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YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

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Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#771

Post by amuchmore »

AHappyCamper wrote: post #739

Recently I spoke with two senior scientists with decades of experience who specialise in pharmacology, biology, and vaccines, who both work at high-level labs that inspect all types of drugs. They both were extremely sceptical of the vaccine, with one being openly antagonistic towards it. YouTube's new rules allow them to post content, but they both say they've been warned by their jobs about speaking out - that they…

It seems curious, then, that the entire source of the vaccine is publicly available.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#772

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

beebmam wrote: post #612
gorwell wrote: post #529

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.” George Bernard Shaw “Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palko v. Connecticut "If…

YouTube isn't the government

What's your point?

The concept of free speech is 2400 years old. Don't be one of those people that conflates that concept with the American first amendment which only blocks government censorship and is barely 200 years old.

Private companies, groups, and people can and do infringe on everyone's right to free speech.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#773

Post by sensanaty »

ookblah wrote: post #50

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools…

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?

Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.

Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#774

Post by AmericanChopper »

ookblah wrote: post #50

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools…

Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it.

The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).

People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.

But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#775

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

xkbarkar wrote: post #594

> Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term). I live in Iceland. Recovery from cov-sars-2 infection is considered as valid as a vaccine here. The same goes for Norway and ( to the best of…

>our high vaccination rate did absolutely nothing to stop the spread.

It was never going to. People have been asking for decades, "Why don't we have a vaccine for the common cold?" And the answer is because it's a type of virus that evolves too quickly. So we just can't. Not really. It's just not remotely as effective as say a smallpox vaccine. And SARS COV-2 is the same type of virus. A coronavirus.

It's just an opportunist money grab by big pharma, and an authoritarian power grab by those in power "for your own good".

It was always going to kill a large number (but small percentage) of people. The "vaccine" didn't stop that one bit. But you can't prove this because we can't go back in time and run to separate Earths, one with the "vaccine"s and one without. So they'll pretend it helped without it being possible to know if it did or not.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#776

Post by koheripbal »

quartus wrote: post #657
ohdannyboy wrote: post #290

I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up a…

> Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#777

Post by chasd00 »

supperburg wrote: post #441

I had to wait for 7 hours at the ER last night. People who choose to not vaccinate shouldn’t be allowed entry to the hospital.

if you're talking about the the ER in the USA and you didn't have a life threatening injury/illness then i say a 7 hr wait was pretty quick.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#778

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

>YouTube is banning anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug activists and blocking all anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug content

FTFWaPo

I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm happy to have my measles, mumps, rubella, and other vaccines. I'm looking forward to getting the new HPV vaccine (gardasil) now that they've started recommending it for adults and you can actually get your doctor to give it to you (a couple years ago they would refuse if you asked and said you'd pay for 100% of it).

Resisting this latest moneygrab by big pharma and power grab by authoritarians is not "anti-vaccine".

That's incredibly disingenuous. Because this drug is fundamentally different from what a vaccine is.

If the authoritarians and their followers pushing this can't even admit that it so radically different from a vaccine as to be outright lying to call it one, how can we even talk about it?

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#779

Post by whiddershins »

mach1ne wrote: post #57

People don't see what the actual problem here is - perhaps because they don't want to see. What is happening is very much the transformation from an open society to one where freedom of speech is limited and certain other individual rights are stripped away. Perhaps not de jure, but de facto. And sure, one might argue that it's for a good cause (even though it's a complex topic). However, the fact is that as this is…

But is free speech dependent on YouTube being a platform for complex discussions between knowledgeable people on a topic?

Maybe YouTube doesn’t want that role.

Maybe we can have a sci-debate website that does want these discussions, and maybe that site could tailor the feature set for exactly this purpose.

Maybe it would focus on citation and annotation features like thinkspot or Spotify or genius.

Maybe the site could have multiple ways to evaluate the reputation of someone making claims. Maybe it could have education, popularity, endorsements from other people with high reputation, and like three other dimensions of reputation measurements.

Maybe it could have tools to disclose conflicts of interest, the accuracy of past claims over time, and automatic linking to rebuttals.

Maybe YouTube just isn’t a fit for this information.

Re: YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

#780

Post by makeworld »

JeremyNT wrote: post #737
ookblah wrote: post #50

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools…

> Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle". Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content. The thing to remember is that Yo…

> Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement,"

This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.

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