Amazon Removed Anti-Vax Documentaries from Prime Video

To me, this action says "We have chosen not to publish material, that is based on indisputably false premises, that may harm viewers and the public at large."

That sounds like an acceptable line to me.

I think your opinion is basically the standard one: censorship is generally bad, marketplace of ideas, etc.

I don't have a take on this particular issue. But I think censorship is generally very dangerous, and I also think the Mill-style marketplace of ideas is a bad analogy bordering on the nonsensical the more I think about it.

Humans generally synchronize their ideas with each other and generally put minimal effort into validating their ideas because the synchronization process works enough as a heuristic.

The obvious attack then is to blast out intentionally harmful material in order to do things like cause disease outbreaks.

Our position can't just be that were defenseless against this kind of attack because censorship is more evil than disease outbreaks. There must be some nuance that so far nobody has articulated sufficiently well.

And none of this really even matters because Amazon is a private platform where I can almost never find the thing I want to watch. The amount of things not on Prime Video is so vast that it's hard to get up in arms about them removing something that has no obvious value other than to cause harm.

Fake news isn't ideas. It's fake facts.

All the information on vaccines is out there, from trial data to journal articles to wikipedia articles to graphic novels on the history to your doctor being willing and able to explain them.

The existence (and growth) of these "sceptics" is a testament to our inability to live up to your standards of critical thinking. I don't see how more pro-vaccine information could ever move the needle. The dynamics are rather asymmetric.

And the "all the information/everyone decides for themselves" strategy is fundamentally impossible, anyway: if you "trust no one", your only chance to verify the benefits of vaccines is to redo the studies yourself. That's impossible, obviously.

So one way or another, we need to delegate some editorial control to institutions/people that we can trust to take on part of the burdens of verifying information.

"Trust" does not imply blind allegiance here: these institutions have track records that you can spot-check. There will always be competition between them. And they tend to follow long-term incentives to keep your trust instead whatever short-term benefit could be derived from lying to you.

This isn't some obscure idea. It's so fundamental to the functioning of our society people don't even notice how they constantly rely on trust. Do you ever board a plane? You're trusting some FAA employees, and that they work within a legal structure that makes it unappealing for them to let a drunk pilot bribe them. Do you trust your spouse more than some random stranger not to steal from you? That's because you have known them for a decade, and (again) because they have far more to lose than to gain.

I mean, if you made a documentary about it being physically impossible to incinerate 6M humans in the span of time the nazi's had to do it in the ovens that they had to do it in, you'd get banned from Amazon before you could so much as publish your video.

But you believing such a fringe nazi conspiracy theory couldn't kill me or my neighbour. My children wouldn't be at a real risk of dying from spending time with your kids, even if you indoctrinated them in your beliefs.

Some ideas are too dangerous to even get the chance to compete, especially in a country like USA with an education system so broken that 40% of its people believe that Psychic mediums can actually talk to the dead.

I suspect you’ll find this opinion is more popular than you expect.

Today in 1985 Amazon pulls all videos discussing links between H.pylori and ulcers from its Prime platform. Many HN users laud the decision to remove the content that a "scientific consensus" of the medical community have "proven false".

'This is not about competing markets of ideas', the HN users are saying, "these are real doctors -- real scientists -- saying that the 'facts' in these videos cannot possibly be true. Therefore these are 'false facts' and should be removed."

https://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/history.htm

Vaccination is not "a competing idea".

The idea is competing -- it continues to grow and spread despite the (continually growing and already present) threat to public health and as such, is increasingly being considered as dangerous and bad. I simply don't understand why we have to have this exact same conversation every time a private platform makes its own content determinations.

I'm also getting really tired of this "it's just ideas, guys!" as nationalism, flat earthism, anti-vaxx and more dangerous, anti-intellectual bullshit spreads across the country in this YouTube-era. I'm on the phone with my brother and he's telling me about a student teacher telling middle school students the earth is flat. I'm tired of acting like it's fine and this is unconcerning. Maybe the ever-reliable, ever-silent downvoters could express themselves and tell me why I'm wrong to be concerned.

Isn’t there an in-between of doing nothing? Asking Amazon to publish an opinion is a pretty big ask. At least deleting the item doesn’t necessarily imply a position.

Disclaimers don't work. In Soviet Russia, a lot of people believe in strange things like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_(2006_film) Rossiya 1 is one of the primary TV channels with a huge audience. When those people see that someone thinks that vaccination is the main source of childhood disorders, they start using folk remedies. My classmate's child died from this stupid anti-vax propaganda. I can't believe that I'm sitting in the office and writing software for a better understanding source of cancer, reading publications about ML and so on, but my classmates really believe in this bullshit about magic power of vater, vegan food and anti-vax.

Are there pro-vaccination documentaries, that Amazon could promote? If not, our indie documentarists are asleep at their cameras ...

Phlogiston, luminiferous aether, and Newtonian mechanics also once had "overwhelming scientific consensus".

"The ends do not justify the means." Even for something as important as addressing climate change.

You like "science" but can't actually read the insert. Why?

Silencing ideas is not the way to correct them...

This is not good. This is a very shitty situation where nobody is winning.

It's a balance. Banning books has been known to make them more widely consumed, but reading is intrinsically less viral (and more informationally dense, typically) than watching a video.

I think it's easier to attain a critical mass of followers if these kinds of videos go unchallenged.