The Crime of Curiosity

Nobody has to use YouTube. There are many other video hosting/watching platforms. None of them are especially popular because they get filled with a lot of junk, because they attract the people who can't host their content on YouTube.

In a way, this dynamic is an effective, natural check on moderation. If moderation primarily removes stuff that most people think is junk, then alternatives competing on reduced moderation will be junk. If moderation removes valuable stuff that lots of people want, then other platforms that host it instead will receive more traffic and legitimacy.

It's kind of like the Reddit vs. Voat thing. Reddit isn't great, but Voat ended up a cesspool, because Reddit's biggest exoduses were driven by hate groups.

> In general, I think I understand where the criticism is coming from. Every time I post on social media about being deplatformed, banned, or silenced, someone chimes in with their own story about being banned because “big government is trying to suppress the fact that echinacea cures Covid” or whatever. Spoiler, echinacea doesn’t cure Covid, but this is the kind of crazy nonsense my work is compared to. Are you a credential person? Great, I’m a scientist with a PhD from one of the top universities in the world. I’ve worked at NASA. I’ve published a number of papers.

I couldn't care less for this shit. "Yes I understand the necessity of censorship. But not me. I've worked at NASA. I've published 'a number of papers.'" Lol.

> The problem isn’t my thoroughly detailed research, which I would love to have critiqued in good faith. The problem is big tech companies making billions of dollars aren’t capable of doing basic analysis of scientific work, or hiring a team that can, which is why the best they’re capable of on the pandemic front, for example, is attaching a link to the CDC website on every post that mentions “Covid” or “vaccine.”

Indeed. They are not capable of doing basic analysis of every video, or hiring a team that can. Billions of dollars aren't enough to hire a team to analyze every video on youtube.

AFAIK, variants are not "resistant" to vaccines, they are just different, so a vaccine targeting the previous strand will be less effective because it doesn't match perfectly.

There is no better vaccine than the one for the current dominant variants. You can't really target future mutations because you don't know what the future mutations will be. You can imagine restricting the best, most current vaccine to the rich to limit escape mutations but besides the obvious ethical concerns, the virus will mutate anyways. Better vaccinate everyone with the best, because the less people infected, the less chances you give the virus to mutate.

Unfortunately, the "echinacea cures Covid" claim probably isn't true, but the CDC and YouTube people seem to have decided that ANY claims about therapeutics must be suppressed. There isn't any objective reason for this; it's purely political side-taking.

As for your research: are you saying there are no forums where your work can be "critiqued in good faith"? Or just that YouTube isn't that forum? Because you're right -- it isn't.