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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

231–240 of 933 posts

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#231

Yay, this is great, and should be used for everything! /s If we used this for medical advice in my country, this would make it very funny... at the start of the epidemic, our government "experts" said: - "healthy people don't need masks" ...and youtube would censor all the "fearmongering paranoics" advocating for mask use. Then on some random spring day, our government makes a new rule: - "you need a mask and gloves…

> Then on some random spring day, our government makes a new rule

It's not a new rule; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#232
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lied because they didn't want medical professionals to run out of masks

Then they should realize that noble lies will erode trust in institutions (rightly so).

This is probably the biggest problem. Trust in government due to bad decisions and outright lies is eroding rapidly. Worldwide. In a few months, the willingness to cooperate from citizens will be almost zero. Rightly so. If I catch someone lying for his own benefit, or not telling the truth because they think I am too stupid to understand, why should I ever listen to anything from the same person/orga again?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#233

Now think about all the conspiracy theories that actually turned out to be truth. MK ULTRA, Dark Alliance, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, COINTELPRO, PRISM, you name it. Would these be banned ("fact checked") from YouTube, Facebook or Twitter under these new rules? On the other hand, there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes (Russia) are weaponizing social media, using troll farms, puppet accounts and fake news,…

> there is a clear evidence that authoritarian regimes

United States, say it with me, United States

My country suffered a literal coup as a consequence of US meddling in our internal affairs and hijacking our media, newspapers, radio, against the national interest and democratic values of the nation spreading literal fake news

I'll let you guess which country I am talking about, because heaven knows there's not only one

You reap what you sow

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#234
post #221
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Some rights are more important than others. If you've been found not guilty of a crime in the US and admit to it afterward, you cannot be prosecuted again by protection of Double Jeopardy, correct? Is that not the same thing as saying some rights are more important than others? And is (2) and (3) not just variations on (1)?

I don't see how your Double Jeopardy example demonstrates 'ranking' of rights. There's no right to punishment of criminals. The US Bill of Rights is a list of negative rights. I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).

> I don't see how your Double Jeopardy example demonstrates 'ranking' of rights.

I was thinking, for example, one person's right to freedom from violent crime over another person's right to not be put on trail again for the same crime.

> I would say that (2) and (3) go further than one. You could say that they are subsets of (1).

Agreed.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#235
post #211

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

> I agree that what YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary. However, I personally think that this is now a war for democracy, and things are going to need to be sacrificed. YouTube choosing what you can see is as far from democracy as it can get. Not sure how you get from that to saving "democracy".

But this is how it's always been, before the web people got their news from a different set of media companies NBC/ABC/CBS. 20th century media conglomerates didn't have the problem of having to censor viral user generated content but they were still censors, and much stricter censors than the social media companies because their channels had more limited information bandwidth so they had to be much more selective about what to broadcast.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#236

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

The solution is decentralized, verifiable forms of authority. Not unelected, unaccountable corporations that selectively (and with repeated obvious bias) choose what is “true.” Especially not YouTube, of all places, who has about as much authority as McDonalds, as far as I’m concerned.

That’s it. No attempt to have a single source of authoritative information is going to work post-Internet. The cat is already out of the bag. This model of the world is outdated and needs to be put out to pasture.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#237
post #191

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on the UK and German models of "free speech" where no one has an absolute right to say what they want - certain subjects such as Holocaust denial or promotion of terrorism are banned. You could argue that we have been on a slippery slope for a long time but you could equally argue the slippery slope is a fallacy. I think it's important to think about what the actual pu…

The idea of an arbiter of what is and isn't free speech is deeply repulsive to me. So is cough medicine. So is chemotherapy. I can't see every cell of the cancer but collectively, there's enough of it visible to shake me. Do you kill the poison with a lesser poison? Depends on your level of concern, I suppose.

Philosophically, I'm in a weird place right now to be honest. If you told me that our country was going to round up all propagandists, science deniers, and white supremacists and throw them in jail based on hard evidence of purposeful misinformation or credible threat -- regardless of how those things are defined and by whom -- I think I would respond, "k"

I acknowledge that I would be resolute in lazily ruining people's lives based on a perceived threat to the greater good out of some longing to be bored again. That's scary to me.

I'm a nerd, wholly driven by logic (to this point), and I can feel the boundaries of its apogee being prodded. It's not just the country that's sick -- my ideologies are also under the weather.

The tl;dr answer would be that personally, I'd be fine with banning Holocaust denial or the promotion of terrorism because at the end of the day, I'm just a everyday liberal software engineer. Neither of those bans would ever apply to me.

That is, unless someone decided to attack me with false or shaky accusations. Therein lies the problem, eh? But what's the alternative? There's no winning.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#238

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

The point is that youtube is not an absolute authority and truth reference. So when they decide what is misinformation they position themselves above public scrutiny. It's not that the masses are dumb or smart. The few deciders from Youtube are not truth dispensers that we should all trust above all else.

> So when they decide what is misinformation they position themselves above public scrutiny.

But aren't Youtube doing this specifically because of pressure from government?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#239

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

What are you talking about?! Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO.

There is very little science (we don’t yet have enough data, and not enough time has passed), so all we have to go on is “broscience” (smartly connecting anecdotal facts and whatever little data we have, and drawing sensible conclusions). By designating one opinion as “officially correct science”, YouTube is seriously damaging humanity.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#240

I'll preface this by stating that I hate the idea of censorship and I always have. However, were I to happen across someone motionless on the floor with a needle in their arm, I would give them NARCAN instead of a ride to a rehab center. I'm from the United States. Social media is currently poisoning our country to a degree that I think it may be too late to try and draw out the fight for free speech by using free sp…

I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the popu…

Except for that extra artery that may be evolving in our arm...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-ext...

Totally static for the last few millennia.

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