
How YouTube converted people to flat Earth - stuartmemo
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-49021903/flat-earth-how-did-youtube-help-spread-a-conspiracy-theory
======
camjohnson26
Behind the Curve is a great documentary about the strange resurgence of flat
earth theory in the last few years. It covers a few of the major YouTube
personalities.

I think flat earth’s comeback is actually a good thing and YouTube is making a
mistake. It’s true that nobody 30 years ago believed the earth was flat but
they probably couldn’t articulate why they believed that. People who are brave
enough today to re-examine their beliefs should be admired, not ridiculed.

Of course flat earthers are wrong, but the coolest part of the documentary is
when members of the movement start spending thousands of dollars to conduct
experiments to prove their theory. At the end one of them gets a contradictory
result to what he expected, and you can see the doubt start to form in his
eyes as he smiles and just says something like “Oh, that’s interesting, that’s
very interesting.”

YouTube has given nonconformists a platform where they can be honest and be
themselves, and it’s unfortunate they look to be trying to take that away. Of
course some people on there will hold views that are frankly stupid, but I’d
say it’s better than having everyone believing the same thing out of a sense
of conformity.

~~~
Kaveren
you can say the same thing about hypothetical people who assert 2 + 2 = 5.
there's nothing cool about it, or people experimenting and starting to doubt
that 2 + 2 = 5. nothing would be lost if nobody believed the earth was flat.
this is not admirable.

~~~
vorpalhex
There's a difference between scientific engagement and brain washing.

Science is always cool. Brain washing not so much.

~~~
Kaveren
It's reasonable to start from a point of "I think the earth is round, but why
is this true?" Flat earthers, much like many conspiracy theorists, are
generally not interested in logical reasoning, and prefer to invent elaborate
explanations to hold on to their delusions.

It's unreasonable to start from a position of "all scientists are forced by
boogeyman governments to say that the earth is flat", which is not a strawman
and something you can in fact see them argue.

------
EventH-
A few concerns with this story:

1\. How big is this 'flat earth movement' really? The video claims it 'caught
fire around 2015-16' but gives no specifics. This is unfortunately typical for
these sort of 'we need to do something' arguments—no sense of the magnitude of
the problem is given.

2\. This argument for censorship is often made without a limiting principle,
as it is here. "Books are a disturbing platform for conspiracy theories" works
just as well.

3\. There always have been and will be conspiracy theories, whether 9/11, Moon
Landing, JFK, Illuminati or a thousand others. We don't seem to be very
concerned with these. Why should we care about flat eartherism, especially as
it seems rather benign in comparison?

4\. Isn't the obvious response to make a point-by-point refutation to their
most convincing claims? The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing
than a silly hypothesis.

~~~
komali2
> The well-argued truth is going to be more convincing than a silly
> hypothesis.

Flat Earthers are regularly presented with well argued truth and are not
convinced, so this point is incorrect.

~~~
buildzr
That's true of anyone who believes something with the utmost conviction - but
we're talking about the general population here, not just those already into
flat earth.

------
ngngngng
I LOVE the flat earth theory. Obviously It's wrong, but it's so fun to think
about how people convince themselves of it. They claim that it's all about
empirical evidence. But spend a few minutes on their site and you'll realize
that's bogus. Such as their reasoning for why the sun sets. What they're
really saying is "Only trust what you can see, but also you can't trust what
you can see"

~~~
wool_gather
I also have a strange enjoyment for learning about the elaborate revisions
people try to make to the world of facts. If you haven't tried reading any
pyramidology, I recommend checking it out. Christopher Dunn is particularly
good; he's a trained mechanical engineer and uses that expertise in his
arguments.

------
typenil
This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at
best. And then there's the nerve to pretend like there isn't some kind of
intentional social engineering going on with internet platforms.

If the kinds of policies I see journalists pushing for on YouTube were in
place before the Snowden leaks, they would've been suppressing any videos
talking about the NSA's spying on American citizens.

But we can't risk letting people try different ideas. They might disagree with
us. They're not smart enough to make their own decisions. Better step in.

~~~
tzs
> This push to censor wrong ideas instead of compete with them is misguided at
> best

I don't think countering wrong ideas by competing with them works well any
more. It used to, but technology changes over the last few decades have given
a big advantage to the wrong ideas.

This comment, from a thread a few months ago, goes into more detail:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19772300)

~~~
loudtieblahblah
The ethical problems of having "truth arbiters" seems pretty simple when it
comes to flat earth stuff. Or anti-vaxx stuff. Or maybe even climate change.

But once established - the power to control society we're handing over to a
handful of corporations is immense and it will bleed into subjects that are a
lot murkier.

It's worth it to compete. B/c centralizing and handing over authority to a
handful of tech companies to determine what is and what isn't allowed to be
said .. this is something that goes way beyond all the freedom of speech stuff
where people are merely offended.

This is dangerous territory. And it's more dangerous than allowing idiots to
spin their wheels with their stupid ideas.

~~~
krapp
No one is handing the power to control society or authority over what is and
isn't allowed to be said at that scale to Google or any "handful of
corporations." What is said on Youtube or any other large social media
platform is not the limitations of what is said in society, nor can Youtube
control society beyond its own platform.

It makes no more sense to argue that Youtube trying to enforce some standards,
however arbitrary or biased, amounts to "the power to control society" than it
would have to argue that having three television stations meant those networks
"controlled society," or that the Encyclopedia Britannica controlled the
English language.

------
tjansen
If you censor conspiracy videos, you're validating them. It looks like you're
trying to hide the truth. There is just no way of getting rid of them, unless
you want to censor all of the internet.

~~~
SquareWheel
They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy
theorists.

It's still advantageous to discourage the spread of misinformation. Nobody is
obligated to host that content, and certainly not make it readily accessible
on their platforms.

~~~
loudtieblahblah
>They will feel validated regardless. That is the nature of conspiracy
theorists.

What are you going to define as a conspiracy theory?

Should we not talk about the JFK assassination possibilities?

The Gulf of Tolkien incident? MK Ultra? The Business Plot
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot))

Where are you going to draw the line between conspiracy theories that are
probably false and ones worth exploring? Who's the arbiter of that?

is the fact that Trump may have raped a 13 year old sex slave a conspiracy
theory? Or do we only use that term with Alex Jones rants about false flags?

~~~
SquareWheel
There is no need for an arbiter. However, statistically, the majority of
conspiracy theories are going to be invalid. As they grow in scale the
likelihood of being real also goes down.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-35411684](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684)

If there is strong evidence for such a conspiracy, then it's gone beyond
theory (colloquially) at that point. By that definition the term is like
"alternative medicine". If it worked, it'd be called medicine.

Additionally, it's worth pointing out that the existence of a previous
conspiracy being true is not actually evidence that later conspiracies are
also true. MK Ultra and co are the exception rather than the norm.

~~~
loudtieblahblah
the problem is once you give platforms the ok to silence dissent, you silence
the spread of truth right along with lies and falsehoods.

And i'd rather live with a 1000 lies if that means the truth can still come
out.

------
JaimeThompson
There are a lot of comments talking about how Youtube should not censor flat
Earth but something that people need to keep in mind is how much the Flat
Earth youtube community censors. If you point out their errors, their
mistakes, or basically anything that goes against what they know to be true
they ban you and delete your comments. As a group censorship doesn't appear to
bother them just as long as they are the ones in control of the censoring.

------
sunseb
How do you explain lunar eclipses (the Earth's shadow is round)?

How do you explain retrograde motions of planets?

These 2 simple observations explain why we live on a round Earth that revolves
around the Sun.

(That said, I am against censorship of any kind. People should be free to
believe whatever they want.)

~~~
imglorp
Not to mention going outside and LOOKING at man made items like satellites and
space stations as they pass overhead.

How does your GPS work? Get yourself an RTL-SDR and watch the traffic
yourself, read the ephemeris, and correlate with your observations.

Build your own Focault pendulum, and explain the observations. And hundreds of
other phenomena you can observe and measure yourself.

There are 18 spacefaring nations.

There are hundreds of spacecraft companies with about 3,000 satellites and
thousands more launches, spending hundreds of billions $$.

If ANY of this was made up, it would involve about a half million people
keeping a secret in the conspiracy. (edit - that's just space industry.
astronomers, cosmologists, LIGO, EHT, etc, geologists, including the oil
companies.. add another million maybe?) So we're either talking about willfull
trolling, ignorance, and illness, or malice.

I would be more inclined to believe malice, in the form of that family
spending millions [1] to spread antivax propaganda. Perhaps it's a more
general anti-science thrust to control the populace. There, it's a conspiracy
in the opposite direction.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/meet-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/meet-
the-new-york-couple-donating-millions-to-the-anti-vax-
movement/2019/06/18/9d791bcc-8e28-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36d4e_story.html)

~~~
JaimeThompson
The FE community basically refuses to do any radio based research. If you ask
them why the radio emissions of the Sun go away after it sets they get upset
and delete your comments because it goes against their idea that the Sun is
just moving away from us and not setting.

------
rchaud
> "One researcher found that of attendees at a flat Earth conference, nearly
> all said they first came to the idea through the video-sharing platform."

Aside from shilling time shares, MLM schemes and recruiting for a cult of some
sort, I can't think of anything that would necessitate a "Flat Earth
conference".

I'm convinced the the only reason these hoaxes exist is to identify high
quality leads for obvious snake-oil products. It's similar to how the ye olde
Nigerian prince scams are made to sound as absurd as possible, so you know
that people who respond to them have a high likelihood of converting.

------
BitwiseFool
Does it really matter if someone believes the earth is flat? What practical
effect does that actually have on society?

I can't help but think most flat-earthers are just after attention and the
desire to correct them is a feedback loop.

~~~
pjc50
This is the non-political version. There are lots of far more political videos
that cause real problems, such as the Alex Jones ones, pizzagate, QAnon etc.

The underlying point is that Youtube's reccomendation algorithm has a
significant effect on society as a whole, and this effect can be very
negative.

------
tehabe
It seems to me, that most flat earthers already believed in some conspiracy
theories so, they just add another one. What puzzles me the most about flat
earther is, how much the shape of the earth is part of their identity. I mean
for my daily life the shape of the earth doesn't matter. So for me personally
it doesn't matter if the earth is round, flat, or shaped like a banana. it
just happened that the earth is round.

------
tobsmagoats
If you go looking far enough to validate an opinion that you have you will
find "evidence". Awful clickbait title BBC for shame!

------
icxa
Really this should be "how the proliferation of disinformation enabled by the
internet converted people to flat Earth." Also not helped by the (warranted)
declining trust in legacy media sources.

------
helen___keller
It's more than just flat earth too. There's many strains of conspiracy holes
on youtube - you can spend all day watching people predict the rapture is
coming (this year for real this time!), of course there's the standard
political extremism strains of youtube if you're into that, and so on.

The problem is that people learn to trust personalities, and then those
personalities can spread ideas regardless of their merit. If you start by
denouncing the brainwashing of the mainstream consensus, just about any idea
can be rationalized with enough effort. And to top it all off, Youtube and
other online platforms offer a profit model for personalities who can garner
attention (not to mention the softer connections to money and fame that come
with being an "influencer")

Do so many of these personalities actually believe in a flat earth?
Personally, I've had my doubts from the beginning. I follow a few communities
on Twitch, for example, and you see personalities pop up all the time, often
by being controversial. I've seen people pop up, often leveraging flat earth
or anti-vax as a tool to make themselves more edgy. Sometimes they make it
_too obvious_ that they're just trying to be controversial and it gives away
the act - one personality on twitch trying to make his debut, for example,
claimed that his childhood best friend grew gills and swam away in the river
after a vaccine. To his credit, it worked in the short term and the show
brought him back for a few more segments.

Frankly, I hope we as a society will come to learn sooner rather than later
that public personalities on the internet can't be trusted. For some reason,
people have learned this lesson for public personalities on TV, on the radio,
and so on - who really trusts the mainstream news these days? - and yet these
same folks turn into their favorite strain of youtube conspiracy to learn on
the daily what the world has been hiding from them and what truth the
mainstream has buried like a treasure, only to be found on youtube.

------
sascha_sl
This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism.

People like PewDiePie are totally not playing into that.

~~~
mopsi
> This totally can't be applied to ironic fascism. People like PewDiePie are
> totally not playing into that.

And him playing "Papers, please" while wearing a hat with hammer and sickle[1]
is a secret plot to convert the youth of America into commies, right?

I'm baffled to see such McCarthyism.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-
Xtc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsWQfZl-Xtc)

------
mruts
It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy theory to censor information and
manipulate public discourse. Hmmm...

The current centralized structure of the web is broken. Any person who
believes in classical liberalism should find this disgusting.

------
pcunite
_company says it 's taking action to prevent conspiracy videos from reaching
large numbers of people_

I'm not afraid of conspiracies. Are you?

~~~
tombert
I don't want to get _too_ political here, but the propagation of Alex-Jones-
esque conspiracy can be very influential to a larger-than-it-should-be
percentage of the population, who will vote in demagogues who perpetuate these
narratives.

~~~
buildzr
That's their choice then. We have to have believe that a majority of our
fellow citizens are by and large capable of overcoming such views otherwise
democracy itself is a failed concept.

Censoring their content to bias their political views in a way you like is...
extremist at best.

~~~
tombert
Ok, I'm a little tired of this constantly coming up; it's not a _political_
position to rebut something that is objectively incorrect. If Party A bases
its platform on the idea that "All Circles Are Secretly Squares", this is
objectively false, and me saying so isn't me "biasing their political views in
a way I like", it's a simple matter of fact.

The earth is not flat. This is relatively easy to prove, but people _can_ be
influenced by the right rhetoric, and they vote.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to believe in dumb things from
a legal perspective, I just don't think they're _entitled_ to a platform.

Would you apply this logic to ISIS recruitment videos? "It's their choice!
YouTube shouldn't pull their videos because if they do democracy has failed as
a concept!"

~~~
buildzr
> I'm a little tired of this constantly coming up

Perhaps then you shouldn't have made it into a political position by
suggesting that they'd all vote for a specific candidate.

> This is relatively easy to prove, but people can be influenced by the right
> rhetoric, and they vote.

It's a bit of a trusting trust exercise - you can prove it in a way that
satisfies you, but that doesn't necessarily satisfy everyone.

> Would you apply this logic to ISIS recruitment videos?

Much more debatable because ISIS videos encourage outright violence.

~~~
tombert
I didn't say they'd all vote for a specific candidate, but based on what
you're telling me, this is the logical conclusion:

1) People don't vote based on their beliefs, 2) Beliefs can't be wrong, 3) A
vote based on a wrong belief can't lead to an undesirable candidate.

~~~
buildzr
That's a complete and utter misrepresentation of what I said and I have no
interest in engaging it.

~~~
tombert
I didn't say that's what you said, I said that's the logical conclusion.

