If someone died because of a "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" video on YouTube, who's to blame? Should YouTube not take steps to prevent the spread of misinformation that could kill people?
edit Big downvotes, no response. Great system.
Ivermectin is a prescription drug in the United States. A doctor would most likely reject the request if a patient asked for it solely on a YouTube recommendation. So to answer your question, a prescribing doctor.
IMO YouTube isn't medically qualified to censor ongoing research or debate, just stick a disclaimer and be done with it.
Whoa whoa whoa. 1 year old mRNA vaccine's risks don't come with scare quotes. He often talks about the lack of long term data. mRNA covid vaccines might have been exceptionally safe so far, yet intellectual honesty demands we admit that indeed we don't have the long term data yet. Implying there would absolutely be no such risk is a fundamentalistic position itself.
Pretty much all risks are identified within a short period, it's very rare for there to be long term risks.So yes there may be some theoretical long term risk, but it's soo small that it is misleading to talk about it as a serious risk. Expecially compared to the real and known dangers of Ivermectin and covid.
Do those risks look proportional to you?
> Pretty much all risks are identified within a short period, it's very rare for there to be long term risks
I am not aware of any first principles in immunology that evidence this view. Maybe you do?
Youtube is qualified to say "This use of this drug is unresearched/unproven by the sources we build guidelines around", as are all private companies.
* If X died because of a "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" video on YouTube, who's to blame?
Assumption: Ivermectin has a net negative effect. Assumption: X relied on Ivermectin exclusively, rejecting the current standard of care procedures.
* If X died because Youtube censored "Take Ivermectin and you'll survive COVID" videos, who's to blame?
Assumption: Ivermectin is effective in certain cases, and X's life could have been saved if Ivermectin were used, possibly in conjunction with other standard procedures, up to and including vaccination.
The point of public conversation is to asses the cost/benefit tradeoffs of different courses of action, especially in presence of incomplete information. Additionally, reliable cost/benefit tradeoffs heavily inform the design of future information gathering campaigns. Given the public's heightened interest in Covid, it is unclear how to have necessary cost/benefit conversations other than in public. Censoring such conversations is potentially costing lives and is eroding the public's trust in the authorities.
The youtube algorithm and social platform is not some kind of careful dialog for mutual enlightenment. People aren't trying to rationally assess conflicting and limited evidence, and youtubes algorithm certainly doesn't reward any such painstaking work.
As such on youtube which is what this is about, any such discussion is not at all likely to inform; yet because convincing tales sell better, whatever claims are made, are likely to sound convincing to at least some people - truth and honesty are entirely orthogonal issues here, or worse actively selected against (because they're usually messy, unclear, and thus boring).
And thus on youtube the appropriate strategy is at a bare minimum draconian censorship. I mean, ideally they'd dump the sensationalism-boosting algorithm, but that ideal is obviously not a viable request to a platform that depends on user engagement (of any kind) for its survival.
Just because we don't want to live in an Orwellian nightmare doesn't mean all speech is necessarily a value-add, nor that there aren't any social dynamics that can reliably induce harmful speech. The world isn't that simple.
So while it's reasonable for people to seek certainty in uncertain times, that doesn't mean youtube is the place for everybody to debate ideal drug regimens.
Worse, youtube outcompetes traditional mass-media for ad dollars by exploiting precisely the sensationalism engine. The net result is an uninformed population fed sensationalism on all cylinders, with rampant censorship decided by a tiny clique. I have some doubts whether this is a recipe for a stable prosperous society.
Edit. Of course the bulk of the conversation should happen on technical grounds in the medical media in relative obscurity. But given the high profile of the covid pandemic, should a therapeutic drug with a stack of studies backing claims of positive impact, be discussed in mass-media?
When a "point of view" is having random unqualified people abuse medications, yes.
How about the person who took it? We are presumably talking about adults, who we supposedly simultaneously trust with choosing a government that decides over life and death for millions in their own country and abroad.
Surely you're not complaining about this social media platform's established method for controlling the platforming of incorrect thought?!?
YouTube is chock-full of dubious health information. But only this one got banned.
Why?
For the record, since I've been muzzled from responding further, I don't believe that it was "money".
But who is to blame for the deaths of thousands of people, who could have been saved by Ivermectin, which in all probability is happening right now, and has been going on for many months, if not for the censorship of W.H.O, Youtube and media?
Entirely irrelevant when discussing YouTube, which we're doing now. YouTube is not a legitimate source for medical/drug information.
It is not a source, and never was a legitimate source of anything, but a media of communication. I am not sure why people mix the two up. If doctors in one part of their world can share their observations with doctors all over the world, it has tremendous value.
Now it seems that doctors can only share their observations with W.H.O and any inference should come from the top, which they could delay citing sorry "no research" for an arbitrarly long time..