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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#601

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jackhack wrote: post #528
Aeolun wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.

Nonsense. Almost free speech is censorship by another name. Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility. Some topics are verboten. When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe. Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK. Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase…

OK, so assuming that free speech must remain inviolate, which I don't agree with, as free speech always has limits, do you see the current state of constant misinformation working as intended? Is the United States as the founding fathers intended it?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#602

Post by hartator »

dogma1138 wrote: post #571
paganel wrote: post #519

The Chief Scientist of the WHO still believed as recently as August that the mortality rate for this virus was still at 1% [1], even though Sweden had published its first data at the start of that month saying that the mortality rate in their case was around 0.4-0.6%. I've seen people mentioning a more recent CDC number of 0.35% mortality. So, when even the Chief Scientist of the WHO doesn't know what she's talking a…

Mortality rates change, they are also dependent environmental factors including population genetics, diet, prevalence of pre-existing conditions and the quality and availability of medical care. The statistics around case mortality rate and overall mortality rate also changes as new and more reliable data is gathered and analyzed, the WHO estimates was quite likely “correct” for the time frame and data they had avail…

The WHO was arguing until February that covid-19 wasn’t transmissible person to person. They don’t know what they are doing.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#603

Post by 34679 »

There was a point in time when the CDC were saying that masks are innefective at controlling the spread. I assume that was to mitigate hoarding in an effort to keep medical professionals supplied.

If I had made a YouTube video explaining the effectiveness of masks during that time, whose video would have been removed, mine or the CDC's? Who would've made that decision and what method would they have used to reach their conclusion?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#604

Post by TeMPOraL »

shadowgovt wrote: post #551
TeMPOraL wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slippery slope is a fallacy only if the slope isn't, in fact, slippery.

No, it's always a fallacy. If A leads to B, B leads to C, and C is bad, argue that people shouldn't do B, not A. Especially if A also leads to D, which is good.

If jumping out of a window usually leads to uncontrolled descent and flight into terrain, which then leads to experiencing a very large and sudden velocity change, which is followed by death from the injuries caused by said ∆v/∆t, I'm definitely going to argue against jumping out of a window. Sure, for the above A->B->C->D(eath) chain, there are many ways to prevent it from reaching the last node, but the default behavior is still A->B->C->D, so it's fair to argue against doing A without evident mitigations of steps B and/or C.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#605

Post by cc81 »

jackhack wrote: post #528
Aeolun wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Censorship and other forms of regulating free speech is simply never a good solution. The almost free speech on the other side of the ocean seems to be working pretty well. You get to say anything that isn’t actively harmful to others, but you won’t be able to advertise bleach as a way to get Corona out of your system.

Nonsense. Almost free speech is censorship by another name. Working "pretty well?" Sure, unless one tries to talk about things that really matter and strays outside the dotted lines of permissibility. Some topics are verboten. When you say "other side of the ocean," I assume you're talking about Europe. Try to discuss the muslim rape gangs in the UK. Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase…

>Try to discuss the surge in grenade attacks and many-fold increase in rape in Sweden.

Why would you not be able to do that in Sweden? How is it limited?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#606

Post by Applejinx »

leothecool wrote: post #533
concordDance wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But that's not AIs. That's 'the algorithm', and has long since already been made. Hell, it was made in Germany in the 1930s: it's called 'radio'. Radio is STILL used to change the behavior of humans.

I'm not nearly as afraid of the very large media companies doing this as I am of HUMANS taking the controls of such a machine and using it for that very purpose. Very large companies, AIs, nations are aggregates and don't inherently take wild radical positions.

Individual humans do. We're the random factor, the chaos feeding the genetic algorithm, we're supposed to get up to some crazy extreme stuff that will sink or float on the larger scale depending on how it affects society. But when we are able to amplify our individual whims to the scale of companies or countries, which is ALWAYS through using these utility functions intended to change the behavior of humans whether that's exploiting YouTube or radio, there's trouble.

I'm not nearly as worried about AI or aggregate entities like corporations. I'm worried about the existence of these utility functions, and before radio it was 'the broadsheets' and yellow journalism, and before then maybe it was nefarious clay tablets or papyrus.

Power corrupts, and individual whims aren't good models for healthy societies. We keep rediscovering this over and over, and sometimes the civilization collapses, and sometimes it doesn't. Here's hoping if we do get AI, it has some insights into this and why its own existence hinges upon not blowing up the underlying levels (of corporations, of individual people, of cells and the well-being of the individual people).

I feel like the 'thine arm/subgroup/demographic is unclean, cast it out and burn it cos it's eeeevil' is far more often an individual human perspective, amplified by these utility functions because somebody LET that human do that.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#607

Post by tw04 »

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…

I don't know how this ever became an issue of "free speech" in the first place. This isn't a matter of free speech and never has been.

If you call up Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern in the middle of afternoon drive hour and he doesn't like what you have to say, he's going to hang up the phone on you (assuming you could get through in the first place). This is no different - google has absolutely no obligation to host your garbage on their site.

If you want to post conspiracy theories, go buy a server from dell, pay for a business line from your ISP, and setup your own site, and host your own content. If the content you're hosting violates laws, it'll probably get taken down.

You're free to say whatever you want, nobody else is REQUIRED to listen to you, host you, or advertise you and never has been. About the only way out of that box is if you can prove they were discriminating against you because you were a member of a protected class (in the US) and not because of the content of your data.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#608

Post by summerlight »

paganel wrote: post #519

The Chief Scientist of the WHO still believed as recently as August that the mortality rate for this virus was still at 1% [1], even though Sweden had published its first data at the start of that month saying that the mortality rate in their case was around 0.4-0.6%. I've seen people mentioning a more recent CDC number of 0.35% mortality. So, when even the Chief Scientist of the WHO doesn't know what she's talking a…

I don't buy mortality numbers around 0.3 ~ 0.5%; South Korea's data shows 1.76% mortality rate[1], which probably has collected one of the most comprehensive COVID-19 case database in the world as well as good medical infrastructures.

[1] https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a20501000000&bid=00...

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#609

Post by umvi »

shadowgovt wrote: post #562
lr4444lr wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy functions with an educated electorate. If you're saying that YouTube has to act as gatekeeper ban non-libellous, legal misinformation, you're passing a grim judgment on your fellow citizens which implies that the battle for the country is already lost.

Our fellow citizens elected a reality TV star as president of a country with nuclear weapons. People are passing judgment for, I think, fully rational reasons. The Atlantic has had several good articles on how fundamental societal trust is dissociating in America. The election of Trump isn't the only aspect of it, but it did scare about half the country into thinking the other half isn't rational in the same way they…

> Our fellow citizens elected a reality TV star as president of a country with nuclear weapons.

But not the majority of our fellow citizens (by popular vote).

Though you could argue that a large % of democratic voter base (voters looking for handouts) is also uneducated.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#610

Post by hartator »

blhack wrote: post #595

There was a period of time when mask wearing was considered misinformation: https://youtu.be/RxbDhECanU8 There was a time when vitamin D correlation was also considered misinformation. Maybe we shouldnt be looking to a group at YouTube to tell us what is true and what isn’t.

Yes, it’s really about blinding trusting one source.
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