YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

This sounds sounds like a very good (discrete) idea to me, well worthy of a dedicated HN thread of it's own, something like "What are the plausible societal pros and cons of forcing(!) social media companies to expose the implementations of their filtering and recommendation algorithms? What bad and good may(!) come of such a policy change?"

I think it could be argued that the way we as a community go about discussing world events is suboptimal. As it is, a commonly recurring pattern (here and elsewhere) is that some singular event occurs, a news story gets posted, and then we have the same general discussions/arguments that have been had many times before (here and elsewhere, many of them decades/centuries old), just in a somewhat differing context. Within these discussions, a large number of very important philosophical perspectives on the particular incidents appear in the comments, but are rarely discussed in depth. And then, time goes on, we all go to bed after having "had our say", and wake up the next day to do largely the same thing again. Rinse, repeat, day after month after year after decade.

I wonder...if we A/B tested a new, experimental approach, where rather than the genesis or focal point of the discussion being a news article about a specific event, instead we chose an abstract, philosophical topic as the primary topic of discussion, and then people posted instances of relevant events, and discussed those events in the context of the main philosophical idea...might these conversations bear more fruit, or fruit of a different kind?

Going further with this idea, might it also be plausibly beneficial to have some sort of a modified version of the HN Guidelines in place for these types of discussions, in order to encourage certain types of thinking (open minded, non-axiomatic, exploratory, minimized criticality and dismissiveness), and discourage others (excessive certainty and materialism, etc)?

Does this sound like a generally good idea or a bad idea?

The price we’re paying is not just that one correct idea. We’re giving up debate. That is expensive.

It seems obvious to me that humans… and I am one!… are not able to handle things that well. Often we have to look at outcomes to populations to really get a sense of what's going on, as we view things in this blindered way and are deeply persuadable in known, exploitable ways. And that becomes a meta-game: become immune to a particular crude argument, fall to a more multilayered argument, and so on.

A key factor here is this (in my opinion): conspiratorial nonsense is not nonsense. Even if it seems bonkers and useless, there's something about it that is serving a purpose, but it's very likely not the purpose that it 'says on the tin'. For instance, there is a great deal of 'nonsense' that exists for the purpose of goading humans on to acts of random terrorism, and for grooming humans to be an extension of an army from somewhere else. Building an army to destroy a country is a VERY high-value activity, but it's not done by showing up and going, HI! I represent the army of Kazakhstan! Please acquire a weapon and shoot your countrymen for me for the glory of country that is not you!

So it's done, by quite a few state and non-state actors, in different ways. And when you've got a global pandemic and the ability to propagandize your country's enemy and get 'em to normalize licking each others' nostrils… well, you do what you can.

Hence 'conspiratorial nonsense' toward nonsensical or nonexistent ends, that happens to fulfill a purpose other than what's argued by the conspiratorial nonsense. The key concept here is that it's possible to misinform on purpose towards a defined goal that's orthogonal to the apparent misinformation.

One VERY IMPORTANT aspect of this, as Facebook and Google have learned, is that if you're doing that and you have access to big data to inspect how your misinformation is affecting POPULATIONS where you can't directly get response data back from the targets, you can use the big data to ask questions like

"Which of these two arguments for hunting lizard aliens that are also pedophiles, most inclines the target towards murdering black people? Which accusation towards this political figure most inclines the target towards inciting civil war and overthrowing the government of the target's host country?"

And that's how it's done. Given sophisticated enough ability to interpret data, you can direct 'nonsense' VERY effectively towards explicit other goals which aren't hard to work out if you're not the target. You need the data, though, otherwise you're fumbling in the dark. Google and Facebook are complicit in this to the extent that they go, 'you gots the money, we gots the honey' and place themselves at the disposal of anybody wishing these services.

How are they going to deal with situations where health authorities in different countries have different positions? Like right now, Germany recommends masks and Sweden doesn't. Are they going to censor anti-mask videos in Germany and pro-mask videos in Sweden?