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YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

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Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#391

Post by __s »

majewsky wrote: post #308
vbezhenar wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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 th…

Torrenting is a pretty good CDN. Then you just need to host a magnet link

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#392

Post by pertymcpert »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #326
darkwater wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-sign…

Those twitter outbursts you dismiss are public statements from the highest executive office. Provoking hate crimes is not something to be dismissed.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#393

Post by dang »

joeclark77 wrote: post #242
drunkpotato wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does it make it better that they've arbitrarily decided to censor videos that contradict China's volunteer propaganda agency?

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#394

Post by krapp »

jb775 wrote: post #373
rcoveson wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 concern…

He's using pedophrasty in his argument in desperation by adding unnecessary elements that distract from the underlying debate and illicit emotions you can't really argue against without being the bad guy. Once you see this approach used, it's safe to assume that person's an idiot (at least on the underlying discussion topic). Pedophrasty Definition: Argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make th…

> 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.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#395

Post by busymom0 »

pertymcpert wrote: post #383
majewsky wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

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…

CloudFlare, the biggest CDN, despite their words and claims routinely censors sites meanwhile defending hosting terrorist site's free speech.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...

> 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:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#396

Post by ojnabieoot »

pacala wrote: post #388
pornel wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 particular…

And those pale in comparison to the worst crimes of YouTube:

- demonetizing videos that advertisers don't want to be associated with

- age-restricting highly questionable content

- deleting videos which I, like, worked really hard on, and which I didn't even say anything directly violent

- ARTIFICIALLY DEFLATING FluoridePoison777's subscriber counts

Seriously: your argument is offensive to victims of totalitarian oppression.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#397

Post by xlc0212 »

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.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#398

Post by [deleted] »

_bxg1 wrote: post #207
acituan wrote: post #51

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 se…

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.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#400

Post by AgentME »

istjohn wrote: post #231
wrsh07 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree 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) https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them t…

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 tha…

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.

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