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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

#451

Post by myk9001 »

Analog24 wrote: post #431
mc6 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People are worried about economies not for some abstract reasons. Bad economies literally kill and have a potential to kill much more people than Covid-19.

From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2]. Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.

Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].

Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/unemployment-today-vs-the-gr...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-economic-cost-and-hum...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MGbyLUCw5k

[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-52747659

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

#452

Post by _23sd »

2019-nCoV wrote: post #443
chrisco255 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abhorrent "safe space" culture was mostly contained to college campuses a decade ago. Unfortunately, every large left-leaning organisation across the US is now deeply steeped in it. You reap what you sow.

If we're going to tie this to college campus censorship, a better analogy would be the tendency of many schools to ban speakers who might criticize the US foreign policy orthodoxy on Israel/Palestine. That would have a different ideological narrative attached, though. But I think, fundamentally, the motivations for a big tech company are different from those of a university. Universities are most interested in preventing disruption on campus that might lead to bad press (and less donations). Big tech platform owners tolerate all sorts of flamewars and offensive or misleading content until governments start talking about regulating them, at which point they try to "self-regulate" by purging everything related to whatever the governments are getting worked up about. So you have at least two types of incentives that lead to censorship of various views, and it's inaccurate to claim that the college campuses are somehow the root of both.

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

#454

Post by polynomial »

ehsankia wrote: post #428
raspasov wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have been really surprised if they actually removed it. The points made in the video are mostly sensible. They acknowledge the many unknowns. It more or less advocates for the Swedish model of dealing with this vs. most other countries.

Their automated system has a non-zero false-positive rate. It will from time to time accidentally take down legitimate videos, which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review, such as in this case. Yet people still jump to conclusion and assume malintent, posting headlines which imply Youtube is intentionally removing these videos. Clickbait.

> which they restore fairly quickly once you request a manual review

Seems like an overly optimistic view, based on stories you hear that small publishers don't stand a chance.

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

#455

Post by pchristensen »

contravariant wrote: post #360
_bxg1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch. Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all dec…

The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed of subscriptions to InfoWars, Stormfront, Plandemic, etc would be protected by law, but YouTube, FB, etc could be held liable for harm caused by content that they recommend. People retain their freedom to speak and publish, but they have no right to promotion or amplification.

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

#456

Post by ShroudedNight »

kerkeslager wrote: post #75
aianus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask? https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/national-directive-on-w...

The National Post are not experts, and they aren't reporting what experts say accurately. And while there's a video in there where an actual expert speaks, you're not reporting what that expert said accurately. Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth. The US and Canadian recommendations against medical masks for the general public were part of a stra…

> Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth.

So there's a narrative that may or may not have my best interest at heart but demands my compliance for some nebulous greater good?

No.

If sacrifice is required on the part of collective, you honour them by allowing them to engage with informed consent. If you don't, you have no credibility the next time some ambiguity arises where collective sacrifice is needed to avoid a tragedy of the commons.

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

#457

Post by polynomial »

ta17711771 wrote: post #446
sneak wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship isn’t the answer to the things you fear. YouTube banning these things won’t stop them from spreading. YouTube not banning these things won’t cause people to commit violence. Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing. You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games…

No, but a hard drive was shot - right through the heart!!

You give censorship a bad name?

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

#458

Post by polynomial »

tomcam wrote: post #403
tomcam wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is QAnon violent? How does their violence level compare to Antifa?

Ah, downvoted with no reasons given or proof presented. I hoped for better from the good citizens of this community.

Welcome to hn.

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

#459

Post by myk9001 »

Hoasi wrote: post #290
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…

> Well, I'd blame the pandemic itself. Exactly. In most countries, people are willingly staying mostly at home. More, they continue to restrain from shopping and eating out after the lockdown ended.

This is not the case for Sweden. For details, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23266698

I don't think this is the case for Germany, Switzerland, or Denmark either.

What countries do you have in mind where lock downs ended and most people are staying at home?

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

#460

Post by unethical_ban »

Cyph0n wrote: post #358
unethical_ban wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube Vimeo Name the next five that are discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day.

We’ve already covered discoverability: you have no right to an “audience”. As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free , why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.

I don't think there is a right, but don't act like there are a million equivalents to Youtube.
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