looks like most of the comments here are debating whether Rand Paul is correct or incorrect, which is wholly irrelevant to the issue at hand here.
YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
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Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. Tech companies now silence politicians unilaterally, while governments made up of the same politicians do nothing to stop the widespread flow of toxic misinformation on tech platforms. So, who is really in charge?
You have no right to use someone else's printing press. The government can easily create their own video hosting platform. Just like the NYTimes doesn't need to allow any politician to submit an oped.
We've lost the essence of journalism.
Instead of a venue where multiple options are presented for review by the reader (along with editorial comment, of course), we now have platforms which are nothing but editorial. Not only individual people but individual comments are called out for censorship. This is not how news reporting was done in the past.
It's sad because today, there isn't a single website where a curious individual can review all of the views on a subject (or all of the comments of opposing politicians, for examples) without the platform weighting or simply removing views it doesn't like. This is a loss of objective information and is detrimental to education and intellectual and social advancement.
Instead of journalism, each "platform" now picks and chooses stories and voices that amplify its overlords' goals and nothing more. There is no truth to be delivered, only "my" truth as seen by my platform owners.
It's a sad day.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#93> YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” > It also included the quote: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.” Regardless of what you think about YouTube's misinformation policy, I don't think this i…
Except they are effective. They are not as effective as a N95 mask but all scientific data shows they are still effective and reducing transmission rate in a population.
Cloth masks are effective in preventing covid in the same way that "the rhythm method is effective at preventing pregnancy." Which is to say it reduces the probability a small amount, but not nearly enough to justify a person treating it as an effective prophylactic. So it depends on what your definition of "effective" is, but it seems to me more like disinformation to call cloth masks or rhythm method "effective" than to say they are not effective.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't follow this reasoning. An imperfect mask is surely going to result in a borderline contacts with infection being non-infections. The debate is "by how much" and without really clear evidence to the contrary, the precautionary principle wins. Wearing masks is usually only a minor inconvenience. I'm gobsmacked how it's become such a battleground.
> An imperfect mask is surely going to result in a borderline contacts with infection being non-infections. Not necessarily. The mask blocks the virus going both ways, so maybe only 10% of the virus particles get inside the mask, but 90% of those that would be exhaled also stay inside the mask. This is not an opinion on whether masks work, just an illustration that it's plausible they don't.
Napkin math would be:
90% of infected person virus stays in
90% of virus does not get in for a healthy person
So 1% (10% through * 10% through) of final particles will be inside the mask. Hence roughly 0.9% of particles (90% stays inside of the mask of the healthy person) would stick around by this logic
Vs 100% of particles that could enter will enter without any sort of mask
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Add to that, remember when a president was impeached over a "conspiracy theory" regarding Hunter Biden's time at Burisma? One year later, fact checkers had to admit that the FBI was indeed investigating him. Edit: From +5 points to -1 in one hour - I didn't realize so many Burisma employees read HN!
It's fun to pretend and play make believe, but that's not why he was impeached.
>> Add to that, remember when a president was impeached over a "conspiracy theory" regarding Hunter Biden's time at Burisma? One year later, fact checkers had to admit that the FBI was indeed investigating him.
> that's not why he was impeached.
Yes, it was. The charge was "abuse of power" because the Democrats claimed that Trump had improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate whether Joe Biden had influenced Burisma to hire or to overpay his son, which is the "conspiracy theory" GP referred to.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it really doesn't seem all that plausible that cloth masks do much at this point. Not only was there never good evidence for them working, the best ones only block something like 90% of virus-bearing particles. To put this in context current estimates seem to be that people infected with Delta produce 100-1000x the amount of virus that previous variants did; the effect of mask wearing is absolutely miniscule co…
I don't follow this reasoning. An imperfect mask is surely going to result in a borderline contacts with infection being non-infections. The debate is "by how much" and without really clear evidence to the contrary, the precautionary principle wins. Wearing masks is usually only a minor inconvenience. I'm gobsmacked how it's become such a battleground.
There are actually two questions: how much do masks prevent borderline contacts from being infected, and how broad a range of contact do they work over. As far as I can tell the two things are at odds with each other: the shallower the slope of reduced infection vs viral load, the broader the range over which masks can work. (Though of course either way there's still the possibility that most transmission happens outside the range where this has any effect worth mentioning.) The flu-based study some mask proponents were pushing had an order-of-magnitude decrease in viral amount giving maybe a 30% reduction in chance of being infected over the range where this was effective, and obviously very little outside that. That's... not great. Definitely much worse than current vaccines. Though of course Covid isn't flu and we don't have the same level of studies covering it yet.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#97> YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” > It also included the quote: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.” Regardless of what you think about YouTube's misinformation policy, I don't think this i…
They don't work? This article is claiming otherwise: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
It's quoting a whole lot of things, some of which are in support of cloth masks, but none of which are particularly conclusive.
It's worth noting that one of the randomized trials mentioned in that article ended up not being able to prove any significant effect. [1] It apparently had some problems getting published.
I've been unable to find the results of the larger trial by Christine Benn et al.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is blocking X% of the virus particles less impactful if there's more of them? Fewer particles admitted means reduced chance of infection, no? Always better to less virus particles than more.
Fewer particles admitted means reduced chance of infection, no? The thing to keep in mind is that blocking 50% of the particles does not mean a 50% reduction in infection. It may mean a 50% reduction in infection -- or it may mean a basically zero percent reduction. It depends on the exposure. Say that in a particular covid-filled room you have a 50% chance of being infected after 5 minutes and a 99.9% chance of bein…
I don’t think anyone is advocating for masks as your only line of defense, just one of a few (vaccines currently being the best)
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#99> YouTube indicated that examples of the offending content in the video included the line: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection.” > It also included the quote: “Trying to shape human behavior isn’t the same as following the actual science which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.” Regardless of what you think about YouTube's misinformation policy, I don't think this i…
> I never thought it would be as overt as it is.
It has been known that they have been doing this randomly to multiple accounts every day and it is clear that YouTube will never change. They will point you to their guidelines and suspend your account at anytime.
> Tech companies feeling competent to dictate truth is scary.
These tech companies are not your friends and are on no-one's side other than the side of profit. They can get anyone and use their slippery guidelines as cover for their suspensions.
They are never going to change and it's only going to get worse.
Re: YouTube suspends Rand Paul for seven days
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rand Paul used the dichotomy of "works" vs. "doesn't work" which is in line with "stops" vs. "doesn't stop."
It's a false dichotomy. None of them will stop covid. Some will just do better than others in different situations.
sure, but depending on what the claim is specifically, classifying what Rand Paul stated as "misinformation" may be misinformation itself.