661–670 of 1001 posts
Why not also state the opposite that they have been criticized for doing too much censorship of even valid and factual information? This clearly shows that the media lives in their own bubble.
Time for repeat showing of the free speech debate we’ve already had a dozen times, whoopee! As ever, IMO, the problem isn’t the hosting or the banning, it’s the algorithms. I don’t care whether YouTube hosts anti-vaccine activists, I care that they actively promote anti-vaccine content to users simply because it’s proven to get clicks and earn them money. Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube…
I personally really preferred old Youtube, where your subscriptions were the main thing you saw along with the absolute "most popular viewed today" kinds of things. The algorithm has only made the site worse in my experience and I always go directly to my subscriptions to be able to at least see things I'm subbed to.
I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up a…
I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't for…
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Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.
She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.
[...]
And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.
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and later, in response
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I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.
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> "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
> Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
> The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship."
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea
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…
This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply. I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or f…
I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.
53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up a…
I am American, but I believe the American view of "we must allow everything so that important things aren't censored" is wrong. I believe it is possible to avoid the slippery slope and just ban certain things. For example, Nazi images are banned in Germany. In a sense, banning anti-vaccine propaganda is an even more important issue.
The "censorship in Germany is fine because it's just nazi stuff" argument doesn't hold water. They are currently progressing down the slippery slope.
Already you're saying it should be nazi stuff + vaccine propaganda. Next year it will be a third thing that is an important pet issue for you or an interest group.
Civilized adults don't tell other adults what they are allowed to read.
I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up a…
I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't for…
I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...
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…
To me this is the key, I got the myocarditis symptoms post vaccine and notably none of the ER staff knew (or wished to acknowledge) that this was a potential sideffect. It's become heresy of the most dogmatic kind to not support the vaccine full stop. Also it took an unrelated to this situation healthcare worker (therapist) to even suggest to me to report it on https://vaers.hhs.gov/ which is how they find out if the…