YouTube bans coronavirus vaccine misinformation

That's exactly what a bunch of serious and respectable people want to do: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid...

"In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong."

This is what influential people in the US actually believe and tech policy people follow along.

However, a war for democracy - democracy is about what the people want, not what the self appointed overseers want. Unfortunately if the majority want to indulge in corrupt thinking then that's democracy. That's how you end up with Trump.

If you want to fight for democracy then you have to let people express themselves. Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy so a fight for democracy is a fight for free speech.

What you seem to be asking for in terms of sacrifice is an authoritarian intervention where we appoint people to determine what is truth and ban alternative thinking. This obviously is just as bad as what is going on now. Once you have the truth committee in place you can predict where that goes once "misinformation" is under control. Start with enforcing scientific truths, and then leaders will abuse this power to further their own truths. Imagine corporations lobbying the Department of Truth.

We are fked for now. I imagine a lot more pain and difficult change is ahead of us. I lament for pre-internet times. I used to champion the idea of the internet giving equal platform for all but I never foresaw the internet being such a huge part of everyday life, and with that comes the good and the bad of humanity.

The 2020 US elections are a storm coming at us, and no one knows just how bad the west will be ravaged after it's done.

Hyperreality is what I thought of when I saw the comments here. I think, these are 20somethings and lower 30s techies who, despite living in an incredibly privileged time compared to decades ago, believe that they're living in the worst of times.

Yes, there's meanness on Twitter, lies and manipulations in the media. I think if you live in that world, it's never been so "unstable" - a word used repeatedly in this thread's comments.

Statistically, there is less not more deaths from things like terrorism, less not more things like racism and sexism, less not more suffering from disease and so forth. I'm talking about statistics, here, not perceptions.

But the hyperreality of the Twitterverse paints a very different picture.

So now we have grand essays defending censorship on the grounds that society is more unstable than it ever was. Than it has been in a decade, yes. Than it has been in 30, 50, 80 years? No.

Claiming people believe there are microchips physically inside vaccines is a major distortion of what these people think. In fact even the Reuters article doesn't say that. It's the age-old tactic of making up something ludicrous that sounds vaguely like a group's concerns and then claiming they all believe it so they shouldn't be listened to.

What they are concerned about is the creation of a system that enables rapid marking of people to identify if they've had certain vaccines or not. Sometimes this surfaces as talk about "quantum dots" or "dot tattoos" which is a reference to research into a way to imprint codes underneath people's skin. The microchip idea comes from the fact that this is already done for animals (rfid tags).

This provokes concern in many people for similar reasons to the (supposed) Chinese notion of 'social credit': the point of tagging the population with a physical marker of compliance is to enable very efficient stripping of their rights if they haven't complied. Sort of a step short of imprisonment. For instance, some politicians already talk of blocking air travel for anyone who wasn't vaccinated (against many kinds of things).

Now if you trust vaccines, no problem. But scientists are busy setting fire to their trust in all sorts of ways so the population of people who don't trust them will only increase:

1. Rapid "moonshot" vaccine development programmes that are skipping the long testing process usually involved.

2. Rising awareness of how politicised academia has become. See the other story about Nature magazine.

3. A Swine Flu vaccine that caused neurological damage in a small number of cases (but Swine Flu hurt a tiny number of people too, so the cure was worse than the disease in this case).

4. Insistence on a waiver of liability for vaccine manufacturers.

5. Many examples of low standards or making contradictory statements about viruses and COVID.

6. Demanding that anyone criticising them is silenced.

And so on. The list could go on all day. Point is, it's entirely rational to be lowering trust in scientists at the moment, so any effective system of tracking and enforcement around their decisions is going to be legitimately controversial. You don't have to be a tinfoil hat wearer to observe that standards have been considerably loosened around vaccines this year.