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Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

jeffgeerling.com

401–410 of 803 posts

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#401
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also suppress videos on the correct manufacturing process for plastic explosives. Not because doing it safely is a bad idea, but because proliferating bomb making materials is. Covid disinformation got people killed. It will continue to get people killed, especially with a proponent of it leading the US health service. Things likely to lead to death, are likely things you do not want on your platform.

> Covid disinformation got people killed. You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't substantiate that humans are the result of evolution because we can't take two groups of early primates, subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of correlations with plausible mechanisms that indicate causation and say it's evidentiary. For example, data that indicates unvaccinated people died at a higher rate and data that indicates people who chose not to vaccinate self-report that the reason they made that choice was based on particular information that they believed. That would be evidence that helps substantiate the theory the information led to deaths. It's not 'proof'. We can't 'prove' that exposure to the information actually led to the decision (because people sometimes misattribute their own decisions) and it would be impractical to imagine we can collect vaccine-decision rationales from a large number of folks pre-death (though someone might have) and you can't attribute a particular death to a particular decision (because vaccines aren't perfectly protective) so you have to do statistics over a large sample. But the causal chain is entirely plausible based on everything I know and there's no reason to believe data around those correlations can't exist. And science isn't about 'proof'. Science is about theories that best explain a set of observations and in particular have predictive power. You almost never run experiments (in the 8th grade science fair sense) in fields like astronomy or geology, but we have strong 'substantiated' theories in those fields nonetheless.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> has continuously curbed free speech over the past few decades mmm do you have example at hand or you are just repeating this in the hope that other with voice the same opinion? The UK has a freedom of expression law: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part... 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart informati…

The issue with the sort of people who don't like freedom of expression is they often ignore the rules giving people positive rights. The Chinese constitution [0] is crystal clear that Chinese people enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration. Pointing to a law that says people have something is evidence, but not really the end of the conversation.

[0] https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/lawsregulations/201911/20... - Article 35

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid disinformation got people killed. You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

Come on, man. COVID deaths per capita were highest in countries that had very active vaccine skepticism. While this is not causation establishment, it is super highly correlative: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... gives good estimates of COVID death impact using a very reasonable methodology. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.27.22271579v... illustrates that it's hard to na…

Sure, you can absolutely claim correlation there and say something like "information making people hesitant to get the vaccine may have increased risk of death." That's wildly different than claiming that misinformation killed people.

Comparing country level statistics is also pretty inaccurate. The populations aren't controlled at all, here you are assuming the only meaningful difference in the populations are vaccination rate. Plenty of other factors could come into play; environmental differences, average health, average number of prescription drugs, preexisting conditions like heart disease or diabetes, etc. You can't just hand wave away any other population differences and assume that vaccination rate was the key there.

As you pointed out the data itself isn't reliable due to differences in reporting and testing. How can you skip past that and still land on misinformation caused deaths?

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah because if it wasn’t for COVID YouTube, Facebook, et al would never have removed any content on their platform, unlike what they had been doing all this while… There are so many issues with this. Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities. The real problem is twofold. 1. A few platforms hold monopoly positions. Who else can compete with Youtubr? And the rea…

> Being able to pick what content they host is fundamental to freedom of speech for private entities Interesting position - when somebody posts illegal content on YouTube, they are not liable, it’s not their speech. But when I want to post something they don’t like, suddenly it’s their freedom of speech to remove it. A lot of breakdown in society lately is clearly coming from the fact that some people/companies have…

This is correct. In the US tiktok is currently being sued for feeding kids choking game content through the algorithm that was earlier judged to be free speech.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#405
post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

In my experience with OFCOM, Child Safety is just the gateway to a vague list bullet points including “terrorism” and “hateful” content (vaguely defined); what could go wrong??

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#406
post #227

This is reason #597 why you just don’t allow platforms to censor. If a site wants to be a publisher, by all means, be a publisher, and don’t monetize user content. If a site wants other people to provide the content for free, then sorry- no censorship for you. “Community guidelines” etc are just censorship with a nicer name. “The algorithm” is just opaque censorship by making content undiscoverable. “un-content” in O…

You absolutely need some rules. Let's say I have a video called "Why Efitz is a serial killer". Sure, you can block my video, and the topic entirely but that doesn't really solve your problem. You're not really worried about you seeing it, but others. I didn't aim the video at you, but rather at a group that already hates people with your race/gender/orientation/religion/etc. They're already vaguely talking about tha…

Now a counterpoint: we banned government censorship for a good reason(or tried to).

Why would a private 3rd party be allowed to do so? especially if government can heavily incentivize the 3rd party(using either stick and/or carrot) to be basically outsourced censorship office? Why do we give power of censorship to private entities that can shape public opinion in a way that brings them the most profit?

you can fix former issue by education and culture shift - censorship is just a bandaid.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#407
post #59

This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed. From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software." This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content. Here in the UK,…

saaaave the children!!!1

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Covid disinformation got people killed. You know this claim can never be substantiated right? You will never be able to show causation like that and we would never allow some controlled trial to see whether giving people whatever information you deem as misinformation actually increases the death rate relative to a control group.

Even in science there is not a 'requirement' that you have a controlled experiment in order to have evidence that a claim is true. Following your argument you can't substantiate that humans are the result of evolution because we can't take two groups of early primates, subject one to evolutionary forces and the other not and see what happens. Instead we can observe a chain of correlations with plausible mechanisms th…

A causal chain being plausible does not justify or substantiate a claim of causation.

I absolutely would say that we can't prove humans are the result of evolution. The theory seems very likely and explains what we have observed, but that's why its a theory and not a fact - its the last hypothesis standing and generally accepted but not proven.

My argument here isn't with whether the causation seemed likely, though we can have that debate if you prefer and we'd have to go deep down the accuracy and reliability of data reporting during the pandemic.

My argument is that we can't make blanket statements that misinformation killed people. Not only is that not a proven (or provable) fact, it skips past what we define as misinformation and ignores what was known at the time in favor of what we know today. Even if the data you to point to shows correlation and possible causation today, we didn't have that information during the pandemic st the time that YouTube was pulling down content for questioning efficacy or safety.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold. For example, YouTube currently has quite a lot of really good videos on harm reduction for drug users (and probably also a bunch that are not very good and/or directly misleadin…

Big tech censorship disgusts me. Everything is completely backwards from what it should be, and the sheer scale of those platforms (bigger than many countries by population or money) prevents individual people and even governments from exercising meaningful democratic oversight. So these platforms congregate hundreds of millions of people and whatever their CEOs and/or douche tech bros in SV decide is what becomes la…

The thing to understand is your last paragraph: everything big ads does is unsurprisingly focused toward making people into worse versions of themselves. You wouldn't let kids go to a casino or porn site for educational material. Don't let them use youtube either.

It could be that someone happened to post educational videos to the porn site. If so you'd might as well download them while you have the chance, but don't mistake their existence for some indication that that's what the site is for. They're still less than 0.1% of the videos, and you'd need to specifically search for them or be linked to them to find them. Assume you'll need to look elsewhere for educational material. e.g. there are 10s of thousands of results for videos for "Holocaust" on worldcat.

Re: Self-hosting your own media considered harmful according to YouTube

#410
post #298
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Swedish policy during covid, produced by medical professionals and researchers, was contrary to US policy during covid, this kind of information was also removed. You do not have this kind of disagreement within the professional field with bomb making materials. Pandemic prevention is an on-going research topic where a lot of different professionals has wild difference in views and approaches, and the meta stud…

Sweden is widely recognized as the example to absolutely not follow in handling pandemics. N95s (and above) definitely work, so does filtered air. But sweden has a long standing history of eugenics

As opposed to the US? Like sending infected elderly people to elderly homes to infect more people?
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