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YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

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Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#491

Post by lordlic »

chrischen wrote: post #238

These types of censorship patterns are identical to that employed by China in intent . The practical consequences are the same as well. In China information censorship is due to the government trying to promote peace and harmony. Aka, the government thinks it knows what’s best for people and forces it on people. Facebook et al also encounter these same problems, where they see people spreading “misinformation.” It’s…

I'm sympathetic to Chinese-style censorship, at least in theory before it degenerates into the state trying to suppress anything it considers embarrassing to itself. "The government thinks it knows what’s best for people" because it does know better than most people. Facebook, as the lowest common denominator for American public discourse, is a cesspool of misinformation, pseudoscience, hate, deceptive advertising, and people losing their skin in MLM scams. In India, fake stories on WhatsApp have whipped up violent mobs into a frenzy of xenophobia, resulting in tragic murders of innocent migrants. We should be more aware of the enormous costs associated with a lassie-faire attitude toward speech, even if we decide it's worth the cost. "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

All that being said, the practical consequences of YouTube moderation are not even remotely the same as those of the Chinese censorship that everyone criticizes. The worst thing that can happen to you on YouTube is that you can't comment or upload videos anymore. YouTube is not sending people to prison or calling up your employer to tell them you're a dangerous agitator.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#492

Post by ColanR »

pchristensen wrote: post #455
contravariant wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not too sure if true neutrality is not the best answer after all. I think these bans are detracting from the real problem, which is that it's Youtube's system for promoting content that is causing problems, not the content on Youtube itself. Youtube has made itself too important a platform to be left in charge of deciding what content people should watch. Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all dec…

The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed…

> recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions

That's actually a great comparison. I wonder if it will ever gain traction.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#493

Post by biztos »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #429
biztos wrote: post #324

Am I the only one bothered by people talking about “censorship” in this context? A private company chose to remove content from its service because it considers that content to be bad, and probably in violation of its terms. Did the government force it to do so? Is somebody preventing the owner of the video from hosting it on their own web site? Censorship is a real thing in the world, and so is crying wolf.

There is censorship and government censorship. Both are real and people can have valid opinions on both. I like it when the government censors child pornography, but I don't like it when they censor political speech. I like it when corporations censors child pornography, not not when they censor minority opinions on covid policy

Ok but then how are we to distinguish Corporate Censorship from Corporation Chooses Not To Publish My Opinion?

If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?

If it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?

If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”

If I’ve got it wrong, please, enlighten me.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#494

Post by nkkollaw »

2019-nCoV wrote: post #421
_bxg1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.

What is wrong with relying on the existing legal foundation? Arrest them for arson, if and when they decide to ravage a cell tower. Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?

Someone with a brain, finally.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#495

Post by __s »

null0pointer wrote: post #471
__s wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torrenting is a pretty good CDN. Then you just need to host a magnet link

That's actually a really interesting thought. I wonder if you can just serve a tiny JS torrent client and a magnet link and automatically download the content. You would need to have a way for visitors to seed the content too, otherwise you still have to serve everything anyway.

& this exists, https://webtorrent.io/faq

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#496

Post by Supermancho »

joshuamorton wrote: post #486
pchristensen wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The podcast "Your Undivided Attention" gets into the tech and public policy of this. Basically, their suggestion is to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, so that storage and retrieval is still a safe harbor for providers, but recommendation algorithms should be treated as editorial decisions and be open to the same liabilities that other communications media are exposed to. So a chronological feed…

But this favors one recommendation algorithm (time based) over others. What makes ordering by time non-editorial?

> recommendation algorithm (time based)

Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#497

Post by nkkollaw »

_bxg1 wrote: post #207
acituan wrote: post #51

I don’t agree with the interview contents, nor think professorship alone gives sufficient credibility in the face of a novel pandemic, data of which is in the process of emerging. That said, I don’t want youtube to be in charge of deciding what is credible or not. They don’t have in-house experts on these domains, they don’t have a magic epistemology machine that spits out the “facts”. They are good at writing web se…

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.

It is. There are books on all kind of things, are we going to burn books we don't like, next?

The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.

If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.

Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#498

Post by nkkollaw »

kfrzcode wrote: post #484
_bxg1 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And on the other end of the spectrum we have people being indoctrinated into violent conspiracy groups like QAnon, or being prompted to set fire to cell towers, or bringing measles back from the dead, because of YouTube videos. There's a line to be drawn here - and it's a tricky line, to be sure - but "YouTube should be totally neutral and not pull anything" is not a viable answer.

What? "because of YouTube videos," isn't that like saying "violence happens because of video games," etc.?

Of course, yes. Doesn't make any sense.

Re: YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy

#500

Post by masnao »

ta17711771 wrote: post #430
ehsankia wrote: post #427

tl;dr: There are millions of videos about COVID-19 being uploaded to Youtube and they have a non-zero false-positive rate. This was accidentally removed and promptly restored upon manual review. Basically nothing to see here.

> promptly restored upon manual review. Promptly restored upon viral traction of outrage...just like that podcast app was....

one have to wonder, if users are already doing all the work to flag and make noise to restore the false positives, what value the centralizers of information even add?

the case for p2p is stronger than ever now that bandwidth is cheaper. downloading a torrent from other users is faster than pressing play on youTube, when you account the time wasted with advertising.

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