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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

701–710 of 933 posts

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#701
post #452

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…

I really hate this hand-wringing over supposed censorship.

The Internet has had to deal with trolls and cheaters from day one. If someone sends a packet that indicates they got a headshot in a multiplayer FPS, they could be cheating so we invented anti-cheat. If someone spams an email account claiming to be a Nigerian price, it doesn’t mean that’s true so we invented spam detection. If someone makes a blog post claiming product X changed their life, it could be an ad so we have ad detectors.

Year after year, people find new ways to manipulate online communities. The people who run them have an obligation to prevent them from becoming toxic.

Now we have powerful actors manipulating political discourse and suddenly the rules are different? It’s complicated but that’s what happens when you serve billion(s) of users.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#702

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 realities of censorship are and historically have been large net losses. That was one of the large premises of the founding of the United States, among many other ideals. So in the interest humanity and historical evidence, censorship is and will always be a bad idea. The best ideas will eventually win, as history has also shown us. Source: US constitution, Venezuelan history, Romanian history, British history, K…

I'm pretty sure current China would disagree with you given the amount of people they've raised from essentially peasantry to a modern middle class in the past generation.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, those people. As I said, they get tripped from time-to-time, but they modify their process when it happens. In that case, they had multiple intelligence agency sources feeding them the same bad data, so their cross-checks failed. They've down-sampled the reliability of those sources in subsequent years.

Everything about your response screams "naivete". The NYTimes role in society is packaging official narratives for mass consumption. Their MO is mindlessly repeating whatever the IC tells them. This is not a new concept [1]. [1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/orwells-proposed-introduc...

How are alternatives working out? Because we're watching people worry so much about an Orwellian future that they're running headlong into a Stephensonian future.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#704
post #631

The YouTube suggestion algorithm is the problem! Create a new account, watch any political video, and then click through the suggestions. Keep clicking through the suggestions and in hour you will be on some extremist nonsense. YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don…

The algorithm makes sense in certain cases, such as music or tv shows, but it's not a one size fits all solution.

Another issue is the use of autoplay (which is enabled by default in chrome on my phone), where they keep shoveling more content at you even if you didn't intend to watch more.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banning obvious bullshit, albeit akin to censorship, is NARCAN. This is the crucial comparison. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook do not promulgate free speech. They are driven by algorithms that prioritize certain information over others. Such algorithmic prioritizations are not platforms for free speech and removing harmful content from these algorithmcally-generated feeds is not the same as censoring speech in the…

Wrong - 1st Ammendment was already ruled to cover algorithims in cryptography export cases. You're trying to rationalize what you already feel is the truth. The definition of harmful content is already a tautology which belies horrifying implications because it puts agency of the reaction soley upon the "speech". It would mean that in Aparthiad contexts an interracial handshake would be responsible for a riot.

And Dred Scott was ruled to not have any rights since he was property, not a citizen. Doesn't mean it's true.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#706
post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to watch a political video. I have crap popping up all the time, "Watch this professor get destroyed by !" I know youtube is a shithole and yet it still surprises me. My son's favorite kid's show is only on YouTube so I created a new account, subscribed just to their channel and still inappropriate content shows up. How hard is this? I also can't block it for my daughter because she has school ass…

> I also can't block it for my daughter because she has school assignments that involve watching YouTube videos. Our school uses http://www.viewpure.com/ to avoid this. Also, I agree you don't even need to watch a political video to see political garbage on youtube. Last night they showed me some bizarre political conspiracy ad saying Pelosi and Harris are going to invoke the 25th amendment on Biden to make Harris th…

I regularily see shady ads as well. This is the actual outrage IMO. Before going off and create a corporate censorship network, they should at least apply some "standars" to what they let through on the ad side. But I guess it is all too late. The Circle proofs to be a pretty prophetic book.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#707

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…

People think that because it was their honest hope/belief that technology would work to amplify ONLY the kind of information they like: Vote liberal, open the borders, affirmative action everywhere, include tech elites in decision making, heavier taxes for everyone above my income bracket, condemn every country who is not a western liberal democracy. When they realized that technology is amplifying EVERYBODY voices f…

Good points. I also hoped that the internet would make everyone smarter by allowing anyone to read physics papers and watch videos on how to build a pc. But we are social creatures, so here I am posting on a message board instead.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#708
post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes United States, say it with me, United States My country suffered a literal coup as a consequence of US meddling in our internal affairs and hijacking our media, newspapers, radio, against the national interest and democratic values of the nation spreading literal fake news I'll let you guess which country I am talking about, because heaven knows there's not only…

Just wait until the CIA is considered the foreign affairs authority, and all information that disagrees with them is considered misinformation. The US government will be able to engage in as many coups as they want and Google and Facebook will help make sure nobody ever knows.

That already happened, basically. Anyone who talks about the CIA in anything but a positive light is a "conspiracy theorist" (their words). It's a criminal organization that has perpetrated an endless list of crimes against humanity, sponsored by the American taxpayer and undocumented money from terror campaigns. Now they have a happy little venture capital firm that invests in new tech, like google and facebook. What do you suppose the ROI is for those investments?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#709
post #631

The YouTube suggestion algorithm is the problem! Create a new account, watch any political video, and then click through the suggestions. Keep clicking through the suggestions and in hour you will be on some extremist nonsense. YouTube is the source of this problem, and their solution is censorship? It's ridiculous. Show people the videos they have subscribed or searched for, and that's it. The majority of people don…

No, the problem is that extremist content is a nonsense concept.

Specifically, there's no reliable way of determining whether content is "extremist content" because a lot of information that the political and religious extremes focus on is actually true information. It often these extreme views that provide unique insights and the most valuable information. So how - and moreover why - should Youtube try to sift through a physics lecture on metallurgy and attempt to differentiate it from a physics lecture on metallurgy.

There's often no way of knowing whether the lecture is being given by a college physics professor or a 9/11 truther, except by examining the contents - and both might be telling the truth. Heck the college physics professor could be a 9/11 truther and the truther could be a college professor... that doesn't mean that this lecture on metallurgy should be removed from the college's account.

The fact that some people can't tell the difference between an Einstein and a wannabe Einstein doesn't mean that we should censor them both.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about your response screams "naivete". The NYTimes role in society is packaging official narratives for mass consumption. Their MO is mindlessly repeating whatever the IC tells them. This is not a new concept [1]. [1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/orwells-proposed-introduc...

How are alternatives working out? Because we're watching people worry so much about an Orwellian future that they're running headlong into a Stephensonian future.

The difference between Orwell and Stephenson is that Orwell spent time as a police officer in Burma, and a solider in Spain. Stephenson does not understand the corrupting influence of power the way Orwell does.

And the alternatives are fantastic, for those who chose to use them intelligently.

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