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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a standard in mind that's better than the WHO? Would you prefer content prohibited on the basis of whether it sounds right or wrong to a random Google employee?

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I would prefer content not to be prohibited at all. Content is not a problem. Actions are a problem. Watch all the videos you like telling you to burn down a cell tower. Once you do burn down a cell tower, then you go to jail. Perhaps we should also then hold the people telling people to burn down cell towers responsible, criminally and civilly, for the people who listen to them.

David Icke might not be so cavalier about telling people to burn down cell towers if he could be sued and/or jailed after people took him up on it.

As a general principle, I think we should focus on actual consequences, not imagined, potential consequences.

This has the effect of also encouraging useful dissent. If you disagree with WHO and you turn out to be right, you can be properly credited with it. You are not automatically punished for the crime of daring to disagree with the WHO, and we all benefit from having more accurate, useful information.

If you’re worried about freedom of speech, then giving more people standing to sue David Icke for taking his dumb advice would be far more stifling than allowing YT to ban people. This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.

> This would basically allow anyone with deep enough pockets to police speech using the courts.

Which, tbf, the US and UK already have to some degree.

Which is what I was thinking of.

But there is a big difference between the U.K. and America here; in the U.K. if you lose a litigation, you have to pay your opponents legal bills. In America the cases where the loser must pay are very limited with high bars to clear. This means that it’s absolutely possible to bankrupt someone in America with frivolous lawsuits, so long as those lawsuits aren’t bad enough to trigger the limited exceptions.

If you're going to give people advice, you should be prepared to take at least partial responsibility for what happens when they take that advice.

If a lawyer, doctor, accountant, engineer, or any professional gives you bad or malicious advice, they expose themselves to liability for the results of it. If you want to present yourself as an expert on some topic and expect people to listen to you, put some skin in the game and stand behind what you say. If you can't do that, you shouldn't be advising people on anything.

They could even keep the content available but give it a ranking penalty. This way they stop short of full on censorship, but also prevent the spread of terrible quality information.

Nobody should be above scrutiny, that's the point!

No, there should not be a standard of truth, that's the point. It's a market place of free ideas.

But then we'd learn about all those oligarchs, abuses of the system, tax evasion, astroturfing, propaganda, opposition gate-keepers, distractions, fake conspiracies etc. ;)

It's not a "marketplace of ideas", in practice it's a used car dealership. Just about anybody with the slightest bit of cleverness and free time can convince any trusting person of anything whatsoever, no matter how horrible, given enough exposure.

But it is, assuming you are in the US. That is how the legal framework is laid out. It is extremely difficult and near impossible to restrict speech in public forms.

So the alternative is to create "oracles of truth" that cannot be questioned?

That's just the opposite idiotic extreme.

Who said that? The range of bullshit information you can find at a moment's whim remains extremely high, in fact higher than it ever has been in history.

so what?

People actually believe it, and cause harm.

Case in point: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/us/pizzagate-comet-ping-p...

So how many people have heard of Pizzagate, and how many of them ended up doing something deranged about it? (The article says no one was hurt, actually, but let's say someone was.) Meanwhile, how many people do deranged things because of beliefs that didn't come from the internet—say, they saw someone looking at them and just knew that person was evil, or they had some misfortune and blamed someone else and decided to get revenge?

I submit that the type of person who believes a wacko theory and kills someone because of it is likely mentally ill, and might well have killed someone because of some other belief; the primary cause is the mental illness, while the specific belief and where it came from is not worth dwelling on.

you are missing the point. with your logic much more should be banned and censored than is.

People also believe WHO and did harm too.

You are walking down a path that doesent lead to anything good.

That's a sign that the system is working as intended, providing publishing ability to millions that never had it before.

Any time that's not happening, you should be asking:

1) who's gatekeeping this forum? what are their motivations or objectives? to whom are they beholden?

2) who always gets access? who always does not?

3) what personal information or other information do they have to give in exchange for access? who's excluded as a result of these requirements?

4) how much access do they get? how many posts are they allowed to make? how much audience are they allowed to reach?

5) are there hidden reach penalties for certain types of users, or certain types of content? are the rules published and the applications of penalties/boosts apparent?

6) what are they allowed to say? what are they not? are the rules different for different people?

7) who decides when their accounts get suspended? can they be unsuspended? is there an audit trail to make sure policies are applied fairly and consistently, or is it all backroom/hidden?

Right now in France one doctor (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing (in my view), and he became popular thanks to YouTube.

Yet his views are in radical opposition to both the French government and the WHO. Should his videos be removed? He's one of the most published expert on infectious diseases, so who in YouTube has authority to decide that he is more wrong than the minister of health, who is mostly a politician?

Nobody is talking about banning people like Didier Raoult. If you can't tell the difference between a professor and a guy who gives spittle-flecked rants about the lizard people, this discussion will not be productive. For example, we all know he did a terrible job with the hydroxychloroquine study, but of course he retains his position.

You've really missed the point

> (professor Didier Raoult) has been mostly right about the whole thing

Can you cite some sources? Everything I've seen about him has pointed out how bad his study was, how he has a track record of just plain making stuff up, etc.

Here's a good example (with extra links) that pretty much demolishes his claims: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/29/mo...

The main source would be the website of his own research center https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/en/ (but it's mostly the content in French that's interesting) He had a lengthy interview on French media last week. As far as I'm concerned he got pretty much every part of that epidemic right from the beginning and the facts are now vindicating him.

But that's not really the point anyway. My point is: he went against the WHO and the French government. And at least some people, like me, find value in what he is saying. So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?

> So who is to judge whether or not he should be allowed to spread his ideas?

People who don't think you should make up stuff in medical studies? Which he has a documented history of doing.

Or people who don't think a half-arsed study of questionable value should be held up as a breakthrough against COVID-19 when it demonstrably is not?

NIH? CDC? Their statements were more accurate.

The same CDC that to this day says masks don't prevent the wearer from getting infected?

Yes, but the effect of this CDC stance is far worse than it sounds. Because of the CDC policy that masks have not been proven to be useful, many health workers have been forbidden to wear them. (source: someone close to me)

WHO, CDC, hospitals, universities, doctors

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