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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

531–540 of 933 posts

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#531
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.

The problem with “hate speech” is that increasingly more things are being added to that umbrella. It’s kind of similar to the way that “think of the children” is often abused to cover all sorts of things.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#532

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…

So YouTube becomes "peer reviewed", accepting only proven research. BFD. They are just going to lose out on all the ad revenue for videos that will go elsewhere.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#533

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…

> What is the end-game that is so feared?

Personally, I am afraid of very large media companies making AIs that have utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans without their consent.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#534
post #517

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…

> I do not like the idea that hard, easily proven facts can be overwhelmed by voluminous bullshit. In principle this sounds agreeable, in practice it is often not that easy because things get muddied fast as soon as politics are involved. I'm very skeptical/opposed to this particular measure, and others like it, because well-intentioned people are also fallible. Disclaimer: I work at Alphabet, but this is strictly my…

Interestingly, I'm skeptical of Alphabet for exactly the same reasons :)

I feel like regarding tech giants handling relatively unprecedented expansions of social media and broadcasting, it wasn't up to you whether politics got involved. As soon as third parties started to work out exploits to your conceptual system, ya got involved.

'The algorithm' has a lot to do with this, but at heart it's an exploit and not the algorithm itself. Until the algorithm is actually intelligent and can think about itself and what it's doing, you and the company you work for are exploitable. As such, you may feel democratization of media and the ability for individuals to broadcast and information-search is vital to societies and humanity as a whole, and you'd be right, but that's not what you're doing. So long as your work is exploitable in this way, you become partisan, you are just blind to WHO you are being partisan for. And we've seen some pretty wild consequences out of the range of possible outcomes this produces.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#535
post #482
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'n…

He actively discouraged mask use. Fauci and the Surgeon General said wearing a mask was more likely to get you sick because you would touch your face more.

"You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Adams said. "Folks who don't know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus," he added.

https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-need-masks-pe...

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minis…

Disallowing certain information be shared, excepting libel/slander/fraud/privacy invasion/classified data and other private data, is censorship. The onus is on you to prove the non-binary nature of a very ordinary concept.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#537
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Source? From what I remember the message very early on wasn't that masks don't work, it was "save the masks for the front line workers"

FWIW: Early news about COVID-19 and criticism is much easier to find on DuckDuckGo than Google.

> In an interview on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" on Monday, Adams said wearing face masks could actually increase a person's risk of contracting the coronavirus.

> "You can increase your risk of getting it by wearing a mask if you are not a health care provider," Adams said. "Folks who don't know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus," he added.

> Adams' comments Monday reiterate his blaring tweet from the weekend, urging people to "STOP BUYING MASKS." He said that they were "NOT effective" to the general public and noted that the increased demand in masks puts medical professionals at risk.

> The World Health Organization joined TikTok last week to provide accurate information about COVID-19. In one of two videos posted, it explained most people should not wear masks and provided instructions for how to properly wear one.

https://www.businessinsider.com/americans-dont-need-masks-pe...

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#538
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. This is of course false. We have hate speech laws for example.

which are not a good solution

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#540
"YouTube says it already removes content that disputes the existence or transmission of COVID-19, promotes medically unsubstantiated methods of treatment, discourages people from seeking medical care or explicitly disputes health authorities’ guidance on self-isolation or social distancing."

Fortunately, there has been worldwide expert consensus on all of these things since day 1 of the pandemic, so YouTube does not find itself in the difficult position of acting as the arbiter of truth.

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