Live data from Hacker News

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

unherd.com

501–510 of 596 posts

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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?

> recommendation algorithm (time based) Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their fee…

> Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book?

Yes exactly.

> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.

In what context?

> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.

This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?

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

#502
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opp…

?

There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.

I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.

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

#503
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…

Maybe the people working at YouTube still have a moral and ethical responsibility to minimize the spread of disinformation.

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is akin to saying "I've heard enough of these NHTSA reports every week when car accidents happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again." A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.

When you are editorializing , you dont get the pipes exception on copyright infringement.

Either they get it right, or open up. They cant do it half way.

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

#505

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.

Google deleted / censored CSPAN video of a Senator on the floor of the Senate[0]. [0] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/c-span-video-of-ran...

That article is about a Tweet being taken down, not about Google. Also that article says

> It is not clear whether C-SPAN or Twitter took down the video.

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

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You give censorship a bad name?

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

It's a play on the "You Give Love a Bad Name" song by Bon Jovi.

"Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, you give love a bad name"

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

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart is not ubiquitous in terms of property the same way Youtube is in terms of streaming video. If you want to protest you can easily avoid Walmart. Likewise if you want to publish a book you can easily avoid Walmart. If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably es…

I don’t follow. When you protest at Walmart you aren’t guaranteed an audience either (people can ignore you and walk away). And when you make a video you don’t get granted an audience either. Why should YouTube have to help you out?

And people can walk away on Youtube, too. That's the equivalent.

Having an audience and Youtube not taking it away, is not the same thing as Youtube intentionally helping you build your audience.

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

#509

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....

Our Covid app was built for a local Govt in India with all official documentation and yet it was banned and no explanation.

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

#510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?

Laws don't have to be philosophically pure. A law can define or describe what counts as an editorial algorithm and what does not, and it could exclude simple sorting while including the complicated thing Youtube does to keep you watching.

What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.

Post reply on HN