YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice

This has been proven to not be true. They had no more information than anyone, and the WHO also did not exclude the possibility of H2H at any point.

It is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater and that is permitted under our country’s highest laws.

The case you’re making is that corporations, who do not have the power of military force over their citizens, should be held to the same standard of law as the governments that do.

As those governments legally have the right to prioritize the greater public gonod over individual rights, your logic implies that corporations, too, should be expected to prioritize the greater public good over individual rights.

This seems in direct contradiction to your point that speech should not be restricted, and so I cannot accept your reasoning as presented.

I think the root of my disagreement is with your phrase “self-serving speech”: the nation’s free speech restrictions must serve the nation’s citizens as a whole, in order to be legal. They must prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few, and do so only in circumstances where the harm is great if left unrestricted. The nation did not put into place such protections at the corporate level, resulting in YouTube, a platform with a population greater than that of our nation, having no legal requirement to prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few.

If your position is that YouTube should be bound to the same onus of responsibility as our nation, then YouTube should be taking much more aggressive action to censor content than it has done to date. It should be restricting individual speech where the welfare of the world’s citizens is at risk of significant harm, exactly as our nation’s laws are.

It seems like your true argument is not with YouTube, but is in fact with the theory that the welfare of the entire population is sufficient cause to restrict individual freedoms; and that this view applies both to YouTube’s policies, and to United States constitutional law. It’s your right to hold that view and express it in general, but I cannot agree, as I consider its outcomes both unjust to the greater good and unsupported by law.

"Are you surprised to hear WHO saying that healthy skydivers don't need to and shouldn't use parachutes? This is backed up by a systematic review of randomized controlled trials, published in the British Medical Journal, cited more than 1000 times: https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459"

From https://twitter.com/hashbreaker/status/1245493436939042816

Apparently yes, given that it's a bit of a smoking gun. Namely because:

> the Huanan Seafood Market was suspected as a source of the virus but it could have come from somewhere else too.

It was (to my knowledge) the only suspected source for quite a while (up until the later discovery that the currently-known "patient zero" had no connection to it, and even then it's still considered ground zero for the outbreak). If there was any indication that "it could have come from somewhere else", and that "somewhere else" is evidently a place where even fewer patients in common visited ("evidently" because if it was a common factor it would've been mentioned instead of or alongside the seafood market, and yet... no such location was mentioned), then that serves as even stronger evidence that it's somehow spreading between humans, even if the mechanism is unknown.

If even a "random programmer" on Hacker News can point this out, then I strongly suspect there were a number of doctors and nurses and other personnel on the front lines who could have and did point this out, too.

Plus, China knew as early as 31 December that the "novel coronavirus" was related to SARS (leaking that info is what got Dr. Li Wenliang in trouble), which was already known to spread human-to-human. Seems like "it looks like SARS and probably has similar spreading mechanisms" would be a reasonable assumption when information is limited: better safe than sorry (and in this case, 180,000+ deaths later, "sorry" indeed). I obviously don't blame the WHO for the entirety of that (or even necessarily China; my government dragged its feet, too, like most governments), but the WHO is certainly not blameless, either, and that it continues to spread misinformation like how not everyone should be wearing masks doesn't leave a whole lot of room for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.