281–290 of 933 posts
Witchcraft ok in Africa but not USA? Prayer ok in USA?
Are they blocked at country level? How does this work?
Most countries are directly contradicting WHO, lucky YouTube knows best and can decide for us.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO. There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion…
The WHO, and all other western CDC-like orgs, made one mistake regarding masks early on during the pandemic. One. A mistake they corrected since. And because of that, you and other see them as totally discredited. On the other hand, the "alternative" sources suggest bleach, un-proofed and not working medication, global conspiracies involving chips and 5G and what not. Seriously, get a grip.
I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…
Let's call some spades. >> I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However ... The first spade is free speech itself. Neither the custom nor the law applies to YouTube. In theory, it's a private site that chooses what videos it shows. In practice, youtube is a newly powerful monopoly. Both YouTube and Alphabet. There's a tension here. In 2020 reality, political freedoms such as speech, association and even r…
This has been the case for the last 100 years friend
> “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
...
> “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”
- Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1927
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the popu…
> The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species It's a pretty far leap from that to saying something should not exist. But I'll bite. How are they not aligned, and why does it not merit existence?
But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh.
If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it.
+If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general.
Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect)
http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe...
EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)
I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…
The reaction is based on unsubstantiated axioms. Does COVID-misinformation do significant damage? I don't think so. Are there concrete examples?
Information gets censored, while simultaneously political information gets censored on Twitter because it implicates a presidential candidate. The reason is that it is information obtained by a hack. Good for democracy? A form of government where voters should hold representatives accountable? This is not a Trump endorsement but I feel driven to state the fact.
> Truth, facts, and hoping that people can apply logic to find their way to them isn't enough anymore and the people exploiting this advantage are getting better at it.
Again, I don't think so, are there concrete examples where this happened? And if so, an advertising company which has some easy ways to distinguish itself by removing unpopular opinions (yes, they are actually unpopular)? It doesn't really make sense to me in any way.
Who are these manipulators? Putin? Trump? Cambridge Analytica? Communists? Capitalists?
Where do we actually see dangerous misinformation? The worst decisions are made from fear and I believe your point of view adds to panic reactions.
> say whatever we want, regardless of our status or wealth. This has been corrupted.
Who do you think would would be able to speak freely if you put constraints here. It won't be low status or low income people.
Disinformation on the internet is not a real threat. Not even compared to Nigerian prince scammers. Not having a authoritative voice might look scary, but it is actually a good development. Otherwise I would suggest church or something with more rigid believe systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO. There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion…
COVID-19 is a novel virus. All information is misinformation until it isn't. I could say that the reason that some people are asymptomatic is that the virus is lying dormant in them like herpes. Can anyone credibly refute that? Logic would dictate that a novel virus -- novel in that we don't know everything about it -- is a threat to the survival of our species as a whole until disproven otherwise and that we should…
I’m strongly on the Swedish/Trump side here. We know that the virus is practically harmless for youth and young adults. If immunity persists, we should let them get infected ASAP while protecting the old/vulnerable. If immunity fades, then waiting for the vaccine is pointless anyways. As a young person, I won’t be taking the vaccine anytime soon anyways, not because I have anything against vaccines, but because I have many doubts about barely tested drugs in general (I’ll take it after it’s been tested for a few years).
But hey, say this on YouTube and I’ll be banned!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The WHO, and all other western CDC-like orgs, made one mistake regarding masks early on during the pandemic. One. A mistake they corrected since. And because of that, you and other see them as totally discredited. On the other hand, the "alternative" sources suggest bleach, un-proofed and not working medication, global conspiracies involving chips and 5G and what not. Seriously, get a grip.
No, they also protested banning of flights (e.g. when Trump banned flights from China and later from the EU), praised China on their pandemic response, ... most recently, they only came out against lockdowns just now , even though others (e.g. Trump, Sweden, ...) were promoting this policy for months already.
It is still not possible to tell whther the Swedish way was the bast way or not. Lockdowns worked in the early days, the goal was to avoid overloading hospitals. Stuff like SARS and MERS didn't spread by planes to a large extent, did they? So not banning them kind of made sense, until people learned more and their opinion changed.
Lockdowns helped halt the spread when the virus wasn't already everywehere, at least much better then they would now where the virus has spread across the globe, more or less.
And just yesterday, Germany and France reinstituted lockdowns. Things change, and I'd rather listen to people who change their minds with changed facts instead of broken clocks that a right twice per day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Something thought to be right was actually wrong. Happens all the time. And of course something thought to be wrong was actually right. This is why disallowing "misinformation" is utterly stupid.
This is not an argument to allow any fearmongering and actively spreading a harmful message. You can use this argument to say nothing should ever be forbidden/punished to say ever.
Yes!
Google has been taking an aggressive approach to Covid content since the start of the epidemic. I tried searching for previous articles regarding commentary on it about it on Google but they're now quite hard to find.
We had a news aggregator kicked out of Google Play because it "promoted misinformation" but it was simply the same headlines (and sources) Google News uses! It has since been reinstated. I'd seen other mentions of apps being removed for the same reasons, which I assume was done in an automated fashion.
There's also been commentary on the same kind of thing happening on YouTube for months for the general topic of Covid-19
That implies that local health authorities are in consensus with the WHO. What happens if local authorities disagree with the WHO? Can either viewpoint then be blocked?