Should people use face masks in public?

Yes - get banned on YouTube for disagreeing with WHO

No - go against the data we have so far

The thing with not valuing free speech is that eventually you will find that a rational position you hold (regardless of whether it is actually rational or if you just feel it is) will run afoul of the censors and you will be left without a voice.

"Misinformation" may seem obvious at times. But its classification can very be easily be bent towards any kind of political agenda.

Take one afternoon of your time and just google information on how China identifies videos on their platforms for a variety of reasons and pulls them. Heck, if you make a dumb enough video saying certain things in China, they’ll pull it and give you a little visit. It’s a super slippery slope once you decide ‘we have to do this because we need to protect the public, we know better’.

Here is a larger scenario. I personally think a lab oversight in the Wuhan region could have led to a virus outbreak, enough to at least discuss it. This theory could be deemed by WHO, which could be heavily influenced by Chinese investment, to be lies. With YouTube’s blanket policy, they would be doing the Chinese government’s bidding by getting rid of this lab virus narrative from Youtube (all under the guise of following WHO guidelines).

Anyway, you cannot censor based on an organization or a government’s guidelines.

What’s terrifying about this is that this is the one you heard about. It’s like seeing two bugs in your house: are there 20 more, or 20,000 more?

The insidious part about sometimes-censorship is that it is invisible and deniable. Everyone knows the press in China or under the USSR is/was censored 24/7.

YouTube is only censored sometimes. It’s like a seatbelt that works every day except the day you crash (emergencies/crises are the times when open and free communications systems are most critical to the functioning of society).

I believe this poses an existential threat to a free society, because everyone flocks to these censorship platforms in peacetime, and they pose a mortal danger in war/crisis. I wrote at length about this failure mode recently:

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

Before WHO was saying there's no human to human transmission and masks don't help. So anyone who created a video opposing that would get their video taken down.

Later, WHO started claiming the exact opposite. Now anyone who created a video previously will also get taken down.

How exactly do you propose deciding what's misinformation and what's not?