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

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

#731

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…

> Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

> Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

The mask one not being useful is a lie where Fauci was trying to reserve masks for medical staff.

Why not lying again about the current vaccine effectiveness/side effects balance to reserve promising treatments to a certain category of the population?

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

#733
The drug war was a huge misinformation campaign. can we ban anything that says marijuana has no medical benefit since the science is there like actual peer-reviewed articles saying that most of the negative information spread about cannabis is false

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

#734

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 chilling effect in this case is by design.

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

#735
Reading the comments here is freaking terrifying to me. This is supposedly an educated and scientifically oriented subset of the human race and the levels of ignorance, dishonesty, and flat out lying going on here make me very, very sad. SMH.

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

#736

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…

You're sketching a number of false equivalences. Left-of-center-in-the-US and Right-of-center-in-the-US each have their problems but that's bad argument for those being the same problems.

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say a substantial portion of anti-vaccine arguments have come from profit-driven fraud. That's pretty well document. That was the point of origin of the original study and various fraudsters have ridden that 'till today. Of course, there are those with nuance positions on the vaccines this will hurt them and hurt informed. Oppositely, the liars have effectively killed many people at this point.

There are a few actual fraudsters on the left but most active health-craze fraud is concentrated on the right in New Age circles (which can generally no longer be considered left).

Which is to say, the left-of-center has a number of problem (absurdist moralistic posturing, say) but straight-up-lying isn't equally divided here, among the politically respectable, it's concentrated on the right.

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

#737
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…

> 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".

Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.

The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.

Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?

The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.

Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.

So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.

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

#739
Recently I spoke with two senior scientists with decades of experience who specialise in pharmacology, biology, and vaccines, who both work at high-level labs that inspect all types of drugs.

They both were extremely sceptical of the vaccine, with one being openly antagonistic towards it.

YouTube's new rules allow them to post content, but they both say they've been warned by their jobs about speaking out - that they will lose their careers if they say anything against the vaccines.

Where is the room for their opinion? Because they are the top of the tree scientifically. What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!

To clarify - the first scientist told me that her lab is not allowed to look at or test the vaccine, even though they test every other drug that comes into the country. She has only found a report from one other non-Pfizer lab that has looked at it under a microscope. To me, that is really scary.

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

#740

Recently I spoke with two senior scientists with decades of experience who specialise in pharmacology, biology, and vaccines, who both work at high-level labs that inspect all types of drugs. They both were extremely sceptical of the vaccine, with one being openly antagonistic towards it. YouTube's new rules allow them to post content, but they both say they've been warned by their jobs about speaking out - that they…

trust me bro
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