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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

#471

Post by null0pointer »

__s wrote: post #391
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…

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

That's actually a really interesting thought. I wonder if you can just serve a tiny JS torrent client and a magnet link and automatically download the content. You would need to have a way for visitors to seed the content too, otherwise you still have to serve everything anyway.

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

#472

Post by revnode »

pertymcpert wrote: post #387
revnode wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you own website, you have all rights to do any censorship you want. There is a difference between can and should . They can, but should not.

Why not? Should revnode-videos.net not be able to decide which videos it hosts, pays for in storage and bandwidth?

> not be able to decide which videos it hosts, pays for in storage and bandwidth?

I didn't say they shouldn't be able to. I said they shouldn't, even if they are able to.

> Why not?

Why should they?

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

#473

Post by blfr »

_bxg1 wrote: post #239
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.

> QAnon's actions are mainly talk QAnon is an FBI-registered domestic terror organization: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-... They've been connected to multiple attempted acts of violence. They aren't just talk.

From the article:

The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.

Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.

Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.

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

#474

Post by aianus »

joshuamorton wrote: post #211
aianus wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial", followed by a list of dangers posed by masks. It was a statement that masks are a placebo for the general public and actually require one to take extra precautions so that they don't make things worse. It couldn't have been more discouraging towards people on the fence about wearing a mask in late March.

> Putting a mask on an asymptomatic person is not beneficial Since then, the understanding about asymptomatic carriers has changed. And in response, the government updated it's suggestion.

Good for them (not sarcastically). My point is that if the experts were wrong then, it’s certainly possible that some of what they are saying now is wrong too, and it should be acceptable to criticize them on YouTube and explore different possibilities and models.

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

#475

Post by soraminazuki »

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.

I've heard enough of these machine learning buzzword bingos every week when things like this happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again.

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

#476

Post by int_19h »

_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.

If it's so dangerous that it should be banned, let legislatures pass laws banning it, and let YouTube enforce those laws.

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

#477

Post by contravariant »

pchristensen wrote: post #455
contravariant wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds interesting, I'll be sure to check it out, thanks.

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

#478

Post by int_19h »

hrktb wrote: post #161
60secz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private. That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are…

It’s not unprecedented to have different rules apply to private company passed a given reach. We could see it the same way we see banks. Banks are private entities but tightly regulated and their activity is overseen by their operating country. Applying a given set of restrictions and requiremnts to services used by more than 50% of the population for instance could be a thing. In the US I know people would call bloo…

One thing that really bothered me was how Australian ISPs handled censorship of the Christchurch shooting videos. They have started proactively blocking not just websites that hosted it, but also those that linked to it - even forums, where it was posted by the users, and the moderators have a general hands-off policy.

It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.

It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.

Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...

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

#479

Post by int_19h »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #323
Justsignedup wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem we face is that social media is about echoing information, not validity, which is how misinformation spreads so rapidly, because it sounds like what people want to hear. There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion. Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moder…

For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history. What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed. Now that we've moved into a regime of…

The problem is that memes themselves undergo natural selection, which favors the "bad" ones overall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

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

#480

Post by tlear »

okreallywtf wrote: post #181

I think that we often get hung up on the what-ifs of censorship while misinformation is doing damage right this second. The problem is that people don't evaluate 2 narratives equally based on the information in them. If that was the case, you would just have to make sure that for every bogus report there is a reliable report, but once misinformation takes hold it takes a lot more than that to dislodge. The analogy I…

Should probably ban NHK to be broadcast in US while we are at it, maybe compel ISPs to do it, Great American Firewall we can call it. Japan not implementing any sort of western style lockdown at all. Ids going to school, people moving around shops open..
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