YouTube says it pulled Bolsonaro videos for Covid-19 misinformation
reuters.com
reuters.com
January 2020: WHO claims that there's "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" for SARS-CoV-2 [2]. Should YT have removed all videos discussing an alternative hypothesis?
June 2020: WHO claims asymptomatic spread is "very rare"[3]. Should YT have deleted all videos claiming that asymptomatic spread causes the majority of infections?
October 2020: WHO does "not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus"[4]. Should YT have banned all lockdown advocates?
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-coronavirus-pat...
[4] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organiza...
They're not politicians, not gurus selling snake oil. They're actually a group of professor of medecine (PUPH, highest level of qualification in france), running a large, government funded public health institution.
And they have been posting weekly updates on their youtube channel, based on their data from their own patients ( as well as very interesting specialized researcher presentation about the virus)
Who in their right mind would think a moderator in a software company would be more qualified and legitimate enough to actually censor them ??
That's just absurd.
So, no, they've not "treated" patients. HCQ's effects are nil. Azythromicine does not work either. Raoult might very well be a prolific scientist, but on Covid, he is absolutely full of shit.
my point is that youtube should clearly not take part in that scientific debate.
I have never seen any two doctors give the exact same medecine for any illness. I'm still having trouble understand why that should be the case for that one.
All of them took great insult when I point to banal arithmetic errors in their "innovations" down to taking the dispute to tvitter and press.
It's impossible to get through to such people. The more obvious is their folly, the bigger extremes they go to self-convince themselves that "they really can't be wrong, even if they are"
PhDs today may signify the level of knowledge, but not necessarily the level of intelligence.
Your statement sounds a bit hard to believe, though. If you had met one physics PhD who was 'completely immersed in perpetual motion engine cult' I would say that this could be true. But 'not so few' really stretches credibilty.
The cold fusion clowns go around TED events, collect research grants, and VC investments though they withdrew the only paper they published for a glaring arithmetics "mistake."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion
Those are not the only ones on my memory. Charles Chase with his "vortex fusion," and very sketchy Tri Alpha.
Samely, the perpetual motion cranks like Salvatore Pais were always hanging around those events popular with tech bohemia.
> I think intelligence is hardly the problem. It is something far more intangible that perhaps should be called 'wisdom'.
It can actually be the problem. Intelligence often manifested as an increased ability for self-deception and rationalization.
He also didn't "convice" anyone, he just gave its own results on a treatment that was tried in different countries at the time. The fact that trump publicaly took a stand poisoned the debate to a degree that made it completely impossible to discuss the thing calmly up to today..
I don't know if this study proves it is or it isn't. I'm making the point that there is at least some proof that it is. Why should YouTube be the arbiter of health information? This seems like another example of big tech censorship.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534595/#:~:tex....
No citations are findable. All indexes (search engines) prevent finding said data, all videos are missing, all forums/boards are purged, and discussing over zoom/voice results in a disconnect.
Also, now Google, Facebook and others have tagged you as a conspiracy nut, just for hitting a flagged term.
Not an expert but from what I understand;
Hydroxychloroquine suppresses the immune system which is apparently beneficial if covid-19 causes an overreaction or cytokine swarm in your body.
But steroids, specifically dextramethasone also do that and are much safer with less side effects.
Does chloroquine provide additional medical benefits that the steroids don't? I don't know and wonder as well.
Warning : the main guy has a huge ego and likes to be contrarian, but the institute does legitimate science on real patients, together with other professors in his team.
It's a whole other thing to prove HDQ is effective in a randomized controlled trial. As far as I know the group has not published a RTC and in general there is no RTC showing a clear benefit of HDQ in treating Covid. On the contrary there are several RTCs showing no effect, e.g. in preventing Covid [1].
We had one attempt in europe at trying out various drugs on a sufficient scale but it failed miserably to reach any conclusions due to lack of patient (and used absurd quantities for HCQ, 6 times the maximum dose, which made a few people think the guy organizing the thing weren't that good anyway).
And you don't have to choose death as your trial end point, you can take something else that is clinically meaningful, e.g. duration of stay in the hospital (not an expert).
What seems to make things difficult with Covid (according to a German virologist working on treatment options) is that we more and more believe Covid is a conglomerate of several different "sub-diseases" (can't remember the correct medical term), i.e. the virus can trigger qualitatively different physiological reactions in different people, and it's not clear at all why.
I know i start to sound like a zealot, but i've been followed this team's work for more than a year now, and i'm absolutely stunned their work isn't more valued, at least in their country. I'm not a health expert, but i've worked for a long enough time to feel when someone's during serious work (not to mention the fact that they've often been very informative on the virus itself, which made me less surprised by the evolution of the pandemic).
I wish it didn't and social media does have a lot of benefits in general, but we have to agree that the current spread of misinformation is costing lives, eroding trust in science, in society and democracy.
That's no comment on what to do - I'm simply saying that doing nothing already has significant negative cost.
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
serious information is for people who crosscheck their information, academically through books or through additional research. No place on the Internet is for serious information on it's own.
That bit about serious information being for people who cross-check information etc. would work if they were allowed to access all sources, something which is made difficult by certain viewpoints being blocked by several of the largest distribution platforms.
What you say about "no place on the 'net being for serious information on its own" is not necessarily true, as long as the above conditions are met - i.e. no network-level censorship - it is possible to present an overview of the current level of understanding on a subject. This used to be the case in scientific journals, nearly all of which are available online. The SARS2-pandemic made short shrift with this reliability when many of the journals started to align with the desired narrative, sometimes by simply refusing to publish studies which went against the narrative [X], sometimes by actively publishing false studies [1,2].
[X| here there would be links to papers on the seemingly proven efficacy of Ivermectin, the potentially useful nature of Hydroxychloroquine, the "statistical certainty" of the virus having escaped from the Wuhan institute of virology, etc. Alas, there are no such links since the journals refused the articles even though they were written by people with a proven scientific background and came with a bevy of evidence. Had the articles been published they could have been discussed in the open and their contents thereby proven or disproven without fear of retribution or cancellation since the works appeared in well-known and -respected journals. Now this is impossible, those who try to bring up articles published in less well-known journals or aggregators like arXiv often find themselves accused of quackery - which was the purpose of forcing those articles to be published there. For the respected journals this is a case of 'mission complete but reputation tarnished'.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The problem isn't the moderation policy, it's the medium. It encourages easy passive absorption of anything presented in a slick matter by people who barely know what they're talking about.
Take for instance this slick video talking about VHS capture by Technology Connections, which I used to have vaguely positive feelings about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC5Zr3NC2PY
The people on a forum with really deep knowledge on the subject have poor things to say about it: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/video-capture/10059-modern-a.... They say he only has a poor gasp of the subject, and half the time sounds like he's just reading off of Wikipedia.
> There are plenty of alternative video distribution channels out there which don't have this problem, the only thing which needs to be solved is video discovery.
No, those "alternative video distribution channels" are usually far worse, precisely because of that lack of moderation. Except in a very few cases (specifically some gun videos, and Serikzhan Bilash), most of the original content that has to flee to them is garbage.
As to alternative video distribution channels being "worse" than Youtube, well, yes, the average quality of the content "relegated" to alternative channels is bound to be lower than that on Youtube simply because they apply both legitimate as well as illegitimate (political, commercial or otherwise) reasons to ban content. The value of the alternative channels lies in their willingness to distribute videos which were banned for illegitimate reasons, not in their use by those who were banned from Youtube for legitimate reasons. You can simply ignore the thrash content when using these alternatives just like you (hopefully) ignore the thrash on Youtube et al.
Of course I am not blind. Big tech companies have just too much power. I hope governments will split them up without being authoritarian but I am afraid this is asking too much.
Weird, I can still find on YT videos stating that masks don't work and we shouldn't wear them from the Surgeon General, Fauci, The Guardian, NYT, and other major experts, institutions and media. When will they be purged?
The Guardian:
> Masks should not be weared and they are potentially unhelpful because they give a false sense of security
I will report it right now for the greater good.
That's the thing about scientific consensus: It evolves over time with the discovery of new evidence.
My point is that those kind of videos are important to understand why some people frown upon radical decisions ( such as censorship) being taken based on today's "consensus".
It's by no means perfect, but it's surprisingly good.
> Models have been proven wrong time and time again, especially in the covid crisis.
That's an important take-away: models are only as good as the assumptions, all models are wrong to some extent. This becomes especially apparent if you try to predict things, which is easy to get wrong. The real strengths of models is not to predict, but to explain.
now that's a bold claim... if i'm not mistaken general relativity ultimate test was actually to predict trajectories we hadn't observed yet.
i can model any behavior happening in the past, with a sufficient number of parameters in my equation. that doesn't say much on the quality of the model.
https://edition.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_e58c20...
(and of course it proves what everyone does kind of knows: misinformation doesn’t just come from “weird” aunts on Facebook and Russians, but from official authorities if they feel lying to you would protect their interest, conveniently equated to societal interest. This becomes especially questionable when financial authorities do it and especially reprehensible when politicians use their positions in authorities to further their own agenda/ideology. Doubly so when it’s racist)
I would like to see a video service that does not censor unless its acts of, or incitement, of violence or breaking the law.
Yes, weird, but they were also clearly stating their action about these videos in particular, not an action against all of them.
As I'm sure you can imagine, it is much easier and reliable to pull videos from a particular user than all videos related to a certain subject. If they did that, they'd probably risk also taking down Joe Rogan (which at this point would be awesome, but also a very bad).
So good luck.