This is simply wrong. Now, we are slowly moving towards to communist regimes.
YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#322YouTube is a private company, not a public service. Anti-vax is not a protected class of people, and so there is no law that says YouTube cannot discriminate against them. As a company, they've decided to take this path. They don't have to justify it. If that makes you angry, boycott them. Don't conduct business with them, which includes watching their content and ads. And if you think that YouTube is large enough an…
A private company shouldn't get to pick and choose what opinions are valid. YouTube is not an arbiter of truth, and there is no universal law that says YouTube's moderators will always be correct. As a massive corporation, when they decide to take the path of banning critics of Google, pro-Palestinian activists, feminists and so on, the other companies will follow suit. They don't have to justify it, because almost no-one will care.
If that makes you angry, go convince people that vaccines are safe and effective. You use the internet to out-argue anti-vaxxers, which should be easy because they're so wrong and ideological.
And if you think that YouTube is large enough and a big enough monopoly that it should be treated as a public service and subject to the rules that apply to public services, then either nationalize it so that it is, or break it up so that there's competition in the market.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#323I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is…
The main problem is that you think you need open discussion and public debates on this topic. You don't. That is not a movie or a painting, it's science. You need research, proof, scrutiny. This is a job and it's done by professionals.
Moderate voices, voices of reason, voices you like, voices you don't like, opinions, ... are irrelevant, useless, not needed, and just add noise. This noise, in all its forms and shapes is detrimental to the only thing that really matters and has value - what the actual researchers and scientists are communicating back to the public.
Opinions, wish-beliefs, convictions are something Reality doesn't concern itself with.
Think of it that way - when the plane is falling due to some technical problem, will you open facebook to scout for opinions and rally support, or will you just sit you bottom down and do as you're told by the cabin crew? What about during some surgical procedure - are you going to pop open a youtube stream so that your followers can judge and guide the surgeon?
Anyway, too late, too little. Damage has been done. And it's not really youtube or the social network's faults. Even without them, stupidity would find another way to make itself visible.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#324My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth. The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.
In addition to playing into anti-vaxxers’ belief that they are being silenced for nefarious purposes, reducing their arguments’ visibility also reduces the likelihood someone will publish a well-reasoned counterargument. Skeptic videos might be disseminated on sites frequented solely by those willing to believe them, and they will be less exposed to dissenting opinions.
I think by now we should understand that it usually takes an order of magnitude more effort to counter-act a false claim than it takes to make it in the first place. If your proposed approach was viable there shouldn't be people around today saying that vaccines cause autism, as the original paper that made that claim has been debunked many, many, times. And yet, that lie is still extremely pervasive in society and directly causing harm to people.
Part of this is because of recommendation algorithms on social media sites like Youtube getting people into positive feedback loops. If you find a anti-vaxx video and Youtube recommends you two videos, one re-enforcing the video you've just seen (making you feel smart for having found and accepted the information in the original video) and one debunking it (which makes you feel stupid for having wasted your time on the original video), which do you think the average person is more likely to pick? Eventually the algorithm will "naturally" pick up that people watching anti-vaxx videos don't want to see videos debunking those views and will never show them to people watching anti-vaxx videos. The only way to solve this paradox is to blanket ban the anti-vaxx videos.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#325My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth. The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.
Yup, the Streisand effect is real. Tyrion Lannister said it best - when you cut out a man's tongue, you're not proving him a liar. You're just proving that you fear what he has to say.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#326YouTube/Facebook/Twitter have proven that anonymized free speech doesn't work. You have no way of knowing if the discourse is being generated by trolls/bots/foreign actors.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#327My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth. The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.
That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One of my family members is also very hesitant to get the vaccine and gets all kind of anti-vaccine propaganda through various groups and channels. She takes that content as "reasonable" and "potentially true" even tho basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid, which is…
There's a third option of actually engaging in the discussion. You know, actually investing the efforts of silencing anti-vaxers into explaining the truth instead. And it's not like that option is unfathomable to the media. When the truth is aligned with their agenda, they are already experts in "fact-checking" and pointing out where their opponents are wrong.
The rules of debate say it's always better to refute the main argument and to address their issues. If you resort to ad-hominem attacks, appeal to authority, or just plain censorship, to me it is a confession that you do not have better information to add to the debate. Which implies that I'm right.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#328ITT: Hacker News comment section continues to boast about how awful they are
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#329My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth. The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.
==She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.== Sounds like she has already made up her mind, in which case I’m not sure it matters if the content is moderated or not. It’s possible she will find whatever reinforces the decision she’s already made. ==The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas.== This sounds good, but is it true? The bad idea exists toda…
> The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas.
So this is sort of meta isn't it? The easy phrase that sounds good gets a lot of traction, but actually proving whether it's true, long term, is a difficult problem!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law - I'm not calling BS on the phrase we're discussing, just that we don't know!
Meanwhile back in the real world, a friend of ours died of COVID yesterday, leaving behind a husband and son. Pretty sure she was not vaccinated. She was relatively young and in good shape.
Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content
#330On one hand, you can claim that YouTube is being proactive against what they perceive to be a problem and that's something.
On the other hand, they don't choose to be proactive against copyrighted material - they just comply with the law when the law comes knocking and that's that. It simply doesn't make sense for them to allow the law to do its job in one place and then be overly proactive in another. At the very least, it undermines their argument that they're only doing this to comply with the law. They're not. They actively want to censor material that they don't agree with and they'll use whatever excuse they need to do it.