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YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

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Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#201

Post by dpatru »

senectus1 wrote: post #119
forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that misses the point. The very fact that a few people at Google/Youtube have the power to censor whomever they want for whatever reason they choose is a problem in itself. Are the doctors in the video saying untruths or misrepresenting data? I think what they said in the video was eminently reasonable. But perhaps I'm wrong. Luckily we have the freedom to publicly critique their claims - assuming our critiques a…

I dont get this mindset. They aren't stopping them voicing their opinions or views... they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service. Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?

> they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service. Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?

Newspapers, TV programs, and radio programs are publishers. In contrast, Youtube, Facebook, and other services like them are platforms. They are more like the theater building, the radio/TV station, or a telephone company. This gives them some legal protection against being held responsible for the conduct of their users. See [1]. Without this distinction, these services could not have taken off, because Youtube and Facebook would have had to sign off on each user's post.

But advancing technology is making it possible to police speech automatically. So the distinction between the publisher and platform is fading. Because platforms can regulate their users' speech now in almost real time, very cheaply, they are kind of forced to do it. Some speech is very hard to defend. The best, and easiest argument for allowing offensive speech on these platforms has been that the offensive speech could not be technically prevented without squelching a lot of acceptable speech. But now that argument is going away.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+publisher+or+platfor...

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#202

Post by jpdb »

irjustin wrote: post #137
senectus1 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont get this mindset. They aren't stopping them voicing their opinions or views... they're just stopping them posting it on THEIR service. Newspapers do that all the time, TV and Radio does it all the time. Why is this different?

It's that youtube, reddit take on more of a public forum than TV, radio at least that was the feeling in the past. The idea that anyone can be a content creator is, it's supposed to be as neutral as possible. Let the world battle it out against itself. Once you start taking sides of opinions (as opposed to legal ones) then you become a content curator. For better or worse, America was built on the idea that I can hav…

> For better or worse, America was built on the idea that I can have an absolutely stupid idea and that's my right.

> That's a core tenant of free speech

I'd disagree heavily with this assessment based on these two points.

The founding fathers drew much of their inspiration from Hobbes who wrote that liberty involved ceding some "sovereign power" (liberty) to a state so that we could be free to do things without worrying about survival of the fittest.

I believe it was Jefferson that was vehemently against government officials making false claims / lying...which is a limitation of free speech, but results in a net surplus of free speech.

The idea that all speech should be free is a fairly ignorant one.

> and voice it with youtube being my megaphone.

And this is ABSOLUTELY against any sort of semblance of the ideas America was founded on. YouTube is a private platform. They can (and SHOULD) police their speech, because it is a private platform.

YouTube is ultimately socially responsible for the outcomes of what people say on it's platform. If someone is denying or minimizing a VERY REAL and VERY SERIOUS global pandemic, YouTube had a social obligation to curtail their free speech.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#203

Post by threeseed »

alvah wrote: post #194
threeseed wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were a bit more self aware you would realise how hypocritical you are. You want your freedom to communicate what you want. But you don't want Google/Youtube to have their freedom. They are a private website who should have the right to host whatever content they choose and free to look after their own interests. And remember nobody is stopping you from exercising your freedom to host whatever content you like…

So we just need to build our own Google or YouTube? That shouldn't be too hard /sarc

Youtube is very easy to build.

AWS has all of the components e.g. hosting, CDN, transcoding, live streaming, analytics, ML. You could easily put together an MVP in a weekend.

Of course you would have to convince people to visit and pay for the content to cover your traffic costs. But since I am sure this content is so incredibly popular and valuable there will be no shortage of people willing to do this.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#204

Post by aw1621107 »

cpwright wrote: post #103
Gibbon1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that are paywalled, in New York the excess deaths of 6 times normal. You can't make that go away by claiming normal deaths are being misclassified.

There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes. It seems unlikely that we actually have fewer heart attacks, but people are scared of the hospital - so don't go and are more likely to die. I am in the end the lockdown camp; but even if we allow businesses to open, many people will still be legitimately worried or scared and stay home even when it…

> There are likely deaths that are collateral damage. Fewer people are going to hospitals for heart attacks and strokes.

And on the flip side, there are people who might have died of things like car accidents if the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had not taken place.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#205

Post by djsumdog »

threeseed wrote: post #186
forgot_my_pwd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that misses the point. The very fact that a few people at Google/Youtube have the power to censor whomever they want for whatever reason they choose is a problem in itself. Are the doctors in the video saying untruths or misrepresenting data? I think what they said in the video was eminently reasonable. But perhaps I'm wrong. Luckily we have the freedom to publicly critique their claims - assuming our critiques a…

If you were a bit more self aware you would realise how hypocritical you are. You want your freedom to communicate what you want. But you don't want Google/Youtube to have their freedom. They are a private website who should have the right to host whatever content they choose and free to look after their own interests. And remember nobody is stopping you from exercising your freedom to host whatever content you like…

I hate this argument because it breaks down at the scale at what YouTube is. Viemo and Daily Motion don't even begin to compare in scale and reach. At what point is a company's reach so big they control the means of distribution? How many people even know what a PeerTube instance is?

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#206

Post by orangecat »

imustbeevil wrote: post #158
orangecat wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the insinuation you're making is that there are statistically more unreported cases than deaths. That seems like a claim you may want to justify. Find any serious expert who does not believe that. Estimates have always been that cases are underreported by 10-20x, and that's consistent with recent serology tests.

From this source [0] it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus. If you assume deaths would decrease with less people driving / going in public, that could be even more. Cases are obviously under-reported. I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported. Even if there were 10x as many ca…

From this source it looks like excess deaths are at least 2x higher than those attributed to coronavirus.

Sure, that's plausible.

I'm making the claim that deaths are also under-reported, and at a rate that could be consistent with the existing known rate reported.

That's not plausible. The current case fatality rate (known deaths divided by known cases) is 5.7% according to https://infection2020.com/#. Nobody seriously believes that 5% of infected people end up dying; the most pessimistic estimates are between 1 and 2 percent. (Which would of course still be extremely bad).

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#207

Post by busymom0 »

p1necone wrote: post #181
busymom0 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that. Unless you consider the far left sources to be moderate.

Something tells me you consider everything that isn't Fox News and Breitbart to be far left?

I don't care about left or right when it comes to listening to viewpoints. I listen/read to Vox, Vice, Salon, Slate, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NYTimes, WaPo, TheHill, WSJ, Fox, Breitbart, Tim Pool, David Packman, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan etc which covers a wide variety of viewpoints. I think it's important for people to listen to both sides to have a balanced viewpoint. As long as the person/news is providing me with the original source of their info which I can read and verify myself, I will listen.

I don't simply trust what the media tells me, I look for the actual source and verify that what the media says is actually what the original source says. I also often wait 2-7 days when some breaking news comes out to actually make a decision about the news as often things turn out to be wrong now a days. We live in a clickbait era where there's an incentive for media to spout nonsensical headlines - therefore verifying it myself is important.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#208

Post by kolanos »

ceejayoz wrote: post #178
ghthor wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what's wrong with the data they presented. That article doesn't explain it, it just says it's wrong. There applications of data make perfect sense to me, that's how I'd use the data they presented. That article makes inaccurate statements like, "basically hyped a bunch of data and weren’t transparent about their methods" which is not true. There were 100% transparent about where there information w…

> I don't understand what's wrong with the data they presented. They took stats from a massively self-selecting population - people seeking out COVID-19 testing at their facilities - and extrapolated to the general public. That's inexcusably dumb. As the bit I quoted states, that's like "estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court".

Did you watch the video? That is not what they did. What you're describing is a brief anecdote they shared about what they were seeing on the ground. Their statistics are based on state level aggregates for New York and California.

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#209

Post by henrikschroder »

busymom0 wrote: post #164
henrikschroder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they're wrong. A simple check of excess mortality shows that something has already killed more people than would normally die during a bad flu season in areas affected by the virus, and we're nowhere near the end of the infection. And that's with lockdown measures that obviously suppress a bunch of common causes of death. To successfully argue that covid-19 is less bad than the flu, you would have to show that…

That's why they looked at the data comparison of Sweden vs Norway. Sweden didn't do lockdown while Norway did. The difference is insignificant.

Yes, and Sweden has excess mortality that is higher than a bad flu year for Sweden, and the excess mortality matches up pretty well with the official covid-19 death count.

Which means that covid-19 is deadlier than the flu.

Just look at the excess mortality statistics for a bunch of European countries: https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Many are seeing sharp increases in mortality, higher than normal flu years. If covid-19 isn't deadlier than a normal flu, then death rates must have spiked in all these countries because of something else. That is one extraordinary claim if I ever saw one.

(In addition, it's false that Sweden isn't doing a lockdown. Sweden is simply one of the countries that have enacted the least harsh lockdown measures. It's a grayscale, not binary.)

Re: YouTube removed a viral video of two doctors calling for an end to quarantine

#210

Post by vharuck »

eloff wrote: post #50
ThisIsTheWay wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says right in the article: "...noted relevant comments regarding censorship that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki had recently made. "Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy ... [removal] is another really important part of of our policy," Wojcicki reportedly said."

By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus? Because I seem to recall the WHO (or I think it was the CDC?) blatantly lying about the efficacy of masks in order to keep them available to health professionals. I think this underscores why I'm so uncomfortable with YouTube doing censorship (or anyone doing it). The official narrative is not always r…

>By that logic can they remove videos claiming masks are effective at protecting yourself and society from the virus?

Cry wolf when this actually happens. I try not to be dismissive, but the repeated harping about masks strikes me as a lack of original thought at best and a coordinated smear campaign at face value.

We get it: the WHO should've recommended masks full-throatedly. But your interpretation that a YouTube policy will be applied maliciously without any justification for why doesn't convince me.

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