YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#581

Post by jsgo » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

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…

I understand that you’re arguing they should honor the spirit of it, but the language is:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“

Could be argued that this is a covenant of sorts the federal government is making with the people and/or states. In a sense, could be argued individual states wouldn’t need to honor it to individuals provided they don’t include such language in their own constitutions (I’d assume there is said language, but don’t know).

The only issue I see with the “bad ideas” thing is that it requires a lot of effort on the part of the person doing the debunking. They have to provide data points, citations, etc. to counter whatever was put out and in a lot of cases, it is just ignored in favor of the bogus bit that started the whole thing (which in some cases requires some degree of effort on the part of the originator, in other cases spitballing gets them there).

I’m somewhere in the middle. I worry about cases where seemingly the only wrong committed is to hold an opposing view, but in cases where someone willfully put forth bogus information, I’m not terribly opposed. Would rather that the sources for where the conclusions were drawn were similarly provided, at least then I could assume some degree of good faith. But if you and I are looking at two pieces of data and come to differing conclusions, that in and of itself should not lead to either of us being “silenced.”

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#582

Post by elbear » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:33 AM UTC

BurningCycles wrote: post #548

Frondo wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, so far I haven't seen anyone on here take the strong free speech absolutist position -- that nothing should be censored ever, including calls to violence. I've seen several comments that basically say "don't censor in general, but do remove calls to violence," so that seems like it's not a controversial opinion at least in this discussion. Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandem…

>Why are calls to violence bad, but spreading misinformation about a pandemic How do you know what is 'misinformation' ? WHO claimed that face masks were worthless, now you are forced to wear them in lots of places. WHO also claimed that there was no human to human transmission of COVID-19, etc. The powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation when it suits them, they just want no one to be able to question…

Why do you assume that the "powers that be will not stop spreading misinformation" like they do it on purpose?

Could it not be that this is a very complex issue and they were simply wrong in the first place? More data came in and they revised their position.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#583

Post by watwut » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:34 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #525

factsaresacred wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mistake, here is what the WHO said: > "If you do not have any respiratory symptoms...you do not need to wear a medical mask" Which is somehow worse.

I've yet to see any actual evidence that wearing a cloth mask while social distancing helps you, as a healthy individual. And I've seen some to the contrary[0]. One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that. I'll note that basically no government suggested (…

> One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that.

This argument does not pass smell test. In countries where masks were mandated, there was simultaneously lock on medical masks. People used homemade ones at first and then later you could buy non-medical cloth masks.

> they only really help if you are symptomatic

This does not make sense either. You spread virus before having symptoms. Asymptomatic people spread virus too.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#584

Post by monocasa » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:34 AM UTC

aantthony wrote: post #448

lonelappde wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you not noticed that the most populous country in the world is run by a self-identifying Communist Party? And the USSR, #4 was Communist until it collapsed economically , not intellectually?

Communism collapsed intellectually in the West after the economic collapse of the USSR and the relevant death tolls. I know China is communist, but in democratic countries, for the most part, communism is an idea that died off.

It's on the rise again. https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article237089274.h...

I'd say it died off for generations because of active deplatforming of anyone involved rather than an open debate on the merits. For instance it was literally illegal to be a communist in the US due to the Communist Control Act of 1954.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#585

Post by colordrops » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:36 AM UTC

esoterica wrote: post #534

colordrops wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence that censorship wins over lies? Considering that one of the most fundamental and important US laws is freedom of speech, it behooves you to prove that censorship works, not that free speech works.

The fact that the first amendment exists is strong evidence that censorship works. If it didn’t work, why is it so important to prevent the government from censoring people? After all, censorship is futile right?

The question is who censorship "works" for. In most cases it works for despotic dictatorships.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#586

Post by elbear » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

ryankemper wrote: post #117

kiba wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-19 has added the additional element of this new concept of "disinformation". The argument is seductively simple: "being exposed to this information could lead you to engage in patterns of behavior that harm society. Therefore we can conceptualize this speech as being an indirect form of violence/negligence and therefore we have a moral obligation to remove such content". Some people, after being exposed to misi…

> Some people, after being exposed to misinformation, chose to believe them. You missed my point :) Humans, being inherently limited, are always at risk of being wrong. Being wrong about things is the default state. I simply don't think that we should strive to expunge all forms of "misinformation". That is to say, of course people believe misinformation. > Do you have evidence that the truth more often than not win…

Can you expand what you mean by "truth is local"?

I'm asking, because I see it as the complete opposite. The rules of physics apply all over the world and outside of the planet. Yes, some patterns of reality are only found in a specific place on this planet (cultural values, for example), but things like whether COVID-19 is caused by 5G does not.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#587

Post by t0ughcritic » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #497

PureParadigm wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as the parent mentions, YouTube can do the same kind of content curation from a legal point of view. The question is whether YouTube is a platform where we should advocate for less censorship/more freedom. I think that since YouTube is a general platform and that no serious alternatives exist, we should advocate for less censorship. YouTube is different from Hacker News because YouTube is more of a general platf…

For one, Facebook's trying to give YouTube a run for their money. There's an entire tab in their mobile app dedicated to small bite-size videos like are watched on YouTube, and Facebook Live is all about connecting small video producers directly to their audiences. Outside of that, there are lesser known sites. Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Twitch, Veoh. YouTube has the brand recognition, but simply hosting video onl…

Vimeo,veoh, metacafe et al need to all merge into one and realize they have failed as individual companies more or less.

Secondly rush’s app will be removed, if he says anything that upsets big bro.

Lastly Facebook video will be just like YouTube in terms of enforcement.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#588

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

stateofnounion wrote: post #568

joshuamorton wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Global air travel does not need to be stopped. This isn't what the WHO said. They said bans on air from specific places (especially those that disrupt supply chains) are bad. This is true. Banning all air travel to/from china would have hurt medical supply chains in the US, with very little benefit. > 2. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission. When this claim was made (in early january), there was not…

There are large swathes of the population that have been infected asymptomatically: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti... There are similar studies and similar findings in both the US and Europe. tl;dr The virus is much less lethal for the average person than models predicted before we had more data.

> There are large swathes of the population that have been infected asymptomatically: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-anti....

No, there are tests that have high false-positive rates. The studies in both the US and Europe used similarly flawed tests and didn't correctly account for the false-positive rates of those tests. [0]

There are two ways to think through how these results are flawed: the first is that the false positive rates of the tests is vastly higher than the prior (which we'll assume is approximately the confirmed case rate per capita) is. There were three studies, NYC, Santa Clara, and one in Europe that I know of. All three tests had false positive rates over 2%, and one test had a false positive rate of like 10%. So when a study shows that a large percent of the population have the virus, and that percentage is suspiciously similar to the false-positive rate of the test, you pause.

The second is a much more grokkable one. Let's assume that 2% of people in Santa Clara were infected (per the study), then 40,000 people are infected, and of them around 2000 people were symptomatic enough to get tested and be hospitalized/tested (per available stats). Or 5% of infections are symptomatic enough to get noticed, ish. Then we'd see that NYC would have ~3.5 million people infected now, or something like 40%.

So we'd expect to see 40% (or more actually) of people tested in NY and NYC test positive for covid. But we don't[1]. We see that as NY adds more tests, the positive rate of the more reliable tests is going down, because they can test more people and because NY appears to be over the hump. At peak, 20% of people were testing positive daily, now it's down to closer to 10%.

And note that most of the tests are going to people who have some symptoms of something, which is why it's that high. 40% of NY residents were infected, we'd expect to see more than 40% of the tests positive, but we don't.

If you do the same calculation but with death rate, you find that there are more people in NYC with Covid than live in NYC. In conclusion: those studies are bad because the tests they use are unreliable.

[0]: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

[1]: https://health.data.ny.gov/d/xdss-u53e/visualization

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#589

Post by t0ughcritic » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #520

rlt wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platforms that are monopolies or close to it are essentially the modern day town square, except instead of police and government enforcing rules, it's tech companies.

The courts have made it quite clear that they’re unwilling to consider companies to be similar to the “town square” unless if they’re doing literally what governments have traditionally done. There is no clear way to argue that YT is doing something that governments traditionally did, so you’re out of luck there. If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up,…

Monopolies are hard to break if the product is free for consumers.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#590

Post by joshuamorton » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #583

joshuamorton wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see any actual evidence that wearing a cloth mask while social distancing helps you, as a healthy individual. And I've seen some to the contrary[0]. One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that. I'll note that basically no government suggested (…

> One of the WHO's main concerns is to prevent shortages and supply chain issues (see their statements about travel and import bans). A run on medical masks is problematic, and the WHO's guidance prevents that. This argument does not pass smell test. In countries where masks were mandated, there was simultaneously lock on medical masks. People used homemade ones at first and then later you could buy non-medical cloth…

> This argument does not pass smell test. In countries where masks were mandated, there was simultaneously lock on medical masks. People used homemade ones at first and then later you could buy non-medical cloth masks.

Right, and there are no studies that I'm aware of showing that cloth face masks are effective at stopping the spread of covid-19. They're good at stopping large particles (which afaik you only really have if you're coughing), but not small/aerosolized ones.

Again, if you're being careful with your mask and making sure to clean it regularly and treat it like a dangerous object and washing hands after using it etc. It might help. If you aren't, it might hurt. Hence the WHO's guidance.

To be clear, I'm not saying "masks are bad", or even "masks aren't good". I'm saying "the evidence that masks are helpful is not strong enough to decry an organization that doesn't recommend them."