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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

#431

Post by Analog24 »

mc6 wrote: post #345
JohnBooty wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself. Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t... Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail busi…

Unlike most other European countries, Sweden is not increasing its sovereign debt load by 15+% of GDP to keep the citizenry afloat. That’ll feel a lot more important than Covid in 5 years.

I think this is likely a biased view. If you ask the families of the 300+k people who died from Covid-19 they probably won't consider the economic impact to be the most significant.

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

#432

Post by myk9001 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #267
xhkkffbf wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? It wasn't QAnon. It was the state -- and it looks like YouTube is aligned with the pro-shutdown folks who don't want their wisdom questioned. Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.

Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work? Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself. Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t... Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail busi…

Lockdowns are causing the majority of economic damage.

Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.

Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.

"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]

[A pedestrian street in Stockholm on Apr. 1](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/04/01/TELE...)

[A market in Malmo during the pandemic (no exact date)](http://archive.is/2siwt/5d1b19d61fd21d052c2cc190f13f722c0bf8...)

[Pubs, eating out](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/newsbeat-52618788/coronavirus-ho...)

It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.

Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:

"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."

So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4...

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

#433

Post by AgentME »

throwaway52120 wrote: post #277

Total censorship doesn't happen overnight. The gates slowly close little by little. Let no good catastrophe go to waste. With each, we lose a little freedom and the populace resounds in joy. Not because they want less freedom, no, it's because they think they've triumphed over a common evil: the dissenters. These cycles always include labeling the enemy, and it's usually the ones who disagree or challenge the state.…

Do you really think there's someone at YouTube with the goal of increasing censorship for the sake of it, and looking for catastrophes to capitalize on? (Have you ever known anyone in your life that has "censorship" as a hobby, specifically as a terminal end-goal not in service of something else?)

Or do you think that maybe the people working at YouTube might be worried about this specific issue -- that their platform could amplify dangerous misinformation about the pandemic -- and they want to reduce the harm they're participating in on this specific issue? (Have you ever known anyone in your life that learned that something they were doing had a bad effect on someone else, and then got worried about that and changed their behavior?)

If people at YouTube really liked censorship for the sake of censorship, they would just dive straight into it, or would have done it from the start.

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

#434

Post by mirimir »

ilikehurdles wrote: post #366
adarioble wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sense that is a default go to platform for many people when searching for (video) content.

Being the most popular platform doesn’t make something a monopoly.

If there's no substantial competition, it's a monopoly. Intentionality isn't that important. It's about market power.

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

#435

Post by busymom0 »

ehsankia wrote: post #427

tl;dr: There are millions of videos about COVID-19 being uploaded to Youtube and they have a non-zero false-positive rate. This was accidentally removed and promptly restored upon manual review. Basically nothing to see here.

No. It got reinstated because there was enough viral outrage. Smaller people and creators don't have that luxury.

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

#436

Post by chrisco255 »

ta17711771 wrote: post #430
ehsankia wrote: post #427

tl;dr: There are millions of videos about COVID-19 being uploaded to Youtube and they have a non-zero false-positive rate. This was accidentally removed and promptly restored upon manual review. Basically nothing to see here.

> promptly restored upon manual review. Promptly restored upon viral traction of outrage...just like that podcast app was....

Exactly. What else aren't we hearing about that's being arbitrarily censored by YouTube? And can we really trust it as a platform? I'm losing more trust in Google every day. 10 years ago was "don't be evil." Now, they're just, "be only as evil as you can get away with."

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

#437

Post by busymom0 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #436
ta17711771 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> promptly restored upon manual review. Promptly restored upon viral traction of outrage...just like that podcast app was....

Exactly. What else aren't we hearing about that's being arbitrarily censored by YouTube? And can we really trust it as a platform? I'm losing more trust in Google every day. 10 years ago was "don't be evil." Now, they're just, "be only as evil as you can get away with."

The situation is very similar to what's happening with a lot of Android developers. Many incidents where their app gets banned or removed for silly things. One I remember was getting removed because they had the word "windows" in their play store metadata and Google banned it because of having third party platform name. Except the app was using the term "windows" in reference to a house window, not the OS. Emailing play store support is pretty much useless unless you are a big company or can generate enough viral outrage on social media for them to notice.

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

#438

Post by bdamm »

chrisco255 wrote: post #436
ta17711771 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> promptly restored upon manual review. Promptly restored upon viral traction of outrage...just like that podcast app was....

Exactly. What else aren't we hearing about that's being arbitrarily censored by YouTube? And can we really trust it as a platform? I'm losing more trust in Google every day. 10 years ago was "don't be evil." Now, they're just, "be only as evil as you can get away with."

Trump's interview where he calls Republicans suckers, for example.

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

#439

Post by JackRabbitSlim »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #283

I can't help but wonder if there is a generational divide occurring in these censorship debates. Some contributors to the discussion seem to believe that everyone has a natural right to post a video and have it available to (if not see by) a global audience. As someone who grew up in the 1980s this is a strange point-of-view to me, but I can see how it might feel more natural to someone who came of age in the 2010s.

“[t]he more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.” -- Justice Hugo Black, majority opinion in Marsh Vs Alabama.

Youtube et al certainly encourage the free and public flow of traffic. Their business model depends on it. So their responsibility to the public would seem to obviously overshadow the perceived protections as a "private company".

I was also a child of the 80's

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

#440

Post by s1artibartfast »

kerkeslager wrote: post #45
thomasahle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that what people were predicting would happen in the summer since the beginning? And then probably with a rebound in autumn/next winter.

1. No, people weren't predicting that the virus would "get tired". 2. Even if we generously interpret this as meaning that the virus would be less infectious in warmer weather, the only evidence we had pointed to this as only a possibility , rather than something we could predict. 3. As summer has begun in the Northern hemisphere, we still don't have any good evidence that the virus is less infectious in warmer weath…

I don't think it is generous to believe "getting tired" was used metaphorically. On the other hand, perhaps you are right and this medical doctor really thinks the virus is a singular entity, with thoughts and feelings.
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