Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word? | Hacker News Reader

Why Has “Ivermectin” Become a Dirty Word?

taibbi.substack.com

39 pointsandrenth30 comments

This feels like a really silly question, but why are these sorts of scientific discussions happening on Facebook and YouTube instead of, like, a journal or conference or mailing list or something?

Like, independent of the particular thing they're blocking, YouTube is not a scientific repository and their financial incentives are not aligned with supporting science. Why are we relying on them? Do we want to watch a Grammarly ad interrupt a scientific presentation every few minutes? What do you do if you're a scientist who got banned from YouTube because of copyright strikes or something?

It seems possible that the Substack crowd can push back against this particular culture-war issue with enough public shaming (and friendly legislators), but it seems like very much the wrong path. If you want a scientific presentation to be watchable by other scientists, why isn't a university or an academic press hosting the video? It is, I hear, possible to run a video hosting site of your own. YouTube isn't the internet.

Two things: look up machine learning stuff on YouTube and you'll find millions probably of sciency videos. Like it or not, its definitely a place where scientific content is present.

Secondly, the article talks about things like testimony before Congress. It's not just that people use YouTube to upload conference presentations (they do) but it's also a general platform for excerpts from tv, other proceedings, etc. So I think it doesnt lead anywhere to just dismiss is as "why are they posting on YouTube anyway"

That just makes it worse, doesn't it? Why have we let a private corporation that's stuffing ads on everything and has a bizarre view of fair use become the location of record for all video in our society?

We have an entire agency - the US Government Publishing Office - whose job is to maintain the Congressional Record and handle all sorts of other printing and preservation requirements for the government. Why isn't congressional testimony there? Like, yes, it's bad for YouTube to delete congressional testimony, but isn't it worse to entrust YouTube with it in the first place?

I agree with you, although I think the most pragmatic way to deal with it is to acknowledge when platforms have a de facto monopoly, and hold them to a standard when they do

You may have heard of a little thing called C-SPAN...

Aren't testimonies before Congress posted on a plateform controlled by the US government, so the public can get their information without depending on Youtube? I'm not american so I'm not familiar with how everything works.

YouTube is very convenient for hosting and sharing recordings of talks. You can't put a video recording in a mailing list or a paper journal, and journal/conference websites are generally not in the business of hosting video recordings.

Often it's much easier to understand another's research in the form of a presentation than a paper (papers give you the details but not necessarily the high level story), so, like it or not, YouTube is a significant scientific repository.

By your logic there should also be no discussion of vaccines in either platform. Those discussions are scientific as well.

My logic is that you shouldn't rely on those platforms, not that you shouldn't try to have the discussions. If YouTube decides that all discussion of the coronavirus in any form - truthful or otherwise - is bad for their ad revenue, they are within their rights to shut all of it down, and those people who want to discuss it (i.e., just about all of us in society) need to make sure we have alternatives.

Allowing companies to centralize vital functions of our society because it brings them profit and then whining that they're profit-motivated is a losing game. That's all.

Imagine if we'd had all our discussions of the vaccine on Google+ and then it shut down. Nobody calls the Google+ shutdown "censorship," and yet it would have had exactly the same effect.

> If YouTube decides that all discussion of the coronavirus in any form - truthful or otherwise - is bad for their ad revenue, they are within their rights to shut all of it down,

Sure, but it's not ALL conversations they are shutting down. Adn then it's a simple observation that if they are doing it for their ad revenue, then advertising companies are the ones deciding this. So then advertisers are the ones effectively allowing and disallowing the medical advise. I don't see that as ethical.

Again, if they come up with "universal" rules like "no discussion of this whatsoever", I would agree, but it is obviously clear there are right and wrong discussions based on what a corporation and/or their advertisers deem fit. This means they are indeed trying to advise the public with what medical actions to take, and people are not "going to another platform" for this.

This is actually about censorship of science and medical professionals on platforms like YouTube. Which is, I think, something to be concerned about.

Eh, I'm not sure I agree. YouTube is manifestly the wrong platform for serious discussion of anything. All their incentives are are geared toward engagement volume, not quality.

The very best you could possibly expect from them is to include "science our advertisers don't hate" in recommendations.

But lots of other scientific and other pseudo-scientific debates and videos get hosted on YT no problem.

The problem seems to be if the content goes against certain narratives, it then gets flagged.

You wanna talk about hormones doing or not doing something for you. Go for it. Sugar is bad or good. Go for it. It questions certain narratives pushed by certain interests... nah ah ah.

But that’s the point of what I was trying to say. Their policies and more particularly their actions seem inconsistent from the standpoint of [science/politics/research/reason] because they’re based on [revenue/regulatory defense/regulatory capture/traffic].

That strategy is obviously successful, which is disheartening to me. But I’m not sure how to argue against it.

What is the suggested alternative for hosting serious video content? Vimeo? PeerTube? BitChute? Some other video hosting platform that is either entirely a ghost town or hosting manifestly questionable content?

My guess would be that a "platform" for serious video content could not be financially viable on today's internet. It would need be able to alienate advertisers over points of principle, effectively argue those same points with regulators, and field an army of capable moderators. It would probably end up looking more like a public-interest media company than a video-sharing site.

Discovering an algorithm to govern on-site activity by the general public that doesn't lift the scum to the top could be a decent start.

I have a server. I can upload video to my server. That was sort of the whole promise of the web...

YouTube made it so easy to upload video to their site instead that vast swaths of the population now seem to have forgotten that you can also upload video to your own site.

If a medical researcher has something to say: they could upload it to their university's site, or to their own personal site, or to the web site of whatever conference they want to present their talk at. Upload it to their blog, and then share the post's URL...

YouTube's policies deserve scrutiny and probably criticism. But I think it's a dead-end argument to say that mistakes in YouTube's policies can entirely stop a video from being disseminated online.

If your intention is to inform as many people as possible, YouTube is manifestly the only platform for serious discussion of anything.

Let me rephrase: It's the wrong platform for the discussion of anything controversial. Their ToS can pretty much be boiled down to "If you make trouble for us, we'll punish you. Or just delete your account." And "trouble" is defined as "threaten our business model in any way," which leads to their delightfully vague policies that try to balance the advertising revenue a loud idiot can generate against potential regulatory actions.

I think more important than whether or not Ivermectin is actually helpful (it seems to have a following, but there appears also to be contradictory evidence and it's weirdly entangled with people advocating against using covid vaccines) is the whole censorship issue raised in the article. I definitely don't want YouTube or whoever deciding what I'm smart enough to think about and accept or reject on my own. They (tech elites generally) went down a dangerous but self-constrained road when they started censoring during the election, but extending this to scientists etc, and by extension somehow pronouncing on what scientific opinions are valid and which are not, moves into a whole different realm of inappropriateness

This is a very good point, and I have no idea why it would be downvoted except for idiotic HN groupthink

This recent tweet from the inventor of mRNA vaccines says it all:

> What happens to confidence in public health and USG if ivermectin turns out to be safe and effective for COVID, and the genetic vaccines turn out to have signficant safety issues? This looks like a very plausible scenario from where I sit.

https://twitter.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1403836354098872322

I suspect it's impossible for social media to come up with a policy that allows discussion of Ivermectin, Remdesivir, and Hydroxychloroquine but doesn't also open the door to homeopathy, bleach, and anti-vax content. COVID is a life or death situation for some people and they deserve better than social media.

Impossible? That's a stretch. They can do anything they want. This is obviously on purpose. I'm not saying I know why, but the intentionality of it is obvious, in my opinion.

What I meant is that it's hard to come up with a set of generic principles that allow people to promote "good raw science" without also allowing "bad crackpot science".

YouTube's current policy isn't an accident or secret: "YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19. ... Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes any of the following: Claims that Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments for COVID-19" https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en (The part about Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine was added in early April.)

People on Twitter keep pointing out low-cost veterinary formulations of ivermectin in the same thread and then harangue the pharma industry.