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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

761–770 of 933 posts

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#761

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…

How is your comment substantively different from someone saying "I love freedom but..." and then proceeding to sing the virtues of how ignoring the 4th amendment will save us from terrorists? We've already gone down a very similar road once we we don't like where it leads. Turns out ignoring the 4th amendment didn't help us stop terrorists and now 20yr later the government is still ignoring the 4th amendment to our d…

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#762
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…

I'm pretty sure parent meant western Europe, not China and Russia. Who would assume someone means China and Russia when talking about countries with free speech?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#763
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…

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…

There's a button, "not interested". Click it. My youtube is mostly pretty nice. I get recommendations for cooking videos because I subscribe to and watch a couple of channels. I get recommendations for GDC videos, various programming videos. I mark videos as not interest often. And if there is something It think might give it the wrong idea I often right click and view in an incognito window. Have had very few issues keeping my youtube recommendations relatively clean, and I really enjoy some channels. Souped Up Recipes, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Coding Adventure, Veritasium, Kurzgesagt

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#764
post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Determining truth is a hard problem, and trusting huge corporations to arbitrate truth for us is extremely dangerous to our democracy[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/ZggCipbiHwE

OTOH, free speech is not a right on itself, but a tool for the betterment of society. If speech is used for a purpose opposed to that - to bring on fascism or risking our extinction - then it's natural, and necessary, to react against it.

> OTOH, free speech is not a right on itself, but a tool for the betterment of society.

This is only true for censors. There is no such thing as a "right in itself," there are things we agree will be rights, and that we choose to guarantee. You choose to not guarantee freedom of speech, and rationalize it as some sort of natural law.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You happen across a skyscraper with a politically charged message on its façade that you disagree with.

You can either:

A) Paint over it.

B) Surround the entire space around the message with hundreds of other messages -- lies -- in the same style and color, designed to sway people to an opposing ideology.

The same effect has been achieved in both scenarios. Which is more insidious?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#766
post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People responding to someone with "that's racist" isn't censorship. It's others exercising their free speech to strongly disagree with the points raised.

The end effect is the same, shutting down the conversation.

That just means it's a low value conversation. The end effect is very different. In my country there are anti-racism laws that /can/ put you in jail for saying something considered racist. Btw, I'm not totally against those laws. To say free speech has to be completely, 100% free, say /anything/ and any message you can think of, seems flawed to me.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#767
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the popu…

We aren't the same at all. In the last 10'000 years, we developed lactose tolerance, enabling us to herd cows for more than just meat. Only about 200 years ago, the first people with three arteries instead of two in their arms are showing up and recent studies seem to indicate that wisdom teeth are evolving away. The evolution of a species never stops, even if it gets a bit slow. And our brains may have changed in th…

How far could a new mutation have spread in the last 200 years though? Not far.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#768
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on the UK and German models of "free speech" where no one has an absolute right to say what they want - certain subjects such as Holocaust denial or promotion of terrorism are banned. You could argue that we have been on a slippery slope for a long time but you could equally argue the slippery slope is a fallacy. I think it's important to think about what the actual pu…

The idea of an arbiter of what is and isn't free speech is deeply repulsive to me. So is cough medicine. So is chemotherapy. I can't see every cell of the cancer but collectively, there's enough of it visible to shake me. Do you kill the poison with a lesser poison? Depends on your level of concern, I suppose. Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to r…

>>The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.

"Neither of those bans would ever apply to me" is a pretty revealing statement. In fact, it's almost so perfectly comical that I would give way better than even odds that your post was a parody if someone just read it to me out loud randomly.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a case involving human rights law? https://reason.com/2019/07/23/jessica-yaniv-da-silva-brazili...

That has nothing to do with expanded hate speech laws, and the in fact the provincial human rights council in British Columbia ruled against the complainant in the article, and ordered her to pay restitution to the salons. I assume the GGP is referring to the C-16 bill passed by the federal government of Canada in 2016, which added gender expression and identity to existing human rights laws on discrimination. I have…

You’re right, I was confusing the two issues. But this article from the cbc with commentary from two legal experts isn’t completely reassuring:

> Does the bill legislate the use of certain language? And could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?

>In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act. >“The misuse of gender pronouns, without more, cannot rise to the level of a crime,” she says. “It cannot rise to the level of advocating genocide, inciting hatred, hate speech or hate crimes … (it) simply cannot meet the threshold.”

>The Canadian Human Rights Act does not mention pronouns either. The act protects certain groups from discrimination.

>“Would it cover the accidental misuse of a pronoun? I would say it’s very unlikely,” Cossman says. “Would it cover a situation where an individual repeatedly, consistently refuses to use a person’s chosen pronoun? It might.”

>If someone refused to use a preferred pronoun — and it was determined to constitute discrimination or harassment — could that potentially result in jail time?

>It is possible, Brown says, through a process that would start with a complaint and progress to a proceeding before a human rights tribunal. If the tribunal rules that harassment or discrimination took place, there would typically be an order for monetary and non-monetary remedies. A non-monetary remedy may include sensitivity training, issuing an apology, or even a publication ban, he says.

>If the person refused to comply with the tribunal's order, this would result in a contempt proceeding being sent to the Divisional or Federal Court, Brown says. The court could then potentially send a person to jail “until they purge the contempt,” he says.

>“It could happen,” Brown says. “Is it likely to happen? I don’t think so. But, my opinion on whether or not that's likely has a lot to do with the particular case that you're looking at.”

>“The path to prison is not straightforward. It’s not easy. But, it’s there. It’s been used before in breach of tribunal orders.”

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identi...

[EDIT: added link]

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#770

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…

Your kid will be corrupted by society anyway. What's this whole thing about protecting children from the reality of the real world anyway? A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.

> Your kid will be corrupted by society anyway. What's this whole thing about protecting children from the reality of the real world anyway?

> A bit off topic but a serious question. What's your logical reasoning for blocking the content now. It's just slowing down what he will be able to see (by deliberately going around you) within a couple years. I never understood this with parents.

Children are not little adults. They're still developing and learning things that you and I would consider basic. It makes sense to delay their exposure to certain things until they have the maturity and knowledge to process them properly.

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