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Comment by fareesh | Hacker News Reader

It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to be watching videos about religion, astrology, etc. In some cases, these are mainstream belief systems that have caused countless death, destruction, financial ruin for thousands of years. This sudden interest in harm reduction is disingenuous and conveniently selective.

If you are not treating these videos as harmful, do not waste my time with blatant politics disguised as sanctimonious harm reduction.

As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians and channels who have identical politics? What are the odds?

All extreme ideology and ideologues - left, right, up down, are poisonous and divisive. They should be treated equally, not selectively.

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It is not more harmful to watch videos about Astrology than videos about how the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a false flag operation.

I have used financial ruin as one of the criteria for harm. There are far more examples of people who have been reduced to financial ruin because of astrology, so I am correct with regards to the quantitative comparison.

You are not correct under any lens in any context

They are though. You just don't agree with their viewpoint and seem to want this kind of censoring of content.

> It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright.

That's an open question - whether conspiracy videos have a negative effect. Given the current state of research in psychology, political science and communication research, it seems plausible that they do have a negative effect, albeit a small one.

The defining feature of conspiracy theories is mistrust in state institutions and elites. Such attitudes - while legally protected - can lead to people rejecting sensible and helpful behavior, including vaccinations [1].

So given the current state of research, I do not think the premise should be rejected outright.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506209346...

You are selectively highlighting part of the comment.

The full context is that it should be rejected outright IF other forms of harmful information are allowed to remain.

Any selective enforcement of this nature is insincere because it blatantly ignores more harmful examples.

If there is a comprehensive enforcement that treats all harmful content equally, it can be considered sincere, else it is simply politics. These are not minor examples, they are far more dangerous than the examples being cited in this study.

I agree with you, but I think I and most people wouldn't view astrology videos anywhere near as harmful as any of the other videos mentioned. Could you link one or two videos that you consider to be presenting information as harmful as the other things you listed?

For things like homeopathy and other medical pseudoscience, I think a lot of those things do get banned, depending on the claims they're presenting.

And for something like a video recommending you invest in the video creator's company because [astrology gibberish], I think in that case it's just a matter of magnitude. Of course such a video causes harm, but YouTube can't be expected to be able to prevent all levels of harm. Your argument is sound when you're comparing against things that many would agree are at least as harmful as the other examples you give, rather than just meeting the criteria of any level of harmfulness.

You are using the term "homeopathy", which includes osteopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic treatments, and other "holistic" areas of treatment.

Homeopathy is a very broad area, and some of it isn't just pseudoscience, although we may not yet know the mechanism of operation for some of the 'treatments' (and some are almost certainly actively harmful).

It's probably a weak analogy, but homeopathy is to medicine as supplements are to FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. There's always going to be some crazies, but there will also be some good things there, too, and by banning it, we will miss out on some really good innovation and ideas.

I've never heard it referring to all pseudo-medicines. Wikipedia seems to agree on a narrow definition about just heavily diluted shits.

Please review the sidebar on the homeopathy page for "fringe medicines", which includes the other examples I cited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy

The third sentence:

>Its practitioners, called homeopaths, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people; this doctrine is called similia similibus curentur, or "like cures like".

I think homeopathy just applies to the pseudoscientific/fake "like cures like" dilution method. The broad category is just known as "alternative medicine", I believe. Some other forms of alternative medicine aren't necessarily quite as baseless.

> You are using the term "homeopathy", which includes osteopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic treatments, and other "holistic" areas of treatment.

> Homeopathy is a very broad area …

Homeopathy is a specific system of “alternative medicine” that involves treating “like with like” – albeit in dilutions that no longer contain the active ingredient. It has little in common with acupuncture or chiropractic which have very different origins and belief systems – other than they are all pseudo-scientific and are broadly categorised as complementary or alternatives to mainstream, evidence-based medicine.

The only reason we have somewhat responsible state institutions and elites is due to a long history of well deserved mistrust of said powers.

You argue that belief systems are both equal and not equal.

Pick a side.

No that is not accurate, I am arguing that if the goal is to tweak an algorithm to reduce "harmful" information then the criteria for what is considered harmful should not be narrowed down on the basis of one's personal politics.

Any sincere effort to minimize harmful information would start with astrology, superstition, religion, homeopathy and other such content - not some local USA "problems".

Then make that argument.

That our tools should empower us. That all existing recommenders disempower, or worse. That people should be in control of their own eyeballs.

In our attention economy, the choice of what to show and not show are equally important. It's trivial to crowd out opposing opinions, no censorship needed.

Who controls that algorithm? Certainly not us.

Most of the pearl clutching over censorship, "cancel culture", blah blah blah would be resolved today by restoring the fairness doctrine (equal time).

(This obvious and correct remediation will not happen so long as the outrage machine is fed by advertising.)

((Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, many others, all made all these points, much more eloquently, repeatedly, much better than I ever could.))

> ...minimize harmful information would start with astrology...

Encourage you to omit your own opinions of any particular belief system. No one cares. It's a distraction (food fight).

It's not harmful to watch videos, if you don't do so uncritically. If you watch uncritically, almost any media is harmful, down to Teletubbies. People need to take responsibility for their minds: Boogaloo bois and Antifa didn't radicalize you, you radicalized yourself by believing what they said, either rationally or by default — but own your decision-making.

> It's not harmful to watch Alex Jones videos, lizard people videos, deep state conspiracy videos. This premise should be rejected outright. It is more harmful to ...

Sure we can go down the whataboutism-road to find examples of things that are _more_ harmful, but you do realize there are people who believe in deep state and other insane conspiracy theories?

There are concepts like equal enforcement and equal justice which by definition require what you are terming as "whataboutism" to highlight.

If there is going to be selective enforcement of content, then call it what it is - politics.

No sincere effort to minimize harm would ignore the harm caused by religion, astrology, homeopathy and other ideas like this.

I fully agree!

I think a better analogy would be Flat Earth, moon landing hoax, aliens on the dark side of the moon vs. astrology and mysticism and religion.

I doubt astrology causes much financial distress for the vast majority of believers, even if it results in some people making poor financial decisions. Same for any other kind of distress.

The problem with lizard people, Deep State, and much of Alex Jones' stuff is that the claims are about specific people and groups of people and their intentions and actions. They cause many people to genuinely, truly believe that certain people are the most abominable evil imaginable. That's inevitably going to increase the risk of direct and indirect harm a lot more than woo-woo fortune-scrying.

One could say religion has done the same, and that's not necessarily wrong, but it's misleading. You'd have to compare specific things like religious extremist videos rather than merely religious/spiritual videos. Lizard people / Deep State YouTube content is very often extreme, while astrology and religion YouTube content is very rarely extreme. Pizzagate and QAnon adherents are earnestly trying to bring about the arrest and/or execution of people they believe to be child rapists and murderers.

Even stuff like 9/11 conspiracy theory videos, if believed, lead you to the unavoidable conclusion that some, much, most, or all of the US government and/or Israel and/or Jews are diabolical mass murderers. You're not going to come away with a conclusion like that after watching a crystal healing or reiki video.

>As a new YouTube user why am I recommended 100% of comedians and channels who have identical politics? What are the odds?

Probably because something in your Chrome or Google search history, or the history or video activity of other people sharing your IP address or device, led YouTube to believe that may be something you like. Or, as this article points out, maybe you clicked one or two things that were tangentially related in some way and their data set indicated a lot of people who watched those also watched those other things. So, the odds are probably very high.

The Alex Jones crowd recently tried to stage a coup. Thousands of Asians were assaulted in the last 16 months or so, often by people indoctrinated by middle-aged men talking rather loudly directly into a camera, in their car with ugly sunglasses.

A riot is not a "coup", especially by people with no weapons. The people attacking asians are mostly not from the right wing crowd.

Such a coup that to date, despite the most far reaching federal investigation in U.S. history, the only sentenced conviction has been to a grandmother who spent 10 minutes sightseeing through the (otherwise publicly accessible) area of the Capitol building, and given a whopping 120 days of community service and probation. Your rhetoric is more dangerous than this.

Alex Jones was literally telling people not to enter the Capital: https://twitter.com/CardinalConserv/status/14037682301083033...

> Thousands of Asians were assaulted in the last 16 months or so

Mostly by people who aren't Trump's demographic. I'm pretty sure you don't want to get into the statistics.

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