We can't outsource our critical thinking to private companies. People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to authority. This can't happen if people become lazy and simply trust whatever media is out there.
This also raises concerns for me around the question of freedom of speech and censorship. I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents.
I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there.
If and when there is some information that is unpopular but critical for people to know, I don't want censorship to be the norm.
There's a huge difference between freedom of speech and actually hurting people. Organizing violence, for example, is already illegal even in many jurisdictions with strong protections for speech. "Information" that's not only going to get people killed but also is factually wrong is definitely fair game IMO.
Those are valid points. I think those are mostly covered already under existing legal precedents for freedom of speech. I don't see any reason they should change based on the medium.
As to your point of information that can potentially do harm, who gets to be the judge of that? That seems like it can be very controversial and subjective.
So far the courts have erred on the side of only ruling against things that pretty much everyone agrees upon and I think we should stick with that.
Having objective criteria for limits to speech is important.
Otherwise we run into scenarios where people start claiming "your opinions and words I don't agree with are considered violence against me". At which point ALL speech is fair game.
> I don't see any reason they should change based on the medium.
No new legal precedent has been created, nor has any existing legal precedent been changed. Youtube has always had the right to curate or ban content for any reason, and has always done so, albeit typically in service of advertisers and copyright owners. Legal precedent has never recognized "freedom of speech" to mean that no form of speech can be abridged or forbidden, rather, it has recognized that censorship is permissible under certain circumstances for the common good (laws against slander, libel, fraud, perjury, etc.)
>As to your point of information that can potentially do harm, who gets to be the judge of that? That seems like it can be very controversial and subjective.
Just because it can be controversial and subjective in some cases, doesn't mean it is equally controversial and subjective in all cases, nor does it follow, therefore, that no cases can reasonably be judged by any criteria, because all cases cannot be equally judged on exactly the same criteria.
>Otherwise we run into scenarios where people start claiming "your opinions and words I don't agree with are considered violence against me". At which point ALL speech is fair game.
The problem with the slippery slope argument is that it assumes humans merely process the law like algorithms, and that it will consider a statement like "your opinions and words I don't agree with are considered violence against me". perfectly valid merely because it is logically consistent. Even without "objective" criteria for limits to speech, someone making the argument you're presenting will be laughed out of court, both of law and public opinion.
The only way the slope can be slippery is if no one had ever looked at the slope, considered that it might be slippery, and maybe added a sidewalk or some stairs or a railing or a sign or something. We as a society are already aware that the dynamics involved in something like speech can be complex, and that the potential to abuse freedom of speech exists. Feedback has already been added to the system, because the system is self-aware and self-correcting. It may not be perfect in that regard, but it's still there.
> Just because it can be controversial and subjective in some cases, doesn't mean it is equally controversial and subjective in all cases, nor does it follow, therefore, that no cases can reasonably be judged by any criteria, because all cases cannot be equally judged on exactly the same criteria.
You dodged GPs question. Who gets to be the judge? We already have a system in place which has answered that question - one which aims to prevent abuse of the power, give every party an opportunity to make their case and be judged by a jury of their peers.
All you are asking for is for this to be circumvented.
A lot of people cry "freedom of speech" when it comes to private platforms (which actually US law doesn't apply in that case but lets shelve that point for now) but the argument could also be tipped on its head:
If the press have the editorial freedom to chose which of their reporters articles they publish -- be it factual, opinion, or even outright biased -- then why shouldn't other private platforms have the same editorial freedom?
The "who" in your "who gets to judge?" then becomes a simple answer: the platform owners. The uncomfortable part is that some platforms have a larger impression on people than others. But short of government intervention -- which is a hugely unpopular option in America -- that's just the markets working the way you guys want your markets to work (ie given the psychology of confirmation bias, if platforms were to focus on unpopular view points their viewership would diminish).
That's the paradoxical part of all this. The same freedoms are being used in both cases but in one instance it enforces principles you believe in and in the other instance it erodes those principles. But you cannot have one instance without having both.
The press you mention is legally accountable for its content. Platforms have protections. Telephone companies, for example, aren't responsible if you slander someone over the phone and they send the audio to the recipient.
Why shouldn't platforms be stripped of their legal protections (and some effectively destroyed) if they are exercising editorial discretion? Why shouldn't YouTube be responsible for the videos that they do allow/have approved?
If someone doesn't think that YouTube should be accountable for content, then should a newspaper be accountable? Should a person be accountable for his content?
The ironic thing about your post is you eventually come to make the same point I was making. It’s just you’re getting hung up on the letter of the law and really that’s become quite an arbitrary distinction these days and one I expect will evaporate entirely within the next few years. For example we’ve already seen plenty vocal about how the likes of YouTube should be legally accountable. It might be an unpopular opinion for techies, particularly those who like to move fast and disrupt, but eventually things will change.
In fact the only defence platforms like YouTube had was the telephone company defence you’re making (as it happens telephone companies haven’t been immune from the demands of censorship either) but the moment platforms do start self-censoring they lose that ISP/telephone defence because they’ve proven they can moderate contributions (even if that moderation is effectively worthless in a great many cases)
A key difference is that the press creates its own content. With platforms like YouTube, it is user generated. There is an expectation that it is a platform that allows people to publish whatever they want.
In many regards I think "common carrier" status applies. Private companies like ISP's, telcos, and parcel delivery services are not allowed to discriminate based on the content nor the individual. This is similar in spirit to "net neutrality".
The larger a platform becomes, and the more essential it is for communication and daily business, then the more important it is that it does not discriminate.
The grey area is that platforms like YouTube both are public communication platforms, but they also curate content as well. Not sure the correct answer in that case.
Indeed but my point was I can’t see the common carrier defence lasting much longer. The argument made some sense when communications on these things were a 1 to 1 relationship (you ring someone, they answer) but when communicating on these platforms have become a 1 to many (YouTube, Twitter, etc) they started to become a lot more like broadcasters than a raw telephone pipe. What’s more, telecoms companies haven’t been beyond government oversight and censorship demands either.
What muddies the water even further is that some platforms even pay contributors, albeit for ad impressions rather than directly, but again it makes the distinction more subjective than it appears at first glance.
Eventually there will come a point where the people outside the tech community will deem the responsibility of moderation greater than the the need for an open platform. I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on but I do agree that the government mandating moderation has the dangerous side effect of raising the barrier for entry too high for any new players to challenge existing networks.
>All you are asking for is for this to be circumvented.
No... because the legal system and the courts were never involved in these matters to begin with.
You, however seem to be insisting that every online platform first go before a judge and jury and seek permission to be allowed to moderate their content, as if doing so should implicitly be considered a crime, which would be far more fascist than anything Youtube is actually doing.
Like it or not, freedom of speech and freedom of association are considered equal to one another, alongside freedom of the press and freedom of religion. Your right to speak doesn't override my right not to allow you to speak on my private property, especially if I object to your speech.
And no, just to preempt that possible rebuttal, Youtube and other sites are not de facto public property. No matter how popular they are, they are actually private platforms whose use requires accepting terms of service under which which those platforms maintain the right to delete and moderate content or terminate service at any time. The only exception that I'm aware of is Trump's personal Twitter account, in order to keep him from blocking anyone who criticizes him.
And even public property has laws, and thus limits, on free speech and expression. "Post no bills" and such.
You're neglecting the market effects of networks that make these 'private' businesses de facto monopolies when you make your comparison to private ownership.
We have so little precedent with these society shaping forms of communication and content, it would seem very strange to me if we had already arrived at an optimum when it comes to how we should treat them. I don't necessarily have an answer to said predicament, but I definitely think 'do nothing and let unelected business decide how the conversation should end' is not a good answer.
And where precisely has that happened here? Icke floated a theory. Some of his other theories include Hillary Clinton being a literal lizard. Should we ban his videos saying that as well, before people start trying to put chemicals toxic to lizards in the food of politicians?
You can't easily separate "straight-up lie" and "politically debatable questions". There are tons of "straight-up lies" used for creating questions, making them "politically debatable" and then acting violently.
That is a silly question. The debate about Medicare for All or Climate Change is based around one group of people wanting everyone to have access to healthcare and/or not destroying the environment (Thus saving lives). While the discussion of stopping 5G is about destroying expensive equipment and assaulting the techs that go out to fix the destroyed equipment.
The only way this could be comparable if someone threaten or assaulted you to get Medicare for all or stop Climate Change.
Oddly enough, a government compelling you to provide medical care for a third party or pay to stop climate change is, in fact, comparable to someone threatening or assaulting you to get you to comply, as assault and imprisonment are what you'll get if you opt not to pay in to government-mandated programs.
This is actually an extremely gray legal area. The only reason platforms are viable is because they have legal protections that don't make them responsible for user content.
At some level of "taken responsibility" (which I think should have been passed), they should be considered publishers and be stripped of their legal protections.
The truth and I have actually been harmed by censorship of this very topic. My aunt tried to send me a link to a video discussing this, wanting my opinion. Of course the link was dead by the time I tried to view it. Which required going back and forth, what's the title of the video, what author, oh that's the one, etc. In the end I was able to view it (my takeaways: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797275), but obviously the better the censorship machinery functions, the more effort it takes to get on the same page to address misinformation! And blind blanket assertions that the whole topic is nonsense is just a path to increasing polarization.
Meanwhile the author of the video played with and mocked the censorship regime to market themselves. Spelling words out, writing them on a whiteboard, talking up how many times this information has been taken down, etc. The more a topic is censored, the more the nonsensical narratives look like forbidden knowledge. It plays directly into the conspiracy angle.
If something technological needs to be done to address misinformation, it revolves around viral sharing, filter bubbles, and most importantly basic scientific literacy. Swiping at the video hosting itself is an ineffective blunt instrument from the same exact toolbox that regressive dictators always reach for.
> I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there.
I think this is a false dichotomy. There is a difference between freedom of speech and freedom to use the most popular communication service. Just because a communication service is popular, does not automatically mean that everyone should get equal access. Freedom of speech means that you are free to say what you want. You are free to publish what you want. It does not mean that the most popular distributors of information a forced to carry your message.
Going back in time, it means that you are free to write a book. You are free to print the book. You are free to distribute the book. You are not free to demand that the most popular bookstore must carry your book. Neither does it mean that the most popular newspaper must publish serialised versions of your book.
It also doesn't mean that you must have equal access to the most cost effective means of distributing your message. Even though the news paper (in times gone by) reached every house and syndicated stories could travel the world incredibly efficiently, it doesn't mean that they are forced to syndicate your story. They have a choice. It may be true that you can't afford to send information to practically everybody in the world like the wire services can do, but that's just too bad.
These days because communications are so cheap to be practically free, people often thing that they should be entitled to the best delivery mechanism possible and that everything else should be considered censorship. A private entity choosing not to spread your message is not censorship. It's a choice and it's a choice that every private entity should be able to have.
I'd rather have the freedom to choose even if it means that tons of people do not have access to the most popular and efficient means of spreading their message.
Of course, if there are groups of people colluding to block your message, then that might be a form of censorship. If you have Youtube making deals with ISPs to make sure that you can't host your own content, etc, then I think that's a problem. That's the kind of action that only governments should be able to take (and with the correct oversight). But people and corporations should have the right to choose what business they want to engage in unless it impinges on special categories that we have already marked for protection (and insane consipracy theories are not marked for such protection).
I don't think comparing facebook or youtube to "the most popular bookstore" is fair, books (and movies, TV, magazines etc) are just not in the same category as facebook or twitter.
I don't think facebook and twitter can be compared to something like an ISP, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I personally find it concerning that more and more everyday human communication is moving to platforms that can arbitrarily ban you from communicating.
It's fair if you want to argue that posting Youtube videos is an essential service. I would argue pretty strenuously that it is not. I might even be convinced that facebook or twitter might fall into that category (but then I would probably argue that the service would need to be forcibly federated in that case). Posting a video on Youtube is publishing, not personal communication. Forcing publishers to show your message to the world is not free speech -- even if they are the only popular publisher on the planet.
I appreciate everyone using the word "publisher" to describe YouTube. Platforms only have legal protection from user content being their responsibility if they are not publishers. I would be happy for YouTube to lose their safe harbor protections if they continue to censor content.
Problem is that critical thinking in some parts relies on comparing to what’s expected.
Now, YouTube’s algorithms are finely tuned to keep you hooked in front of the screen by continuously feeding you things that are just enough outside the expected zone to keep your attention. Slowly eroding away that critical thinking by simply normalizing the non-expected.
So while I might agree on the principle I think the area is a little gray.
Well that's the thing, it's not really an issue of free speech. These people didn't get kicked off the internet. There's nothing stopping them from paying for their own hosting and posting all the videos they want. Let's say you made a site called awesomepupperpics.com for people to post people of their puppers that you're paying for and people start posting pictures of their cats. Is it your responsibility to pay to host those cat pics? No. Are you violating cat owners rights by deleting those cat pics? Also no. You as the owner and proprietor of awesomepupperpics.com also have rights. No one is saying people can't post cat pics on the internet just not on awesomepupperpics.com because puppers are awesome.
>I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents.
Youtube is not more powerful than the government. The government has the power to create laws, levy taxes, raise an army and wage war, arrest, detain, torture and kill. Youtube only has the power to control speech on its own platform, governments have the power to do so across entire societies, and to enforce that will on businesses subject to their laws.
You can say the same about any social media platform - none of them are governments, nor are any more powerful than governments. This kind of hyperbole only undermines the strength of your argument.
> People need to develop the ability to think critically for themselves and not rely on appeals to authority. This can't happen if people become lazy and simply trust whatever media is out there.
That's a nice normative statement, but that battle has been lost over a century ago with advent of cheap mass media that enshrined consumerism. Consumerism advocates that the optimal behavior isn't "what is optimal and fair here?" but "what do I want ?"
It erodes critical thinking at grassroots levels.
Not to mention that these days media companies have perverse incentives to generate outrage and polarizing viewpoints instead of just reporting the damn news
Wow I disagree. If you look at the US as a whole, it is clear we are much better at critical thinking and even thinking in numbers than ever before.
YES lots of people get things very wrong. But we are now throwing data, charts, statistics in front of the general population. People are seeking out data and trying to make decisions for themselves (even if they are not doing a great job yet, it's far better than before!).
I know it is fun to be doom and gloom but the reality is our society is better than it was before. People are calling out the media and politicians on their BS faster than ever before.
Using (misleading) statistics/charts/graph to lie to people is an age old tradition. I dont think their usage indicates much about critical thinking unless viewers are viewing the charts critically
It would be great to have some sort of Dewey decimal system-style classification of content. I'm sure it would be controversial to assign a true/false or fiction/non-fiction rating, but having a finer rubric/methodology could be beneficial. Although, for a classification system to succeed requires curation, which may effectively be a filter.
Appeals to authority is the inevitable by-product of specialization.
No one understands even a small fraction of all branches of science, let alone engineering and the rest of it.
Freedom of speech is just double-speak for the idiot masses. You're free to say things and others are free to put you in jail for hate speech, inciting violence or the other 100+ laws that limit free speech.
The sooner you quit thinking in double-speak slogans meant for idiot masses, the sooner you'll realize you don't know what you're talking about, realize how much work it'd take to know what you're talking about, give up and live your life, relying on appeals to authority.
Try knowing what the hell you're talking about in your professional discipline of choice, intimate relationships, physical health and parenting. That's enough for a single human being - most are utterly incompetent at these matters of vital importance to their well being. When you have those under a solid grasp - you can venture out into contemplating politics, propaganda and law.
It's someone strange that this idea–of everyone independently evaluating everything they read or hear–is so popular, considering it's entirely impossible to do even for just a fraction of the information you consume every day and rely on.
It doesn't even work in principle: as long as you are limited to receiving information over the internet, it's impossible to verify any of it from first principle. The results of some automatic processes can maybe use cryptography for verification. But any real-world fact relies on people observing it and providing you with texts/photos/videos: there's no end-to-end process to definitely proof that Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany. You have to either travel to Berlin and check for yourself, or you have to trust a single source completely, or you construct some most probable version of reality by aggregating many sources weighted by whatever trust you assign them.
"Having trust in..." is obviously the same as "appeal to authority". And if you belief you're not relying on that mechanism you're delusional.
Every time you trust Google Maps to get you to your destination, you do so because your experience with Maps specifically and Google more generally has taught you that this company and product can be trusted to a certain degree.
Every time you're more open to lending your car to your spouse than some random stranger, you're acting on trust.
Every time you return to your favourite restaurant, you're relying on the intuition that past behaviour is predictive of future behaviour. That's yet another formulation for "trust".
Do you believe there's a virus going around right now? How do you know? Are you just counting the number of sources saying so? Because in that case I can probably find more anonymous twitter accounts denying it. Do you consider a story in the New York Times to carry more weight than @justin1256 on Twitter? That's trust.
When you get a vaccination, you're relying on the combined authority of your doctor, and your country's licensing scheme for physicians, and the FDA and the company producing the vaccine.
What does "thinking for yourself" mean in that context? Reading a few papers online doesn't qualitatively change anything: you're just distributing your trust more widely. In practice, it typically means giving yourself license to find whatever study or YouTube video best conforms to your priors. Those people currently setting 5G towers on fire in Britain are excellent at "thinking for themselves" and "consuming a wide variety of sources".
Not relying on some sort of authority implies proving information from first principle. How do you go about it? Are you going to run your own clinical trial? That would cost billions, and expose dozens or hundreds of people to whatever danger you're trying to evaluate, defeating the purpose. It would probably also involve more work than you could do yourself, so you'd need to trust some collaborators. Foiled again!
I also don't get what's so bad about trust? If you want to define it, it's making predictions (about some person's or institution's honesty and competence) based on past experiences. Is there any difference between extending someone (limited) trust after a good experience to, say, jumping headfirst into a pool after you've swam in it to check its depth? Or cuddling a dog you know to be friendly? Yes, people can change (so can dogs), which is why trust isn't binary, and needs continuous updating. Which is why it's so fortunate that nature has evolved a whole range of emotions, from love to friendship to sympathy to fear, to keep track of this elusive quantity called trust.
There are two things at play here, one is misplaced trust. These people are trusting the wrong authority that are feeding them bullshit. Why? They may have had legitimately bad experiences with the sources you and me trust. Or they may just not know one way or the other.
To go along with your example, flying these people to Germany so they can check for themselves whether Angela Merkel is the Chancellor might actually work.
Then there are also people with mental illnesses like schizofrenia. They will not be persuaded either by logical arguments or having the evidence in front of their two eyes.
You have to hold private companies responsible for the content they syndicate. If freedom is free it has no value.
We ran into the same issues as mass communication started to appear in the 1920s and 1930s. The danger of giving everyone the megaphone is obvious then and now. Tight regulation limited the impact of extremists and crazy people in the United States and other places, it empowered fascists and dictators in other places.
Twitter and YouTube's promise was and remains amazing. The problem is people whose speciality is garnering attention will drown out rational voices. That why the POTUS is a demented game show host.
Freedom of speech doesnt apply on websites. It's their platform, they call the shots.
Dont like it? Start a competitor and pay the bandwidth bill. Google doesn't have to allow misinformation any more than they have to allow someone being an incendiary asshole in a comment section.
Social-network, mass-participation and mass-publication platforms, like YouTube, are not "theirs". They are a public resource under formal private ownership. This is not unheard of, of course - in some countries it's like that for water, or electricity, or mass transit, or healthcare, or schools and so on.
Allowing private owners to have total control of these public resources is obviously not what we want or need. The problem is that the formal owners of such resources also have a tremendous amount of influence - as single entities or altogether ("Big Tech") on the politics of states. And this influence is very fundamental to modern democracies, it's not some aberation.
Also:
1. It's nearly impossible to "compete" with such platforms once they are established.
2. Google not only allows misinformation, it intentionally pushes misinformation on YouTube: Sources which are politically acceptable to it are strongly promoted and recommended (e.g. CNN, MSNBC, Fox) - even when they peddle misinformation, which they occasionally do.
Spreading misinformation is bad. However, maybe casting media into the memory hole risks creating glorified digital martyrs.
I wish the WHO made more transparent arguments about the utility of masks. Their failure and apparent flip-flop gives the crazies low-hanging fruit and ethos.
I believe they (and the CDC) are switching their stance on masks because they didn't want people wearing masks to have a false sense of security. Now, it's getting bad enough that the benefits of people wearing masks and not infecting others are starting to outweigh the downsides.
That was only like #3 in bad/dumb things the WHO has done lately.
I struggle to figure why anyone trusts an organization that is so in China’s pocket they’re happy to report it’s not human to human spreadable then fake a disconnect on a video interview just to try and avoid answering a question about Taiwan and then to double down by answering the question pretending Taiwan doesn’t exist and just substitute China in place (no, Taiwan is not an “area of China”).
I don’t care about the opinion here. The WHO has lost almost all credibility to me.
Anyone that ever had close contact to what the UN does, knows that it is a corrupt, inefficient and grossly incompetent organisation, filled with cousins of African strongmen and other connected people. Same goes for people working in NGOs cooperating with the UN, a common arrangement for example in Geneva is that while the partner works as an oil broker, the other writes position papers on women's rights and observes meetings that has half of the members of the subcommittee asleep.
We have a major "boy who cried wolf" problem with the media, and many of our truth-finding institutions. There've been enough instances in recent decades of arrogant incompetence and self-serving deception, that the public grows to distrust experts disproportionately in domains where it really matters: vaccines, epidemics, climate change.
> We have a major "boy who cried wolf" problem with the media, and many of our truth-finding institutions.
Media isn't a "truth-finding institution". Neither are global political organizations. What we have a problem with is people being brainwashed into believe that media/political organizations are "truth-finding institutions".
> There've been enough instances in recent decades of arrogant incompetence and self-serving deception
Because they are in the business of deception. And it's not decades. It's centuries.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle."
"I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors." -- Thomas Jefferson
Do you hold lunatics and quacks to the same standards, or are they not considered part of the media... Despite having what are, essentially, television channels?
I don't mean to paint a false equivalence between the likes of Icke, and the first person to say "maybe bloodletting isn't helpful". But what does one do about collective/consensus quackery? Even if the consensus of experts is the more solid bet on average, the outliers are consequential, whether it's telling citizens not to wear masks, or invading Iraq for no good reason.
> Despite having what are, essentially, television channels?
Mu. The new media landscape doesn't map cleanly to the old. For better and for worse, cheap and asynchronous publishing puts us in uncharted territory relative to the "Blue Church" of 20th-century broadcast media: https://medium.com/deep-code/understanding-the-blue-church-e...
(I do find it interesting that InfoWars is now incorporating their pariah status into their branding: they brag that they are the "Most Banned Network in the World". For those on the other side, a banning by the Social Media Giants can serve as an erroneous counter-signal that the bannee should be trusted. Cross-reference with the Streisand Effect, and Orwell's admonition that "journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed".)
A healthy dose of distrust towards experts is necessary, because they're wrong all the time.
What about the experts - including those at the CDC - that said COVID-19 was no worse than a flu? Are they no real experts, or are they just the wrong kind of expert?
This covid-19 debacle illustrated a big conflation with experts and authoritative bureaucracies.
Researchers, scientists, and people on the ground in China, Taiwan, and South Korea issued early warnings well ahead of the WHO, CDC, and FDA flip flopping on transmit-ability, masks, and testing.
Unfortunately the average person can’t tell the difference between a researched investigative journalism piece in the New York Times and an opinion column in the New York Times. Most people can’t tell the difference between the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Many people can’t tell the difference between the Chicago Tribune and a random website that stole the Chicago Tribune’s layout.
All these differences matter an enormous amount. They don’t matter subtlety like missing the freeway exit and taking the next one. They matter like chopping your hand off instead of keeping it.
>Researchers, scientists, and people on the ground in China, Taiwan, and South Korea issued early warnings well ahead of the WHO, CDC, and FDA flip flopping on transmit-ability, masks, and testing.
Do you have a rough timeline for 'well ahead'? From what I've read it was classified as zoonotic, because the staff in China who handled the initial cases weren't presenting, and the wet-market was the only causal link. That's when the WHO reported (mid/late Jan) that human-human transmission wasn't possible.
>Unfortunately the average person can’t tell the difference between a researched investigative journalism piece in the New York Times and an opinion column in the New York Times. Most people can’t tell the difference between the Washington Post and the Washington Times. Many people can’t tell the difference between the Chicago Tribune and a random website that stole the Chicago Tribune’s layout.
But its not just "average people", its most people, including HN folks. On any expert topic, when you have no hands-on expertise, you apply "common sense", or read some articles, and then you're back to square one. Most scientific fields are advanced to the point where common sense doesn't get you very far. Not only that, there are a lot of professional explainers who muddy the waters by repeating things without understanding the nuances. I think its fine to say whatever, as long as its fine for me to ask "OK, but what makes your opinion worth something".
> Although the CDC considers this coronavirus (whose scientific name is 2019-nCoV) to be a serious public-health concern, the agency said in a statement Friday that "the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time."
Your paraphrasing of them is dramatically misrepresenting what they said, which I think is the real problem. "Experts" tend to hedge and use inconclusive language, because that is correct. Then journalists come along and confuse/misinterpret things a bit, but the real damage comes from people like you come on social media. The vast majority of people seem to only ever read these misunderstandings and misrepresentations from other social media users.
Here is what an expert in the field said, in my reference:
„When we think about the relative danger of this new coronavirus and influenza, there’s just no comparison,“ William Schaffner, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Kaiser Health News (KHN). „Coronavirus will be a blip on the horizon in comparison. The risk is trivial.“
I guess we can both agree it turned out not to be that small of a blip.
> "Experts" tend to hedge and use inconclusive language, because that is correct.
Well, clearly not all of them used inconclusive language. Furthermore, if your "expert opinion" is inconclusive and hedged against all possibilities, it may be honest, it may be correct, but it is also useless.
Anybody with literally zero expertise on the topic could've told you that "Coronavirus is bad, but at this point in time we don't have a clue what is going on, nor do we know what is going to happen, so let's do nothing for now". That is, of course, paraphrasing the CDC and its experts.
Again you’re misinterpreting what was said, an incoming ICBM is a blip on the horizon. At the time it was a potential threat, which could become very real very quickly. Part of that was splitting up the actual quote into multiple pieces without the correct context, but that’s on the reporter not the expert.
> Coronavirus is bad, but at this point in time we don't have a clue what is going on, nor do we know what is going to happen
Yes, that was probably the only objectively correct thing to say at the time. At the time, this seemed like it could have still ended up like SARS v1. If they advised drastic measures at the time, people similar to you would have crucified them as alarmist and disregarded any advice they may have had.
I think that we actually took the maximum response possible politically regardless of what experts may have said. Even now, there are large contingents of people, including political leaders who think we are overreacting, and the US response wasn't that different from most of the world in timing or severity.
> so let's do nothing for now
They didn't say that. I doubt they would call something a "serious public health concern" and recommend doing nothing.
> Yes, that was probably the only objectively correct thing to say at the time.
Maybe, but had they been less objectively correct and worked based on unproven assumptions, harm could've been prevented.
> If they advised drastic measures at the time, people similar to you would have crucified them as alarmist and disregarded any advice they may have had.
Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that it would've still been the right call. They would've been vindicated very soon after.
As it stands, the experts made the wrong call. I don't fault them for it at all. I'm just pointing it out as an example that sometimes even the experts get it wrong and therefore being suspicious of expert opinion is always warranted.
> I doubt they would call something a "serious public health concern" and recommend doing nothing.
Well yes, that's me being sarcastic. They didn't explicitly recommend to do nothing, but they didn't recommend to do anything either. So that's what was done. Nothing. Same difference, perhaps?
It’s important to separate individual experts from the general belief of experts as a group on some topic. However, this is a different problem where understanding context of experts is the issue.
Back when 5 known cases of COVID-19 where in the US, the risk on that specific day was lower from the virus than the flu for the average American. “immediate health risk” However, understanding that risks change over time is critical to understanding what was being poorly communicated by that piece.
Suppressing David Icke only makes this conspiracy stronger. Icke has close to zero credibility in the UK and well known to believe in lizard people and other such wacky theories.
If you stop people knowing he is also talking about this then the only people left to talk about it are the regular normal seeming folks. Channels like this https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsAwM1EqcYXKeIEufJqwWjw/vid... thousands of views per video, seems like any normal bloke you'd chat to down the pub.
So well done by silencing a known eccentric you just made the only voices in this conspiracy the normal everyday folks, if regular people searched this theory and Icke popped up they might have actually questioned it because they don't want to be associated with the lizard guy.
> Suppressing David Icke only makes this conspiracy stronger.
I think this is begging the question. Why does Youtube, in particular, have an obligation to not "suppress" this person, especially when there's no element of Youtube's terms of service that would force them to carry his content?
He's not being hauled to jail by the authorities, he's just being denied (the greatest use of) the Youtube platform. If Youtube wants to enforce a degree of content control over what it hosts, that would ordinarily be its right -- in the same way that if I run a print shop I don't have to print flyers from any crank who walks in the front door.
Moreover, you're making a testable point here, that suppression "only makes this conspiracy stronger." Is there social science evidence to back this claim up, or is this just an intuitive opinion? An alternative framework is that by denying a pernicious idea its greatest platforms, it makes the topic seem more rare and thus less credible. (The converse of "everyone's saying it, there must be some truth to it.")
> Moreover, you're making a testable point here, that suppression "only makes this conspiracy stronger." Is there social science evidence to back this claim up, or is this just an intuitive opinion?
When discussing whether Youtube should or should not suppress a particular person / point of view it is not conductive to bring up the fact that Youtube has little (financial, legal) obligation to not suppress anything. Frankly they are able to do whatever they want, but I reckon we can at least agree that this wouldn't necessarily be desirable.
And yes it is a problem to have this much depend on the decisions of a single organisation, as they are wrong no matter what they do, and frankly they don't have the mandate to make such decisions to begin with.
All you have to do is look at the antivax movement for a possible counterexample. Social media has allowed that movement to strengthen to the point where they are a global public health threat. Groups like this need the equivalent of email spam filters. Flagged and hidden by default, at best. They should be marginalized and stigmatized.
I downvoted you because that's clearly not what's happening. A delusional person spreading lies and made up facts is not just disagreeing with a worldview.
Freedom of religion says you have to believe in and spread delusions and lies. And to top it off, we have seen multiple instances of religious ideas directly leading to spread of Corona. I'm aware of both jewish, muslim and christian cases.
It is not binary. 5G doesn't cause coronavirus, airplane contrails don't contain mind controlling chemicals, vaccines don't cause autism, and the Earth isn't flat. Those aren't worldview choices, those are facts. They aren't subject to opinion. It is a shame that mental healthcare has been stigmatized, that so few resources in mental health exist for those who need it, and that modern society has created such a profound loneliness that otherwise well people feel the need to attach to groups like this to fulfill a sense of community.
But no, I welcome people I disagree with. 5G causing COVID-19 or it being a Bill Gates conspiracy is not something that is categorized by agreement or disagreement.
You're confusing general and specific cases. Computer people should introspect more often, because we approach problems trying to solve them in general when an solving it for specific cases on a per case basis is called for. I can't evaluate any given claim as true or not, but I am perfectly comfortable evaluating the truth of the four cases I mentioned as well as millions of others. Further, I'm perfectly happy saying "I don't know". I'd probably be perfectly capable giving a 1-10 score on the truth of most things. Further, it would be perfectly approachable to use a variant of graph spectral theory (using pagerank as an example) to score people as sources of information.
This isn't as hard as the generalized solution. I don't have to deal with Godel or Turing limits on the possibility of computability and provable truth to know QAnon is a bunch of lunatics and that I should ban them from a forum if I don't want them to ruin it. There are a bunch of things that are more borderline and what to include and not include is an editorial decision for community owners / moderators. Further, the "<bad actor> will abuse this and you'll be one the other end of it some day": guess what, bad actors will act badly. They will abuse the system anyway, there is no way to prevent that.
What does this comment even mean? In my comment, I was putting it bluntly what he/she was basically saying. I agree it sounds harsh, but that was my point. My point is that it's not acceptable or productive for a society to suppress someone else's right to be heard just because they are disagreed with.
Then let me bluntly reply. That is wrong. We suppress all sorts of speech and have well before the internet. I don't need to enumerate it, but there are all sorts of content encouraging or causing harm or violence that is already illegal, policed, and most people will have no problems with agreeing should not have a platform.
Now, let's look at Youtube specifically. It is a business unit in a US corporation. The company has an obligation to make money. That is completely at odds of the role of a public forum and we all shouldn't pretend it is one. If we want a public forum (which only makes sense in the universe of a federal government with robust protections for individual rights) then the it should be a publicly funded resource. The government should run a free video site or should bid out a contract to have a private company operate one. If that existed, then certainly, yes Icke's video should stay up there.
But Youtube is a private business and it should operate under what makes best business sense for its social platform. Anything else is an harmful illusion.
Hm, I think there's a difference between disagreeing with 'worldviews' and repeating provable lies that cause actual damage.
The whole 'intellectual dark web' was built around the idea that 'every idea is worth discussing', even though it so happens a lot of the 'ideas' presented have been debunked a million times over, and the proponents usually ignore the data disproving their 'theories'.
Personally, I think the biggest damage the internet has done to the world is allowing anyone to parrot insanely stupid anti-science positions unchecked. There's no good solution to that problem, but it is important to be reminded that just because a problem doesn't have a good solution, it doesn't mean it's beyond the realm of ethics.
They need to be careful, such approach would have limited the info about covid-19. When I was watching the news, youtube videos in early Jan, it was coming from the "conspiracy theory" folks. Not mainstream media. Those folks were right.
They weren't right, they were just doing their usual shtick: weave panic narratives. The only reason they were 'right' because it so happens COVID-19 is actually pretty bad. But if you go and check their history of 'predictions' I bet everything in my savings account they've predicted a thousand 'tragedies' before and none of them came to pass.
In other words: even a broken clock is right twice a day, that doesn't mean it's working.
9 Feb 2020 was full conspiracy theory while mass media stood silent.
Even today its not entirely common knowledge to what lengths China went at the end of January while WHO was spreading lies about no human to human transmission, no masks, and definitely no international border closing necessary.
... and pray tell us what the 'heaven descended' Ministry of Truth was doing ? Oh that's right, they were claiming it was no big deal "it's just the flu... don't worry about it". This was the case even after witnessing China's troubles. Now the same people have the gall to go and complain about WHO. Hindsight 20/20.
To some degree, the media needs to treat its audience like grown ups who are capable of thinking rationally and coming to reasonable conclusions. The more they try to handhold everyone, it will produce two effects: reduce audience ability to make informed decisions, and reduce audience trust in the media.
Someone showed me the Icke lecture, and so we discussed what are easy ways we could falsify his claims. E.g. countries with high incidence of covid19 and no 5g.
Especially when the conspiracy theory is so easily debunked the media should handle such cases more liberally. Think of it as inoculating the population against misinformation.
I do tentatively agree there are some kinds of misinformation that should be suppressed, but any such thing should be very exceptional, and very well explained. Otherwise, the media will end up being the modern Catholic church and go the way of the reformation. The church has spent centuries undoing the mistakes it made handling Luther's and other's criticisms.
The fact that it's not true is largely irrelevant. When the media pursues a strategy of manipulating the masses rather than reporting the truth, the masses notice and stop believing what the media has to say. In the modern age, the media only has power to the extent that people believe what it's saying.
Substantial numbers of people don't trust their own pediatricians on vaccinations. 40% of Americans think God created humans in their current form instead of evolution.
Society has become hostile to facts, and sites like YouTube are all too often happy to serve up bullshit if it gets engagement.
The important question to ask is 'why?' Are these people just stupid ignorants requiring being spoon fed information, or is there something more going on?
If we assume most people do not act rationally should we rescind their rights to vote? And their legal autonomy in general? After all how can they give informed consent to contracts if they're not thinking for themselves?
> To some degree, the media needs to treat its audience like grown ups who are capable of thinking rationally and coming to reasonable conclusions
Except a significant (and growing) number of people aren't. There's a huge 'anti-science' (or 'anti-elite' if you move in those circles) movement in this country. Without getting into politics, the proof is in the pudding: just the other day, we had the governor of one of our biggest states saying he 'didn't know the coronavirus could be transmitted before people showed symptoms' even though that fact has been readily available to everyone for weeks if not months. When would rather believe politicians than experts, giving those politicians an unchecked way to propagate their message will only kill people.
Initially there was fear that 'deplatforming' would make these ideas stronger, and the people promoting them 'martyrs' and their 'martyrdom' a 'cause célèbre' that would promote them even further. In other words, that the Streissand effect of deplatforming someone would make them more powerful.
Reality seems to contradict that. People who used to enjoy quite a bit of notoriety a couple years ago have essentially disappeared since being deplatformed. Idiots like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Alex Jones and a whole bunch of other alt-righter 'personalities' who promoted white supremacy, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. have lost their audiences and are only recognizable by a handful of people who were aware of their positions before they got deplatformed.
On the other hand, the people that put the effort to continue following such personalities and ideologies in whatever platforms they managed to stay on, belong to the extreme fringe of the original audience. Because the platforms that still host these people tend to host all kinds of terrible stuff, it's possible that some are being exposed to bad views they didn't espouse before. But let's face it: anyone digging through white supremacist sites to get the latest from Gavin McInnes was a lost cause anyway.
In conclusion: deplatforming seems to limit exposure of new people to such perspectives, without requiring government-enforced violations of the First Amendment. There's nothing we can do against people actively looking for such anti-perspectives, because they are already biased against the 'normal' perspective. Conspiracy theorists have existed forever, but only recently they've become mainstream and affect public policy.
You are right these particular personalities are no longer well known. But, my question is whether deplatforming in general leads to more or less trust in the platforms, whether mainstream media or new social sites?
Hm, I don't know. The only people I see complaining about 'losing trust' in the platforms is the very people who would be posting harmful content in those platforms.
Nobody should place all their eggs in one basket. It is unfortunate that a lot of these platforms have become the only source of revenue for a lot of people. The moment you are that tied to a revenue stream, any changes in policy that restrict the content you produce will become a death blow. People in YouTube are living the 'gig economy' from a different angle.
One of my favorite aspects of Hacker News is how many people get really miffed when one criticizes the alt-right ideology, but are cowardly enough to not argue the points.
> thinking rationally and coming to reasonable conclusions.
If they did, no one would buy the BS that the mainstream sells (cf. Iraq War, Vietnam War, ... nearly every war, the 'Russian collusion' of current era). Power is obtained not when people are taught to think - it is when you keep them stupid and limit their brain feed to one gutter.
We've been conducting this experiment for many years, and it should be painfully obvious by now that the public at large is incapable of rationality and reasonableness.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook has brought the long tail of politics and stupidity to the mass audience.
We've conducted experiments with tyranny before and it has never ended well. But it's clear that the elite is getting more and more enamored with the idea.
It may well be that it can no longer be peacefully stopped, and that battles and violence will decide this.
Perhaps, but the ability for the population at large to think critically also has great value. If you dumb down the populace even more by spoonfeeding them acceptable information, then they become even more susceptible to bad reasoning. It is like having a child grow up in a completely disease free environment. They'll remain healthy, but in a very fragile way.
Plus, there's always the problem of who watches the watchers.
Step 1 is to stop all this platform censorship, especially of clearly crackpot theories.
Only censor people who are clearly proposing people harm others. Such as Spike Lee posting a couple's address on Twitter during the Zimmerman trial. Or the social media mobs trying to ruin the lives of those they disagree with.
A lot of that is their personal responsibility. They learn in the school of life, just like we can naturally inoculate ourselves by living out in the real world.
How do you know they are not? And there is no contradiction. It is more a matter of not stopping learning. Learning is always happening naturally. People mostly need the opportunity.
So you don't actually have a plan. You just want to keep going down the same status quo which is what allows people like Alex Jones and what not to spread conspiracies which have directly resulted in harm to people.
Why are the owners and managers of Twitter and Facebook and a Google not held to that standard?
Perhaps if Twitter thought critically about why they give white supremacists and folks seeking to hurt people with crazy conspiracy theories things would be better. Maybe if YouTube didn’t syndicate and promote antivax messages through their algorithms, some children killed in an outbreak last year would be alive.
Political speech has nothing to do with media platforms. You have a right to speak. You don’t have a right to be heard.
> Conspiracy theories linking 5G signals to the coronavirus pandemic continue to spread despite there being no evidence the mobile phone signals pose a health risk.
> One falsely suggests 5G suppresses the immune system, the other falsely claims the virus is __somehow using the network's radio waves to communicate and pick victims, accelerating its spread.__
(__ emphasis mine)
W T Actual F people!
Facepalm.
If it were true it might be one of the greatest discoveries of all time ;)
Isn’t this basically an ad hominem attack? I don’t know the guy, but you’re attacking him and not his argument. Isn’t the rule here to take the strongest part of an argument and go off that?
Edit: Downvoted on a site for pointing out the rules of the site. Maybes it’s just me, but since the Great Quarantine, some websites have been a little extra smug and “hide the wrong think” prone.
Are we actually under obligation to listen to everything a crank says and then evaluate each statement? Once I find out someone believes in "reptoids", I don't see a lot of value in wasting my time with them, and it's exhausting to make that effort when they clearly aren't.
No, I believe you have the option of not watching his content, not replying to it, and generally allowing others to be as wrong as they would like to be. Unless someone is forcing your to interact with him... are they?
That isn’t the topic of an ad hominem however. Saying “he’s been kicked in the head too many times” is.
No. Icke has serious mental health issues and promotes ridiculous conspiracies like all government leaders are reptile aliens. I'm not making this up, this is what he actually believes and promotes.
Do you think it should be illegal to think lizard people exist?
Do you think there is any degree of comprise in a best case argument you could make to how some actions are made with people’s “reptilian brain”?
Should it be the responsibility of someone else to make sure you aren’t “assaulted” with other people’s wrong ideas? Or should you take responsibility for your own intake and just ignore the guy?
I wonder how much credit do you give to your own “has serious mental issues” justification? Isn’t that the exact argument that transphobic people use? That this person has a serious mental illness so they shouldn’t be afforded like-protections? Seems like a bad argument on either use because it’s all opinion based on disagreement.
I was raised to respect people’s right to express their ideas even if... especially if I disagree.
I'll ignore Gish gallop of questions and respond the the last sentence.
> I was raised to respect people’s right to express their ideas even if... especially if I disagree.
No one is threatening or infringing on his rights. YouTube is not a government entity and has no obligation to host his content. If he wants to put up his own website, which I believe he has, and host the video there then he can do so.
It is kinda tricky. While i could see it as a possible instance of ad hominem in some cases, would it really count as a personal attack to say that someone who talks a lot of zany ideas might be doing that due to a lot of documented brain damage (concussions) in their past?
I dont think this specifically would count as an ad hominem, given the “personal attack” (lots of concussions in the past) is directly relevant to the current criticism and is a very probable source of their crazy illogical statements and opinions.
EDIT: just fyi, I didn’t downvote your comment. I think your question is very relevant and is in good faith. It is a shame that some people ganged up on your comment, because it seems genuine.
I would agree more if the specific context wasn’t “this guy was hit in the head too many times so he’s insane”... does the number of times he was hit in the head have any bearing on 5G issues real or not?
An ad hominem is “he is a lunatic with head trauma, so take his platform away!”.
A real argument would be that Iran has no 5G and has been hit hard with covid19 so his correlation and his causation seem disproven easily.
Don’t like the direction YouTube and other social media companies are headed. This is pretty much censorship of free speech. I understand that he may be spewing garbage, but sheesh. At this rate YouTube will only have content it wants you to see; this is how it starts.
Whenever conspiracy theory talk pops up, I notice 2 groups of people: 1) the conspiracy theorists 2.) the people calling the conspiracy theorists crazy lunatics....rarely anything in-between. Is there anyone out there that can scientifically debunk this guy's claims?
It's a variant of "wifi allergies". These sorts of things do crop up from time to time. In Switzerland there were people who claimed a mobile tower (or was it a new electricity mains cable) was causing them headaches and other illnesses. Only problem: the thing wasn't on when they reported complaints.
That's the usual way this belief is debunked. Find people who say they can sense radio waves or are made sick by them. Wait until they complain they're sick. Show them the device was switched off. Job done.
I'd love to know what it is about 5G specifically that's got these people so worked up. Maybe tower density? There are going to be just way more 5G towers than prior generations?
I have no idea, do you know if those folks haven't shown symptoms of 5g poisoning? Probably something worthy of looking into since many people have concerns about 5g.
> Probably something worthy of looking into since many people have concerns about 5g.
Take flat earthers. Because many people believe it we should investigate - so people post evidence that the earth is round, the flat earthers reject that evidence and make the flat earth claim again. So do we keep investigating? The same number of people still believe. How many times around that wheel do we go? Do you believe that no one has honestly looked into the health effects of 5g? What evidence do you think it'll take for someone who believes radio waves are causing these effects, even though scientists have pictures of the virus, to have their mind changed?
Asking a person to disprove someone else's claim to the affirmative is not how the scientific method is supposed to work. The burden of proof should on the person that is claiming something is happening, rather than burdening everyone else with the disproof. This is a fundamental problem with conspiracy theorists' methods-- they often say, "You can't prove it's _not_ happening!". This is called shifting the burden, and it's a popular argument in theology.
Bertrand Russell's Teapot is an example of what I mean:
"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense."[1]
In that same vein, it would be a supreme waste of time to try and scientifically debunk the trolls that are promoting this nonsense; they have the burden of proof.
Still I agree it would be fun to watch it be debunked. But how would you propose it be done? Gather a large number of healthy people around a 5G tower and do a cohort study of COVID-19-like symptoms among that group and compare to a control population? There's any number of possible methods, but it sounds pretty silly when you say it out loud.
What's worse is even if you _did_ such a study, its results would fall on deaf ears as far as the conspiracy theory folks go. They are not interested in proof.
Russell's teapot a great reference here but I think sometimes it's a human fallacy of logic, or technically an "Argument from ignorance"[1]. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In this context, the "absence of evidence" is that we don't currently understand the full cause/effect intricacies of many human ailments. When there are many unknowns, it's somewhat of a straw-man argument to argue based on Russell's teapot example.
For example, look at how yellow fever played out in the past. The fever swept across large populations, killing many....then people started to pick up on the fact that individuals drinking from private wells (or cisterns) weren't getting sick as often. Conspiracy theorists back in the day would have said "The public water is making us sick!", and anti-conspiracy-theorists would have said "Oh yeah? How about you prove it to me!". Considering they didn't have the technology to "prove it" (or at least it wasn't nearly as accessible as today), the anti-conspiracy-theorists were probably strutting around thinking they won the debate.
Google: “it’s better to be illiterate than have the possibility to read something wrong.”
I swear to god I thought the internet would be so different in 2020.
Before (and even after) the ban there was a lot of good information on YouTube, a lot of it was from trained medical professionals and now it’s all going away and people will be left with gossip and guesses.
What is the problem with believing 5G causes coronavirus? The people who believe it are misinformed, and so what?
I understand why it's harmful to spread anti-vax memes, but 99% of "misinformation" is harmless. It's often difficult to separate theory and conspiracy from harmful information, a dubious concept.
Besides being bad on principle, misinformation in times of struggle can lead to irrational behavior, including misguided violence. For example, in this specific case: "5G-coronavirus conspiracy theory spurs rash of telecom tower arson fires" https://fortune.com/2020/04/06/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-the...
I don't think that contemporary, high emotional arousal misinformation sources are harmless. I contend instead that the feeling of superiority and constant novelty of conspiracy theories lead to a dopamine-addiction loop. Since novelty is one of the primary focal points of the human attention system, we are hijacked and conned by these systems. This is why high-anger television (Fox News) has ads for gold and reverse mortgages. Turn off the ability to fight, make them angry, then when the cognitive defenses are turned off, take them for what they are worth.
Misinformation and the hole that leads into it are not harmless, and lead to mental degradation and emotional trauma.
Nothing is wrong with it. But the belief is complete incorrect and Icke is clearly mentally unwell, and social platforms have a right to defend their communities from people like him. They should not have to indulge lunatics that reduce their brand value or community health. Icke has the right to believe what he wants, and speak/write about it freely. Youtube should be under no obligation to provide a platform for him on their private service, either.
> Youtube should be under no obligation to provide a platform for him on their private service, either.
And that’s TOTALLY FINE. But the issue surrounding the whole “should these monopolies be the free speech overlords?” Is that if they say this guy can’t be allowed speech, they should have to take responsibility for the speech they do allow. Publisher vs Platform.
I definitely am in the "not public forum" camp. Let me explain. The second you allow a private company control over a public resource, you are creating an expectation that a private company cannot meet. Public access tv and public streets are examples of public forums, and for example, I am very against free speech zones. But Youtube, Facebook, Reddit are ultimately private for-profit companies and - as indispensable as they feel in modern life - we shouldn't conflate them with public platforms.
To your other point, they are responsible for content on their platform in many cases (violent threats, illegal adult content, allowing access to adult content to minors, copyright violations, dissemination of classified information, and so on) so I don't see a problem.
edit: please don't downvote the parent poster? This is a perfectly fine response and good faith dialogue. We don't downvote something because we disagree with it.
I agree with you except the reality is that we have no alternative to YouTube, not a serious one anyhow. So until that changes, unfortunately and regrettably, I do consider it a public forum - held by a private company. It’s a brave new world!
Should thinking there is correlation between 5G and viral sensitivity be illegal? Of course not.
The examples you listed are illegal and no one has any issue with those being removed.
Public forum or not, these companies should not ethically be engaging in the policing of things they consider “wrong think”. It does nothing but distort reality for both sides. Look at HN, this is an extremely strong bubble mechanic here. I’ve lost 50-some “points” on this site in the last two days and prevented from replying for saying true, first hand, or on-topic things people don’t want to see, certainly nothing that breaks rules or should be hidden because one disagrees... but that’s what it is - people trying to hide the thing that makes them upset. Same issue in micro scale.
No one should celebrate this mechanism. You should defend lizard man’s wrong think as “allowed speech” - because at some point no matter how smart or “Correct” you think you are, you will eventually find yourself on the “wrong side” of a corporate opinion, and when that happens, you will want to have supported protections for everyone the whole time.
No one ever thinks the pendulum will swing. What child-like naively would be needed so just always assume the monopolies will “just happen” to agree with one’s sensibilities on who should get a voice or not?
So your position is that if someone starts spamming Hacker News with hate speech, HN shouldn't be allowed to ban that user and delete their posts without shutting down the entire site? Because if web sites are legally liable for every post that's what's going to happen.
“Hate speech” is a very loose term. Do you mean actual calls to incite violence? Which are illegal and no one has any problem with their removal? Or do you mean “things I just don’t like”? Because HN already has a strong bubble mechanic to remove wrong-think (in practice right now!)
“I disagree with you” or “I’m wildly wrong” isn’t typically against a website’s terms of service. Is this looney guy being wrong about 5G calling for violence? Is his opinion illegal in anyway? Can you see no scenario (past your own nose) that your opinion ever winds up on the “wrong side” of corporate judgment?
Furthermore, if you’re just going to kick people off your platform because they’re wrong, you had better not selectively enforce that. Seems like it’s best to just be a PLATFORM. Which is exactly what they all claim to be. Except they do it while enjoying PUBLISHER convenience of removing things they just don’t like but are otherwise within the rules and terms.
No. It really isn't. Normal people know it when they see it, and the people who claim not to know it are usually the ones using it, along with the bad faith contrarians.
> Seems like it’s best to just be a PLATFORM. Which is exactly what they all claim to be.
Most sites refer to themselves as communities, and I have no problem with a community kicking bad actors (which they're free to define on their own terms) out while not being held legally responsible if they fail to do that perfectly.
> No. It really isn't. Normal people know it when they see it,
Wow. That’s an argument I didn’t expect to see. Do you know we’ve already been over this for pornography? It’s a pretty famous argument that didn’t go the way you might want if you’re using it too.
If you can’t tell me what hate speech is, but prove my point saying “people know what it is”... that’s exactly the definition of “loosely defined”. I’m not even saying it shouldn’t be loosely defined, there is nuance per context.
>Communities
Would you please be so kind as to tell me where that definition is in Section 230?
You can refer to yourself however you like. In this context the LEGAL terms are platform and publisher.
Well, Sounds like a good plan you have there. That it’s entirely ethical to hide wrong-think. Yes, I hope you never think the wrong things! Surely that could never happen right? Do you think it is coincidence that your opinion largely agrees with Silicon Valley’s “taste makers”?
> Do you know we’ve already been over this for pornography? It’s a pretty famous argument that didn’t go the way you might want if you’re using it too.
I know exactly the context I'm lifting that line from (fun fact: Hacker News is not The Government). The great thing about Section 230 is that what is 'offensive' is up to the interactive service provider to judge. We're free to host our own web sites, let others publish to them, and we're free to tell them to get lost if they post repugnant things we don't like. It's perfectly in the spirit of the 1st Amendment.
You're free to start your own web site and allow hate speech to be posted there. Many have tried. This site doesn't do that, and you're still spending time here and not on the hate speech-friendly sites. Why is that?
A couple days ago in Long Beach, CA, USA, a train engineer derailed his train in an attempt to stop a medical ship which he believed was part of a government takeover. Conspiracies are all fun and games until a simpleton believes them and does something that hurts others.
> Now any content that disputes the existence or transmission of Covid-19, as described by the WHO [World Health Organization] and local health authorities is in violation of YouTube policies.
> This includes conspiracy theories which claim that the symptoms are caused by 5G.
Yeah, fair point. But it's a red herring.
> For borderline content that could misinform users in harmful ways, we reduce recommendations. We'll continue to evaluate the impact of these videos on communities around the world.
This one is KEY. Truth is, the majority of views comes from the Recommended, Trending and Next to Play. No one without a direct link will see your video, if it's nerfed by the algorithm. Checkmate.
Corona is a very heated topic with many unknowns. Deciding what can and can not be labeled as misinformation is thus very tricky even for an expert, because there is a very fine line between misinformation and speculation (which is different in the sense that it's done in good faith and thus perfectly fine). Who's going to make these decisions? A private corp with zero transparency?
We sorely need very clear distinction (maybe even legal - e.g. a framework for Terms of Service) between media and medium. With the former being free to set arbitrary rules, push agendas, ban otherwise harmless content, fuck with content promotion in whatever ways they want, etc. And the latter providing just the infrastructure and technical means to publish content with minimal governance. Status of being either of these must be granted upfront and then prohibited to change.
Otherwise every "social media" platform will eventually mutate into a weaponized propaganda machine, promoting the interests of its stakeholders and greater powers-that-be and suppressing any dissenting opinion. This temptation is evidently impossible to resist.
All social media are strangely censoring anything that even remotely questions the official coronavirus story. I had shared this article on twitter some days ago and it's not even some weird conspiracy theory but twitter flagged it https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-t...
Because this is not the time for conspiracy theories. People talking about the earth being flat doesn't really hurt anyone. People believing conspiracy theories about a global pandemic can be seriously dangerous.
This particular incident actually sounds like it involves pretty heavy "out there" stuff. But in general the term conspiracy theory means barely more than "not in line with government press releases". The average conspiracy theory guy is much less crazy than one might assume and a surprising number of now public revelations have been circulating in these corners of the internet way earlier. It can be quite informative and challenge critical thinking at the same time.
I have no problem with conspiracy theories, or people talking about them. What I do have a problem with is the general category of misinformation/conspiracy theories which hurt or endanger others. For instance, for every person who doesn't get a vaccination because they believe some of the anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, there is an immune-compromised individual who is being put into harm's way because of misinformation because they medically cannot receive the vaccine.
In the case of the coronavirus, we are dealing with a very dangerous global pandemic, and I personally think that this falls into the category of "misinformation can be very dangerous."
As much as I agree with you when it comes to pretty much anything else, I have to draw a line when it comes to conspiracy theories which are undeniably false such as anti-vaccination ones, which harm others who cannot medically get vaccinations.
I see your point and can understand your position.
Just as a counterpoint I would still add that "undeniably false" is a very high bar that many believe is not reached with some topics, the "gospel" (not meant dismissive) on vaccinations being one of them.
Good for Twitter; it is complete nonsense. This is not a made-up spook. "Normal" coronaviruses don't cause 3500 people in New York city to die over the course of a few weeks.
It's nonsense, except it's a summary of what a bunch of professors and research scientists specialised in biology and medicine think. So you[tube] are now in a position of deciding which experts are right and which are wrong.
Is there anything that defines your view of what nonsense is other than government approval? Wait, except up-thread I am reading that the problem is politicians who don't accept experts.
So who defines expertise? Who gets the label of expert and who doesn't, in your view, if qualifications aren't it?
I would say that the answer to this involves peer review.
Do the statements have the backing of the expert's organization?
Experts speaking alone are less credible than experts speaking on behalf of a committee (consisting of members from more than one organization, ideally) which reviewed information and prepared statements for presentation to the public.
In OECD countries. the mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 (1.3%) is not significantly different from that for common coronaviruses identified in public hospitals of Marseille, France (0.8%; P=0.11).
The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.
So this paper agrees with the ones in the page you cited as nonsense. Will you now do an about-face and demand Twitter erase tweets by public scientists demanding mass lockdowns?
Peer review is no panacea. It can rapidly become a circular argument - someone is an expert because some experts say they're an expert. OK, who says those people are experts? Ah, the first set of people we're trying to evaluate. Peer review lets all sorts of rubbish slip through because the peers doing the reviewing aren't usefully different to the people being reviewed (same background, same education, same social circles, same incentives structure). But it can be great at shutting down outside voices and reinforcing groupthink.
When there's expert disagreement about something important, there's typically no substitute for just letting people wade in there and form their own opinions. Twitter (of all companies!) is nowhere near intelligent enough a group of people to resolve every controversy in every field of study in the world, indeed the fact that they're even trying suggests serious deficiencies of institutional analysis!
The simple fact is that the paper is outdated. A lot of sensible people were thinking along the same lines around that time. That was published before the WHO even declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
"The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated" means that it might not be, and there is even a slim chance it could even be underestimated.
Outdated? It was published on the 19th March, the data is from the 2nd of March. The virus hasn't changed since then.
Look, you keep moving the goalposts.
First you were sure Twitter should take down links to the page because it was "nonsense". Your own hot take on Coronaviruses was so vastly superior you were convinced censorship was justified.
After it was pointed out you were arguing with medical professionals and researchers, your position became "experts are only experts if peer reviewed". That's clearly wrong but whatever.
After you were given a bunch of medical professionals and researchers who were peer reviewed and saying the exact same thing, now you write them off because their paper is a few weeks old? Peer review fundamentally introduces latency, so you've set up a Kafka-esque "heads I win, tails you lose" situation there. Either you're not peer reviewed and thus not an expert, or you are and thus your paper is outdated.
Come on, knock it off. You've gone full Orwell in the space of about 3 posts - under your preferred regime there'd be literally no way anyone could ever speak if they disagreed with you regardless of who they were or their background. You'd just constantly redefine "expert" to exclude them. This thread is a textbook example of why platforms should not be censoring information on COVID-19 under any circumstances.
Yes, predictions made from March 2 data about the COVID-19 are objectively outdated, because it's a rapidly changing situation.
By March 2, 4000 died around the world. Today, more than 1200 residents of just Queens, New York have died.
Lots of leaders around the world made the wrong guess with overly optimistic thinking, like what is in that paper.
> Look, you keep moving the goalposts.
Based on the March 2 view of the situation, what it says is not without justification. The paper doesn't claim to be asserting unvarnished truths. It makes some forward looking statements that are in the rational range, based on what was known.
The arguments in that paper do not hold today; it is not appropriate to wield that paper due to its connection to expertise.
It's like referring to last month's weather forecasts in the middle of a hurricane.
So, I don't agree at all that the paper is wrong. The results are about the virus itself, which would scale up. You seem to be arguing their data was totally wrong but haven't explained why, other than it's a month old, although the virus had been around for three months by then.
But the core argument here isn't actually about the virus. It's epistemological. You have been arguing for censorship on an exceptionally weak basis and haven't acknowledged that. Every criteria you've put forward for deciding what experts should be allowed to speak is invalid or unusable. That's more relevant than this specific paper, which was simply an example to disprove your position.
Most platforms don’t really like censorship themselves because it effectiveness is limited, costs them money to implement and acknowledges liability for stuff contributed to their platform. However COVID-19 poses a unique challenge in that misinformation can have a death toll. At least other conspiracy theories and extremist content is either (relatively) harmless or requires the viewer to step far beyond the boundaries of common sense.
I think a solution would be to let the video on the platform but display a huge yellow banner or something like Reddit's quarantine thing where it says "this video contains misinformation about Covid-19" or something more intrusive if you'd like. That way you're not necessarily compromising free speech
How about modelling good behavior? Instead of opinionated name-calling "misinformation", simply add a comment with their claims about such and such authorities explanation of the situation. If you can trust people to believe your facts, why would
you assume they trust your opinions?
I don't think this is helpful, it's quite possibly counter-productive. If you're prone to conspiracy thinking, you're going to link any current event to any alternative explanation, no matter how far fetched.
If 5G wasn't in the news, it would be something else. Suppressing the signal only makes it stronger, because now you've "proven" that "the elite can't allow the secret information out".
David Icke is preaching to the choir, he isn't converting anyone. Nobody who is otherwise capable of sound reasoning is going to watch him and go: "I might disagree with this person on whether Zionist Reptile Shapeshifters are controlling the world, but his analysis of the effects of 5G on human health and COVID-19 seem credible!"
Conspiracy thinking is extremely common even among clinically sane people. The "cure" is not suppression, not derision, but letting people figure it out how their mind sometimes works against them. The biggest obstacle is the human ego.
I disagree completely. David Icke is responsible for the major conspiracy theory innovation that the Zionists controlling the world are actually shape-shifting Reptilians, effectively letting the Jews off the hook.
That means a set of people who could've otherwise ended up in classic Nazi conspiracy circles end up in something closer to a science fiction fanclub. Yet another set of people who dipped their toes into conspiracy theories might actually start to question whether it's all bullshit, upon finding that the Pope is supposedly a lizard.
The 5G thing on the other hand is something that a lot of people think is probably dangerous, whether they're conspiracy theorists or not. Of course conspiracy theorists picked it up, but if it wasn't 5G, it would be fluoride, or contrails, or literally anything else that might somehow be polluting water, ground or air.
Icke's theory does not differentiate between Zionists, Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the royal family, the pope and so on. They are all reptilian shapeshifters from another universe, sometimes posing as Jewish leaders, sometimes as Christian or secular leaders, but it's never "the Jews" as a people.
The reason this distinction is important is because if you believe "your enemy" is really reptilians from another dimension, you don't have a reason to be hating or threatening the jews next door. It's strictly better than you becoming a Neonazi ready to pick up where the "final solution" left off, which is another possible trajectory.
Bottom line, if you have the predisposition to believe in "secret group controls the world" stuff, I'd much rather have you believe in Icke's theories. If you don't have that predisposition, you're not going to believe in any of that stuff either way. You don't need to be "protected".
This is absurd. Saying "famous Zionist are reptiles" doesn't protect non famous Zionists. It promotes violence because it's a lot easier to set fire to a synagogue than assassinate a Prime Minister.
Furthermore, a huge amount of leftists are openly anti-Zionist.
I'm not saying the alien lizard theory is "protecting" anyone, I'm saying it's the better alternative to whatever Nazi conspiracy theory you're going to buy into otherwise.
> The 5G thing on the other hand is something that a lot of people think is probably dangerous, whether they're conspiracy theorists or not.
If you think 5G is dangerous, and that there's a conspiracy to harm the public through wanton disregard for public health, you are a conspiracy theorist, it's just a matter of degree.
Now, they're not explicitly saying that 5G is dangerous, but that's not my point.
Rolling out a potentially unsafe technology is dangerous, even if the technology is harmless. Pulling the trigger on a gun that might be loaded is dangerous, even if it isn't loaded.
> Not only was the paper’s result weak, but the same analysis showed that male rats in the high-RF group lived significantly longer than the unexposed rodents. It would, of course, be utterly and equally fallacious to claim that RF exposure increases life span. Yet the fact that anti-5G activists are happy to gloss over this detail shows an alarming degree of cherry-picking afoot.
> The most reliable data come from large and robust trials, with careful controls and large sample groups. The 13-country INTERPHONE study is one example: its unequivocal conclusion was that there was no causal relationship between phone use and incidences of common brain tumors such as glioblastoma and meningioma. The dose-response curve from this undertaking is telling, because it clearly does not betray any obvious signs of correlation. A similar Danish cohort study also did not reveal any obvious link between phone usage and tumor rates.
Now, you're saying:
> Rolling out a potentially unsafe technology is dangerous, even if the technology is harmless.
So great news, the evidence that 5G is potentially unsafe isn't really there. Heck, there's evidence that it could make you live longer, so maybe we're being irresponsible by waiting to deploy it.
To be clear, I'm not personally concerned about 5G, my point is that not everyone who has concerns about it is a conspiracy theorist. That I have shown.
Besides that, I have a problem with "the evidence is weak" arguments, because the evidence for anything is weak if you never have looked. The INTERPHONE study may be of high quality, but it didn't look into 5G. Extrapolating from that is insufficient.
The fact of the matter is that proving the safety of 5G before rollout is not feasible. At best we can look back in ten or twenty years after rollout and draw our conclusions. That's how long it will take to actually get any good evidence, like the INTERPHONE study. By then, we'll probably have rolled out 6G and 7G, to unknown effect.
> So great news, the evidence that 5G is potentially unsafe isn't really there.
The evidence that 5G is unsafe isn't there. The evidence that it is safe isn't there either. It's still "potentially unsafe".
The Indian government allegedly (can't find source except John Oliver's TV show, so take with grain of salt) published textbooks claiming that Caucasian people are undercooked toast and Africans are burnt toast, and is currently running an ethnicity cleansing campaign to eliminate Muslims.
This makes me wonder if there will be “covid19 deniers” in the future just like there have been holocaust deniers ever since the war, claiming that it never happened and is a conspiracy.
It’s really depressing these theories, anti vaccine, and anti science ideas are gaining so much momentum in recent years. And then the world governments pull something like they just did, saying masks don’t work when in fact they help... how can you ever convince anti science people to trust, well, science and governments when this happens??
I suspect this will become a bigger and bigger problem, with more and more people dying of illnesses we have vaccines for. Very sad.
I admit that I don't live in bizzaro world--where some crazy old man's conspiracy theories must be suppressed, while multi-billion-dollar corporations that deceive broadly, frequently, and incompetently are the "good guys."
"But, BUT, we retracted!" After they were caught...
It was incompetence that they then corrected. Should the whole company be disbanded for a few employees' corrected mistake?
Meanwhile, crazy old man has never retracted any of his conspiracy theories, instead repeating them over and over. One is a reliable source of information, and the other is a reliable source of misinformation.
This also raises concerns for me around the question of freedom of speech and censorship. I fear we are centralizing too much power into a few private companies that effectively wield more power than the government and the people for whom it represents.
I'd rather have freedom of speech even if it means tons of misinformation out there.
If and when there is some information that is unpopular but critical for people to know, I don't want censorship to be the norm.