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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

#541

Post by zo1 »

skronch wrote: post #482
soraminazuki wrote: post #475

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.

Near zero (not actual 0%) is definitely achievable and within grasp. We just end up playing funding politics because we don't like the price-tag and liberty-curtailment associated with the value of human life and these things we're trying to solve.

Car accidents? Drunk driving? Murders? Dark-web illegal activities? Domestic violence? Those and many others are all solvable problems that we can get very close to zero instances. But right now we're quibbling and putting measures in place that don't get the numbers anywhere close to zero, they just "incrementally" reduce instances and we all applaud and find those meaningful whilst 99% solutions are ignored.

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

#542

Post by jakeogh »

_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.

...... Joe

....... Hillary

..... Chuck

Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.

Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.

People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.

It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23112787

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

#543

Post by ifjdndixi »

RandomTisk wrote: post #525
Thorrez wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My bad, here's a better link. It's hard to find a "mainstream" source because most of the old media is ignoring a lot of newsworthy items these days. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/02/13/rand-paul-blasts-y... It's widely known that Google/Youtube took down any videos where the name of the supposed whistleblower were being mentioned, at least according to a lot of regular content creators who had videos deleted o…

Breitbart Fuck you asshole.

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

#544

Post by thu2111 »

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…

And then the CDNs no platform them and and then someone who agrees with the Wojcickis of the world DoS attacks you and then you're gone.

This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.

This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.

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

#545

Post by jexah »

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…

I really love the sound of this idea.

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

#546

Post by jexah »

joshuamorton wrote: post #501
Supermancho wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In what context?

Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.

From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.

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

#547

Post by joshuamorton »

jexah wrote: post #546
joshuamorton wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In what context? Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information prov…

> Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume.

But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.

You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?

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

#548

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

#549

Post by zimpenfish »

RandomTisk wrote: post #525
Thorrez wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My bad, here's a better link. It's hard to find a "mainstream" source because most of the old media is ignoring a lot of newsworthy items these days. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/02/13/rand-paul-blasts-y... It's widely known that Google/Youtube took down any videos where the name of the supposed whistleblower were being mentioned, at least according to a lot of regular content creators who had videos deleted o…

> Google/Youtube took down any videos where the name of the supposed whistleblower were being mentioned

Presumably because they didn't want to be exposed to the legal ramifications of broadcasting a crime?

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

#550

Post by ojnabieoot »

pacala wrote: post #502
ojnabieoot wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, you are just playing word games. "Free speech" does not and has never meant "the right to get any letter to the editor published in the New York Times" and therefore does not mean "the right to get any video I want on YouTube." So it is not a "simple observation" that deinfrastructring -> depersoning is a spectrum. There is no such spectrum. There is an enormous gap between "society thinks you're icky and big corporations won't host your content" and "the state sends you to Siberia," since one is clearly a human rights violation and one is clearly not. Likewise there is an enormous gap between "Simon and Schuster rejected my novel!" and "the FBI busted the printing shop I hired to print my novel." YouTube removing this guy's video is very clearly in the former category. I am aware that it is out-of-reach for many individuals to create their own website which can host videos. But a right to free speech does not mean a right to any content distribution platform you want.

It also whitewashes the issue at hand: this professor is a notorious crank and has been a notorious crank long before COVID-19. This is not a free-thinker taking a bold stand against a sclerotic public health bureaucracy. This is a con artist spreading dangerous misinformation during the worst public health emergency in 100 years. YouTube removing his content is not just them suppressing views they politically disagree with, it's also individual employees at YouTube viewing this interview as a imminent threat to their family's health and safety. This is a very reasonable view for private individuals and private corporations running private infrastructure to take.

Look: if he starts his own website self-hosting COVID quackery, and the government shuts it down, then that really is Soviet-level and I will take your argument more seriously (though given the vicious threat COVID-19 poses, I am open to the idea that this is an extreme but necessary use of the government's emergency powers). But it is simply ridiculous to say that YouTube can't moderate their own content, especially when 99% of the world's doctor's and public health officials would describe the video as dangerous misinformation.

But your self-pitying shtick about how you're a lone voice of moderation in a sea of adversarial extremes is nice. It's not quite as nice as bringing back 90,000 Americans from the dead but it probably made you feel nice about yourself.

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