Well, if the principle is "don't lie", then "expose people who lie" doesn't violate the principle. It remains to be seen, however, whether Google actually has any principles other than making money.
The CDC is a political organization controlled by the executive branch that happens to be staffed partly with people who call themselves scientists[0]. The unwavering faith that people put into political organizations is its own tragic issue.
[0] - In the same way that many programmers are terrible at being programmers, many scientists are terrible at being scientists.
However there are a third group that knowingly misrepresent and fabricate evidence to promote conspiracy theories. Screw those guys. They hide under the cover of legitimate opinion, but no platform should be expected to tolerate being used to propagate that sort of crap.
If a socialist candidate is assassinated in South America and someone on YouTube says “this was the American imperialist regimes doing” without evidence, I wouldn’t assume they are right, but I’d see it as an opinion based on historical evidence that I’d hate to see censored.
This applies even if someone claims it was aliens!
The differences are in the type of claim being made and in whether the reasons given are real or made up and in whether the reasons actually support the claim and in the systemic harm caused by being wrong. All of those differences matter.
There’s no place for silencing opinions, and those are opinions that all have different levels of evidence. That you tend to weigh certain evidence differently is your own stance, not objective fact.
To try again, let’s say someone is a “body language expert”. I don’t really believe that to a large degree, but fine. They post a YouTube clip showing the Chinese gov denying the lab leak and say “oh man I can tell based on X, Y, and Z their body language is a total giveaway that this was intentional!”
Again, I don’t believe it. But it doesn’t matter. Whether they think it’s aliens because they saw some cloud trails or tea leaves or whatever, it’s all a matter of degree.
The lab leak was shut down under the same premises. “Our” evidence is strong, and “their” evidence is conspiracy theory. Except it wasn’t. So I don’t trust anyone, you included, to be the decider of valid evidence. I’ll sort through it myself.
You are conflating "opinion" with "unsupported statement of fact", "assumption", and "guess". Assumption and conclusion are not synonyms, but your statement here treats them as though they are.
"Murder is wrong" is an opinion, because it's a compressed substitute for an expansive syllogistic trail that starts from some initial premises that are purely personal and subjective about the value and nature of life and being and leads to the conclusion. You reach a moral ruling starting from an instinctive feeling. Expressing that feeling itself is not an opinion, but concluding a moral position from that feeling is. "I like the taste of this cheese" is a factual observation about the self that is not an opinion, because while it observes something personal it itself is not subjectively based on an initial position. You either like the taste of this cheese or you don't. Statements about the cause of things that happen in the world are either true or false, not opinions. There's a reason for the old saw that opinions can't be wrong. Subjectivity is the critical element that makes them opinions in the first place. People tend to lose or forget that distinction or insert subjectivity where none exists, but that's an error which disrupts effective communication and muddies thought.
If we have to have some private unelected board at YouTube deciding where opinion ends and fact begins, that’s dystopia. People state opinions as facts all the time. “It was the United States gov” is an opinion it’s just a colloquial American thing to say it in that style. Their real belief may be that it’s actually only 90% probable, and their threshold for wording it as certain is lower than yours.
Only a fool listens to a strongly stated opinion, even when it’s worded as though it’s a fact, and isn’t skeptical. If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over. I don’t want that.
I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe, and it seems people who don’t get real worried that their “better” opinions will drown out. I don’t think so. And I’ve seen the people with the right opinions be wrong too often lately to ever trust them.
I think I have bad news for you about the world, then.
> If we designed our society to cater to the greatest fool, we’d have ridiculous rules all over.
What is your plan for a society like the one we currently live in that appears to be mostly greatest fools?
> I actually think the main difference is I have a lot more faith in the intelligence of the average joe
According to polling, in the US the average joe claims that God directly created humans in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years and that evolution is, to put a common phrase in their mouths, "fake news". https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creati...
Feel whatever you want about the benefit of religion, that belief is based on something entirely extraneous to evidence.
Exactly. As I had edited in my last comment before I saw your reply, you have a huge lack of faith in the intelligence of others (that, or a big ego).
Believing in religion got humans a lot further due to in-group cooperation. Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
Column A, Column B.
> In your world talking about any religion would be banned, and what a sad world that’d be.
I promise I wouldn't ban talking about religion.
> Their exact beliefs may look wrong, but the way it makes them act is more right than atheism or anything else.
Secular humanists would strongly disagree.
How come the folks who keep bringing this up don't also mention that the original "censored" claims were that the virus was both engineered and intentionally leaked?
https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir...
Literally claims it's a manmade weapon released intentionally in the first paragraph.
Edit: it seems pretty obvious that article was banned because it's an unsubstantiated witch-hunt. It even gives the guy's number and urges the reader to harass him. Fwiw "they were just asking questions!" is not a valid argument.
Do you know what the word "accidentally" means?
Edit: ah you're the troll I unfortunately encountered yesterday. Won't be engaging further, have a good evening!
Yes. Do you know what a disjunction is?
Don’t get me wrong, it absolutely sucks to feel “silenced” and I’m sure it sucks even more to feel silenced when you are indeed correct or at least aren’t as dead wrong as others claimed. But isn’t the crux of the free speech “marketplace of ideas” that the “good” ideas will find listeners and gain traction anyway? Even when “everyone” initially disagrees or thinks you’re crazy.
Because that’s free speech, too. You have a right to say things even if they sound kind of crazy and I have a right to say “hey, that sounds crazy!”
Also if you scroll down about 40% of the way here: https://m.facebook.com/help/230764881494641/ you will see that claiming that the vaccine has negative effects is still a bannable offense.
Have they always been problematic? I would love to hear some historical conspiracy theories and their deleterious effects.
Also Ancient Rome and demonizing political opponents (some the depravity ascribed to some of the emperors were exaggerations).
Here is a concrete example from NBC[0]: their fact-checkers say Trump's statement about Clinton "acid-washing" her email server was a lie, because her team actually just "used an app called BleachBit".
Do you see the point I am making?