YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#571

Post by swader999 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

tebruno99 wrote: post #228

mariodiana wrote: post #65

I 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 only reason You can watch any video for free on Youtube at all is because Youtube chooses to let you do so. It is not a public forum for debate, it is a business.

They still use enough of the public commons to be held to account.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#572

Post by d0gsg0w00f » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

landryraccoon wrote: post #447

Here's a thought experiment. Suppose we were at war with a hostile adversary, and that adversary had killed over 700,000 people already, and thousands more each day. I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech. Once the imminent threat is over, those efforts can and should stop, but n…

Breakthrough case here. Clinic said that's all they've been seeing recently, dozens per day.

One thing I've never understood is why the vaccinated care so much about what he unvaccinated are doing?

Vaccinated people still carry viral loads so it's either how it affects you personally or your compassion for the enhanced vulnerability of the unvaccinated. Based on the toxic rhetoric towards the unvaccinated it seems to me the former.

You've done everything within your control to protect yourself so why do you feel the need to have an opinion on their bodily choices?

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#573

Post by deelowe » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #481

deelowe wrote: post #134

Of course it will. Welcome to the new propaganda. Same as the old propaganda. Free speech is the act of standing up for those who you disagree with simply because you believe they have the right to be heard. In today's world of "woke" content creators, everyone seems to miss this point. What started out as fairly clear cut issues such as racism and homophobia has now bled into grey areas around vaccines and gain of f…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407 , partly because it's swerving into generic ideological flamewar, and partly because I need to prune some large subthreads in order to ease the load on our poor server, which smoke is coming out of right now. The latter is our problem and we're working on fixing it, but the former is the community's problem and everyone needs to work on fix…

Thanks. I'll tone down the snark.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#574

Post by Guvante » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #555

mariodiana wrote: post #65

I 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…

> It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's really amazing to me how easily the "left" was able to be tricked in the same death of critical thinking as the "right". The "stick to the libs!" angle is far more responsible for the rise in support of Trump leading up to the election. People on the "right" were manipulated for decades into reducing their political beliefs to defending themselves from a fictiti…

What angle about vaccine skepticism isn't summarized as "it might negatively impact you so maybe don't get it".

The vaccine is totally the tragedy of the commons. If everybody gets it you are just making your life worse by also getting it.

If nobody gets it it is bad for everybody.

The reality is sometimes everybody collectively deciding to take one for the team is exactly what we need. Vaccination is one of those situations.

There are exceptions, I don't mean to imply otherwise, but those are not what is being talked about.

"Maybe we shouldn't vaccinate those who have been infected to vaccinate someone else" is being used to justify those who were presumed infected to not get vaccinated. The nuance is getting lost in a painful way.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#575

Post by Malician » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

3grdlurker wrote: post #444

mariodiana wrote: post #65

I 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…

I’m not a believer that vaccine science is a matter of “public” debate. It’s scientific debate, where only experts who have the tools, experience, and knowledge to argue should be allowed to weigh in. If you already have the problem of bad actors misappropriating yet-to-be-verified “scientific” claims for their own political agenda, then I don’t see why it’s right to let those ideas go out there. I believe that peopl…

Experts should be allowed to weigh in, not office workers and bureaucrats. Where were the aerosol dispersion specialists when the CDC/WHO were preaching "droplet?"

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#576

Post by risk000 » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

w0mbat wrote: post #434

listless wrote: post #174

My 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.

The tendency for anti-vaxxers to believe in their delusions more the more they are contradicted with facts is a thorny problem. However the flow of new misinformation also strengthens their beliefs, and draws in new people to the delusional cause. Overall I think deleting this misinformation channel is still a net positive. We need some psychologists on the case. Or advertising professionals.

Yeah, 30-40% of the population needs psychologists and propagandists to evaluate or re-educate them. I think this viewpoint you're espousing might be part of the problem.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#577

Post by SergeAx » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

ookblah wrote: post #50

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools…

A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#578

Post by ohdannyboy » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #488

> I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked." Thanks for your vulnerability admitting someone very close to you has behaved out of spite and contrary to their own interest and the interests of their community. How is your mother’s behavior in delaying^ not “too stupid to make their own decisions” though? Behaving out of spite is stupid (and totally human! Not…

Her belief was that she'd be feeding into a system that encouraged things to happen that were against her principles. I wouldn't call that self harm out of spite. Spite would be "they were right, but I'll be damned if I let them know that!" She never changed her mind on the censorship.

    Is it that Yes people are too stupid to make their own decisions, but a government mandate isn’t the right tactic to influence their behavior?

That's pretty much what I see. People make sub-optimal decisions all the time for a variety of reasons and these decisions often affect others. Government mandates on bodily autonomy get tricky and have massive externalities. It's all good fun until you're the one the government says is making a bad decision.

    What’s the right tactic to influence stupid people?

I don't think making a sub-optimal decision makes you stupid. In this particular case I think a better question would be "how do we influence people who are making bad decisions based on emotions and politics?" It's pretty tough to craft a government solution to that last part since the government is always political. Polite discourse is the best way IMO. It won't turn everyone, but when people get interested they won't be thrown back into their in-group by seeing nothing but coercion and vitriol.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#579

Post by elsonrodriguez » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

TameAntelope wrote: post #483

I know this comment will be lost in the shuffle, and I notice this was submitted by danso, so I imagine there's an intentionality here, but I very strongly believe submissions like these are a substantial and growing threat to HN. Just remove them! Let's talk tech, startups, science! Submissions like these distract from the stuff I like on HN, but more importantly I worry they chase away the people I like from HN. I…

People in technology fields absolutely have an obligation to talk about the morality of technology.

I'd highly recommend you to read Cat's Cradle if you haven't already. Carl Sagan also had something to say about this.

In lieu of that, one can meditate on this more condensed take:

> Don't say that he's hypocritical

> Say rather that he's apolitical

> "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

> That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

- Tom Lehrer

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#580

Post by twofornone » Wed, Sep 29, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

ascar wrote: post #271

listless wrote: post #174

My 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…

>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

No, the claim is that statistically for every life saved via vaccination, more lives are lost due to vaccine complications, based on officially compiled numbers.

It occurs to me that most of the people arguing for vaccination are just as ignorant and faith based in their argumentation as the people they demonize for arguing against it. This is probably a consequence of the normal distribution of competence, and a significant argument against censoring dissent (dishonestly conflated with "misinformation"), because when ≈70% of the population is not competent enough to consume and evaluate literature, suppression of counter narratives becomes an oppressive tool of the establishment, even when done by so called "private" companies. Our economic system is conveniently organized such that going public for the funding necessary to compete with VC money subjects your company to the rule of an inevitably politically connected board.

It's telling that almost all of this recent censorship (not just regarding the COVID vaccine) aligns so neatly with leftist views. This top down authoritarianism is leading to a parallel society, encouraged by the pervasive breadth and depth of dissent suppression: if you have the "wrong" opinion, you cant post videos on social media, you cant host your own social media on cloud providers, you can't host your own servers because CC companies will refuse to service you...

The authoritarian dystopia has already arrived, not with the sort of force we were warned about, but with welcome cheers from a naive, docile populace.