Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society.
And you think this is the first time in the history of American democracy that actors used misinformation to influence an election? Again, this is not a new phenomenon whatsoever. All that’s new is that more people have access to the technology, which makes the previous gatekeepers nervous.
Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution.
What are some better alternatives?
As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.
And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?
On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help the propagandists reach their target audience effectively. The algorithms help then widen the audience automatically through shares of their supporters and further engagement.
I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green.
It looks to me like what is needed is detached, discerning thinking, which is not the same thing. What reason do we have to think that people will start to do better about it and it will take care of itself?
I'm not opposed to your view, I just don't think I'm on the same page as you and it I'd like to hear more.
Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths.
Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“).
And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“.
But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence.
When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying.
And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.
The US Constitution restricts the Government from infringing on rights we, as citizens, already have.
The Constitution does NOT grant us rights. The whole freaking point of our revolution vs., say the French Revolution, is the PEOPLE have the rights and government is restricted - NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
YouTube's unequal and arbitrary application of rules is EDITORIAL CONTROL. As such they fall FAR more on the side of a publisher than platform and that's the part of 230 that needs SERIOUS overhaul.
Then again maybe not. Their latest antics have pushed even more people off onto other platforms; and ultimately that will be the best correction. De-aggregation is the best antidote.
How do we measure integrity?
The first amendment and freedom of speech are not synonyms, quite obviously because there can be freedom of speech outside of the jurisdiction of the US government; and similarly, Youtube is a trans-national corporation with more than just US citizens using it.
Even if it were wholly within US jurisdiction and Youtube only served US citizens, the first amendment is still not a synonym for freedom of speech. The word censor comes from a Latin word for a governmental position in ancient Rome but it does not follow that all censorship is therefore only possible or enacted by government. Not only is there no supporting logic for that, it's not evident in practice. Companies like Twitter[1], Facebook[2] and Google[3] remove things from their platforms for political convenience (or, as Anand Giridharadas points out[4], for any convenience):
> When you look at the ways in which the winners of our age give back, help out, make a difference, they are often designed to protect the system - above all - that the winners stand on top of.
As ever, I suggest getting a copy of On Liberty[0] by J.S. Mill, where he goes over both the tyranny of government and the tyranny of non-governmental actors, with regards to speech.
[0] https://www.bartleby.com/130/
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/12/15/facebook-twitter-donated-to-bi...
[2] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...
[3] https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tulsi-gabbard-lawsuit...
We can probably make individual expression possible without allowing organized disinfo campaigns to continue unchecked.
Acting like this is an unsolvable problem is an intellectual disservice.
Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory.
I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.
But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.
This is a central theme of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I found thought-provoking.
I've just been looking for a decent review. This is half-decent:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr...
As is this:
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/bo...
However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism.
The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed).
The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.
You can't argue rationally with someone like that. They aren't skeptics, they're devout believers.
Epidemiology has so many massive cultural and methodological issues you could write an entire book about it, maybe one day I will. It is absolutely de rigueur in this field to make predictions without ever bothering to go back after an epidemic played out to study how well those predictions matched reality. They cherry pick data at an absurd rate: if they can get a more dramatic paper by using data that's 8 months old and based on a sample size of 7 people when they could use data published last week and which has a sample size of hundreds of thousands, they'll happily pick the former every time. Nobody in that field will notice or care, and they'll throw in a misleading citation or two to disguise what they're doing. There is no code quality control: these people happily publish papers based on models filled with memory corruption errors that can't even replicate their own output.
As for ideology, the fact that you can't explain what climatology sceptics believe should give you pause for thought. You appear to be projecting: a blind devout belief in "scientists" (they aren't really) is itself an ideology. Rather than engaging with the concerns of people who are pointing out problems in the published literature, you're just blowing them off as irrational.
Do you have a particular example of this?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...
Published August. Based on the Covasim model, paper describing it here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20097469v...
The model takes its IFR data from Verity et al (see table 2), which is about 4x too high because it's taken from Wuhan evacuee data in January. The Verity paper that calculated this had access to a bigger and better dataset, the Diamond Princess cruise ship which they acknowledged they had looked at, and which yielded a lower IFR, but they didn't use it:
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/covid-19-updated-data-implies-...
"The Verity et al. CFR estimates were derived primarily from Chinese data, which reflected non-random testing ... When Verity et al. was prepared, the final death toll was not known. The data available only ran to 5 March 2020, at which point 7 passengers had died."
There's an analysis of the school re-opening paper that explains all this here. It also claims the paper used values for k (over-dispersion) from February, when there were hardly any cases on which to calculate that: https://lockdownsceptics.org/schools-paper/
Here's another paper that used an IFR of 1% in May:
https://www.nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-mi...
And another paper that assumed a 1% IFR in June:
https://github.com/ptti/ptti/blob/master/docs/PTTI-Covid-19-...
Analysis: https://lockdownsceptics.org/new-ucl-paper-on-contact-tracin...
That one didn't even bother to give a citation for its source, just assumed a value that was 4x too high.
Here are some current, reasonably up to date and sourced IFR estimating papers: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/
Epidemiologists know IFR rates fall over time because they always do. Yet they continued to use the earliest calculated value they could find, based on a tiny dataset that wasn't even the best available, because it gives the highest value and that lets them make the most dramatic results. This is a systematically untrustworthy field, they literally do not care about their own reliability at all.
Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.
An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.
https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-africa...
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinoritie...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-a...
Intelligence is not a prerequisite for being elected, and in many cases intelligence is a disadvantage. Most people are stupid, and they would rather see one of their own in positions of power. Dumb people can more easily connect with certain areas of the electorate.
Examples of this phenomenon are so copious and obvious that I shan't point them out.
> What are some better alternatives?
I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliably determine (arbitrary examples) country or even continent of residence, paid posts by an organized campaign (PR, propaganda, etc) versus organic occurrences, etc.
Of course, Facebook is the ever present counterexample where people proudly attach their full legal name to hate filled streams. But at least I personally know for certain that they're local people who actually exist and aren't being paid for their posts! Silver linings and all that.
To be clear, I'm not talking about present day clunky GPG web of trust with key signing parties and all that. I'm talking about a hypothetical (ie as yet nonexistent) magical web of trust that somehow doesn't destroy your privacy in the process of being used. (It's not as crazy as it sounds - we already have zero knowledge proofs, blinded encryption, and various other privacy preserving cryptographic schemes.)