That is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the role of fact-checkers.
I think the even bigger danger here is when people want to point out flaws in policies like Section 230 and Net Neutrality. The incentives are huge for these companies to either bury or suppress dissenting views that impact their bottom lines.
Good grief. Why are urban legends so hard to kill? There is no such policy. There never was.
The source of that bit of ginned-up outrage was an informal interview (when I looked this up earlier, there wasn't even video or a transcript available anywhere!) where someone senior was asked about what Youtube's criteria were for vetting advice in the face of the pandemic. And the answer was a hand-wavy thing about how anything that was clearly wrong, or clearly dangerous, and one of the examples given was about medical advice that clearly runs counter to existing health care bodies like the WHO.
And that's as far as it went. There never was a policy about the WHO. To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the WHO.
The whole point wasn't to nitpick about exactly what the WHO said, it was to reference the fact that Youtube would adhere to expert consensus where possible.
> That is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the role of fact-checkers.
The irony there is that, had Google or Facebook or someone taken on that role, you wouldn't have internalized this fake fact because whoever it was that spun it to you wouldn't have had an audience. But they didn't. So you got lied to.
Which is better?
There is a widespread misunderstanding of the YouTube removal reasons. Bad faith actors are spreading these rumors and creating conditions to falsely claim censorship.
For example, most "alt-right" videos and users were removed due to their targeted harassment of other users. But they mix it in a larger video and then claim that YouTube removed the video for the generalized content. This is a bad faith argument, and they know what they are doing.
"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy." - YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki
> To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the WHO.
"Sharyl Attkisson, host of the nationally syndicated news magazine TV show "Full Measure" had her story about "politicizing COVID-19 medicine" pulled by YouTube, because the video service deemed it 'dangerous.' The issue was that one doctor said that hydroxychloroquine still needed to be studied."
https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/youtube-reinstates-hyd...
As far as the video you linked: it was reinstated. That's right there in the headline of the article you linked. They messed up, and put it back. Isn't that saying that their actual policy is the opposite of what you claim?
>YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19
What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?
Google's mission used to be to organize the world's information. Now they seem to be want to go way beyond that.
>What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?
Simple: then you're not allowed to upload videos on those topics at all.
That story ran six weeks ago, and there's been no corroboration of that "policy" by any other source in any other media. It's all a bunch of huffing about this one out-of-context, apparently off-the-cuff (quote. So yeah, I think that's pretty much the definition of "grossly misrepresented".
Not quite. Before there's more back and forth about some interview and what that meant, let's quote the actual policy, and focus the discussion on that?
from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785 :
> YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities’ medical information about COVID-19. This is limited to content that contradicts WHO or local health authorities’ guidance on:
- Treatment
- Prevention
- Diagnostic
- Transmission
followed by a long list of examples
https://www.change.org/p/youtube-tell-youtube-to-letusdecide...
Trump was fact checked by Twitter a few weeks ago for claiming mail in ballots are linked to voter fraud [1]. In reality, there have been several hundred cases of mail in voter fraud, though certainly the convicted cases are rare on a percentage basis (though actual cases are unknown).[2]
Many thousands are today posting about how black people are being continuously killed by police, but yet no Twitter fact checks. In reality, just 10 unarmed black men were killed by the police last year.[3]
Can anyone here imagine Twitter putting up a fact check saying "Misrepresentation/exaggeration: Only 10 unarmed black men were killed by police last year"?
Is it just a coincidence that Twitter is a company who's employees lean heavily left and their policies also lean heavily left? What would a conservatively run Twitter look like with fact checks, and would you be comfortable with that?
[1] https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384?lang=en [2] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/more-false-mail-in-ballot-... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
Need to clarify (for those harsh to judge) that I am in no way comparing the severity or tragic nature of fraud vs killing, just Twitter's response to various facts on its platform.
The later goes against the specific rules in Twitter's "civic integrity policy" that try to prevent to use of Twitter to spread misinformation that can result in voter suppression.
You can say falsely say election was rigged but you cannot falsely say that a poling location was closed (at least on Twitter).
But disagree on the other point of their fact check - which goes with my argument. Here is the quote from the top of their fact check of his tweet:
"Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud
On Tuesday, President Trump made a series of claims about potential voter fraud after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced an effort to expand mail-in voting in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud."
This quote could literally be written to disprove any of a number of liberal arguments - but yet curiously isn't.
Isn't that 10 way too many and the whole point of the current protests.
Twitter made the case that Trump's tweet was false by saying "These claims are unsubstantiated, according to CNN, Washington Post and others. Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud."
Why can't that statement be rewritten to say that "Experts say that police killings of unarmed black men are very rare".
and most of those 10 were attacking police officers when they were killed
Do note that IIRC, this is 10 unarmed black men shot by the police though, since non-shooting deaths aren't properly tracked. So Imperfect data collection could be an issue here.
And on the too many side, I think that 1 is too many, but unfortunately, the nature of the american enforcement landscape (and I don't mean police attitudes here, I mean prevalence of guns) mean that mistakes fundamentally more likely than in most other countries.
I'm not sure this was the motivating factor for these initial protests.
Now it may have morphed into this over time, but I think they started on much simpler terms.
The world watch as a police officer kill someone and then watch as the authorities did very little about it (i.e. getting sacked for killing someone is a rather strange form of punishment).
The protests where in response to that poor attempted by the authorities to serve up justice for what is an obvious act of manslaughter if not murder.
Do you realize how you moved the goalpost? The second sentence does not contradict the first one ...
From similar stats, about 240 (24% of 1000 total) black people were killed by the police.
Of course some of the armed ones are unjustified (for example, the tragic and imo unjustified Philando Castile shooting counts as armed) and some of the unarmed ones are likely justified.
"yet again, another unarmed black man was killed by the police" is the typical refrain and the narrative the protestors are screaming and tweeting.
So far I've seen a lot of self-correction done by the scientific and medical communities themselves. There hasn't been a single example of a nontrivial story broken by a guy delivering spittle-flecked rants on Youtube. The ranters, however, are very good at taking credit for what actual scientists did.
But that's not really the point. Doesn't it bother you even a little bit that you might be barred from posting a valid critique of a bogus study?
This added color detracts from your comment's point. It's the kind of thing that would be included in, well, a spittle-flecked YouTube rant.
HN Commenter: claims no one YouTube did anything to help change conversation about topic. Uses this to validate YouTube censorship.
That’s some Catch-22 type stuff.
This is the type of “Only the experts can decide for us... attitude that people are fed up with. A cabal of experts should not get to decide which theories I want to read about by simply labeling them as wrong or crack pot conspiracies.
Why should I be limited to the source material? Why can’t I watch a video of someone discussing the topic and providing their own analysis?
What gets taken down is spittle-flecked rants about how COVID-19 was created by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci to bring about the Biblical apocalypse, but can be cured by drinking bleach, but simultaneously it doesn't even exist.
In fact I heard about that flawed paper from a Youtube video.
Plandemic is probably a stupid movie. I haven't seen it, so I cannot judge. Regardless, it has been scrubbed from Google Drive accounts by the powers that be!
Misinformation about coronavirus finds new avenues on unexpected sites (WaPo) http://archive.today/wKfVi
What kind of automated or intentional interference might researchers face in the future when Google or Facebook has already decided on the facts?
P.S. The crazy thing about the Plandemic take down is that it is driven by someone trying to license their content removal patent to the oligopoly. The WaPo reporter never even bothered to research that, or if she did, she didn't disclose that fact in her article! Another hidden business interest.
https://adage.com/article/digital/eric-feinberg-man-google-y...
Along with that little problem of Google and Facebook being aggressive monopolies capable of wiping you off the Internet as a presence to an extent that whatever you're trying to publish will barely exist online (G search, gone; YouTube, gone; FB, gone; Instagram, gone; WhatsApp, gone).
Five monopoly positions on critical speech platforms between the two of them.
Those two monopolies have more totalitarian speech restriction capabilities than the US Government does by a dramatic margin. They should be broken up and regulated accordingly, due to their monopoly positions de facto putting them into the role of censor.