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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

#641

Post by hubert1234 »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #439
mrfusion wrote: post #223

Just some food for thought. If youtube was around in the past and doing this stuff they could have deleted videos in support of the following: (these all started as fringe beliefs(1)) Interracial marriage Gay marriage Smoking causes lung cancer (1) interesting topical read and it has sources for these at the end https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/09/american-brain.html

Those are ideological beliefs. Yes, at one time they were very widely and strongly held. But they were never remotely comparible to spreading factually incorrect information about something biological. A simple demonstration to this: even the reverse of these (e.g. "I believe gay marriage is morally wrong") can't reasonably be argued against with "that is factually incorrect". It's fair to believe that private compan…

you really think that somebody cant come up with strong scientific evidence to support all of those? cmon, it's a lack of knowledge and imagination on your part. There are plenty of real scientific arguments against gay marriage or gay rights at large. You just dont ever hear them because everyone who ever so much as hints at them gets banned immediately.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#642

Post by andai »

esoterica wrote: post #543
ryankemper wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally agree that what David Icke is spreading is a bunch of nonsense. But I'm against suppressing him because otherwise I can't maintain a logically consistent belief system. That is to say, as soon as we can ban the lizard guy, we can also ban a lot more viewpoints that are not quite as controversial / outright crazy but straddle the line. And just to head this off, the dimension of palatability to advertiser…

It’s very easy to maintain a logically consistent belief system that allows for private censorship. It’s called “the person who owns the servers makes the rules”, and if you don’t like then rules then buy your own servers.

While this kind of censorship bothers me, I think it's funny everyone forgets we're hanging out at Google's house. If Google wants someone to leave their house that person has no right to protest.

What should be protested is that there isn't really anywhere else to go -- and the best form of protest is to build it.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#643

Post by zimpenfish »

hyperbovine wrote: post #92
bcoates wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As everyone knows, nobody propagated strange conspiracy theories before the invention of YouTube and Twitter.

Perhaps you are genuinely not old enough to remember a time before YouTube and Twitter, but there were way fewer conspiracy theories floating around, and they didn't have nearly the social impact that they do today. A coordinated misinformation campaign could never have swayed elections in the US and UK before social media. Why? Because there were institutions in place that acted as a filter. Say what you will about…

> there were way fewer conspiracy theories floating around, and they didn't have nearly the social impact that they do today

I remember a whole bunch of crazies on usenet in the early-mid 90s but that was an extremely effective filter at keeping them from the rest of the world.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#645

Post by hubert1234 »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #602
giantDinosaur wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if that 'extremist content' is pro-LGBT content somewhere else? What if it's criticism of religion? There's no consensus that those aren't equivalent to extremist content around the world, so such censorship does just as good a job at stopping what we once, in the West, considered abhorrent and obscene, as whatever we consider abhorrent today. I don't get how you can consistently square that circle.

Well, rascist content tends to denigrate and harm people, it causes people to get killed and injured, while pro-LGBT content tends to call for love and allow people to love who they want. I can see the difference, can you? You make it sound like some slippery slope fallacy, but it's not the same speech. Calling for hate is wrong and should be shuttered in the darkness.

Really, so giving young children hormones to transition to the other gender doesnt harm anybody? You simply have no idea what the argument of the other side even is. You live in an airtight bubble.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#646

Post by wnoise »

elbear wrote: post #582
BurningCycles wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

They certainly were spreading it on purpose. What's unknown is whether they knew it was misinformation at the time. Perhaps they thought this was a good way to manage supply shocks and keep masks flowing to medical workers. Or perhaps they truly thought masks were useless. That's hard to believe, but not impossible.

But they wouldn't have backed off as quickly without pushback from others taking the opposite position that masks were critical. And at the time, that was contrary to the officially espoused position by both CDC and WHO. Even now WHO haven't fully reversed course, they have only stopped anti-recommending face masks as hard. Banning spreading this countervailing opinion would have been a grave mistake.

WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

> If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.

CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

> In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#647

Post by busymom0 »

“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#648

Post by close04 »

identity0 wrote: post #453
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…

It’s an issue that’s difficult to distill in a way that could work as a law or as a winning argument against snarky commenters playing Devil’s Advocate. In theory the line between rules and censorship is vague and grey, but in practice it’s pretty easy to tell what is rule enforcement and what is political censorship. I guess a good place to start would be examining the rules of a website and determining if the taked…

While banning or deleting accounts could go all the way from legitimate to oppression, it doesn't seem like banning the account of someone spreading false information that leads to dangerous situations to be an abuse in any way. Yes, we have to hold YouTube to higher standards than others simply because of the disproportionate power the platform has. But this doesn't change the fact that in such cases the measure was warranted.

People constantly misunderstand "freedom of speech" as something that somehow entitles one to trample over someone else's freedom.

For example every time there's a discussion about "hate speech" someone will say that the laws are routinely abused to punish people for their legitimate free opinions. Yet no such examples of routine abuse are ever given. There's room for common sense when judging a situation. Common sense can't be put in law but you also can't really judge these gray areas without it.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#649

Post by kd5bjo »

chrononaut wrote: post #511
parsimo2010 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My actual answer is in the last line, but I'll ramble a bit first. You make an interesting point, but I think there are times in which we can prohibit certain types of posts and comments that might technically be censorship (using the definition of suppression or prohibition of things that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security), but they aren't bad censorship. I would place some so…

Great set of questions and points. > I struggle a bit with whether YouTube should be legally required to follow the First Amendment (they are a US corporation, not a government), but I can say that I think that their deletion of David Icke's account leaves a bad taste in my mouth- not because I like him, but because I worry that YouTube may one day bow to majority pressure and censor a topic in which I belong to the…

> However, let's also say they only take action on "the worst offenders" (of some definition), would it be better for them to not do anything at all until they have the means to capture the majority of videos / users that violate those policies, or start with the larger groups first?

One of the most common forms of discrimination is unequally enforced rules: they nominally apply to everyone but are in practice enforced only against an arbitrary subset of violators. For a rule to be fair, whether it’s a law or private policy, enforcement needs to be against an unbiased sample of offenders that’s large enough for the community to see that it’s unbiased. There also needs to be an effective appeals process that can overturn the enforcers’ actions in the cases where they behaved wrongly. Both of these have costs roughly proportional to the number of potential offences.

In YouTube’s case, that’s the number of uploaded videos. They cut costs along the way by neglecting the executive and judicial parts of this process with regard to copyright violations. Now, when they want to institute a new policy (with good reason), they have neither the trust of the community nor the institutions necessary to implement it in a fair manner.

Re: YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

#650

Post by cycomanic »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #449
techsupporter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I won't address that argument here but personally I think it's a very dangerous way of thinking The problem is you’ve just said you won’t address the primary, most compelling reason to take these actions. Assuming that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” presupposes a lot of things about society that are, in my observation, no longer true. We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contempla…

> We do not have the time, through our own actions or not, for quiet contemplation and retrospection into deep topics. This is a problem, but how does censorship solve it? You would in fact need to solve that problem for all ideas in order to correctly know what to censor, which nobody has time to do, hence the problem. > We have polarized ourselves into camps of right and wrong. This is exactly what the censorship m…

> And the other is trusted thought leaders who consult a variety of domain experts on a given topic to determine the consensus of the experts and relay it to all of the people who don't have time to look at the specific details on that specific topic. This is what has completely imploded. The news media has lost their credibility by explicitly abandoning even the pretense of impartiality and chasing clickbait nonsense for ratings, so nobody trusts them anymore. As it should be when they're publishing things like that.

I would argue that this assessment quite strongly examplifies the whole issue. I think that we have seen an unprecedented campaign to propagate the belief that the "mainstream media" is untrustworthy. And that campaign is very clearly politically motivated (funnily enough the most partisan of the big news networks portraits itself as the the upholder of truth, a misinformation campaign itself), and is very strongly based on misinformation and providing easy answers... Largely financed by an ideological opposition to government intervention and fueled by propaganda against global warming action

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