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YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

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Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#501

Post by colordrops »

ebg13 wrote: post #472
colordrops wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. And Vice ain't it.

> If you are to just claim that someone made something up, you must yourself raise the standard and provide a scientific or otherwise evidential source. Vice in this article links to evidential sources while summarizing the findings. You should bother reading it and what it links to. ALSO, and this is a bug fucking also, that's not how the burden of evidence for claims works! You just argued against falsifiability! O…

I was responding to you, not the OP. Most statements on HN are not immediately backed by sources, as this is not a scientific forum. But if you are just gonna tell someone they are full of shit, you should have some solid data behind it rather than a questionable clickbait rag that may or may not be cherry picking and massaging its own sources.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#502

Post by zimpenfish »

koheripbal wrote: post #339
stevebmark wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a completely valid question. In this specific case: Do you think it's bad for YouTube to be active in reducing the spread of this information? Because to me it's almost self evident it shouldn't be entertained as a valid idea. I might also ask why you aren't protesting Hacker News having moderators? Content is deleted from this platform all the time.

Again, the issue is the abuse of power. Google is very nearly a quasi-government organization. They have endless government contracts, they spend more on DC lobbying than anyone else, and they actively share data with US intelligence agencies. At some point, the laws that protect us from government, must also apply to these massive quasi-government monopolies - or they quickly become worthless.

I would venture that the government should be protecting its people from misinformation like Icke's (after all, they enforce things like "truth in advertising", "medicines must state side effects", etc.) and not leaving it up to YouTube.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#503

Post by tomhoward »

james-mcelwain wrote: post #484
tomhoward wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the events you list happened in the wake of the enlightenment, the period when ideas challenging the validity of the dominance of the monarchies, nobles and the church were disseminated and popularised in large part due to the invention of the printing press - i.e., an instrument of free speech.

This either trivially true, in the sense that the Western canon builds on itself, or patently absurd, in the sense that you attempt to frame the 1918 revolution as being a mere effect of the invention of the printing press 500 years earlier. Neither strikes me as being particularly rigorous historiography.

> particularly rigorous historiography

It was one-line discussion-board summation of what is widely accepted by historians (as you said, "trivially true"), but if you'd like to share an explanation of how the spread of ideas leading to the revolutions of Europe could have happened without an innovation that had the same effect as the printing press did, I'd be intrigued to to read it.

> patently absurd

So far, three of your replies in this thread alone have contained the word "absurd".

They probably all break the HN guidelines ("Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation", and "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says").

But more importantly, you're too busy sneering at other people's comments to make any positive assertion of your own.

So what is it you actually want to persuade us of, about the appropriate levels of constraints on speech in the modern world?

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#504

Post by joshuamorton »

TheUndead96 wrote: post #489
joshuamorton wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

This is the exact type of escalation that is not helpful. This caricatures the argument that institutions are not perfect. In the beginning, the WHO said the virus could not be spread between people. And YouTube & friends are actively censoring to imperfect sources (since all sources are ultimately imperfect).

No, because the argument that "institutions are not perfect" is a strawman that distracts from the actual question which is "is anything David Icke says anything remotely approaching the truth?" and the answer is undeniably no. Arguing about a slippery slope that the institutions might not be perfect either doesn't matter. Icke isn't trying to be correct. He's either literally mentally unwell (I've read that he has schizophrenia) or he's intentionally being provocative, or both. This isn't even a case of YT removing someone who is acting in good faith.

I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here: the idea that institutions can be mistaken does not mean that we should remove things that are just clearly completely and totally false (and damaging). It's the difference between the idea that a large portion (say, 10-20%) of the population is infected with covid with no symptoms, which is also almost certainly wrong, but there's at least some level of evidence for. Almost all of that evidence is flawed, but like, you can cite real academic papers from people. And the idea that 5g causes covid, which doesn't even make enough sense to create a well founded argument to the contrary. It relies on the audience not understanding what a virus is (or wanting to suspend disbelief).

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#505

Post by syrrim »

brickmort wrote: post #486
longtom wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WHO seems to have been embarrassingly wrong or overconfident on many accounts: 1. Global air travel does not need to be stopped. 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. 3. There is still a "window of opportunity". 4. Masks don't work (but health workers need them!). 5. The CFR is like 4%.

In the USA, if travel restrictions hadn't been put in place in late January (going directly against WHO recommendations at the time), the virus would have propagated much quicker into the country and the US would have been in way worse shape today than it is now.

You don't know that. Italy had early travel restrictions, and had it very bad. Canada had no travel restrictions until much later, and has it better than (parts of) the US. That so many believe the travel restrictions were warranted seems to solely be the product of them having been considered an outsize response at the time, rather than evaluating the arguments against them not qualified on the danger of the pandemic.

In particular, travel restrictions become actively harmful when they reduce the capacity to detect and therefore apply extra scrutiny to those travelling through affected countries. Insofar as people will travel anyways, they only serve to hide that fact from authorities. This of course does not apply to the US, which had no testing capacity at the time. But we can no more suppose that the US would have been worse off as we can suppose they would have been better off.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#506

Post by ashtonkem »

ryankemper wrote: post #46

I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…

The “platform” (section 230) discussion has always been based around a bad faith reading of the law; Ken White (1st amendment lawyer) covered that in his podcast “Make no Law”.

I think the troubling thing is that binding corporations to the first amendment would have all kinds of troubling consequences, including eliminating the ability of moderators to ban people for misbehavior.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#507

Post by streb-lo »

ryankemper wrote: post #46

I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech. That is, I am opposed to the argument that private corporations are not bound by the first amendment, and therefore it's okay for them to suppress content. I agree that they're not bound by the first amendment (I don't claim to understand the nuances of the "platform" laws so I won't address that), b…

At the heart of your opinion is a contradiction.

Corporations are just people. You are suggesting that when people speak in groups (e.g. enforcing the Youtube EULA) that is not protected free speech but when an individual speaks it is.

Good luck translating this half-baked idea into a legal framework that is consistent and sensical.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#508

Post by yesenadam »

colordrops wrote: post #198
stevebmark wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe in shining a light on them I hear this a lot. Light is the best disinfectant. What evidence do you have for this? I've never seen a bad or immoral or harmful idea die out when more people learn about it and scrutinize it. However, I have repeatedly seen the opposite: Sharing bad ideas increases their audience, increases ignorance, hate, fear, and human suffering. You're looking at an article describing th…

I know that HN is an international community but it's based in the US and most users are Americans. In the US, you need strong evidence of negative repercussions to restrict speech, and even then it's extremely difficult, due to the 1st amendment being one of the most important laws of the land. It's not the other way around - evidence is not needed to show that allowing speech is helpful.

> most [HN] users are Americans.

Apparently, that's not true. I initially had that strong impression too, from the way estadounidenses talk on here, (like as if everyone in the world lives under US constitutional amendments etc) but I heard the majority are non-US. Last I heard, HN might have another survey on that question soon. I hope so, I'd love to know what the numbers actually are.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#509

Post by ashtonkem »

JSavageOne wrote: post #474
chrononaut wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hacker News Guidelines > What to Submit > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. > In Comments > Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion…

HN is a niche community focused on startups and tech. Youtube is the monopoly on user-uploaded video content and has 2 billion users.

Why should the size of the community matter? Under what rationale are you going to decide that HN can moderate but YT cannot?

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#510

Post by aantthony »

james-mcelwain wrote: post #384
aantthony wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant they didn't know the truth about them. They obviously knew that slavery was occurring.

I mean, like many things, this just comes down to axioms that ground your meta-ethics. I don't find moral Platonism very convincing. There's no natural inclination of humans towards justice or injustice, beyond the limits of our own psychology. To me, the idea that there is some internal teleology towards justice is absurd. These are material struggles and material gains that must be defended materially. We should re…

I also reject platonism. I really don't mean to imply changing these norms was easy, or is only a matter of putting the information out there disregarding material conditions and then just hoping for the best.

It seems that having free speech is a necessary, although not sufficient, condition to improve society. It's a principle worth defending.

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