YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy
unherd.com
unherd.com
The points made in the video are mostly sensible. They acknowledge the many unknowns.
It more or less advocates for the Swedish model of dealing with this vs. most other countries.
[0] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/c-span-video-of-ran...
> It is not clear whether C-SPAN or Twitter took down the video.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/02/13/rand-paul-blasts-y...
It's widely known that Google/Youtube took down any videos where the name of the supposed whistleblower were being mentioned, at least according to a lot of regular content creators who had videos deleted or shadow banned.
“The site has published a number of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, and intentionally misleading stories.”
Presumably because they didn't want to be exposed to the legal ramifications of broadcasting a crime?
> According to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, the disclosure of a whistleblower's name could be a criminal offense if it is intentional, unauthorized and "the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal the covert agent's foreign intelligence relationship to the United States."
But as many pages about the Whistleblower Act will tell you, this kind of thing is uncharted territory and presumably the exact kind of uncharted territory that gives expensive lawyers for large media companies extreme willies.
Yet people still jump to conclusion and assume malintent, posting headlines which imply Youtube is intentionally removing these videos. Clickbait.
Seems like an overly optimistic view, based on stories you hear that small publishers don't stand a chance.
A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.
Car accidents? Drunk driving? Murders? Dark-web illegal activities? Domestic violence? Those and many others are all solvable problems that we can get very close to zero instances. But right now we're quibbling and putting measures in place that don't get the numbers anywhere close to zero, they just "incrementally" reduce instances and we all applaud and find those meaningful whilst 99% solutions are ignored.
Read the article: "They rejected our appeal to have the video reinstated." - appeals are at least looked at by humans and the humans are affirming they made the right call. Most likely the only reason this one got fixed is someone internally caused a stink and got it looked at by someone higher up, as usual for Google. But most of the time that isn't happening.
Here's another example of them erasing a video by an actual epidemiologist:
https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/youtube-censors-epidemiologist...
Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, told The Post in a statement: “We quickly remove flagged content that violates our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. We are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.”
Note: you aren't allowed to disagree with or even dispute the efficacy of government policy. Period.
There's no difference at this point in policy between a Chinese video site and YouTube, just that the latter are censoring criticism of the state because they've been internally taken over by authoritarians loyal to generic "authority", not because they're forced to. But in the end how does Chinese censorship work? Well, it's not like Xi individually orders people to kill individual stories. It works by ensuring that information services are run by people loyal to the state, who then take decisions autonomously to defend the state.
Yet the video is up and working just fine...
https://twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora/status/12635183523471482...
I always imagine past figures that had adversarial relationships with authority at their times like Socrates, Galileo or Jesus and realize how Youtube would definitely take their videos down, shut their channels down and Susan Wojcicki would say things like “on matters of geocentricity vs heliocentricity we will follow the expert opinion of Catholic Church”. Then I think how might we be hurting ourselves today in ways we don’t even know by letting these tech institutions be the ultimate arbiter of our meaning making machinery.
Should youtube overstep its bounds, that makes it easier for competitors to enter the video streaming market. It seems like libertarian leaning people forget half of their philosophy on this issue.
Because they are "drunk" on theory. To grind out a new video hosting platform is a lot of work.
Is there a way to easily have popular interviews online outside of YouTube?
This point is often repeated during discussions on these topics but I believe this is an inaccurate characterization. YouTube is not "in charge of deciding what is credible" in the fashion that kind of phrasing suggests; they are moderating the content on their platform with respect to their business process and company values, those decisions are not a reflection of credibility. YouTube is a corporate product and we should not encourage the narrative that this product is the zenith of knowledge even though there are knowledgeable people who put content on YouTube.
There is no precedent in human history in such a thing. A private entity which controls so much public understanding and opinion.
Making YouTube liable for content would go a long way in helping keep YT content honest, and solve the moderator problem. YT will either moderate or die.
The reason YT could get so popular is because they neither have to moderate, nor fact check, but still get the benefits of being informational. This is true for ALL social media, unfortunately. How would one go about moderating the thousands of hours of content produced every hour in TikTok? Etc.
What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed.
Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered.
That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.
But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.
I disagree that this is the ultimate question or that this is in any way a problem that merits a changing of the laws (as current law explicitly permits this). Websites aren't common carriers, and I don't see a compelling reason to force websites to host content that they disagree with for any reason. I don't see any connection between the idea between popularity and the loss of editorial control of your own website.
> They exist in a limbo where they have their cake and eat it too- which I think is ultimately untenable.
Moderation is part of the product. I would argue that the idea that we can effectively constrict companies into a specific type of moderation behavior is what's untenable because it strikes at the heart of the creative freedom to build a website and online community with respect to your own ideals.
If you don't want to be accountable for what people say, that's fine - but maybe then like a traditional common carrier you shouldn't get to control what people say.
The asymmetry of "I control everything you can say but am accountable for none of it" is wrong, in my eyes.
This is such a tired argument. YouTube is ubiquitous - it is the primary (read: effectively only) platform for video hosting, which today comprises a large proportion of all information transfer between humans. Companies like Facebook and YouTube are central to social discourse, at least in the west. When a medium of communication is that ubiquitous, the fact that it is owned by a private company is not an excuse to throw up one's hands and say "Well, I guess they own it - they can censor what they want".
The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
That argument seems a slippery slope towards reverse privitization. Who determines what companies are allowed to censor? Who censors the censors? Companies censor content because they are primarily afraid of liability (legal, political, cultural). There are other video sites out there. Just because youtube is popular doesn't prevent people from hosting content on other platforms.
We could see it the same way we see banks. Banks are private entities but tightly regulated and their activity is overseen by their operating country.
Applying a given set of restrictions and requiremnts to services used by more than 50% of the population for instance could be a thing.
In the US I know people would call bloody murder, but other countries could do with sensible rules of that kind.
It was strictly private censorship at the time - Australia didn't pass legislation to censor it yet. But it was coordinated across the entire industry - basically all ISPs used the same list, so the customers had no choice.
It was also completely non-transparent - the blacklist was secret, and they wouldn't even confirm or deny whether any given website doesn't open because it's on that blacklist.
Yet, since the government was not (officially) involved in any of that, there was no review and no appeal...
Far from it. You can host your video anywhere you like, but you get the most eyeballs and revenue from YouTube, and that's based on user preference and not on some nefarious activity on their part. A lot of what makes them successful as a hosting platform is the same content curation that people like to complain about.
I'm not sure about this. Besides removing obvious hate speech, which sort of content curation do you mean? I thought its success was due to everyone being able to upload and share video clips. I don't think curation was an important feature.
Maybe it wasn't in the beginning, but Youtube is a Google company now, and their entire business model is based on (mostly) algorithmic curation. The business model of every content creator depends upon catering to the preferences of that algorithm, and their success at doing so determines their value to advertisers. Entire genres of content have come into being and have been destroyed overnight because of the algorithm.
Youtube's success mostly comes from driving discovery of new content through recommended channels and videos.
I'm not sure the discovery/recommendation algorithm is the same as curation. It seems to me these are related but distinct fields.
Maybe not "nefarious" exactly. But YouTube does have a virtual monopoly. And that's arguably illegal in the US. Or at least, it exposes them to additional government oversight.
I think it does. Others disagree. Sometimes it's an interesting discussion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
(I don't mean to suggest that this provides some kind of obvious solution to Internet content moderation disputes.)
If you want to communicate to a large audience with streaming video in the US (and many other nations), it's Youtube or nothing unless you have an already established audience (which you probably established on Youtube).
Having an audience and Youtube not taking it away, is not the same thing as Youtube intentionally helping you build your audience.
You are performing some sleight of hand here - claiming they are the only way to share your view - when what you are really referring to is that they have the most viewers, and that they have tools for promoting content in front of that audience.
"I deserve access to an audience on their system" is a very weak claim compared to the (untrue) "they are the only place I can share my views."
Personally, I say kill the era of algorithmic search and recommendation. Then you'd have to convince people with compelling content to link out to you, not just be clickbait that plays well in the naive algorithmic feedback loops. Good luck!
Let's say your video has some modicum of success on no-name-host.com. Suddenly facebook, youtube, reddit, discord all ban links to that host to reduce spread. They do this intentionally. They brag about it to politicians. They get rewarded for acting as a block... by the state.
It's a nice little proxy arrangement.
Vimeo
Name the next five that are discoverable, host your videos for free, and can stream that to millions of people in a single day.
- It's not cheap - It's not easy
However, it's a platform of speech that is available to everyone, and if you want to scale to millions, one can add the same caching layers etc that FAANG can. We've seen this kind of thing when people were banned from twitter or whatever, and ended up migrating to other twitter-competitors. Newspapers are not required to post our opinions, and I don't think youtube is either.
Have fun with that egress bill when your video goes viral.
No one has an inalienable right to any of these features, let alone to all of them in a neat package. The organizations that invest ingenuity, capital and labor to create platforms with those features do have a right to set terms on how their platforms is used.
I don't get how the solution to what is seen as corporate authoritarianism (on private property) is asking for more authoritarianism (by the government) to force persons to host content they'd rather not.
As far as being able to reach millions of people per day for free, why do you think that’s a right, exactly? The fact that the websites you listed are footing the bill for you doesn’t mean that serving content (i.e., bandwidth) in general is “free”.
If most of the world's population was on one continent-sized piece of private property, and because it was private property the owners were allowed to censor whoever they wanted, "you can go talk freely on the almost empty island over there, maybe someone from the continent will come listen!" doesn't sound like free speech to me.
I agree that getting rid of algorithmic search/recommendation/promotion would be a big step forward, but platforms for speech of a certain massive size like Youtube/twitter/facebook/etc should also be heavily regulated and their ability to censor limited. They are, due to their overwhelming size, de-facto custodians of speech.
This is very obviously false based on countless examples, but you're baking in the assertion that exposure to the YouTube audience is a necessary criteria to be considered a video platform, yet you haven't justified that belief. YouTube's ubiquity is an accolade afforded to it by the public on a completely voluntarily basis that can be effortlessly revoked at any time. The reason it is not revoked is because it costs users nothing to use YouTube and for the overwhelming majority of its users YouTube is just a small and generally unimportant slice of their day akin to watching netflix or playing video games.
> The fact that it is so widely used and owns such a significant share of the "ways to spread information" market outweighs the fact that the company is private.
Why? I don't see the connection between the quantity of eyeballs freely gazing and the need for the owner to abdicate their editorial prerogatives. What is your justification for this? If the eyeballs have a problem with how those prerogatives are expressed they can look away to another website and they actually do that quite frequently.
This is textbook definition of Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Google is either becoming the Ministry of Truth, or by its policy, allowing governments to be the Ministers of Truth, with no room of any dissent.
This should be greatly troubling.
Remember this is the same company that controls Chrome. It's all fun and games right up until people start discovering their Chromebooks and Androids are blocking web sites on the grounds of "misinformation"
There is a difference between morality and legality. It might be legal for ATT to cut your Internet because they don't like you but it will be immoral for sure.
What is your evidence for this? There are so many other sources of influence in this world that I find this idea completely at odds with reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub...
Considering the content of YouTube's top channels I think the evidence isn't in favor of that suggestion that YouTube has a noteworthy impact on "the population's aggregate belief"
..walks outside to car ..sees local grocery store owner has flattened his tire
Meanwhile, YouTube does little moderation of zany philosophical, conspiratorial, or otherwise disruptive, unconventional content. The ideas of Galieo, Socrates, Jesus etc. fall into this category. That is to say those figures did not promote public health opinions that undermined a global cooperative effort in a time of crisis.
I don't agree with censorship, but your analogy is off base.
I think the figures running the Inquisition and the counter-reformation at the time of Galileo might have disagreed. Remember the 30 Years War was also ongoing from 1618-1648 during the whole time, a Catholic-Protestant religious conflict that engulfed all of Europe and resulted in 8 million deaths.
Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
BTW, I strongly disagree with the this video, but really not sure if YouTube removing it is the right way to do this or will be effective in suppressing virus truthers.
> Bucking the authority of the Church/inquisition at that time was seen as a serious issue against social order in a way that’s hard for us to understand from a modern perspective.
Exactly my point. You can criticize the powers and be and the social order today with impunity on YouTube.
Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, "Why do Your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They do not wash their hands before they eat."
(...)
Jesus called the crowd to Him and said, "Listen and understand. A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it. (...) For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man, but eating with unwashed hands does not defile him."
(Matthew 15:1-2, 10-11, 19-20)
Given that, I think this is gross overreach by YT in establishing narrative. What happens if their management becomes a bunch of anti-vaxxers, do they get to set the tone?
Now I'm a big believer in keeping things shut. I thing prudence is super-important. But QAnon's actions are mainly talk. The state's, however, are different.
QAnon is an FBI-registered domestic terror organization: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-...
They've been connected to multiple attempted acts of violence. They aren't just talk.
The FBI memo cites at least two violent incidents or attempts purportedly linked to QAnon: An Arizona man harassed and doxed locals he suspected of participating in the child sex trafficking ring at the heart of the conspiracy theory; and a Nevada man at the Hoover Dam whose truck was found to contain rifles and other ammunition, who was later discovered to have sent letters to President Trump containing references to the movement.
Doxing and keeping guns in your car are not violent acts and the connection is tenuous at best. By that measure you could easily classify The Young Turks as a terrorist organization, Elliot Rodger was their subscriber on Youtube. And the violence was real.
Why would people on HN of all places take FBI at their word. How many hackers have been defamed, and even jailed, by FBI like that.
Let me be contrary: who shut down millions of businesses and put millions out of work?
Sweden provides an imperfect but interesting what-if scenario for countries wondering what would have happened if they'd imposed little to no lockdown restrictions.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/coronavirus-sweden-economy-t...
Their economy is still taking a very severe hit despite retail businesses remaining open there, because people are shying away from making purchases and visiting shops.
You can (correctly) say that many governments took the decision out of peoples' hands. Perhaps the people of country XYZ would have made a different choice. But Sweden's example suggests that economies would have been screwed pretty hard no matter what.
Exactly.
In most countries, people are willingly staying mostly at home. More, they continue to restrain from shopping and eating out after the lockdown ended.
I don't think this is the case for Germany, Switzerland, or Denmark either.
What countries do you have in mind where lock downs ended and most people are staying at home?
If you believe the disease is rampant in Sweden, it’ll be much higher now. If it’s not, then the hard lockdowns elsewhere were superfluous.
"The disease-induced herd immunity level is 43% ... when immunity is induced by disease spreading, the proportion infected in groups with high contact rates is greater than in groups with low contact rates"
We obviously need to deal with both problems concurrently. There are a lot of actions that can be taken which can help one which doesn’t come at the expense of the other, so it’s not purely a either-or decision.
It would be wrong to turn a blind eye to either effect. The death toll is an immediate concern, but so is a functioning food supply chain, and indeed a healthy economy is critically important to everyone.
No having lived through an economic collapse or a hyper inflation event, for example, it may be hard to appreciate how difficult (and deadly) that situation can be.
From what I gather, the scale of current economic damage is seriously compared to the Great Depression in mainstream media[1][2]. Well, the Great Depression brought Nazi into power in Germany[3], WW2 followed and took lives of 70-85 million people[4] to say nothing of the post-war devastation.
Or look at Venezuela for an example of a bad economy in modern times, where "families buy rotten meat to eat"[5].
Also, if you ask families of people who will die because their cancer wasn't diagnosed in time, they will probably consider lockdowns too excessive[6].
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/unemployment-today-vs-the-gr...
[2] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-economic-cost-and-hum...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression#Germany
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
Also, the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim.
Yes, I think I understand what you're saying.
My point is the harm to the economy directly translates to lives lost too. Bad economy leads to surge in violent crime, opiods addictions, gang violence, lost access to health care...
"... the Great Depression was one of many factors that led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany. The tensions that led to WW2 were brewing for before WW1 even started so don't try to claim that an economic depression caused all those deaths. There are far too many factors to make that claim."
It wasn't the only cause, sure. But it was a huge one, afaik. History isn't a hard science, of course, and I'm not a historian (not even an amateur historian) but this quote from Wikipedia doesn't strike me as particularly controversial:
"The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932, bolstering support for the Nazi (NSDAP) and Communist (KPD) parties, causing the collapse of the politically centrist Social Democratic Party... Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery."[1]
When we all look back in 5 years, then 10, then 15, there will be different "obvious" conclusions drawn. Right now, anyone who sides with any action as correct should have a confidence level that is extremely small.
The more varied the responses, the more we learn as a species, and I am glad that not everywhere assumes they are NYC or Lombardy, and acts in varying ways so that in 5, 10, and 15 years the coming studies have different data points of comparison.
Whether lockdowns are justified anyway is a question for another discussion. But economies are hit by lockdowns not the pandemic itself. Let's look at info we can find about Sweden.
Sure, people in Sweden are staying at home more, but the decrease in activity is hardly on the level of locked down countries.
"When people became aware of coronavirus around March 12, we lost almost overnight 30 per cent. It’s OK. For a couple of months, it will work. But after that it will be very, very tough,"[1]
[A pedestrian street in Stockholm on Apr. 1](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/04/01/TELE...)
[A market in Malmo during the pandemic (no exact date)](http://archive.is/2siwt/5d1b19d61fd21d052c2cc190f13f722c0bf8...)
[Pubs, eating out](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/newsbeat-52618788/coronavirus-ho...)
It absolutely doesn't look that Sweden's economy took a downturn because people are afraid to go outside.
Their economy seems to be hit by supply chains dependent on locked down countries being suspended[1]:
"One big reason is that Sweden is a small, open economy with a large manufacturing industry. Truckmaker Volvo Group and carmaker Volvo Cars were both forced to stop production for several weeks, not because of conditions in Sweden but due to lack of parts and difficulties in their supply chains elsewhere in Europe."
So, to reiterate, it looks very much like the majority of damage to economies are caused by lockdowns.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/93105160-dcb4-4721-9e58-a7b262cd4...
Isn't QAnon directly promoted by some people directly related to the president of the state?
Don Jr. wears it:
https://www.etsy.com/dk-en/listing/716574473/the-official-q-...
The President himself reused their hashtag:
https://www.businessinsider.de/international/trump-retweeted...
It sure can be given other means of combatting misinformation. But sure, let's just go with the sledgehammer every time.
That's just off the top of my head. There are dozens of possible strategies, but companies will always do the cheap and easy thing that will stop the bad PR quickest, even if it hurts some people. We should demand better.
Frankly I would feel much more at ease if we could all decide that Youtube doesn't get to decide what content should be deleted, provided they also can't keep recommending videos. Let me explain.
By recommending videos youtube has a huge amount of influence on what content is promoted and what content isn't. However youtube's bottom-line isn't to recommend good content (despite what they claim it is) but it is to maximize ad revenue, which means they need to make people watch as many videos as possible. Superficially this would seem like it should drive Youtube to recommend good content, but it's beginning to look like it is biased towards addictive content, which has questionable quality at best, but might veer towards harmful conspirational theories at worst. It's a classic example of value drift, Youtube has turned into a paperclip maximizer that is beginning to harm humans to produce more paperclips.
Can't any choice (not being purely audio, why the title is only in X languages, etc) can be considered editorial, for any TV news show or book? It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events. Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
Yes exactly.
> It isn't constructive to construe FIFO as editorial when it is the common way to experience and share events.
In what context?
> Since content creators ostensibly retain control of what is published, they could ideally rearrange their content in their feed by re-pub or out of order publishing anyway.
This sounds horrendous. You want to encourage content creators to spam you with content so that they're always at the top of your "feed"?
Any episodic context, like 99 percent of the media we consume. TV show episodes happen in a specific order of events, movies are constructed of scenes in a specific order, community growth around a channel is built around common experiences already shared, even looking at history channels, if a story spans multiple videos requiring multiple media releases, when each video relies on information provided from another, the content creator would have to be daft to release them in the reverse, or worse, a random order, when everybody is waiting to find out what happens next.
From my perspective, it seems like the only videos that are viable outside of this context are long-form videos (1hr+) or viral trash.
But you're suggesting a single "timeline" for all content. So you get one stream of every show on every channel in order. That's not the usual way we watch episodic content. Hell since the invention of the VCR, we mostly just watch the specific stuff we want, not everything in I ur bundle.
You seem to be conflicting the content made by a single entity with the aggregator. For an aggregator, why does time name more sense than any other view (like say clustered by creator, or as is common today ordered based on presumed interest)?
WRT conflating aggregators and creators, any decision the publisher makes, they should take responsibility for, such as promoting some content and hiding others.
Any "editorial algorithm", by the standards you have put forth, can be abused.
What might be harder is to distinguish sophisticated search algorithms from recommendation algorithms. There's some overlap, but I'm inclined to think that the two are mostly different kinds of things, especially if the search results aren't personalized to the user.
I don't think the concern with rolling back platform immunity is government restrictions on free speech, exactly. In the US, the first amendment provides the same protections it always has. Instead, concerns include that the risk of liability will hamper innovation, that only companies with a lot of resources will be able to take the risk, and that companies will overreact with their own proactive censorship to stay well clear of areas with potential liability.
We've seen the latter with FOSTA/SESTA weakening platform immunity, which is arguably what its creators intended, but I suspect not what everyone in congress who voted for it expected.
To word it differently: "Platforms that recommend/aggregate speech in government sanctioned ways are protected from liability, while those that do not are not". That's, while not open and shut perhaps, certainly spooky.
Tomorrow at 10 AM, join me on the steps of the capitol. Bring your gun and a sign that says "we will shoot you unless you vote no on bill 123.".
The action described is a crime, soliciting others to participate in it is a crime, and my deliberate choice to show it to a larger audience is likely enough to subject me to accomplice liability that virtually any criminal lawyer would recommend against it. If violence actually occurred, there would be an ever lower bar for the victims to clear to sue me. Planning crimes is unambiguously not protected speech.
The proposal described would subject any sufficiently editorial algorithm to similar liability.
That's actually a great comparison. I wonder if it will ever gain traction.
Try replacing “being indoctrinated” with “reading” or “being prompted to” with “watching crazies talk about how you should”, and try your sentence again without the biased framing.
You misattribute the agency of the viewer. Video games don’t make kids shoot up schools, and stupid videos don’t make people light cell towers on fire.
Even the entirety of Pizzagate led to exactly one guy out of hundreds of millions picking up a gun, and even then no one was hurt.
Meanwhile, YouTube is taking down videos of ACTUAL war crimes in the Syrian civil war, which is destruction of evidence and is hindering prosecutorial efforts.
Censorship is not the solution.
"Shot through the heart, and you're to blame, you give love <sic:censorship> a bad name"
- Don't list these videos in watch-next / suggestions. This avoids people getting lost down these strange rabbit holes
- Insert a prompt which notifies the viewer that the content has been flagged as misinformation. Ideally include links to resources to find out more. This prompts people to check out the widely accepted truth to compare what they'll see in the content
Just because something needs to be done about misinformation doesn't mean censorship is necessary
Should we halt the sale of knives because they can be misused to murder?
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4zTt8oLD44
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/magazine/didier-raoult-hy...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/06/hydroxychloroq...
[3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.16.20065920v...
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far less frequently and lead to far less destruction.
> The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected)
No, it's not normal, and the protests have been very small and sparsely attended, but they've been massively amplified by the media [6]. As of May 7th, 68% of Americans (10957 people surveyed) were more worried about restrictions being lifted too early vs 31% that were worried about the lifting too late. And saying you're more worried about the economic harms than the virus is way more normal than actually going into public and gathering in a group with other people who are all intentionally rejecting safety recommendations.
> For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities.
Yeah, it's not possible to change a conspiracy theorist's mind with facts, because any inconvenient fact can just be interpreted as another part of the conspiracy. To those susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is no known cure to the infection. The only way to avoid outbreaks is to stop transmission.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/K9IJKHr
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
[4] https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...
[6] https://www.vox.com/2020/5/10/21252583/coronavirus-lockdown-...
[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/07/americans-r...
I think giving people the idea that they've stumbled onto dangerous truths just makes them more resolute. Or do you think the issue is they just need to be suppressed even harder?
The line is already there, we don't need corporations to draw it for us. If something isn't illegal, it should not be censored.
If people commit crimes they'll get arrested.
Including those that commit crimes because they watched the extremely fringe and dangerous Qanon conspiracy theory you mentioned--which from what I've heard makes you torture and kill small animals right after the first video, to continue onto progressively worse things as you keep watching (stay away from it, kids!).
....... Hillary
..... Chuck
Like him or not, the President is a master at branding. If you really think he is going to have his record setting rallies literally filled with people with Q shirts on and not have control of that situation; it's you who is confused.
Notice how the hit pieces never link to the actual posts.
People who want can find them @ q map dot pub, or a level up at crowd sourced news sites like we are the news dot ws, or even a level up from that at citizen free press dot com.
It's common knowledge that the President of the United States posts on 8kun. We are not waiting for the mockingbirds.
What are the other options? Is there any good_or_not(url) API youtube service can call? They are forced to moderate content.
I don't understand mechanism on why something like this gets censored. I think it is obvious that this sort of "overcensoring" will come back on youtube in a negative way; and possibly even hurt the case for lockdowns and careful reopening.
YouTube has to make these decisions because there's no one else willing or able to do the job. If the government established a Department of Social Media to do the same work, HN would be losing its mind over government censorship. And if YouTube does nothing at all, it ends up hosting terrorist recruiting videos and instructional videos on how much bleach to drink to kill coronavirus.
You might be uncomfortable with the role of big tech companies in moderating content but, until you can provide an alternative, your discomfort does not override the imperative to save human lives.
In more modern times, suggesting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was misrepresented would be "disinformation". Suggesting that we didn't need to invade Iraq to prevent another 9/11 would be "disinformation". Sometimes yesterday's "harmful disinformation" is simply today's "information".
I think the ethical question you presented is multifaceted. On another axis, do the people who control the most prolific video platform also have a moral responsibility to ensure a free society has the tools to ask difficult questions?
Does YouTube remove flat earth idiots?
In China information censorship is due to the government trying to promote peace and harmony. Aka, the government thinks it knows what’s best for people and forces it on people.
Facebook et al also encounter these same problems, where they see people spreading “misinformation.” It’s a hard problem to solve, but they essentially resort to taking the same types of censorship as China that everyone so easily criticizes.
The irony is Google is now doing it too after claiming to have left the market due to forced censorship.
Some people may cite China’s censorship/banning of Falun Gong. What people don’t bother to look into is that Falun Gong is an anti-gay, really out there cult. Their censorship justifications of that is not unlike censoring “fake news” like this “doctor.” While it may be right (of course their methodology may be questionable), it completely short circuits the ability for critical thinkers to actually analyze all content. It’s done supposedly for the greater good.
They're not identical, the state doesn't determine YouTubes actions.
True, if you ignore the fact that China is a government and YouTube is an internet video portal. And that there are sites like HN that can point it out. And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
But yeah, let's compare the policing of bad information in a pandemic that gets people killed, where YouTube doesn't benefit from the "censorship", to what China's government is doing. At least you get to feel good about your purity when you're posting comments on HN, secure in the knowledge that you don't have a teenager or a parent that might die as a result.
Of course they do. You think they're spending all that money out of the kindness of their hearts?
Way to dodge actually engaging with the principles at play here. You can certainly assert your consequentialist/utilitarian arguments, but not everyone agrees with that ethical framework.
What's this ad hominem crap doing here?
I don't know anything about the poster you're replying to, but I think I'm safe in assuming that they don't want your teenager or parent to die either. It's acceptable--essential, even--to be concerned about more than one thing at a time, even during a pandemic.
Youtube, Facebook, etc. in some ways have more power than the government because they can influence public opinion. They also set the standard for what's morally acceptable and people carry that standard with them elsewhere in their lives. Eventually, they'll probably vote for the government to enforce it because it's so popular.
I once met an American who believed hate speech was a crime. It turns out that a lot of young people believe that. No doubt because it is a "crime" on all their social media platforms. Some of them already want to make it a real crime when the discover it isn't yet.
That's the way the west perceives the situation - although over there they might see this as 'powerful unelected corporation which is legally mandated to maximise profits arbitrarily censors with no oversight, in a country where these unelected corporations control parts of the government'.
The difference between governments doing it and YouTube doing it is that people do have the practical choice of leaving YouTube if the situation is deemed intolerable. Up until that point there isn't a practical difference between YouTube and China if they employ the same censorship methods.
> And that YouTube isn't taking steps to cover up what they've done.
The Chinese government isn't exactly subtle; they are promoting peace and harmony through censorship. A lot of people died in the last Chinese revolution & aftermath - they do have a reasonable argument that unstable government will kill people. It is just we know from experience in the west that transparent democracies are more stable because problems tend to get dealt with when they affect large groups of people.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the intended spirit of the site, we'd be grateful.
Twitter and media hyperbole aside how exactly is the current admin that much different than the previous? Bush #2 had fake WMDs and leveraged that to go to war. A war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and a ridiculous amount of money. The last admin bailed out Wall Street (with few concessions), re-signed and expanded the Patriot Act, floated the Paris Climate Accord as a victory (but Naomi Klein tells otherwise). Over both of these admins and prior income inequality has increased.
We've been getting shot in the foot, the head, the arse, etc. I'm not a DJT voter or fan but the idea that he's the problem is naive. If W.DC had been doing their job there would have been no opportunity for DJT to rise. Trump is a symptom. Let's not be foolish and blame the symptom.
On one hand you can say that nothing should be censored and the onus is on the viewer to critically evaluate information. But the reality is that misinformation/disinformation is causing real harm to people, populations, and civilization itself.
For example, propaganda on Facebook in Myanmar has fueled mass killings against the Rohingya. Anti-vax misinformation is lowering vaccination rates and causing a resurgence of diseases that were almost eradicated. Should companies like Google and Facebook just turn a blind eye to all of that and watch brutality and backwardness thrive and tear down progress? At what point should the line be drawn?
Make no mistake, there are malign actors out there who are weaponizing misinformation as we speak. If we choose not to do anything about it, they will have an out-sized role in shaping the future to their ends.
It certainly is a very difficult question to figure out where the line should be drawn, and even then it's a moving target. But it's a question worth wrangling over, and ultimately if mankind is going to meet the challenges of now and the future, the threat of disinformation has to be met one way or another.
That said, I agree that huge websites like youtube, facebook, instagram are something more than just another web resource and probably some regulations should be applied to them. But it's very sensitive subject.
Very few people even within this peer group have the capability of hosting videos on their own website unless the video is intended for a very small audience (say, less than 1000 viewers per day).
If you want to reach any significant number of people, you absolutely need to go through one of the major video hosters or pay for a CDN. And that's before you consider the network effects of YouTube.
Even putting Webtorrent aside, a simple server with a gigabit connection allows you to handle a hundred simultaneous viewers at once with a reasonable bitrate, all day long. If you're constantly getting more than that, you can surely afford a CDN or a proper infrastructure.
I do agree that the network effects of YouTube are very hard to compete with, however.
There's no reason why they should be able to use the infrastructure of private companies to scale their message as much as they want.
Or they can just pay for a CDN as you say. This just highlights the differences between the West and China even more. In the west, harmful messages need to stand on their own two feet. If they don't have support, then they can be kicked off private platforms. No need for the government to intervene.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...
> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.
> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.
So CF bans even remotely right leaning content but claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:
> you might contact your local elected officials and request regulation
Voicing my opinion on a public forum is one way to do that.
This argument ends with "just build an entirely parallel internet". It incentivises radicalism inside tech and communication companies. It incentivises the "play to win" mentality we see in universities in which the hard left relentlessly attacks anyone they disagree with using any tactic they can get away with, which are often illegal tactics when the rules are enforced by people who agree with them.
This stuff ends with a totally lawless society, a la China. It's the logical end-game of allowing the hard left to dominate: the rules are just words on paper, what matters is your ideological loyalty to authority. We can see it happening before our eyes and it's terrifying.
Admittedly, they’ve had a hell of a time, but the hard data is that it continues to run. I don’t condone domain names or hosting accounts getting shut down based on content (ANY content) but it appears that it is still at least a little bit possible to host the most extreme of incorrect/offensive content, it’s just not convenient.
I imagine they might even still be on Cloudflare if they hadn’t promoted the (incorrect) theory that Cloudflare not canceling them was actually a dogwhistle endorsement of their content. Cloudflare cited this incorrect claim as the reason for their termination.
That said, large hosting platforms used by majorities of the population (eg YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) should absolutely have to carry data uncritically, just like the phone company, or at least as long as they are actively trying to kill the federated open web with things like censored native app stores, censored browser extension indices, censored and surveilled messaging platforms, and AMP. Things would be quite a bit different if our hardware didn’t forcibly opt us in to dictatorial censorship of native apps.
It also grinds my gears that they call it “community standards”, which are weasel words to pretend that their userbase likes being forced to watch only what their dictator approves of. They’re unilateral, and invoking the term “community” is a dishonest, unprofessional move.
There is a difference between can and should. They can, but should not.
I didn't say they shouldn't be able to. I said they shouldn't, even if they are able to.
> Why not?
Why should they?
I absolutely agree with you here, but we also have the right to criticize and/or stop using platforms that use this. Your parent post said it was wrong, not that you tube didn't have the right to do this.
The case of the baker refusing to decorate cake for the gay couple comes to mind. He's in court for the third time. Same people who talk about "private company can do whatever they like" attack the baker.
Soon this will evolve into letting private companies being able to censor minority opinions. Don't forget, just few decades ago, LGBT rights opinions weren't mainstream and would therefore have been banned from private companies.
EDIT: Please explain the downvote.
In China you can easily get around the firewall if you try hard enough.
In American you can easily distribute your video on your own website if you try hard enough.
Do you see how these two things are fundamentally the same?
Is YouTube sending people to "re-education camps" now?
If a private platform kicks you out, you can host your stuff elsewhere. If a state censors you, it can use lethal force to silence you. Pretty big difference.
* Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some remote small city with little impact on the national scale. Technically, the Gulag itself was an application of this strategy, with a particularly harsh destination and a particularly dangerous occupation.
* House arrest. Keep dissenters in their homes, and carefully control whom they get into contact.
The end effect is the same: drastically limit the platform available to dissenters, without outright murdering them.
- demonetizing videos that advertisers don't want to be associated with
- age-restricting highly questionable content
- deleting videos which I, like, worked really hard on, and which I didn't even say anything directly violent
- ARTIFICIALLY DEFLATING FluoridePoison777's subscriber counts
Seriously: your argument is offensive to victims of totalitarian oppression.
There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.
I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.
It also whitewashes the issue at hand: this professor is a notorious crank and has been a notorious crank long before COVID-19. This is not a free-thinker taking a bold stand against a sclerotic public health bureaucracy. This is a con artist spreading dangerous misinformation during the worst public health emergency in 100 years. YouTube removing his content is not just them suppressing views they politically disagree with, it's also individual employees at YouTube viewing this interview as a imminent threat to their family's health and safety. This is a very reasonable view for private individuals and private corporations running private infrastructure to take.
Look: if he starts his own website self-hosting COVID quackery, and the government shuts it down, then that really is Soviet-level and I will take your argument more seriously (though given the vicious threat COVID-19 poses, I am open to the idea that this is an extreme but necessary use of the government's emergency powers). But it is simply ridiculous to say that YouTube can't moderate their own content, especially when 99% of the world's doctor's and public health officials would describe the video as dangerous misinformation.
But your self-pitying shtick about how you're a lone voice of moderation in a sea of adversarial extremes is nice. It's not quite as nice as bringing back 90,000 Americans from the dead but it probably made you feel nice about yourself.
This is long form journalism with establishment figures such as university professors.
YouTube censors clearly overstepped their "mandate" here. And Unherd has other ways of publicising this particular interview and drawing attention to YouTube's censorship.
At the end of the day, Youtube's intent is to make as much money as possible. If Youtube didn't censor a lot of misinformation videos, people would get mad and demand advertisers to stop advertising on Youtube.
All that being said, the practical consequences of YouTube moderation are not even remotely the same as those of the Chinese censorship that everyone criticizes. The worst thing that can happen to you on YouTube is that you can't comment or upload videos anymore. YouTube is not sending people to prison or calling up your employer to tell them you're a dangerous agitator.
Correct. This function is outsourced to Twitter mobs.
According to this guy's Wikipedia page, he has claimed many times to be a professor of oncology at Imperial College: but he is not, and Imperial College has sought legal options to stop him from making this claim.
The page is full of other fairly astonishing stuff, not the least of which is apparent fraud connected with the Lockerbie Bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora
I get the feeling that there's more to this story than this article suggests.
"Sikora told The Guardian that he did not know he would be used in the ad campaign, and that he agreed with Obama about the American health care system. In the attack ad, Sikora was referred to as professor of oncology at Imperial College. This led Imperial to seek legal advice to stop Sikora from claiming to be a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial; a claim that he was understood to have made repeatedly over the previous five years."
.
Here is The Guardian source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2009/may/22/karol-sikora...
"Although the US advert did not state a link to Imperial, at the end of piece written by Sikora on the day it was first aired, 12 May, for UnionLeader.com, he was described as professor of cancer medicine at Imperial College school of medicine, London.
...
"I'm very careful not to involve either my NHS contract with Hammersmith or Imperial in anything that's political," he said. "I'm a consultant at Hammersmith hospital, nobody would dispute that. It's true I can't call myself professor of cancer medicine at Imperial, but I can at Buckingham. The trouble is when I get quoted somewhere, they just use the old stuff."
However, on 29 January, Sikora gave evidence to the Commons health select committee. Introducing himself, he said: "I am Karol Sikora, professor of oncology at Imperial College for 22 years.""
.
I believe it is possible the advertisement made this association without his consent; however I agree it is problematic if he represented to the Commons health select committee that he is a professor at Imperial. Personally, I don't find this damning evidence enough to eradicate his credibility.
Lets not resolve to flame wars using factually false info which nobody ever said.
The problem is that there is no counterargument to an argument made in bad faith.
> Promotion of alternative medicine
> Sikora and the School of Medicine at Buckingham have in the past been supportive of alternative medicine. For a short time, Buckingham offered a diploma in "integrated medicine" (a relatively recent euphemism for alternative medicine). Sikora was a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health[24] and Chair of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, which is unaffiliated with any university; it includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who led Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course. > > Sikora is also a "professional member" of the College of Medicine, a patient-oriented healthcare lobby group also linked to the Prince of Wales that appeared shortly after the collapse of the Prince's Foundation. The College has been criticised extensively in the British Medical Journal for its promotion of alternative medicine. These claims have been contested by the College. He is on the advisory panel of complementary cancer care charity Penny Brohn Cancer Care (formerly the Bristol Cancer Help Centre) of whom Prince Charles is a patron, and is a patron of the Iain Rennie Hospice at Home. Statements by Sikora have been critical of unproven methods of alternative medicine, after Parliament member Lord Maurice Saatchi proposed a bill allowing doctors to use unproven experimental therapies, and he has spoken out against claims that an alkaline diet can cure cancer.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karol_Sikora#Promotion_of_alte...
It sounds like he might actually have infringed Youtube's "Harmful or dangerous content" guidelines:
> Harmful or dangerous content > > Don't post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt, especially kids. Videos showing such harmful or dangerous acts may get age-restricted or removed depending on their severity.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/about/policies/#community-guidelines
I have a facebook page for sharing my take on non-monopoly medicine. I wrote a blog post for one of my websites commenting on a Spectator.co.uk article about how the Germans were doing much better with their SARS-CoV-2 patients than the Italians. The interviewed German doctor attributed their success to their making every effort to not ventilate their COVID-19 patients.
Facebook scanned my website and decided that it violated their "community standards", or some such claptrap. But the facebook robots let me directly link the same Spectator article to my facebook page. Facebook's algorithms must have changed between March and April, as they previously allowed my early-March post calling SARS-CoV-2 a 'weakling virus'. [I stand by that statement: the SARS-CoV-2 virus has mostly killed nursing home residents, ventilated patients, and other vulnerable populations (vitamin-D deficiency), and is entirely survivable for young/otherwise healthy people.]
Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell broke rank with consensus to share the experience of doctors on the front lines actually treating SARS-CoV-2 patients, by posting a few videos expressing his frustration at the standards his ICU was implementing while treating SARS-CoV-2 [0]. He single handedly changed the COVID-19 standard of care in the United States by objecting to the consensus policy of ventilating fully-coherent people, thereby preventing untold number of patients from being harmed with ventilation. A later Spectator.co.uk article was written by a Canadian M.D. who traced the abandonment of ventilation for SARS-CoV-2 patients to Dr. Kyle-Sidell's efforts. The Canadian opined that Kyle-Sidell really just tapped in to the mass of front-line workers' observations that aggressive ventilation was not helping.
Conventional medicine is founded on quicksand (mercury/blister agents/bloodletting/etc), got captured by the pharmaceutical industry in the early 1900's (over-reliance on asprin, heroin, etc), made some progress in the early 20th century anyways (antibiotics, imaging, lab tests, science), then was led astray by drug reps promoting new patent-medicines when the old patent medicines lost their protection.
A solid case can be made that the former consensus on SARS-CoV-2 was wrong, and that BY DEFERRING TO THE CONSENSUS OF THE MEDICAL MONOPOLISTS the platforms are promoting modern bloodletting.
[0] https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246765252307533825 / https://twitter.com/cameronks/status/1246762772400148480 - These two tweets from April 5th announced the Doctor's uploading his video to Vimeo and YouTube. Dr. Kyle-Sidell's video seem to have been the catalyst for the abandonment of the former consensus of proactively ventilating SARS-CoV-2 patients. [483]
You've completely misunderstood this.
It's not the ventilation that was killing patients. It was the covid-19 that was killing patients.
We've reduced the numbers of people going onto vents. This has not reduced the numbers of people dying. Now they're dying with nasal oxygen in a care home, not on a vent in an ICU. It's a better death, but they're still dead.
I'm not a professional with years of slinging the lingo. But I think Kyle-Sidell's retweet of "Barotrauma is a real phenomenon" [0] implies [edit] that aggressive ventilation was actually what was killing people. Is it so unreasonable to propose that many of the prematurely-ventilated might have survived, if not for their ventilation?
Wikipedia has a page about Barotrauma, which is damage to bodies caused by pressure differentials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma
Dr. @erikfreyrMD's earlier tweet said "I don't know where this dogma of 'intubate early' came from. Intubation is a death sentence. " [1] (emphasis added).
[0] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243775103071973376
[1] https://twitter.com/erikfreyrMD/status/1243697159037259776
[edit1: means -> implies]
Yes, because we've stopped intubating people so early and they're still dying.
"other treatments they gave [George Washington] during that period were enemas and drugs to make him vomit and something called blisters, where they applied Spanish fly onto his throat, which raises a painful blister, again to remove these terrible humors that are caution the inflammation."
-Bloodletting and blisters: Solving the medical mystery of George Washington’s death, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/bloodletting-blisters-solv...
That should give you a better idea of what harms alternative medicine quackery can cause.
It's another story when people are actively running interference. I've seen messages like "don't go to the doctor for your cancer", and I agree those should be suppressed. But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.
Imagine a population of 1 million users. In one timeline evil, stupid misinformation isn't spread around and 1000 people die.
In another timeline it is spread around and 10000 people die. Warning labels can't help here because most of the people negatively effected are multiple steps removed from such a label. Like the first example we should have reduced its audience by taking it down entirely not added a warning label that 50-80% wont attend to.
I just wanted to put in a nice word for Penny Brohn. They very careful position themselves as complementary, not alternative, to conventional cancer treatment.
There was some work that looked at the outcomes of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre that showed poor outcomes, but that research didn't correct for the illness of the patients. Lots of people using the service were on palliative care pathways and were expected to die. They were using the service to get the death they wanted.
These are relatively simple steps that would improve public health dramatically, I'm not really sure why these kinds of arguments are presented like some sort of self-evident zinger against censoring dangerous content.
And nuking a city stops all crime in it. If you only look at one tiny aspect and ignore everything else, just about anything can be made to seem sensible.
He's being deplatformed for even slightly questioning the conventional wisdom.
Wow! These tech companies hold way too much power.
Indeed, they probably don't censor the people who are truly insane because that's obvious to any viewer. They only censor the people who say things they don't like.
Alex Jones?
Regarding his relation to WHO, according to his own claims (dead link on wikipedia) he was "Chief of the Cancer Program from 1997" (to 1999, just two years, two decades ago). But we also know that he falsely claimed to be professor on Imperial College, see also posts here.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331393/WH-1...
"Dr Karol Sikora is Chief of the WHO Programme on Cancer Control" as per the magazine from "September--October 1998"
1) obviously not equivalent to "ex director at the WHO"
2) obviously more than 20 years ago
3) and "on cancer control", not on epidemiology
still not anything to allow him to misrepresent his relation to Imperial College as late as 2020 (!) or to give a credence to his current epidemiological policy views.
However, once they consider themselves as "curators" of information with near-monopoly status, I hope they are litigated against successfully.
The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
> The current situation is because governments passed laws to regulate the type of content they are allowed to show.
> The "phone company" is not the right analogy. They are more like mass media (TV, news papers, etc), which is the rational for censoring them
This assumes they don't have the legal resources to fend off such a case.
For example: They could easily - but actively choose not to - host pornography.
They do not want to host everything that is legal.
This suggestion (and the comparison to phone companies) comes up repeatedly but Youtube can't _be_ a neutral carrier if they are funded by advertising. That's because the businesses' choice to pay for advertising is not a neutral choice. See "advertiser friendly content"[1] and Adpocalypse[2][3].
Land line phones and cell phones are funded by subscriptions and they are also point-to-point communication between 2 private individuals. Phones (barring small-scale exceptions such as conference calls) are not a "broadcasting" medium.
There is no broadcasting medium in the world that acts as a neutral carrier. Not newspapers. And not tv like NBC/CBS/ABC. Even the government funded broadcasters like American PBS or UK BBC are not neutral carriers.
Ok, let's say you this ambitious idealism to create a new broadcasting website that allows anything except for child pornography. How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma. Subscriptions? Most people don't want to pay a subscription fee for user-generated-content. Yes some die-hard web surfers pay for Youtube Red/Premium to avoid ads but they are a small minority that's not enough to pay for the entire Youtube infrastructure. So far, only funding based on advertising seems to be viable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google#Advertise...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=biggest+advertisers+abandon+...
[3] https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/04/20/pg-resumes-youtube-spe...
It should be as well.
Disallow advertising companies from paying for ads on specific content only.
They should have a blanket agreement to show N ads, to user demographics, interests, etc. But not the ability to not have their ads shown on particular channels/videos. That just gives the ad companies censorship power.
>How are you going to fund it? Advertising?!? That's just recreating the Youtube "ad friendly" dilemma
Ban by law "a la cart content/ad choice" across all platforms. Customers/Ad companies either sign to show their ads the platform or they don't. No selection of channels/videos they'll be shown on (except if they have a deal with a specific channel as sponsors). If that's the case for all platforms by law, they can't go to another platform to have it cater to their demands...
That way a platform doesn't have to cater for specific "ad friendly" content. Just to have popular content, that draws ads in general.
That's easy, because the law I propose will decree so.
As for the moral reasoning, because (a) advertisers are scum, and (b) they should not have powers over content publication. The same reason advertisers putting a billboard don't get to dictate what cars can and cannot pass by it.
>It amazes me how willing HN posters are willing to give up power to the government.
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
If anything, my problem with government is that enough of it is dictated by those same interests (lobbys, private interests, advertisers, etc) as opposed by the voters directly. But that's another thing to solve, and giving more power to those interests is the opposite of the solution.
Honestly I think politicians are bigger scum and they have the power of the state to impose their will. Do you really think if you gave the state power they would use it fairly?
I'm all for giving power to the government, which people vote for, and have established mechanisms to control, instead of private interests that talk by throwing money.
Elected officials don’t get into the minutiae of enforcing those types of laws. Unelected committees like the FTC do and most of your recourse if you don’t like it is to file lawsuits that are decided by unelected judges that have lifetime appointments.
Not to mention that even those appointments are made by the Senate where the flyover states in “Middle America” and the “Bible Belt” have power far more than their populations would call for thanks to them having two seats in the Senate just like the more populous states. Those are both the last people I want to give more power to.
Yes I’m well aware that the other side is just as bad.
If someone wants to spread bullshit and hate, let them do it on their own dime, or find someone wanting to do spread it.
They are not forced to do anything. They can always NOT advertise.
What I propose is not forcing them to subsidise anything, it is about taking away from them the power to dictate terms to platforms.
Moreover, the "bullshit and hate" is your strawman.
Traditionally, and I'm not some Gen Z to not remember this, it has been the right that was pushing advertisers and platforms to assist in censoring tv shows, music videos, records, etc with non-approved messages (pro-gay, anti-religion, pro-choice, etc).
That the tables have turned for a while doesn't mean the tables will always be this way (we're already 4 years into Trump for one), and I don't even believe the tables have turned as in "it's just bullshit and hateful stuff that's demonetized". I think that all kinds of good content is demonetized all the time, both left and right wing.
Any cause you personally might like can easily be labeled "bullshit" and or "hateful".
I think if you want to separate YouTube into separate stacks (eg fundamental infrastructure for hosting videos & a publisher / curator of those videos) you could imagine the infra part not being picky about what is uploaded (as long as it is legal) but the publisher part de listing videos except to be shared by link
Do you take issue with that?
They only pull ads because they can. If all platforms are banned from allowing removal of ads on specific videos, then those advertisers will have the option to (a) advertise, or (b) not advertise.
Will the opt-out of YouTube (and every major platform) altogether?
In fact, the public will also understand it's not up to the advertisers and the story will end there. The people can then try to boycot YouTube itself for having a specific video, but that wont go very far either, especially if it doesn't touch the advertising money.
It's actually a good thing if advertisers don't sponsor something because their customers don't like that thing. Those customers are voting with their money, and those customers -- the democratic electorate -- those are the people we want making censorship decisions
This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
For one, I don't want anybody "making censorship decisions". We're not that far from the time the majority would like pro-integration/black, gay friendly, or atheist e.g content censored.
Second, they don't vote with their wallet on the actual content. They could always vote by not watching the video they don't like, and if enough people did that, the video would naturally not have advertising revenue.
But no, while they hate on the video, they don't target it, but target the company making some totally irrelevant to it advertised product, using their complain to negatively affect the video creators.
Third, and more important, this is not actual voting, nobody counts and there are no official rules and limits. A 20% or even 10% of customers can make the companys, and throu that, the content creators' life miserable (cut ad revenue, deplatform, censor, lose display space, etc), even if a bigger majority has no problem or even likes it. In fact, you don't even need that (10-20%), just enough determined hardcore complainers creating a fuzz, even if they're like 1% of customers, many companies just don't care to suffer them, and cave in.
Fourth, advertising companies also take pressure from their customers, the advertised companies, not just the public. Even more pressure there. So companies can also have leverage to stop them giving ads to content they don't like (whistleblowers, critical videos, etc).
>This bizarre notion that more regulation (advertisers can't choose what videos they advertise on) would somehow fix the problem we're seeing is completely disconnected from reality
Since the problem is advertisers having too much power by being able to choose the videos they advertise in, of course more regulation disallowing that will fix it!
If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube
I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Now advertisers are effectively still making the same decisions that they were, YouTube is still the preferred advertising backend, and nothing changed except that you made it harder for smaller sites like Vimeo to attract advertisers
Your regulation idea is reckless because you haven't thought it through
Not if laws lessen it. Which is my whole point.
>If an advertiser today wants to advertise with pornhub, that is a different editorial decision than choosing to advertise on YouTube. I shouldn't have to spell this out because it seems pretty obvious.
It's only obvious within a certain puritan culture. In Europe nobody would bat an eye if an advertiser for a, say, fast food store, advertised in pornhub. People wouldn't want to take them down.
>One can imagine a world where YouTube complies with your regulation by providing YouTube, YouTube for kids, and maybe a couple political niches that capture their most popular creators
Adults are not kids - they don't need or should require special segmentation from different content (aside from their chosing what they like to view/read).
So we'd just needs a kids and an adults YouTube.
Plus making advertising on the adults YouTube wholesale: you buy impressions/views/clicks/etc - and that's it. You don't get a say which video they appear on.
In fact, the "break up big tech" groups might laud such a thing
There is no way of framing your regulation so that it does something useful. Instead it will only ever be a burden on smaller distributers and hurt their chances of advertising (because in order to find advertisers, those advertisers will either have to not care about the content or be convinced that the content is pg -- an incredibly onerous technical burden)
This idea that the regulation wouldn't have consequences you don't like because you don't like them is a fantasy
None of your ideas make any sense here
Actually it can. That's the whole point, legislation can do anything, In the US case it can even change the constitution with a new amendment...
YouTube does not have a monopoly on video streaming. There is nothing stopping anyone from paying for the bandwidth and streaming anything they want by renting computer hardware and bandwidth from a colo.
Heck, I can set up a bandwidth adaptive video stream and put it behind a CDN.
They're already that. Youtwitgrambook's front-page and suggestion algorithms are forms of curation, specifically designed to maximize some form of engagement metric.
Their respective content policies are really just an attempt to correct the failings of algorithmic curation.
I tend to think Ben Thompson has a good way of delineating who should be moderating the internet... that's discussed here (I think the day before he had an excellent interview with the cloud flare CEO)
https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/
These platforms (fb, YouTube, Twitter) are not fundamental service providers
As you move down the stack to fundamental infrastructure, you want them to be more constrained in how they censor.
Ultimately, we also need to figure out how to make policy decisions wrt censorship (at all levels of the stack) so that there isn't a single person at a tech company pushing a button. That's a lot of work and needs to be done carefully, but we do need to genuinely consider at what point something is damaging enough that we forbid it.
And no, it's not germane that these websites are operated by private corporations. If anything, the fact that hugely important forums where modern speach takes place are censored by parties without any form of democratic accountability adds weight to the argument against censorship in these spaces.
If we had a vibrant tech economy with new platforms arising and competing amongst eachother, it would be a different story, but when we have a stale internet landscape dominated by sprawling behemoths like Alphabet and Facebook, what happens on their platforms are issues of national importance and cannot be left to undemocratic governance and censorship.
We can decide that it's too dangerous to encourage people to commit violence, for example
We can still change laws (and have recently!) about what types of posts are acceptable. I want a world where we democratically decide that revenge porn is illegal.
But it doesn't even seem like you read my post, much less the link.
Freedom of speech means that anyone can write letters or start their own newspaper/platform, not that all other newspapers/platforms have to give part of their audience to everyone.
The opportunity to be a neutral carrier is sacrificed by any platform that deploys a recommendation engine. Recommending content is a form of curation, which makes them a publisher, conceptually. It does not matter if the content curation is done by hand or by an algorithm that was built by hand.
The problem is that people don't evaluate 2 narratives equally based on the information in them. If that was the case, you would just have to make sure that for every bogus report there is a reliable report, but once misinformation takes hold it takes a lot more than that to dislodge. The analogy I think of is that when presented with a table full of junk food, its hard to get people to pay attention to the veggie platter.
This study[1] indicates more success could be had with a new narrative that doesn't just refute the misinformation, but crafts a new narrative with additional information that can dislodge the other one, like a flank attack instead a head on one. Anecdotally I've seen that work and I've also been guilty of the lazy head on approach and seen it fail.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170912134904.h...
As the Covid-19 situation, prognoses, diagnoses, testing procedures, and far more are PUBLICLY ADMITTED to be flawed, it is RIDICULOUS to silence ANYONE, let alone legitimate experts, even if they are engaging in WILD speculation.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH ONLY MATTERS WHEN THE SPEECH IS DISLIKED.
Think over that...deeply...speculation and experimentation may save your life....or not.
wa inna Allahu Al Alim
But as stated this is not a freedom of speech issue as YouTube is not the government and nobody is entitled to their private platform
In the grand scheme of things, there isn't much that is universally agreed upon even in professional/academic circles.
I would submit that limiting discussion because it doesn't fit the most wideley accepted or palatable narrative is a magnitude more dangerous than instead relying on people to take in all sides and decide for themselves.
Recall how Galileo Galilei was treated. History can and does repeat itself.
Is it authoritarian if misinformation are being spread?
That said, having tens of thousands die bringing innocent people with them to the grave is a matter of public policy and the very reason why governments are not direct democracies but republics instead
I am happy that this video was removed, not because I trust YouTube, but because I don't want to see people continue to die needlessly. Governments have other tools to provide economic sustenance to those that require it. And no, I won't go to the cinema, a mall or a restaurant simply "because they are open" as I don't have the brain of a child to risk myself and my family for it
I prefer to live in a world where both are available and the preferred solution is education about the effects of junk food.
Guess what happened when we decided "telling people sugar is great for kids" was bad? The government now regulates the information people are provided regarding nutritional content in food.
Speech isn't so easy, which is why the analogy still doesn't work.
Cows are not perfect spheres, and people are not perfect rational agents and that won't change for the foreseeable future so policy makers need to handle things with their avaliable policy tools, not the tools they wish they had
Not sure what the best action points would be, but I'm thinking we start by speaking with our companies about redirecting ad-spending away from Google, pausing any active development related to integrating Google products and seek out alternatives, removing/replacing Google analytics (since this is where tons of value is created for Google and allows them to follow users basically everywhere), and seriously talk about unionization next-steps. Thoughts?
He can be his own distributor that’s the power of the internet.
Yes, I fully agree with you that they have the right to remove whatever content they want. And I absolutely don't want that right to be taken away from them. However, I disagree with how they are currently utilizing that power, even though they have full rights to do so.
It's kind of similar to how I support the 2nd amendment rights and don't want them to be taken away from people (including open carry). But I disagree with how certain people use it during protests by open-carrying at the airports or in front of the city council building.
The government would probably go out of it’s way to make sure “Focus on the Family” content would be allowed but not “Black Lives Matter” just like they shut down the government in Michigan but the same conservatives passed laws for stricter gun control when minorities started exercising their 2nd amendment rights (the Mulliford Act).
But it doesn't mean that I cannot be upset at youtube for exercising their rights in ways that I disagree with. Mind you, I am not calling for a legal action against them or to change laws pertaining to those rights. I am just expressing that they shouldn't be exercising their rights in such a way, but they should still have the legal right to do so. Mostly because I believe that the unintended consequences of regulating that will be much worse (same with gun control).
That wasn't the question. The question was should they be banned?
I'd say no.
Passive voice makes the situation seem more universal and nefarious than it actually is.
"Do you think that such people should be banned from sleeping in houses"? No, but I think I should be allowed to decide who sleeps in my house.
The virus is getting "tired" ... really.
Lots of these contrarian "experts" popping up in youtube channels with rather slick production values (wonder who is funding them) about social distancing and lock down policies.
I have my problems with YouTube, but this isn't censorship, and it isn't a conspiracy to silence anyone. It's an effort to be responsible to public health and safety. The hysteria I see here is completely unwarranted.
1. https://www.who.int/images/default-source/health-topics/coro...
No, YouTube still is determining credibility. YouTube is still saying, "this video is misinformation and we are removing it." The fact that it's treating the WHO information as the baseline does not change the fact that YouTube is deciding credibility, and removing videos that do not meet it's criteria for credibility.
February onwards, WHO did a full 180. But everyone who got censored before then was the victim.
Same thing about effectiveness of wearing masks.
So anyone pointing out the obvious that "China cannot have lesser deaths than Canada" is considered a "misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theorists" because they "contradict the World Health Organization's official guidelines during an emergency pandemic".
How people don't see the clear danger of such censorship is beyond me. WHO also says China has been transparent.
The WHO said there had been no reports of it spreading human to human. And that was true, there hadn’t.
The reason your favourite conspiracy sources are taken offline is because they lie - they make you, an otherwise intelligent person, believe something that wasn’t true.
A favoured argument by one section of the internet is that “it doesn’t spread from Children to Adults”. An extraordinary claim.
They interpret the statement “there have been limited cases of it spreading from children” and treat that absense of evidence as an evidence of absence.
Note that in January, in a QA dated 9th, they did say
“Yes, some coronaviruses can be transmitted from person to person, usually after close contact with an infected patient, for example, in a household workplace, or health care centre.”
I.e coronaviruses in general spread, we haven’t seen this one spread yet.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200129195709/https://www.who.i...
Two reasonable people can agree on the underlying facts but disagree on policy.
Additionally, this is absolutely censorship and an effort to silence people. It is not an illegal act of censorship. similarly, you can agree that it is legal, but still not like the censorship.
https://twitter.com/ProfKarolSikora/status/12635183523471482...
> He estimates 25-30% of the UK population has had Covid-19, and higher in the group that is most susceptible
Here's the Office for National Statistics household survey results. This is only people living in households. (It doesn't include hospital patients, or people living in care or nursing homes).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
> Our latest estimates indicate that at any given time during the two weeks from 4 May to 17 May 2020, an average of 137,000 people in England had the coronavirus (COVID-19) (95% confidence interval: 85,000 to 208,000). This equates to 0.25% (95% confidence interval: 0.16% to 0.38%) of the population in England. This estimate is based on tests performed on 14,599 people in 7,054 households.
Frustratingly they haven't said yet how many people in total they think have ever had covid-19, but it's not going to be anywhere near 15million people in the UK.
>Maybe it's because I grew up on the Internet in places where there was always a sysop, and so I take for granted that whoever runs the server has certain responsibilities. Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam). Maybe because I grew up in that wide open space where the freedom that mattered was the freedom to choose a well-kept garden that you liked and that liked you, as if you actually could find a country with good laws. Maybe because I take it for granted that if you don't like the archwizard, the thing to do is walk away (this did happen to me once, and I did indeed just walk away).
I think many people coming to the internet nowadays have had their formative internet experiences on large social media sites, where moderation is both impersonal and rare, to the point that users don't bother understanding it because it's unlikely to affect them, and then if it does affect them, the reasons for it aren't understood and they feel singled out. When these people hear someone talk about smaller better-moderated places, they can't understand the appeal, as if it were proposed to them that a site would be better with more boogeymen.
Youtube et al certainly encourage the free and public flow of traffic. Their business model depends on it. So their responsibility to the public would seem to obviously overshadow the perceived protections as a "private company".
I was also a child of the 80's
The first few statements he makes are bit eye-raising and I didn't continue listening but:
"many of the people who died would've died at the exact same time anyway"
I wonder the source or how he knows. He says it so matter of factly that I'm sceptical.
https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-will-ban-anything-ag...
The article used to say "Japan to start trials of Favipiravir for treatment of COVID-19". Changed to "Japan tests showing Favipiravir not effective against COVID-19". Removed.
The is btw zero evidence that having fake prophets on youtube is endangering public health and this is unfortunately an excuse for people who like to tell others what to do, to pretend they are doing it for the public good.
A private company chose to remove content from its service because it considers that content to be bad, and probably in violation of its terms.
Did the government force it to do so?
Is somebody preventing the owner of the video from hosting it on their own web site?
Censorship is a real thing in the world, and so is crying wolf.
But I don’t see why that matters. If I can’t get published in the mainstream media, but I have plenty of options in the alternative media, is that censorship?
I like it when the government censors child pornography, but I don't like it when they censor political speech.
I like it when corporations censors child pornography, not not when they censor minority opinions on covid policy
If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?
If it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?
If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”
If I’ve got it wrong, please, enlighten me.
>If your minority opinion on Covid is welcome on Platform A, but banned from much larger Platform B, both of them being private entities, does this count?
Censorship does not have to be universal. For example, some speech is banned in churches but permissible in public.
>f it counts, how is that different from the New York Times refusing to publish my dissenting opinion on the local galleries, which I am free to publish on my universally accessible blog?
In your example. if the New York Times normally allowed the public to post gallery reviews, but refused yours specifically because it fell into a category they want to suppressed, this would be considered censorship.
>If it’s just that “not publishing what I want them to publish” counts as censorship then (as per my first, unloved comment) I think it’s a perversion of the term. Many places have real censorship, as in “publish this idea and you go to jail.”
I agree that many places enforce censorship with severe punishments, but punishment is not central to the idea of censorship. For example, an effort could be made to destroy all evidence of Oscar Wilde's Homosexuality. This would certainly be an act of censorship, even if Wilde is not harmed, or even if those who resist are not punished.
>If I’ve got it wrong, please, enlighten me.
Wikipedia has a decent summary of different types of censorship if you scroll past the political section [1]. Some examples of corporate, religious, and self censorship. This utilization of the word is not new and consistent with what I have said.
I think that the idea that censorship can only be imposed by a state under threat of punishment is an inaccurate and restrive view. That said, if you feel strongly that this is the wrong definition, you can just substitute the word censor with suppress when whenever you read it.
what we can do is suing them. censorship became too popular recently.
Using Google software and services is dangerous and irresponsible. De-platform now!
Let no good catastrophe go to waste. With each, we lose a little freedom and the populace resounds in joy. Not because they want less freedom, no, it's because they think they've triumphed over a common evil: the dissenters. These cycles always include labeling the enemy, and it's usually the ones who disagree or challenge the state.
The common man isn't an expert in virology, world politics, or terrorism. Yet, if you look at the ones upholding and defending the position of the state, they're just laymen. Their opinions are fiercely held without question and expertise.
All you have to do is label the enemy, make that label an adjective that the average-person would reject at first glance (conspiracy theorist, extremist, etc.), then assign that label to anyone who dissents from the state's position. After that, it's just policymaking for the "greater good".
beautifully stated. Or the more common "boiling a frog slowly"
If we do not fight for our freedoms, our children will get used to the reduced freedoms as a 'new normal' and it will only get more repressive
Existing platforms could be misused by private actors in a way that negatively effects the populace. Arguably most of the people presently concerned are either a majority of bad actors or a minority of idealists concerned about future potential.
To the worthy minority I would suggest that difficult to censor platforms are probably trivially realizable in mid term especially if substantially desirable or needed.
I don't think censorship by platforms like YouTube is being misused now and the massive risk remains censorship by state actors. I suggest we in the short term we encourage people like YouTube to censor more evil idiocy not less while working on maturing decentralized options to the net benefit in the short to mid term as a hedge against tyranny that will virtually certainly primarily remain the province of state actors.
the state actors are to an extent, elected by the people. The big corporates have no accountability.
> I suggest we in the short term we encourage people like YouTube to censor more evil idiocy
You say that because in this narrow issue, you agree with youtube.
What is the short term?
Have you thought through all the consequences? and still, things will happen that you have not accounted for. everyone is against evil or idiocy. The question is who decides what is?
The media's propaganda can and is being used to brainwash the people, and the results are clearly out for all to see.
PragerU got a whole bunch of videos blocked. One of them was about the 10 commandments. about 10 minutes long.
One of the commandments was 'Do not murder'
the reason youtube gave was that hate words were used. (I am paraphrasing).
you really should watch that video with a open mind, look at all the rap videos that exist that talk about murder, violence etc, and make a case for it.
--
>"import to society"
Again, who decides what is important to society? To me, the pragerU series is very important to my worldview, to you, it could be nonsense. Youtube is clearly biased against it.
It is important for you to be able to seek out alternative view points. Currently, these are being buried.
Or do you think that maybe the people working at YouTube might be worried about this specific issue -- that their platform could amplify dangerous misinformation about the pandemic -- and they want to reduce the harm they're participating in on this specific issue? (Have you ever known anyone in your life that learned that something they were doing had a bad effect on someone else, and then got worried about that and changed their behavior?)
If people at YouTube really liked censorship for the sake of censorship, they would just dive straight into it, or would have done it from the start.
https://www.rivm.nl/en/novel-coronavirus-covid-19/children-a...
Promptly restored upon viral traction of outrage...just like that podcast app was....
Not sure if anyone has noticed but when logging in to a Gmail account, Google is trying to access a YouTube domain. Not too many weeks ago they announced a change in the YouTube terms of service. Sad to think every video you watch could be used to help online advertisers. Google is not like the public library. The public library does not use the list of every book or other item you borrowed to try to help the ad industry. Of course it is much more than just a list of videos. They probably record data such when you watched, what portions you watched, etc.
the case for p2p is stronger than ever now that bandwidth is cheaper. downloading a torrent from other users is faster than pressing play on youTube, when you account the time wasted with advertising.
Also, the videos that should be deleted before any others are the videos about the claim that it's better to be too afraid than too little, for instance. If people deliberately increase their fear, they become irrational like Francis E. Dec, who believed in the "Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God". The difference is that Dec had no doubts, and didn't choose to ignore doubts and to deliberately be afraid the most.
2. Even if we generously interpret this as meaning that the virus would be less infectious in warmer weather, the only evidence we had pointed to this as only a possibility, rather than something we could predict.
3. As summer has begun in the Northern hemisphere, we still don't have any good evidence that the virus is less infectious in warmer weather--certainly not in the Southern US where the disease continues to spread unchecked.
However I do think there are "flag mobs" which increasingly flag posts they don't agree with.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but in this case I suppose it might have been a combination of users who are fatigued by this general topic having been repeated so frequently in recent weeks, and users who agree with the decision to take down the interview and don't think HN should have a thread about it. As I said, though—those are just guesses.
In the meantime, someone else reposted it and it was on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258432. But since this post was first, I've turned off the flags on it and merged those comments hither.
My post is what I think a necessary reminder in a topic that I honestly don't think is very polarizing. It just needs to be repeated, over, and over again. The same way it gets taught to kids at school so they teach it to their kids, and so on.
Because it is important.
Think about this: if something is taught to kids at school, how can you justify objecting to it on HN (I mean unless it is a topic that is obviously incorrectly taught, which I suppose this is not one of them)?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Multiply that 10x when the repetition is indignant or inflammatory.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I doubt that you would want other commenters to drill you like a schoolchild, but even if I'm wrong about that, please don't do it to others on this site. We're trying for entirely the opposite sort of discussion. Basically, if it's predictable, it is off topic here.
1. Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field. Sikora is also a fellow of The Princes Foundation For Integrated Health and a professional member of the generically-named College Of Medicine. Both of these organizations are lobbyists which promote alternative medicine.
2. Censorship: rather than allow conversation where real scientists can respond to Sikora's nonsense with facts, YouTube decided to push his followers into their own echo chambers where pieces like this which represents him as a martyr go unchallenged.
Sakora isn't a martyr: he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed. But I don't think censorship is the answer to lies. Truth is the answer to lies.
Which is why it's important that we present the truth right next to it, so people don't have to look elsewhere.
> The information is dangerous, it should not be available.
Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
This still assumes that people will be willing to watch it.
> Well, it is available, in places where the truth isn't available, so I don't really know what you think taking it off YouTube has achieved.
It has achieved a lower spread of misinformation. Now nobody browsing YouTube will happen upon this video by chance and start believing something that is false and dangerous. Of course, those who are already embedded in these communities will still be able to access the information elsewhere. It is not a perfect solution, I don't think there is a perfect solution, but it does reduce the impact.
Has it? I'm not really sure how you came to this conclusion.
If kicking Sakora off YouTube causes his followers to become angry and go share his personal site through a bunch of different channels, that could easily outpace the impact of a YouTube channel where refutations are included.
If someone censored your views, what would you do? Why do you think people who disagree with you won't do all the same things?
Meanwhile, Fox News is the most popular news network in America.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
I explained in the comment you replied to. You seem to be deliberately ignoring that people who are not predisposed to the viewpoint could also be exposed. I do not believe that censoring on YouTube will prevent anyone who already believes this stuff from finding the content elsewhere, and I already admitted as such.
If two groups of people (those who actively seek the misinformation, and those who encounter it by chance) could access the misinformation, it stands to reason that preventing one of those groups from accessing the misinformation results in a lower overall spread of misinformation, even if the other group is unaffected.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/national-directive-on-w...
Note the difference between "we can't condone masks because there is limited evidence that they are helpful" and "we recommend against masks because they are harmful" and "the lockdown is a government consipracy to subjugate us".
You can listen to Theresa Tam's (Canada's version of Dr. Fauci) exact words here: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/watch/tam-on-why-canadians-d...
I think any reasonable person who defers to authority would have listened to this and come to the conclusion that there is no reason to wear a mask if they're asymptomatic and had no connection to a sick individual. They could even reasonably conclude that it would be dangerous as they would be touching their face and virus particles would accumulate on the outside of the mask.
And they would have been wrong.
- Prioritizing supply to healthcare workers is of the utmost priority
- Current evidence supports wearing a mask if you're sick to prevent spreading droplets, also wearing a mask if you're in close contact with a symptomatic person
- Masks can provide a false sense of security.
Her final statement is "if people try to use these measures, they have to be really, really careful and wash their hands, absolutely. That's the key. So we're also worried about the potential negative impacts."
All of that is sound advice, and it is dangerous to think that a mask will protect you without any other precautions. But it isn't a statement that one should not wear a mask, fullstop. It's a statement that one should still follow other cautions. IOW, a mask isn't a magical solution.
It was a statement that masks are a placebo for the general public and actually require one to take extra precautions so that they don't make things worse.
It couldn't have been more discouraging towards people on the fence about wearing a mask in late March.
Since then, the understanding about asymptomatic carriers has changed. And in response, the government updated it's suggestion.
If so, why not steer people toward that process, especially when the harm of wearing a mask is low, while the harm oh reopening the economy due to a lack of understanding the covid dangers is much greater?
Have you seen different statements?
Public health officials, while they usually are experts, have other concerns beyond simply saying the truth. The US and Canadian recommendations against medical masks for the general public were part of a strategy based on reserving medical masks. So yes, you should have followed the recommendations of health officials and not worn a medical mask, because healthcare workers needed them.
As far as I know, neither the US nor Canada has ever taken a stance against non-medical masks. They haven't taken a stance for medical masks either, but this was likely due to concerns that people would be confused about medical versus non-medical masks. Your own post is an example of this being a very legitimate concern: you have completely failed to differentiate between medical and non-medical masks.
If you look at what experts have been saying who aren't part of governments, the messaging has been fairly consistent: masks prevent illness at varying rates, and we need to prioritize healthcare workers when allocating the most effective masks.
So when you say, "Should I have deferred to expert opinions and waited until yesterday(!?) to start wearing a mask?" I have to say, no, it would have been impossible to do that, because deferring to expert opinions and waiting until yesterday to start wearing a mask are mutually exclusive actions.
So there's a narrative that may or may not have my best interest at heart but demands my compliance for some nebulous greater good?
No.
If sacrifice is required on the part of collective, you honour them by allowing them to engage with informed consent. If you don't, you have no credibility the next time some ambiguity arises where collective sacrifice is needed to avoid a tragedy of the commons.
Experts discover they are wrong and change their views based on evidence, not based on what other experts or non-experts say.
Non-experts, like the majority of HN users, really can only go off the word of experts at some point, unless we decide to spend the time studying a field to become experts.
And to be clear, I'm not saying "experts" only meaning people who got a degree in a field. A degree is only the most obvious way to show expertise in a field. But it's quite possible to study a field for a long time without getting a degree. But it's not at all apparent that Sakora has done that--in fact, all evidence I see seems to be trying to gloss over his lack of expertise.
I wish this was true. I hope it was true. But I'm losing faith. People have a hard time believing truth if it goes against what they want to believe if the lies can be framed in any plausible way at all. This applies to everything from cults to businesses to abusive spouses to, of course, politics.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky and tired of playing the long game of truth. Part of the problem is the liars are sometimes highly motivated to continue with the lies, and it takes a greater army of equally motivated truth "warriors" to come behind them and put out the fires. It's just so damn easy to spread bullshit.
The other issue is that smart people are way outnumbered- and the others now have a helluva voice.
Sound familiar?
Infectious disease is a distinct specialty in medicine.
The doctor in question is not licensed for infectious disease.
You should never trust a doctor speaking outside of his expertise.
However most of the celebrity doctors do that every single day which is an insult to the entire medical profession.
In general we shouldn't blindly trust any single doctor about an important or risky topic, even within their own specialty. Always get a second or even third opinion if practical. (I agree that most celebrity doctors are little more than quacks.)
> and imo the issue here isnt what is "true" -- nobody knows the truth with corona; its novel.
If nobody knows what's true with corona, then shouldn't claim to know what's true with corona, which is what Sakora is doing.
The Wikipedia article looks very unbalanced to me, but there is definitely some smoke there too.
How do I know what anyone says is true? Why should I trust what you're saying about Sikora?
I should be able to watch a video on youtube and decide for myself because censorship is inimical to free thought.
You should take a moment to consider that most of the examples throughout history of censorship were carried out by decidedly bad people. Truth can stand on its own!
The only opinions that matter are infectious disease and respiratory doctors.
A clear example is an Italian virologist that called the hypothesis of thrombosis in the alveoli that came out from autopsies and the suggestion of using heparin in treatment protocols "a colossal idiocy".
Then other data, including the recent Lancet paper and the Hamburg study came out.
The mere fact one is an expert does not make him or her always right. So weigh opinions more, but don't trust them blindly.
Creating a culture where people are willing to have uncomfortable conversations instead of trying to silence anyone they disagree with is the hard part.
"A lie gets halfway around the world before truth puts on its boots" - not sure who actually said this
I agree with everything you wrote, except the above. He is a doctor, speaking on health issues, so he isn't speaking from outside the field of medicine. And I'd challenge that a specialist within the field of medicine can only offer valuable information or insight with their own speciality. Specialists on all fields are prone to group think, so people with related training from the outside should be welcomed to challenge the orthodoxy.
The the fact is, charlatans are far more common than visionary outsiders.
And in Sikora's case, there are a lot of red flags indicating he's a charlatan and not a visionary outsider. The virus is "getting tired"? Really?
Then why is Bill Gates the de facto lead on curing covid?
It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
>It's my general impression that if Gates says something about Covid, he's just repeating what experts said.
And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
The power to decide who is or isn't an expert, as well as the ability to restrict speech based on those decisions, is a pretty dangerous and scary path that I am vehemently opposed to taking.
> Why doesn't that disqualify Bill Gates according to your own reasoning?
Because there's a big difference between presenting yourself as an expert and saying things that disagree with experts, and repeating what experts say.
If Bill Gates starts spouting off stuff without evidence that disagrees with what all the experts are saying, he'll absolutely be disqualified according to my reasoning.
> And who determines if he is or isn't repeating experts? Also, who decides who is or isn't an expert? An advertising company? Sorry, but that is a scary path.
Well, everyone has to determine that for themselves, based on what limited ability they have.
It seems like you think I'm one of the pro-censorship people here, but I assure you I'm not, please follow the comment chain up to where I started it and read my comment there. On the contrary, I believe Sikora's video should have been left on YouTube, and responded to by experts.
I haven't actually seen evidence that this is effective in the modern social media era.
Trump is president, the American Nazi party is growing, the most popular news network in America is Fox News, the anti-vax movement is growing; and the primary evidence that deplatforming works seems to be a study that shows that bigots left Reddit and declares victory, completely ignoring that Voat started at the same time. If you want evidence, where's yours?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-ba...
Deplatforming leaves people with a smaller audience. Only a fraction of the audience follows a banned person to another platform. Voat is nothing compared to Reddit.
> Non-science: calling Karol Sikora a "professor of medicine" hides the fact that he's an oncologist; if he ever had any expertise it was in cancer, not epidemics, and he has no business speaking outside his field.
Can you provide us with an image of your degree and job experience to prove you have the expertise to tell us "he's either an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar who doesn't care if his lies get people killed."? Or at least admit you're being hypocritical.
Neil Ferguson's model was not flawed (at least, not in a significant way that would invalidate its conclusions)
Also Neil's other predictions have been completely wrong on the Swine Flu and Bird flu. Why this "expert in his field" is still listened to is a mystery to me.
Now compare number of deaths with countries that reacted quickly, for example: South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and others.
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
https://nypost.com/author/michael-goodwin/
"Susan Rice's email exposes Team Obama's 'by the book' treachery"
"Shameful media still slamming Donald Trump during coronavirus crisis"
"Trump passes coronavirus test with flying colors"
"Deep State snakes slither back after FBI, CIA swamp draining"
yeah, definitely not a right leaning columnist.
You don't think the tens of thousands of deaths in Italy, Spain, France, and the US had already caused that panic by the time his model was released?
Why do you say that? The reputation of the Imperial College team seems to have become a lightning rod for disgruntled right-wingers but the team is one of the world's most respected.
Imperial is one of the world's top universities. That's probably why Sikora falsely claimed on multiple occasions to be employed there.
There's nothing in the Imperial report that caused the UK government to change course that has been shown to be false. The prediction from the report was that the UK would suffer 20,000 deaths from the virus if extensive distancing measures were employed. The current total is 36,000 confirmed, so if anything the report was too optimistic.
Given that this interview is misleading at best, and dangerous at worst. It's up to YouTube to decide if it wants to be used as a vehicle.
Personally I'm glad they took it down. I want to get out and would love to go back to old normal. We all would. But I don't want to get sic before a vaccine is ready, and I don't want people I know and love to get sick either.
If you're getting upset about the actions of youtube, the fact is they are full within their rights to do whatever they like with their platform.
As for the free speech argument : Companies are not required to give space to ideas or viewpoints they do not wish to be associated with.
https://pacificlegal.org/a-first-amendment-win-supreme-court...
https://casetext.com/case/manhattan-community-access-corp-v-...
YouTube is not a monopoly. There are other websites where you can post or watch video. Not as many people choose to use them, but you're not entitled to their attention anyway.
This has caused an upheaval in societal mores as regards free speech. Enough is enough! There needs to be limits. Communities started imposing limits to free speech. For example, UC Berkeley, renowned for giving birth to the Free Speech Movement, made news for banning harmful speech, such as that by Ann Coulter. This is a natural evolution of societal mores. This particular evolution was a reaction to the excesses and abuses seen in social media. This type of censorship, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal. We live in a new world. Malicious individuals and groups now have the power to reach hundreds of millions instantly, at no cost to themselves. The old rules no longer apply.
Some say if you disagree with someone else's speech you should not just ban them, you should defeat them by arguing against their ideas. But when state-sponsored actors spread fake news and divisive ads at a massive scale on social media you can’t simply defeat them by arguing against their ideas. How do you counter it? By buying opposing ads on Facebook? Even if you have pockets as deep as Putin’s, what a waste of money that would be! This is a new world and the old methods are no longer applicable. Communities and social media companies will need to engage in some censorship.
Disclaimer: Work at Google, thoughts are my own.
The beauty (theoretically) of platforms like YouTube is that we can watch what we like and skip what we don't without harming any other user.
And as for qualifications, if an oncologist isn't qualified to have an opinion on COVID-19, YouTube sure as hell isn't.