
> Big tech platform owners tolerate all sorts of flamewars and offensive or misleading content until governments start talking about regulating them, at which point they try to "self-regulate" by purging everything related to whatever the governments are getting worked up about.
one have to wonder, if users are already doing all the work to flag and make noise to restore the false positives, what value the centralizers of information even add?
the case for p2p is stronger than ever now that bandwidth is cheaper. downloading a torrent from other users is faster than pressing play on youTube, when you account the time wasted with advertising.
I am with you on the p2p thing. I have been considering developing video streaming with p2p (similar to bitchute but better UI/UX). But despite that, p2p still needs a central server for the non-video elements like static files - images, css, html etc. Can't avoid it 100%
I hope YouTube only removes a little bit. It seems so to me. A lot of similar information is still available.
Also, the videos that should be deleted before any others are the videos about the claim that it's better to be too afraid than too little, for instance. If people deliberately increase their fear, they become irrational like Francis E. Dec, who believed in the "Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God". The difference is that Dec had no doubts, and didn't choose to ignore doubts and to deliberately be afraid the most.
1. No, people weren't predicting that the virus would "get tired".
2. Even if we generously interpret this as meaning that the virus would be less infectious in warmer weather, the only evidence we had pointed to this as only a possibility, rather than something we could predict.
3. As summer has begun in the Northern hemisphere, we still don't have any good evidence that the virus is less infectious in warmer weather--certainly not in the Southern US where the disease continues to spread unchecked.
All predictions about seasonality were made using analogy to similar viruses which have shown that sort of behavior. I am not aware of any high quality scientific evidence supporting seasonality (or nonseasonality). I think that only really becomes available after several seasons; predictions aren't super helpful here.
I don't think it is generous to believe "getting tired" was used metaphorically. On the other hand, perhaps you are right and this medical doctor really thinks the virus is a singular entity, with thoughts and feelings.
Especially if the more deadly variants are stuck in bodies of people being isolated. With quarantine measures in place, the less aggressive variants (if different variants with varying degrees of aggressiveness exist) will spread more.
Is there any way if I can find out why my submission is flagged? The last thing I submitted was also flagged (and then unflagged), but I have tried to abide by the submission guidelines.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I suppose it might have been a combination of users who are fatigued by this general topic having been repeated so frequently in recent weeks, and users who agree with the decision to take down the interview and don't think HN should have a thread about it. As I said, though—those are just guesses.
In the meantime, someone else reposted it and it was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258432. But since this post was first, I've turned off the flags on it and merged those comments hither.
Yeah, I don't even think it has to be mob, it's just one of those things that happens as a site becomes more mainstream. Ironically it's related to the same issue as the submission: people equate permitting something to condoning it.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Internet threads can't handle denunciatory rhetoric without collapsing. It's the way the medium works, and we have to consciously compensate for it, if we're going to keep curious conversation going here.
I think flamewar is for when people will have polarized views on a particular topic and the poster posts only to bring the people to fight each other.
My post is what I think a necessary reminder in a topic that I honestly don't think is very polarizing. It just needs to be repeated, over, and over again. The same way it gets taught to kids at school so they teach it to their kids, and so on.
Because it is important.
Think about this: if something is taught to kids at school, how can you justify objecting to it on HN (I mean unless it is a topic that is obviously incorrectly taught, which I suppose this is not one of them)?
I doubt that you would want other commenters to drill you like a schoolchild, but even if I'm wrong about that, please don't do it to others on this site. We're trying for entirely the opposite sort of discussion. Basically, if it's predictable, it is off topic here.
Google is not a government organization is a private platform. It generally does not get involved in things like that, but the amounts of misinformation is staggering.
I have family members affected by this and it looks like it is a targeted misinformation attack. It starts with Facebook posts, which then often direct you to youtube channels which are condition people into crazier and crazier theories.
It is so weird, because many of these theories even contradict themselves, yet people still believe them.
The guy in article is also an oncologist and he talks about subject that is not his expertise. It's like asking a front end engineer how to best design the a new data center.
This is especially dangerous since we are currently in middle of pandemic and many people will trust his advice.
There's a relevant engineering axiom, that a sufficient quantitative difference amounts to a qualitative difference (sometimes phrased as "quantity has a quality all its own").
At some ineffable point, a "private platform" of sufficient scope becomes a Commons, resembling a social substrate more than a mere voluntary exchange between individuals. A historical equivalent would be "company towns", with goods only available from company stores, exchanged in company scrip, etc. [0]
Obviously, from a purely legal perspective, you are 100% correct. Google is under no obligation to uphold a principle of free speech, non-favoritism, etc., and it would take significant new legislation or regulation to change that.
Nonetheless, in terms of the role that is being played in society and culture, tech giants in general, and Google/Facebook in particular, are wielding disproportionate (and arguably ideologically biased) influence, bordering on an attempt to control narratives and ideas. It's perfectly legitimate to find this trend concerning without supporting the particular ideas being suppressed (I think Plandemic/InfoWars/etc, are utter nonsense).
I believe such actions tend to be counter-productive: (a) isolating and ostracizing those who are falling for bad ideas only reinforces their beliefs and persecution complex, while obstructing the path back to better ideas; and (b) every once in a while a seemingly-crazy idea turns out to be true (it's instructive the extent to which it was a fight uphill for germ theory to be accepted by the experts of the day [1]).
There simply isn't a magic wand that sifts good ideas from bad, a priori; and if the power to make that decision is centralized, even with the best of intentions, whoever wields it will inevitably make mistakes.
You misunderstand what "totalitarian" means. Per Wikipedia:
> Totalitarianism is a political system or a form of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.
Also, free speech is not absolute.
Reasonable people can disagree how rights are balanced against the need for public safety. It helps not to throw around words unfairly.
1. Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field. Sikora is also a fellow of The Princes Foundation For Integrated Health and a professional member of the generically-named College Of Medicine. Both of these organizations are lobbyists which promote alternative medicine.
2. Censorship: rather than allow conversation where real scientists can respond to Sikora's nonsense with facts, YouTube decided to push his followers into their own echo chambers where pieces like this which represents him as a martyr go unchallenged.
Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
I wish this was true. I hope it was true. But I'm losing faith. People have a hard time believing truth if it goes against what they want to believe if the lies can be framed in any plausible way at all. This applies to everything from cults to businesses to abusive spouses to, of course, politics.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky and tired of playing the long game of truth. Part of the problem is the liars are sometimes highly motivated to continue with the lies, and it takes a greater army of equally motivated truth "warriors" to come behind them and put out the fires. It's just so damn easy to spread bullshit.
The other issue is that smart people are way outnumbered- and the others now have a helluva voice.
Truth may not be the answer to lies (in any straightforward way), but bureaucratic committees deciding what's true is hella not the answer to lies. This is so obvious that the weird part is smart people acting otherwise. I'm surprised it has happened so easily. It seems that all that is needed are the right labels (words like 'science', 'public health', 'misinformation', and 'disinformation') to generate a high level of conformity. That this is a time of mass fear must be making a difference too.
I think one of the dynamics that we need to look at is the formation of cults. Cults are dangerous literally because persuasion is asymmetrical. It's not a matter of "Oh this guy persuaded these people of this stuff, and you just need to set them straight", once someone is in a cult it's close to impossible to pull them out of it.
One key to the formation of cults, is the control of information: instead of group decisions being arrived upon by informed discussion, there are ideas which are allowed and others which are not. Maybe the ideas are good (like "brush your teeth") but the enforcement is totally irrational and over the top (like "Sister Emily didn't brush her teeth, so no one will speak to her for 3 days"). This is because these ideas are beyond question so anyone who disagrees with them must be evil.
> calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Then why is Bill Gates the de facto lead on curing covid?
Bill Gates has spent decades on the front lines of various wars against infectious diseases. He may not have a university degree on the subject but he is as much an expert as anyone who does - not to mention, he mostly defers to the expertise of his many qualified colleagues when speaking publicly.
Your own comment says "if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field."
Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
>It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
> Your own comment says "if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field."
> Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
Because there's a big difference between presenting yourself as an expert and saying things that disagree with experts, and repeating what experts say.
If Bill Gates starts spouting off stuff without evidence that disagrees with what all the experts are saying, he'll absolutely be disqualified according to my reasoning.
> And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
Well, everyone has to determine that for themselves, based on what limited ability they have.
It seems like you think I'm one of the pro-censorship people here, but I assure you I'm not, please follow the comment chain up to where I started it and read my comment there. On the contrary, I believe Sikora's video should have been left on YouTube, and responded to by experts.
I disagree with your reasoning for the entire first half of your post regarding BillG, but I can absolutely agree with you on the last part.
The power to decide who is or isn't an expert, as well as the ability to restrict speech based on those decisions, is a pretty dangerous and scary path that I am vehemently opposed to taking.
I agree with the idea of truth being the answer to lies, and echo chambers being dangerous for society in the long term. But I disagree with the notion that no one has business speaking outside their field of expertise. Experts can be wrong or change their views over time and they should be open to being challenged by others. No one has a monopoly on data or logic or free thought. If the line of correctness between specialists and others is so clear, then surely it must be easy to counter others views.
> Experts can be wrong or change their views over time and they should be open to being challenged by others. No one has a monopoly on data or logic or free thought.
Experts discover they are wrong and change their views based on evidence, not based on what other experts or non-experts say.
Non-experts, like the majority of HN users, really can only go off the word of experts at some point, unless we decide to spend the time studying a field to become experts.
And to be clear, I'm not saying "experts" only meaning people who got a degree in a field. A degree is only the most obvious way to show expertise in a field. But it's quite possible to study a field for a long time without getting a degree. But it's not at all apparent that Sakora has done that--in fact, all evidence I see seems to be trying to gloss over his lack of expertise.
No, complex topics that aren't simple and sometimes are counterintuitive are exactly the cases when deferral to experts is important because countering other views in lay explanations may not be possible.
Two questions: did the Canadian government actively recommend against mask wearing? Do you live in Canada?
Note the difference between "we can't condone masks because there is limited evidence that they are helpful" and "we recommend against masks because they are harmful" and "the lockdown is a government consipracy to subjugate us".
I live in Canada and they actively recommended against cloth mask wearing for the general public on the grounds that it leads to a "false sense of security" and "increases touching of one's face" and that asymptomatic persons do not spread COVID-19. "Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial".
I think any reasonable person who defers to authority would have listened to this and come to the conclusion that there is no reason to wear a mask if they're asymptomatic and had no connection to a sick individual. They could even reasonably conclude that it would be dangerous as they would be touching their face and virus particles would accumulate on the outside of the mask.
- Prioritizing supply to healthcare workers is of the utmost priority
- Current evidence supports wearing a mask if you're sick to prevent spreading droplets, also wearing a mask if you're in close contact with a symptomatic person
- Masks can provide a false sense of security.
Her final statement is "if people try to use these measures, they have to be really, really careful and wash their hands, absolutely. That's the key. So we're also worried about the potential negative impacts."
All of that is sound advice, and it is dangerous to think that a mask will protect you without any other precautions. But it isn't a statement that one should not wear a mask, fullstop. It's a statement that one should still follow other cautions. IOW, a mask isn't a magical solution.
"Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial", followed by a list of dangers posed by masks.
It was a statement that masks are a placebo for the general public and actually require one to take extra precautions so that they don't make things worse.
It couldn't have been more discouraging towards people on the fence about wearing a mask in late March.
Good for them (not sarcastically). My point is that if the experts were wrong then, it’s certainly possible that some of what they are saying now is wrong too, and it should be acceptable to criticize them on YouTube and explore different possibilities and models.
There exist (clearly functional) processes to improve the scientific consensus. The government changed its recommendation. Do you think they were convinced by a YouTube videos or perhaps did some other process cause then to amend their recommendations?
If so, why not steer people toward that process, especially when the harm of wearing a mask is low, while the harm oh reopening the economy due to a lack of understanding the covid dangers is much greater?
Those Canadian experts haven't been telling you not to wear a mask, have they? I can't find evidence of that - I just find them saying they don't have scientific evidence (yet) that wearing masks prophetically is necessary. Which is a very different thing.
The National Post are not experts, and they aren't reporting what experts say accurately. And while there's a video in there where an actual expert speaks, you're not reporting what that expert said accurately.
Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth. The US and Canadian recommendations against medical masks for the general public were part of a strategy based on reserving medical masks. So yes, you should have followed the recommendations of health officials and not worn a medical mask, because healthcare workers needed them.
As far as I know, neither the US nor Canada has ever taken a stance against non-medical masks. They haven't taken a stance for medical masks either, but this was likely due to concerns that people would be confused about medical versus non-medical masks. Your own post is an example of this being a very legitimate concern: you have completely failed to differentiate between medical and non-medical masks.
If you look at what experts have been saying who aren't part of governments, the messaging has been fairly consistent: masks prevent illness at varying rates, and we need to prioritize healthcare workers when allocating the most effective masks.
So when you say, "Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask?" I have to say, no, it would have been impossible to do that, because deferring to expert opinions and waiting until yesterday to start wearing a mask are mutually exclusive actions.
> Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth.
So there's a narrative that may or may not have my best interest at heart but demands my compliance for some nebulous greater good?
No.
If sacrifice is required on the part of collective, you honour them by allowing them to engage with informed consent. If you don't, you have no credibility the next time some ambiguity arises where collective sacrifice is needed to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
White people who have never been around black people are more likely to hold racist views. Straight people who have never been around out gay people are more likely to hold homophobic views. MLK understood that to change the image of black people as dangerous, he had to get black people shown behaving peaceably on TV. Harvey Milk understood that to change the image of homosexuals as foreign and strange, he had to show people that gays were their siblings, their children, their neighbors. What makes you think that social media has so fundamentally changed humanity?
Trump is president, the American Nazi party is growing, the most popular news network in America is Fox News, the anti-vax movement is growing; and the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time. If you want evidence, where's yours?
>the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time.
Deplatforming leaves people with a smaller audience. Only a fraction of the audience follows a banned person to another platform. Voat is nothing compared to Reddit.
I agree with everything you wrote, except the above. He is a doctor, speaking on health issues, so he isn't speaking from outside the field of medicine. And I'd challenge that a specialist within the field of medicine can only offer valuable information or insight with their own speciality. Specialists on all fields are prone to group think, so people with related training from the outside should be welcomed to challenge the orthodoxy.
That's all fine and good if you're knowledgeable in the field enough to evaluate his claims. But I'm not, and most of HN is not, so how do we know the difference between an outsider with the vision to see what the orthodoxy can't, and a charlatan trying to profit off lies?
The the fact is, charlatans are far more common than visionary outsiders.
And in Sikora's case, there are a lot of red flags indicating he's a charlatan and not a visionary outsider. The virus is "getting tired"? Really?
Meta: This is a very low quality post. It is accusing Karol Sikora of being 'either 'an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar' without a shred of evidence of such behavior. Assassinate the character of the messenger with no proof, then add insult to injury and wholly fail to address the message. What was so objectionable about content of the interview in question?
did you watch the piece? what exactly was "insane" about it? and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel. so what's important is having a guide to truth. and that guide is scientific thinking -- the scientific method. experts are dead wrong all the time. but they dont stay wrong.
I didn't watch the piece, but I've read enough of what Sakora has written to conclude that Sakora is a consistent liar. Even if a liar tells the truth, he's not a valuable source of information because you don't know whether what he says is true or not.
> and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel.
If nobody knows what's true with corona, then shouldn't claim to know what's true with corona, which is what Sakora is doing.
> he's not a valuable source of information because you don't know whether what he says is true or not
How do I know what anyone says is true? Why should I trust what you're saying about Sikora?
I should be able to watch a video on youtube and decide for myself because censorship is inimical to free thought.
You should take a moment to consider that most of the examples throughout history of censorship were carried out by decidedly bad people. Truth can stand on its own!
I am definitely NOT pro-censorship, so I don't know why you're saying this to me. Please read a few comments up. The entire reason censorship is a topic on this subthread is that I brought it up as a problem.
ive never heard the name sakora before. genuine question -- just curious how/why you've come across their writing, when it seems the claim is that they are some kind of quack?
When the Libyan government was trying to get the Lockerbie bomber out of jail, they paid Sikora off to say that the bomber was going to keel over in a few weeks from cancer. He admitted that the Libyans let him know what prognosis would be most helpful when they hired him. Lo and behold that's the prognosis that he came up with (which also ended up being completely wrong)
Yes because doctors are licensed by their specialty. Which is only achieved by years of direct subject matter training...coupled with continuous education.
The doctor in question is not licensed for infectious disease.
You should never trust a doctor speaking outside of his expertise.
However most of the celebrity doctors do that every single day which is an insult to the entire medical profession.
In the US at least that isn't how physician credentialing works. Doctors are licensed by state medical boards. In addition, some go on to earn certification from specialty medical boards but those certifications are not legal licenses.
In general we shouldn't blindly trust any single doctor about an important or risky topic, even within their own specialty. Always get a second or even third opinion if practical. (I agree that most celebrity doctors are little more than quacks.)
Allowing conversation isn't tough: FB and Twitter would literally have to do less than they do now.
Creating a culture where people are willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of trying to silence anyone they disagree with is the hard part.
I agree but it isn’t a general solution. “Allowing conversation” is what Facebook did in 2016, letting people attend fake rallies created by fake Facebook groups disseminating fake facts.
Sakora is the latter, and the problem with this viewpoint is publishing the truth elsewhere doesn't stop people from absorbing the lies here. Somebody consuming this content is not likely to seek out alternative viewpoints to correct themselves. The information is dangerous, it should not be available.
> Which is why it's important that we present the truth right next to it, so people don't have to look elsewhere.
This still assumes that people will be willing to watch it.
> Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation. Now nobody browsing YouTube will happen upon this video by chance and start believing something that is false and dangerous. Of course, those who are already embedded in these communities will still be able to access the information elsewhere. It is not a perfect solution, I don't think there is a perfect solution, but it does reduce the impact.
> It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation.
Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
If kicking Sakora off YouTube causes his followers to become angry and go share his personal site through a bunch of different channels, that could easily outpace the impact of a YouTube channel where refutations are included.
If someone censored your views, what would you do? Why do you think people who disagree with you won't do all the same things?
YouTube is one of the largest disseminators of information in the world. No amount of small replacements with an existing audience of gullible fools can make up for the loss of audience of hundreds of millions of not-yet-introduced-to-this-garbage victims.
None of his videos are on this page[1]. The idea that just being on YouTube gets you an audience of "hundreds of millions" is completely false. In fact, I have friends who make great content that is lucky to hit 1000 views.
Meanwhile, Fox News is the most popular news network in America.
> Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
I explained in the comment you replied to. You seem to be deliberately ignoring that people who are not predisposed to the viewpoint could also be exposed. I do not believe that censoring on YouTube will prevent anyone who already believes this stuff from finding the content elsewhere, and I already admitted as such.
If two groups of people (those who actively seek the misinformation, and those who encounter it by chance) could access the misinformation, it stands to reason that preventing one of those groups from accessing the misinformation results in a lower overall spread of misinformation, even if the other group is unaffected.
They are people, and they can make mistakes or miss something, like everyone else.
A clear example is an Italian virologist that called the hypothesis of thrombosis in the alveoli that came out from autopsies and the suggestion of using heparin in treatment protocols "a colossal idiocy".
Then other data, including the recent Lancet paper and the Hamburg study came out.
The mere fact one is an expert does not make him or her always right. So weigh opinions more, but don't trust them blindly.
>Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
> Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Can you provide us with an image of your degree and job experience to prove you have the expertise to tell us "he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed."? Or at least admit you're being hypocritical.
Hardly surprising that a video full of dangerous misinformation has been pulled. It would be worth reading about this particular professor on Wikipedia, particularly his support for alternative medicine, his false claim to have been a professor at Imperial college, and his claim that the UK's NHS is "the last bastion of communism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
So what is so dangerous about it? Perhaps you need to consult a dictionary as to what danger really is. I don't know these people that made the video and I don't subscribe to magic crystals or whatever they are pushing/saying but I do know what Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson from Imperial college created in his flawed modeling - a world wide panic. That is what has been dangerous. Google is a private company I suppose and they can do whatever they want but it would be better to leave their videos up so they can be "peer reviewed" and mocked if what they are saying is farcical. Just like we do with these ladies: https://youtu.be/B4s9GLWiUJM
> what Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson from Imperial college created in his flawed modeling
Why do you say that? The reputation of the Imperial College team seems to have become a lightning rod for disgruntled right-wingers but the team is one of the world's most respected.
Imperial is one of the world's top universities. That's probably why Sikora falsely claimed on multiple occasions to be employed there.
There's nothing in the Imperial report that caused the UK government to change course that has been shown to be false. The prediction from the report was that the UK would suffer 20,000 deaths from the virus if extensive distancing measures were employed. The current total is 36,000 confirmed, so if anything the report was too optimistic.
I welcome Youtube to ban every member of the press and Congress who publicly supported our various wars, which are government policies leading to "unnecessary deaths." Cherry picking a nobody with no power who is into crystals is bs.
If you have a specific reason to believe that the model resulted in an incorrect conclusion, feel free to share it, instead of casting aspersions with cryptic nothings.
Also Neil's other predictions have been completely wrong on the Swine Flu and Bird flu. Why this "expert in his field" is still listened to is a mystery to me.
If you're talking about that first graph on the page, I think that it is not very helpful. Comparing total number of deaths can be misleading, especially for small countries like Sweden. If my state had a Coronavirus death rate as high as Sweden's 15,000 more people would be dead. Still not "millions", but it wouldn't be an ideal outcome.
Sweden is pitched as as some kind of example of handling the pandemic correctly, when their numbers[1] don't look good at all. From their numbers[2] 44% of people diagnosed ends up dead, implying they are way under tested or they have ridiculously deadly strain (I think it is the former). Because of that the most reliable indicator from them is number of deaths.
Now compare number of deaths with countries that reacted quickly, for example: South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and others.
It looked very wonky. I cannot judge if the code does not actually produce something worthwhile, but it certainly doesn't pass any smell tests. In no profession would work looking as sloppy as that be trusted. And for the critical decision it was used for I would expect something more robust.
So this is your source? An opinion piece in a right leaning columnist in a biased NY Post, where author couldn't even help himself but include other unrelated tidbits, like how is Joe Biden and Tara Reade related to corona virus? There's nothing there to verify that even the characters in the story are real not to mention the story.
This is just the first article I found at of many from many sources - I heard about it on MSNBC or somewhere like that when a reporter was asking him about it. This happened - it is a fact; the same thing occurred in Britain resulting in the same high death toll of elderly people. But bury your head - fine with me.
Are you serious? The orginally predicted death number was over 250,000 in Britain. How do you explain the numbers in Sweden which had a much different policy compared UK? Yes Sweden has a higher mortality/million pop rate, but estimates are showing that the number of people dying in UK from non-covid-19 health issues as a result of covid-19, (not going to hospital or getting treatment), would put those numbers on par.
No, that is not how the timeline went. As to who created the panic - it was Neil, Fauci and their ilk along with the media. The media, instead of reporting that the data shows old and sick people are the ones dying chose to hide that relevant fact and just report the death toll ad nauseam with no context - as a matter of fact they are still doing it.
what’s missing is the conversation of how many deaths we’re going to see from the lockdown itself in the form of suicide, alcoholism, drug overdose, domestic violence, mental health etc
Nobody is advocating to throw them under the bus. But the fact is since the virus is essentially unstoppable in its transmission rate everyone will be exposed to it...and what will be of those people will be of them. Their best hope is hospital care if they need it; our hospitals are not overwhelmed and neither are Sweden's...so these quarantine measures are an unnecessary burden.
The shape of your argument is why we are doomed to censorship. You could have kept to the abstract point about information itself not being dangerous, but instead you invoked the opposing team's narrative about what constitutes dangerous information. Eventually, we all lose.
This is where it doesn't matter.
YouTube does not have an obligation to leave everything up there at all.
Given that this interview is misleading at best, and dangerous at worst. It's up to YouTube to decide if it wants to be used as a vehicle.
Personally I'm glad they took it down. I want to get out and would love to go back to old normal. We all would. But I don't want to get sic before a vaccine is ready, and I don't want people I know and love to get sick either.
If you're getting upset about the actions of youtube, the fact is they are full within their rights to do whatever they like with their platform.
As for the free speech argument :
Companies are not required to give space to ideas or viewpoints they do not wish to be associated with.
Libertarian leaning myself, sad to say, this is the first time I am now in full realization that monopolies do in fact exist and are very dangerous. Platforms like Youtube are beyond ubiquitous and we all depend on them. The companies behind them have more money than countries. That, combined with the tax free private foundations their founders nearly all have, is taking us down some very bad roads. Of course, those roads are always paved with the best intentions and for our own good. I think it is well past time government step in and limit the power and control mega corporations flex on their platforms and on our public policy in nearly all matters.
> Libertarian leaning myself, sad to say, this is the first time I am now in full realization that monopolies do in fact exist and are very dangerous.
YouTube is not a monopoly. There are other websites where you can post or watch video. Not as many people choose to use them, but you're not entitled to their attention anyway.
Existence of competition doesn't stop courts from considering a company to be a monopoly. You could have used a Mac and Netscape in the 90s, but the US went after Microsoft anyway.
On top of that, you have to realize that these countries (YT, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are completely obedient to the government of China. Not because it's their biggest market, but because China will shut them out if they don't toe the line. Whereas the US and Europe have never indicated a willingness to sanction these companies no matter what. It's a tyranny of the minority.
Attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot in recent times. Social media has made it too easy to spread dangerous levels of misinformation and hate online. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to YouTube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, adversarial nations were spreading fake news to influence who gets elected, and others were even live-streaming mass murders.
This has caused an upheaval in societal mores as regards free speech. Enough is enough! There needs to be limits. Communities started imposing limits to free speech. For example, UC Berkeley, renowned for giving birth to the Free Speech Movement, made news for banning harmful speech, such as that by Ann Coulter. This is a natural evolution of societal mores. This particular evolution was a reaction to the excesses and abuses seen in social media. This type of censorship, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal. We live in a new world. Malicious individuals and groups now have the power to reach hundreds of millions instantly, at no cost to themselves. The old rules no longer apply.
Some say if you disagree with someone else's speech you should not just ban them, you should defeat them by arguing against their ideas. But when state-sponsored actors spread fake news and divisive ads at a massive scale on social media you can’t simply defeat them by arguing against their ideas. How do you counter it? By buying opposing ads on Facebook? Even if you have pockets as deep as Putin’s, what a waste of money that would be! This is a new world and the old methods are no longer applicable. Communities and social media companies will need to engage in some censorship.
Lots of great points made in this thread. Question is, what can we do about it as a collection of individuals? Hackers often like to pretend to be apolitical, when faced with political issues. No wonder, escaping from the turmoils of the real world in technology has always been a sweet sweet delusion. Now the technology itself becomes an instrument of politics, and there's no place left to hide.
You act like information isn't constantly being curated in all forms of knowledge delivery. The same way we don't tolerate students attempting to derail professors in class with unfounded hypothesis or flawed logical arguments, Youtube doesn't have to tolerate the same on its platform.
There's a lot of difference between preventing a student shouting down a professor in class with some crap argument and the college telling the student they're not allowed to quietly discuss an "unfounded hypothesis" in some corner with another student.
The beauty (theoretically) of platforms like YouTube is that we can watch what we like and skip what we don't without harming any other user.
And as for qualifications, if an oncologist isn't qualified to have an opinion on COVID-19, YouTube sure as hell isn't.
What I love about comments like this is that "we" (the citizens) are demanding that websites filter out X, Y, and Z, and then at same time come back yelling at them when they do. Censorship and lack of censorship come at a cost and you have to be willing to pay one of them.
https://youtu.be/uk2YZfnsOPg