YouTube Just Demonetized Anti-Vax Channels
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
On the other hand, antivaxxing is one of those problems crying out to stamped into the dust. I don’t particularly care if some decides to eat lots of fruit instead of getting chemotherapy, because their cancer isn’t contagious. Immunization though, is a matter of public health, and my patience for precious fools on a mission is precisely 0 when it could hurt people I care about.
Still... why the hell is this something we let YouTube decide? The problem with antivaxxers isn’t their YouTube channels, it’s the fact that our lawmakers are too cowardly to pass some laws around the issue. YouTube shouldn’t be in a position to exert this kind of power, and this isn’t how issues should be tackled. This doesn’t solve anything, it just obscures it. A solution involves restricting access to public spaces for selfish morons who don’t get vaccinated, and yes, their children.
Edit: Sorry I just realized that my comment is on the border of being little more than a rant. Like a lot of people here I suspect that this is the intersection of two issues I care about deeply; a big tech company’s questionable, situational ethics and enormous power, and the horror of people facing debilitation or death because of pseudoscience. I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and while I know having the government intervene is fraught with danger, it seems necessary especially in cases of public health.
How do we stop this without making matters even worse? I want to say “educate people” yet that’s a pat response. Some people won’t be educated, it takes a lot of time, and how do we even agree on what a good education is? To me it’s critical thinking, STEM, and meeting other people. To others it’s teaching their kids that people like me are the agents of the devil, that fossils are a test from god or a plot by the CIA. How can that gap be bridged without someone trampling all over the rights of the other? How can people in such separate relaities not undermine each other or seek to use the system against each other, only to see it turned back on themselves?
How many times have you read a comment on a board and your first thought was, “That has to be a troll/shill/bot”? How often have you just given up on a discussion because the signal:noise ratio was intolerable? I know my answer is “too many times to count.” I worry that it means bad actors are winning, that I’ve fallen under the spell of Oh Dearism.
But there have been many drugs with serious side effects pulled from the market some of them after regulators and drug companies behaving badly.
Is YouTube pulling them because of a sense of responsibility to open fair scientific inquiry? Or are they doing it as a PR stunt to distract from other bad behavior?
More than a few friends and people I know are immunocompromised, for them it is a big deal.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/history/narcoleps...
They don't cause autism, but what if we set up mandatory vaccinations with absolutely no opt-out because some parents were offensively wrong, and later a vaccination does start causing serious problems and the government doesn't move fast enough to change its rules?
This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.
Isn't that because those issues usually aren't visible before around that time? (I am neither a GP nor a psycologist though so this is just trying to apply common sense.)
I demand my kids gets all recommended vaccines. Because even if there was a (vanishingly small) chance of a kid getting autism like symptoms I can live better with that risk than the much bigger risk that that being unvaccinated presents.
> This is not necessarily a topic to be 'stamped out', and free speech has to transcend censorship, search engine companies hiding materials and discouraging the creation of those materials.
Free speech is important. I would like to use mine to point out that looking at some anti-vaxxers (I'm not singling out your relatives, they might very well be reasonable people) one might get the idea that any autism in their kids might have simpler explanation than a vaccine that millions of other kids take without issue every year ;-)
Edit: that last paragraph really feels bad. My point is I mostly do defend peoples right to free speech (I might even pay close attention to people who argue against AGW as long as they are trying to be honest and have a discussion, not a sermon), but when it comes to vaccines it is actually pretty much settled science that they save millions of lives, millions of hours of suffering each year.
If anyone still wants to debate it, I might even listen carefully, but it really helps a lot if the other part treat the subject with the respect it deserves.
By not getting a vaccine when you medically can, you're putting others at risk because of your freedom.
In some cases maybe, but it don't believe in all cases. A neighbour had this with her 7 month old baby, and symptoms showed up literary 4-5 hours after vaccination (not autistic symptoms of course, problems with breathing and similar), but at about 3-4 years you could already see some of the autistic symptoms in the kid along with speech impairment.
Leaving that aside, usually don't even understand why they choose to not vaccinate their child, they just believed someone that said it is bad. Look at the "flatearthers", some arguments are even funny because they are based in nothing. You can only just "believe" them.
Of course the government should do something about it. Don't forget the government is the society.
Not necessarily. Human-to-human transmission isn't the primary vector (if even possible) for a lot of diseases we get vaccinated for, e.g. yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, lyme disease, tetanus, shingles, rabies, etc.
We can both make lists of equal length back and forth, but we also both know that there are plenty of communicable diseases between humans. Would we be having this debate if the outbreaks weren’t measles, but Variola Major? ZEBOV?
There are laws on the books in the U.S.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;"
The solution to bad speech is more speech, not less.
And YouTube's decision was to silence anti-vaxxers, not mandate vaccines.
What might also help is research about what % of kids don't respond to vaccines so people who choose not to vaxx can better understand their impact.
Edit: In case you were interested in hard data on non-responder rates here is that data: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6007a1.htm
Yes it has. If I understand you correctly, you suggest that the treatment having a 0.01% chance of being live-saving also be considered in the same way.
Currently, that is true. But medical opinion changes constantly. Is that really the proper domain of government?
I hope we can learn from these intense political discussions that wether it's vaccinations, guns, MeToo, abortion, etc., if you skip the calm discussion of the facts and skip right to name calling, public shaming and advocating criminal prosecution, you've only succeeded in appealing to those who already agree with you.
So, what do we really want? To shame the other side or find compassion and common ground?
Unfortunately, if you look at all the anger getting upvoted, it's a very emotional discussion that probably will just alienate anyone who's on the fence or just starting to research things.
People should be restricted from accessing public spaces if they pose a direct and credible threat to the public. If a person is not vaccinated, they are a threat to the health of those around them. It is not an issue of speech.
And yes, there are forms of speech not protected from abridgement by Congress.
I think you and I both know that talking about side effects of medical procedures is not even close to being one of them.
Free speech is there exactly to protect minority opinions because sometimes it happens people in minority are right.
Every major movement started as minority, by definition. Free speech protection is there to make sure we can have smart people notice a problem and then express their concern and be allowed to voice it so that if they can gather enough movement to make a change there can be a good change.
It is sad that this can sometimes lead to aberrations like anti-vac movement but it would be a horrible idea to argue this is a reason to throw free speech protection out. Instead we should demand lawmakers to grow a spine and recognize there is no basis for anti-vac movement and enough is enough. Sadly, vote counting is much more important nowadays than sound medical advice.
Youtube is a not a public institution nor is it public land or space. Google can allow, or deny, whomever or whatever they want on their platform so long as their motivates for denying service are not due to regulated prejudice such as racism or sexism.
At some point a private company that allows you to post amateurish videos or 140 character messages becomes public utility used by millions and if they decide not to allow you to express your opinion your opinion becomes effectively unavailable to others.
In actuality I think society has reached a point where the ability to post something to facebook or youtube is actually a specific form of expression that should be protected as a public institution. That said, spreading dangerous misinformation is not wholly protected by free speech, if you are a weatherman and advise (with malintent) commuters fleeing an incoming storm to take a highway that is known to be dangerous then your speech is not protected, the government may silence your speech and you will likely face legal repercussions for doing so.
I think freedom of speech is very important and I do acknowledge that this issue is littered with slippery slopes but, not all speech is free and there are some forms of speech that should be controlled. The problem of how to do that as a society while not impeding free speech is extremely hard and unsolved, the best current solution might be to assume all speech is free until a court rules otherwise but that is not an ideal solution.
The correct course of action here is for our leaders to grow a spine and publicly acknowledge this is a problem.
Of course speech should be free until court rules otherwise. How otherwise you expect minority opinion to be safe from majority? It is not free speech if anybody with more power than you may shut you up.
Should he submit a request to have the case reviewed to the DA and ask a judge to allow him to stop you from taking that option?
The courts cannot be expected to individually guide every action (although law enforcement should be cognizant of the types of speech previously ruled to be free or restricted and respect that ruling with penalties for knowingly violating that precedent).
This stuff is complicated and making blanket statements is just silly. _Most_ speech should be protected, but some speech is limited.
I would absolutely love for the top ~20 sites to all be rendered public utilities. But that would require legislation regulating these private websites as newly minted public institutions and I'm sure the operators of these cash cows would have a word or two to say about the government seizing control of their businesses, even if indirectly through regulation.
Right now, legally, Google can do whatever they want on youtube with impunity - if we want that to change, that will require state involvement, because all these sites are way too big for a crowd of nerds on a forum to influence the business models of in profound ways.
Youtube is trying to stem the outflow of advertisers who've clearly stated that they don't want to be associated with certain kinds of content.
There's an argument that perhaps Youtube should provide the ability for content creators to provide their own Ad Network integration, if Youtube is unwilling to provide that monetisation themselves.
However, creators are free to source their own advertising deals and directly incorporate those into their videos - see just about everyone advertising Audible, Squarespace, Dollar Shave Club, Brilliant, etc.
I'm certainly not an antivaxxer. I receive vaccines and will vaccinate my children.
But the government mandating people vaccinate themselves or their children in order to participate in society crosses a line for me.
It may be reasonable in specific circumstances, which I haven't fully thought through, but not by broadly restricting access to public spaces.
Is it your right to potentially threaten their population by bringing in dangerous diseases? Or does this only apply to your current government?
As part of that, people that disregard vaccination are putting the lives of those around them in very real danger. Which is exactly why people believe anti-vaxxers are a problem, and why there's an increasing push to deny them the public sphere.
If thousands of people were dying of vaccine-preventable diseases I may reconsider my stance, but we are currently nowhere close to justifying crossing that line.
IMHO it's a self-correcting problem. If more people do start dying of these diseases some of the holdouts will get the vaccines.
Anti-vaxxers threaten the lives of innocent people and acting otherwise is incredibly callous and ignorant.
Like I said, if it's thousands I might reconsider my stance. If not, sorry, but it doesn't justify the government forcing people to do things to their body.
There's a huge logical problem with your argument. The reason why so few immune-compromised individuals die of vaccine-preventable diseases is because they're protected by herd immunity due to people being vaccinated.
When the vaccination rate goes down, you see more people die from vaccine preventable diseases. Because that's what vaccines do: they prevent people from dying from vaccine-preventable diseases. Which, often, is children.
To see this all we have to do is simply visualize history backwards, re-visiting the time before vaccines and medicine in general, and how people just horribly died in large numbers of diseases we don't even think of as deadly any more.
But what are the odds vaccine deniers would believe historic record, right?
The plague pandemics? Never happened; it's just a fabrication to promote vaccination.
I’ve repeatedly said I’d be willing to reconsider if that changes.
> forcing people to do things to their body.
Ah, but, firstly, your child's body isn't your body; that's a separate human being who has a right not to have idiot parents interfere with their survival.
Secondly, one person's immunization status affects others around them. It's not just a personal choice. Choosing not to be immunized and being around people is somewhat like smoking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine#Effectiveness
"Vaccines also help prevent the development of antibiotic resistance. For example, by greatly reducing the incidence of pneumonia caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae, vaccine programs have greatly reduced the prevalence of infections resistant to penicillin or other first-line antibiotics."
Sourced from Nature Journal: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722121157/http://www.nature...
You're right, and I've never thought about the pneumonia vaccine being against bacteria as well, even though I've taken it myself.
The only reasonable default assumption is that even "idiot" parents have more interest in the survival and well-being of their own children than the vaccination industry equivalent of the Sackler family.
So do people that drive...
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/laws/state-reqs.ht...
https://vaccines.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=003...
Obviously, restricting access to all public spaces goes much further...but functionally, this works well enough if we just get rid of the states with philosophical exemptions.
> It seems to be a minority of states that allow 'philosophical' exemptions.
Antivaxx is basically a religion, isn't it? ;)
How can you be for bodily agency and also be in favor of forcing people to get vaccines?
No value is absolute. Trolley problem and all that (Judith Jarvis Thomson phrased the trolley problem as an organ transplant case it so happens). The potential destruction wrought by an unvaccinated child is deadly enough it overrides the individual bodily agency. By taking away the bodily agency of one child you are potentially saving several living, actual humans. When you take away the bodily agency of one woman, you are potentially saving the life of an unborn person at best. This doesn't compare favorably. Also, beyond bodily agency we need to weigh all effects of forcing a decision and forcing vaccinations have an extremely low chance of causing harm to the child being vaccinated whereas banning abortions have an extremely high chance of causing harm to the woman.
The point is, women are free to abort unborn children. They're not free to let their (born) children die (of neglect). It's not an obvious choice whether they should be free to not vaccinate their children or not.
I mean, it really is. Not vaccinate can lead to death, not always but it massively increases the risk to the point that I consider it neglect. Just as a child left on the street may survive, it doesn't stop the path that put that child on the street being termed "neglect".
(Yes, I’m aware this is due to herd immunity. I’m not talking about hypothetical situations where the majority of people do not voluntarily get vaccinated)
Easier than that - you either vaccinate your kids or we take them away, period. We're ok taking kids away from parents who starve their kids or beat them or let their wounds get terribly infected. Why do we allow parents to keep children if they're not willing to vaccinate for bullshit reasons?
The only thing YouTube has decided here is that they aren't going to take money from advertisers and give it to anti vaccine channels.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/09/14/health/hepatitis-a-outbreak-s...
[2] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Typhus-Epidemic-Wor...
Aren't the people you care about vaccinated?
It is not that easy. Some people cannot be vaccinated, for example measles vaccination isn't licensed for babies younger than 6 months AFAIK. So they will still be at risk from others who could have gotten vaccinated but didn't.
Crazy... to think YouTube execs had no clue that there is a direct correlation to the media they help propagate and the outbreak of previously cured diseases!
Where do you think the line should be drawn in your hypothetical government intervention?
If someone's religion said you needed to disobey red traffic lights, or shoot guns wildly into the air, we'd tell them to knock it off real quick.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/father-vanco...
Was that even a serious question?
How would you endanger others if you weren't? Well you could potentially contact the disease and then spread it to those others, right?
If you're asking how you would endanger someone in a society where 100% of all other people were vaccinated, well I guess you don't but that's not the world we live in.
I was vaccine injured. I battled crippling physical pain and brain damage for over a decade. Do I not have a right to try and survive? Or are you willing to sacrifice people like me so you can be safe with minimal effort?
In medicine, we understand that there are risk calculations to every treatment and preventative decision. You weigh them against each other. When public health at large is the question, you certainly do have to consider the risks that come with public health policy.
For example, diabetics with retinopathy receive injections of medication that can help stop the condition from causing blindness. There is a 1/3000 chance that the injection can cause an infection which can lead to permanent blindness in the eye that was treated. You have to weigh the risks in this case personally when you're a diabetic with retinopathy, but imagine that the decision was instead that refusing the eye injection because of the tiny, well studied risk to yourself meant you were risking blinding someone else's child. It's not a perfect analogy but I hope it may help some understand that we aren't talking about a sacrifice in the way you seem to portray it in your questions.
Also, regarding your health issues, I am truly sorry. I also have some debilitating medical issues that have affected my daily life for almost 20 years, but when having discussions about policy or philosophy around medicine I try not to use them as an appeal to emotion because that can cloud your judgement and logic.
I generally don't bother to argue logical points because no one will listen. But here are a couple of the big ones:
Measles is not a deadly disease for all but in the most rare of cases. Yet the claims of vaccine injuries are skyrocketing. It doesn't make sense to protect people from a non-deadly disease at the cost of giving millions lifelong debilitating illness.
There has not been one double-blind placebo controlled trial to evaluate the safety of any vaccine. All studies that have been done compare a newer vaccine to an older vaccine. Those are the kinds of studies people are referring to when they claim that there is no link between autism and vaccines. These studies only prove that the new vaccine is AS safe as the old vaccine.
The measles vaccine was introduced in 1963. Deaths from measles were already minuscule before the vaccine was even introduced.
Likewise, most diseases were well under control before the introduction of vaccines. This is due to advances in sanitation.
Of course, vaccines for polio are probably worth the risk/reward. But no one is actually talking about polio. We are talking about non-deadly diseases.
This is a decent summary with sources to these claims: http://www.jannyorganically.com/blog/2019/1/27/your-industry...
Yet it's widely known in the medical industry that all medical treatments carry risk, like you said.
And it’s funny because a lot of them actually started with health related concerns.
I believe anti-vaxxers are nuts. I believe they are dangerous. I believe YouTube is a private company who can do what they want with their company.
So why does this leave a bad taste in my mouth? Because they have so much power and influence and they can pull the plug on what could be called a difference of opinion. Yes, it's a horrible opinion but it's still empowering one side of an equation.
Yes, Youtube may be "right" about Anti-vaxxers, but what happens when they're wrong? What happens when they decide to silence or stifle a group that's actually trying to help the good of the people? It's a complex issue to say the least.
Are they really being demonetized being conservative? Or are they being demonetized for being racist, bigoted, transphobic, etc?
What about Flat Earthers? Again, science and fact obviously prove they are wrong but are they causing any harm by sharing their non-fact based opinion? What about religion? Christianity? Islam? Scientology? What about abortion?
I do agree with you but i also agree with the parent comment, the underlying issue is, do you trust Google to know where to draw the line?
I'm not saying YouTube made the right or wrong decision, but is it that much of a stretch to go from demonetizing anti-vax channels to smoking or alcohol channels, and if not, at what point do they stop?
The flip side of this is that it's terrible PR for YouTube if they _do_ let it continue, at which point it turns into a "YouTube is supporting anti-vaxxers during a budding health crisis" headline.
This is before we even talk about vaccine efficiency. In the worst case scenario, evolution means we start wiping out vast amounts of the human population because of a growth in previously preventable diseases.
They end up doing more harm.
In fact measles is probably not going to be much more than a painful few days for most school-age kids but infants and folks who are immunocompromised can die from it, so if anything your "dummies deserve to die" stance is probably going to wipe out the wrong population.
While in this particular case it might be "justified", imho it still sets a very problematic precedent. Because now YouTube has pretty much ascended itself as some kind of arbiter to decide as to what constitutes as "monetizable opinions" and "unmonetizable opinions".
The potential long-term consequences coming out of this are not that difficult to imagine and quite scary.
If the line for free speech has moved from "you must be allowed to speak" to "somebody must pay you for your speech", I just don't know what to say.
> If the line for free speech has moved from "you must be allowed to speak" to "somebody must pay you for your speech", I just don't know what to say.
I never said anything like that, that's just assuming bad faith on your part. I'm merely pointing out that this sets a very troublesome precedent.
Particularly in the context of how dominant these companies are: For the vast majority of people Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter ARE the Internet. Giving this position even more power, without acknowledging it even exists, is a very dangerous thing to do.
I don't need nor do I want these companies to define factual reality, just because their stance, in this case, aligns with what's sensible, does not mean that will always be the case.
Because this will already further play into this "Silicon Valley censoring conservatives" narrative that's even peddled by the US president himself [0]
Note: I'm not saying that's actually happening, I'm merely pointing out it's a thing and how this will very likely further feed this notion.
[0] http://nrb.org/news-room/articles/ft/ifw/president-trump-den...
Given that holocaust denial is illegal in some European countries and there are already some legal restrictions on speech (yelling fire in a crowded theater) it's possible for reasonable exceptions to exist without the entire thing collapsing.
This is probably even more true when the organization making the decision is a company and not a government.
More generally, effects that have the ability to meaningfully and physically compound among both children and adults seem pretty obvious targets. Ideas that can compound in adults are ok, because they're rational actors under the law, but for example teaching kids to teach other kids pro-anorexia propaganda is not, because it compounds to a public health problem that they never could have consented to deal with.
How so? It is a private service.
These are the video types not allowed on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guideli...
My subjective judgment is that it would be wrong for YouTube to disallow/remove antivax content, despite also personally thinking antivax rhetoric is unfounded and extremely dangerous.
But everyone's going to have their own opinion about it.
But, YouTube has a huge problem with thoughtless monetization, there's the grotesque "for kids" videos that seem to be algorithmically generated, unscrupulous people make videos about whatever, not really caring about the content, as long as it gets views and makes them a buck.
By removing the monetization, a lot of actors will disappear, and the only people left will be the true believers who want to spread their misguided word, and that's fine. If they can't make money off of their shit, that's a good thing. They're not being censored in any way shape or form.
Is there a risk that someday in the future these tech giants will censor a “good” thing? Maybe. But those types of slippery slope arguments aren’t very convincing, in my opinion. It’s way more pragmatic to take the “we will cross that bridge when we get there” stance, rather than getting paralyzed by over-analyzing.
The slippery slope concept has played out many times throughout history and the idea that history keeps repeating has as well.
Not moving in that direction is the only thing stopping the slide down.
This decision will shape future decisions and force youtube to make decisions based on popular opinion. Youtube one day will ban any videos with waterbottles or sugary drinks or something else you deem acceptable ytoday that could fall out of fashion tomorrow.
This is what it always comes down to with me. It is a free service that can change anything they want at anytime.
If there is concern they will stifle someone trying to do good or have an unpopular opinion, there are other options. They might not be as easy. They might not offer the eyeballs.
As the laws are written today, services like Youtube are free to do whatever they want in terms of what is on their site.
I understand the bad taste in your mouth, but I have learned services I do not pay for owe me nothing. It used to upset me, but I get it now.
Heck, I think it was just 2 days ago that the headline was "Facebook allows ads to target people with interest in Nazis." Same idea.
It's amazing to me how angry people get at people who choose not to vaccinate.
Throughout history there are countless examples of medicine and medical practices that were deemed safe that turned out not to be.
And the published reaction rate for vaccines is not 0.
So, while completely rejecting conspiracy theories or vaccines as a cause of autism or ADHD, I don't think it's fair to demonize people who choose not to put something into their body that they don't fully understand or trust.
Just calling them names or stupid isn't going to help. A little more empathy and less anger might actually help adoption.
But the last time I checked aggressively guilt tripping someone into a health decision usually creates more resistance than adoption.
The measles is a disease preventable by vaccination which causes hearing damage in one in 10 children, which is much higher than the rate of complications from the measles vaccine.
Horror and anguish is perhaps one of the most reasonable responses to anti vaccination movement getting any sort of momentum.
When had that worked in history? I only know of it creating more conflict and more deeply entrenched positions.
Until you can understand and empathize with who you're talking to, trying to convince them off anything is going to do more harm than good.
Because in the end, no evidence you have will be enough.
Trying to use facts against emotion never works as you mentioned. Helping work through the emotion and then introducing facts does in my experience.
That said, though, it shouldn't leave a bad taste in your mouth. A lot of us were raised to be very sensitive to the restriction of free speech but not all speech is protected. A news caster that intentionally misinforms with mal-intent in an effort to cause harm (i.e. advising people to take a highway that they are aware is dangerous to traverse while dissuading them from taking a safe route) is unprotected speech. I believe anti-vaxxers are either at, or approaching, presenting the same sort of danger to society and action is required to protect individuals.
>What happens when they decide to silence or stifle a group that's actually trying to help the good of the people?
They're not even deleting these videos, they're demonetizing them. No one is getting silenced or stifled. Videos that probably weren't attractive to advertisers to begin with, can't get advertising revenue.
And if Youtube did "stifle" a group actually trying to do good.. their reputation would suffer and the Streisand effect would raise the visibility of that group and they would move their content elsewhere.
There's no slippery slope towards a boot stomping on our faces forever, here. Youtube's influence is not absolute and not unassailable, they're not a government, they aren't backed up by a monopoly on force, and their ability to control or censor information doesn't extend to society as a whole.
Anti-vax channels have not been deplatformed. They can still post their videos on YouTube. They just can't profit from it anymore.
I applaud YouTube for taking a restrained but decent step to help this crisis.
Do we want corporate entities dictating/enforcing social rules OR
Do we want the elected government to be our moral compass and have corporations abide by the same / help the government enforce the same?
If you run a platform you should be able to exercise your view of morality on there, assuming such morality is permitted in the jurisdictions you're working with.
I have long held the belief that the "global no-regulation" Internet was a frontier mentality, and as it becomes more crowded, we will see a balkanization as places like Saudi Arabia, China, US and Europe have different rules/mores.
What this means for the digerati and the Internet's impact on freedom of information remains to be seen.
The government can still declare vaccinations mandatory and enforce that without forbidding from campaigning against that very policy.
Youtube wouldn't have to do anything at all in that case.
No, your hypothetical concern of authoritarian government doesn't trump dead children, because the slippery slope can go both ways. If we are okay with a few kids dying because our freedom is so sacred, where do we stop?
Sounds silly? That's because slippery slopes are mostly silly. It's basically a glorified straw-man.
This simple fact is why the pro-choice/life debates go nowhere. If you disagree on this basic point of fact, no amount of discussion will change your mind. If you believe fetuses (fetii?) are people, then abortion is murder. If unborn are not people, it's a medical procedure between a doctor and a patient.
Imagine if there were YouTube channels in the 19th century promoting the idea that surgeons washing their hands causes surgical complications. What would be the appropriate response?
Yes, anti-vax is not well founded, and yes, YouTube is a private entity that can do what they want, but this tells me YouTube is willing to get involved to push an agenda.
And that gives them a lot of political power.
And yes, companies like these have too much political power. That's something we all know. The question is how to fix that.
If someone made a cleaning video that encouraged users to mix bleach and ammonia to make a super cleaning liquid, I don't think anyone would disagree that it's harmful and dangerous.
I understand anti-vac people are seriously misguided and are posing threat to others but has there been any ruling on this or Youtube just decided it doesn't like it?
I am of the opinion that this needs a transparent process so that YOUR rights are not stomped on when you are in minority. Say you we are transported back 200 years and you express an unpopular belief that black people should be made free and allowed to vote (and women too!) Who is to decide you are not allowed to even express your opinion because majority of the society thinks what you say is complete bullshit (why, who's going to do all this work?)
Both sides of that particular discussion would argue the other one is doing things that are actively harmful to others.
I think one side is grossly unfounded fearmongering that's doing long-term sometimes irreparable harm to a great many people, some of whom are vulnerable and unable to decide for themselves, but they would say the same about people who encourage vaccination.
I'm just trying to convey that almost any form of filtering qualifies as pushing an agenda, and it's just how controversial we find the topic that affects whether it bothers us.
(Work for elgooG, not on anything even remotely related to Youtube, all opinions are my own, etc.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/next-front-in-tech-firms-war-on...
If you disagree with the government stepping in to control things, then the logical conclusion is the users stepping in to control things.
So I'm surprised there's channels big enough which are dedicated to this anti vax thing to be monetized in the first place.
Then again, this is probably the one place in which my views on free speech would come into conflict, since while I do feel people should be allowed to say/write what they want for the most part, anti vax stuff is both scientifically/factually wrong, dangerous to society and dubious all round.
I demonetized all of YouTube a long time ago.
Whatever ads do play or recommended continent appears, I distrust them and never click on it because as other comment said, they have an agenda. ZeroCredTube.
Notice that antivax side doesn't have a "product" to sell while provax does. Guess which one makes more money for The Evil Boys
That's simply not true; the channels they demonetized like iHealthTube and LarryCook333 do sell products (both their own and others') - usually "naturopathic" books, treatments, etc. Some of these can be quite expensive.
My feeling is that since this is HackerNews, instead of arguing about censorship of idiots... let's instead build a startup to solve this.
It seems anti-vaxxers main concern is that vaccines are unsafe due to preservatives. Why doesn't someone make a startup that has "freshly killed virus" that charges $10k per vaccine? Do you know how much money you could make from celebrities advocating these preservative-free vaccines? People would sell their homes just to get these "safe" vaccines from the startup.
It's a win-win-win solution... someone gets rich, the idiots do whatever it takes to get vaccinated or they get put in jail (let's jail them for child-abuse if they don't vaccinate), and we still have herd-immunity in society. So common HN, someone has to have the capital to get this started. Let's solve this.
- no vaccine was/is ever tested against inert placebo in clinical trial. How the hell can we let manufacturers get away with this?
- majority of (media) cited epidemiological studies around safety are just (very) bad
- so as a result we have here following situation: people claiming to be injured (also killed) by untested and massively deployed product (that also saves lives, yes) and we have no data to calculate the benefit/risk ratio. Instead we just vilify them.
I can understand how/why (majority of) scientific community maintains the old reductionist paradigm. But how this can stay out of scope of investigative media is beyond me. (edit: formatting/grammar)