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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#301

Post by concordDance »

owlbynight wrote: post #174

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…

> 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 speech alone.

Why do people think this? A few selected anecdotes and some tiny numbers (1000 people liking a post talking about covid causing 5G? Tiny numbers)?

What is the end-game that is so feared?

If the people as a whole can't be trusted to make sensible decisions and judgements then abolish democracy and copy the Chinese system.

Or, if the problem is uninformed people, then adopt a representative democracy where a random sample of 1000 voters are chosen by sortition and metaphorically locked in a room with the candidates for the governing council for a month (as if they were a jury) after which they elect a handful to government.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#302

Post by Smithalicious »

owlbynight wrote: post #174

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…

If social media is poisonous and the powerful are using it to control ideas, the solution isn't to let the billionaire class social media giants be the arbiter of truth, methinks.

"misinformation" is indistinguishable from "thinks I think are false" which in turn is hard to distinguish from "things I disagree with".

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#303

Post by owlbynight »

keiferski wrote: post #278
owlbynight wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this solution possible with misinformation campaigns being waged against it from its inception? I'm not disagreeing with you on an ideological level, but this solution is pie in the sky. How do you propose this solution be enacted while the supporters it would need to come to fruition are actively being lobbied by the problem its supposed to solve?

I think it will occur naturally over the next few decades. Each misstep that Big Tech / Big Media makes chips off a tiny sliver of their edifice. Over time this will splinter into a thousand pieces, and some attempt to unify information across them will be invented and adopted. It’s easy to forget that the modern Internet itself is only about thirty years old. We’re still at the very, very early stages.

I was on the early Internet. I miss it greatly, but also, it was the wild west, which was awesome when I was essentially living in the woods secluded from the outside world. The freedom was intoxicating. It ended up shaping my entire life.

I've watched the Internet grow and evolve into what it is and spent the majority of my free time participating in it from 1993 until today and probably until I die.

The thing is, the problem has always existed but its now being scaled up. There were kids pretending to be adults and puffing up their chests at the expense of decency. There was child porn. There were racists. There were pockets of criminals. There weren't many flat out idiots because using the Internet required at least a mononom of intellect to participate.

Yes, it's still early for the Internet, but America is just getting dumber while the Internet is getting easier and easier to use. How does it get better before it gets much worse?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#304

Post by kortilla »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #284
darkerside wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Happy to engage you in another forum, which would probably be more productive. Ping me if you'd like to video chat. 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: w…

Your thesis is based on the notion that “society is unstable” more than ever before. How are you measuring that?

Despite tons of noise in social media, real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west. The least amount of violence, lowest extreme poverty, highest disposable income, etc etc.

In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today. The headlines and discussions on social media today now heavily surround parsing Trumps words and arguing about how he’s racist and doing things wrong.

Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever (barring recent economic instability caused by COVID).

Some questions about the US?

- when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#305

Post by raxxorrax »

onion2k wrote: post #157
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #115

Yay, this is great, and should be used for everything! /s If we used this for medical advice in my country, this would make it very funny... at the start of the epidemic, our government "experts" said: - "healthy people don't need masks" ...and youtube would censor all the "fearmongering paranoics" advocating for mask use. Then on some random spring day, our government makes a new rule: - "you need a mask and gloves…

And youtube would censor everybody saying that masks don't help healthy people. There's a mile-wide chasm between posting an opinion that differs from the official government line and posting something that's deliberate misinformation designed to harm people. YouTube are only removing the latter. The article actually quotes a YouTube spokesman saying as much " A YouTube spokesman told Reuters that general discussions…

Now I have concerns about the vaccine...

This is how it works with modern information spread. Of course you can have concerns and you should be able to state them openly. Any doctor that wouldn't have concerns without a long term clinical study does lie.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#306

Post by paul_f »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #115

Yay, this is great, and should be used for everything! /s If we used this for medical advice in my country, this would make it very funny... at the start of the epidemic, our government "experts" said: - "healthy people don't need masks" ...and youtube would censor all the "fearmongering paranoics" advocating for mask use. Then on some random spring day, our government makes a new rule: - "you need a mask and gloves…

What we need is a Ministry of Truth to decide what is real and what is misinformation.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#307

Post by bufferoverflow »

tony101 wrote: post #111
anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zzzz. Yeah that's a problem, but come back with a proposal about how to deal with the existing misinformation and bad faith problem.

Demonetize and demote these videos, without taking them down entirely. Make them accessible through search but do not recommend them to people who are not specifically looking for the videos.

What "these videos" though? How do you determine which ones are misinformation, when WHO was demonstrably wrong at least 3 times in this pandemic? What's your source of infallible truth?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#308

Post by hef19898 »

foepys wrote: post #300
hef19898 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is part of a public, non-state-controlled entity. As such, it has close to nothing to do with democracy as a form of government. It does have a social impact, which then influences democracy. As such, Youtube, and FB and Twitter and all the others, do have a responsibility for all of us. And they have to be held accountable for their actions, up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anyth…

> Them now changing that is a good thing. I agree but it's not selfless or altruism. In the EU they are one law away from being effectively shut down. The EU commission is eyeing the behavior of social media networks for a while now and the increasing misinformation and radicalization of groups like white supremacists or QAnon pose a very real threat to democracy and society. If the social media giants like Facebook,…

Oh, I would never go as far as thinking they did this for some altruistic reason. Rather that they finally reached a point where the benefit-risk equation tipped to the other side.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#309

Post by raxxorrax »

garbagetime wrote: post #24
michaelterryio wrote: post #22

We’ve been searching for a rigorous way to determine scientific consensus on claims but I don’t think we realized the answer was YouTube’s management.

Science doesn't work by consensus, anyway.

It actually does. Something is called scientific consensus if a large group of independent! researchers come the same conclusion.

A far more common problem science faces are the people that claim to know the truth.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#310

Post by noahtallen »

cheph wrote: post #292
hef19898 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube is part of a public, non-state-controlled entity. As such, it has close to nothing to do with democracy as a form of government. It does have a social impact, which then influences democracy. As such, Youtube, and FB and Twitter and all the others, do have a responsibility for all of us. And they have to be held accountable for their actions, up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anyth…

What I don't see in your response is an actual argument for how YouTube doing something which not democratic is good for democracy. > up to know they just raked in the profits and gave shit about anything else. Them now changing that is a good thing. Censoring unpopular and controversial views on their platform makes it more attractive for advertisers, which is good for YouTube's bottom line. This action in no way in…

I think the idea is to censor untrue and dangerous ideas rather than unpopular ideas. Yes, determining that is challenging. But denying COVID, for example, is very dangerous to all of society. Thousands of people are dying because of COVID deniers.

To me, this is theoretically similar as if a massive video campaign was messaging you to drink bleach. I’m sure that sort of video is against YouTube’s terms of service — at least, I would hope that it is!

The difference is really that some lunatic could stand in Times Square and scream that we should all drink bleach. But in that public forum, no one would take them seriously, and plenty would deride them. But with a great production value, paid influencers, just the right wording and messaging, you can manipulate social networks into spreading very dangerous information and actually making people believe things that can kill them. I think that problem, gone unchecked, leads to serious consequences and it would be in the best interest of society as a whole to fix it.

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