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Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

Well, you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you. I couldn't disagree more!

My response would be, don't you think you can judge for yourself what is ok, and to not watch things that are nonsense? Also, aren't you concerned that you could be manipulated as you may be trusting authorities who - out of self-interest - could fail to disclose information to you; ie that you will be unable to reach an informed opinion as you will be in ignorance?

Personally, I have zero trust in any other parties judging what is ok or not for me to know about. I am happy to judge for myself, without parental guidance.

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I think it's important to realise that anybody can be influenced, even smart people who look at any information with healthy criticism.

Unfortunately, the human brain is not without its problems. One of those problems is that information that is repeated often will start to "feel" true, even if it is false. If you want to read about these kinds of biases, I'd recommend the book Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.

With platforms like YouTube, it's incredibly easy to get stuck in a filter bubble. Their recommendation algorithm is more than happy to keep recommending you conspiracy theories, because users seem to like those, and the algorithm doesn't care about the actual content.

And once you've watched 10 of those videos, the 11th will no longer sound as ridiculous as it would have if you had watched it without first being (perhaps subconsciously) influenced by those first 10 videos.

This is a real risk of algorithm-based recommendation platforms, and something that Google/Facebook are trying to address now because it has already caused real problems in society.

Yes. But do you mean to use conspiracy in a pejorative sense?

I think its pretty obvious that people 'breathe together' and formulate plans that work best for them. So with us, at the individual level, and so with those who have all the money and operate at the macro level. Are you saying that conspiracies don't happen? What is your method of finding the true ones?

The answer is that we require unfiltered information, and open communication with others. We need to personally engage in verifying claims. We can only confirm or deny whatever claims are made, if we have the information. If that is unavailable because of censorship we can only verify very little. This is where we are today.

As we can only verify very little, the problem is that we are not getting the information. Who is restricting information then? Is the world's leading, corporate-sponsored, search indexer (google), preventing the free flow of information? Well, yes it is. So we can say google is part of the problem, not the solution.

> you are saying it is a good thing that certain information is unavailable to you, and that you trust google, the government to do the job for you.

That's not what I'm saying. Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet. They are just making use of their right to decide what they give space to on their platform. I can still go to a specific conspiracy theory website and read about it there if I'm feeling like it.

The "government" has nothing to do with that as we are talking about a company applying their own policies to their website not a government mandated take down of content.

But it does. Its public knowledge that google was partially funded by inqtel. The government subsidises corporations.

I think you and I must have different ideas on what governance is. You probably think education, corporations, government and media are separate. I don't. I think they are part of the same governance apparatus.

Hence you have a search company providing email, content, etc in google. And you have Bezos who supplies your online request and media. And Elon who supplies a car service (that he can shut down), space, and neural laces. Microsoft who provide the world's operating systems, family planning and viruses. Etc.

> "Removing the information from YouTube isn't removing the information from the internet."

What gets "flagged" or "removed" from Youtube, mostly also gets the same treatment at Facebook, Twitter, etc. Some extreme examples have seen people be deplatformed from a wide range of "internet" platforms, including their hosting. It's a sad road to go down, and each time we concede things such as removing content from Youtube because of "user safety" and "experience", we add legitimacy for the deplatforming, cancelling and exclusion of individuals with different or controversial opinions.

Yes - corporates, media, education AND government form the governance system we have.

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