YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
That "and/or" is doing a lot of work here. There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.
Then again, Alphabet is now claiming they did want to host it and mean old Biden pressured them into pulling it so if we buy that, maybe it doesn't matter.
> What if they started banning tylenol-autism sceptical accounts?
What if it's pro-cannibalism or pedophilia content? Everyone has a line, we're all just arguing about where exactly we think that line should be.
This throws out spam and fraud filters, both of which are content-based moderation.
Nobody moderates anything isn’t unfortunately a functional option. Particularly if the company has to sell ads.
I think government censorship should be strictly prohibited. I think "company" censorship is just the application of the first amendment.
Where I think the problem lies with things like YouTube is the fact that we have _monopolies_, so there is no "free market" of platforms.
I think we should be addressing "big tech" censorship not by requiring tech companies to behave like a government, but rather by preventing any companies from having so much individual power that we _need_ them to behave like a government.
We should have aggressive anti-trust laws, and interoperability requirements for large platforms, such that it doesn't matter if YouTube decides to be censorious, because there are 15 other platforms that people can viably use instead.
My fear is that this is incredibly uncontroversial this is until it's not-- when pushes becomes shoves we start having debates about what are, "legitimate" concentrations of power (wealth) and how that legitimacy in itself lets us, "tolerate what we would generally condemn as intolerable." I feel we need to take a queue from the Chomsky's of the world and decree:
"all unjustified concentrations of power and wealth are necessarily interested in control and as such we should aggressively and purposefully refuse to tolerate them at all as a basic condition of democratic living..."
This used to be, "social democracy" where these days the Democratic Party in the United States' motto is more, "let us make deals with the devil because reasons and things." People have the power. We are the people. Hare fucking Krsna.
As a book publisher, should I be required to publish your furry smut short stories? Of course not. Is that infringing on your freedom of speech? Of course not.
What you are arguing for is a dissolution of HN and sites like it.
The reason we ban government censorship is so that a private actor can always create their own conspiracy theory + snuff film site if they want, and other platforms are not obligated to carry content they find objectionable. Get really into Rumble or Truth Social or X if you would like a very different perspective from Youtube's.
On their platform, that’s exactly what they are entitled to do. When you type into the box in the Facebook app, that’s your speech. But unless the platform wants to add your contribution to their coherent speech product, they have every right to reject it.
Otherwise, the government is deciding what people can say, and you’d be against that, right?
Further, if I wanted to start a social media platform called thinkingtylenolcausesautismisstupid.com, wouldn’t restricting my right to craft my product defeat the whole point of my business?
Giving platforms the ability to moderate their output to craft a coherent speech product is the only reason we have multiple social networks with different rules, instead of one first-mover social network with no rules where everyone is locked in by network effects.
I've seen stupidity on the internet you wouldn't believe.
Time Cube rants — four simultaneous days in one rotation — burning across static-filled CRTs.
Ponzi pyramids stretching into forever, needing ten billion souls to stand beneath one.
And a man proclaiming he brought peace in wars that never were, while swearing the President was born on foreign soil.
All those moments… lost… in a rain of tweets.
We've got LLMs now, letting interested parties (government or not) overwhelm everyone with an endless barrage of the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop, the kind that makes even AI proponents like me go "ah, I see what you mean about it being autocomplete", because even the worst of that by quality is still able to bury any bad news story just as effectively as any censorship. Too much noise and not enough signal, is already why I'm consuming far less YouTube these days, why I gave up on Twitter when it was still called that, etc.
And we have AI that's a lot better at holding a conversation than just the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop. We've already seen LLMs are able to induce psychosis in some people just by talking to them, and that was, so far as we can tell, accidental. How long will it be before a developer chooses to do this on purpose, and towards a goal of their choice? Even if it's just those who are susceptible, there's a lot of people.
What's important is the freedom to share truth, no matter how uncomfortable, and especially when it's uncomfortable for those with power. Unfortunately, what we humans actually share the most is gossip, which is already a poor proxy for truth and is basically how all the witch hunts, genocides, and other moral-panic-induced horrors of history happened.
It is all a mess; it is all hard; don't mistake the proxy (free speech in general) for the territory (speak truth to power, I think?); censorship is simultaneously bad and the only word I know for any act which may block propaganda which is also bad.
Have we all lost the ability to reason? Seriously, this isn't hard. No one owes you distribution unless you have a contract saying otherwise.
SCOTUS. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, holds that governments cannot coerce private entities into censoring speech they disfavor, even if they do not issue direct legal orders.
This was a publicly announced motivation for Elon Musk buying Twitter. Because of which we know the extent of this illegal behavior.
Mark Zuckerberg has also publicly stated Meta was asked to remove content by the US government.
If you take proposals from whoever and then only approve ones you specifically like, for whatever reason, then I don’t think anyone would feel silenced by that.
If you take anything from anyone, and a huge volume of it, on any topic and you don’t care what, except for a few politically controversial areas, that feels more like silencing. Especially when there is no alternative service available due to network effects and subsidies from arguably monopolistic practices.
Sure, Google doesn't need to host anything they don't want to; make it all Nazi apologia if they thing it serves their shareholders. But doing so and silencing all other viewpoints in that particular medium is surely not a net benefit for society, independent of how it affects Google.
That distinction is a relic of a world of truly public spaces used for communication— a literal town square. Then it became the malls and shopping centers, then the Internet— which runs on private pipes— and now it’s technological walled gardens. Being excluded from a walled garden now is effectively being “silenced” the same way being excluded from the town square was when whatever case law you’re thinking was decided.
The common carrier law says you have to for for some things, so it makes sense to institute such a law for some parts of social media as they are fundamental enough. It is insane that we give that much censorship power to private corporations. They shouldn't have the power to decide elections on a whim etc.
Even today, I was listening to NPR talk about the potential TikTok deal and the commenter was wringing their hands about having a "rich guy" like Larry Ellison control the content.
I don't know exactly what the right answer is. But given their reach -- and the fact that a lot of these companies are near monopolies -- I think we should at least do more than just shrug and say, "they can do what they want."
To me that sounds only fair trade. You editorialize content. You are liable for all content. In every possible way.
You seem to think there's a bright line of "silenced" vs "not silenced". In reality there's many ways of limiting and restricting people's expressions. Some are generally considered acceptable and some are not. When huge swaths of communication are controlled by a handful of companies, their decisions have a huge impact on what speech gets suppressed. We should interrogate whether that serves the public interest.
I think if public health bodies just laid out the data they had honestly (good and bad) and said that they think most people should probably take it, but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.
It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.
The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .
Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines.
As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)
These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication.
*And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.
"A total of 913 participants were included in the final analysis. The adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals were 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001). The odds of contracting COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses: one to two doses (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.08-2.46, p = 0.020), three to four doses (OR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.35-3.08, p = 0.001), and five to seven doses (OR: 2.21, 95% CI: 1.07-4.56, p = 0.033)." - ["Behavioral and Health Outcomes of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination: A Case-Control Study in Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises" (2024)](https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health...)
"the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category" - ["COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study" (2023)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/)
"The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19" - ["Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine" (2022)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v...)
"Confirmed infection rates increased according to time elapsed since the last immunity-conferring event in all cohorts. For unvaccinated previously infected individuals they increased from 10.5 per 100,000 risk-days for those previously infected 4-6 months ago to 30.2 for those previously infected over a year ago. For individuals receiving a single dose following prior infection they increased from 3.7 per 100,000 person days among those vaccinated in the past two months to 11.6 for those vaccinated over 6 months ago. For vaccinated previously uninfected individuals the rate per 100,000 person days increased from 21.1 for persons vaccinated within the first two months to 88.9 for those vaccinated more than 6 months ago." - ["Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity" (2021)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...)
If you allow crazy people to "let it ride" then they don't stop until... until... hell we're still in the middle of it and I don't even know when or if they will stop.
Very analogous to people who don't like how inefficient governments function and somehow conclude that the solution is to put people in power with zero experience managing government.
People should be free to say what they want online. But going down "YouTube conspiracy theory" rabbit holes is a real thing, and YouTube doesn't need to make that any easier, or recommend extreme (or demonstrably false) content because it leads to more "engagement".
The first amendment was written in the 1700s...
In this sense platforms like X need to be regulated more like gambling. In some ways X is a big roulette wheel that's being spun which will help stochastically determine where the next major school shooting will take place.
It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.
I'm a bit amazed seeing people still justifying it after all we've learned.
COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.
And to state my position like the root guy, I'm a progressive, pro-vaccine, medical science believer. I listen to my doctor and am skeptical if not dismissive of the YouTube "wellness" grifters selling scam supplements. I believe in science and research. I thought the worm pill people were sad if not pathetic. Anyone who gets triggered by someone wearing a mask needs to reassess their entire life.
But lockdowns went on way too long. Limits on behaviour went on way too long. Vaccine compliance measures were destructive the moment we knew it had a negligible effect on spread. When platforms of "good intentions" people started silencing the imbeciles, it handed them a megaphone and made the problem much worse.
And now we're living in the consequences. Where we have a worm-addled halfwit directed medicine for his child-rapist pal.
It would be a mistake to think such operations care too much about specific talking points, the goal is to drown out moderate discussion to replace it with flamewars. It's a numbers game, so they'll push in hundreds of different directions until they find something that sticks and also both sides of the same conflict.
Content that makes people angry (extreme views) brings views.
Algorithims optimise for views -> people get recommended extreme views.
You can test this with a fresh account, it doesn't take many swipes on Youtube Shorts to get some pretty heinous shit if you pretend to be a young male to the algorithm.
Is it? How does that work at scale?
Speech generally hasn’t been restricted broadly. The same concepts and ideas removed from YouTube still were available on many places (including here).
Yet we still have so many people believing falsehoods and outright lies. Even on this very topic of COVID, both sides present their “evidence” and and truly believe they are right, no matter what the other person says.
Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.
The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.
Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.
The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.
Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.
Trump thought so too.
Now vaccines are getting banned and the GOP is gerrymandering the hell out of the country to ensure the end of the democratic process. Sure, let's do nothing and see where that brings us. Maybe people will magically come to their senses.
My biggest problem with YouTube isn't what it does/doesn't allow on its platform, it's that it will happily feed you a psychotic worldview if it keeps you on the site. I've had several family members go full conspiracy nut-job after engaging heavily with YouTube content.
I don't know what the answer is. I think many people would rightly argue that removing misinformation from the recommendation engine is synonymous with banning it. FWIW I'd be happy if recommendation engines generally were banned for being a societal cancer, but I'm probably in the minority here.
If 'silencing people' doesn't work- so online platforms aren't allowed to remove anything? Is there any limit to this philosophy? So you think platforms can't remove:
Holocaust denial? Clothed underage content? Reddit banned r/jailbait, but you think that's impermissible? How about clothed pictures of toddlers but presented in a sexual context? It would be 'silencing' if a platform wanted to remove that from their private property? Bomb or weapons-making tutorials? Dangerous fads that idiotic kids pass around on TikTok, like the blackout game? You're saying it's not permissible for a platform to remove dangerous instructionals specifically targeted at children? How about spam? Commercial advertising is legally speech in the US. Platforms can't remove the gigantic quantities of spam they suffer from every day?
Where's the limiting principle here? Why don't we just allow companies to set their own rules on their own private property, wouldn't that be a lot simpler?
1) They are public corporations and are legal creation of the state and benefit from certain protections of the state. They also have privileged access to some public infrastructures that other private companies do not have.
2) By acting on the behest of the government they were agent of the government for free speech and censorship purposes
3) Being monopolies in their respective markets, this means they must respect certain obligations the same way public utilities have.
In this case it wasn't a purely private decision.
How about "If the content isn't illegal, then the government shouldn't pressure private companies to censor/filter/ban ideas/speech"?
And yes, this should apply to everything from criticizing vaccines, denying election results, being woke, being not woke, or making fun of the President on a talk show.
Not saying every platform needs to become like 4chan, but if one wants to be, the feds shouldn't interfere.
Except many people don't roll their eyes at it, that's exactly the problem. QAnon went from a meme on 4chan to the dominant political movement across the US and Europe. Anti-vax went from fringe to the official policy position of the American government. Every single conspiracy theory that I'm aware of has only become more mainstream, while trust in any "mainstream" source of truth has gone down. All all of this in an environment of aggressive skepticism, arguing, debating and debunking. All of the sunlight is not disinfecting anything.
We're literally seeing the result of the firehose of misinformation and right-wing speech eating people's brains and you're saying we just have to "let it ride?"
Silencing people alone doesn't work, but limiting the damage misinformation and hate speech can do while pushing back against it does work. We absolutely do need to preserve the right of platforms to choose what speech they spread and what they don't.
It actually does work. You need to remove ways for misinformation to spread, and suppressing a couple of big agents works very well.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3479525 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11864
Obviously, the best solution would be prevention, by having good education systems and arming common people with the weapons to assess and criticize information, but we are kinda weak on that front.
Doesn't it though? I've seen this repeated like it's fact but I don't think that's true. If you disallowed all of some random chosen conspiracy off of YouTube and other mainstream platforms I think it would stop being part of the larger public consciousness pretty quickly.
Many of these things arrived out of nothing and can disappear just as easily.
It's basic human nature that simply hearing things repeated over and over embeds it into your consciousness. If you're not careful and aware of what you're consuming then that becomes a part of your world view. The most effective way to bring people back from conspiratorial thinking (like QAnon) is to unplug them from that source of information.
We also tried letting the propaganda machine full-blast those lies on the telly for the past 5 years.
For some reason, that didn't work either.
What is going to work? And what is your plan for getting us to that point?
People can post all sorts of crazy stuff, but the algorithms do not need to promote it.
Countries can require Algorithmic Impact Assements and set standards of compliance to recommended guidelines.
The US military also promoted anti-vax propaganda in the Philippines [0].
A lot of the comments here raise good points about silencing well meaning people expressing their opinion.
But information warfare is a fundamental part of modern warfare. And it's effective.
An American company or individual committing fraud can be dealt with in the court system. But we don't yet have a good remedy for how to deal with a military power flooding social media with information intentionally designed to mislead and cause harm for people who take it seriously.
So
> I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work
it seems to have been reasonably effective at combating disinformation networks
> It just causes the ideas to metastasize
I don't think this is generally true. If you look at old disinformation campaigns like the idea that the US faked the moon landings, it's mostly confined to a small group of people who are prone to conspiracy thinking. The idea of a disinformation campaign is you make it appear like a crazy idea has broad support. Making it appear that way requires fake accounts or at least boosters who are in on the scheme. Taking that away means the ideas compete on their own merit, and the ideas are typically real stinkers.
[0] https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/167919/20240727/u-s-ad...
Neo-nazis and white nationalists went from their 3-4 replies per thread forums, 4chan posts, and Telegram channels, to now regularly reaching millions of people and getting tens of thousands of likes.
As a Danish person I remember how American media in the 2010s and early 2020s used to shame Denmark for being very right-wing on immigration. The average US immigration politics thread on X is worse than anything I have ever seen in Danish political discussions.
Silencing absolutely works! How do you think disinformation metastasized!?
Reality is, i have personally seen what this type of uncontrolled anti-vax stuff does. The issue is that its harder to disprove a negative with a positive, then people realize.
The moment you are into the youtube, tiktok or whatever platform algorithm, you are fed a steady diet of this misinformation. When you then try to argue with actual factual studies, you get the typical response from "they already said that those studies are made up"... How do you fight that? Propaganda works by flooding the news and over time, people believe it.
That is the result of uncensored access because most people do not have the time to really look up a scientific study. The amount of negative channels massive out way positive / fact based channels because the later is "boring". Its the same reason why your evening news is 80% deaths, corruptions, thefts, politicians and taxes or other negative world news. Because it has been proven that people take in negative news much more. Clickbait titles that are negative draw in people.
There is a reason why holocaust denial is illegal in countries. Because the longer some people can spew that, the more people actually start to believe it.
Yes, i am going to get roasted for this but people are easily influenced and they are not as smart as they think themselves are. We have platforms that cater to people's short attention span with barely 1~3 min clips. Youtube video's longer then 30min are horrible for the youtubers income as people simply do not have the attention span and resulting lost income.
Why do we have laws like seatbelt, speed limits, and other "control" over people. Because people left to their own devices, can be extreme uncaring about their own family, others, even themselves.
Do i like the idea of censorship for the greater good, no. But when there are so many that spew nonsense just to sell their powders, and their homemade vitamine C solutions (made in China)... telling people information that may hurt or kills themselves, family or others.
Where is the line of that unbridled free speech? Silencing people works as in, your delaying the flow of shit running down a creek, will it stop completely? No, but the delay helps people downstream. Letting it run uninterrupted, hoping that a few people downstream with a mop will do all the work, yea ...
We only need to look at platforms like X, when "censorship" got removed (moderation). Full of free speech, no limits and it turned into a soak pit extreme fast (well, bigger soak pit).
Not sure why i am writing this because this is a heated topic but all i can say is, I have seen the damage that anti-vax did on my family. And even to this day, that damage is still present. How a person who never had a issue with vaccinations, never had a bad reaction beyond the sour arm for a day, turned so skeptical to everything vaccination. All because those anti-vax channels got to her.
The anti-vax movement killed people. There is scientific study upon study how red states in the US ended up with bigger amounts of deaths given the time periodes. And yet, not a single person was ever charged for this, ... all simply accepted this and never looked back. Like it was a natural thing, that people's grandparents, family members died that did not need to die.
The fact that people have given up, and now accept to let those with often financial interests, spew nonsense as much as they like. Well, its "normal".
I weep for the human race because we are not going to make it.
I agree, but how do you combat propaganda from Putin? Do you match him dollar for dollar? I am sure YouTube would like that, but who has deep enough pockets to counter the disinformation campaigns?
Similar issue with Covid... when you are in the middle of a pandemic, and dead bodies are piling up, and hospitals are running out of room, how do you handle misinformation spreading on social media?
If you were on the early Internet, you were self policing with the help of admins all the time. The difference was you had niche populations that had a stake in keeping the peace and culture of a given board
We broke those boundaries down though and now pit strangers versus strangers for clicks and views, resulting in daily stochastic terrorism.
Police the damn speech.
The simple solution is repeal Section 230. When information can be transmitted instantly on a massive scale, somebody need to responsible for the information. The government should not police information but citizens should be allowed to sue social media companies for the harm caused to them.
Both have always been massively shady. I'm old enough to remember the big stink around the Al Gore election loss, or the robust questioning of the 2016 election for that matter. So ridiculous for self-proclaimed defenders of democracy to want to ban the discussion and disagreement about the facts around elections. Democratic processes and institutions should be open to doubt, questioning, and discussion.
The response to covid vaccines was actually extremely rational. They were highly taken up by the elderly who were shown to have the greatest risk, despite that demographic skewing more conservative (and arguably could be most at risk of "misinformation" from social media). And they were not able to stop transmission or provide much benefit to children and younger people, so they didn't get taken up so much among those groups. So there was really no need for this massive sustained psychological campaign of fearmongering, divisiveness, censorship, and mandates. They could have just presented the data and the facts as they came to hand, and be done with it.
This actually surprised me because I thought (and maybe still think) that it was Google employees that led the charge on this one.
I wouldn't trust any public statement from these companies once that kind of threat has been thrown around. People don't exactly want to go to prison forever.
For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.
The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...
Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...
It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.
Did they? I remember them revising their guidance, which seems like something one would expect during an emerging crisis, but I don't remember them directly contradicting themselves.
June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0]
June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1]
0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac...
Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
I'm not aware that the WHO ever claimed simultaneously contradictory things.
Obviously, rapid revisions during a period of emerging data makes YouTube's policy hard to enforce fairly. Do you remove things that were in line with the WHO when they were published? When they were made? Etc
A broken clock says the right time twice a day, that doesn’t mean much.
ps: I don’t support the bans but you argument seems flawed to me.
Like, we're getting pretty nuanced here pretty fast, it would be nice to discuss this against an actual example of how this was enforced rather than being upset about a hypothetical situation where we have no idea how it was enforced.
Yes.
> If people on June 8th criticized that official position before they reversed the next day, do you think it was right or a good idea for them to be censored?
Obviously not. Like I pointed out to the other commenter, if you were to read the comment of mine you replied to, I have a whole paragraph discussing that. Not sure why you're asking again.
1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.
2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.
I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.
A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.
So in response.
It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.
People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
It's 2020 and suddenly we need research about how well masks work, if at all and what is their exact benefit.
Eh, ya kind of, but it seems more like the distinction between parallel and concurrent in this case. She doesn't appear to be wrong in that instance while at the same time the models might have indicated otherwise, being an apparent contradiction and apparently both true within the real scope of what could be said about it at that time.
Whether they did or not is almost irrelevant: information doesn't reach humans instantaneously, it takes time to propagate through channels with varying latency, it gets amplified/muted depending on media bias, people generally have things going on in life other than staying glued to new sources, etc.
If you take a cross sample you're guaranteed to observe contradictory "parallel" information even if the source is serially consistent.
If you posted to YouTube that it is very rare for asymptomatics to spread the disease, would you be banned? What if you posted it on the 9th in the hours between checking their latest guidance and their guidance changing? What if you posted it on the 8th but failed to remove it by the 10th?
What if you disagreed with their guidance they gave on the 8th and posted something explaining your stance? Would you still get banned if your heresy went unnoticed by YouTube's censors until the 10th at which time it now aligns with WHO's new position? Banned not for spreading misinformation, but for daring to question the secular high priests?
It was a novel time and things were changing daily. Care needs to be taken yes, but it’s also weighed against clear and open communication. People were very scared. Thinking they would die. I don’t mind having up-to-date information even if it were changing daily.
They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)
Not they believed it wasn't airborne.
Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.
That it was fact.
In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
Argue that they were incompetent in their handling of it, sure, whatever. That's not the comment you're replying to.
Eventually I started seeing some serious discussion about how it might have been accidentally created through gain of function research.
If it was a lab leak, by far the most likely explanation is that someone pricked themselves or caught a whiff of something.
A friend of mine who lived in China for a while and is familiar with the hustle culture there had his own hypothesis. Some low level techs who were being given these bats and other lab animals to euthanize and incinerate were like “wait… we could get some money for these over at the wet market!”
No, that was just the straw man circulated in your echo chamber to dismiss discussion. To be clear, there were absolutely people who believed that, but the decision to elevate the nonsense over the serious discussion is how partisan echo chambers work.
excuse me I'm sorry what?
A novel coronavirus outbreak happens at the exact location as a lab performing gain of function research on coronaviruses... but yeah, suggesting a lab leak is outlandish, offensive even, and you should be censored for even mentioning that as a possibility. Got it.
This line of thinking didn't make sense then and still doesn't make sense now.
Plenty of people were able to talk about lab leak conspiracies. That is why we are still debating it today.
I doubt it.
Because WHO worked with CPC to bury evidence and give clean chit to wuhan lab. There was some pressure building up then for international teams to visit wuhan lab and examine data transparently. But, with thorough ban of lab leak theory, WHO visited china and gave clean chit without even visiting wuhan lab or having access to lab records. The only place that could prove this definitively buried all records.
To the people zealously downvoting all of these replies: defend yourselves. What about this is not worthy of conversation?
I'm not saying that I support lab leak. The observation is that anyone that discussed the lab leak hypothesis on social media had content removed and potentially were banned. I am fundamentally against that.
If the observation more generally is that sentiments should be censored that can risk peoples lives by influencing the decisions they make, then let me ask you this:
Should Charlie Kirk have been censored? If he were, he wouldn't have been assassinated.
On the other hand, if he were, then whoever censored him might have just as easily become the target of some other crazy, because that appears to be the world we live in now. Something's gotta change. This whole "us vs them" situation is just agitating the most extreme folks right over the edge of sanity into "Crazy Town". Wish we could get back to bein' that whole "One Nation Under God" "Great Melting Pot" "United States" they used to blather on about in grade-school back in the day, but that ship appears to have done sailed and then promptly sunk to the bottom... :(
It was not a bold claim at the time. Not only was there no evidence that it was the wet market at the time, the joint probability of a bat coronavirus outbreak where there were few bat caves but where they were doing research on bat coronaviruses is pretty damning. Suppressing discussion of this very reasonable observation was beyond dumb.
I thought it wasn't so much an error as a conflict of interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid...
Even Dr Fauci said in 2021 he was "not convinced" the virus originated naturally. That was a shift from a year earlier, when he thought it most likely Covid had spread from animals to humans.
https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/5/24/22451233/coron...
(..February 2023..) The Department of Energy, which oversees a network of 17 U.S. laboratories, concluded with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 most likely arose from a laboratory incident. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it favored the laboratory theory with “moderate” confidence. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from natural zoonotic spillover, while two remain undecided.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
WHO says that "While most available and accessible published scientific evidence supports hypothesis #1, zoonotic transmission from animals, possibly from bats or an intermediate host to humans, SAGO is not currently able to conclude exactly when, where and how SARS-CoV-2 first entered the human population."
However "Without information to fully assess the nature of the work on coronaviruses in Wuhan laboratories, nor information about the conditions under which this work was done, it is not possible for SAGO to assess whether the first human infection(s) may have resulted due to a research related event or breach in laboratory biosafety."
https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advi...
WHO paraphrased: We have no data at all about the Wuhan Laboratory so we can not make a conclusion on that hypothesis. Since we have data relating to natural transmission from animals we can say that situation was possible.
Placing absolute trust in these organizations and restricting freedom of speech based on that is a very bootlicking, anti-freedom stance
It turns out that masks ARE largely ineffective at preventing CoViD infection. It's amazing how many studies have come up with vastly different results.
https://egc.yale.edu/research/largest-study-masks-and-covid-...
(Before you tell me that the story I cited above says the opposite, look at the effectiveness percentages they claim for each case.)
There's also this: https://x.com/RandPaul/status/1970565993169588579
> Colored masks of various construction were handed out free of charge, accompanied by a range of mask-wearing promotional activities inspired by marketing research
"of various construction" is... not very specific.
If you just try to cover your face with a piece of cloth it won't work well. But if you'll use a good mask (N95/FFP2/FFP3), with proper fit [0] then you can decrease the chance of being infected (see e.g. [1])
[0] https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protectio...
[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-...
Especially at the time when many countries were having their healthcare systems overloaded by cases.
There was scientific basis for N95 masks and similar masks. If you are talking about cloth and paper masks, I mostly agree. Even then there were tests done with using even those surgical masks with 3d printed frames. I remember this as one example of people following this line of thinking.
https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2021/07/26/surgical-ma...
As for dehumanization, I used to live in Tokyo and spending years riding the train. I think blaming masks for dehumanization when we have entire systems ragebaiting us on a daily basis is like blaming the LED light for your electric bill.
Social Distancing having "no scientific backing" is very difficult to respond to. Do you mean in terms of long term reduction of spread, or as a temporary measure to prevent overwhelming the hospitals (which is what the concern was at the time)?
I do agree that it was fundamentally dishonest to block people from going to church and then telling other people it was OK to protest (because somehow these protests were "socially distanced" and outdoors). They could have applied the same logic to Church groups and helped them find places to congregate, but it was clearly a case of having sympathy for the in-group vs the out-group.
This is false. Even quick search shows multiple papers from pre-covid times that show masks being effective [0][1]. There are many more studies post-covid that show that N95/FFP2/FFP3 masks actually work if you wear them correctly (most people don't know how to do this). Educate yourself before sharing lies.
If we think tylenol might cause autism why doesn't he run/fund a nice clean and large randomized controlled trial? Instead he spreads conjecture based on papers with extremely weak evidence.
But who watches the watchmen?
misinformation is a real and worsening problem, but censorship makes conspiracies flourish, and establishes platforms as arbiters of truth. that "truth" will shift with the political tides.
IMO we need to teach kids how to identify misinformation in school. maybe by creating fake articles, mixing them with real articles and having students track down sources and identify flaws. critical thinking lessons.
I think some accountability for platforms is an important part of this. Platforms right now have the wrong incentives, we need to fix this. It's not just about "truth" but it's also about stealing our attention and time. It's a drug and we should regulate it like the drug it is.
I spent several hours on one of these only to discover the author of the post had found a subtle way to misrepresent the findings and had done things to the graph to skew it further. You cannot expect a kid (let alone most adults) to come to the same conclusion through lessons on critical thinking.
You just described a perfectly normal "Civics & Current Events" class in early grade-school back when / where I grew up. We were also taught how to "follow the facts back to the actual sources" and other such proper research skills. This was way back when you had to go to an actual library and look up archived newspapers on microfiche, and encyclopedias were large collections of paper books. Y'know... When dinosaurs still roamed the streets... ;)
This is extremely difficult. Many of the people who thrive on disinformation are drawn to it because they are contrarian. They distrust anything from the establishment and automatically trust anything that appears anti-establishment. If you tell them not to trust certain sources that’s actually a cue to them to explore those sources more and assume they’re holding some valuable information that “they” don’t want you to know.
The dynamics of this are very strange. A cluster of younger guys I know can list a dozen different times medical guidance was wrong in history from memory (Thalidomide, etc), but when you fact check Joe Rogan they laugh at you because he’s a comedian so you can’t expect him to be right about everything. “Do your own research” is the key phrase, which is a dog whistle to mean find some info to discount the professionals but then take sources like Joe Rogan and his guests at face value because they’re not the establishment.
Although if they got banned during the start of covid during the Trump administration then we're talking about 5 years.
No, it was not. It’s particularly silly to suggest this when we have live example of such orders right now.
The companies were nudged. (And they were wrong to respond to public pressure.) The President, after all, has a “bully pulpit.” But there were no orders, no credibly threats and plenty of companies didn’t deplatform these folks.
I’m not disputing that they coördinated. I’m challenging that they were coerced.
We wouldn’t describe Fox News altering a script on account of a friendly call from Miller and friends the “government ordering private companies” around. (Or, say, Florida opening their criminal justice records to ICE the federal government ordering states around.) Twitter’s leadership and the Biden administration saw eye to eye. This is a story about a media monoculture and private censorship, not government censorship.
https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-bi...
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kDr0LcmqOHOz3mBHMdDuV?si=j...
It was not. No threats were made, and Twitter didn’t blindly follow the FBI’s guidance.
The simple truth is the leftist elements that wanted to control the debate were there in the White House and in Twitter’s San Francisco offices. Nobody had to be coerced, they were coördinating.
Silver lining in this is the conversation continued and will continue. I can see governments needing to try to get accurate and helpful information out in crisis - and needing to pressure or ask more of private companies to do that. But also like that we can reflect back and go - maybe that didn’t work like what we wanted or maybe it was heavy-handed.
In many governments, the government can do no wrong. There are no checks and balances.
The question is - should we still trust YouTube/Google? Is YouTube really some kind of champion of free speech? No. Is our current White House administration a champion of free speech? Hardly.
But hopefully we will still have a system that can have room for critique in the years to come.
So after January 22 2026, US leaves WHO and youtube users will be able to contradict WHO recommendations
But when it comes to this thread, the sentiment mostly is banning is good and we should trust Google made the right choice.
More than that... different situations usually require different conclusions.
"You and I, if we say a lie we are held responsible for it, so people can trust us. Well, Facebook made a system where the lies repeated so often that people can't tell."
"Both United Nations and Meta came to the same conclusion, which is that this platform Facebook actually enabled genocide that happened in Myanmar. Think about it as, when you say it a million times... it is not just the lie but also it is laced with fear, anger and hate. This is what was prioritized in the design and the distribution on Facebook. It keeps us scrolling, but in countries like Myanmar, in countries like Philippines, in countries where institutions are weak, you saw that online violence became real world violence."
"Fear, anger, hate, lies, salaciousness, this is the worst of human nature... and I think that's what Big Tech has been able to do through social media... the incentive structure is for the worst of who we are because you keep scrolling, and the longer you keep scrolling the more money the platform makes."
"Without a shared reality, without facts, how can you have a democracy that works?"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/12/us/video/gps0112-meta-scraps-...
As bad as facebook and it's opaque algorithms that favor rage bait are, the kind of stuff you get by keeping score is worse.
I don't know how it works in The Philippines, but in the USA the suggestion that media outlets are held responsible for the lies that they tell is one of the most absurd statements one could possibly make.
Passive voice. Who exactly is supposed to do the "checking" and why should we trust them?
The idea that we need to protect people from “bad information” is a dark path to go down.
Even here on HN, i was almost banned when i said about children abduction by Russia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33005062 - the crime that half year later ICC wrote the order against Putin.
Who would hold Meta accountable for the lies it helps spread and capitalize upon them if not the government.
So by crippling democratic institutions and dwarfing the government to the point of virtual non-existence, all in the name of preserving freedom of speech and liberalism -- and in the process subverting both concepts -- elected leaders have managed to neutralize the only check in the way of big corps to ramp up this misinformation machine that the social networks have become.
But no, yet again the blame is all piled on to the little people. Yes, it's us plebs lying on the internet who are the cause of all these problems and therefore we must be censored. For the greater good.
I have an alternative idea, let's first imprison or execute (with due process) politicians, CEOs, generals, heads of intelligence and other agencies and regulators, those found to have engaged in corrupt behavior, lied to the public, committed fraud, insider trading, fabricated evidence to support invading other countries, engage in undeclared wars, ordered extrajudicial executions, colluded with foreign governments to hack elections, tax evasion, etc. Then after we try that out for a while and if it has not improved things, then we could try ratcheting up the censorship of plebs. Now one might argue that would be a violation of the rights of those people to take such measures against them, but that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Since We Are All In This Together™, they would be willing to make that sacrifice too. And really, if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear.
When you get people like Zuckerberg lying to congress, it's pretty difficult to swallow the propaganda claiming that it's Joe Smith the unemployed plumber from West Virginia sharing "dangerous memes" with his 12 friends on Facebook that is one of the most pressing concerns.
Yes, I know about the Charlie Kirk firings etc.
- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/youtube-may-reinstate-chan...
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/youtube-will-restore...
This is why perma bans are bad. Id rather a strike system before a temp ban to give some breathing room for people to navigate the inevitable incorrect automation. Even then if the copyright issue is anything to go by this is going to hurt more than help.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/managing-harmful-vaccin...
From the two links in the post, Google fleshes it out in great detail, with many examples of forbidden thought.
https://x.com/cidrap/status/1420482621696618496 ("Our Osterholm Update podcast episode (Jul 22) was removed for “medical misinformation.”" (2021))
Most ironic thing I've ever seen. I still recall it perfectly, though it's been four years. Never, ever trust censorship algorithms or the people who control them: they are just dumb parrots that suppress all discussion of an unwanted topic, without thought or reason.
The problem is that the recommendation algorithms push their viewers into these echo chambers that are divorced from reality where all they see are these videos promoting misinformation. Google's approach to combating that problem was to remove the channels, but the right solution was, and still is today, to fix the algorithms to prevent people from falling into echo chambers.
For whatever reason I guess I'm in that very rare group that genuinely watches everything from far-right racists, to communists, to mainstream media content, to science educational content, to conspiracy content, etc.
My YT feed is all over the place. The algorithms will serve you a very wide range of content if you want that, the issue is that most people don't. They want to hear what they already think.
So while I 100% support changing algorithms to encourage more diversity of views, also I think as a society we need to question why people don't want to listen to more perspectives naturally? Personally I get so bored here people basically echo what I think. I want to listen to people who say stuff I don't expect or haven't thought about before. But I'm in a very significant minority.
First, there's YouTube's decision of whether or not to allow potentially dangerous misinformation to remain on their site, and whether the government can or did require them to remove it.
Second, though, there's YouTube's much stronger editorial power: whether or not to recommend, advertise, or otherwise help people discover that content. Here I think YouTube most fairly deserves criticism or accolades, and it's also where YouTube pretends that the algorithm is magic and neutral and they cannot be blamed for actively pushing videos full of dangerous medical lies.
These companies owe you nothing that's not in a contract or a requirement of law. That you think they owe you hosting, distribution, and effort on their algorithm, is a sign of how far off course this entire discourse has moved.
I like the term disinformation better, since it can expand to the unfortunately more relevant dissenting information.
My argument, free speech is a limit on the government. Give them as much consequences you please but not with government power.
That's the problem here, Democrats were using government power to censor their political opponents; but they wouldnt have been able to do it without government power.
So yes. This is a problem rooted in the USA. But it is still a problem, and it's a problem for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Reddit bans aren‘t an indicator for anything
As for free speech online, do you think there should be no limit to what can be said or shared online? What about pedophilia or cannibalism? Or, more relevantly, what about election-denialism, insurrectionism or dangerous health disinformation that are bound to make people act dangerously for themselves and society as a whole? Point is, free speech is never absolute, and where the line is drawned is an important conversation that must be had. There is no easy, objective solution to it.
Same thing with the UFO "Alien" video that was "shot down" by a hellfire missile (most likely a balloon), people just automatically assume that because it was said in congress it has to be true, zero analysis whatsoever of the footage or wanting to seek analysis by an expert, nope, it must be an alien.
There is so much misinformation, so much lack of understanding, and so many people, from every side that just have complete and utter lack of understanding of how seemingly basic things work, I am afraid for the future.
But yeah! let's unban unscientific sources, oh and people who are okay with a literal coup on a democracy.
"DOJ aims to break up Google’s ad business as antitrust case resumes"
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/google-back-in-court...
Without their claim to victimization, they can't justify their hatred.
The issue is that there is no mechanism for punishing people who spread dangerous misinformation. It's strange that it doesn't exist though, because you're allowed to sue for libel and slander. We know that it's harmful, because people will believe lies about a person, damaging their reputation. It's not clear why it can't be generalized to things that we have a high confidence of truth in and where lying is actively harmful.
..but i'm not a yter.
On this site, we're trying for discussion in which people don't just bash each other with pre-existing talking points (and unprocessed rage). Such comments quickly flood the thread on a divisive topic like this one, so flagging them is essential to having HN operate as intended. To the extent possible at least.
(oh and btw, though it ought to go without saying, this has to do with the type of comment, not the view it's expressing. People should be able to make their substantive points thoughtfully, without getting flagged.)
Future tense?
Second, some ideas just aren't worth distributing or debating. There's a refrain "there's no point debating a Nazi". What that means is there is a lot of lore involved with being a modern Nazi, a labyrinth of conspiracy theories. To effectively debate a Nazi means learning all that lore so you can dismantle it. There's no point. In reality, all you end up doing is platforming those ideas.
I'm actually shocked at how ostensibly educated people fall into the anti-vax conspiracy trap. Covid definitely made this worse but it existed well before then. Certain schools in San Francisco had some of the lowest child vaccination rates in the country.
As a reminder, the whole vaccine autism "theory" originated from one person: Andrew Wakefield. He was a doctor in the UK who was trying to sell a vaccine. The MMR vaccine was a direct compeititor so he just completely made up the MMR link to autism. He his medical license because of it. But of course he found a receptive audience in the US. He is and always was a complete charlatan.
Likewise, the Covid anti-vax movement was based on believing random Youtube videos from laymen and, in many cases, an intentional ignorance in the most esteemed traditions of American anti-intellectualism. People who are confidently wrong about provably wrong things who had no interest in educating themselves. Some were griters. Some were stupid. Many were both.
We had people who didn't understand what VAERS was. (and is). We had more than 10 million people die of Covid yet people considered the vaccine "dangerous" without any evidence of side effects let alone death. As one example, you had people yelling "J'accuse!" at hints of myocardial inflammation from the vaccine. But you know what else causes myocardial inflammation? Getting Covid.
If you're excited by this move, it just further highlights that you have no idea whta's going on and zero interest in the truth. What's happening here is big tech companies capitulating to the fringe political views of the administration, a clear First Amendment violation, to curry favor, get their mergers approved, get cgovernment contracts and so on.
Regardless of your views on this or any otehr issue you should care about capitulation by social media sites in this way.
This comments on this post are just a graveyard of sadness.
In my country of origin, you get called a Nazi simply for being opposed to the war of aggression that it is currently engaged in. In US, we have a long history of "terrorist" and "extremist" being similarly abused.
I'm sure Zuckerberg will say the same thing in 2029 too if the ruling party changes again. Until then, removing fact-checking and letting conspiracy theorists have their freedom of speech while suppressing voices critical of the current administration will make that change less likely...
I know that some services do this in addition to account ban.
First of all, you can't separate a thing's content from the platform it's hosted on? Really?
Second of all, this is why
I'll just go do this again and if you flag me it's on you, you have no standing to do it (the internet is supposed to be democratic, remember?)
https://rumble.com/v28x6zk-sasha-latypova-msc.-nsa-team-enig...
https://rumble.com/v3zh3fh-staggering-17m-deaths-after-covid...
https://rumble.com/vt62y6-covid-19-a-second-opinion.html
https://rumble.com/v2nxfvq-international-covid-summit-iii-pa...
I could go on. Feel free if you want to see more. :)
(Was it misinformation when Fauci said you shouldn't rush a vaccine or all hell breaks loose years later? Or when he intimated that masks wouldn't work for covid?)