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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#321

Post by dtech »

jstanley wrote: post #288
dtech wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can use this argument to say nothing should ever be forbidden/punished to say ever. Yes!

Ok, so everyone should be allowed to broadcast, promote and advertise: "all white people are inherently evil and criminal and should all be exterminated, go out and shoot every and kill every white person you see!"?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#322

Post by lodovic »

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…

The real problem is that people are looking for solid medical advice on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. No amount of censorship is going to change that.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#323

Post by freeone3000 »

j8hn wrote: post #210
nso95 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lied because they didn't want medical professionals to run out of masks

For a while I assumed they lied as well. Now, looking back I'm not so sure. There really wasn't much scientific evidence of masks being effective for respiratory diseases.

Putting aside the knee-jerk response of "of course a mask that covers your disease holes is protection against giving other people your disease"...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121... (2016) on the role of (incidental) face coverings to prevent population-level disease at large gatherings.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190903134732.h... (2019) on the role of personal protective equipment on stopping contraction of respiratory disease (flu).

And to top it off: https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/65/11/1934/4068747 (2017) meta-analysis, including a controlled section on effectiveness on population face mask use to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV.

We had the evidence.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#324

Post by nl »

keiferski wrote: post #236
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…

The solution is decentralized, verifiable forms of authority. Not unelected, unaccountable corporations that selectively (and with repeated obvious bias) choose what is “true.” Especially not YouTube, of all places, who has about as much authority as McDonalds, as far as I’m concerned. That’s it. No attempt to have a single source of authoritative information is going to work post-Internet. The cat is already out of…

Why is this a solution.

No one doubts Alan Jones identity for example.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#325

Post by watwut »

concordDance wrote: post #301
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 decisi…

I dont think issue is uninformed people or people in general not making sensible decisions.

Large issue is euphemisms we use and collective inability to call spade a spade. Misinformation about covid does not randomly happen because uneducated Johny randomly something something. It happens, because well educated people intentionally spread it as a way to acquire or keep power. It also happens, because Youtube algorithms are easy to use by smart educated actor in order to promote whatever that person want to promote. And the people who put time and effort into this tend to be overwhelmingly bad actors.

I watched "triumph of will" once and then I was getting holocaust denial videos suggested for months. I was not getting history or lectures tho. After a while that went down. Then, I watched some gaming videos and started to get such materials again.

That is to point out that for whatever reason, youtube itself is promoting these things. It is not "people in general", I sure as hell was not seeking these materials. And maybe if we have been able to admit out loud that it is not just some teenagers cosplaying white supremacists or stupid hippy moms promoting anti-vaccins, but instead well organized political groups pressing for own agenda, we would be better off.

Because current discussion about speech is absurdely naive.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#326

Post by save_ferris »

kortilla wrote: post #304
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west

This isn't universally true in the US. Millions lost their homes in the great recession and never fully recovered, it's just easy to forget that the American economy doesn't work for everyone when it does work for you. Now millions more face eviction and starvation amidst a major public health crisis.

> In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today.

True, but mass shootings were unfathomable in the 70's and happen at an alarming rate today. To your point, we've largely become desensitized to those stories because they just happen so often now. I think that the patterns of violence have shifted, not the presence of violence.

> 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

I disagree with this too. Wealth inequality is skyrocketing and has been for many years. Average life expectancy has been declining in the US. Our current president has discussed running for a 3rd term and preemptively declined to accept the results of a Presidential election overseen by his own government. Has that ever happened before?

> 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?

These questions say more about the government's ability to protect its members than providing insight into the stability of society. Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in 2017 during a practice session for a congressional baseball game, but survived. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011 and survived. There are numerous attempts at these things that we'll surely never know about.

It's also worth pointing out that a group plotted to kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan and try her for treason. Law enforcement officials interviewed about that case largely said they'd never seen anything like that before.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#327

Post by raxxorrax »

hef19898 wrote: post #317
raxxorrax wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding them accountable by giving them more power sounds like a losing strategy. Because that is exactly what the "pressure on big tech" has done in favor of classical publishers that thank them by favoring their censorious actions in articles.

They already have all the power you can think of when it comes to the content on their platforms. They just use it differently now.

There was an understanding that they don't remove content they disagree with and would get criticism in return if they do. Now people want them to do exactly that. That is far worse in my opinion, especially for those without power.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#328

Post by dekken_ »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #224
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…

> ...what YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary... BTW, "slippery slope" was intended to be an example of fallacious thinking. Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad." I'm not bringing this up (just) to be pedantic; the overwhelming evidence to date is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get any of…

The DMCA isn't political? Hard disagree.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#329

Post by owlbynight »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #297
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…

You don't hate the idea of censorship. You openly support it.

I don't believe that censorship from a 10,000 foot view is a binary state. You're thinking that I support redaction, I suspect; probably because it's hard to represent my beliefs in a few lines of text.

My view is that attempting to convert facts -- delivered by the scientific method -- to fiction by way of purposeful misinformation is a more corrosive form of censorship than showing the door to a comparatively miniscule number of who-knows-whos seeking to corrupt our agreed upon truths for their own benefit.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#330

Post by ben_w »

concordDance wrote: post #301
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 decisi…

> Or, if the problem is uninformed people, then adopt a representative democracy where a random sample of 1000 voters are chosen by sortition

I can see why that would help with corruption, but I’m not sure why it would help with a population being uninformed, let alone misinformed.

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