YouTube spokesperson: “Specifically, we don’t allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19 or that encourages people to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus. We do allow for videos that have sufficient countervailing context, which the violative videos did not provide.”
YouTube is part of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which is commited to censor anything that would impede the vaccine rollout, including any early treatments.
'Trusted News Initiative' 'which is committed to censor anything that would impede the vaccine rollout, including any early treatments.'
Also including censoring the official CDC.gov guidelines because somehow that is 'False Information' according to Facebook. [0]
I don't know about you but I think this initiative is going to give big tech companies the green light to mass sweep and ban anything that moves or crawls against any criticism of their guidelines.
This is just the beginning, with lots of users getting their accounts banned without reason. Oh dear.
Odysee is a centralized client using the decentralized LBRY blockchain. Because of that Odysee's contents is somewhat restricted, though you can still access contents directly on the LBRY blockchain, though at a slightly poorer user experience.
But at the same time Fox News [1] is still on Youtube.
I felt there is something missing in context. Is this something to do with Google paying for AUS News content or some other bad blood going on between the two?
It will be interesting to see the range of comments here as Europe and the US wakes up. Assuming it doesn't get flagged.
It appears to me that Australian users are very supportive of this (but I could be wrong) but are there any reasons why, culturally?
Edits: we hear and understand the political reasons. I'm wondering about the cultural reasons. In other cultures around the world, people wouldn't be so supportive of a tech platform banning a news broadcaster.
It's the intellectual class that are going to be generally supportive of this. The same people that are currently telling the people that have lost everything in the lockdowns that they're being selfish protesting.
While I was a little irritated that I was constantly getting their content pushed onto me and autoplayed even though I've blocked the channel, it's disgusting that a Yankee company is effectively playing politics here.
They often don't have strong convictions and if they like something they don't think it through.
When someone headbutted a former Australian Prime Minister, people generally thought it funny. To be fair most Australia thought it funny to call that Prime minister a cunt (The official reason given for the headbutt) even if they voted for his party. Jim Jefferies on the incident - https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1759051187728612
Generally a physical attack on a ex-leader of the county would be considered serious and a danger to democracy. Here the Ex-Prime Minister's only media recourse was to say the guy was a bad headbutter, he really said this. (The attacker did eventually get 2 months prison)
Overall if the apathy is good or bad is a hard call, it's somewhat anarchistic, but ironically gives those in power more control.
Speaking of FOX, they have gotten so bad that in what surely is a sign of the apocalypse Steve Bannon and Mike Lindell now recommend that their followers watch MSNBC instead.
According to Bannon, "Watch Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow. They get better coverage every day". He adds, "They're blowing us off and they hate you in the audience, but they're still doing real coverage".
I think this gives a good political reason but does it explain it culturally?
For example the right wing, I've heard but could probably be wrong, is quite pro censorship generally?
Compared to the USA that wasn't the case. It's a bit puzzling. For example an American Democrat might say "I hate sky/fox news with a passion but I think Google shouldnt be making these decisions"
Yes Australians in general are quite accepting of authority. America fought a war of independence to be free of the British Monarchy. We got offered a vote to leave the monarchy and be a republic and we voted no. There is no bill of rights or anything in Australia, most of our freedoms are largely implied and the government can pretty much prevent us from doing whatever it wants whenever it likes and does so frequently.
For example, the government has essentially banned us all from leaving the country for the past almost two years due to the pandemic and despite some grumbling we mostly just accept it and in fact many people are quite supportive of the lockdowns as although it keeps us in, more importantly it keeps everyone else 'out'. As long as we feel comfortable and safe in our homes we seem to have been fairly happy to accept whatever restrictions the government imposes on us.
Perhaps ironically one of the reason for this is that we largely haven't had much of a diverse media to push back on this, the Murdoch press has a very large influence on the governments that get in and what they do. Any government that doesn't align with the Murdoch press isn't going to get very much done at all and one that does will get most anything it want through with at the least minimal opposition if not wholesale support.
> For example an American Democrat might say "I hate sky/fox news with a passion but I think Google shouldnt be making these decisions"
American Democrat here. I would have said that 10 years ago, but nowadays, Fox News is actively working to dismantle people’s right to vote, committing economic sabotage by spreading anti vaccine propaganda, and enabling people that are actively making the planet uninhabitable.
At some point, this crosses the line from freedom of speech to acts of war. It’s completely reasonable for the US to enlist domestic corporations to fight back against foreign aggression.
If that includes going after Murdoch in Australia, great.
Sky News peddles everything from flat earth conspiracy to vaccine FUD. I blame a lot of the US's problems with polarisation and truth losing its meaning to its culture of cable news talking heads which pander to anything and invite anyone just to prop up their ratings. We in Australia have mostly avoided that, and Murdoch, via Sky News, is intent on changing that. As an Australian, I want Sky News to disappear because its success would bring a kind of politics to Australia that causes harm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
What is with Australia and it’s authoritarian bend? First soldiers are enforcing their covid curfew and now this?
And nothing but support. Seems like some of the authoritarian culture of SE Asia (Singapore, Indonesia, etc) has rubbed off on them? The UK is far more anti-authoritarian.
No doubt any video about a lab source of Covid would have been banned too.
Sort of - in this case they have no choice. They previously held up New South Wales as the "gold standard" in contract tracing and halting the spread of the virus; so if the NSW Government says they have to lock down, the Federal Government pretty much has to go along with it.
But you can be sure that as soon as NSW's case numbers come down enough, the Federal Government will pressure them to start lifting restrictions, as they did towards the end of Victoria's 4 month lockdown last year.
The federal government is very reluctantly accepting of these lockdowns, having been strongly opposed to lockdowns previously in states governed by the opposing party. They are not so supportive that they would conspire with YouTube to censor Sky News, which is their most friendly media outlet in the country.
Australians, for whatever reason, don't have the same concern for civil liberties that Americans have. I can't explain why, but as a citizen it's a little troubling.
Could be because our (the Australian) government looks after us a bit better than the American government looks after their people? I mean a good, free healthcare system, university fees aren't through the roof, reasonable minimum wages, comfortable standard of living.
That might be right, but do they need to be mutually exclusive? The policy on healthcare, education and minimum wages could be made while maintaining strong civil liberties (I think?).
An interesting difference to highlight - the statement "government looks after us" is something many folks in the US would find strange. The US views government more "of the people, by the people, for the people" - ie the government is us governing ourselves.
Does your "civil liberties" concerns include far left or even Islamist content? No? And before you downvote "I'm just asking questions" as probably your favourite broadcaster says.
I'm not sure who my favorite broadcaster is supposed to be, I don't live in Australia. Maybe Alan Jones? He seems controversial but I've never listened to him.
Lying to the public to maintain power, keeps their hands on the government purse.
Loss of trust in institutions.
Loss of sense of prestige in the traditional tracks, they make up for it by becoming authoritarian to maintain sense of utility.
This has been apparent in the US. Our govt tells us small lies for the greater good - early in the pandemic masks weren’t needed - better to tell them they didn’t work so there were enough for healthcare workers.
Works great until the situation changes and you need people to wear masks. Not only do people question why things have changed, they start to ask what else you’re lying about for “the greater good”.
I'm not sure. I'm not sure it is authoritarian, but there is support for this action. It might be something to do with its general classless style of politics or it could be due to a very recent coronavirus scare in the major city after months of peace. I also suspect that culturally users there don't have the same history of freedom of expression as other places. I'm guessing but it's interesting.
I hope a disinterested and calm australian user can see through what's going on and educate the rest of us.
I'm Australian, and one thing I've noticed is when people from other countries describe working with us, they say we are some of the loudest biggest wingers on the planet. Perhaps that gets the nuance slightly wrong, but the general complaint is if an Australian thinks something is wrong, he will tell you long and loudly, and most importantly he will do so regardless of his relative rank to you. I gather other cultures are taken by surprise when a Australian worker tells his boss to his face exactly what he is doing wrong.
I suspect he fundamental difference between US citizens is while both cultures aren't authoritarian, unlike the USA Australian's don't hold authority in disdain either. They aren't scared it - they are happy to delegate responsibility and decisions to a central authority where that makes sense. I suspect that is precisely because they are confident in questioning it, and confident they can overturn it if it isn't working out.
The lock down's were far more controversial at the start, when nobody had an idea what the cost of them where compared to the alternative. There were vigorous discussions in the media and elsewhere about the right approach, to the extent that different states took very different approaches, one literally shutting it's borders to all other states.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. It is now clear what the right approach both economically and health wise - and that is to stop the disease dead in it's tracks so you can re-open the economy a soon as possible. That's obviously is the best approach health wise, and it turns out it's also the best approach economically. We know that because the state that locked down hardest and returned to growth before everyone else, and Australia is now growing economically faster than it has in years, and this happened before just about every other country on the planet.
Lock down's are highly intrusive on personal liberties of course. You have to stay at home unless you have a reason, you have to wear masks, you have to "check in" at every shop you visit by scanning a bar code. The rules are policed. It is with a light touch you will get several warnings and you will be given a mask if you don't have one, but if you continue refuse to comply the law you will be prosecuted.
Still, it's acknowledged by everyone except nutters it works exceptionally well (and in fact it appears to be the only thing that does work short of full vaccination), and the governments are very careful to lift the restrictions as soon as the threat passes. And as I said, Australian's aren't afraid of authority. It's just a tool - you deploy it when it works.
Also, "soldiers are enforcing their covid curfew" is not an accurate characterisation of what's going on here. (I'm not in Sydney where the major outbreaks/restrictions are happening now but I'm in Melbourne where they were last year, and the military involvement then was the same).
For a start, there's no "curfew". There is a stay-at-home order, but people are still allowed go out where necessary for shopping, exercise, education and work. The main restriction is on visiting other people's homes.
Military personnel have been deployed to provide logistical support and additional bodies to help police, medical and welfare services. They're helping set up and staff covid testing facilities, and doing checks on infected people quarantining, both for compliance and welfare. And yep there's also some walking around the streets with police, but there's basically no hostile engagement with citizens or anything remotely like martial law. Mostly it's polite reminders to people of what they need to do - i.e., just wear masks and avoid gathering in big groups.
Most people are accepting of it as Australians are not accustomed to or comfortable with a serious disease just tearing through the community causing significant numbers of deaths, so they're accepting of measures to prevent that from happening.
> No doubt any video about a lab source of Covid would have been banned too.
Nothing remotely like this has happened. I've watched plenty of videos about this, as well as many about vaccine concerns, ivermectin, etc. Australia isn't restricting any content like this at all.
The only blocking of content is being done by YouTube in the USA.
People getting histrionic about this try to portray it as though there are tanks rolling down the streets and weapons shoved in people’s faces.
In reality it’s a few uniformed personnel out with police saying “hey guys if you could just put a mask on that’d be great”. Sure if people refuse they get fined by the police, because, you know, rule of law matters.
The reality of this is not as outrageous as some people want to imagine. Various forms of lockdowns have happened all over the world, with varying degrees of success. Australia has so far kept total covid fatalities under 1000, avoided medical systems being overwhelmed, and kept the economy going quite well.
We can debate the relative merits of masks and lockdowns vs “letting it rip”. I continue to contemplate and research it and waver in my own position. I don’t know how anyone couldn’t, given that no position is without huge costs, whether to short-term liberties and economic wellbeing or to long-term health and survival.
But if you’re going to have restrictions, like so many other countries have done, Australia’s use of the military as a part of managing them has been very restrained and benign. Australians are accustomed to the military helping out during natural disasters - bushfires, floods, etc. They see this involvement no differently.
If you want to continue the discussion, it would be helpful for you to consider and signal whether you actually want to understand the way things are in Australia, vs just heaping scorn on it.
Some of those restrictions are stricter than any in Australia have been. And, as per the article, they're being actively enforced by the police, same as Australia. The military isn't doing that kind of enforcement in Australia.
Perhaps worth remembering that Sky News is still available to watch through many other avenues within Australia, such as Foxtel [1], subscription streaming, and most notably government controlled [1] free to air broadcasts [2].
I had blocked Sky News from my Youtube account as didn't want to see it's content but was still having Sky News content pushed to me in the app. I suspect because of the recent News Media Bargaining Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Media_Bargaining_Code. Now Sky News has gone completely from my feed.
Being Australia and Rupert Murdoch's business, I suspect this won't be the end of it and they'll be some rushed through laws so this never happens again. The News Media Bargaining Code was for propping up Murdoch's businesses after all.
Basically it's to do with ownership, Rupert Murdoch/News Corp actually has nothing much to do with Sky News UK (anymore) but completely owns Sky News Australia.
Sky News UK is owned by Sky Group, which also used to own Sky News Australia until a few years ago when it was acquired by News corp. News Corp of course used to own a controlling stake in Sky group and even tried to buy the whole lot at one point but failed and now it's mostly owned by Comcast I think.
It's also worth nothing that Sky News Australia also runs a relatively 'normal', fairly respectable news network during the day but then in the evening they switch over to start broadcasting much more right wing conspiracy laden content and pushing this onto digital channels such as Youtube where it then gets picked up and used by more fringe right wingers in the US to legitimise their views (kind of look this 'mainstream' australian news channel is broadcasting this clip, it must be true and the US mainstream media just is covering it up). This is commonly known as 'Sky after dark'.
They have gone through most of the FDA approval process. 3 phase clinical trials have been completed. Applications have been submitted for the two mRNA vaccines, and the ~6 month rolling review process has started. They also have been approved for emergency use, which might be what is referred to here.
Her overall point stands fine even if she misrepresented the completion of the approval process. The vaccines are well tested. Adverse reactions are primarily immune response related, and at similar rates to the unvaccinated population.
Semantics maybe, but if you ask the FDA they will say the vaccines are not approved.
Look at the package insert for Pfizer: "FDA has authorized the emergency use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19
Vaccine, which is not an FDA-approved vaccine."
Why are you okay with giving her the benefit of the doubt for something she was entirely wrong - a luxury which she doesn't even afford to others when she wants people to be banned from all social media?
There is no "most of the FDA approval process" gold standard as she claimed. None of the vaccines have gone through that and they are being used under the EUA. It's 100% factually wrong. And if her political opponent has said something similar, they would get crucified for it.
Youtube should be the arbiter of content that's allowed to be posted on Youtube, yes.
The government forcing companies to host content that they don't want to host would actually be a violation of freedom of speech. Youtube taking down content on their own platform is not.
The whole private sector censorship reminds me of a very good piece by Matt Taibbi:
> "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
> Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
> The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship."
This is even more applicable considering the current administration, press secretary have all openly admitted to forcing tech companies to censor viewpoints under the guise of "misinformation".
Given that Taibbi is writing in English, most of his audience has not directly experienced censorship in China, even though they might have experienced censorship in America.
So what he's doing is taking something people understand through experience (censorship in America) and drawing an analogy to something they don't understand, because they've never experienced it (censorship in China), in order to use that analogy to make an argument about the thing people already understand. That's the opposite of a good explanation, where you take something that people don't understand and illustrate it by analogy with something they do understand.
Since Taibbi wants to talk about censorship in America being bad to an audience already familiar with censorship in America, he should've cut the circuitous "censorship in America is like censorship in China, which is bad because (insert half-remembered news report here), therefore censorship in America is bad" because it is much less illuminating than "censorship in America includes censoring Matt Orfalea, which is bad, therefore censorship in America is bad."
A lot of reporting about China is like that, where a bunch of people who've never been to China use "China" as a symbol for "things we don't like about America."
Case in point, censorship in China isn't like censorship in America. Yes, in both cases removing a social media post requires the social media company in question to do the censoring. But Chinese companies do it because every time they try to censor less, the government steps in and shuts them down. https://www.whatsonweibo.com/tuber-app-that-promises-access-... If the Chinese government were to be miraculously replaced tomorrow, the social media giants would stop censoring most content.
If the US government were to be replaced... Well, electing a Republican president didn't stop social media companies from censoring him, because their leaders and most of their employees thought that was the right thing to do. So combating censorship in America is much harder, because it would require replacing large parts of the technology landscape. And that doesn't seem to be realistic, since e.g. Parler is so dependent on being in the Apple store that they censor content just for Apple users: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/apple-requires-partic...
> So what he's doing is taking something people understand through experience (censorship in America) and drawing an analogy to something they don't understand, because they've never experienced it (censorship in China), in order to use that analogy to make an argument about the thing people already understand. That's the opposite of a good explanation, where you take something that people don't understand and illustrate it by analogy with something they do understand.
What experience would that be? The experience of being censored? The experience of censoring others? The experience of seeing stuff censored that you agree or disagree with? All these experiences bias people, making true understanding harder, which is why the analogy to the way censorship works in other countries is so useful.
> Case in point, censorship in China isn't like censorship in America. Yes, in both cases removing a social media post requires the social media company in question to do the censoring. But Chinese companies do it because every time they try to censor less, the government steps in and shuts them down. https://www.whatsonweibo.com/tuber-app-that-promises-access-...
Your own link is an example of censorship by private companies in China - a social media platform and an app store.
> All these experiences bias people, making true understanding harder
Do all experiences bias people in a way that makes true understanding harder? Meaning that true understanding can only exist in the absence of first-hand knowledge? Or is there a way to experience something in a way that furthers understanding?
> which is why the analogy to the way censorship works in other countries is so useful.
Is it useful? What is it that Americans understand about censorship in China that they can't understand about censorship in America?
> Your own link is an example of censorship by private companies in China - a social media platform and an app store.
Do you think those private companies made that decision without influence from the government? Admittedly, it's hard to get a direct statement from the government why something was taken down. E.g. when Zhao Lijian of the Foreign Ministry was asked about it, he just said that it wasn't a diplomatic issue, so he had no handle on the situation, and anyways the internet is managed according to law. http://by.china-embassy.org/chn/wjbzs/t1823326.htm
> Do all experiences bias people in a way that makes true understanding harder? Meaning that true understanding can only exist in the absence of first-hand knowledge? Or is there a way to experience something in a way that furthers understanding?
These are all very interesting philosophical questions. However, I'm not talking about all experiencies, I'm talking about specific experiences. If only some experiences bias people, an analogy to something that people have less experience with can be useful.
> Is it useful? What is it that Americans understand about censorship in China that they can't understand about censorship in America?
One thing that Americans understand about China, that they don't understand about the US, is that no private organization can be absolutely independent of the government, that the government has many subtle ways to pressure private organizations. This is especially true for profit-driven public companies. The only thing necessary to successfully pressure them is to make resistance more expensive then surrender.
> Do you think those private companies made that decision without influence from the government?
As a Melburnian who lived 4 months last year under the world's most severe form of lockdown (outside Wuhan), we know that lockdowns work and they save lives.
The world's most severe lockdown and all you have to show for it is the biggest death count in all of Australia (8x the rest of Australia COMBINED), skyrocketing youth suicidality [1] and skyrocketing domestic abuse (especially among children) [2]
A staggering 1 in 10 Victorians "seriously considered" suicide. [3]
The Australian Medical Association projected up to 5,000 additional suicides, with a large portion of them being young people. [4] This is over 5x the current COVID death count in Australia in suicides alone, without considering deferred medical problems, domestic abuse and other factors.
As someone who lost my beloved grandmother and an uncle last year to this virus (all overseas), and after watching my mother become a shell of her former active self after 2 bouts of battle with this virus (also overseas), I am very thankful that my State's government did not follow the approach of many countries overseas and actually locked us down.
As for the deaths you refer to, the great majority of them were in private nursing homes, regulated and administered by the Commonwealth government. Yes I'm very sad and angry that that happened, but my criticism is solely targeted towards the people responsible: the federal government, in particular the Minister for Health, Greg Hunt.
As for the mental health issues you name, yes it's very sad, and very tough, but pandemics have costs. No one is doing it easy.
I'm not sure how you can't also criticise the Victorian government for their hotel quarantine disaster? That's an "upstream" event before the virus got to nursing homes.
This. It was hard, but we managed to go back to zero cases. And we've done it multiple times, and currently down to 4 cases today since the last outbreak.
Meanwhile, Sky News advocating no lockdowns, which NSW took to heart, and is currently at 240 cases today. Looking at the graph, they are following the exponential curve.
Of course NSW has lockdowns. Sydney in particular - which is where most of the cases are - has been in increasingly strict lockdown since June, and I think they've spent more time under lockdown than not since the start of the pandemic at this point. The lockdowns just haven't worked there.
Their lockdowns haven't worked because they have not been anywhere near strict enough.
As a Melburnian, looking at Sydney, I can't believe they call that a lockdown. Even right now with 200± cases daily, only 8 LGAs are in lockdown and even they are nowhere as strict as what we experienced in Melbourne. The rest of Sydney can only be described at what we here call Stage 2 restrictions.
We learnt this the hard way in Victoria last year, you need to go early, and you need to go hard. Since then we have managed to stamp out the virus using that strategy everytime it has entered our state. I just don't understand why the NSW government is reluctant to accept lessons from Victoria's experience in 2020.
If you talk to anyone in NSW, their lockdowns have been mockdowns. Nobody wearing masks, jewelry shops open because for some reason they are "essential" workers... no wonder their lockdown isn't working.
Compare that to Victoria. Last year, you would be stopped by police if you went out onto the road, and be fined without an essential working permit.
It's absolute insanity. One thing we know after 1.5 year of dealing with this is that outside in the sun is the least likely place one would catch the virus. Yet they are forcing people to stay locked in, not get sun, no gym, order eat out food and stay away from society. This would have been a perfect opportunity for governments to encourage healthy living, eating healthy, exercising, losing weight, doing cardio, going out and getting sun etc but they did the exact opposite.
Full context: he was talking about how children get their news: if they wanted to find out about if there are men on the moon, etc., would they go to tik tok or newspaper?
So, in other words, the Sky propoganda piece was not accurate reporting.
Thanks for translating that. But anyone that watches this video, or others, can see the difficulty in articulating answers. And that is what Sky News is pointing out
Well there’s the Streisand effect so this will actually help them more than it hurts. Everybody already hates YouTube, now skynews will get a bump from those who seek out censored books and media. Such people exist. Deplatforming works as well as book burning. It doesn’t.
Deplatforming can work. r/fatpeoplehate and other right wing hate subreddits pretty much fizzled out after they went to Voat and couldn't be on the front page of Reddit anymore.
In neutral journalism, all sides are interviewed and given grounds to discuss the matter fairly. You don't for example just interview Arabs when it comes to Israel, you interview all sides. But with Youtube's Covid censorship policy in place, each time a so to speak "Jew" was interviewed, the journalist would receive a strike for it and just be banned after 3 strikes.
That people didn't go out and instantly boycott Youtube for this anti-democratic experiment is ridiculous.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-austr...
YouTube is part of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which is commited to censor anything that would impede the vaccine rollout, including any early treatments.
https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative...