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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#481

Post by btbuildem »

dandare wrote: post #186

Now think about all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be truth. MK ULTRA, Dark Alliance, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, COINTELPRO, PRISM, you name it. Would these be banned ("fact checked") from YouTube, Facebook or Twitter under these new rules? On the other hand, there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes (Russia) are weaponizing social media, using troll farms, puppet accounts and fake news,…

> What is the correct solution here

Pull the plug on the mega-services. Take down FB for example, physically destroy the data centers.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#482

Post by scoutt »

clinta wrote: post #433
jmull wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think it makes sense that as we learned about how the virus spreads, and as the number of people infected exploded, that the mask recommendation might change? I think you're trying to mock scientific experts, but what kind of expert would NOT be willing to change their recommendation based on new, strong, contrary information? Of course experts would prefer not to make a recommendation until all the facts a…

This is not what happened, not in the US anyway. Fauci, after the recommendations changed, admitted that masks were discouraged to prioritize them for first responders[1]. So we have government health experts publicly saying they engaged in misinformation. But they are the experts against which every other opinion is to be judged as misinformation. 1: https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...

I am not in favor or against Fauci or his comments (I am not even american), and I am not a linguist either so perhaps you can help me:

Is "not recommended" == "discouraged"?

"He also acknowledged that masks were initially not recommended to the general public so that first responders wouldn’t feel the strain of a shortage of PPE."

As far as I understand, 'discouraging' is to saying publicly "Do not buy masks" and 'not recommending' might be just that, as in, not saying "Go and buy a masks or you'll spread the disease".

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#483

Post by rmrfstar »

dgb23 wrote: post #452
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…

> things are going to need to be sacrificed I say this for emphasis, not to personally attack you: Whenever I read or hear this it makes me extremely suspicious, because it often doesn't come from those who will do the sacrifice themselves. Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. Perpetrators of lies will even hide behind this, and create a false image of rebellious heroi…

> This is from the top of my head but there are certainly other people who have smarter ideas that don't involve straight up censorship.

So what can you conclude about the private intent of key decision makers?

I find that imputing malign intent often improves my ability to forecast outcomes. Whether there is actual bad faith almost doesn't matter if the assumption improves forecasts.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#484

Post by Fnoord »

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 have free speech on a platform like YouTube. It is Google's walled garden, with Google's set of rules. Free speech and censorship is for and by the government, and it was never absolute to begin with; always been a nuance.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#485

Post by raxxorrax »

Shish2k wrote: post #60
s3r3nity wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree on this one - authoritative bodies can be wrong / misled as well, and shouldn't be the only arbiters of truth. Ex: The WHO made many mistakes during COVID, including faulty recommendations and (alleged) influence by a governing body to limit bad press. [1] (Before the ad hominem attacks come in, I'm obviously very pro vaccine...but against censorship and generally distrust authoritative bodies of most kinds.) […

> authoritative bodies can be wrong / misled as well, and shouldn't be the only arbiters of truth I agree, but with a very large caveat - the human brain is not good at probabilities, it basically only recognises “outcome A is guaranteed” and “outcomes A and B are equally likely”. So how much credit should we give to an authority who is correct 90% of the time? 90% isn’t great when it comes to life-or-death matters,…

I think there is merit to the argument that if you cannot guarantee 100% correctness, that you cannot strip people of their ability to form their opinion themselves. And that requires access to different perspectives.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#486

Post by mistermann »

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…

I liked your blog post, this part stuck out to me:

> Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops), and social organizations like churches and civic clubs see fewer and fewer members attend their meetings. The skills that are increasing? Reflex time. Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems. Basically the skills we need to interact with our entertainment. More and more, Indians and Chinese – people coming from cultures who have been shut out of the technical world until recently – are writing software for hardcore western appetites to consume.

"Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems"

I wonder about this. I speculatively propose that there also seems to be a curious inability (or unwillingness) for people who happen to be blessed with the skill of abstract thinking, to apply that skill to the greater world (the complex system we have built for ourselves to live within). I would say that abstract thinking, done right, allows the one wielding it the ability to step out of the ~axiomatic frame in which they live, and use to evaluate the world with a relatively clean mind - to set their individual political beliefs and preferences aside and consider things from a disinterested 3rd party perspective. At least to some degree. And I think mass social media, including forums like this one, likely contribute in significant ways that we do not currently understand. Whether a change in our aggregate ability has taken place over time, I have no opinion, but an ambitious person could likely pick up on it if it had by reviewing conversations from a decade ago or so.

> 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.

This seems like the kind of abstract thinking (disconnection from the specific object level characteristics of the problem) that we need more of. Do you happen to have any theories on what steps we should be considering to get us out of this mess, that could plausibly be applied at national or planetary scale (or, know of any formal or informal organizations that are working on such ideas)?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#487

Post by excerionsforte »

I question what constitutes censorship here to people? Is all censorship is bad? Moderation is bad? Should Hacker News in particular not have rules to censor content that does not follow rules? Censorship has and will always be part of our lives. The problem is the application of it.

I applaud YouTube, Twitter and FB primarily for trying to not facilitate distribution of bullshit all because free speech. Free speech has limits in everyone's house.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#488

Post by 0-_-0 »

pzmTWLwfwJ wrote: post #126
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…

Isn't this how science works, you have new information and you use it to make a better decision.

You won't get new information if you ban anything that disagrees with the old information

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#489

Post by superkuh »

This is hardly the only thing or topic that youtube bans and will continue to ban. Youtube is extremely censorous and it's not just things that are 'bad'. This fits entirely within their existing behavior and is nothing novel. It isn't going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's just turning up the temp on the frog in the pot.

Yes, people do need to stop centralizing in a single corporate entity to communicate. But is banning vaccine misinformation the reason to do it? No.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#490

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

dandare wrote: post #186

Now think about all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be truth. MK ULTRA, Dark Alliance, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, COINTELPRO, PRISM, you name it. Would these be banned ("fact checked") from YouTube, Facebook or Twitter under these new rules? On the other hand, there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes (Russia) are weaponizing social media, using troll farms, puppet accounts and fake news,…

We're too concerned with edge cases to justify the absolute nightmare we are in with regards to information. For every "true" conspiracy theory there are millions of junk ones - of course some will be partially correct.

We are so afraid of losing "one correct idea" that we allow orders of magnitude more bad ones to flourish and drown out good ideas anyway.

Dealing with foreign powers abusing the system would be easy if the current administration didn't benefit from it.

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