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Comment by mrcsharp | Hacker News Reader

Horrible news! There's nothing wrong with questioning narratives and this is what Sky News is doing. They questioned the effectiveness of lockdowns and why wouldn't they? Sydney and other parts of NSW have been in lockdown since 23/06 and the case numbers have been either steady or increasing. Today over 230 cases.. A few days ago it was around 170. Isn't it reasonable then to question the lockdown?

Well Youtube says no. Google says no. And apparently many here are ok with an unelected private entity dictating what information they can access and how. And frankly, even if they were elected I wouldn't want them to have such control.

Essentially, an American private company led by un-elected individuals are controlling what Australian individuals can see and hear.

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Well after seeing that Facebook is now censoring links from CDC.gov [0] and now this, it seems that you are going to get banned regardless of whatever the algorithms say about the guidelines. [1][2] You can get banned for no reason other than 'guidelines' and they can edit and alter them ahead of the ban. Good luck trying to appeal this.

This is all fine right?

At this point, it is time to delete your accounts off of these websites.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27999720

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28003635

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28005238

The lockdowns have been the least locked down lockdowns I've heard of, and they are weeks too late. Queensland has had 6 cases and entered a 3 day hard lockdown with no messing around, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is extended. Lockdowns do work. They stop people mingling and spreading the virus though the community. The videos that Sky News put out are dangerous to the larger community and cause issues like the completely over the top protests that have been happening, and result is further transmission of the disease.

Wow. Ok. A lot to unpack here.

Sydney's current virus problems are due to a slow, reluctant, partial and piecemeal lockdown. Meanwhile, other states doing a rapid, hard, comprehensive lockdown have far fewer cases, with some that had to deal with infections spreading from Sydney already out of hard lockdown and just keeping an eye on things with masks required for a little extra time.

If Sky Australia is, in fact, using Sydney's disaster to question lockdowns (and your post isn't satire), they absolutely should be de-platformed.

>Sydney and other parts of NSW have been in lockdown since 23/06 and the case numbers have been either steady or increasing. Today over 230 cases.. A few days ago it was around 170. Isn't it reasonable then to question the lockdown?

Won't the numbers be way worse without the lockdown?

> ... controlling what Australian individuals can see and hear on YouTube.

FTFY. It's important we remember that Google is exercising its rights to not host certain content and people on its own platform.

This is the Internet. Australians still have access to the Sky News website. There are other third-party video platforms too. This idea that because they're the biggest they have to operate like a public utility is utter nonsense.

Yes, they are exercising this control on their platforms. However, considering how the new generation's source of information is the internet and that google's search engine market share is 92% [1] and YouTube market share is 90% [2]. Isn't it alarming when one entity (google) decides what information 90%+ of the public have access to?

And yes, Sky News still have their website, for now, but do you also expect them to build their own Internet when their ISP bans them, their DNS records get purged, and their hosting provider shuts down their servers?

I'm sorry but it is not utter nonsense to expect an entity that 90% of the public rely on every day to not have such control over the public's access to information.

[1] https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/search-engine-market-share [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-o...

You're talking about hundreds of private companies and utilities all denying them service.

Your slippery slope is a fantasy scenario that even internationally recognised hate and pirate sites avoid. 4Chan thrives, KiwiFarms plods on, ThePirateBay still has its domain a host and is still listed in places without relevant court orders.

Yes, it denies them some access to market but while everyone goes to YouTube and Google, that's Google's market to curate as they see fit. Don't like it, encourage people to use other services, as I'm sure Sky Oz will now.

...at some point, massive multi-national monopolies (or oligopolies) have a certain responsibility to societal ethics.

This isn't the local pub kicking out a loud-mouth racist.

The danger of these few massive corporation, which control 99.9% of all human communication, dictating what we can say will bite us in the ass.

It's important to remember that YouTube's policy isn't always correct. They defended the WHO - but the WHO hosted a video on Youtube from Feb-2020 to July-2020 telling people that they did not need masks unless they were directly caring for sick patients.

These massive corporations can no only get things wrong, they have an incentive to alter narratives to support their own agendas.

It is their ubiquity and size that necessitates they respect free speech of content creators, unlike a small business that we can easily avoid.

To give a more extreme example of the danger of allowing unfettered corporate censorship: Imagine if mobile phone companies started listening to the content of your calls, and banned your mobile phone from the network if you said something in a private conversation they objected to. Or Skype/Meet/Zoom did the same?

It's one thing to be kicked out of a bar for being an idiot. It's another thing to be kicked out of all bars all over the world, forever.

Considering how Google is being strong armed into paying Australian news companies for the “privilege” of being able to index their websites… I am not surprised that Google is leaping on any opportunity to rid themselves of doing business with Australian news. And because of said strong arming, it’s hard for me to see how Google is the one acting from a position of strength here.

>Today over 230 cases.

And now let's go to the other side of the world where the "lockdowns don't work" propaganda was shat out as an argument for months:

>29692 new cases for the US on July 31st.

Good job people.

Excellent news! Now every Australian that visits youtube isn't recommended and suggested hateful rhetoric that contributes to right wing extremism.

> Essentially, an American private company led by un-elected individuals are controlling what Australian individuals can see and hear.

No sympathy from over here. Australia brought us the plague that is Fox News, and therefore Trump, etc. If starting a shooting war with the land of Murdoch would somehow repair the damage he has personally done, I’d be all for it.

(Edit: To be clear, I don’t have anything against Australia specifically, but Murdoch has done more economic damage and killed more Americans than any foreign aggressor since WWII. Actually invading Australia would be a pointless, but proportional response, aimed at the wrong people. Kind of like the second Iraq war, which was largely brought to us by Fox News.)

I'm sorry, are you advocating invading another country over a news channel? If the lab leak theory of the virus is proven correct, would you be for war against China too? If a war does happen, would you enlist in the army to go to the front lines and sacrifice your life?

Your comment is just over the top and really has nothing meaningful to add to the discussion here.

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