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YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

reuters.com

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Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#241

Post by watt »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #120
anonymousiam wrote: post #2

This is the slippery slope of censorship on display for everyone to see. What panel of certified physicians is YouTube using to identify what information is correct vs. incorrect? I'm pretty sure they don't have any doctors doing this. The ban is a political act and not a scientific one.

Misinformation is also a slippery slope though; you have to say "enough is enough" at one point because else you reach a point of no return. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance (iirc that was linked to on here a while ago, I may misremember)

This "paradox" is resolved by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie - self-defending democracy. Before this idea, a democracy would allow itself to be subverted by allowing a dictator to be democratically elected, and consequences be damned. Not a good idea as we find out.

By extension, a system that wants the idea of free speech to stay viable needs to protect itself from ideas that bring harm to it. Maybe it can be argued that from mathematical sense there is some kind of paradox (a set of all sets that are not blah blah), but this is no contradiction for us humans. There is no mathematical beauty in submitting to a wave of harmful, malicious misinformation.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#242

Post by [deleted] »

owlbynight wrote: post #174

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…

[deleted]

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#243

Post by coldtea »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #224
owlbynight wrote: post #174

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 YouTube is doing here is a slippery slope and it's scary... BTW, "slippery slope" was intended to be an example of fallacious thinking. Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad." I'm not bringing this up (just) to be pedantic; the overwhelming evidence to date is that it is extraordinarily difficult to get any of…

>Before it became a popular term, it was intended as a criticism of arguments of the form, "A will lead to B will lead to C, so A is bad."

Sorry, this is backwards. Before it became a criticism of arguments "A will lead to B and so on" it was a term used to signify a "slippery slope", that is, something that has the potential to snowball to something much worse.

The name as a "criticism of the fallacy" resulted from the term being used as an argument -- not the other way around.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#244

Post by maxehmookau »

tomp wrote: post #239
owlbynight wrote: post #174

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…

> Don’t blame social media, the biggest and loudest source of COVID-related misinformation have been institutions like the WHO.

This is demonstrably untrue. There is measurably more bullshit on Facebook groups than there is coming from the WHO and other institutions.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#245

Post by nickff »

gitrog wrote: post #234
nickff wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I think the non-aggression principle applies without reference to the 'justice system'. That is to say, whether or not someone has committed a crime, for which they may or may not have been convicted, they have a moral obligation not to perpetrate violence against you. Post-hoc detention or punishment does not 'correct' or remediate aggression, and I am not aware of any right to prevent hypothetical aggression.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#246

Post by brigandish »

gitrog wrote: post #225
brigandish wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is/was there less misinformation among a population living under strong censorship? We have several examples to choose from, and I'd wager there's more, at any point in history compared to freer societies. > Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I completely agree, but why should we assume falsehoods and truth travel at…

No one here is advocating strong censorship though, and there is a massive chasm between banning specific topics during a pandemic and having generally strong censorship. This slippery slope is fallacious.

I wasn't making a slippery slope argument, I'm answering to whether there is more or less misinformation under a freer or a less free society. The easiest and best place to start is always going to be at the more extreme ends of something.

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#247

Post by coldtea »

pzmTWLwfwJ wrote: post #126
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #115

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…

Isn't this how science works, you have new information and you use it to make a better decision.

There wasn't any new information, it was just policy decisions hiding the information.

1st stage: "We don't have enough masks to go around, we need them for doctors and such -- ok, let's tell citizens "don't wear masks, as they do no good"

2nd stage: "We have ample of masks now imported. OK, let's tell citizens they have to wear masks".

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#248

Post by read_if_gay_ »

gitrog wrote: post #225
brigandish wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is/was there less misinformation among a population living under strong censorship? We have several examples to choose from, and I'd wager there's more, at any point in history compared to freer societies. > Anecdotally, it seems that the more the internet has expanded our ability to communicate, the more widespread misinformation has gotten. I completely agree, but why should we assume falsehoods and truth travel at…

No one here is advocating strong censorship though, and there is a massive chasm between banning specific topics during a pandemic and having generally strong censorship. This slippery slope is fallacious.

You're declaring the opposite, but for a proponent of the slippery slope argument this would be a perfect example of going down the slippery slope. First came banning hate speech, now comes COVID, what's next?

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#249

Post by hannofcart »

It's going to be interesting to see how YouTube polices information from Govt sources that are arguably lacking in scientific rigour.

For eg. India has a whole ministry devoted to 'alternative' medicine called AYUSH (which is an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy) which puts out videos like this:

https://youtu.be/hBxXOYk3bVw

Re: YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

#250

Post by 3np »

keiferski wrote: post #236
owlbynight wrote: post #174

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…

This. YouTube should be free to allow or block any content they want on their privately owned and permissions platform.

At the same time, no company should have the power to decide what content can be shared and spread.

It’s all of our responsibilities to take back the power we always had and give it back to individuals. The other their is through open protocols through decentralized / federated permissionless infrastructure.

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