YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/29/youtube-ban-joseph-mercola/

by danso • 5 years ago

1408 2593 5 years ago

washingtonpost.com

null0pointer• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/OJlxk

yosito2• 5 years ago

I'm surprised other major platforms haven't done this yet.

hakre• 5 years ago

Following the report, some have.

But why be surprised? They grow a lot of greens out of such content. Why kill the golden cow unless you need to (because forced to)?

danso• 5 years ago

Facebook banned all anti-vax content 7 months ago, according to the article

yosito2• 5 years ago

They haven't banned it very consistently, according to my news feed.

pyronik19• 5 years ago

Trust the science...or else.

rdtwo• 5 years ago

The same way trust in God

mc326• 5 years ago

Except we’re not allowing Sputnik V travelers in the country despite science…

_v7gu3• 5 years ago

In tandem with not recognizing natural immunity, it's not really about science is it?

thriftwy• 5 years ago

One have to admit this is a major anti-vax move being performed by USA and EU.

If the government get to discriminate which vaccines are good and which are not, why their citizens won't do the same, even if they leave the 'good' bucket empty?

When I travelled to South America I had to do "the" vaccine shot (yellow fever I believe), but nobody would inquire me "which one" and whether it is on some white list.

avianlyric3• 5 years ago

The Sputnik V vaccine might be good. But there’s a fair bit of evidence that it’s mass manufacture has some problems. Which makes it difficult to say with certainty that what’s injected into peoples arms, is effective as what was tested during clinical trials.

vibrato26• 5 years ago

And by science we mean the profitable stuff. Like the most profitable pharma therapies ever offered.

Remember when they discontinued the control groups? I thought Randomized controlled trials were the gold standard for science

blnkhc• 5 years ago

“Trust their interpretation of science”

roenxi5• 5 years ago

Misinformation researchers have for years said the popularity of anti-vaccine content on YouTube was contributing to growing skepticism of lifesaving vaccines in the United States and around the world. Vaccination rates have slowed and about 56 percent of the U.S. population has had two shots...

I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, maybe because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.

Also, the mandate part of vaccine mandate is legitimately scary. It is reasonable not to trust a big pharma-big government alliance actively controlling our medical life with no ability of the patient to opt out. It is easy to see this ending badly, US healthcare is not known for being full of angelic, selfless and friendly actors. These opinions should be aired.

jjice2• 5 years ago

I assume 20% of the US population can't take the vaccine or something, because they are kids. That suggests YouTube is coming out as a political opponent of ~25% of their customer base. This is an unwise course of action.

Are you counting those children as political opponents? I don't think they have a political interest because they can't get it due to regulation yet, and they're also children.

roenxi5• 5 years ago

55% vacced + 20% kids + 25% likely politically opposed ~= 100%.

Plus some will have gotten the vaccine despite political opposition to the mandates. Being vaccinated is a good idea in a pandemic.

mc326• 5 years ago

I think poster is discounting children altogether as they are outside the scope therefore you’re left with an actual 25%.

lmilcin4• 5 years ago

"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognized as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law by the United Nations."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/principle

It is hard to sympathize with people who sow disinformation that costs people lives.

But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.

Principles are tested not when it is convenient for you to follow them.

What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

"In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech.[1]

(...)

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also an exception to free speech."

So in short. There are existing laws that can be used to decide what is and what is not protected by freedom of speech.

These laws should in my opinion be applied by judicial system, not invented on the spot by corporations.

People should understand they are responsible for what they say online just as if they used other methods of communication.

And if the exceptions to free speech are incorrect or incomplete, we should demand that the law is corrected in a democratic process rather than having companies act on their own.

elliekelly2• 5 years ago

What about YouTube’s right to freedom of expression?

lmilcin4• 5 years ago

YouTube is a company. Freedom of speech only applies to individuals and communities of individuals.

EDIT:

elliekelly, I can't answer because I am being rate limited and can't write new comments on HN.

You have surprised me, but it is sadly true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

josephcsible12• 5 years ago

I wish freedom of expression were GPL-style freedom instead of MIT-style freedom, e.g., "You're free to express whatever opinions you want. You may not keep others from expressing whatever opinions they want."

AndrewBissell2• 5 years ago

But it is also hard to watch principles being ignored for immediate benefit.

This won't even provide any "benefit" in terms of increased vaccination rates, but that's not the real purpose anyway. What they're really doing is carving up large chunks of people into information silos and trying to reduce the amount of communication happening between them.

unethical_ban5• 5 years ago

How so?

If one were charitable to this action, you'd say they're blowing up a silo full of rat poison and disallowing people from adding poison back in.

The balance between "free speech" in the moral, not legal, sense and disinformation is going to be just like "security v. privacy" has been, but perhaps even harder to draw lines for.

If you accept as a premise that most anti-vax sentiment is driven by charlatan media outlets and influencers (and probably nation-state adversaries), and that much of what is repeated by laypeople is an echo of this intentional drivel, and that this drivel is immediately costing not only their own lives, but the lives of others, what do you do? It's literally a disease.

Which the Chinese would say about "people talking about democracy". So there it is: Where, if at all, do we in a "free society" draw the line where harmful disinformation campaigns get cut out?

I argued several years back that the "app layer" of the internet should have more freedom of control over their content, but that the "infrastructure" layer should be expected to be more neutral. In other words, if an anti-vax website or social network got hosted on AWS, it would be a different thing for AWS or a registrar to kick them out.

hestefisk• 5 years ago

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to lie and hurt public health efforts.

fallingknife• 5 years ago

No it absolutely does. This has been ruled on by the courts a million times.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

What I think is needed is people spending more time to figure out how it is possible to reconcile fight against misinformation with preserving basic human right which is ability to express your opinion.

Simple: The right to free speech doesn't mean people have to listen, or guarantee access to a publisher. You can self-publish all you want.

lmilcin4• 5 years ago

This is false argument.

Ability to work with companies is no longer an option if you want any message through.

If you can't post on any social media you are as good as being completely censored.

Mary-Jane• 5 years ago

Thought experiment: how would you feel if YouTube banned all pro-trans content? ...or pro-choice, or anti-Isreal/Jewish material?

It doesn't matter to me if you're against companies censoring any of these things. Be aware that it means you're fine with authoritarianism, so long as it aligns with your politics...

pvm3• 5 years ago

Who will check the fact checkers?

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Certainly not the people who can’t read a scientific publication.

amimrroboto• 5 years ago

It's the top scientists in the world vs Sheryl from South Carolina. The research and testing these professionals do will be good for fact checking.

_v7gu3• 5 years ago

Aren't top scientists in Wuhan the ones who probably got us into this mess?

kristofferR• 5 years ago

This is so dumb, vaccine proponents doesn't have anything to hide (like censoring information from vaccine opponents gives the impression of).

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Correct. You are free to read all the studies. YouTube isn’t a place to learn about vaccines.

CodeWriter234• 5 years ago

Would you please point me to the Clinical Trial Studies for coronavirus vaccines?

themusicgod13• 5 years ago

Can you imagine if the previous generation had this opinion?

"Television isn't the place to learn about the flaws in astrology, or about astronomy, the big bang, conflicting visions of human progress, galileo, and the like... we are totally fine in banning Cosmos and keeping children from learning any alternative to jesus christ our lord and savior"

mypastself4• 5 years ago

It does play into the vaccine opponents’ belief they’re being victimized.

It’s also getting more and more difficult to look up their arguments, if only for the purpose of developing and reasoning about the counterarguments.

Finally, it can lead to banning legitimate questions, such as the ones about alternative origin theories.

lmilcin4• 5 years ago

Moreover, whoever grabs power in future will be able to do the same by argumenting that this has been done before and their opponents said it is right back then.

timnetworks• 5 years ago

What's the thing where things are either nazi bars or supplement pyramids? YouTube* already disallows nazi bars.

Your whole host getting banned when you make your own youtube is the issue at hand, methinks.

WmyEE0UsWAwC2i• 5 years ago

One of The Osterholm update's video (a podcast) was censored for spreading "misinformation".

I hope they can survive this.

pbourke• 5 years ago

For context, Michael Osterholm runs the Center for Infectious Disease Reasearch and Policy at the University of Minnesota and was a member of Biden’s COVID advisory board during the presidential transition.

bxrxdx• 5 years ago

good

xqcgrek23• 5 years ago

They're a private company and can do whatever they want. However, one only needs to see the trending page in any country to see the kind of crap YouTube promotes and profits from. So, please spare me of the corporate propaganda for YouTube's rationale of this decision.

woodpanel2• 5 years ago

"They're a private company and can do whatever they want."

Flies in the face of jurisprudence accross industrialized nations, as many courts again and again ruled that a platform cannot "do whatever they wan't" if they dominate the market and thus effectively are a public space of opinion.

xqcgrek23• 5 years ago

No, they can do what they want -- but you're right, they'll have to face the consequences.

rafaelturk• 5 years ago

As much I condemn anti-vaxxers: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”

user-the-name3• 5 years ago

This is not about "disagreeing with what you say". This is about people literally dying. Not just the people spreading the information either, innocent bystanders that get killed by the disease.

the_snooze• 5 years ago

They still have every right to say what they want. YouTube also has the right not to aid them.

This is the information version of "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

kkoncevicius6• 5 years ago

YouTube of course has the right not to aid them. But we also have the right to point out that YouTube is making a mistake by doing this.

kansface• 5 years ago

As if Youtube is any ordinary company. Some day in the future, with little doubt, the censorship shoe will be on the other foot.

machiaweliczny9• 5 years ago

YT is monopoly

evgen• 5 years ago

Looks to me like they still have the right to say it, YouTube is just opting out of being their distribution system.

root_axis• 5 years ago

They can say it, just not on YouTube.

hef198984• 5 years ago

"Your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins". This anti-vaxx BS is already posing, or at least aggrevating, a serious public health issue. If it was just for the anti-vaxxers, I wouldn't care. It is affecting their children and people that simply cannot get the vaccine. At which point their freedom of reach (not necessarily expression, as far as I know their demonstrations are allowed) has to take the backseat when it comes to other people's health.

karlkloss• 5 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

paws• 5 years ago

Anybody know of examples/precedent where an entity covered by Section 230 lost that protection?

afavour2• 5 years ago

Time for repeat showing of the free speech debate we’ve already had a dozen times, whoopee!

As ever, IMO, the problem isn’t the hosting or the banning, it’s the algorithms. I don’t care whether YouTube hosts anti-vaccine activists, I care that they actively promote anti-vaccine content to users simply because it’s proven to get clicks and earn them money. Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube itself is responsible for this disinformation getting so much traction.

BrianOnHN• 5 years ago

Admitting change to the algo inherently admits fault, so good luck waiting for that. Counsel will never allow it.

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Let me reframe: let’s say that YouTube hosts anti-vax content and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not vaccinate themselves or their children. Some percentage of them dies. Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10,000 people. Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?

zpeti3• 5 years ago

Let me reframe, in spring 2020 the CDC says don't buy or use masks, they don't work. This was spread as the gospel, by the media and probably youtube.

How many people died because of increased infections? Is that Youtube's fault or anyone else who repeated the CDCs guidelines?

dongping5• 5 years ago

Or this way, let’s say that YouTube hosts earlier anti-mask content from Dr. Fauci/CDC and as a result some percentage of people are swayed by this content to not wear mask. Some percentage of them dies.

Do you think that YouTube did a good thing by allowing that content?

afavour2• 5 years ago

IMO one of the reasons these debates go back and forth forever is because it’s impossible to come up hard and fast rules that cover every scenario.

Maybe a poorly thought out analogy but think about cars. There are a ton of car accidents every year, a good number of which result in death. But we don’t ban cars because they’re essential for the way many people live. But if 50% of all car journeys resulted in accidents? Maybe we’d be having a different conversation.

DiabloD33• 5 years ago

That is a moral argument and has no place in a discussion of the laws of a modern western country. We are a system of law, not a system of justice.

Although I do agree with you that anti-vaxers should be treated no different than common terrorists; as Americans, under the law, they have a right to declare that they are terrorists and give their little illogical terrorist rants. The First Amendment is very clear on what is not covered, and the courts have repeatedly confirmed that being wrong, being disingenuous, and lying is covered (as long as you are not committing perjury or other similar, actual, crimes).

Our founding fathers knew exactly what they were doing when they penned this: in their day, they also had their form of denialism. The first amendment is, essentially, "It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubts.", but weaponized against the idiots that shall forever plague us.

That said, if a rational adult, one that we have, as a society, cannot tell the difference between the truth and the lies, then we have both failed as a society, but also have trusted an adult to actually act like one and they, personally, made the choice to act like a spoiled brat; acting like a spoiled brat is not a victimless crime, and sometimes, but not always, they are punished like an adult for violating the trust of the society that they live in.

noxer4• 5 years ago

The whole thing is a "correlation does not imply causation" fallacy because you just assume that changing one thing lead to the change of something else while ignoring all the other effect it has. For example by leaving the content and being a neutral platform the subjective value of the content on the platform is higher. More people who are not sure about something can listen both sides and choose based on that. However by removing it you exclude these people (for a million of other topics too) even trough they could very well end up on the "right" side after doing their own research. They wont do this if its clear that the platform already removed one side and the other therefore is propaganda. So by removing it, how many additional death would this actually cause? You just leave this out. What if it causes thousands of deaths too? Let’s say in absolute numbers it is 10000 people.

You can now make a non-emotionally decision whether removing it or not is actually a good idea because the arbitrary appeal to emotion evens out.

This is the way think about such stuff, not by making arbitrary emotional "arguments" which can not be proven or disproved and may as well be completely irrelevant or even in reverse.

Whenever the "logic" of "X people (less) die if we do Y" is used its an attempt to make it emotional instead of rational it should ring some bells and raise some flags. You can see this with autonomous driving or gun control an many other topics. Its some kind of appeal to emotion fallacy combined with false cause fallacy. And instead of convincing anyone or find common ground it just pushes people to more extreme opposition. Because you "literally kill people if you disagree with X".

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

It's an interesting question, but keep in mind that Youtube allows junk food advertising targeted towards children, which contributes to the obesity epidemic, and obese people have much higher medical needs and tend to die earlier (and are much more sensitive to COVID). Clearly, this contributes to untimely death, right?

So should we ban all junk food advertising on Youtube? Also, how about a ban on all pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube (which is the norm in most countries)?

ihsw• 5 years ago

There is such a thing as anti-mandate pro-vaccine activists and their voice is being squashed as well. There is no nuance to the conversation.

OJFord• 5 years ago

proven to get clicks and earn them money

Aren't they already 'demonetised' (as Youtube terms its withdrawal of adverts and hence money)?

I agree though, simply not recommending them (i.e. you can be linked to them, or get them from search results only) would be better.

ethbr04• 5 years ago

I'd imagine most of this type of thing (prominent anti-vaccine personalities) is externally monetized via donations, as opposed to directly through YouTube.

toyg• 5 years ago

It's all very simple, considering Youtube has had a feature to keep videos out of their search indexes since, I don't know, forever...? It's effectively a form of voluntary shadowbanning, used by people who just want to embed videos somewhere else or, y'know, simply keep them somewhat private. YT could just say "right, anything we object to, gets removed from the search index." Two-minutes job. If you want to be more proactive, stop them from embedding too, so they can't be reposted elsewhere. The videos are then effectively neutered and only the already-nutcase will see them, limiting the virality.

capdeck• 5 years ago

Aren't they already 'demonetised'...

That affects only content creator. YouTube, even if not directly profiting from ads, profits indirectly from you staying on the site and moving on to other 'monetized' videos eventually.

emilfihlman• 5 years ago

Demonetised videos can be loss leaders, pulling views to other monetised videos and having the user stay on the platform.

VikingCoder• 5 years ago

Not entirely true. If it's hosted on YouTube and then goes viral on Twitter or Facebook...

chmsky00• 5 years ago

The stupid information is still out there.

It’s just not on YouTube.

We don’t live in the reality where the local book store and media owner keeping information away actually had an impact.

This only effects YouTube. Of the millions of other sites out there.

I think even the smart people are a bit stuck on YouTubes marketing effects on their limbic brain versus the reality; the bad info is just a Google search or friend posting in private away for anyone still.

YouTube is not the center of the internet.

vibrato26• 5 years ago

The only disinformation I've seen about these vaccines has been from Fauci and other pro vaxxers.

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” - Joe Biden

there was never a basis for this statement, making it clear disinformation. Grass roots research doesn't fit the bill of what that word means.

KittenInABox• 5 years ago

I might suggest we avoid using superlatives. I have seen disinformation about vaccines both from mainstream media presumptions that breakthrough infections won't happen at all, and also from other mainstream media publishing entire segments that the vaccine might cause infertility in women or somehow affect the fetus (a spreading of FUD basically).

scoutt• 5 years ago

“You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Not to defend Biden, but the vaccine decreases the probabilities of getting COVID. You still get infected with sars-cov-2, and you are probably still contagious, but it's unlikely you get COVID (as in COronaVIrus Disease, the disease produced by sars-cov-2 virus (or coronavirus), that is the thing that eventually kills you and/or jeopardizes the public health system).

swayvil5• 5 years ago

It isn't the guy with the gun. It's actually the bullets that are to blame.

ethbr04• 5 years ago

Ha. I think part of this struggle, to borrow your analogy, is that YouTube and Facebook are organizationally blind to the fact that they built a gun.

Or maybe Google is concerned. And Facebook just doesn't care.

But the root cause is "algorithms for increasing engagement will prefer shock content." Solve that, and they wouldn't need to band-aid issues like this.

afarrell3• 5 years ago

There seems to be an AI safety problem here: The youtube algorithm is optimizing for engagement at the cost of some other less-quantifiable human value like social trust.

https://youtu.be/L5pUA3LsEaw

macinjosh5• 5 years ago

I am gonna go out on a limb and say Google's product dashboards likely all have engagement metrics and probably close to zero have "social trust" metrics.

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

I'm really curious if it would be possible for Youtube / Google etc. to expose their algorithmic interface to their public users so that they could twiddle with the settings themselves - or is that just technologically impossible given the internal structure of their systems? I really have no idea, but I've been wondering about it for some time.

goldenbikeshed10• 5 years ago

Technologically possible, corporocratically impossible - it would lose the company money.

BeefWellington2• 5 years ago

I personally really preferred old Youtube, where your subscriptions were the main thing you saw along with the absolute "most popular viewed today" kinds of things.

The algorithm has only made the site worse in my experience and I always go directly to my subscriptions to be able to at least see things I'm subbed to.

syshum12• 5 years ago

It appears to me that YT is actively trying to move away from subscriptions completely, relaying on this recommendation algorithm for everything

hell I would not be surprised if with in 5 years they remove the subscribe button completely, replacing it with just the notification bell

toby-2• 5 years ago

I'm of the same opinion. A user's subscriptions seemingly matter very little nowadays, I've noticed. The focus on recommendations is so heavy I'm very often recommended videos I've already watched, some of them multiple times; very few recommendations are videos (old or new) from channels I'm subscribed to.

I've also noticed that many content creators are now offering email newsletters (such as Tom Scott) and encouraging subscribers to connect outside of YouTube, presumably as a response to this.

sneak9• 5 years ago

Be thankful they still let you view a chronological feed at all.

sz4kerto• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that 'banning' and 'changing the algorithm so that it doesn't pop up' is meaningfully different. We can just assume that YT hasn't banned this content, but it never ever shows up in recommendations. The effect would be practically the same.

It's a hard problem to solve.

syshum12• 5 years ago

Banning means the content is not accessible at all.

Changing the Algorithm would mean the content is less discoverable but could still spread outside the platform via alternative methods, such as Tweets, Links, emails, slack, etc.

There is a difference, and the effect is not the same

vkou• 5 years ago

Bans like this look incredibly stupid when you realise YouTube itself is responsible for this disinformation getting so much traction.

People keep repeating that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and more speech is more money for YouTube.

Unsurprisingly, more speech on this subject has not managed to drown out the nonsense, but it has done a great job of amplifying it.

chrisco255• 5 years ago

Techno-fascism rears its ugly head once more. These mRNA shots aren't flawless medications with zero side effects. People are getting strokes. People are getting heart inflammation. It's not even working against new variants. The emperor really doesn't have clothes. I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes. You need 3 booster shots apparently in less than 9 months and you'll probably still get Covid. But meanwhile lets throw out all human rights that hundreds of millions died for and many more suffered for.

The reason freedom of speech is a must in a free society is that speaking is the same as thinking. Who watches the watchmen? There is no amount of "misinformation" that could ever hold a candle to the absolute evil that has been perpetrated throughout history by outlawing or banning or shunning free speech.

avianlyric3• 5 years ago

I've had dozens of vaccines in my life. The Covid vaccine might be the worst-performing vaccine of all time as far as effectiveness goes.

Funny thing about those other vaccines. They protect against viruses that we already have collective heard immunity for.

As it happens, it turns out that herd immunity substantial reduces community transmission, and thus makes vaccines appear more effective. Without that, you’re pretty much always gonna get breakthrough infections.

So you want the COVID vaccine to be as effective as other vaccines. Then get vaxxed, and get everyone in your community vaxxed.

ookblah3• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

Just a no win situation. It's too easy for bad characters to screw up an entire system with little effort (look at trolls, spammers, etc). Either you moderate everyone and slippery slope down into censorship where the tools used to police are used on good actors, or you do nothing and watch the bad actors poison your entire ecosystem.

mariodiana7• 5 years ago

"Misinformation" should not be combatted by anything other than better, more persuasive information.

ookblah3• 5 years ago

Great in theory, but if you've ever debated someone who is not acting in good faith online it's near impossible. Their energy input is an order of magnitude lower than yours. And yes, in this specific context it IS misinformation, disinformation, or just flat out false.

seqastian• 5 years ago

Too bad that is not how humans work. If the good information is complicated and scary, we will go for easy and pleasing every time.

ramses0• 5 years ago

You’re wrong, several Oxford and Harvard studies show that misinformation is best fought with more misinformation. Either that, or your own personal beliefs, which are _way_ more true than something studied for years by ivory tower academics who are always changing their mind. Like and subscribe to my podcast and buy my T-Shirts……

jhedwards3• 5 years ago

Good luck explaining to the mob that "there in fact is no fire", as they charge out of the theater.

I typically agree with you, and it was justice Louis Brandeis who said it so well: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

On the other hand, the one exception to this is when the speech is question causes a clear and present danger. We are facing a rather perverse crisis in the world right now with respect to vaccine misinformation. I'm not saying I know the answer, but I know we did not get here through a lack of quality, persuasive information.

kgwxd• 5 years ago

If the hare never takes a nap, the tortoise will never catch up.

atty• 5 years ago

This is an outmoded concept based on the idea that humans are purely rational creatures, which we already know is false. Just providing better information does not sway individuals. People are far more swayed by information from their “tribe”, even if that information is patently false, than they are by quantitatively better information, because it makes them feel good. That’s why actions like this seem to be necessary.

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

Why do we always assume that it's "misinformation" and that if people were told or shown better, they would want better. Many times, people actually want the bad thing. I can't help but see the "Free Speech" alarmism on HN originating from the fact that the market of ideas is no longer participating in arguments about right-wing viewpoints, but is actively moving against them and taking them off the shelf.

mtberatwork• 5 years ago

Related: "Why Science Can't Settle Political Disputes" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693269

krageon5• 5 years ago

Better information is not more persuasive.

enraged_camel• 5 years ago

Nah. Brandolini's Law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, explains why this will not work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The gist of it is that making up bullshit takes almost no energy, whereas refuting that bullshit effectively will be very time-consuming. This is exacerbated by the fact that bullshit is usually packaged in a way that makes it spread way faster by, for example, exploiting social media "engagement" algorithms.

There are corollaries to this. For example, the idiom "a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes."

yupper322• 5 years ago

Combating misinformation with more persuasive information takes about 10-100x more effort than putting out the original misinformation.

_moof9• 5 years ago

People are not little machines that accept information as input, apply impartial rules of logic, and then spit out a correct answer. People are social-emotional animals with a carefully guarded sense of self, a basic need to belong, and all kinds of nervous system structures that, when activated, prevent rational thought.

This is not as simple as putting more information out there.

tsfranke• 5 years ago

Agree completely on a no win situation.

Censorship can keep good information out.

No censorship can make whoever yells the loudest be the most heard, which can snowball into millions of ramifications.

I'd like to go back to the early internet days where people had to at least make a geocities site to spread their word, with no financial incentives to getting more clicks or viewers. It wasn't perfect, but you had to be seeking that group / audience rather than having it thrown in your face everywhere.

z3ncyberpunk• 5 years ago

...or you just do some actual moderating instead of offloading your workload on machines. People worry about idiots and disinformation yet ignore and allow way more non conspiracy nutjobs all the time. Big Tech has such a cognitive dissonance its dizzying

inglor_cz8• 5 years ago

This isn't a new situation. Free speech debates are as old as civilization itself. The printing press was at least as disruptive as the Internet, precisely because relatively small players could sabotage power of huge organizations such as the Church relatively cheaply.

I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.

We might actually be over the crest of max poisoning in social media. Lots of people have realized that such channels are not to be trusted. This is partly masked by the fact that a lot of new content is still churned out by dedicated players; silent majorities are silent.

burrows• 5 years ago

A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.

Like the millions of people who unironically watch CNN, FOX, ESPN, MTV and whatever else TeeVee networks are carrying?

tw042• 5 years ago

I think that the old classical liberal principles still apply. A certain fringe of the population will eat any propaganda unthinkingly, domestic or foreign. But if a majority was so uncritical, democracies would have collapsed a long time ago.

I think most Americans are delusional and think "the good guy always win" because of the outcomes of WWI and WWII. The fact that Nazi Germany existed at all, or that democracy is non-existent in the second largest economy in the world should tell you that it's just not accurate to pretend that only the fringe of the population buys into propaganda.

53% of registered Republicans still believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election based on nothing other than propaganda... I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.

drewwwwww2• 5 years ago

the printing press did not induce algorithmically amplified radicalization in order to serve more underwear ads. youtube and facebook are different.

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 years ago

The printing press didn't allow adversaries to flood your citizens sources of information with disinformation.

throwaway0a5e7• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation

Yeah. Don't do shit. Let the stupid run its course.

Trying to combat disinformation is like bombing villages in hope of hitting an ammo dump. The collateral damage is more damaging than ignoring the problem.

Why do we always have to be Doing Something(TM)?

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

You're arguing to let low information or critical thinking challenged people die because of the actions of others (whether those actions are in good faith or not is immaterial). If Youtube decides it wants to take action to promote the public welfare, that's their right as a business.

"Doing Something" is usually harm reduction within the framework of law and public policy, and there's a lot of harm out there, hence the continual debate over a) should something be done? and b) what can be done?

strgcmc2• 5 years ago

Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.

So, maybe there are situations where doing nothing is okay, but I don't think very large scale problems that require coordinated large scale action over long time scales to address, like global pandemics or mitigating the impacts of man made climate change, are the right situations for that kind of approach. Too many thousands/millions will die, too many billions/trillions of dollars of damage will be done, via inaction.

Of course, it all comes down to whether you can stomach the cost of inaction, because maybe you don't think the impacts are all that bad. I don't have an answer to that, if two parties fundamentally disagree about what the cost of impact will be or whether that cost is acceptable (e.g. many folks in the US apparently think 600k+ COVID deaths in the US isn't a big deal, and wasn't worth the interventions applied to mitigate it to that level).

Espressosaurus2• 5 years ago

Don't do shit is how you turn into 4chan.

And even 4chan has moderation.

valeness2• 5 years ago

"Let stupid run it's course"

4.5 Million Deaths Later...

papito• 5 years ago

As people already mentioned here, try running a free-for-all moderation-free discussion board and see what happens.

Back in the day, the Internet was full of HTML discussion boards just like this one, and idiots were banned with no questions asked. It was beautiful, and no one complained.

This site has moderation, no one is complaining. YouTube is a "person" - legally now, but somehow they don't have the responsibility to be a good citizen?

The fact that allegedly smart people on HN use the term "censorship" in the context of non-government control is pretty shocking. You don't know censorship.

"Censorship" has absolutely nothing to do with it. A private company can allow/disallow whatever content they f---ing please, and the Wild West capitalists on this board should be the first ones to support this move. Who is going to force them? The government? Oh, hello.

smnrchrds5• 5 years ago

In Alberta, the <20% of individuals who remain unvaccinated make up >90% of ICU admissions. ICUs are so full surgeries are being postponed, resources are being diverted to COVID ICUs, and they may have to start triaging ICU patients soon because of the lack of capacity, all of which affects not only the unvaccinated but everyone needing medical care in the province. Letting the situation run its course will kill and has killed way more than just the anti-vax.

gentle3• 5 years ago

Great point!

josephcsible12• 5 years ago

I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

You say that like it's a bad thing. If we don't stop the censorship now, it'll be too late to stop it in a year or two when we're the ones being censored for some reason.

mcovey• 5 years ago

I think it's already too late. Removal of unpopular / non-mainstream opinions from large social media sites is now the norm and is celebrated (by those who didn't get silenced).

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

I can confirm your suspicions in my case. I'm vaccinated (against COVID, the flu, and tetanus, and all the other things you can get vaccinated against), but I think YouTube is wrong here.

goldenbikeshed10• 5 years ago

I think the problem is less what YouTube is doing here and more that YouTube has this kind of power. If every country had 10 video Websites like Youtube that each had a 10th of the users from that country, and maybe some international users, then one portal taking a total ban-all hard-ass stance on misinformation wouldn't be a big deal.

tldr: Monopolies bad, YouTube bad, facebook bad.

krageon5• 5 years ago

I think YouTube is wrong here.

When your child gets polio because some soccer mom spent too much time listening to crackpots online and decided not to vaccinate their children, that's when you realise they were correct. And perhaps society as a whole did not nearly go far enough.

EastOfTruth2• 5 years ago

I've also been vaccinated twice and think that this is a slippery slope we have been going down for quite a while.

lucumo• 5 years ago

Yes, exactly. It's just so similar to forum spam. Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.

Like the forum moderators, it's perfectly okay for Google to just not want the headache of dealing with pests.

a13692099933• 5 years ago

Free speech absolutists were far less in favour of free speech when it came to banning viagra-salesmen.

Nope. We're in favor of viagra salesmen being able to speak to anyone who wants to listen to them, same as anyone else. It's just that effectively noone wants to listen to them, and we tend to design things accordingly because we're lazy and noone is complaining (that they want to listen to viagra salesmen).

mbesto10• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?

Actually, people have, we've just moved on from the more important discussion which is whether YouTube (and other similar forms of social media / UGC) should exist in its current form.

I personally do not like regulation, but this is a situation in which the harm of social media / UGC is starting to outshine its benefit. I'm not sure if an outright ban of sites like YT is warranted but I think the frictionless experience of uploading/commenting/etc. on YT should be questioned.

nradov11• 5 years ago

Fortunately the First Amendment doesn't allow the US government to regulate such activities just because elitist authoritarians consider them harmful. This is an area where fundamental rights overrule cost-benefit analysis.

marcosdumay5• 5 years ago

Well, that's the entire point of principles.

(I do actually not hold this one principle as absolutely, because Youtube is designed for public manipulation, so they have the onus of ensuring their manipulation isn't a bad one. But I do surely hold it for a neutral channel and that governments must ensure neutral channels exist.)

awofford• 5 years ago

Standing by people you don't agree with is a pretty hallmark demonstration of "principle."

seph-reed2• 5 years ago

YouTube's algorithm actively pushes people down rabbit holes towards fringe content.

The best way to combat this is not invest billions of dollars in infrastructure meant to do exactly the thing it just did.

Bad actors didn't poison the system, youtube covered itself in lacerations and jumped into sewer water. They stand back watching their algorithm divide and extremize everyone on every side of every debate, and now that the flame wars are starting to turn into mass graves they're hoping they can stop the whole thing by banning a few extremes here and there.

Just a no win situation

I think there is a clear win here: AI should not be allowed to do what it is doing. Humans can't handle it. And the cost of lives is on Facebook and YouTube, plenty of employees took a stand to say exactly what was/is happening and were ignored.

SergeAx9• 5 years ago

A simple question: do you beleive that suppressing freedom of speech will seriously inclrease a number of vaccinated? I beleive that the best outcome is it will stay around the same. Some sensitive people will calm down and eventually vaccinate, others will become stronger anti-vaxxers, because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".

sneak9• 5 years ago

A private site like YouTube choosing to censor content on its own servers is not suppressing freedom of speech.

In fact, it is YouTube exercising freedom of speech by wielding editorial control over their own website.

burnished• 5 years ago

Another simple question: if actions were ineffective like you describe, why would people take them? There isn't some cosmic homeostasis keeping the world the way you percieve it. If you get rid of anti-vax videos, fewer people are going to be exposed to that, and fewer people will be resultantly anti-vax.

mcguire13• 5 years ago

If you don't mind my asking, how old are you? And did you grow up in the United States?

If you grew up in the US and are (significantly) older than Facebook and Youtube, you were raised in a society that had significantly greater suppression of free speech than is being discussed here. Nobody handed crazy people a megaphone and a world-wide platform to spread their nuttiness. They had to stand out in front of the post office or mall entrance (where they would be shooed away by security quickly) to enlighten the world about the evils of fluoride.

But that's probably just Bill Gates' chip talking.

weaksauce5• 5 years ago

do you beleive[sic] that suppressing freedom of speech

wildly wrong take on what the first amendment means....

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

This seems incredibly naive. The present proliferation of anti-vaccine sentiment is almost entirely the result of propaganda pushed by a tiny number of people being amplified by social media. You can argue about whether or not it's right to suppress information on principle, but I don't see how you can argue it's ineffective. It's ineffective at combating actual truth when things like the Supreme Soviet just lie about meeting their five year plan goals and imprison anyone who presents real data, but scientific journals and newspapers introducing some editorial curation in what they were willing to amplify worked perfectly fine at actually suppressing fringe pseudoscience and false conspiracy theories for centuries.

I get it. Some conspiracies turn out to be true. Watergate happened. The Panama Papers happened. COINTELPRO happened. The FBI probably really did assassinate Fred Hampton. Galileo was right. But for every Galileo, there are a few thousand cranks thinking they disproved special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine and refusing to grant them a platform has worked fine forever until social media came along and gave everyone an audience.

notacoward7• 5 years ago

Very tricky, embedding an assumption - that a particular example conforming to long recognized free-speech exceptions is the same as general suppression of free speech - in your question. Have you stopped beating your wife? Maybe, if you're acting in good faith and really are prepared to consider an answer other than the one you've ordained, you could try phrasing the question in a less prejudicial way.

a13692099933• 5 years ago

because "if it is forbidden by authorities, it should be somehow true".

Note that that is incorrect, and ironically demonstrates a unjustifiably high degree of trust in authorities. Rather, if someone supports censoring something, it means that they believe that it[0]'s true. But that doesn't mean they're right - their revealed internal beliefs are no more infalliable than their externally claimed ones.

0: Technically, they believe that something in the general class of claims they're attempting to censor (eg some anti-vaxx claim, but not necessarily any of the specific ones that have actually been made) is true.

shadowgovt3• 5 years ago

Principles aren't worth anything if people don't stick by them when expediency would recommend another course of action.

... This is why I chucked this particular principle overboard years ago. I don't personally think it holds water in light of irrational human actors and an under-informed public, given the immense power of modern bidirectional communications media.

mythrwy5• 5 years ago

How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method?

Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?

Solstinox• 5 years ago

Hypothetically, what do you do when there isn’t enough quality information to gauge “disinformation” from “information?”

trezemanero2• 5 years ago

Yes? If we continue to allow explicit censoring this will become normal.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

If you have a formula to infallibly decide that A is a "bad actor" for any A in actual practice, you have solved the organizational problem of the past few millennia.

xanaxagoras2• 5 years ago

I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

I know I am. As someone with 2 shots that sympathizes quite a lot with the people who are commonly and ridiculously maligned as "anti-vaxxers", as though their position is even remotely similar to the people that term accurately described pre-2020, this will make my people dig their heels in even more. Good.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant, remember? Democracy dies in darkness, remember? The left has morphed into a censorious dictatorship that castigates anyone who doesn't think specific thoughts and punishes wrongthink by making pariahs out of those who wronglythink it. This is just a prominent example of the same authoritarian movement expressed through the burgeoning hegemony of big tech. Shit like this doesn't convince anyone, we'll just leave you to fester in your echo chamber, oblivious as you are to the fact that we'll be festering in our own.

Speaking of which, this announcement doesn't bother me at all. Youtube is over, it's just corporate sponsored tepid garbage at this point. It's not interesting anymore because creators aren't permitted to speak freely - not just w/r/t COVID. We are already moving to platforms where free expression is allowed and supported, and I hope Google does even more to hasten the exodus.

jjtgbbjui• 5 years ago

Provide a better education for the poor. I don’t mean education about a particular subject; better education in general.

In almost all conspiracy theories, one side has a lot of facts, the other has a lot of “feelings”. If you try having a conversation with someone who believes in some conspiracy you’ll eventually get to “I just don’t feel…”

nonameiguess2• 5 years ago

How on earth is YouTube supposed to do that? They have no control over the however many thousands of public school systems exist in the United States, let alone education in the rest of the world.

vimy• 5 years ago

People who don’t want to take the vaccine come from all walks of life. Not just the poor or uneducated.

chefkoch8• 5 years ago

Ok, and you get this how through school boards who don't want to talk about slavery and want to teach creationism?

And in what timescale, 2 generations?

ptaipale9• 5 years ago

Covid vaccine hesitancy does not seem to be about poor education, nor about poverty. The visible antivaxx activists are well-to-do people.

Distrust of government and authorities is a big factor. You have much more vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. than in Nordics (high-trust societies); Russians and Bulgarians are extremely sceptic of their governments, and extremely sceptic of vaccines.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

disconjointed4• 5 years ago

there is definitely a better way. i am building that right now

credit_guy• 5 years ago

I don't know myself; however Steven Pinker published yesterday a new book called "Rationality". He promises to give the readers tools to cope with exactly this type of situations. I don't know if he delivers on it, I just started the book, but I really hope he does.

https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-What-Seems-Scarce-Matters...

JeremyNT• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement," which inevitably leads to amplifying compelling but technically incorrect and outright dangerous content.

The thing to remember is that YouTube is essentially designed to boost disinformation. As implemented they have no effective counterbalance to this.

Is it also "censorship" when the YT recommendation system effectively buries factual and useful information for some people just because it's less engaging than the misinformation they currently consume? Maybe so?

The solution seems pretty obvious to me. There's a middle ground between banning and allowing to run rampant - and that's to add human reviewers to counterbalance the terrible job currently being done by their automatic recommendation system, and manually down-rank disinformation so it is less likely to be surfaced automatically in peoples' playlists.

Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.

So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.

makeworld• 5 years ago

Social networks seem to be unable to optimize for anything other than "engagement,"

This is mostly due to the profit motive. Optimizing for time spent on the platform benefits shareholders.

oblio11• 5 years ago

I would argue it's much, much, worse than what you're saying. I mean this part:

Google will never do it, because it would 1) require paying humans to do work, which is expensive, and 2) it wouldn't drive engagement and generate clicks.

Every regular business out there needs support. In the form of pre-sales, sales, post-sales, actual support folks, etc.

Google's entire business model is predicated on there being no meaningful human support.

If they're forced to implement the level of support their worldwide, what-they-consider-top-notch operation would actually require, their business model goes bust.

Ok, I'm probably exaggerating, but their profit margins would go down from ~25% to probably something like 5%.

They will <<never>>, ever do it, unless someone puts a legal gun to their head.

smileysteve• 5 years ago

You assign this to social media, but it's is seemingly true of politics as well. (Reference vaccines in 2016 GOP Primary debate about vaccines)

strogonoff2• 5 years ago

I agree that adding human reviewers could help; but it will not resolve the root cause of YT being designed to boost disinformation in the name of engagement.

It’s encoded in their business model: the paying customer and the source of revenue is the advertiser. Thus, their interests are radically different from those of the users.

I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about such models, especially applied at scale, that I would not even oppose some light, focused regulation that brings it in check.

Otherwise, adding human moderation could maybe help in short term but the business model with find its way to ruin things again.

foota3• 5 years ago

So they just take the easy way out, so they can keep on doing what they do.

I don't think this is a good takeaway, they can always replace bans with deprioritizing, so banning is a conscious choice.

mlindner4• 5 years ago

I got the vaccine and I'm pro-vaccine in general (for vaccines that are long term preventative, not single-year preventative, ex: never gotten flu vaccine) however I keep finding myself wanting to defend the anti-covid-vaxxers as they're fighting a fight I sort of feel like I understand.

sensanaty3• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?

Yeah, don't do anything? Why do we have to do anything about """disinformation"""? What'll happen in a few years when the things you stand for and believe in are labelled as disinformation? Because if you start censoring and combating "disinformation" now, it's only a matter of time until the same practices start affecting you and the things you stand for.

Besides, do you really think banning people off of platforms for wrongthink is more likely to make them change their minds? If anything, those kinds of actions cause resentment to fester, which only leads to more radicalization (for lack of a better term) in the future.

goatlover15• 5 years ago

This assumes that disinformation can't be identified objectively. Claiming that COVID vaccines implant a microchip is simply false. There's no good reason to allow that sort of claim to spread on social media in the midst of a pandemic where people can die because they believe blatantly false conspiracy theories.

You're committing the slippery slope fallacy. That any kind of censorship leads to the bad kind of censorship, instead of there being a reasonable standard for banning harmful disinformation, and not just differences in political, religious or whatever views. Societies always have to maintain some kind of balance between individual rights and the collective good.

AmericanChopper• 5 years ago

Misinformation, aside from being a rather subjective thing to define, isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s just a symptom of it.

The cause of the problem is people losing trust in their institutions. People not trusting pharmaceutical companies barely needs any explanation due to their history of scandals (any opioid crisis threads on HN today?).

People not trusting public health institutions is a bit more serious. But it’s a perfectly rational reaction given how much they’ve lied over the course of the pandemic. Looking to misinformation as the source of the problem is just a way to deflect responsibility.

If the problem you’re trying to solve is “how do we combat misinformation”, then “strictly controlling the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” seems like a reasonable response to a lot of people.

But if your problem is “why have people lost trust in our institutions”, then “because we failed to strictly control the information they’re allowed to consume, and the things they’re allowed to say” is quite obviously a counterproductive KGB-style response.

diegoveralli• 5 years ago

I believe that tradeoffs between individual freedom and the common good are necessary. So I am biased in favour of intervening when it's necessary.

But it's very hard to see how these social network interventions are well thought out and have considered all the possible side effects, many of which are mentioned in other comments. I suppose they're tracking the data and will change course if this doesn't work how they expected..

Still, rather than being a case of deplatforming harmful speech, these look like amputations of entire conversations from the service, maybe to take the spotlight off the degenerate nature of Youtube as a human communication platform.

It's clear that the ability of bad characters to screw up an entire system, as you say, is at least partially enabled by Youtube's incentives, and the features those lead to (the old radicalization = engagement fiasco for example). A better way to combat disinformation would be to understand how Youtube often brings the worst out of its viewers, and to fix that. But it's not clear who has the incentive or the obligation to do it.

The alternative is to move the conversation to other types of social networks, with other incentives. But that seems even harder.

What is clear to me is that having most of the world get their news from a service that algorithmically (I think, it's unclear from the article) bans a fully vaccinated, pro-vaccine M.D. for suggesting people who have been infected have immunity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407), to give an example, is not ideal. If they choose to do this instead of tackling the problems in their recommendation system, which rewards disinformation and other harmful types of content in all sorts of topics, not just vaccines, then it's even worse.

deadpannini3• 5 years ago

"Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?"

Yes. Combat disinformation by refuting it. This requires credibility, and censorship is one of the fastest ways to burn that down.

ptaipale9• 5 years ago

The covid disinformation is like a religion; no amount of researched data is going to change peoples minds. Believe me, I've been patient in explaining facts and referring to data, but people just report fabricated data memes and click the laughing emoji (which in fact should be removed from Facebook...)

m-p-32• 5 years ago

The problem is that bullshit takes significantly less effort to produce than a well-researched counter-argument.

With the sheer volume of disinformation out there, you can't even start to imagine having the required manpower to squash it all with refutation alone.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

People don't fall for this stuff because they've weighed up the evidence for and against.

_moof9• 5 years ago

Combat disinformation by refuting it.

Got any ideas that might actually have a non-zero chance of working?

MrYellowP• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision?

Censorship is always bad. Always. When people accept it on a broader scale, more censorship will be applied eventually. People already accept it. At some point, broad censorship becomes the norm.

What needs to be disregarded completely is the fact that it's about a vaccine. People shouldn't talk about censorship in context of what's being censored. Censorship itself should always be the topic.

The fact that there's people dumb enough to believe things they shouldn't, isn't a problem that censorship solves. Furthermore are these people only so dumb, because politics made them dumb. They went to schools that made, or kept, them dumb.

By "dumb" I mean "incapable of thinking critically", which - to be fair - also applies to a lot of people on the vaxing side of the equation.

What they need is education. Locking them out of the public is only going to make them grow "underground". That's definitely not preferrable.

notacoward7• 5 years ago

So your answer to GP's question is no, you don't have any suggestions for how to fight misinformation. Thanks for that.

MrRiddle2• 5 years ago

You don’t, like you’re not supposed to lead war on drugs. It’s a battle against the symptoms not the cause.

shartacct• 5 years ago

Someone want to throw out there a better way to combat disinformation than just armchair criticizing their decision? I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

No, because it's pointless to legitimatize conspiratorial or fascistic views by engaging in a one-sided debate where one side is backed by scientific fact and the other is backed by Karen on facebook's idea that the election was stolen and that a COVID vaccine will kill you.

I would argue that there is no reason why freedom of speech should apply when you are actively trying to undermine the country (treason) and sow chaos/fear among the populace (terrorism).

StanislavPetrov• 5 years ago

I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

Part of the issue is the blanket characterization of everyone who doesn't verbatim repeat the preferred rhetoric of Youtube/Google as "anti-vaxxers". As everyone informed and intelligent knows, the government, the corporate media and the "intelligence agencies" have been, by far, the greatest disseminators of "disinformation" for decades. From the Bay of Tonkin to babies pulled from incubators to WMD in Iraq to Hunter Biden's laptop being a Russian plot. The problem is that this sort of disinformation is not only allowed, but amplified by these same corporate media outlets (and their government handlers) who claim that we desperately need to eliminate free speech. You want to fight disinformation? Teach people how to think critically and be necessarily skeptical of everything they are told, no matter what the source. Teach people how to examine evidence that underlies assertions, and reject assertions that are made without evidence (or, worse yet, claims of "secret evidence" that are rampant in corporate media and government sources). Except this is the opposite of what Google/Youtube and the government want. They want total control over the information flow, along with a low-information population that uncritically soaks up whatever propaganda they are saturated with. They don't want a population that is equipped with the tools needed to sort through the lies and bullshit - they just want to control which lies and what bullshit they are exposed to.

Grustaf2• 5 years ago

I think a big part of vaccine resistance is because of the insane levels of propaganda and censorship.

Anyone who is even slightly suspicious of authorities will be much more hesitant to take a vaccine when any criticism of it is effectively forbidden.

Put it the other way around, how many will be convinced to get vaccinated thanks to censorship? Here in Scandinavia, I'm sure at least 99% of people happily give their children the standard childhood vaccines, so it's not like people are anti-vaccines in general.

heavyset_go5• 5 years ago

I almost feel like people are siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

This is called "spite". Turns out that the aphorism about one cutting of their nose to spite their face is incredibly apt.

swiley• 5 years ago

I was quiet about it until the mandate and planning to get vaccinated once everything child out.

After that I’ll die before I get vaccinated and I’ve been posting about it under my real name which is something I almost always avoid doing with non-software politics.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

siding with the anti-vaxxers out of "principle".

A large media company like Google banning content that is heavily politicized by partisan politics is a big threat.

Jimmc4144• 5 years ago

The problem is that questions about the vaccine are being labeled as anti-vaccine. Real data about the side effects of the vaccine constitutes science not anti-vax propaganda. It is distressing that supporters of informed consent are being lumped in with QAnon.

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Maybe YouTube isn’t the best place to discuss results of scientific inquiry?

Jimmc4144• 5 years ago

Why not?

uuddlrlr3• 5 years ago

If you're not already subscribed to Two Minute Papers you oughta go check them out

https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai

risk0005• 5 years ago

What if we don't want to be told by you where we can and can't have a discussion?

Geee• 5 years ago

I'm starting to believe in the conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories are created by a conspiracy to make rational talking points easier to attack and silence. Rational dissidents can be easily silenced if they are connected to these propaganda movements.

When there's a flood of misinformation, then it's hard for anyone to get factual information out. It's a way to censor information by flooding it with adjacent misinformation to dilute and discredit the message.

TrispusAttucks9• 5 years ago

Another related tactic now popular is:

    "Always Accuse Your Enemies of Your Own Sins"

Incredibly hard to defend against. I'll leave it to the reader to research the origin of this disgusting tactic.

notacoward7• 5 years ago

"Truth decay" is the common term for this. Usually it's considered as an attack on expertise and authority, but associating a belief with a government conspiracy is no different than associating it with any other conspiracy. "Rational dissidents" is not redundant. Being a dissident doesn't make someone rational, and being conventional doesn't make someone irrational. All such assumptions or insinuations are forms of truth decay.

felistoria2• 5 years ago

One of the CIA's favorite moves!

bena10• 5 years ago

The real data is that the common side effects are negligible and the serious side effects are exceedingly rare.

Over 6 billion doses have been administered since they were first given early this year. Even if you were waiting for the "guinea pigs" to experience side effects, that point has long passed. There is no massive die off. No massive set of complications. I work in a building where over 90% of the people have received two doses of Pfizer. In April. Everyone here has three arms, six toes, and a glorious horn, just like they're supposed to.

If you aren't convinced by now, you're not supporting "informed consent" you're conflating "being a contrarian" with "being concerned".

notacoward7• 5 years ago

The problem is that questions about the vaccine are being labeled as anti-vaccine.

When is a question not a question? When - despite phrasing - it admits no possibility of a satisfactory answer. Then it is functionally a statement, and should be treated as such with associated burdens of proof etc.

It is distressing that supporters of informed consent are being lumped in with QAnon.

And how is one supposed to tell the difference, when every outward appearance is the same?

longhairedhippy25• 5 years ago

I agree with the sentiment, however it does not appear folks are putting actual science forward in their arguments. How do you rank people sticking spoons to their face and saying the vaccine magnetized them alongside serious discourse?

The "questions" that Tucker Carlson are not "questions" at all. "What if taking the vaccine turns you into a newt? I'm just asking questions here" (not an actual quote but along the lines of his questioning). People asking questions in good faith should definitely be discussed, it's the only way forward. People asking "questions" purely as a method to sow doubt and further their personal agenda is harmful.

Uberphallus• 5 years ago

I'm normally against this kind of thing, but then I read the comments, even here on HN, and kind of see it as the lesser evil.

seph-reed2• 5 years ago

The fact that so many people are willing to choose a "lesser evil" is striking to me.

I wasn't even done with High School by the time I figured out that any dichotomy of two evils is a dead end, and that there is always a better place to focus energy upstream.

In this case, AI algorithms are the core problem. Their metrics for success (view time) appear to often lead to extremes. Nothing needs to be banned, it definitely needs to stop being suggested though.

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

"Even" here on HN?

Frankly, every time I read the comments on articles about COVID on HN I lose more respect for this community. Been here for years, but I may just leave and never come back.

mach1ne2• 5 years ago

People don't see what the actual problem here is - perhaps because they don't want to see. What is happening is very much the transformation from an open society to one where freedom of speech is limited and certain other individual rights are stripped away. Perhaps not de jure, but de facto.

And sure, one might argue that it's for a good cause (even though it's a complex topic). However, the fact is that as this is done once, it becomes something that can be leveraged as the norm. There is a very real danger here, and nobody knows whether it will realize or not.

The question is not whether you can post anti-vax content today. It's whether you can post anti-anything tomorrow.

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Yes our freedoms are being eroded. It’s a slippery slope. All that bullshit.

Come on. A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying. Oh and by the way don’t they have the right to do what they want? You want what, regulation to prohibit this?

throwaway0a5e7• 5 years ago

Youtube doesn't give two shits about people dying. They care about not drawing the ire of advertisers or legislators.

mach1ne2• 5 years ago

When a private company with a market share of information as large as Youtube acts as an arbitrer of truth, regulation to prevent this would be nice, yes.

derbOac• 5 years ago

I'm sort of sympathetic to that argument except:

1. I think at the end of the day, the problem isn't "does YouTube have the right to do this?" it's "should YouTube be doing this, given their status?" For me even though they have the right to, I think it's just the wrong thing to do.

I personally am baffled by how the US as a society seems to be devaluing free speech principles in the private and public sphere due to some argument that it's needed to combat misinformation. This strategy never ends well, and it belies a lack of strength in promoting alternatives. The way to combat misinformation is with better information. Resorting to free speech restrictions is a sign of weakness in my opinion.

In the end I'd rather have YouTube (and other platforms) modeling a different approach.

2. I also think, regardless of how they got there, at some point a private business functions as a monopoly and should be treated as such. I'm not so sure how I feel about regulations along those lines, but I do think anti-monopoly legal response to this sort of behavior wouldn't be unreasonable. I'm not at all sympathetic to the GOP in general, but if they started coming down on YouTube for this kind of thing under anti-monopoly regulation umbrellas I think it wouldn't be irrational or unreasonable to me.

3. As a more immediate issue, I think this sort of thing always backfires. If you have a bunch of people thinking there's a conspiracy to shove untested vaccines down people's throats, and then you have a major media distributor like YouTube censoring all anti-vaccine discussion, what do you think they're going to conclude? I'm as pro-vaccine as someone can get, and think arguments against them are usually pretty absurd, but I have to say that this kind of thing starts to look like a conspiracy, even if it isn't one. Why give them ammunition? If you can't convince people the vaccine is a good thing, how do you think that shutting down discussion is somehow going to work better?

eric_cc6• 5 years ago

A private company doesn’t want to contribute to people dying.

And the best action they can take to that end is to ban all anti-vaccination conversation?

Loughla• 5 years ago

I genuinely don't get it. YouTube, a private entity and not a government entity, is saying they don't want certain content on their platform. This is not the end of your free speech. This isn't really even a movement away from free speech. It's YouTube exercising their right to freedom of speech by not allowing what they believe to be harmful or disagreeable on their platform. They already do this with other categories of thing. This is no different.

You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site. Or just go to your local city center with a megaphone and give people your thoughts - perfectly legal.

If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.

prohobo4• 5 years ago

This fallacy of "private entity" when talking about a corporation that's more powerful than most governments is truly ridiculous.

It's okay if the East India Company enslaves and exploits the savages and mongrels, murders opponents, rigs elections, installs corrupt politicians and destroys communities; it's a private company and it only hurts stupid people! Just stop buying their tea if you don't like it, amirite? Start your own company!

Covzire• 5 years ago

Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have been censoring content that nearly exclusively goes against left wing opinion narratives. At the top of Twitter right now are the DNC's "expert" opinion on whether the vaccine mandates are legal. They're shoving their political speech down everyones throat and censoring as many opposing views as they can get away with. But let's say that's legal for now.

If we take a equitable view of the situation, the vast majority of content that they're removing is simply being removed for wrong-think according to the DNC. This gives the Democratic party a leg up through overt censorship and information warfare of a sort they couldn't possibly have achieved through direct government action.

Whether that's legal or not is immaterial to me, they are stifling legal free speech of the de-facto public square, and those who cheer it on now won't be so happy in the future when the alignment of special interests shifts against them, I promise you it will happen and sooner than anyone thinks.

Google is a cancer on public discourse, how many fake media narratives have to collapse before people realize censorship of wrong-think is not a good idea for a healthy society?

Edit: Looks like Twitter finally removed their ridiculous propaganda from the trending section.

the-dude• 5 years ago

If YouTube is THAT essential to getting your views heard, you need to take a lesson from business - don't rely on anyone else for critical infrastructure.

No other platform offers a competitive audience.

themacguffinman2• 5 years ago

I completely agree that YouTube should absolutely be free to do this but they're obviously doing this because citizens and their own employees demand it. The movement away from free speech is caused by the growing number of people (including people in this very thread) who want YouTube to do this, YouTube acquiescing to their demands is just a symptom of this trend.

YouTube is the profit-driven canary in the coalmine. YouTube's business model naturally incentivizes more speech of all kinds. This crackdown indicates there is mounting pressure - from democratically elected governments, from HN commentators, from our friends and neighbors that regulate & patronize YouTube - to stop being tolerant of certain kinds of speech like antivax.

hhhhhdsgs• 5 years ago

You don't get it because you agree with it. If it was your views being silenced you would suddenly remember how hard it is to create your own video platform that can compete with youtube (especially when the big tech monopolies will refuse services to you)

MadeThisToReply• 5 years ago

"‘Skynet Is A Private Company, They Can Do What They Want,’ Says Man Getting Curb-Stomped By Terminator"

https://babylonbee.com/news/skynet-is-a-private-company-they...

JohnWhigham• 5 years ago

I find it hilarious that in recent years, people on the left have started using the "don't like it? make your own! ;)" reply after it exclusively being a right-wing thing (e.g. telling people "don't like the USA? then leave"). Especially since both sentiments come from the same root: being out of a legitimate argument.

eric_cc6• 5 years ago

I genuinely don't get it.

At least you admit it.

You are more than able to start your own company and let whatever you want on that site.

"If you don't like YouTube, build your own" is a really shitty take. It's very obvious the role that YouTube has right now and why massive censorship is a problem.

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

I can see the CEOs and politicians wanting to implement a Chinese-style 'social citizenship score' and if it falls below some level you get banned from all platforms and your travel rights are restricted, etc.

GaryTang2• 5 years ago

Oh boy. MSM is going to jam the importance of it down our throats. “Social citizen scores are necessary to save lives. Get your score now! Lottery for people who register early.”

yibg5• 5 years ago

Do you also feel it’s wrong of YouTube to not allow porn? Feels like people are laser focused on anti vax content due to the political nature of it, while not really caring about all the other moderation they already do.

etchalon6• 5 years ago

Porn is a great counter example to the idea social media companies have some all powerful control over public information. Nearly all of them ban porn, a form of absolutely protected speech, but behold, it’s easy to find porn.

The whole “death of free speech” argument is such nonsense

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

They need to ban all references to the vaccine, and then your analogy to porn would hold, and I would be fine with it.

syshum12• 5 years ago

Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent, hopefully we do not regress all the way back to Dark Ages, where people will stoned and hanged for defying the church... In our time "the church" will likely be replaced with a new non-theistic religion of some kind, a Technocracy of "The Experts™" and "Authoritative Sources™" who are the ones that will tell us what "The Truth™" is today

AlexandrB6• 5 years ago

Society is regressing back to a time where idea's like those in the Pre-Enlightenment era where prevalent...

I agree, people are denying vaccines work, taking fluoride out of tap water, and saying that the earth is flat. It seems like there's something seriously wrong with our media ecosystem when ideas like this are flourishing. I don't know if banning these ideas is good/effective, but we need some way to incentivize the veracity of ideas and not just their "engagement". What that mechanism might be, I don't know.

jawarner6• 5 years ago

That's a funny analogy to make. Didn't the Enlightenment involve the promotion of expert knowledge, a heightened value of empirical truth?

md2020• 5 years ago

This trend in combination with the new wave of everything being a subscription really has me worried as a recent college grad who therefore does not own a home or have much in the way of savings. If you don’t own anything and your access to essential items is decided by some megacorp like Google or FB, you bet people will fall in line with the latest recreational outrage real fast. Connected cars with subscription features that show you ads even if you do own them (see the Ford Mach-E), and financial institutions buying up single-family homes to keep as many people as possible renting forever and never gaining equity in anything. The World Economic Forum came out and said it blatantly: “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.” That’s starting to read more like a command, not a prediction.

134153• 5 years ago

Personally, I don't care what Youtube bans and believe they should just do whatever they like. I don't care because Youtube does not provide any essential service to society. The content they serve is entirely expendable. The same holds for Twitter and Facebook. You could close these content distribution sites tomorrow and nothing substantial would change. A few of their competitors would gain a larger user base and that's it. If you rely for your income on some of these media channels (like ad revenue), you have a bad business model.

Principally, however, there could be a quasi-monopoly that turns out so essential for society that they should be treated as a public utility with a right to access instead of a private company that can enforce whatever house rules they like within the boundaries of law. I just don't think YT (or FB or Twitter or Google...) are there yet and find it hilarious that butthurt Youtubers so grossly overestimate their own importance.

sneak9• 5 years ago

...and we're still in peacetime. Wait until you see what you're not allowed to post once that changes.

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

But is free speech dependent on YouTube being a platform for complex discussions between knowledgeable people on a topic?

Maybe YouTube doesn’t want that role.

Maybe we can have a sci-debate website that does want these discussions, and maybe that site could tailor the feature set for exactly this purpose.

Maybe it would focus on citation and annotation features like thinkspot or Spotify or genius.

Maybe the site could have multiple ways to evaluate the reputation of someone making claims. Maybe it could have education, popularity, endorsements from other people with high reputation, and like three other dimensions of reputation measurements.

Maybe it could have tools to disclose conflicts of interest, the accuracy of past claims over time, and automatic linking to rebuttals.

Maybe YouTube just isn’t a fit for this information.

JasonFruit• 5 years ago

I'd agree that YouTube isn't designed for useful debate. That being the case, I'd rather see them say they won't allow discussion of vaccines at all, rather than promote one viewpoint and suppress all others. That seems like a less troubling way to handle a disputed topic: opt out, don't pontificate.

palijer• 5 years ago

Freedom of speech doesn't mean other people have to listen or host what you say.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Prior8Channer• 5 years ago

I really like the /pol/ version of this where they just edited in if you were of a certain race how this comic would read. Needless to say, it's wrong and everyone who agrees with that comic is wrong.

LdSGSgvupDV• 5 years ago

To simplify the question. Do we like to allow the social media to take parts of the position from court?

wepple6• 5 years ago

Can anyone recommend a good book on the balance between free speech versus disallowing harmful ideas to propagate?

Or even one book from each side of the argument?

I don’t think I’ve even begun to comprehend a robust position on what might make sense, or the arguments involved.

seanhunter• 5 years ago

"The Open Society and its Enemies" by Karl Popper would be one thought-provoking contribution on this topic.

nanis7• 5 years ago

balance between free speech versus disallowing harmful ideas to propagate?

There is no balance. The very fantasy of such a balance relies upon the presumption that 1) there are harmful _ideas_; and 2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.

The discussion here gets overwhelmed by several generations of people who never actually understood what people had to give up for the right of everyone to speak and for the right of everyone to be able to expose themselves to any idea they themselves deem interesting or appropriate.

Also, enmeshment of barons of industry with powerful political operatives to suppress competition to both is literally fascism (regardless of the historical revision of the definition 100 years after the fact).

wepple6• 5 years ago

There are folks out there that believe some level of content moderation is useful, and I’d like to understand their argument. If my conclusion is that it’s not robust, so be it.

But let’s run a thought experiment. Let’s say an idea shows up on Twitter that Asian people are ruining the US. It spreads and gains attention. People start killing, and citing the Twitter misinformation as a key motivator. Can the vast majority of society not agree that 1) this is a harmful idea and 2) reasonable people agree it is harmful. And therefore Twitter has a responsibility to remove that content?

ncallaway6• 5 years ago

1) there are harmful _ideas_

There are, though. There are ideas that are harmful.

The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.

2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.

It's obvious to me that there cannot be a singular authority that makes such determinations.

But it does seem totally plausible to have a distributed network of actors, each making their own determinations, and each influencing each other about which ideas are harmful, and which they will tolerate within their sphere. After all, that's the basic concept behind the "marketplace of ideas".

You can sell into the marketplace, but YouTube doesn't have to buy what everyone is selling.

I think it's just as totalitarian to tell a private entity that they must host content they disagree with, as it is to tell a private entity that they cannot speak about a specific topic to others. It's the antithesis of the marketplace of ideas.

I think the actual underlying issue is that YouTube, and a few other select entities, have an absolutely massive spheres of influence and feel like monopolies within. That's what kills the marketplace.

So, I do think private entities are completely within their rights to restrict their platforms however they see fit. I think doing so is even necessary for an effective marketplace of ideas that seeks truth. But I think we should also look at anti-trust laws that prevent individual private entities from having such a dominant position over an entire space.

IgorPartola36• 5 years ago

Look up the paradox of tolerance and go from there.

mariodiana7• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices. I'm subscribed to the channel of an M.D. on YouTube who discusses COVID-19, vaccines, etc. He is very careful to (repeatedly) point out that he is vaccinated, he has personally vaccinated hundreds of patients, he encourages everyone to speak to their doctor and follow their recommendations, believing that the vaccine is beneficial for the overwhelming majority of people. But, for all that, he has had videos taken down, and worries that it will happen again.

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

jakelazaroff5• 5 years ago

Okay, but we really need to talk about what “stifling of public debate” means.

Companies are routinely pressured to fire people in public positions who espouse pro-Palestinian views.

Across the nation, states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism, and firing teachers who dare to make students uncomfortable (by the same people who decried “safe spaces” less than a decade ago). Plenty of people on HN support this!

But for some reason, the only “free speech” issues that get attention here are radical right-wing viewpoints that get moderated on private tech platforms.

mc326• 5 years ago

People don’t get fired for being pro Palestinian they get fired for being violently anti-Israel. Don’t conflate the two.

invisible• 5 years ago

We are on a news site focused mostly on tech, startups, and entrepreneurship that often just has other intellectual conversations. It makes sense that the general flavor of submissions leans tech.

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

josephcsible12• 5 years ago

states are enacting legal bans against teaching the history of racism

There's a big difference between keeping government employees from saying certain things during their official duties, and keeping everyone from saying certain things in general.

jquery3• 5 years ago

Precisely. This is a private company taking a stand against dangerous medical disinformation in the middle of a pandemic and HN is willing to die on this hill. Meanwhile I see HN cheer what you just mentioned. It churns the stomach.

Reminds me of how Reddit just dropped the ban hammer threat on /r/hermancainaward because it was making right-wingers angry, while leaving up /r/conspiracy and other antivaxx disinformation subreddits. The faces of the dead have to be censored now, sanitizing the entire experience of /r/hermancainaward, making the experience little more than a bunch of anonymous antivaxx memes.

Dumblydorr2• 5 years ago

The wackos are the ones creating the context in which moderate voices lose their power. If you want moderation, you have to remove the extreme BS and the algorithms that thrive on it, which process buries moderates and makes their views anathema to the polarized extremes. Why allow polarized extremes to form on your private, I must emphasize privately owned, platform? This isn't the public square, freedom of speech does not guarantee freedom of reach. Content moderation is a good thing, it has the word moderate in it after all, that may signal that it promotes healthy dialogue just like public ridicule and scorn and shame should, in theory, moderate discourse actually covered by free speech in the public square, where it's not anonymous.

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

The wackos don't actually have the power to take down moderates as parent discusses. Only youtube has that power.

Content moderation is not inherently good or bad, it simply is. A version of Youtube that cracked down on well known science would be legal but not "good".

SamPatt3• 5 years ago

The problem is: who determines who the "wackos" are and what is and isn't "extreme BS"?

If it's defined by social consensus then during periods of groupthink and hysteria (common among humans) even the most reasonable people will be labeled wackos and shunned.

inglor_cz8• 5 years ago

If you want moderation, you need human moderators.

The trouble with the tech giants is that their "free service paid by ads" business model completely collapses into red numbers if they start employing adequate numbers of people for that purpose.

So they resort to artificial intelligence, which is worse than natural stupidity in this regard.

ethbr04• 5 years ago

The moderation is the problem. Because it's fundamentally a cost center, and will never be resourced sufficiently to do a nuanced job.

Consequently, you get someone making minimum wage banning videos because they're not saying only positive things about vaccines.

And Google and Facebook won't care. Because moderation is a cost intended to curb the worst PR scandals, but content is profit.

inglor_cz8• 5 years ago

This is my concern as well. How many people refrain from saying anything about Covid at all for fear of triggering some mindless algorithms?

Human review of such blunders is unreliable at best.

bildung• 5 years ago

Funnily enough, I have exactly this problem with ads on a youtube channel right now. On the Channel, one video mentions Covid in the context of healthcare politics. This results in instant rejection of ads for other videos about other topics. Requesting review of the denial results in confirmation of the denial in about 95% of the cases so far.

The video in question is citing official recommondations, i.e. is pro-vaccination, of course.

ggggtez2• 5 years ago

Obviously not enough people are shutting up, given the way that antivax content is the #1 propagator on Facebook.

There is money to be made from lying to people. That's why it's being banned. It should have been done last year honestly, but social media companies were afraid to anger Trump. They took the barest actions to add warnings, and no surprise, no one reads them.

mc326• 5 years ago

Thank you for presenting the nuance.

It’s easy to condemn the quacks and extremely ill informed, but all sorts of opinions get swept away. Skeptics, those who want to study the details, exceptions, oddities, etc., get swept up by the system thus stifling legitimate debate and learning of a critical topic.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

Covid is a serious disease, there is denying of that. But information control of this kind is far more insidious and overtakes Covid here by a few steps in my opinion.

There is a loud advertising crowd that is transparently motivated to stick it to some deniers that will welcome this and I think they put pressure on Youtube. In some form they deserve each other.

I think this behavior is just as resistant to learning, not hat I think that this measure will even net you one more vaccinated person or that it will change any position. So this only incurs huge cost without benefit.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech, and this has been accelerated by the pandemic. I hope the pendulum will swing the other way, but it's also possible to cross a tipping point where we just lose our way.

BeefWellington2• 5 years ago

It's funny to me because Free Speech is one of those topics on its own that doesn't permit nuance in my experience - either you're for it or you're a dictator/sheep/lapdog/etc.

In reality though, laws have been limiting speech for hundreds of years, and those laws and judgements are enforced by the government. The idea that it is sacrosanct and is (and should "continue" to be) unabated is already not what happens. The usual example is about shouting bomb in an airport or fire in a crowded movie theatre but those are more about mischief than any freedom to say a thing (you aren't punished for the words alone). However, Libel and Slander laws exist and have for a long long time and are limits on free speech.

I'm not in favor of draconian laws designed to chill debate but it's important to recognize that limits already exist and how we navigate where to draw the line is the key I think.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

I’ll be voting for anyone that advocates civil liberties.

Another thing that is not talked about enough is how small minority of people in Silicon Valley gets to dictate how the rest of the world sees information. Algorithms and things that Big Tech is doing behind the closed doors to influence the world. It doesn’t matter left or right, what matters is the unbelievable power of say 1000 people in SV that figured out content engagement algorithms at Google, Twitter, FB, Apple News, etc.

The most powerful people on earth are those that govern algorithms that preferentially show content to people. In China that’s their Big Tech fused with CCP, in the west it is SV Big Tech shunning anything that’s not woke. FB is an exception but even within FB there is a rout.

yibg5• 5 years ago

I’m not sure if this is true. I think there has always been restrictions to free speech, it’s just what’s not allowed has changed over the years. Try having pro Soviet material in the 70s.

ahallock• 5 years ago

We need to start applying free speech to internet platforms as well -- an updated first amendment. Times have changed and these platforms can deny speech, effectively silencing political opposition. The people cheering it on are happy because their political opponents are being silenced. But imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. If you're a coward, you won't speak out against it. You'd rather relish your opponents getting deplatformed.

chillly• 5 years ago

What has 'social media' got to do with free speech? Who is stopping you saying what you want? If what you mean is that what write or say is not beamed on everyone's phone, that is not a free speech issue, it's that you can't persuade anyone to publish what you say, which is totally different.

jasonlaramburu7• 5 years ago

Society in general has been making chilling moves away from free speech

Private companies in the US have always had the right to refuse a customer anytime, for any reason. No shirt, no shoes, no service. Should a social media company be treated differently?

sixothree• 5 years ago

I wouldn't blame YouTube here. I would blame the anti-vaxxers. They created an impossible atmosphere for youtube to navigate.

yonaguska• 5 years ago

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

risk0005• 5 years ago

Anti-vaxxer is a pejorative word, it lumps people together in ways that aren't fair. Many were just skeptical and wanted to discuss and debate the evidence, and that was ridiculed, as evident everywhere in this thread.

ocdtrekkie4• 5 years ago

I'm not sure "legitimate public debate" is warranted in this case. Too many people who are not qualified think they have "done their own research" and come to conclusions causing real harm to other people.

Even MDs are not necessarily well-suited to make expert opinions on pandemics and vaccine technology and such. A lot of MDs are qualified to diagnose conditions and recommend treatment and prescription medication... that doesn't mean they should act like they know more than people who specialize in infectious diseases.

The place for "debate" of the effectiveness and safety of vaccines is peer-reviewed studies, not YouTube videos.

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

There is a certain legitimate distrust at this point over the lab leak issue. That's because of those two papers published in I believe Nature and the Lancet claiming that the evidence strongly supported a natural origin theory; those papers have now been discredited and some of the authors have deleted their Twitter accounts after exposure of their own emails that questioned natural origin theories due to anomalies in the viral sequence. That's very suspicious behavior for 'peer-reviewed research'.

strken3• 5 years ago

The problem is that legitimate public debate has been fully warranted within the context of the pandemic response already - see the initial WHO recommendations not to close borders (closing borders was effective), the failure of the WHO to give useful advice about masks (even cotton ones worn without a tight seal work to a degree), and the failure of the media to accurately represent scientific consensus on whether there was a lab leak (it's very hard to find strong evidence either way).

There seems to be a common pattern where the media gets something wrong, scientists in the field aren't able to call it out, and there's a fairly long wait until someone has the visibility and credentials to point out the mistake. Banning discussion from more and more platforms could make it harder to correct real mistakes.

On the other hand, "do your own research" clearly doesn't work out well for a lot of people. I have no idea how to balance the competing factors. Maybe we have to accept some legitimate debate will be stifled by platforms, or maybe this is a problem for scientists themselves to solve.

winternett2• 5 years ago

Youtube should have instead declared war on the companies and people that are simply generating junk content to game their creator funds...

No one really wants to uncover the fact that most disinformation campaigns are simply created by people who are desperate to make money off of video views, and also those who want to sell off products (like horse de-wormer) that they may have an overstock of.

YouTube should de-monetize all independent and unverifiable political content instead of this censorship approach. Taking away the money making for people who just want to stoke public emotions to their benefit of popularity.

Politics should not be a for-profit business... No content platform wants to give that profit up because it generates a lot of money, but we face peril if the profits rise.

Make politics boring again. MPBA.

peakaboo• 5 years ago

Honestly, the world has gone off the deep end. I don't even know where to start to explain, but it should be obvious for anyone what's wrong anyway.

oliwarner2• 5 years ago

Right to ask, but not without also balancing against the issue of people being utter idiots. A little sensible conversation has lead to tens of thousands of hours doctors talking patients down when they come in demanding anti-parasitic medicines.

I don't know what the best balance is. One thing is evident: social media is not the venue for scientific debate.

hammock4• 5 years ago

anti-parasitic medicines

Protease inhibitors* , similar to the one Pfizer is testing right now for COVID.

marcosdumay5• 5 years ago

One thing is evident: social media is not the venue for scientific debate.

Hum... Any place people can gather to have an online debate is social media. That's the wrong dimension to use here.

nimbius• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.

Second, the topic of conversation is vaccination methodology during an ongoing pandemic in which a sizeable quantity of affected persons refuse to vaccinate. This is without a doubt a sensitive topic and likely shouldnt use Youtube as a forum. You should have a gatekeeper and there should be a minimum level of scientific competency and acumen required to participate in the conversation. A moderator should exist, and that moderator is not youtube.

Might i suggest matrix or signal? or perhaps even pleroma?

as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned. No reasonable person would evangelize healthy adults forego vaccination during a global pandemic.

syshum12• 5 years ago

>as an aside, the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist"

Well they change what "anti-vaccine" means [1], so now I am classified as a "person who has been vaccinated but is Anti-vaccine" because I oppose any and all governments mandates that would force a person to be vaccinated, or would impose conditions on them by government to participate in society.

private companies can impose them but government should not, not if we want to claim to be a free society.

Due to my position against authoritarian policies I am officially a "Vaccinated Anti-vaxxer" a oxymoronic label only government could come up with.

[1]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

nitrogen3• 5 years ago

the concept of an "anti-vaccine activist" is puerile and absolutely should be banned.

This type of categorical banning from public discussion never works. It just creates martyrs.

There's an object lesson they sometimes do in university classes or corporate retreats where two people are asked to push against each other's hands. It usually ends with "why are you pushing so hard?" "Because you were pushing so hard."

There's a human instinct that many of us have that is basically "fight makes right." That is, when vehemence in opposition to a thing goes beyond a certain point, the vehemence becomes "evidence" that the thing being opposed must have some legitimacy to it, or else there wouldn't be so much energy dedicated to opposing it.

megous2• 5 years ago

first, youtube isnt where open discussion by moderate voices happens. Its a cavalcade of endlessly random videos promoting everything from free energy to colloidal silver cures and get rich quick schemes.

Youtube also has people doing educational videos. I can watch recorded lectures there, if I want. Why do we need a gatekeeper for that?

It also has videos of people just sharing their experiences. Should that be banned to, if those are negative about the vaccine? On what basis?

djent2• 5 years ago

Yes, making claims about vaccines with without basis is "anti-vax"

HeroOfAges3• 5 years ago

Does this include those that made claims about the effectiveness of the vaccine that turned out to be overstated?

_-david-_2• 5 years ago

Is somebody who makes the claim that vaccines are better than natural immunity actually "anti-vax"?

raverbashing• 5 years ago

Try having a "legitimate public debate" about anything where the loudest 90% are there to be antagonistic for purely personal reasons (or, in English, jerks)

Really, about anything. Free software. Best football players. How to best build a bike shed.

Anyone with willingness for legitimate debate gets drowned by the noise.

arein3• 5 years ago

Why should you jump trough so many hoops to convey some information.

Why an anti mandatory vaccine person shouldn't be able to explain his position?

mattigames2• 5 years ago

I woulb be surprised if even 1% of the videos being pulled out are moderate voices, but that's the price of moderation, in order to enjoy any freedom you need to stay alive but if you get killed by disinformation you lose them all, so in such cases as this one moderation of mass communication channels is the lesser evil even if a few reasonable people get their content pulled out.

enriquto• 5 years ago

Let's kill them all and God will choose the good ones!

aioprisan5• 5 years ago

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

No such study exists, please link to the primary research. Vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus [1], and more importantly, even if they offered equivalent protection for 99% of people, the portion of the additional 1% of people without a vaccine who show up at a hospital are going to be much sicker than the vaccinated with breakthrough infections and more likely to need to go or stay at a hospital for an extended period of time (29x more likely [2]), which our healthcare system cannot support. We've had to ration care and kick out cancer patients out of hospitals [3], who have subsequently died as a result of lack of care, but we should allow for limited resources to be used up by the willfully unvaccinated? I have personally had family members in need of critical care have care rationed due to hospitals being full with 99%+ unvaccinated folks. So much for the personal responsibility crowd living up to their slogans.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s0806-vaccination-pr... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/cdc-study-shows-unvaccinated... [3] https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article25394605...

m-ee• 5 years ago

That’s not really true that vaccination is always more protective, immunology is complex and there’s more interesting nuance to that. See the latest twiv with Shane Crotty, he goes into detail about how natural infection plus one shot creates a better response than reversing the order.

I’m not wringing my hands over anti vax content being pulled at all, but I don’t think we should be reductive about the science. That doesn’t help to establish trust.

gotoeleven• 5 years ago

You're simply wrong

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101

This religious fervor that has developed around the vaccine has done as much to burn the establishment's credibility as anything.

nradov11• 5 years ago

There is conflicting research in this area. It's too early to declare any definitive conclusions yet.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

White_Wolf2• 5 years ago

This is recent and not peer reviewed:https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

And here's some news from Israel, one of the most vaccinated countries: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

I'd say that is pretty clear cut when looking at the numbers from Israel.

new_stranger• 5 years ago

Vaccines work by prompting a targeted (partial) immune response. They give your body advanced designs for part of the virus so it can be proactive - the con is a vaccine can not provide all of the information.

Contracting a virus provides your body with the full genetic footprint of the virus. Assuming you survive, you should have better antibodies than what a vaccine can provide.

johncolanduoni3• 5 years ago

Your first link does not actually claim that “vaccination always offers stronger protection than getting the virus”. It indicates “among people who were previously infected with SAR-CoV-2 [the study] shows that unvaccinated individuals are more than twice as likely to be reinfected with COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated after initially contracting the virus”. So it’s comparing infected + vaccinated to just infected, not just infected vs just vaccinated.

You have just (unintentionally) shared misinformation about the vaccine. Would you support deleting your comment from HN?

tebruno992• 5 years ago

The only reason You can watch any video for free on Youtube at all is because Youtube chooses to let you do so. It is not a public forum for debate, it is a business.

swader99920• 5 years ago

They still use enough of the public commons to be held to account.

Bhilai• 5 years ago

I agree with most of what you said but my opinion is that right wing media, radio show hosts and podcasters have pushed it too far this time by peddling conspiracy theories that are doing actual harm to populace at large.

Ardren• 5 years ago

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

He was insisting without any studies? How is that not a problem?

dlisboa2• 5 years ago

People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform. It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

My opinion is that we didn't need YouTube/Facebook to conduct public policy debate before, and we don't need it now. It has brought nothing to the table except the, as you put it, "wackos". I really challenge the idea that there is value to them at all in the public debate.

Take this example you gave (by the way I agree that the doctor in question was doing good work). This doctor, 20 years ago, had direct influence in his own practice, some influence in his hospital, and maybe some influence in the health agency, although that is mostly reserved to the politically connected "big doctors" who sit at the top.

What is his influence to enact public policy change today? The exact same as it was then. He's no closer to personally convince his health agency or Hospital administration than he was 20 years ago. The difference is that now he has direct influence over millions of people, outside of any nuanced structure or supervision.

We may argue this isn't great, or democratic, that is true. But it is also true that YouTube videos and Facebook commenters have contributed nothing of value to public health debate. No single life was saved because of YouTube, except for videos where people were urged to see a "real doctor" and not follow Internet advice.

---

As a more general note, I always find the idea that YouTube/Facebook are free speech enablers disturbing. They are companies, they have nothing to do with rights. We have to perform a simple test: If YouTube went bankrupt tomorrow and had to close doors, would someone's right to Free Speech be diminished? They would suddenly not be able to reach as many people, but they'd still hold the exact same rights.

Tuckerism• 5 years ago

I would say the distinction here is allowing some parties "direct influence over millions of people" and not others. As other commenters have pointed out, it feels like the decision on who gets access to the "virtual town square" is a small, un-elected, and limited-accountability group.

I do agree with your final point-- if social media went dark tomorrow, no ones rights would be diminished. But if it went dark for only certain people, I think we would agree that -something- is being diminished (even if it's not necessarily a right or that it's in the best interest of everyone).

I fully believe that this is a topic where people get to land differently, and I respect those that do their mental calculus differently. There's so many second-order and third-order effects when it comes to speech, and then you amplify it to global-level... there's no great, clean answer. But ultimately, we get to choose what we weigh as most important-- as I've heard others on HN say, "If we wrap ourselves around every conceivable axle then nothing will be achieved."

gitfan86• 5 years ago

It is a matter of consumer protection. We allow a farmer to set up a farm stand and sell tomatoes by the side of the road without much regulation, because consumers in general can determine if the product is good.

We don't allow that farmer to sell auto insurance by the side of the road without regulation. This is because a consumer cannot possibly look at a few documents from the farmer and know the quality and reliability of that auto insurance policy that the farmer is selling.

Things are more complicated with regulating free speech because people approach the speech from very different angles. Maybe I watch a scummy Televangelist because I want to make a new farting preacher video. Maybe an elderly person watches the same video and gives away the money she had for food for the week. How do you balance the religious and free speech rights of the preacher, my right to make fun of him, and the consumer protection of the elderly person?

dragonwriter8• 5 years ago

It's the stifling of legitimate public debate

No, non-State actors choosing what messages to relay or not with their resources is fundamentally the conduct of public debate, not its suppression.

ggggtez2• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask

No we don't. The question we have to ask is whether allowing this content is worse for society than any stifling of moderate voices.

And the answer is obviously yes. Covid-hoaxers represent millions of people who are causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore. Fuck moderate voices who are "just asking questions". They can deal with playing a little less devil's advocate, and getting more in board with the obvious health benefits of vaccination.

jaybrendansmith4• 5 years ago

Hard agree. I've had it with moderate voices on this issue, it's a matter of life and death. Would we not push someone out of the way of an oncoming train? Do we not have lights, gates, and bells that ring when a train is going to come through? Should we take those down, and just leave it up to each individual and their opinion? Fuck their idiotic opinions.

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

causing a national health crisis that doesn't need to be happening anymore

This just isn't true, it's never going away and nothing can stop it, this is it for the rest of your life. It'll get less deadly over time but you will get covid at some point in your life and you will get it again and again as it mutates over the years. Same with flu it was initially deadly, now it's just bad but it's never going away.

Notanothertoo3• 5 years ago

This is a very dangerous slope, especially because you are so willing to dismiss the conversation under the assumption that you know best/everything.

mlang235• 5 years ago

STFU is not going to work to build trust in government and medical institutions. Frankly, believing it will is one of the reasons why things go downhill these days. "My way or the highway" has never really done anything good to make people understand eachother. I hear that you are frustrated, but your attitude is not going to help anyone except yourself.

_hilro• 5 years ago

MD is a just a general doctor correct? So, who is he to make that proclamation:

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

He doesn't have the expertise to say this.

jonemi• 5 years ago

MD means Doctor of Medicine, i.e., they completed medical school. Dr. Fauci is a Doctor of Medicine in that he completed medical school and received his MD.

After medical school, doctors will enter a residency program for a specialty, but they are still MDs (DOs are equivalent). Their post-graduate training (residency and fellowship) varies but they are still MDs. MDs who specialize in infectious disease or epidemiology are still MDs. MDs who specialize in family medicine are still MDs.

You are falsely inferring MD means GP (general practitioner) which it may or may not. And you are further falsely inferring that a GP cannot have expertise in virology and immunology, which they likely don't, but they may. If you were to conclude a GP does not have CREDENTIALS to speak authoritatively about virology and immunology, I'd accept that assertion.

willcipriano3• 5 years ago

Do you have the expertise to evaluate his expertise? Did the person who granted you proof of this expertise also have sufficient expertise to do so? What about the person above that? What is the root of expertise? Plato with his allegory of the cave, casually dismissing claims that come from the wrong mouths in his lofty opinion?

In my mind it would be simpler to evaluate claims as they are rather than bringing the speakers life story into it.

laserbeam• 5 years ago

Honestly, in a world where wackos will take the smallest soundbite they agree with from a moderate legitimate discussion, blow it out of proportion and weaponize it... It's hard to imagine this move by Google as overall bad. It's definitely heartbreaking, but so is the fact that a 3rd of the world is refusing to help out with solving the pandemic.

I honestly have no idea which move has an overall higher cost for society. Yet, we can't keep incentivizing wackos by giving them a platform or there'll keep being more and more of them.

Free speech, amplified to a wide audience is clearly having a negative impact on society and on out ability to be compassionate as a society. Maybe this is a step in the right direction.

Only time will tell but it's far to early to criticize the move. Especially when without it, wackos are gaining agency.

roody15• 5 years ago

Agreed shutting down discussion is not helping matters and we appear to be moving in an autocratic dystopian direction as a nation.

The FDA advisory panel was overridden to endorse a booster shot. Even mentioning FDA officials resigning and the board being overridden gets you labeled as anti-vax and blocked.

Future not looking good :/

codyswann3• 5 years ago

Don't be naive. It's not the wackos who won't have a platform. It's the people who know vaccines aren't dangerous, but realize they can snag an audience by claiming otherwise, so they prey on those people. These charlatans are the people who won't have a platform and, I say good riddance.

sto_hristo• 5 years ago

The main problem is that you think you need open discussion and public debates on this topic. You don't. That is not a movie or a painting, it's science. You need research, proof, scrutiny. This is a job and it's done by professionals.

Moderate voices, voices of reason, voices you like, voices you don't like, opinions, ... are irrelevant, useless, not needed, and just add noise. This noise, in all its forms and shapes is detrimental to the only thing that really matters and has value - what the actual researchers and scientists are communicating back to the public.

Opinions, wish-beliefs, convictions are something Reality doesn't concern itself with.

Think of it that way - when the plane is falling due to some technical problem, will you open facebook to scout for opinions and rally support, or will you just sit you bottom down and do as you're told by the cabin crew? What about during some surgical procedure - are you going to pop open a youtube stream so that your followers can judge and guide the surgeon?

Anyway, too late, too little. Damage has been done. And it's not really youtube or the social network's faults. Even without them, stupidity would find another way to make itself visible.

jlebar17• 5 years ago

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

I'm curious what his evidence is, because I find this argument compelling: https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

yibg5• 5 years ago

What should happen here? Do we not allow YouTube to ban content they don’t want on their platform? What type of content? Just anti vax or anything that’s not illegal? Should YouTube be forced to host racist content, porn etc? Is it just YouTube or any site with user generated content like forums? What about illegal content? Who gets to decide what’s illegal? Is YouTube the law enforcement on YouTube or do we need to go through courts to take down content that’s potentially illegal?

Slippery slopes go both ways.

pessimizer• 5 years ago

Do you have an opinion on any of these questions? Or are you just implying that the world is so complicated that no one should make any decisions about anything?

tomrod14• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

I argue that it won't. We have had over a year for Anti-vaccination advocates to make their case. In all instances the goalposts tend to move. Spotlighting continual questioning and false claims benefits no one. It's time to move on.

SSilver2k22• 5 years ago

No one is stopping anyone from hosting their own website and getting on their own soap box. You just can't do it on this person's lawn anymore.

shadilay3• 5 years ago

What happens when the company owns the whole town and you're not allowed to have your own lawn to speak on?

numeromancer• 5 years ago

The accumulation of "chilling effects" has now become a deep-freeze.

esja3• 5 years ago

The stifling seems to be by design, or at the very least it's being considered acceptable collateral damage. Our modern censorship infrastructure does not see minority voices as legitimate.

That infrastructure may not even be capable (as evidenced here) of allowing for minority voices or any form of nuanced dissent, because it has been outsourced to a combination of incompetent "AI" (or dumb algorithms) as well as underpaid, understaffed, undertrained humans.

We are reaping the benefits of tech companies prioritisation of "scale" above all else.

zionic• 5 years ago

People need to get it through their skulls that "tech companies" have _no place_ "moderating" scientific debate.

If you've ever found yourself typing "Should X give Y a platform?" you are part of the problem.

Be better, be a part of the solution.

rootlocus3• 5 years ago

Scientific debate happens in scientific circles. The results are presented to the media. The public debates it on social media.

Be better, be a part of the solution.

And what is the solution?

vikingerik• 5 years ago

People are going to cheer that "wackos" will no longer have a platform.

And if you deplatform wackos, you just create incentive to decry everything as wacko in order to ban it.

The way to combat misinformation is in the free market of ideas and discourse. Not by banning it. That's just might-makes-right.

goatlover15• 5 years ago

Problem is that combating misinformation in the free market hasn't been working so well. While I agree this is fine for most things, there are exceptions such as a pandemic or when a powerful political figure can invoke a riot.

tylerhou• 5 years ago

The problem with your argument is that you assume that legitimate voices won't be coöpted by people pushing some agenda that is not supported by any data; i.e. you assume that the people on the other side of the "public debate" are operating in good faith. There is no debate when one side is not seriously & honestly looking at the data.

It's good to debate science and to question whether vaccines are safe and effective. The problem is that if someone with any credentials asks these questions in public, a firestorm of antivaxxers will immediately create thousands of posts claiming "doctor questions the safety of the vaccines." Most people who read those posts won't take the time to understand the nuance -- their takeaway will be "this confirms my belief that the vaccine was rushed/etc."

That's not to say that these debates shouldn't happen -- they absolutely should, but not on YouTube or social media where nuance is easily lost. During a global pandemic the consequence of airing objections in public on social media can mean that thousands of people might not get vaccinated because of bad or malicious actors. That leads to real deaths.

stickfigure4• 5 years ago

By censoring the debate on youtube, you're basically confirming to the wacko conspiracy theorists that there is in fact a conspiracy. The damage to civil society is far greater than a little misinformation.

The solution to bad speech is more speech. Speaking of nuance easily lost, an algorithm is not going to be able to figure out the nuance required to censor rationally. Honestly, I don't think most humans are capable of it. Best to err on the side of letting information spread.

cft• 5 years ago

Written by a Google employee. This totalitarian thinking is a perfect example why the US is declining so rapidly into a poorer oligarchy. He (Xir?) is convinced that vaccines are necessary for COVID, and that plebes that use his product are too stupid for "nuance". Thus it should be banned speech. Thinking about it, there were discussions even in Nazi Germany or in the Soviet Russia: except that plebes went jail for them. They were the privilege of the very top: like Hitler discussing with Goebbels or Brezhnev with Kosygin. Or Pichai with Wojcicy in his oligarchical case.

takeda2• 5 years ago

Agree, I saw multiple times that someone who actually discussing topic from their area from expertise, who tried to remove some hyperbole media added. For example he was saying that lockdowns (like an actual lockdowns) only made sense initially when there was a possibility to contain it.

The anti-vaxxers cut it out of context and spreaded it on FB and sounded like someone with credentials was basically saying that all precautions were not needed and this was all fake pandemic (this was a year ago, BTW before we had vaccines).

2OEH8eoCRo04• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask whether adversaries have the right to run hogwild on western social media and spread disinformation.

CodeMage4• 5 years ago

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation. I don't know what form his "insistence" had, but I've seen plenty of similar cases so far, and all of them have been from people pushing their own narratives, instead of informing people responsibly.

If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

Being in a minority does not absolve one of responsibility. If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).

ravar2• 5 years ago

never mind that many of the positions that are "scientific consensus" are not supported by the current peer reviewed research.

virtuallynathan5• 5 years ago

I’m not really sure what kind of problems you expect peer review to solve? https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1441040475826184194?s=21

There’s plenty of bad/fraudulent/wrong stuff that gets through peer review, perhaps even a majority.

kodah2• 5 years ago

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.

By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation. In fact, most political speech is misinformation.

If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that. There sure is an undercurrent of people making narratives but that's not a new problem. The left and right have weaponized narratives to the detriment of this country ad infinitum. If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems. The new problems will alienate and harm anyone that your current telemetry (and understanding) doesn't reflect. To me, that's an age-old problem where some value technocracy while others value bureaucracy; my personal opinion being that both are valuable but they need a distribution model in government that optimizes for problem solving.

If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).

I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.

TrispusAttucks9• 5 years ago

The same exact argument could be said about the platforms.

What evidence do they have that that there is no chance of complications for certain individuals?

They need to be held to the same standard they are holding their end users.

In the last year social media platforms have suppressed facts and discourse pre-emptively and only months later do we find out that there was truth in the censored content. They can't be the final arbitraters of truth.

trentnix7• 5 years ago

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion.

Not necessarily. What is the bar to be defined as "scientific research"? What is the bar for "peer review"? Considering the massive amount of evidence that a large amount of "peer review" doesn't review much and that a measurable amount of "scientific research" is inadequate and sometimes outright fraudulent, any pursuit of truth shouldn't be built exclusively on such a weak foundation. But to your point, good research should hold more weight (and does!).

If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

And yet concerns about the long-term safety of these vaccines are, by definition, untested. The long term efficacy of these vaccines are certainly in doubt. Both are reasonable concerns worth debating and exploring. But will get classified as "anti-vax" and will become subject to censorship "for our own good".

I am vaccinated. I believe these vaccines represent an astounding accomplishment. I believe people should have access to all information in order to make the best decisions for themselves.

I also have some skepticism regarding the messages and messaging that comes from the CDC and NIH. I also distrust the role they've played in any discussion regarding the origins of Covid.

Why we (in America at least) can watch abject government incompetence in the DoD, FBI, CIA, ICE, IRS, and on and on but pretend the CDC and the NIH, the ultimate gatekeepers of the Covid and vaccine narratives, are immune to such failings is beyond me.

oceanplexian6• 5 years ago

In the 19th century, Ignaz Semmelweis claimed that hand washing was a way to improve hygiene and communicable disease. If Google had existed in 1847, his claims would have been censored since they went strongly against the scientific consensus. History is littered with examples like this. Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind. I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

There wasn’t scientific consensus that recovery from COVID did not leave antibodies in your system so as to make vaccine unnecessary. It was undecided.

belorn6• 5 years ago

When the different vaccines came out we did not have peer-reviewed studies to show that they were effective, only the smaller studies done by the drug companies that developed them. In much we were accepting the opinions about the effectiveness as facts, as well as the side effects which were yet to be discovered.

We saw the same thing about the effectiveness of cloth mask and anti-bacterial cleaning had on spreading of covid. It took well past the first year before we started to see when, how, where and whom benefited from different strategies, and the meta studies is yet fully clear on the answers to those.

Looking what we don't know as far as today in terms of vaccinations, the biggest unknown variables seems to be about duration. With most nations having gone through two rounds of vaccinations, it seems now that a third one is now needed. One study cited recently was conducted on patients that is undergoing transplantation, with half of the patients missing antibodies while having taken two vaccination already this year. As a result there is a lot of talking about treating covid vaccination as something that will be added to the existing seasonal flue vaccinations that vulnerable groups take, but which the general population do not because of the short window of protection. Time will tell and it won't be anti-vax people that do the research or conduct the discussion.

iskander• 5 years ago

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research,

That's not how science has worked, especially in this pandemic. Most of what we know about SARS-CoV-2 came to us through biorxiv preprints and posts on forums like virological.org; the added value of peer review has typically been minimal (but often adding 3-12 months of delay in disseminating information). Even the role of peer review as a gate keeper has been wanting, lots of garbage studies about Covid-19 with glaring confounders keep getting published in peer reviewed journals. You could probably find a few hundred trials with systematic age differences between treatment groups that have been published in respectable venues. Some of these studies even contribute significantly to misinformation about the efficacy of sham treatments like hydroxycholoroquine and ivermectin.

There is unfortunately no short-cut to the development of individual scientific literacy, no trusted tier of experts which can safeguard us from misunderstanding and falsehood. We're all more or less on our own.

stale2002• 5 years ago

If you're claiming something that hasn't been demonstrated through peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. If you present that opinion as a fact, then that's misinformation.

Unironically, I would consider your opinion here, to be dangerous mis-information. Yes really.

We do not have to throw out the entire body of past medical work, for every single "new" question that comes up.

So there are absolutely some, scientifically supported, conclusions, that we can come to, about diseases, using this past body of medical work.

If we listened to you it would result in people refusing to do basic things, like wash our hands and socially distance, because we haven't yet completed a full study, for a specific new disease that is going around.

didibus• 5 years ago

Bingo!

And for people who might contest the "peer review" dimension, it's not so much about having peer reviewed things, it is about clearly disclosing the basis from which you're putting forward a statement you claim to be true.

That said, I'm not doubting that the YouTube mechanisms for suppression of irresponsibly disbursed information and misinformation has a high false positive rate especially when addressing similar topics. And hopefully YouTube can address that over time.

3grdlurker• 5 years ago

I’m not a believer that vaccine science is a matter of “public” debate. It’s scientific debate, where only experts who have the tools, experience, and knowledge to argue should be allowed to weigh in. If you already have the problem of bad actors misappropriating yet-to-be-verified “scientific” claims for their own political agenda, then I don’t see why it’s right to let those ideas go out there.

I believe that people only have the right to speak their own opinion, but have none to spread disinformation.

mewpmewp22• 5 years ago

But vaccination can't be as binary as that it's "safe" and that it's "effective" for each and every individual. As a layman I can't accept binary beliefs given like that. Nothing is truly safe. These words are meaningless to me. Everything has trade-offs and risks associated. Claiming something can be "safe and effective" to me throws so many red flags.

How can I tell if the research done on the subject and conclusions of it are in my best interests? For me easy example and what concerns me about both covid and vaccines are the long term effects, like brain fog aka "long covid". If vaccines can cause similar symptoms to what covid can cause, then can vaccines cause "long covid"? If spike protein can reach brain for example can it give you brain fog indefinitely?

I've seen several anecdotal reports where people have had brain fog, fatigue, lethargy and other long covid symptoms after vaccines for many months, some claiming they are still not over those. Reading Pfizer study for instance, I don't see that this was researched at all. All everybody seems to be caring about is short term hospitalizations, deaths and side effects. But where can I find data on how large percentage of people have long covid either from vaccines, or covid or breakthrough after vaccine?

There was a study done according to which 19% of individuals who had taken a vaccine and got breakthrough after had long covid. I definitely would like to see more information about that as I definitely don't want to get brain fog lasting for many months.

The study in question: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072

Malician• 5 years ago

Experts should be allowed to weigh in, not office workers and bureaucrats. Where were the aerosol dispersion specialists when the CDC/WHO were preaching "droplet?"

hackinthebochs4• 5 years ago

But much of the debate isn't strictly scientific. What is appropriate policy is not something science can determine. People who will be affected by policy absolutely should weigh in on it.

Mikeb853• 5 years ago

I was banned from a Reddit sub for saying that a previous Covid infection probably infers some immunity. This was around 8 months ago. Now EU vaccine passports accept a recovery from infection as being sufficient proof of immunity.

On top of that now it's coming out that the Canadian military/government (and likely others) was intentionally deploying propaganda to make the populace more compliant.

This is why moderate voices are being drowned out. I got vaccinated pretty much as soon as it was available to me. Yet to some on the left, I'm a rabid anti-vaxxer (!?!) and to my anti-vaxx friends, a sell-out (ironically, they're far less angry, just disappointed in me for not pushing back against government overreach).

TheBlight• 5 years ago

Anyone who shames you for taking/not taking a form of medicine can safely be ignored. I know it's easier said than done but things like HIPAA exist for a reason. It's no one's business.

mountainriver• 5 years ago

Reddit has a way of drowning out moderate voices which is why I no longer use it

trident5000• 5 years ago

The mere suggestion that covid came out of a lab was banned by youtube, and downvoted by Reddit and HN heavily at the time. You were considered a crazy person. Now its the leading theory. It shows how fast people listen to authoritarians in desperate times despite common sense lingering in the background. That phenomenon has led to terrible events in the past and carries forward today. If someone says you cant discuss/debate something be suspicious.

gorwell4• 5 years ago

Can you provide more info re: compliance propaganda? I haven't heard about that.

apostacy2• 5 years ago

YouTube does not deserve our trust.

We've seen repeatedly over the last two years truthful and helpful warnings classified as dangerous misinformation by big tech platforms.

First they censored people warning us about COVID itself, then they censored people saying we should wear masks, then they censored any talk of it coming from a lab.

Every time citizens try to spread the truth, they are censored. Sometimes the truth becomes so obvious that they can't censor anymore.

Facebook is directly responsible for censoring American expat groups in China that were trying to warn their families about COVID in late 2019.

Facebook has no problem shielding criminals and dictators for money[1]. They will eagerly censor innocent people speaking truth to power.

Corporate America will protect its interests from the people. They are invested in a new normal, and China, and they will censor us to protect their investments.

Even if something was wrong with the vaccines, or there was some effective new treatment, they would censor it regardless. So why should we ever big tech platforms the benefit of the doubt?

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/03/sheryl-sandberg...

n3dm• 5 years ago

Sounds about right for reddit. It is anti free speech and anti education. If it sounds good but is made up and spreading lies, top of the posts you go.

dogman1443• 5 years ago

It's possible but what needs to be added to this (very common) what-if is the anti-pattern your response creates for solving complex problems. "Chilling effect" concerns have been raised since '08 or so, and that platforms have unilaterally moved on with a decision indicates to me the failure of this approach. What does that show?

It's a (very, very valid) counterpoint that's ultimately a slippery slope argument in disguise. Slippery slope arguments rarely present a way out of a mess, and instead just serve as this semi-stakeholder that won't help solve things but adds nice insight. A position's side needs to be more than just a slippery slope approach, in short. It's important to sense when "something" is going to get done, and shift from wise advice on second order effects to something more outcomes-oriented.

munk-a7• 5 years ago

I think America has a very serious problem right now accepting that personal liberties, while important, need to not deride public welfare. It's like the entire nation has taken it's anti-anything-socialized fervor to an extreme level and is now becoming self-destructive. During a pandemic it is unacceptable that prominent national politicians vocally fight against societal welfare but that's where we're at.

I'm looking at you guys from up here in Canada where there were some CPC (Conservative Party of Canada) candidates who are still openly anti-vax and the party leader took a lot of shit on the public stage for failing to stamp out their voices. The PPC (People's Party of Canada) by comparison is openly anti-vax and did secure a big chunk of voters (I'd assume the vast majority of anti-vaxers) but again failed to win even the party leader's seat and the GPC (Green Party of Canada) had their turnout decline staunchly after a combination of weak leadership and continued ambiguity over vaccine passport rollout. No where on the main stage except for the PPC (which failed to qualify for the debates) was there any voice actually advocating against vaccination.

This is I think why America has a real problem that the entire world is getting their civil liberties curtailed in order to address. The country needs to get its house in order - it is unacceptable that mask mandate prevention laws have been passed by governors that might legitimately consider a presidential run next year. This is a crisis that needs to be addressed seriously and overcome and at this point governments in the rest of the world are losing their ability to keep order internally because of how fractured the nation has got.

It absolutely sucks that it has come to this - but the domestic government in the US has not been acting competently. Even with both sides of the aisle have technically worked together you still have the BS "We're not going to side with them" crap going on. America has a long, long history of severely curtailing civil liberties - if you think this sort of an action is new I would direct you to one of the most regretful legal frameworks ever issued - the Sedition Act of 1918.

Get vaccinated and get your friends and family vaccinated - get those numbers up so you can be a world leader again.

robhunter2• 5 years ago

Can you point me to the specific sections of the PPC platform that are anti-vaxx?

Are you sure you're not conflating anti-vaccine-passport with anti-vaccine?

teawrecks• 5 years ago

Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that.

The studies from the CDC indicate the opposite: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

Which studies are you referring to?

brianobush2• 5 years ago

Most MDs are general physicians and know little about vaccines other than textbook knowledge that is decades old. Why would you trust them over a team of researchers? Especially at this point of the pandemic when we have so much data showing their effectiveness?

ptaipale9• 5 years ago

I generally trust MDs here more than others. That doesn't mean that some MDs couldn't be completely wrong. But almost all MDs agree that vaccines are very effective.

MDs have, via connections such as subscriptions to medical publications and net sites or databases, access to more information than most people, and because of their training have an ability to assess information, including which teams of researchers are doing genuine science, and which are selling horse dewormers.

RandomLensman3• 5 years ago

One of the reasons we find ourselves even in such a predicament is so odd: while governments the world over were (and are) quite willing to put very strong curbs, shut-downs etc. in place, they are hesitant to generally mandate vaccination. So now we are in these proxy campaigns on vaccinations.

Of course, one could argue that governments should not/cannot mandate vaccination, but then we also generally accept that governments can send you off to die in wars. Generally speaking, this whole mess actually brings some much deeper issues on state vs the individual to the surface. Those are the ones that will eventually need proper debate much more than finer points on immunology.

eecc4• 5 years ago

Indeed. I rationalized it so: COVID is a wild enemy that will do whatever to survive at our own expense. We need to fight and wage all-out war, conscript, treat the wounded and comfort the widowed.

bondarchuk• 5 years ago

It would look like this: people get dragged out of their houses by armed men, and are forcibly injected while screaming and being held down. "We also send people off to war" is not a sufficient argument for removing the right to bodily autonomy.

Edit: oh, and probably you wouldn't get to see any videos of it online, because it's anti-vaccination content. Haha.

qwytw3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure if there is really any widespread acceptance in any democratic country that the government can just decide to send anyone to a foreign war. Every western soldier who died in Iraq, Afghanistan etc. volunteered. I think that if the US government just decided to reintroduce conscription back in 2003 it would had went down much worse than when they were sending conscripts to Vietnam and there'd probably be even much more resistance to that these days.

megous2• 5 years ago

Governments already mandate vaccinations [of kids] in many places. Just not for covid-19.

ilogik• 5 years ago

who is saying people that have had COVID shouldn't vaccinate? because they're wrong.

Maybe not the second shot. But if you've had covid, you should 100% get vaccinated.

supercanuck• 5 years ago

*May

The word May is doing a lot of work in this paragraph.

ceilingcorner2• 5 years ago

It already has had a massive chilling effect, because anyone that even raises the slightest question about the situation is labeled as some kind of right wing Trump supporting radical. A lot of very normal, thoughtful people are not okay with what is happening.

xadhominemx2• 5 years ago

Correct, I am not ok with 10’s of thousands of completely unnecessary deaths because people believed dumb antivax memes on Facebook

lemmsjid• 5 years ago

It's highly debatable (bold face on that!!), but I'm not sure that Youtube counts as public debate. If you look at the comments sections on Youtube articles about vaccination, you will find a lot of manifestly false or misinterpreted information. If argued against, people will link to their evidence, which, unsurprisingly, is usually other Youtube videos. This is when you can go down a depressing rabbit hole. These are usually videos, slickly produced, making probably-intentionally bad faith arguments against vaccination. They will take public statements out of context, misinterpret public data, and use a combination of charisma and good (if scrappy) production values to give the viewer the sense that they are the ones telling you the truth. You will find these videos on pretty much any subject, and the makers are clearly monetizing them. You can then go down a rabbit hole, viewing video after video, each providing you with another nugget the confirms your growing suspicion that they're all out to get you.

While it's, again, highly debatable, increasingly to me these videos do not count as public debate, though they are certainly an exercise in free speech. They are not public debate because they do not subject themselves to any form of such debate and intentionally avoid it. If you want skeptical takes on left wing politics, you can see public debate on, say WSJ, Fox News, even OANN. Public in the sense that they put themselves out there in the public sphere and can be scrutinized thusly. These shadowy Youtube articles clearly bank themselves on A) not being found by people who will disagree, or B) have an audience who increasingly will not seek out or countenance opposing viewpoints.

frogpelt• 5 years ago

There's an overwhelming tendency now to boil down all opinions to either "right side of history" or "wrong side of history", "anti-science" or "pro-science". This is especially true on social media, YouTube. etc.

Out in the real world there is so much nuance. There are actually black people who don't agree with BLM. There are intellectual people who don't think they need the vaccine. There are Democrats who are pro-life. There are Republicans who support gay marriage. There are bunch of undecided people on a bunch of topics.

We are not all on one side or the other. There is so much middle ground. I still believe most people are in the vast expanse of middle ground.

It just doesn't look that way on the Internet.

mewpmewp22• 5 years ago

This is so spot on. I have seen countless of times in forums how if someone voices concern about a vaccine they are immediately called "Trump supporter", even though they might not even be from the US. Especially in US though it seems that in people's minds there's just 2 types of people, one are allies and the other are enemies. Allies all have the exact same beliefs, and enemies exactly the opposite. Therefore if someone has a belief that doesn't agree with mine it means they must also hold all the other beliefs and must be of the enemy group. I think it's more than ridiculous. And you also can't hold a belief that's in between the other beliefs, this immediately means you are the enemy.

LudvigVanHassen12• 5 years ago

Frogpelt has an understanding that so many lack. I wish there was some way for this middle ground to speak and make itself now.

This "tribal" devolution of everything to two sides on an issue with interlocking viewpoints on all subjects is a major problem in our current climate.

I agree the nuance of this situation is lost when there are so many people who do not see the nuance to begin with.

A culture that cannot understand nuance is a culture more likely to go to war. To see others as "other", not seeking common ground, but seeing things that differ as reasons to hate

simorley3• 5 years ago

I think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices.

That's the point of all censorship. It isn't to censor the truly outrageous wackos spouting nonsense since hardly anyone believes them and most laugh at them. It's to censor the moderates who critically analyze and perhaps offer some truth.

Heliocentrism has been around since the ancient greeks which the church leaders could easily write off as being the ideas of backwards pagans. After all, you can see for yourself that the sun rises in the east and crosses the sky and sets in the west. They could "prove" it to the laity. It was only when telescopes and scientific evidence proved that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth that the church started censoring, excommunicating and killing people. The censorship wasn't to silence the uneducated wackos, it was to silence the likes of galileo, copernicus, etc.

Guvante9• 5 years ago

Is your claim that moderate voices are causing people to not get vaccinated then?

If that is the case maybe silencing them isn't a bad thing so that we can get past the pandemic rather than wallowing in "would we should we" territory.

EDIT: To be clear this was meant to be a joke about loosely defining "moderate". Many things are being said that aren't "Bill Gates is tracking you" that are also staunchly anti vaxx such as "it doesn't actually work" and "it can kill you".

antognini2• 5 years ago

Off topic, but as an astronomer I have to dispute your characterization of the development of heliocentric theory. Around the time of Copernicus and Galileo heliocentrism was a radical idea, but it also had a number of problems. Astronomers of the time expected that if heliocentrism was true and the Earth was moving we should observe parallax of the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun. But no such parallax was observed (and it took another three centuries before telescopes were good enough to measure this phenomenon). In fact it was more than 150 years before any direct proof of the Earth's motion was found (from a measurement of the aberration of light at the end of the 17th century).

Of course Galileo was put under house arrest and Bruno was burned at the stake, but in the case of Galileo, the reasons were more political in nature (going out of his way to insult the pope), and in the case of Bruno it was because of his heretical theological ideas (like the idea that the Trinity doesn't exist) rather than his scientific ideas. That doesn't excuse the Church's actions, but they really just weren't all that interested in the science.

SquishyPanda233• 5 years ago

think we have to ask if this won't have a chilling effect on open discussion by moderate voices

You have to weigh that against the known chilling effect caused by the disinformation campaign.

You also have to include the fact that the disinformation campaign is killing people. And that it is known to be partially funded by governments specifically to shut down discourse and destabilize the US.

uhtred3• 5 years ago

youtube is a private company, they can ban you for whatever reason they want, presumably. Youtube, google, facebook, they aren't public services.

exporectomy3• 5 years ago

Of course they can, because they do. What are you really trying to say? Is it that you believe no other moral authority should exist besides the law?

lijogdfljk2• 5 years ago

Frankly, i applaud this censorship. Granted i'm super left/liberal/pro-vax/etc so i'm _definitely_ not in the camp of anti-vaxxers, however we have for years put all our faith and trust in corporations.

Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought. It frustrates me that many of these people didn't care when it was others that were oppressed, but i digress.

Regardless, this sort of mostly harmless but highly sensationalized censorship is very good for our freedoms in my mind because it forces us to decentralize. We've become far too centralized and complacent in unwarranted corporate faith. This is to be expected, and people should have been prepared.

Let Youtube/etc censor all it wants. We need better than Youtube. Wake people up to that. My 2c.

oceanplexian6• 5 years ago

Now private entities aren't aligning with a lot of people and they're shocked that corporations aren't the free speech utopia that they once thought.

I've worked at some of these companies so I can give you an insider perspective, because what you're saying isn't an accurate reflection of history. Maybe the internet wasn't a "Utopia" but compared to what it is now it certainly was.

In the tech community 5-10 years ago, all of us working for these larger platforms used to pride ourselves upholding free speech as a core value. At that time the only content banned were threats, copyright violations, child pornography, etc. Only after the 2016 election rolled around did everything change. The problem is that it's an incredibly slippery slope and once you start compromising your moral compass for "the right reasons", it quickly snowballs into something much worse than anticipated.

pitspotter22• 5 years ago

What an interesting argument about decentralising. I hadn't thought about it like that before. Thank you!

baron_harkonnen• 5 years ago

It's not the wackos we should be worrying about.

It's really amazing to me how easily the "left" was able to be tricked in the same death of critical thinking as the "right".

The "stick to the libs!" angle is far more responsible for the rise in support of Trump leading up to the election. People on the "right" were manipulated for decades into reducing their political beliefs to defending themselves from a fictitious adversary (this is why I put quotes around these terms). If you listen to any radical Trump supporter you'll quickly see that a large part of their logic is based on a deeply held belief that roughly half the country is mind washed, irrational liberals that seek to destroy their way of life.

This rewriting of people skeptical of the vaccines as "wackos" serves the same purpose for the "left" and mainstream progressives have gobbled it up without hesitation. They now see roughly half the country as a bunch mind washed, irrational "wackos" that are a threat to the foundations of our society.

Both the "left" and "right" (terms which honestly don't make any political sense any more, evidence by exactly this irrational support for corporate suppression of voices on the "left" and it's dissent on the "right") are currently structured so that any real, meaningful political discourse about the future of the country is dissolved into two insane groups of people throwing rocks at each other.

If you find yourself defined by either of these major narratives, then you are being played.

Guvante9• 5 years ago

What angle about vaccine skepticism isn't summarized as "it might negatively impact you so maybe don't get it".

The vaccine is totally the tragedy of the commons. If everybody gets it you are just making your life worse by also getting it.

If nobody gets it it is bad for everybody.

The reality is sometimes everybody collectively deciding to take one for the team is exactly what we need. Vaccination is one of those situations.

There are exceptions, I don't mean to imply otherwise, but those are not what is being talked about.

"Maybe we shouldn't vaccinate those who have been infected to vaccinate someone else" is being used to justify those who were presumed infected to not get vaccinated. The nuance is getting lost in a painful way.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

You're sketching a number of false equivalences. Left-of-center-in-the-US and Right-of-center-in-the-US each have their problems but that's bad argument for those being the same problems.

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to say a substantial portion of anti-vaccine arguments have come from profit-driven fraud. That's pretty well document. That was the point of origin of the original study and various fraudsters have ridden that 'till today. Of course, there are those with nuance positions on the vaccines this will hurt them and hurt informed. Oppositely, the liars have effectively killed many people at this point.

There are a few actual fraudsters on the left but most active health-craze fraud is concentrated on the right in New Age circles (which can generally no longer be considered left).

Which is to say, the left-of-center has a number of problem (absurdist moralistic posturing, say) but straight-up-lying isn't equally divided here, among the politically respectable, it's concentrated on the right.

loudtieblahblah• 5 years ago

If freedom of speech - as a concept - doesn't protect the worst of us, it won't protect the rest of us.

RGamma• 5 years ago

We need to worry about the wackos especially, since these tend to network and radicalize more due to their skewed perception.

A prerequisite to the tasteful application of censorship in these cases is a functioning scientific and moral apparatus and strong civil society to keep things in the public interest.

gentle3• 5 years ago

They're banning a set of channels that are known to be spreading vaccine lies and then they're also banning videos that are claiming that vaccines aren't safe.

We know they're safe because they undergo exhaustive testing. Banning videos from people that are lying isn't stifling debate, it's banning lies.

txsoftwaredev• 5 years ago

Do you agree they should also ban the lies about Russian collision? What about the lies about Hunter B.'s laptop? What about the videos of Fauci saying we shouldn't be wearing masks?

loudmax• 5 years ago

I think one of the things we need to appreciate is the scale of video uploads that YouTube has to deal with. There are something like hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Aside from dodgy medical advice, they need to look out for child pornography, revenge porn, snuff videos and incitements to terrorism and violence, not to mention copyrighted content. There's no way they could hire enough people to review every single video that's uploaded, so if they're going to have any review at all, it has to be automated.

Getting their algorithm to have any understanding of content that's being uploaded is an extremely difficult problem, and the fact that they're able to do so with any degree of accuracy is an impressive achievement, whatever the merits. Expecting a YouTube algorithm to be able to parse a nuanced reasonable argument from bullshit is to expect a level of AI sophistication that doesn't exist yet.

YouTube could, and probably should, hire people to review videos from high profile YouTubers, but this is only going to work for people who've already established themselves. There's no way to scale that down to everyone that wants to upload something.

So yeah, moderate voices pointing out that people who have already had covid have a solid degree of acquired immunity, or maybe we shouldn't shut down schools are being clobbered. That's a bad thing but it's tough problem to solve.

I also think there's a broader problem that a handful of private companies have such control over public discourse that they're able to effectively censor ideas at all. Or maybe they're not so effective, but the level of control that Google, Facebook, etc, have should give us pause.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should go back to the free for all internet that we had in the 90's where everyone who got online had equal access. This would allow a level of nuanced moderate discussion that we desperately need, but it will also allow crazies, and child porn and terrorists and all the rest. If we don't want that kind of stuff to be easily available online, we need to figure out not just where to draw the line, but how to draw the line. This is a hard problem.

maerF0x03• 5 years ago

To me this is the key, I got the myocarditis symptoms post vaccine and notably none of the ER staff knew (or wished to acknowledge) that this was a potential sideffect. It's become heresy of the most dogmatic kind to not support the vaccine full stop.

Also it took an unrelated to this situation healthcare worker (therapist) to even suggest to me to report it on https://vaers.hhs.gov/ which is how they find out if the vaccine has side effects.

IMO we need to tolerate a lot of "free speech" in order to ensure the validly dissenting voices are not squashed.

134153• 5 years ago

What does this anecdote have to do with free speech? In my country rare cases of myocarditis were listed as a possible side effect immediately after the first potential cases came up and it was also all over the media. Do you claim that in your country the information was not available because of censorship and you nearly died? Which country do you live in? And what kind of medical doctor would not investigate a possible case of myocarditis (or any other kind of heart problems)?

jmull• 5 years ago

It's not the wackos we should be worrying about. It's the stifling of legitimate public debate, the stifling of legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

We should be worrying about the wackos -- and stifling legitimate voices who find themselves in the minority.

I doubt I will agree with exactly where Google draws the line between whacko and legitimate voice, but I have no doubt the line should be drawn.

I also think there's no doubt Google has the right (and responsibility, IMO) to draw the line on their platforms.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 5 years ago

If you look at the policy, you'll see that this isn't aiming at the doctor who says that some people don't need the vaccine, but specifically at people who spread specific claims that are considered solidly disproven with overwhelming consensus: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11161123

You definitely raise valid points about the side effects of false positives during enforcement and the resulting self-censorship, but the other side of the coin is that we've seen that we unfortunately do have to worry about the wackos too.

takeda2• 5 years ago

I welcome that chilling effect, because people who believe YouTube and other sites are required to not do censorship are completely wrong. Not only they are not required to keep everything, they actually have right to remove anything ironically by the first amendment. The only reason they don't do it because they want to appear neutral.

Having the false belief that they can't censor is actually dangerous, because it makes everyone pile up to one service starving and killing competition creating monopoly.

odessacubbage• 5 years ago

the chilling effect in this case is by design.

nojs• 5 years ago

The chilling effect is made worse by the fact that this censorship is conducted entirely by algorithms, and there are no reasonable channels available for appeal other than knowing Google employees or hoping to gain viral traction on other social media.

Rational people making a living from their channels will therefore decide to avoid the topic entirely, even if they have something substantive to add that’s in the public interest.

myko• 5 years ago

he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine.

Actually the research shows the opposite: https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/covid-19-studies-natural-i...

kkoncevicius6• 5 years ago

The article is pay-walled to me. But I am interested - do they mention where the line for being "anti-vaccine" currently is? For example - is someone who is making a video about why he/she will not be taking a 3rd booster shot anti-vaccine and therefore banned?

rscoots• 5 years ago

That line is hidden and opaque by design.

macinjosh5• 5 years ago

Anything short of complete 100% vaccine fanaticism could and probably will be construed as anti-vaccine when useful.

Source: downvotes on this post.

afarrell3• 5 years ago

If I recall correctly, the internet was born from a DARPA project to enable resilient communications that would ensure a nuclear missile launch order would always get through.

If so, then it is indeed contrary to the spirit of the internet to block messages on the basis that they guide people to actions which cause harm to existing structures. The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

My question is: How wise is the spirit of the internet? Does it lead to human flourishing?

squeaky-clean2• 5 years ago

People can still post anti-vax things on the internet if they want. Youtube is not the internet.

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

youtube isn't the internet. Why should you or I be able to tell Youtube want to host on their own servers? If we don't like it we can go to other services.

machiaweliczny9• 5 years ago

Can we? I don't think so.

Network effects are too strong.

mensetmanusman3• 5 years ago

YouTube frontpage promoted and is still promoting crypto scams. A family member lost $4000 to it, and they are still ongoing, and YouTube is too overwhelmed to pull them.

swayvil5• 5 years ago

Given that youtube looks, walks and quacks precisely like the classic "public forum where free speech is valued" that we all know and love, this move is clearly a massive act of deceit.

mabbo2• 5 years ago

YouTube is a private company, not a public service. Anti-vax is not a protected class of people, and so there is no law that says YouTube cannot discriminate against them.

As a company, they've decided to take this path. They don't have to justify it.

If that makes you angry, boycott them. Don't conduct business with them, which includes watching their content and ads.

And if you think that YouTube is large enough and a big enough monopoly that it should be treated as a public service and subject to the rules that apply to public services, then either nationalize it so that it is, or break it up so that there's competition in the market.

prohobo4• 5 years ago

You're right; but I just want to point out that most people arguing against these actions hold this principle despite their visceral reaction.

Two things can be true: YouTube (and Google) have way too much power and are destructive to democracy, AND they have the right to be that way.

The point is that people believe they shouldn't have that right.

machiaweliczny9• 5 years ago

have the right to be that way.

Not for long. I think they pissed off Republicans a tiny bit too much.

_bfhp6• 5 years ago

A private company shouldn't get to pick and choose what opinions are valid. YouTube is not an arbiter of truth, and there is no universal law that says YouTube's moderators will always be correct. As a massive corporation, when they decide to take the path of banning critics of Google, pro-Palestinian activists, feminists and so on, the other companies will follow suit. They don't have to justify it, because almost no-one will care.

If that makes you angry, go convince people that vaccines are safe and effective. You use the internet to out-argue anti-vaxxers, which should be easy because they're so wrong and ideological.

And if you think that YouTube is large enough and a big enough monopoly that it should be treated as a public service and subject to the rules that apply to public services, then either nationalize it so that it is, or break it up so that there's competition in the market.

mabbo2• 5 years ago

A private company shouldn't get to pick and choose what opinions are valid

They aren't. Their not deciding universal truths. They're deciding what content they want to host on their platform, which they operate and pay for. You have no control, nor any say, in what content that is. Go make your own.

And I'd gladly vote in favor of a break up of all the big tech firms.

gentle3• 5 years ago

Thank god.

mmcdermott2• 5 years ago

One of the things that gets lost in the arguments around this sort of censorship (and, before I lose you, it is censorship and that is fine; we all engage in forms of censorship in determining what we will or will not ingest - the danger comes when some third party is acting as the censor for others) is the distinction between legality and morality.

Legally, it seems self-evident that YouTube should be permitted to curate their own content however they deem fit, whether it is fair in the abstract or not. I wouldn't want to live in a world where anyone was compelled to publish, disseminate or engage with content against their will.

Morally, this sort of mass banning of a position ought to be a taboo if we want a free society. We, as free citizens, have every right to petition that an open stance be adopted even if YouTube is well within their rights to refuse.

The other thing I tend to think important is to always ask one more question - would I support this action if it was taken if the sides of the issue were reversed? Sometimes the answer is 'yes', but I've found it a warning sign when the mental response is 'but....'

strgcmc2• 5 years ago

In a funny twist of fate, I for one have become less and less worried about the "opposite" scenario coming to pass, as time goes on and we observe the evolution of political discourse at least in America (and to a lesser extent globally perhaps).

What I mean is, the general trend towards anti-intellectualism in the right-wing, means that their policy positions generally trend towards being based on opinions rather than facts, and become further and further divorced from reality. For example, think about banning contraception or sex education, which are proven to reduce teen pregnancy and abortions; these are counterproductive policy positions the right wing takes, because they don't care to judge policies by their factual outcomes, but instead by what "feels right".

Ergo, as time passes, I find it less and less likely that corporations or organizations that have to live in the real world, deal with practical real world facts and outcomes, will end up taking right wing policy positions or censoring pro-reality positions. It would be fundamentally anti-profit and anti-capitalist to do so and goes against their self-interest (which is an incentive structure that political parties don't share, as spewing misinformation and even acting irrationally won't necessarily lose them voters or supporters, but companies who act irrationally will over time tend to be less profitable), which is cynically the best available guarantee of good decision-making that we have in our broken society.

TLDR: I am not worried about a world where "round Earther's" or pro-vaxx positions get censored, because corporations know that round Earth and pro-vaxx policies lead to better outcomes, being better grounded in reality.

x86_64Ubuntu2• 5 years ago

You can't "reverse" the situation in good faith. Facts, science, logic exist on one side of the discussion, not both. So if we are going to reverse the situation, then we have to acknowledge that the original stance is science/logic invariant.

mmcdermott2• 5 years ago

Facts, science, logic exist on one side of the discussion, not both.

I'm not really sure I buy this. There are people who are simply misled, but most disagreements touch on either disagreements with regard to facts or else values about what is more or less important. I tend to find that there are thoughtful people who disagree with me that are worth hearing.

Beyond that, though, there is simply risk management. The harder it is to impose speech controls (governmental or corporately), the harder it is for them to be applied badly - and there is no tool that cannot be used for ill as well as good.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

I can't tell if I'm more disgusted by the anti-vaxxers or the censorship.

IMHO no content should be banned, ever. The only thing is to be held responsible for the content if you are not going to be impartial.

For example, instead of banning videos of anti-vaxxers, put a claim progress list clearly visible together with the video that can be maintained by those of opposing views.

For example, according to some anti-vaxxers, people with mRNA vaccines are about to die en mass. In places like Portugal, full vaccination rate approaches %90. Wouldn't be good to keep the video and see if Portuguese are dying?

Content moderation by elimination is one of the biggest sins of the internet era. The internet has become a place where history doesn't exist because you can't have a history without having the artefacts that make it. We should be able to look back a few years back and see who said what.

gitgud• 5 years ago

Free speech on Youtube is like being in the audience of a sitcom, you can't just yell out swear words, it could cost the production company money...

deelowe6• 5 years ago

Of course it will. Welcome to the new propaganda. Same as the old propaganda.

Free speech is the act of standing up for those who you disagree with simply because you believe they have the right to be heard. In today's world of "woke" content creators, everyone seems to miss this point. What started out as fairly clear cut issues such as racism and homophobia has now bled into grey areas around vaccines and gain of function research.

On the latter, should we not be concerned about this? We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky? We're not allowed to discuss the nuances of what a "lab leak" may really entail? For example, I think the theory that a researcher collecting specimens from the wild accidentally infecting people in wuhan or themselves holds a lot of merit. Yet, it cannot be discussed.

We should be outraged. And, back on the topic of anti-vaxers. They kind of have a point. Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point? Shutting down open discussion around this topic will only make the situation worse, not better.

EL_Loco3• 5 years ago

Well, in the field of immunization, the WHO has done quite a lot since its creation.

artificialLimbs9• 5 years ago

In the field of rape as well.

https://www.mypanhandle.com/health/panel-finds-80-alleged-ab...

swader99920• 5 years ago

Censoring discussion in an environment of coercive mandates. Anyone working for Google - how do you justify this? You have great options out there you know?

fridif• 5 years ago

By ignoring it and buying new houses and cars

pjc50• 5 years ago

There's still people dying in large numbers, unvaccinated? Eventually people notice the body count against a point of principle. That's how we got to this point.

Aunche• 5 years ago

Google isn't the one who wants to cut their ad revenue and get accused for being Big Brother. Social media censorship has always occured because people demanded it. This time, it's not just an angry Twitter mob either. Even the president are saying that they are not doing enough to combat misinformation.

colechristensen2• 5 years ago

The problem is that for any major issues you can get attention and money for publishing a contrarian view. Platforms like youtube then can be megaphones for monetizing conspiracy theories which do actual harm. There is some distance between good faith discussion and promoting the opposite of whatever view is popular.

Content distributors are then on a knife edge with moderation, and how to moderate fairly is incredibly difficult. Youtube doesn’t want to be the vaccine conspiracy clearing house so at some point they decided to just ban it all. Making money from peoples attention brings this problem and moralizing won’t make it go away.

reilly3000• 5 years ago

Ir hardly "cannot be discussed". I've participated in several online discussions about it, and cited several major news outlets covering the story. The White House is openly investigating the topic. Defending free speech is very important, but crying wolf about censorship is counterproductive to the cause.

josephcsible12• 5 years ago

How much content needs to be censored before we can talk about censorship without "crying wolf"?

whatshisface• 5 years ago

It's difficult to claim that it's crying wolf in the comment section of an article by a reputable mainstream source telling us what's happening. Honestly it is a little surprising that the mainstream is even admitting the censorship is happening and not helping hide it "for the good of the people," but I guess if this article didn't appear they'd lose what was left of their credibility.

ghuin• 5 years ago

The problem is people who thought there were "clear cut issues". Now there are more issues that are considered clear cut. Disagree? Bad for you.

hammock4• 5 years ago

Related to consolidation and centralization of power

kiba• 5 years ago

While I agree that free speech is important, misinformation is nonetheless an important topic to discuss.

Public policy debates are important because it leads to a more accurate state and more informed decision, but not when anti-vaccine opponents continue to undermine accurate information at every turn.

native_samples7• 5 years ago

How do you know the information is accurate?

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

Then argue against it. You elevated the misinformation by banning it.

How many people make their vaccination decision because of Youtube content?

It is paramount that some people get a more realistic picture here...

ljm• 5 years ago

I feel like 'malinformation' describes this kind of thing more accurately, as it is a style of misinformation that has directly harmful effects that can be fatal.

It's another level, compared to misinforming people about other things.

Meekro• 5 years ago

The lab leak theory was "misinformation" until it wasn't. They say "listen to the experts" and then censor actual doctors and scientists who say the wrong things. An "expert" is apparently someone who has a degree and holds the approved views, everyone else is spouting "misinformation."

umvi10• 5 years ago

The rationale is:

"There's no time to be debating the scientific consensus right now. We are in a crisis. Lives are at stake. Debating and questioning the consensus (even if it changes) will cause misinformation to propagate and lives to be lost. The only way to optimize for lives saved is to temporarily take away some fundamental freedoms like speech so that the smart people in charge can resolve the crisis with minimal loss of life."

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

Sorry, we had emergency legislation because of terrorism since 2 decades now. A bit desensitized by now. Perhaps I should look for something that induces fear?

TimTheTinker5• 5 years ago

This sounds like the rationale government leaders often employ to institute a dictatorship: "temporarily remove freedoms and grant the president emergency executive powers".

But somehow "temporarily" becomes "permanently" because no one in power wants to voluntarily give up that power.

mbesto10• 5 years ago

We're in the middle of a global pandemic and we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky? We're not allowed to discuss the nuances of what a "lab leak" may really entail?

When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?

Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point?

To this point? Are you serious? Does someone seriously need to explain to you all of the viruses (far more deadly than COVID mind you) that have been eradicated by government organizations?

Shutting down open discussion around this topics will only make the situation worse, not better.

You're missing the point. The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith. I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way, however when most of the actors who are bringing up these topics are trying to cry wolf then why should we take them seriously?

gruez5• 5 years ago

When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?

They weren't?

You're missing the point. The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith. I absolutely think we need to discuss this topics in a meaningful way, however when most of the actors who are bringing up these topics are trying to cry wolf then why should we take them seriously?

Why would the good faith actors get punished for the actions of bad faith actors?

HonestOp001• 5 years ago

The CDC of the past is not the CDC of today. It never is the same, people come and go. The make up of the political structure has overwhelmed the program:

1. CDC director overrules recommendation of board (political reasoning alone).

2. Dr. Faucci admits he lied about the amount of people needed to be vaccinated.

3. Dr. Faucci admits they lied about the need for masks. Which if we look at the data it is messy and shows only a 20% efficacy. If we look at recommendations prior to this outbreak, the documents say not to bother with masks. Do not tell me it was for the greater good to lie, they lied. Which people were told to shut up and listen when we all questioned the lie.

4. The head of the CDC is having an emotional break down on TV when all metrics are trending good (1Q). Why was she having a break down when the public data shows something else. Could it be she had knowledge of something?

The point is, agencies change, they adapt to the political masters. We have these three examples plus my fourth curiosity that point to the government agencies no longer being trustworthy in their guidance.

deelowe6• 5 years ago

When the polio vaccine first came out was the public (i.e. non medical personnel) allowed to discuss whether the use of inactivated virus was too risky?

I would certainly have thought so. Are you referring to something specific or just sowing seeds of doubt?

To this point? Are you serious? Does someone seriously need to explain to you all of the viruses (far more deadly than COVID mind you) that have been eradicated by government organizations?

To me? No. I can read the whitepapers myself and understand the risks I'm taking. I'm fully vaccinated btw.

Regardless, you're sort of missing the point here. Shutting down dissenting views is authoritarianism and categorically not free speech. And, to be clear, it's not just "misinformation" that's being banned. There are legitimate issues with vaccines people should be informed of such as early warning signs of myocarditis that are also not allowed on YT.

The people who are crying "why can't we discuss GoF research or the lab leak" are not engaging in the argument in good faith.

"They" are? Who is "they?" Are you claiming there's no point in discussing this? We still haven't sorted out where the virus originated and simply showing it is likely zootonic in origin isn't enough. Wuhan was doing active research on zootonic coronaviruses.

nradov11• 5 years ago

In terms of human viruses, governments have only eradicated smallpox and almost polio. We will not be able to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 the same way. Unlike smallpox and polio there are animal hosts (most other mammal species can carry and transmit the virus) and the vaccines don't reliably prevent infection. So I encourage everyone to get vaccinated to protect themselves, but we need to face reality that the virus will never be eradicated.

specialist2• 5 years ago

...In today's world of "woke" content creators

Welcome to the new woke. Same as the old woke.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

president2• 5 years ago

Don't forget, the term "anti-vaxers" has become a catch-all term for shutting down the slightest criticism about the virus, whether fact or opinion. I have seen this term slung at people simply questioning vaccine mandates and passports in casual conversations both online and offline. Very few people are anti-vax but they powers that be would like most people to think there are only 2 sides. We live in dangerous times.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

Exactly: that term seems to be used as a strawman to attack the worse positions avoiding the reasonable ones.

Dismissal has been a constant presence. Somebody got damaged after infection? Some will come and dismiss with "anectodal". Somebody got damaged after vaccination? Others will come and dismiss with "anectodal". One tries to tell someone that he lost very real family members and friends to covid: "they must have been already sick". One tries to tell someone that he has known of a surprising number of people with adverse events: "they must have been already sick". And with that the issue has not progressed a bit.

HyperRational• 5 years ago

Anti-vaxxers spread lies that are causing a lot of unneeded death and suffering.

justwanttolearn2• 5 years ago

Even for racism and homophobia has now merged through grey areas. Someone who disagrees with mass immigration is a racist and someone who is pro the sanctity of marriage between man and woman (not that you can't get legal rights as a same sex couple) is now homophobia. There's so much nuance in under these big umbrellas that no one care to have a dialogue about, they just want clear cut right or wrong with the world is filled in fuzzy lines.

melenaboija• 5 years ago

"Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like?"

For similar reasons they should be trusting people creating content on private media platforms.

People need information and seek for sources, whatever they are. I don't think the lack of content on YouTube will make change most of people beliefs, if something will reinforce them to think this is imposed.

You can always go to other sources to look for what you want to see.

nsxwolf2• 5 years ago

We should have supported openly racist and homophobic speech. So that we'd be able to continue openly talking about other things, like science. But we all think we can control the beast.

ineptech• 5 years ago

I know HN is always on a hair trigger to call out free speech issues, but "youtube does a poor job of curating covid information" is the expected outcome. You don't need to postulate a conspiracy or malicious actor to explain the expected outcome.

So it's kind of hard to take stuff like this seriously:

...we're not allowed to discuss whether GoF research is too risky?"

Of course you are. Youtube middle-management aren't the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable scientific or medical information. If they ever were, that would be a crisis worthy of outrage.

dang4• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693407, partly because it's swerving into generic ideological flamewar, and partly because I need to prune some large subthreads in order to ease the load on our poor server, which smoke is coming out of right now. The latter is our problem and we're working on fixing it, but the former is the community's problem and everyone needs to work on fixing that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

deelowe6• 5 years ago

Thanks. I'll tone down the snark.

poo-yie• 5 years ago

"Why should they trust the government, the CDC, the WHO and the like? What have they done to prove they are trustworthy at this point?"

This is the crux of the issue IMO. As someone pointed out in another comment, the CDC of the past is not the same as the CDC of today.

I am vaccinated as are my wife and kids (young adults). However, it was not a slam-dunk decision to get it.

Why the hesitancy?

- Trump pushed to get the vaccine in record time (maybe to score some political points?)

- When outbreak first hit the US, Trump tried to halt international travel to a large extent. He was berated for this, while it seemed to me to be a prudent action given the situation. Other countries put the clamps on international travel and I didn't see any criticism of them.

- While Trump was still in office, Harris and others were publicly quoted as saying that if Trump says they should get the vaccine that they would be hesitant (don't recall the exact quote). (Did they say this as a legitimate concern or as a way of scoring political points?)

- Biden administration, supporters, and MSM rush to label anyone who questioned whether the virus originated from Wuhan lab as "conspiracy theorists", "kooks", "crackpots", "nutjobs", etc. Then later on, well-respected scientists openly suggest that Wuhan lab could be the origin. (Who is trying to manipulate our perceptions and WHY?)

- Mask mandates openly ignored by the same people who advocated for strict adherence (Gov. Whitmer, Pres. Biden, former Pres. Obama's big birthday party, etc.) If wearing a mask is so important for public health, why are they NOT doing it at times?

- Sufficient public testimony from NIH scientists in Congressional hearings to conclude that NIH funding of Wuhan lab through 3rd party DID fit the definition of gain-of-function research (suggesting that Fauci is lying to the public. Why?)

- Earlier in outbreak, Biden administration stated that they don't foresee mask mandates. Later, mask mandates.

- There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that many hospitals were quick to report fatalities as being Covid when there was no Covid connection. Why? Were the hospitals coached to act this way? Was it about federal government payments? Make the numbers look a certain way?

- From the very earliest days of Biden administration, up to today, there has been record immigration on the southern border. Putting aside your position about how immigration should or should not be handled IN THE ABSENCE OF a worldwide pandemic, WHY are record number of immigrants being encouraged, supported, and processed at our southern border? Are they being tested for Covid? Mayorkas just made a statement a day or 2 ago that he was SURPRISED by the jump in delta variant numbers at the immigrant processing and staging locations!! Really??? WTF are these people thinking?

I could continue on, but by now you either see the pattern or you refuse to acknowledge that it's even conceivable that there could be a pattern of deception.

If I look back over the history of vaccinations, they have been an absolute blessing to all of humanity. There's no doubt about their effectiveness in wiping out terrible things such as Polio (as just 1 example).

However, today there is so much evidence that federal government, UN, WHO, state governments, local governments, MSM, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. are now operating under a perpetual mode of MANIPULATION to coerce the public to their DESIRED end goals, irrespective of truth and scientific fact. Both Democrat and Republican parties are guilty.

Are you really surprised that there are people who question the truth and sincerity of the powers that be?

funOtter• 5 years ago

Solid list, thank you for this.

goatlover15• 5 years ago

I'm not standing up for people who spread conspiracy theories about an ongoing pandemic. I hope they get deplatformed.

rvz• 5 years ago

Another day another ban-hammering from YouTube; so what.

It is their private platform and if you sign up you agreed to their T&Cs and they can choose to ban or remove whoever they want. Mistake or not, robot or not.

They will never change and it will only get worse.

haunter• 5 years ago

I wonder when they start banning people who don't want a not-compatible with the EU vaccine passport jab (for example Sputnik and Sinopharm)

helen___keller5• 5 years ago

IMO, go further. Remove all medical recommendation and assertions from YouTube. Leave YouTube for entertainment, and have other platforms - perhaps ones better regulated and better managed - for medical discussions in a scientific context.

There's inherent difficulty in trying to judge between wackos and pros, because wackos do their best to masquerade as pros. This is basically a turing complete issue, because there's always people straddling the line between wacko and pro. YouTube has mostly avoided the difficulty with this issue until now by avoiding moderation entirely (aside from certain categories that suffer from the same problems, like copyright claims), so the issue with most of YouTube is that you can jump from pro to extreme wacko and not realize it as a non-professional yourself. Meanwhile, all content creators, wacko and pro, are given the same platform to promote their claims - one that incentivizes eyeballs, clicks, and engagement, not one that incentivizes accuracy or merit (or one that allows discussion in a context independent of monetization and ranking, which are known to poison good faith discussion).

Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV. These are much like buying a social media influencer to push your medical claims. It's disgusting.

LocalH2• 5 years ago

Taken to its logical end, that would also prevent many very useful channels from existing. What about all the people who live with a mental illness and also have a Youtube channel documenting that experience? Should that be prohibited too? For which disorders? If you remove all ADHD-related individual content from YouTube, you're harming the platform and a crapton of people who have bettered their lives with the aid of such videos.

paulryanrogers2• 5 years ago

It could be a slippery slope. Still I wonder if such a ban could also have positive effects by fostering smaller, more collaborative communities too.

As it is YouTube is becoming a (mostly unidirectional) public commons that is captured by a single profit-seeking corporation.

helen___keller5• 5 years ago

You're alluding back to the moderation problem. I claimed that discerning between pros and wackos is turing complete, and you have indeed shown that discerning between ANY kind of allowable content A and disallowed content B is also turing complete - you can get arbitrarily close to the line between A and B, so any algorithm (or human guidelines) is necessarily going to have issues on some edge cases.

I agree, you're absolutely right. Still, I claim it should be done, and maybe the content you listed should also be disallowed.

I'm not saying these videos and discussions shouldn't exist, I'm suggesting that perhaps it's time we dispelled the idea of a global Town Square - one platform for all content. It's a recipe for disaster. We've seen what can happen and what will continue to happen. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - how many times do we have to watch a global town square devolve into shit flinging, disinformation, and hate?

Let's stop pretending that there can be a global free speech forum and that we can have some fair minimum ruleset to moderate all content on that forum.

We should opt for the opposite - a spectrum of platforms that appeal to different interests and are regulated in proportion to the severity of incorrect or bad-faith information in that interest.

The entertainment that dominates Youtube is minimally severe if incorrect or bad faith, so YouTube would have minimal regulation.

Content on personal health and experiences could go into HealthTube, where moderation exists to prevent making strong medical claims or pushing bullshit (the "pay an influencer to say that ElaMexaTrin cured my covid" problem), but people are otherwise allowed to post what they want about their personal experiences.

Content with strong scientific claims on health would go into MedicalTube, which is regulated and heavily moderated to prevent commercial interests and disinformation.

Really, if YouTube was forward thinking, all of these could be different subsets of the same platform. But instead we have one platform with the same erratic hand of moderation slapping things down left and right based on whatever changing ruleset seems convenient today.

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

Not a bad idea, although I'd start with a ban on medical - pharmaceutical advertising on Youtube. Most countries don't allow marketing of any kind of prescription drug (not sure about over-the-counter though), based on the very common-sense notion that only trained doctors (with no backdoor kickback deals with pharmaceutical outfits) should be advising patients on appropriate medicines for their condition.

helen___keller5• 5 years ago

I agree strongly, but my point is that in modern social forums the only difference between advertising and content is who is getting paid. I can promote my drug through traditional advertising, or I can promote my drug by sponsoring channels, or I can promote my drug by hiring a "viral marketing" firm to try and spread rumors about how my drug is so much more effective than the competition but being held back by an evil shadowy cabal of big pharma.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

That would be another sensible approach. Or Youtube would need to employ doctors that judge on a case by case basis and articulate their decisions. Anything else is a bad solution in my opinion and this current position warrants a lot of pushback in my opinion.

winternett2• 5 years ago

Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV.

Amen to that statement... Is there any more obvious cue that news is all a profit machine than a half hour repeating commercials about reverse mortgages and anti-depressants that cause diarrhea?

_bfhp6• 5 years ago

Hope nobody against abortion is at the wheel in this scenario.

Censorship is a shortcut to avoid doing the real work of de-radicalizing people and convincing the undecided. It's not even a working shortcut.

For every issue liberals focus on, there has grown a loud minority who want to normalize Big Tech using their power to ban opponents because they don't see how it will always backfire, and/or they're bullies who crave power over other people.

helen___keller5• 5 years ago

Not sure how this relates to my comment, sorry.

crooked-v2• 5 years ago

Similarly but unrelated, let's also ban drug ads on cable TV.

I'm reminded of seeing anecdotes about British and Australian people watching US TV streams and them finding the prevalence of drug ads really bizarre.

bla15e• 5 years ago

Thank god, praying that this includes those vagabond anti-booster folks (JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE VACCINATED DOESNT MEAN YOU'RE FULLY VACCINATED!!!)

photochemsyn7• 5 years ago

Well, I do believe two FDA officials resigned in protest saying there was no scientific evidence for the efficacy of a third dose, and that does sound like legitimate informed scientific dissent.

I think the claim that this 'third dose' was pushed through by pharmaceutical corporations and compliant government officials can't be so glibly dismissed, given such issues.

Of course, future data might support or undermine this view, but it's hardly 'anti-vax hysteria'. Our pharmaceutical system has a long history of this kind of thing, due to their mindless focus on profit margins with much less regard for the safety or efficacy of their products. Look up the Vioxx debacle, for example.

antioxidant• 5 years ago

Awesome! Finally. I think they should ban all anti-Facebook content as well. Facebook is a good company and never makes mistakes, to think otherwise is simply dangerous for the whole tech industry and must be removed.

deadalus• 5 years ago

2 points by deadalus 22 minutes ago | parent | edit [–] | on: YouTube removes “I Can't Believe You've Done This”...

Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller, Gab TV

Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

listless2• 5 years ago

My wife is very vaccine hesitant, and every time they make a move like this to block content or take it down, it only strengthens her position. She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas. It’s tragic that we knew this at some point, but are going to have to figure it all back out again the hard way.

commandlinefan4• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

Hell, I always thought anti-vaxxers were looneys and was first in line for the COVID shot when it was available in March... but even I'm starting to be convinced that the anti-vaxxers might have a point because of all this effort to silence them. I'm becoming vaccine... remorseful?

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

I am remorseful at this point. By calculation taking the vaccine is sensible. But very closely so in my age group. There is currently a push to vaccinate children which is technically irresponsible since they won't suffer symptoms and would reach a better immunity they will never get with the vaccine. There is a lot of room for critique and much panic about a serious but not too deadly disease.

simonh• 5 years ago

None of the material that's being pulled would in any way persuade me that getting vaxxed was a mistake. I'm very happy with my choice and highly recommend it. Most of the material being pulled is pernicious conspiracy rubbish, but too much legitimate discussion, some of which has a chance of persuading anti-vaxxers is being hoovered up in the cull.

goldenbikeshed10• 5 years ago

I don't get this. Here in Germany for example holocaust denial is illegal.

Assume you are in a country where it's not, say the USA. Assume you slowly witness a rise of naziism that as usual comes with holocaust denial. Now the USA make holocaust denial illegal. Would that make you reconsider if the holocaust really happened?

What the anti-vaxxers and their misinformation are doing has lead to the absolutely unnecessary loss of thousands of lifes. Depriving them of any platform is morally imperative.

coldpie• 5 years ago

Please don't make medical decisions based on crap you read on the Internet, and especially not based on articles about crap other people are reading on the Internet. Talk to a doctor. That's what they're there for.

idiotsecant2• 5 years ago

Yes anti-vaxxers are looneys.

No they shouldn't be removed from the modern public forum because of that.

Don't let the two get confused. Just because someone is silencing people with stupid opinions doesn't somehow make those opinions less stupid.

scohesc2• 5 years ago

Welcome to the club!

Almost two years of "two more weeks and we'll be out of this! just do your duty and we'll be free of this pandemic!"

I was very vaccine hesitant and would say I was coerced by government, private businesses (and the governments mandates handed to them), and by my peers. I ended up getting the vaccine recently but I am very scared of the potential consequences.

We need the world to rip off the bandaid and open up instead of our leaders prolonging this pandemic to gain more and more power.

belter11• 5 years ago

Employees, Scientists and Managers of Vaccine producers, when recorded with hidden cameras, also seem to be vaccine remorseful...

"Johnson & Johnson: Children Don’t Need the ‘F*cking’ COVID Vaccine Because There Are ‘Unknown Repercussions Down the Road’ …"

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/johnson-and-johnson-chil...

Grim-444• 5 years ago

I never once in my life considered an anti-vax position until now. I still think previous vaccines are fine as we have had decades of experience making and studying them, and only at the moment am concerned about the brand new mRNA vaccine, but the result of all of the recent events and all of the censoring really has thrown me for a loop and I actually have started reconsidering what I used to just assumed was true.

I lost all faith in mass media years ago, haven't watched CNN/etc in years, and now I've lost any faith I had in our institutions such as the CDC and FDA. Censoring any opposition and using full on physical coercion, forcing people to do what they say or else they'll take your job away from you, or else you won't be able to provide for your family, ruins any remaining trust I had in them and now I'm questioning everything that I just blindly trusted was true.

I don't know how many years it'll be before I ever trust them again. You may think I'm completely wrong and misled, and that's fine. But the actions these groups are taking are completely undermining themselves, they're completely screwing over their credibility. Not just for this issue, but for every issue into the future, and that is a serious issue. I no longer assume that what the FDA approves is good for use. I no longer assume what the CDC says we should do is what's best for me. The trust is gone. This dystopian situation of removing the voice of anyone who dares question them only further entrenches my doubt.

TeMPOraL3• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

The sad truth is, they do this just because of fucking ad revenue. There's no grand conspiracy against, or even for anti-vaccination movements. It's just people selling the world for a quick buck.

And some people are still shooting me weird looks when I keep telling them that advertising is a cancer on modern society.

BuyMyBitcoins2• 5 years ago

I’m not so sure. I can’t help but think a good proportion of Google/YouTube employees truly believe they are saving lives and fighting “misinformation” with this move. To me, citing lost ad revenue is a convenient scapegoat for what these partisan folks wanted to do the whole time.

air7• 5 years ago

Huh? The opposite seems to me to be true: YouTube can make "easy money" selling ads on viral anti-vax videos, but choose not to.

Koshkin3• 5 years ago

Truth it is. Whatever their motto of the day, companies have no morals or principles, they are driven purely by their business goals and would change their policies in a blink of an eye when they feel it would help their business.

jimbob453• 5 years ago

Preach, my man. I've been saying that for years too. There's a fear that banning advertising would be a stain on free speech and that may be true but legislation is the only way outside of this cold war.

We're getting to the point where companies could pay parents to name their children after products. Oh wait, too late[0], we're already there.

[0]https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-17-bethesdas-skyr...

datavirtue3• 5 years ago

Maybe because when they hear "advertising" they think car commercial or magazine ad and associate that with your comment. Those can be very good things. Mechanizing disinformation to pool people into cults and sell them to the highest bidder is not advertisement...it is what we call "big tech" until we can figure out another word.

AgentME• 5 years ago

If advertising is responsible for actually getting them to get off their asses to take down antivax misinformation and potentially save lives, that's making advertising sound really good right now. Though that might be crediting advertising a little too much, maybe some employees in charge don't want to take part in spreading misinformation.

mypastself4• 5 years ago

In addition to playing into anti-vaxxers’ belief that they are being silenced for nefarious purposes, reducing their arguments’ visibility also reduces the likelihood someone will publish a well-reasoned counterargument.

Skeptic videos might be disseminated on sites frequented solely by those willing to believe them, and they will be less exposed to dissenting opinions.

MrRadar4• 5 years ago

I think by now we should understand that it usually takes an order of magnitude more effort to counter-act a false claim than it takes to make it in the first place. If your proposed approach was viable there shouldn't be people around today saying that vaccines cause autism, as the original paper that made that claim has been debunked many, many, times. And yet, that lie is still extremely pervasive in society and directly causing harm to people.

Part of this is because of recommendation algorithms on social media sites like Youtube getting people into positive feedback loops. If you find a anti-vaxx video and Youtube recommends you two videos, one re-enforcing the video you've just seen (making you feel smart for having found and accepted the information in the original video) and one debunking it (which makes you feel stupid for having wasted your time on the original video), which do you think the average person is more likely to pick? Eventually the algorithm will "naturally" pick up that people watching anti-vaxx videos don't want to see videos debunking those views and will never show them to people watching anti-vaxx videos. The only way to solve this paradox is to blanket ban the anti-vaxx videos.

ascar• 5 years ago

That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

One of my family members is also very hesitant to get the vaccine and gets all kind of anti-vaccine propaganda through various groups and channels. She takes that content as "reasonable" and "potentially true" even tho basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid, which is "backed up" by official NHS statistics. How did they arrive at this claim? Well they just said any recorded covid death with a recorded precondition didn't die due to covid but due to the precondition and any death that occured within 14 days after a vaccine shot was definitely because of the vaccine. I think I don't have to explain the logical fallacy in that argument, but it does make for a nice headline and many (most?) readers only read the headline. Who really takes the time to carefully read and see if the claim has any logical basis? To make things worse, this kind of "news" is regularly republished across multiple sites hiding the "data" multiple links deep (if directly linked to at all).

That's the kind of content many anti-vaxxers are exposed to on a daily basis. For your line of reasoning to make any impact it would mean that not blocking this kind of content actually weakens the positions of anti-vaxxers. However, I strongly belief the opposite is the case. Being exposed to this kind of content and treating it with similar credibility as other news/media is strengthening their position too.

So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".

I'm also not convinced that outright blocking it is the right move. Hindering it's discoverability (e.g. by downranking it in the so dangerous social media reinforcement bubble algorithmns) and somehow making clear that it might be of very low credibility might be a better approach. It might also be equally hopeless.

specialist2• 5 years ago

There's no silver bullet for cults and other addictions.

Unwinding decades of malfeasance and indoctrination takes time and effort.

Even those who snap out of it then spend decades coming to terms.

Even worse: The liberal tendency to cult shame and scold backfires. (Am guilty as charged.)

The only effective remedy I'm aware of is distraction and redirection. Like the guy who slow walked his wife out of the QAnon cult by encouraging her interest in the opera.

Meanwhile, cockblocking the grifters helps too.

colpabar3• 5 years ago

So we have a situation where keeping the content is reinforcing the beliefs and where blocking the content is also reinforcing the beliefs, because "legitimate" content telling "the truth" is blocked "without reason".

I'd say that blocking the content doesn't always reinforce their beliefs. For a lot of people, reading something that is then blocked at a later date reinforces the belief that the information they consumed is not only true, but so true that it has to be censored by some authority, because it would threaten said authority's legitimacy.

As an example, imagine you think that the police are too violent, and you stumble upon police bodycam footage of a cop getting unnecessarily violent at a traffic stop. You bookmark the video, and then later when you try to tell people about it, the video has been taken down the police, for whatever reason. Wouldn't that reinforce your belief that police are too violent?

I know this isn't a perfect example, because a video of someone doing something is much different than an article making claims based on little to no evidence. But the reason some people's beliefs are reinforced by censorship is because they can't help but wonder if the people doing the censoring are trying to hide something.

bronzeage2• 5 years ago

There's a third option of actually engaging in the discussion. You know, actually investing the efforts of silencing anti-vaxers into explaining the truth instead. And it's not like that option is unfathomable to the media. When the truth is aligned with their agenda, they are already experts in "fact-checking" and pointing out where their opponents are wrong.

The rules of debate say it's always better to refute the main argument and to address their issues. If you resort to ad-hominem attacks, appeal to authority, or just plain censorship, to me it is a confession that you do not have better information to add to the debate. Which implies that I'm right.

throawayfuntime• 5 years ago

Looking at ONS and NHS statistics for deaths and using the same criteria to look at deaths within X days of a vaccine, and adjusting the excess deaths in each as compared to the baseline rate of deaths in previous years, adjusted by age group, has been considered anti vaccine propaganda for a lot of this covid debacle.

UNfortunately what your family member is doing is actually the mirror opposite of what the official reports and mainline consensus has been, that all deaths in X days of a positive covid test are caused by covid but that no deaths after vaccination are are caused by vaccines. Also consider that harms from covid have been reported averaged amongst all age groups to give and inflated risk for the young, while risks from vaccination have been averaged amongst all age groups to lower the stated risk to the young. I state this last point just to illustrate how deliberate misinformation has been government policy with regards to covid stats, so the same technique used by anti vaxxers is of no surprise whatsoever.

When the mainstream consensus uses precisely the behaviour nudging abuse of data as a conspiracy theorist, do not be supposed when some people are unable to see what the problem is.

shikoba• 5 years ago

Yes, you're right people are too dumb, they're don't have a good judging ability. We should select the right info for them.

flybrand2• 5 years ago

That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

A previous fundamental tenant of public health was candid communication.

Censorship goes against that - many activities through this - such as not promoting general health and wellness, diet etc, - go against past foundations of PH.

If people are questioning the legitimacy of PH, censorship reinforces that perception.

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Those who have good arguments against something can convince people with them.

Those without good arguments, need to ban it.

twofornone2• 5 years ago

basically all of what I've seen is simply untrue. E.g. an article claiming there were more deaths due to covid vaccines than to covid

No, the claim is that statistically for every life saved via vaccination, more lives are lost due to vaccine complications, based on officially compiled numbers.

It occurs to me that most of the people arguing for vaccination are just as ignorant and faith based in their argumentation as the people they demonize for arguing against it. This is probably a consequence of the normal distribution of competence, and a significant argument against censoring dissent (dishonestly conflated with "misinformation"), because when ≈70% of the population is not competent enough to consume and evaluate literature, suppression of counter narratives becomes an oppressive tool of the establishment, even when done by so called "private" companies. Our economic system is conveniently organized such that going public for the funding necessary to compete with VC money subjects your company to the rule of an inevitably politically connected board.

It's telling that almost all of this recent censorship (not just regarding the COVID vaccine) aligns so neatly with leftist views. This top down authoritarianism is leading to a parallel society, encouraged by the pervasive breadth and depth of dissent suppression: if you have the "wrong" opinion, you cant post videos on social media, you cant host your own social media on cloud providers, you can't host your own servers because CC companies will refuse to service you...

The authoritarian dystopia has already arrived, not with the sort of force we were warned about, but with welcome cheers from a naive, docile populace.

hartator2• 5 years ago

That line of reasoning doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Can you think about one time in history when you conclude "the government was right to censor this"?

bruiseralmighty2• 5 years ago

This is pretty close to the truth. For a further nudge in the right direction you should apply that thinking to the state of mind your family member was in prior to encountering any "anti-vaccine propoganda".

They were not in a kind of limbo where they could go either way on covid vaccination. They consumed specific media because they already distrusted the authorities in power in the USG.

The reason you are ending up in this apparent to censor or not to censor paradox is because leadership had already previously failed to convince your family member that they could be trusted. Everything that came after was just mobilization.

Now in your situation you should of course censor the hell out of any anti-vaccine sentiment for the same reason that ISIS should not get to train on Army gym equipment and weapons: it *strengthens* your enemies.

Downranking will of course be equally hopeless. This is the equivalent of the Army allowing ISIS to train with them but only on Sundays at midday or something. Its incoherent.

The right answer has been and will always be to have a leadership class (and that includes the people at Youtube and Google as well as legacy politicians) who can be relied upon to display even a modicum of trustworthiness towards *all* Americans. Ironically censorship also fails to move the needle in the right direction at this point.

Guess we are still in that paradox after all.

long_time_gone• 5 years ago

==She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.==

Sounds like she has already made up her mind, in which case I’m not sure it matters if the content is moderated or not. It’s possible she will find whatever reinforces the decision she’s already made.

==The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas.==

This sounds good, but is it true? The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas. Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?

davidw• 5 years ago

The bad idea exists today and is spreading, does limiting that spread actually cause more harm? Is there evidence of this or a study to support it? In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas.

So this is sort of meta isn't it? The easy phrase that sounds good gets a lot of traction, but actually proving whether it's true, long term, is a difficult problem!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law - I'm not calling BS on the phrase we're discussing, just that we don't know!

Meanwhile back in the real world, a friend of ours died of COVID yesterday, leaving behind a husband and son. Pretty sure she was not vaccinated. She was relatively young and in good shape.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

In schools, we suppress all sorts of bad ideas

No, fortunately that is not worldwide practice. "Challenge", possibly, «suppress», not everywhere.

Would suppressing the discussion about eugenics worsen the matter: yes, for example by having to restart the discussion from stage one. The naïve would retain naïve ideas, unchallenged.

__blockcipher__19• 5 years ago

Take eugenics, has suppressing that idea made the belief in eugenics worse?

Ideas like eugenics clearly have something to them that resonates with people, at least until they think hard enough about the ethics or logistics involved. There's a reason eugenics cropped up in the first place. So yes, insofar as you suppress a dangerously seductive idea, you do make it worse, because it takes actually explaining what the flaws were with the idea to shake people out of it.

CivBase4• 5 years ago

Sounds like she has already made up her mind

If that's the case, did she make up her mind before or after consuming the anti-vaccine content?

In my experience, most people who are hesitant about the vaccine are that way because they distrust the government. The anti-vaccine content didn't cause their hesitancy. They only consumed it because it confirmed their pre-existing bias.

If the anti-vaccine content isn't the underlying cause of people not wanting to get the vaccine, censoring that content will not fix anything. I know many people who, like OP's wife, simply see the censorship as further justification for their pre-existing bias. We are likely killing free speech with nothing to show for it.

CrendKing• 5 years ago

Sounds like she has already made up her mind

Exactly. My experience with people taught me that once an adult made up his/her mind with some belief, it is extremely difficult to shake. Confirmation bias will be in effect most of the time. The only chance to change it is when someone really close to the person (who he/she trusts), or someone this person admire/worship says otherwise. And in this case, since it's Youtube, it will never happen.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

...News just in: there's an article today on The Conversation about eugenetic practices having been carried on in the USA in the past hundred years, and still ongoing: they involve forced sterilization of a considerable number of people.

So, since the "idea" has actual current practice, you may want it to be in the foreground, not «suppress[ed]».

https://theconversation.com/forced-sterilization-policies-in...

And again about school, we were taught about the eugenetic effort of mid century in primary school, when we were eight years old: relatively "mature" content, but is it possible (yes, it is) that "if you treat children like children (and adults like children), they will behave like children?".

SuoDuanDao6• 5 years ago

Yup, the Streisand effect is real. Tyrion Lannister said it best - when you cut out a man's tongue, you're not proving him a liar. You're just proving that you fear what he has to say.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

https://kidadl.com/articles/of-the-best-tyrion-lannister-quo...

woodruffw8• 5 years ago

This is the same thing people said about vaccine mandates ("mandating vaccinations will only make people dig in!"), but we've had concrete evidence of the exact opposite behavior just this week: after weeks of grumbling, thousands of unvaccinated healthcare workers went and got their shots ahead of NYC's mandate[1].

Edit: because I realize this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, here's an appropriate one: we don't allow cigarette companies to advertise, since smoking cigarettes is manifestly unhealthy. There's been an extraordinary amount of reporting on the undisclosed financial relationships between prominent anti-vaxxers and snake-oil companies; it's not clear to me why forbidding this kind of manifestly dangerous profiteering on a global pandemic actually represents a risk to free expression.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/nyregion/vaccine-health-c...

chasd008• 5 years ago

when you tell someone "get vaccinated or be fired" what choice do they have? My job required us to all upload our vax cards or be fired. I resisted for a few days and even applied for an accommodation on the basis of "crisis of personal conscious" but was told if my accommodation was denied then i would be fired. I eventually relented and uploaded my vax card because i wasn't going to risk my family's wellbeing over a random piece of paper.

i did file a formal HR complaint and asked for a list of other personal health information required for continued employment that was not in my offer letter. I expect no response though.

downandout• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

To some degree, that’s true. While the vaccines are overall relatively highly effective and safe, there is no denying that tens of thousands of serious injuries and deaths have occurred as a result of them. Overall the benefits strongly outweigh the risks, but there are risks nonetheless. This is not abnormal for anything that is injected into hundreds of millions of people.

However, platforms like YouTube - cheered on by the CDC and an incredibly heavy handed Biden administration - have decided that people don’t have a right to learn about these cases of “adverse reactions”. As well intentioned as they may be, hiding obvious facts from people calls into question everything else that they are being told. It only emboldens the vaccine hesitant when the powers that be are less than honest and forthcoming about the potential negative outcomes of the vaccine, regardless of how rare they might be.

jaybrendansmith4• 5 years ago

She might just die. I recently convinced a coworker to get the vaccine, and she did. And four weeks later contracted Covid-19, probably the delta variant, lost her taste and slept for 5 days straight. Had she not had the vaccine, it's quite likely she would now be dead.

nradov11• 5 years ago

How likely would she to be dead? I encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can, but even without vaccination the CDC estimated the fatality rate at only 0.6% for the population as a whole. We should take this seriously but exaggerating the risks isn't helpful.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

NDizzle• 5 years ago

Uhh.. what makes you say that? What percentage of people who get covid actually get admitted to the hospital? What percentage actually die? Both answers are probably lower than you think.

You convincing her to get the vaccine probably fucked up her immune system and led her to getting covid. That scenario is equally possible at this point.

belter11• 5 years ago

Or you could have convinced Lisa Shaw:

"Lisa Shaw: Presenter's death due to complications of Covid vaccine"

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796

Or this lady in New Zealand:

"New Zealand woman dies after receiving Pfizer vaccine"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58380867

Or the parents of this boy

"Michigan boy dies 3 days after getting Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, CDC is investigating"

https://eu.freep.com/story/news/2021/07/02/jacob-clynick-pfi...

travoc• 5 years ago

The sleepiness of a vaccinated Covid victim is not a scientific way to measure their risk prior to vaccination.

bwship6• 5 years ago

or a 99.2% chance she would have just lived, you know, using the stats on the virus.

jmpman• 5 years ago

I have a similar friend, and whenever I provide links to peer reviewed articles, I’m told that I’m a sheep, and to search on DuckDuckGo, as they don’t hide the truth… so, a YouTube ban is going to do little to him.

SergeAx9• 5 years ago

The only thing worse than bad ideas is the suppression of bad ideas.

I don't know. This on one hand, but people burning down 5G network towers on the other.

MisterBastahrd5• 5 years ago

That makes zero sense.

An action that has nothing to do with the vaccination itself does not "strengthen" anything unless you have decided that you are just in opposition to something for the sake of being in opposition. Which is entirely what the anti-vaxx movement is really about from a political standpoint. Same thing with anti-mask.

josefresco• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

I'm sorry to hear this. I hope she find the help she needs to understand how and why she's been led to believe this. You might want to talk to her about where she's spending time online, and maybe look into her social circle. Lastly, if she's susceptible to conspiracy theories this won't end with COVID for her or you.

w0mbat2• 5 years ago

The tendency for anti-vaxxers to believe in their delusions more the more they are contradicted with facts is a thorny problem.

However the flow of new misinformation also strengthens their beliefs, and draws in new people to the delusional cause. Overall I think deleting this misinformation channel is still a net positive.

We need some psychologists on the case. Or advertising professionals.

risk0005• 5 years ago

Yeah, 30-40% of the population needs psychologists and propagandists to evaluate or re-educate them. I think this viewpoint you're espousing might be part of the problem.

dspillett• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

People already that far down the rabbit hole aren't going to be made more or less hesitant whether YouTube or others leave the content up or take it down because at this point they are already believing things that have been shown to be untrue (or at least highly unlikely to be true).

But taking it down might stop a lot more people being drawn in to the conspiracy theories and becoming that hesitant in the first place and further perpetuating the problem by forwarding on the misinformation.

Taking the information down saves a lot more from the misinformation than it pushes in the other direction. Not that I think we should abandon the latter of course, but they are going to need some other form of intervention anyway, whether this step is taken for the benefit of the others or not. We can't fix all the problems with one action, but needing other actions to help those more deeply entrenched doesn't mean we shouldn't perform this action to help those who are not yet there.

snarf212• 5 years ago

I disagree. I think we can all agree that we don't need videos talking about how the "bad ideas" of slavery/child abuse/human trafficking/etc. are wonderful things. I think we are right to suppress them. You can make the same argument that allowing these videos validates that they must be telling the truth or YT wouldn't allow it. If all you are looking for is confirmation bias, it is all you will find. It sounds like you wife won't get a vaccine no matter what so let's not argue semantics about what will make her even less likely to get a vaccine.

prpl• 5 years ago

Would the alternative, leaving it up, weaken her position? I don’t see a scenario where a decision by Youtube removes her hesitancy, TBH.

Knowing some hesitant people, the only thing that changed their minds was their MD.

davesque2• 5 years ago

I feel as though there's actually nothing that would convince people like your wife to get vaccinated. Or at least the ultimate deciding factor cannot be predicted or understood. The problem is that people begin to personally identify with an opinion that they hold. And then they'll find any reason or justification for holding onto it.

CDC says get vaccinated? Oh, but they said not to wear masks early on. They can't be trusted. Medical researchers release studies showing vaccine effectiveness? Oh, but look at this random other study that shows otherwise. YouTube decides to moderate vaccine misinformation more strongly? Oh, what are they trying to hide? What are they scared of?

You can keep asking questions and doubting as long as you want if you're emotionally attached to an idea. Welcome to the mind of an anti-vaxxer.

What this all means is that we shouldn't take into account the effect YouTube's action will have on anti-vaxxers because we'd see the same effect regardless of what we do.

leepowers• 5 years ago

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

1) If they take false content down that will reinforce her beliefs.

2) If they leave false content up, she will keep consuming it, which will reinforce her beliefs.

3) So - when it comes to changing her mind (and the millions like her), 1 and 2 are a wash. She's adopted an unfalsifiable position. There is no policy Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et al. can adopt to reason her out of this position. She will have to reason her self out of it at some point.

4) The purpose of taking down false content is not to change her mind, or change the mind of anyone else who has adopted an unfalsifiable position. The purpose is to stop the spread of false and untrue information. If there's 10 million people who have taken the unfalsifiable position the goal is to prevent another 10 million from adopting the same viewpoint.

5) However I can't be sure #4 will actually work. Its very difficult to lockdown information and prevent its spread.

6) And can these platforms moderate edge cases with accuracy? If they bungle the job users will lose trust in them as an information source. But - since these platforms are the main driver of misinformation, then discrediting them as information sources would be a net good.

7) So - no moderation means we continue the status quo of information and vaccine hesitancy.

8) Requiring moderation might combat hesitancy by a) preventing the spread of misinformation and b) discrediting platforms in the eyes of the hesitant or hesitant adjacent.

9) Because these platforms are public and performative they are ill suited for mea culpas. Rarely do people relish engaging with ideas that might prove you wrong, especially in a public setting. The work of helping people reason themselves out of unreason will be done outside these platforms.

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

But your wife should realized that if she can have her free speech then so can facebook. She's free to peruse odysee and gittr and get all the antivax stuff she could possibly ever want to see.

mrcrypto20203• 5 years ago

The challenge is to determine how misinformation is defined. Would peer reviewed scientific papers that come to different conclusions than the current CDC guidelines be considered anti-vaccine? Should we consider conflicts of interest or sources of funding when determining misinformation? Are open ended questions about the safety and efficacy allowed? What about other medications?

woodpanel2• 5 years ago

Don't be evil, eh?

themusicgod13• 5 years ago

Who's next? People who are pro-vax, fully vaccinated, but skeptical of proprietary software (ie https://shitposter.club/notice/ABq6GiHXERyKEqCCqO or https://stallman.org/archives/2020-nov-feb.html#16_February_... )?

sampo• 5 years ago

This is worrying. I still remember, in March 2020 believing that face masks work was still the contrarian opinion. Large Western countries such as USA, Germany, changed their official position in April. WHO changed their position in June. My country (Finland) only in the end of August. If contrarian voices had been efficiently suppressed, would the medical mainstream have changed their position at all?

bagacrap• 5 years ago

Are you suggesting YouTube helped reverse the position on masks?

The anti-mask recommendation was a decision made by the political mainstream, not medical. It wasn't a poll of doctors or scientists that determined whether we thought masks worked. And in the end, at least in the US, I don't think the official position switched because of contrarian voices. It switched because supply caught up with demand.

dilap• 5 years ago

Someone I follow on instagram had opened up a conversation for women about irregular periods as a side-effect of the vaccine. They had to carry on the conversation using an emoji code to avoid getting banned.

The basic idea behind these bans is that authorities decide what is right, and common people should not have a forum to discuss the decisions.

It's basically soft-censorship, a partnership between government and large tech companies to make conversations contra government policy much more difficult to have.

Seems unfortunate, to me.

sneak9• 5 years ago

a partnership between government and large tech companies to make conversations contra government policy much more difficult to have.

Same situation as China, tbh.

btbuildem• 5 years ago

Paywall

sporkland• 5 years ago

I don't understand the approach of banning certain content. It feels like the root cause here is self reinforcing filter bubbles that social media creates. Is it not possible for YouTube to instead change their algorithm around this to recommend a blend of videos for topics like this one? Kinda like labeling approaches used elsewhere but a little more subtle.

ridaj4• 5 years ago

I think people outraged at the content censorship on YouTube can look at the media landscape overall and consider that, compared with Hulu, CBS, MSNBC or Fox News, it's still a extremely permissive environment, an outlier in the world of ad-supported media companies. This looks like regression to the mean - as it becomes bigger and forever needs to get more money from advertisers to sustain growth, it gets pushed to provide a product that emphasizes middle-of-the-road views. YouTube of 10 years ago was so much smaller that it got away with a lot worse (eg terrorism apology and recruitment), but as it's grown, it's going to be increasingly difficult for controversial content to live on ad-support.

djent2• 5 years ago

This should have happened months ago. The damage is done

rodolphoarruda• 5 years ago

Free speech! As long as we are in agreement with each other.

pmlnr• 5 years ago

Good.

mrcrypto20203• 5 years ago

We know vaccinated people still replicate and transmit the virus. So the only reason to get the vaccine is to potentially lessen the symptoms. With lessened symptoms you will be less likely to add to the clogged up the hospital system. Should we also ban food ads that contribute to obese or diabetic folks clogging up the hospitals? What about people choosing to ride motorcycles? Kids trampoline ads? Why do we still have cigarettes?

rmu09• 5 years ago

Even if some vaccinated people replicate and transmit the virus, they do so for a shorter amount of time and with less infectious virus than unvaccinated.

mrcrypto20203• 5 years ago

data source? "...less infectious virus than unvaccinated." the sars-cov-2 virus doesn't mutate and become less infectious somehow when it encounters a vaccinated person.

gfodor4• 5 years ago

Neo-fascism, plain and simple. If this feels hyperbolic, I’m just applying definitions. The government has already admitted it colludes with these companies to censor. Time to build. Time to exit.

crocodiletears4• 5 years ago

At this point I'm not hesitant about the vaccine, but getting it would only validate the heavy-handed approach we're seeing wrt censorship.

MrRadar4• 5 years ago

So you understand and acknowledge that this vaccine can literally save your life, and you accept all the science that shows that it is safe and effective, but you refuse to get it because some people are being forbidden (by a privately-owned platform, only on that platform) to spread lies about how it's not safe or effective? That's a very strange position to take, to put your own life in literal mortal danger because other people want to spread lies (that you acknowledge are lies) that put their own lives and the lives of people who listen to them at risk.

crocodiletears4• 5 years ago

I have values and principles that I want to see embodied by the society in-which I participate. The vaccination rate is (to my knowledge) the only metric being used to validate these policies that I can directly and consciously affect. So I do.

If I was unwilling to tolerate even the minute risk of not getting the jab, my position wouldn't be based on values or principles, it'd simply be aesthetic preference.

As it stands, I keep an eye on my health, keep an extra distance when I'm around others, mask when it makes sense, and keep social interaction to a reasonable minimum. If the mortality rate of covid increases significantly I'll reconsider my position in light of the new numbers, though I don't know if I'll reach a different conclusion.

d0gsg0w00f6• 5 years ago

I'm a breakthrough case. Nobody in the testing office asked me if I was vaccinated. The breakthrough wasn't tracked in any system to my knowledge. How many more of me are out there? I only know anecdotally that at least 10 people 1 or 2 degrees of separation from myself are also breakthrough cases. I'm sure I was very contagious during this time but as soon as I tested positive I quarantined. I personally don't trust that these statistics are being tracked properly.

My point is that although I'm glad I got vaccinated, vaccination is not the panacea the media makes ot out to be.

eertami• 5 years ago

Dude read that back to yourself and think about it for just 5 seconds.

"Validate" it how exactly. This is just like a child folding his arms and saying "well now I'm not doing it" because somebody asked them to. It's the same attitude that has left hundreds of thousands pointlessly dead, because owning the libs is more important than self-preservation.

crocodiletears4• 5 years ago

I'm not happy with it either. If there's another way to push back against corporate censorship that's more effective than boycotting their services and the objectives they're working towards, I'm all ears.

But so far as I can tell, I don't have a voice in the matter so I'll opt to be a statistical papercut.

ktkoffroth• 5 years ago

Here's the thing: What about the vaccine is saving the lives of others? It doesn't prevent spread. It simply provides you with protection from the virus for a limited period (~270 days). So what, exactly, are unvaxxed people doing to harm others?

chasd008• 5 years ago

i'm glad you have the balls to say this. Not being vaccinated is close to becoming a stance against authoritarian rule.

I'm vaccinated (almost regrettably now) but I support anyone's choice to not get vaccinated, i feel like you should because it's been shown to dramatically reduce your risk of getting seriously ill but I absolutely respect your choice and will defend the right to choose.

asdff9• 5 years ago

When have internet websites where the public can comment on not been heavily moderated? It's been like that since forums came out. HN is also heavily moderated, it keeps the weeds out of the garden.

andreskytt• 5 years ago

Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution. Does it now mean the right to have ones opinion be actively globally distributed by a third party?

This is very much about fighting two viruses: one biological and the other one informational. We agree to limit contacts between people to stop the one but do not accept the same method to stop the other. Why? In both cases it is vital to ensure the measures to not cross certain boundaries and are rolled back.

ceejayoz8• 5 years ago

Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution.

It never meant that. People have always been similarly free to say "that guy is a dick, we shouldn't invite him to our get togethers" based on your free speech.

btmiller• 5 years ago

I think you’re saying exactly what OP was implying. Persecution as in legal consequences. “You can say whatever you want, but we’re going to ask you to leave our private establishment”.

_bfhp6• 5 years ago

People never say what they mean. Just say: I am comfortable with Big Tech having the right to pick and choose which opinions are valid and I don't think it will backfire in any way that upholds the exploitation of the oppressed.

Or one could say: Though I was alive through the War on Terror, I don't think giving exceptions to restrictions meant to protect individuals and peoples from extreme concentrations of global powers will tend to go wrong. Those in power will only use the new powers in the cases that I agree with, and not go further.

umvi10• 5 years ago

Free speech used to mean the right to say anything without persecution

Free speech used to be more of an ubiquitous social courtesy like that, yes.

However, that courtesy is rapidly disappearing in our society and free speech is being distilled down to its legal core which is: "you won't go to jail if you say something unpopular"

Everything else is on the table including losing your job, being boycotted, being hounded on social media, and otherwise ruining your life.

I personally like society better when free speech is a social courtesy extended to everyone by everyone, but... society's values change, and right now "harm reduction" is king.

ceejayoz8• 5 years ago

Free speech used to be more of an ubiquitous social courtesy like that, yes.

Oh, come on. Social consequences have been part of history since the start of the US, and long before that elsewhere too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Brown_(loyalist)

On 2 August 1775 a crowd of Sons of Liberty confronted him at his house. Brown requested the liberty to hold his own opinions, saying that he could "never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being", and finally met their demands with pistol and sword. Taken prisoner with a fractured skull, he was tied to a tree where he was roasted by fire, scalped, tarred, and feathered. This mistreatment resulted in the loss of two toes and lifelong headaches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Titus

Despite Robert's importance in Rehoboth community, he began to have problems with his fellow townsmen. On June 6, 1654, he was told to move his family out of the Plymouth Colony for allowing Abner Ordway and family, "persons of evil fame", to live in his home. The practice of banishing a family from the colony was known as a "Warning Out Notice."

Black people got lynched for using their right to free speech for much of this country's history. People who piss off their communities have been banished or exiled or worse for millennia. Our close cousins in the animal kingdom do the same thing; if you're a dick, you're either the new leader or you're out of the group.

ip264• 5 years ago

The hand wringing about boycotts seems a little humorous. A few decades ago wasn’t the GOP the ones telling us if we didn’t like something, instead of regulating it we should vote with our wallets?

andiareso• 5 years ago

I agree the general meaning would be free to say and do anything, however in reality free speech is freedom of speech from the government. Not individuals or private entities. What is common in law is the idea of the market place of ideas. This is generally what free speech to the average American is. We are free to spread information whether right or wrong in order for others to comment and critique and to grow as citizens. I think it's a horribly slippery slope to ban one group from speaking. You can't have an active conversation about a topic without allowing someone to talk. Their decision is sidestepping the root cause and is treating the symptom which is algorithms optimized for engagement. Misinformation and hysteria is what drives engagement.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

Freedom is nothing more than the right to do the "wrong" thing.

The "free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences" crowd are more dangerous than the coronavirus.

gonational2• 5 years ago

I am absolutely OK with any platform censoring any content for any reason, as long as they are not treated like a public square by the government.

clever-leap• 5 years ago

YouTube and Google just joined the most brutal regimes on Earth in suppressing different opinions than what is government given propaganda. I am from former communist Czechoslovakia, never believed that again in my life I will have to challenge news and meet with censorship on such a big scale.

silent_cal2• 5 years ago

Big Pharma worshipping elitist shills see that they're losing the argument, so instead of thinking harder or changing their minds, they ban their opponents. These people are the worst.

greyhair• 5 years ago

The problem is all down to the cost of moderation, nothing else. Maintaining YouTube profitability.

Troll farms are spamming all of social media with misinformation, and that makes it hard to filter out the actual rational voices in the discussion.

I don't know the solution, I really don't. Without some form of 'trust' label that gets vetted to drown out mere 'views' and 'likes'.

Just read an article that in 2019, 19 of the top 20 Christian sites on Facebook were generated by Troll farms in Eastern Europe.

It is all messed up (disclosure, I don't have a Facebook account) and I don't know how it gets fixed.

I am all for factual vaccine information, pro and con, but I am opposed to people learning any topic from trolls with an adversary agenda.

The anti-vax crowd has been very effective in killing off Trump supporters for the last two months, for example.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

I have an anti-vax person in my family. As disturbing and wrongheaded as their opinions are, I find it significantly more disturbing that they are being censored.

The irony is that this censorship doesn't even work. It just strengthens their resolve and deepens their conviction that they have found The Truth in their conspiracy theories.

etchalon6• 5 years ago

I see we’re going to spend another day talking about “the death of free speech” because a private company doesn’t want to pay to host someone’s content.

kubb• 5 years ago

Youtube is also banning content that incites racial violence, and that is not an issue, so why is this? Both cause immense harm.

ohdannyboy8• 5 years ago

I was hesitant for a while and the massive censorship was part of it. I got vaccinated in May and have convinced others to get the shot since the side effects, while existent, appear to be minor compared to the reduction in harmful symptoms. Talking to my doctor is what did it for me. He cleared up most of my concerns and pressed me that my remaining concerns were too nebulous to be useful. If he just said "shut up and take it" I wouldn't have.

My mother only got vaccinated last month. She and my father are both medical professionals (she's retired and my dad got it early on since he's super high risk). Her main hangup was the lies and coercion. She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions. I'm confident there was also some element of "if I get it now I'm telling them their tactics worked."

NotSammyHagar2• 5 years ago

I'm glad you got vaccinated. But... Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? Because if there were lots of serious problems with the vaccine, they'd be covered in a second on fox news. Meanwhile, a lot of people are hugely influenced by false stories on social media, it's just a fact, with recent examples being things like ivermectin and the 2016 presidential election conspiracies, and don't forget q-anon.

Since covid is so deadly if you get it, and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore, vaccination is also almost guaranteed to protect you from serious cases, why wouldn't you get it? Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?

crazy_horse3• 5 years ago

Really devalues the meaning of censorship.

Social media platforms broadcasting your views around the world and moderating some of them was not censorship.

destitude3• 5 years ago

The fact that they completely ignore natural immunity in the USA is enough to be concerned about their motivations.

destitude3• 5 years ago

"almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination" how do you think you'd possibly hear about this when you are replying to an article where any anti-vaccine information is censored?

CWuestefeld4• 5 years ago

Found on a different discussion at TheZvi (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/09/23/covid-9-23-there-is-...):

--- start quote #1 ---

Thanks to your ongoing efforts, my 40+ year old sibling finally got vaccinated about three weeks before getting infected by her kids. She still had it pretty bad, so I think it’s likely you saved her a trip to the hospital or worse.

She was on the brink of getting vaccinated weeks earlier, but “That Guy” had cast enough doubt that a family member talked her out of it. So I’m glad you specifically mentioned him back then. Thanks to our civilization’s shiny new censorship machine it was maddeningly difficult to actually find good counter arguments to his claims, since we’re all supposed to just pretend bad claims don’t exist. So mostly I had to just point to the favorable evidence rather than being able to give a point by point rebuttal.

[...]

And her family is fox news conservative, so all the tribal hate made it especially hard for her to take their claims seriously. She stayed up all night making her decision, and had 250 browser tabs open by the end. So people do try, and do pay attention.

--- end quote #1 ---

and later, in response

--- start quote #2 ---

I had the same experience. I wanted to know whether the “vector vaccines alter your DNA” claims had any truth to them, given that “dna altering virus” is definitely something that exists. As far as I can tell, this is (probably) false, but it was really hard to find any evidence beyond “prof. dr. X says this is a conspiracy theory, now get your vaccine they are safe and effective ™”. It was really frustrating; I’m not surprised that many people feel like they are being tricked.

--- end quote #2 ---

bmarquez3• 5 years ago

they'd be covered in a second on fox news

I don't know why you assume Fox is anti-vax, Trump took the vaccine and promotes it on Fox News interviews himself.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-urges-all-americans-to-g...

ohdannyboy8• 5 years ago

    Can you expand on why you were hesitant because of censorship? ... Have you heard rumors of some problems from vaccination?

It made it more difficult to ascertain what the risks were, I didn't feel our officials were being honest with us (something I still think). Back in early 2021 it was a lot more open to speculation since it was an minimally tested treatment who's delivery method had never been widely deployed on humans before. We still don't know if there's long term effects and there's no way for us to find out until enough time has passed. I didn't want to be part of the initial test group.

    Since covid is so deadly if you get it

I'm relatively young and not in any risk categories, covid does not pose much of a death risk to me. Significant non-deadly outcomes are another story (permanent lung damage, loss of taste, ect). I decided that protection from the latter category (significant non-deadly outcomes) was worth my rather nebulous fears that we'll realize it does some harm over the next decade.

    and there are basically almost no cases of serious health issues with vaccination and furthermore

"Basically almost no" is a difficult term to quantify, but VAERS database does have plenty of entries.

blub5• 5 years ago

You're probably referring to Biontech*, but when I got AstraZeneca the chances of dying from the virus for my age interval was only slightly more than the chance of dying from the vaccine, as calculated by the ECDC.

* which as an aside does cause myocarditis and pericardits in particular for young males. This is important because for example in Germany the incidence was 1 case from 17.271 doses for males in the 12-17 age range and in most cases the symptoms appeared after the second dose, which may mean that a booster could also trigger it.

quartus2• 5 years ago

Her main hangup was the lies and coercion.

Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

avereveard5• 5 years ago

That "vaccine granted immunity" was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit if you catch covid, but you'll be less likely to die from it.

Then there's whatever percent of vaccinated that would have allowed the fabled reopen, we engaged trough most of these metrics, and we're still far from normalcy.

Heck my vaccine passport has a very clear, very bold expiry date on it, talk of normalcy are nonsense.

Oh and there's that "let's not tell peasants masks are useful as not to cause shortages to professionals." Maybe warranted, given what happened with hoarders and toilet paper, but still definitely a lie.

edit:

jesus christ look at the mess of downvotes this whole thread attracted, replies included, this place is populated by people more toxic than facebook's and more sensitive than twitter's.

and you wonder why the content platform are in full on containment mode. truth is you're bringing your corporate dystopia unto yourself.

orangepurple2• 5 years ago

Because of the way they are constructed, Randomized Control Trials will never show any benefit for any antiviral against COVID-19. Not Remdesivir, not Kaletra, not HCQ, and not Ivermectin. The reason for this is simple; for the patients that they have recruited for these studies, such as Oxford’s ludicrous RECOVERY study, the intervention is too late to have any positive effect.

The clinical course of COVID-19 is such that by the time most people seek medical attention for hypoxia, their viral load has already tapered off to almost nothing. If someone is about 10 days post-exposure and has already been symptomatic for five days, there is hardly any virus left in their bodies, only cellular damage and derangement that has initiated a hyperinflammatory response. It is from this group that the clinical trials for antivirals have recruited, pretty much exclusively.

In these trials, they give antivirals to severely ill patients who have no virus in their bodies, only a delayed hyperinflammatory response, and then absurdly claim that antivirals have no utility in treating or preventing COVID-19. These clinical trials do not recruit people who are pre-symptomatic. They do not test pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis.

This is like using a defibrillator to shock only flatline, and then absurdly claiming that defibrillators have no medical utility whatsoever when the patients refuse to rise from the dead. The intervention is too late. These trials for antivirals show systematic, egregious selection bias. They are providing a treatment that is futile to the specific cohort they are enrolling.

ohdannyboy8• 5 years ago

Off the top of my head:

Fauci told the American public that masks don't work. My mom already owned N95 masks and got looked at like a crazy person because she was wearing one when shopping, ect. Then suddenly it became "the science" on the heels of all the research that already existed... Turns out it was a noble lie to protect the supply of masks while production caught up with demand.

It looks like Fauci lied about the lab leak theory for his own reasons, although I'm pretty out of date on that issue. Even if not Fauci we know that scientists with conflicts of interest all signed an open letter saying the theory is bunk and it was uncritically paraded around as "the science."

We were very clearly told "get the vaccine and you'll get your life back" but that hasn't even happened in paces like Israel with extremely high rates.

The vaccine was initially sold to us as something that would prevent infection, but that turned out not to be true. (I'm willing to concede this probably wasn't a lie but just something we learned as time went on, but it does reflect that they may have been overconfident and refrained from discretion because it was a pro-vaccine talking point)

Vaccine passports used to be conspiracies. Same with the idea that we'd have to get booster shots every so often to stay current.

And this is probably the biggest one: So many of the politicians pushing covid restrictions fail to practice what they preach outside of photo ops. The list is a mile long of local, state and federal politicians constantly violating their own restrictions. It lends credibility to the idea that none of them believe any of it.

hartator2• 5 years ago

Can you provide examples of the lies you're referring to?

The mask one not being useful is a lie where Fauci was trying to reserve masks for medical staff.

Why not lying again about the current vaccine effectiveness/side effects balance to reserve promising treatments to a certain category of the population?

jboggan• 5 years ago

The lie that masks didn't work was the first and one of the biggest. At the time it meant that my wife's hospital wouldn't let her wear an N95 that we personally provided when interacting with obviously sick COVID-19 patients. She got extremely ill and after she recovered we decided it wasn't really worth it to work as a nurse in a medical establishment that could tell such obvious lies to its own people.

tomp5• 5 years ago

I listed some of them here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28536296

koheripbal• 5 years ago

How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic. ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

Trust was destroyed in the first two months of this pandemic.

Alex39172• 5 years ago

I also find the censorship to be deeply disturbing, but for me that's counterbalanced by the fact that the arguments against vaccination are so dumb. The best argument is basically, "It's not researched enough and it might kill you." But so what, doing things that might kill you on the basis of limited data is like a basic part of being an adult.

cromulent3• 5 years ago

Yeah, over 2 billion people have been vaccinated against C19. It's a pretty good sample size. Probably less people have tattoos.

Florin_Andrei2• 5 years ago

Crossing the street is also potentially deadly.

Not crossing it, staying home all day until you starve or go insane from isolation is more deadly.

So we choose to cross the street.

swivelmaster3• 5 years ago

What kind of medical professionals?

boringg2• 5 years ago

I picked up on the strangely vague "medical professionals" piece as well. One thing I learned from the pandemic is that not all health/medical professionals are created equal, and that there is a large portion of very specifically trained and fairly uneducated people in the medical community.

ohdannyboy8• 5 years ago

My mom was a RN most of her career then got her masters and went into education. My dad is a nurse practitioner.

trts3• 5 years ago

There are at least four people close to me who become more entrenched in their anti-vax stance the more this stuff happens.

It's so obvious to me how counter-productive these measures are. However I don't suppose increasing vaccination rates are part of the goal of these measures, but just protecting YouTube from having to do moderation or take responsibility for the content on their platform.

My mom for example, after many conversations and a great deal of effort on my part to present data and evidence that was free from shaming and judgement, has made two appointments to get vaccinated, and subsequently cancelled them. The second cancellation came after Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition.

This is scary stuff. The moral absolutism that the platforms endorse is creeping into more and more subjective areas, and essentially obliterating any hope of nuance or increased understanding about changing strategies and data.

alex5043• 5 years ago

Biden's recent speech blaming unvaccinated people being directly responsible for killing the vaccinated, a nonsensical supposition.

Can you explain how this is nonsensical? There is quite a bit of data showing that those who are unvaccinated are much more likely to spread the disease.

ldbooth• 5 years ago

Same here. Social Environment is hard to overcome. In the battle of social environment (group think) vs. individual reasoning, environment will win almost every time. This is a known bias among professional investors, and well appreciated there. Vaccine hesitancy follows this pattern, where future is unknown and FUD is trending.

rpmisms3• 5 years ago

Hi, I'm one of those people. I already had Covid before the vaccine, and have been exposed without reinfection since having it. I was neutral on the vaccine at the start, but now I'm only going to get it if I'm forced to. I'm not interested in being bullied into a choice that

a) could harm me, and is more likely to given my family history, and b) there's conflicting evidence that it gives me any advantage over the immunity I already have.

If you'd like to change my mind, you can start by not threatening my livelihood, not calling me a murderer, and not treating me like I'm subhuman. Yes, I'm a little angry. Wouldn't you?

Florin_Andrei2• 5 years ago

because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions

The unfortunate reality is - that is the actual crux of the problem. Maybe say "incapable of making" instead of "too stupid to make", since that makes the scope wider. But that is the long and short of it.

throwawayjeje3• 5 years ago

Do you routinely analyze and challenge your own biases? Do you ever wonder if someone you disagree with might be right?

It's easy to call someone stupid while ignoring what they are saying. It's hard to charitably hear someone's argument. I'm certainly at fault there.

Either way I categorically reject the worldview where a "benign" paternalism protects us from ourselves.

tomrod14• 5 years ago

Thank you. In my view you did everything appropriate, including seeking out advice from people with training and experience who could help you decide.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

Does she get flu shots because that has been all about coercion since the ramp up of medical profiteering that started in the 90s. Nevermind that the lethality of influenza precipitously declined in the 40s and isn't a mass killer. Covid is a far more credible threat that shouldn't be ignored so readily.

jackson1442• 5 years ago

She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions.

The problem I see here is that the (I hesitate to call it this) anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1. If you've ever talked to someone who's shifted goalposts you'll see it's essentially an impossible situation; you can't convince someone who doesn't want to be convinced.

If I'm remembering the timeline correctly, it started with the vaccine being rushed and that we were essentially being experimented on. It's been six months since I – and many others – have had their first dose and we're completely fine. Some claimed to be concerned about the long term effects; do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath")

Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.

At some point it was too hard to get- yes, that's true. However, now you can walk into a Target and decide to get the shot in the middle of a shopping trip! I did that with a Flu shot a few weeks ago and it took about five minutes.

In short, you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not. I don't have a good answer to this – I really wish I did – but that's the reality of the situation.

eric_b4• 5 years ago

Eh, everyone has been moving goalposts. First it was "flatten the curve" to prevent hospital overrun. Then at some point it became "no one can ever get covid again" and we did wild things like close schools even if a person so much as got near a person with COVID.

I don't think one side has a monopoly on losing trust, behaving badly, or making anti-science decisions.

bronzeage2• 5 years ago

I'm from Israel. I got the vaccine. The goalposts here shifted to a third booster shot. They already admit the first two doses become ineffective very fast, contradicting the early research that actually got me to trust and take the vaccine in the first place. The stated effectiveness of the vaccine also went downhill. I also had some unusual vaccine side effects that I will not discuss here because I prefer my privacy and nobody believes random internet anecdotes anyway, I'm only going to get criticized for sharing.

I'm not going to get any booster, even tho they are heavy handedly mandating it here, with absolutely zero data. They don't even allow you to confirm a healthy antibody count, strengthening the suspicion that this isn't about "waning antibodies count" at all.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I had my suspicions that this medical tyranny would keep on going on even when the medical data is non-existent, and that most people will not even notice the difference. That suspicion was fully confirmed. I personally apologized to my anti vaccine friend that he was right.

It's going to take a detailed research on why the original Pfizer trial was wrong on the effectiveness, what is the amount of antibodies required to be safe, and then I would see if I meet the criteria, if being recently vaccinated meets the criteria, if they understand the causes of the effects, if the booster actually gives reasonable advantage. And maybe then I'll consider it. If they don't put the side effects and the errors of the phase 3 trials under investigation I might not even vaccinate me or my future kids against other diseases as my trust of this industry was broken by the Pfizer experience.

curun1r• 5 years ago

do you think they know what the long term effects of a serious covid case is? (hint: it starts with a d and ends with "eath")

This is a dangerous message to push. The reality is that there are many lasting consequences of COVID that fall short of death but are, never the less, quite serious. The so called “long COVID” really needs to be part of the vaccine calculus because the health consequences are very much worse than the purported side effects from the vaccine.

I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon first hand when it comes to drugs. As a teenager, there was lots of anti-drug messaging trying to convince us that ecstasy was dangerous. And all of it focused on scaring kids by exaggerating the risk of death. But we could see people taking it regularly and none of them were dying. And so it undercut the message. But decades later, I know a few people who’ve had depressive episodes potentially linked to heavy ecstasy use. And that consequence was never a part of the decision-making process because the authorities discredited themselves by being unnecessarily and obviously hyperbolic.

We need better messaging that provides people with the full range of consequences for their choices. The “you’re going to die!!!” hysteria ends up being counterproductive. Even as deadly as COVID is, the truth is that unvaccinated people probably won’t die from their case…the vast majority survive. But if people understood how many recoveries included long-term health consequences that significantly affected their quality of life, they might be better able to weigh that against the potential side effects of a vaccine.

batch123• 5 years ago

Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.

I believe that the FDA has only approved one of the vaccines so far. When I got mine, I didn't have a choice.

dude4you7• 5 years ago

For me, the other side is shifting goalposts.

I could not get vaccinated in Germany. Every illegal immigrant could get vaccinated but I as a German citizen, since I was not registered with the police, (some countries have this, for a US citizen this sounds weird) could not.

Ok, caught corona in south America in the Andes mountains and had serious breathing problems but survived.

I have a biotech background and I am sorry to break the news to you. Vaccinations won't make corona go away. I fact it may force it to adapt faster.

So why should I get vaccinated now? I dislike all the government pressure that is put on citizens in this regard.

An the parties in Sao Paulo are back on. No masks. Germany is not considering Brazil even as a high risk country anymore.

So why the force for vaccinations? Freedom won't come back except if the Citizens demand it.

b7bfcdeaab335• 5 years ago

Oh, but it's also not FDA approved.

FDA's announcement https://www.fda.gov/media/150386/download

Point to the sentence that says the vaccine got approved.

Natsu3• 5 years ago

Oh, but it's also not FDA approved. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I bet vaccinations haven't gone up significantly since FDA approval. Obviously it's because the FDA isn't to be trusted, that's a given.

Actually, there was a big shift in the numbers about then. People are just divided over whether it was due to shaming people or the certification. I believe Matthew Yglasias posted about that, though he seemed to think it was from shaming people.

It's true that some people moved on to other arguments after that, but if someone has multiple independent reasons for not wanting something, you do kinda have to shoot them all down.

From my experience in trying to explain the benefits of the vaccine to the hesitant, there are more than a few who just won't listen, but there are quite a lot of people who will listen when you calmly explain things. Trying to be forceful will basically always backfire.

Many of them were previously meming about how Covid is not very dangerous, with only a 1-2% mortality rate. So I like to point out that the risk of vaccine injury is several orders of magnitude lower. You need thousands of people dying per day for months to convince anyone that the vaccine is anywhere near as dangerous as the virus, not the odd death of someone the day after they vaccinated here and there.

Once you get people into a direct comparison even if they push back on the numbers being fudged, you can point that every country in the world would have to be in on some conspiracy.

I feel like this is the most effective way to defuse the vastly over-hyped danger of the vaccine. Even if they try to quibble the numbers with the best and worst numbers possible, you don't get to risks that are even the same order of magnitude.

Saying that it's all not in good faith quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I find that most people are willing to have an honest discussion with someone who respects them and who will listen and address their concerns.

Those conditions are hard, though, because a lot of people seem to quickly throw human empathy out the window and start yelling. That... doesn't work at all.

Anyhow, that's my experience from talking to people. I've gotten several of the hesitant to vaccinate by trying to be as honest as possible about the risks and why worrying about the vaccine but not Covid doesn't make sense. But if you don't listen to or understand where the people arguing are coming from--which is often hard with internet strangers--you probably won't get very far, so I do understand why it's frustrating.

fsckboy6• 5 years ago

anti-vax "side" has been shifting goalposts since day n-1.

(claimer/disclaimer: I'm a hard-science type (famous university or rather, institute) and got vaccinated as soon as I could; I am from a very healthy family that does not suffer from outlier symptoms (like flu, but eh it's not bad, no allergies, no side effects etc.) so overall I just didn't worry about it, but I didn't worry about Covid before I got vaccinated either.)

but the biggest goalpost that got moved was, we have government regulations and protocols that concern drug approvals to make sure that the general population is not exposed to unnecessary risks. The Covid vaccines were fast tracked and unleashed untested: that's a huge goalpost shifted a huge distance. And nor was the administering of the vaccine accompanied by a notification of the major risks inherent in this approach, like for example, perhaps the viral spike protein was causing all the tissues' damage and the vaccine included the spike protein.

so, in my book the pro vax side has behaved reprehensibly and is doing even deeper damage to the body politic by normalizing censorship.

I'd still urge everybody to get vaccinated.

ALittleLight• 5 years ago

You pretty obviously can argue with people who don't argue in good faith. When they shift the goal posts call attention to it, explain it, and then meet them where they are at. People watching will see the other party being duplicitous.

I'm imagining YouTube or the government or whoever hiring some informed experts and inviting the vaccine hesitant on for debates. Let them make whatever arguments they want and when they are absurd or move the goalposts point it out. Are medical doctors X, Y, and Z, selected for being informed and skilled orators going to be outdebated by the likes of Alex Jones? Why can't we have some experts who just engage with the conspiracy theory stuff, not sneeringly but just dispassionately.

I don't think this would convince everyone. I don't think convincing everyone should be the goal. I do think it would convince more people than the current approach though and it would be more in keeping with free speech ideals.

belorn6• 5 years ago

Depending on which country you look at you got different goals. Some tried isolation. Others tried herd immunity. We are currently trying those 2 dose vaccines and are already planning for a third before the winter has even started, and I suspect we will see talk about a forth dose by early spring. Then we have nations like Norway addressing covid as a new aspect of the seasonal flue with no end date.

The idea that we just take two doses and are done is clearly no longer the goalpost.

alex_munroe• 5 years ago

you cannot argue in good faith with someone who does not.

But the solution shouldn't be to shut down the discussion by banning the other side, because then you just have two sides who fight dirty.

One side refuses to see reason and understand arguments, the other uses shaming, coercion, and censorship in place of the arguments. If the truth is on your side, you shouldn't resort to that.

karaterobot• 5 years ago

The thing to keep in mind is that when we say "the other side", we just mean people who don't intend to get vaccinated.

This hides the fact that there is no actual "side" in the sense of a unified group of people who collectively agree to a set of principles, and goalposts that can even be moved. It's just a bunch of people who have their own brains, and reasons. They aren't all the same, or believe the same things, or make the same claims.

This is trivially obvious, but I see it ignored most of the time. People get accused of things they don't actually believe, and didn't say, or do. That makes them defensive and makes it impossible to have a good-faith discussion, and that's part of the mess we're in.

m0zg• 5 years ago

Before Jan 20 the democrats too were the "anti-vax" side. Do you want me to dig up videos of Joe and Kamala telling everyone they'd be insane to take the "rushed" vaccine? I don't think such overt politicization of this issue is helping with "hesitancy". And neither does the incessant lying about "stopping covid". Vaccine is not going to stop covid. It'll just make people 10x less likely to die once they get it. Notice the choice of the word - we'll all get it eventually. This is a less "satisfying" message, but I'd argue it's a more persuasive one, simply because it's true.

hncurious• 5 years ago

If it was called the Trump Vaccine and he was mandating it, this whole thing would be flipped. It's that simple.

It has been tribal from the start and still is. We all know this is how things work at this point. It's not as based in science or rational arguments as it is based on motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.

garyfirestorm• 5 years ago

Shifting goal posts? They said the mRNA vaccines were not safe even before the first trial began. You just can’t have a rational argument with folks who irrationally arrived at a viewpoint.

Lochleg3• 5 years ago

Some people think that the chance of death from a vaccine is not worth it, however slight that chance is. For the young and healthy, risking catching the vaccine shouldn't be that big of a deal despite all the hype about "long covid". With the virus having been around for two years now, there's a strong argument to be made about natural immunity.

I think they knew that they had a lot of ways to make a better vaccine, and they will work on that, but I don't think it's going to be done quickly enough. So, I guess we all just have to go along with the booster shots until they "get it right". The government got heavily involved in the process, so it was bound to end up half-assed. There were people that said they would never let the government force them to take Trump's rushed vaccine. They wanted to create a disruption and a huge resistance to his efforts. Biden came along and "changed" it, and now they sing the praises of the vaccine and the unbelievable science behind it endlessly.

You have an enormous pressure to take the vaccine by the behemoth government and the people that write the paychecks. If people use one of the only avenues they have to not get forced into something they have their own reasons for not buying into, I don't really blame them. The people you argued with about the vaccine have nothing to do with ordinary people and their decisions. If I was a lowly worker, I would probably just take it because I guess I would have bigger problems.

There may not be much weight behind the anti-vaccine argument, but there's a lot to be said about better governance that probably would have involved doing things that actually work instead of having to point to things that didn't happen, especially with the angst about not enough people having complied with the emergency measures. Of course, the skeptics believe we mostly did the wrong things in a bout of panic and the need for post-hoc justification grew alongside the mass hysteria. There was the option of focused protection, yet it seems we neglected many people in care homes while the government got busy fighting windmills. We also seriously tampered with natural processes and normal lifestyles. That may have been counterproductive. We are now in a situation where there is no herd immunity, high-risk people are finding it impossible to avoid the infection forever, and we lost a lot of opportunities as the world was on pause that it everyone's life may objectively be worse than should be expected even after all this time.

throwawaycities• 5 years ago

I understand being pro Covid-19 vaccine and wanting to get it to minimize your chances at a negative health outcome if you get infected.

Also mandating certain vaccines (like MMR) makes sense because they fully inoculate a person and eradicate these diseases.

But when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines I don’t understand the insistence others get the vaccine because it doesn’t fully inoculate against the virus nor does it prevent carrying/spreading the virus.

Perhaps there is an argument that hospitals are overloaded and 100% vaccination would relieve that burden, but I’m not in favor of mandatory vaccines that don’t fully inoculate and eradicate something on the basis it might help our overburdened healthcare system. It becomes a slippery slope, and opens the door to asking why we don’t then mandate diets, supplements and lifestyles that promote healthy immune systems in the name of minimizing chronic conditions that are a financial burden to tax funded Medicare and the healthcare system generally.

throwaway292939• 5 years ago

The moving goalpost argument goes both ways. I'm vaccinated but here's what I hear.

- just get vaccinated - we need booster shots - we need booster shots every 8 months - we need booster shots every 5 months

And you know there will be something next, it never moves in the other direction.

account425• 5 years ago

If you don't take no for an answer and won't accept anything besides people agreeing to your goals then it is you who is not arguing in good faith. Correct misunderstandings, refute falsehoods, but ultimately you need to let people make their own decisions.

Accusing someone (or worse, groups) of "shifting goalpoasts" is a lame excuse to write of discussion. People can an do have multiple concerns where some of those take a backseat until others are resolved. People can be afraid to state their true concerns, often rightfully so considering how quick they can be grouped with all the other wrongthinkers and summarily condemned and ridiculed. And when it comes to groups - especially such nebolous ones as "the anti-vax side: - the apparent (ie loudest) argument can shift just by the group composition changing.

monocularvision• 5 years ago

My wife’s theory is there would be less hesitancy if the vaccines were being distributed through people’s primary care physicians instead of at mass vaccination sites or Walgreens. People may distrust the media, the government and all sorts of other nebulous groups, but they largely trust their doctor.

velcrovan• 5 years ago

I got vaccinated as soon as I did in large part because I didn't have to deal with my primary care.

heartbreak3• 5 years ago

You can almost certainly get the vaccine from your physician, and you can also call your physician’s office and leave a message asking them whether you should get vaccinated. They’ll call you back.

tshaddox4• 5 years ago

It sounds like both you and your mother have both adopted an epistemology that incorporates the perceived amount of censorship, lies, and coercion performed by proponents of some claim into your discernment of the truth value of that claim. Namely, you both seem to have adopted some level of doubt about pro-vaccine claims because you both perceive that proponents of pro-vaccine claims participate in censorship, lies and coercion, or that those proponents of these claims do not engage in reasonable arguments with their critics.

There are two problems with this type of epistemology. The first is that, like all claims, attributes of the people making the claims are not relevant to the truth value of the claim ("fallacy of irrelevance"). The second is more important and more unique to this particular epistemology: the actions you perceive to be conducted by perceived proponents of some claim will vary heavily based on your own behavior. For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint? Surely that is just based on your own "media diet." Surely that perception depends heavily on where you spend your time on Twitter, YouTube, cable news, etc. Would you perceive something differently if it were the case that the vast majority of medical and public health experts who are pro-vaccine in fact have engaged in numerous reasonable arguments with critics and have nonetheless come to the same conclusion? Is there ever a point in which litigation of existing criticisms can end so that we can move on to new criticisms?

colecut• 5 years ago

   For instance, how do you know that pro-vaccine people "can't win arguments" and instead "stop them because the other side is too stupid"? Or that there is "massive censorship" favoring the pro-vaccine viewpoint?

Did you notice the article that you are commenting on?

talaketu• 5 years ago

You over-fit the "fallacy of irrelevance". This is my feeling about the Monty Hall problem: The fact that Monty is now offering me the option to take make chances and switch to the other door, after I have chosen this one, when he knows which door actually has the prize, does seem relevant to which door has the prize.

matheusmoreira2• 5 years ago

It's unreasonable to ignore these abuses. If the pro-vaccine argument is so persuasive, why must they perpetrate censorship and coercion?

Vaccines are widely recommended because they offer enormous benefits. However, they are not without risk or contraindications. People who claim otherwise are spreading misinformation.

People are right to be worried about the COVID-19 vaccines. Without proper studies, their risks and benefits are unknown. We're discovering this information by observing what's happening to the humans who took the vaccines after the fact. This is less than ideal, to put it mildly.

COVID-19 happens to be a potent enough disease that the potential benefit of these vaccines outweighs the risks. We must still be careful though. It's possible that we'll find that the benefits outweigh the risks only for certain age groups, for example.

chakkepolja• 5 years ago

You use big words like epistemsodhjapHwo but don't really counter his fundamental thesis that if doctor had said "shut up and take it", he would be more sceptical. That's healthy scepticism.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

Your epistemology argument about special media diets directly contradicts what we read in this article.

skyde3• 5 years ago

when you say "medical professionals" do you mean nurse or doctor ? I have seen a huge amount of nurse refusing to get vaccinated but not so much for Doctor!

skyde3• 5 years ago

I think the data alone is an objective argument. Using basic math (Bayes theorem) I can compute it reduce my chance of death by 668 time and Hospitalization by 116 times.

see below:

Covid Fact: - proportion on covid death that are unvaccinated p(not(vaccinated) | covid-death ) = 99% - proportion of population this is unvaccinated P(not(vaccinated)) = 14% - proportion of population this is vaccinated P(vaccinated) = 86% Basic math: - Probability of death from covid if not vacinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) = 0.99 * P(covid-death) / 0.14 - Probability of death from covid if vacinated P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 0.01 * P(covid-death) / 0.86 - How many time more likely to die from covid if not vaccinated P(covid-death | not(vaccinated)) / P(covid-death | vaccinated) = 608 Fact: if you are not vaccinated, You are 608 times more likely to die from Covid 19 and you are 116 times more likely to be hospitalized.

somewhereoutth• 5 years ago

The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their lives being told what to do, in one way or another.

The problem with the vaccines (and lockdowns etc) is that these are new obligations, so making people realise how little control over their lives they actually have (in spite of the 'freedom' retoric so popular in the US).

thatfrenchguy• 5 years ago

You can’t really get objective goal posts (for herd immunity for example), given how unpredictable the virus and people’s clustering are though?

lazysheepherd• 5 years ago

She believed that if the vaccine was actually as great as they're saying they'd be able to make more objective goalposts and win arguments instead of stopping them because the other side is too stupid to make their own decisions.

1) People ARE too "stupid". "Stupid" here is a placeholder for a larger discussion on biological, antropological, social and psychological evidence. Which all could be summed up as: We are meant to be just smart enough to survive, then some more. Average human capability for evidence evaluation and independent reasoning is quite low.

2) Effort for winning in an unbounded argument space is practically infinite. Debunking bullshit takes several orders of magnitude more resources than coming up with more bullshit.

There needs to be a point at which you should disqualify an arguing party as not worthy of further evaluation. That's another way for the other party to "win the argument". In this specific case, pro-vaccine people has long won the argument, and by a mile.

tinus_hn• 5 years ago

Good thing they told us yesterday that ‘free speech is a 'core value'’

https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-google-russia-putin-...

Well, not that kind of speech, of course!

amznbyebyebye• 5 years ago

As the moderate and wholesome voices get drowned out by the push of “the algorithm” towards engaging (read: polarizing) content, YouTube will sadly become like Facebook for me- obsolete and deleted. Once I’m convinced that your product is unhealthy, especially in this time, I’m out, and I won’t be back.

Sex, hate, anger, violence, political extremism- so over it.

How about a tech platform that actually does good for once?

What alcoholism and obesity were to the precious generation, we are on a fast track to a mental health crisis of epic proportion if something isn’t done. I don’t know how people work at places like fb/ig/yt in good conscience.

Program_Install• 5 years ago

It's a start.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

How about those scammy financial advisers and history rewriters?

snambi• 5 years ago

This is simply wrong. Now, we are slowly moving towards to communist regimes.

pupppet• 5 years ago

YouTube/Facebook/Twitter have proven that anonymized free speech doesn't work. You have no way of knowing if the discourse is being generated by trolls/bots/foreign actors.

jimbob453• 5 years ago

On one hand, you can claim that YouTube is being proactive against what they perceive to be a problem and that's something.

On the other hand, they don't choose to be proactive against copyrighted material - they just comply with the law when the law comes knocking and that's that. It simply doesn't make sense for them to allow the law to do its job in one place and then be overly proactive in another. At the very least, it undermines their argument that they're only doing this to comply with the law. They're not. They actively want to censor material that they don't agree with and they'll use whatever excuse they need to do it.

ZetaZero• 5 years ago

The real problem is with the discovery algorithm. If the algorithm sees a user watching subject XYZ, it keeps suggesting more XYZ to that user. The goal of the algorithm is to own the users eyeballs as long as possible. This results in more ad-views and a more accurate profile of the user.

So if a user watches one anti-vax video, YouTube then suggests a bunch of other anti-vax videos. Many people will start believing it, after being bombarded with misinformation.

Fixing the algorithm is hard. Instead, as usual, YT is just removing videos that cause the problems. This is just a bandaid

baobabKoodaa• 5 years ago

Corporations like Youtube shouldn't be in the business of arbiting the truth, because they have time and time again proven themselves utterly incompetent at it.

Heyso2• 5 years ago

I guess I be spending more time on odysee and telegram. At worst it is censorship, at best youtube (meaning whoever random peoples are behind the compagny) think they know better than you and me.

snidane• 5 years ago

Google: from 'Don't be evil' to 'Support the genocide' in one decade.

heywherelogingo• 5 years ago

I've already banned youtube, along with all tyrannical platforms. People should be more proactive.

sneak9• 5 years ago

They should, but they won't be, and this sort of head-in-the-sand approach will just mean you personally get left behind, not that YouTube will change.

We live in the world we live in, not the one we should live in.

Heyso2• 5 years ago

Remember Wuhan lab outbreak ? It took 9 months for mainstream media to present it as plausible (France). Before that, it was called a "conspiracy theory", synonym to a fable. What did you think happened to people speaking about it on twitter, facebook or youtube before mainstream media greenlighted this theory ?

the-pigeon• 5 years ago

And what did censoring the theory do?

It made actual researchers and scientists shut up to not hurt their reputations. And made internet conspiracy conspiracies go crazy in all directions.

I believe the more we censor vaccine information, true or not, the more hardened people will get in their beliefs. What I'd love to see is YouTube change their algorithms to promote quality content over engaging content so good information rises to the top.

HKH2• 5 years ago

They already do promote content which they consider to be good quality.

wellthisisgreat• 5 years ago

why not set the terms for anti-vax or “vaccine hesitant” behavior where people are deprioritized in terms of getting medical treatment for diseases they refuse to get vaccinated for?

Not rejected of course but if you deny Covid-19 vaccine you are behind in line after people who did get it.

“Reap what you sow”.

ryandrake2• 5 years ago

A little off topic, but I wish we could stop using this nice-sounding "hesitant" euphemism. Hesitant implies that people are weighing options and open to changing their minds. With the amount of time they have been available and the overabundance of evidence that the COVID vaccines are safe, effective, and that they decrease hospitalizations and death, I find it very hard to believe that anyone is still "on the fence" about it.

She thinks they’re taking it down because they don’t want people to know the truth.

And there it is--this doesn't sound like a person who is weighing their options in good faith. It sounds like someone who is already convinced of what the truth is. Let's stop calling them "hesitant".

colordrops5• 5 years ago

It's certainly better than "anti-vaxxer" which labels them and buckets them as crazy and makes them dig their heels in further. If the goal is to convince people to get vaccinated, belittling them is not the right approach.

tomrod14• 5 years ago

When I was in the process of disassociating from a high demand religion (a decade long process), I was struck with how effective people who insisted on reality were. Reality sounded belittling, but it really wasn't. I see an analogy here with the people insisting against vaccination with zeal and fervor. It is very hard to break through the bubble of cognitive dissonance, and lone/let live or "humor them" approaches frankly are disingenuous.

tomrod14• 5 years ago

Agreed. Anti-vaccine advocate is more accurate at this point. Denialist is harsh, but fits.

__blockcipher__19• 5 years ago

Most people who are "COVID vaccine hesitant", or whatever term we want to use, aren't opposed to the concept of vaccination in general. Many of them have even gotten flu shots many times in the past, which as an aside when analyzed rigorously are barely better than placebo:

https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influ...

Injected influenza vaccines probably have a small protective effect against influenza and ILI (moderate-certainty evidence), as 71 people would need to be vaccinated to avoid one influenza case, and 29 would need to be vaccinated to avoid one case of ILI. Vaccination may have little or no appreciable effect on hospitalisations (low-certainty evidence) or number of working days lost.

So 71 shots to avoid one case, or if we want to be charitable we should use the 29 shots per one ILI since really ILI is what we care about. And no actual effect on hosp. or working days lost (both of which is what we should really actually care about)

Anyway I got off track with the flu vaccine stuff, but anyway surely you're aware that far more people are "hesitant" about the COVID vaccine specifically than any of the other vaccines? So to cast it as a case of "anti-vaccine advocacy" is just wrong. That's not what's going on here and as long as you refuse to try to understand these people you will continue failing to impact their behavior.

ghoward• 5 years ago

Oh, Mirriam-Webster already decided that "fully vaccinated" people are "anti-vaxxers" if they do not support vaccine mandates. [1]

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

rchaud3• 5 years ago

"Webster defines [word] as..." has been a running punchline for over 20 years. I think the dignity of the real anti-vaxxers will remain intact.

rabuse5• 5 years ago

That is absolutely ridiculous.

woodruffw8• 5 years ago

What's the point of appealing to Mirrian-Webster? They're the tail, not the dog; nobody goes to one of their dictionaries to determine how a word or phrase is used.

mns• 5 years ago

In my country people that are already double-jabbed and say they want to wait for the 3rd dose/booster are already called science deniers and anti-vaxxers, so that's that.

dredmorbius9• 5 years ago

Merriam-Webster's standard in definitions is descriptive rather than prescriptive:

Merriam-Webster is a descriptive dictionary in that it aims to describe and indicate how words are actually used by English speakers and writers. Generally, the descriptive approach to lexicography does not dictate how words should be used or set forth rules of "correctness," unlike the prescriptive approach.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/descriptive-vs...

If Merriam-Webster are defining a word in a specific way, that reflects typical usage of that word, not M-W's "decision". It is literally the voice of the people.

__blockcipher__19• 5 years ago

While I almost entirely disagree with you, I agree with the general idea that most people aren't "hesitant". Personally I'm vaccine "hell no!" (because I don't have a personal medical need for the COVID vaccine, potential side effects aside, and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike).

So while I come at it from the total opposite reason, you're right that with the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months, most people who are not vaccinated are fairly strongly opposed to getting it (not necessarily all for the same reason). There are definitely a bunch of "I wanna wait and see" type people, but given all the coercion/propaganda they are few and far between.

arcticbull7• 5 years ago

That's like saying I'm "vaccine hell no!" because I don't have a personal need for a polio vaccine lol. Across the entire spectrum you're at less risk from the vaccine than you are from the disease.

and I reject the societal benefit argument given the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike

That's so weird, all the data seems to indicate that in areas with high vaccination rates nobody gets sick and dies.

It feels like you've manufactured a windmill for yourself.

tomrod14• 5 years ago

This is the exact reason vaccine mandates are necessarily and even desirable as a policy. You're not alone, but the proportion of the population willing to live with discomfort in life is vanishingly small, and hopefully small enough that herd immunity can be reasonably established.

We see similar behavior/attitudes among off-grid folks who refuse to use credit cards or other common adaptations.

I make no judgment of you for your thoughts, just pointing out why a policy maker is justified in increasing the personal cost to ensure the responsibility of freedom isn't shirked, since an unvaccinated population invites variants and harms (imposes social cost) on people unable to be vaccinated (kids, medical issues). So long as Anti-vaccine advocates are willing to pay for the costs of their actions, have at it.

km3r2• 5 years ago

the population dynamics of what happens when you vaccinate against just the spike

Haven't heard of this before, care to elaborate?

the massive amount of propaganda and outright coercion that everyone (at least in the US) has been exposed to over the last several months

See idk if propaganda is the right word here. Imagine a world were covid was 20x as deadily, and the vaccine had absolutely zero side effects. How else do you get the message put to get it? Just say nothing? If hospitals are at risk of getting overrun, and unlike lockdowns, vaccines actually make differences in case numbers, the government has an obligation to do something (protect the general welfare clearly is a mandate to prevent overrunning healthcare facilities).

orra6• 5 years ago

Refusing a safe and effective vaccine (that clearly wins any risk/benefit on your personal level!, not just population wide) is such an odd choice.

Past vaccines, like against measles and smallpox, were so effective that eejits like you never had to learn the importance of vaccination, before now.

burnafter1825• 5 years ago

They keep moving the number for herd immunity. Biden want 97% vaccinated. Fauci is following Biden.

TheOtherHobbes2• 5 years ago

People are opposed to being vaccinated because of a coordinated media campaign put out by elements in the mainstream media - not least from outlets like Fox whose employees are 90% vaccinated, while daily tests are mandated for the rest.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/15/fox-news-vacci...

Being strongly opposed to something does not make opposition legitimate or warranted. It's perfectly possible to believe something which is absolutely harmful and objectively wrong on a mass scale. Such beliefs are not protected by law or by any reasonable definition of ethical morality.

So having said that - why do you think Fox and co. require tests and vaccinations for their own people while broadcasting anti-vaxxer denialism to their viewers?

mbg72110• 5 years ago

What would actually happen if a year or two from now, it turned out that, however unlikely it may appear now, there really were serious long-term vaccine side-effects?

There's absolutely no way it would involve the pro-vax people saying, "We're sorry, you were right." More likely, the same political sides would dig in further, there would be a bunch of attempts to cover up and revise history, and the message would be "The evidence has changed, but people who never got the vaccines didn't believe in science and were still selfish and wrong."

That wouldn't be true if this were really about health.

tbihl3• 5 years ago

I find it very hard to believe that anyone is still "on the fence" about it.
And there it is--this doesn't sound like a person who is weighing their options in good faith. It sounds like someone who is already convinced of what the truth is.

Pot, meet kettle.

sethammons• 5 years ago

that one jumped out at me :)

browningstreet• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I entirely agree.

There are people getting vaccines for the first time every day right now. Somehow they came around.

randallsquared• 5 years ago

But lots if these people DO change their minds. I have a relatively small circle of in-person family and friends, and five of the six hesitant people in that group are now covid vaxxed. There are those who will accept no evidence, but most of the "hesitant" aren't in that group.

zucked2• 5 years ago

Curious - what changed their minds?

tomp5• 5 years ago

Indeed, I prefer "vaccine redundancy" over "vaccine hesitancy".

For people who've had Covid before, vaccine is simply redundant. (If you disagree, please provide sources / data for your view.) Of course, getting vaccinated would increase their immune system's response, but so would for someone who was vaccinated a month ago... at some point, it has to be "good enough" for normal life (not 100% safe anyways).

darthvoldemort2• 5 years ago

Israeli study says getting infected creates 13x stronger immune response than the vaccine versus Delta. How much stronger do we need to get that justifies taking the vaccine at that point? This is the entire point of why they say vaccine mandates are wrong for those that already had it.

WalterSear2• 5 years ago

https://abc7news.com/covid-immunity-coronavirus-vaccines-cdc...

mlang235• 5 years ago

At this point in time, nobody not vaccinated yet is interested in your propaganda. Also, the post you are replying to is already sort of doxing his own wife, so please dont make it even worse by capitalising on that.

mlang235• 5 years ago

Right, people like you need to be stopped. Lets stop talking to people like you, and support them in our community. Lets stop helping people like you if they need something. Lets just drop people like you out of society.

nsxwolf2• 5 years ago

Given that there have been 20 million vaccine doses administered in the US during the month of September, it would seem that you are wrong. The vaccine has been available for many months. Certainly some of those 20 million doses represent people who have been hesitating for one reason or another.

batch123• 5 years ago

If it is an established truth that these vaccines are safe, why still grant these companies immunity from liability if something goes wrong?

Before someone dismisses the question as anti-vaxxer, I have taken the vaccine.

dang4• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28694236.

Thuggery2• 5 years ago

overabundance of evidence that the COVID vaccines are safe, effective, and that they decrease hospitalizations and death

"evidence" that comes from tightly controlled information sources with clear non-truth oriented motivations, that can only accept one answer, and suppres all contrary evidence and discourse? Well if Pravda and the Party tell us the injection is a must and safe too then who could ever doubt it?

I was (and am?) "vaccine hesitant." I am vaccinated now, though it was probably unnecessary since I already had it. I'm really starting to wonder what exactly they injected into me and almost regret it. These are not the actions benevolent actors with nothing to hide.

FYI what pushed me over he edge was a combination of discomfort (wanted to occasionally re-engage with nightlife without worry and guilt), time, local community that I trusted more getting it, and some people in particular I wanted to meet up with that were particularly anal about covid fears.

Nesze• 5 years ago

Age old follow-up question. Who decides what anti-vaccine content is? Who is going to draw the fine line? How simple (i.e. black and white) is to make this distinction? Do you trust that person / entity making these decisions for you and your peers?

But even without defending free speach, looks to me that when you start censoring you just create multiple new problems with zero solution. So even from a design point of view it's clearly a bad thing.

duhast11• 5 years ago

Thought experiment:

Would you be making the same points if the debate was about ISIS propaganda? Or Holocaust denialism? Or content encouraging child exploitation? Viral videos encouraging suicides?

Wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and that platform owners are responsible? Or would you advocate for free speech and watch as the algorithm encourages more and more people to leave their home and join ISIS in Syria?

After all, people are free to make decisions and are responsible for their actions. Suicide doesn't harm anybody else, right?

Andrew_nenakhov4• 5 years ago

Wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and platform owners are responsible?

It is obvious that you have a totalitarian mindset and believe in one 'objective truth'. A Free society that holds to the free speech principle should do the opposite. After all, this principle is not about protecting views that you agree with, but those that you don't.

History has shown time and again that censorship never resulted in a positive long-term outcome, and you are repeating past mistakes.

Also, coming from a totalitarian USSR and now living in a totalitarian Russia, I tell you this, fellow Americans: most of you here don't seem to understand the value of free speech and harm that censorship does to society.

Quick example: beside vaccine deniers, youtube now also bans users who doubt the official election results. What could possibly go wrong with that, right?!

seieste• 5 years ago

if the debate was about ISIS propaganda?

Google recently deleted the entire account of someone who had videos of vehicles in the Middle East, claiming it was extremist content [0]. He was a historian who was cataloging how vehicles are used and modified in military operations across the globe. But google’s bots (which are probably pretty similar to YouTube’s) classified it as extremist content.

So I disagree with the premise of your argument — that we’d all support the automatic removal of “ISIS propaganda”.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621412

flavius296635• 5 years ago

ISIS propaganda - at what point does a cleric preaching the Coran becomes ISIS propaganda? Should we stop seeing news where the taliban shout "death to america" - is that pro-taliban propaganda? Should we ban videos showing life inside Kabul today? Is that taliban propaganda? What about a person interviewing that says under Americans the soldiers came in his home and broke his stuff and also streets were unsafe at night and now under the Taliban it's safer all around?

Holocaust - what is denialism? If you argue for the figure of deaths in Auschwitz being smaller than it is currently publicly known, is that denialism? Does that mean that you are never allowed to challenge the dogma in the "wrong direction" ? What if the official number is actually wrong? https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-05-07-920210... Btw, there are countries in Europe that will prosecute you for denying holocaust, but that is an actual formal process: the prosecutors gather evidence that you consistently try to deny it, with false information, for the sole purpose of minimizing it, not for research or open discussion reasons. This is something prosecutors should do, not some random employees at youtube.

Viral encouraging suicides - should we ban Radiohead altogether? What about "Virgin Suicides"? Should we ban all depressing music and movies? Where do you draw the line? Should we only see happy stuff all the time?

I think speech should be free, except for the cases where it causes actual harm, and those cases should be determined by an official body that has a democratic control over it, like the police, FBI, DAs etc. Youtube/twitter/facebook are completely undemocratic, opaque and unaccountable for their actions. They should not have this much power to steer speech.

And children abuse is a hairy one. When exactly is something ban-able? Does it start at anything below 18? What about countries where 15 is the norm(and the law). What about Romeo and Juliet? And what constitutes abuse? I personally think Desmond is a clear abuse, same with Cuties, same with all beauty peageants for kids. I would ban them all, but you see, I should never have that power, it should come from officials that are ultimately democratically elected.

lopis• 5 years ago

Would you be making the same points if the debate was about ISIS propaganda?

It doesn't matter, that's a fallacious comparison. It's not what the videos are about, and even if it was, who decides what is pro-ISIS propaganda and what is just discussion about what ISIS was doing? For years Youtube has been de-platforming anything that is not advertising friendly using AI, often de-listing videos altogether, with very little recourse unless you know someone who works at Youtube.

adamrezich4• 5 years ago

thought experiment:

what if YouTube existed and was as popular as it is now, in the early 00s, leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, and there videos attempting to prove that Iraq did not in fact have weapons of mass destruction, and YouTube was deleting these videos?

wouldn't it be suddenly obvious that these videos must be taken down immediately, accounts banned and that platform owners are responsible? or would you advocate for free speech and watch as the algorithm encourages more and more people to question the Bush administration narrative, parroted and perpetuated unquestioningly by the media?

syshum12• 5 years ago

Not the OP, but You are not going to like my answer....

My Answer is simple "Unless the content constitutes a "True Threat" [1] as understood under US Constitutional Standards it should be allowed"

As to suicide, I advocate for assisted suicide to be Safe, Legal and Rare. if a person chooses to end their life that choice absent a clear and confounding mental health crisis should be respected by society. This idea that suicide is always wrong is simply false, there are all manner of reasons why one can logically choose suicide.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat

grillvogel5• 5 years ago

wasn't tons of isis and taliban propaganda being posted on twitter long after they banned the orange man?

Spivak5• 5 years ago

The real answers:

* YouTube’s team of content moderators who are directed ultimately by YouTube’s ELT. So… humans. I mean if we expect every highschooler in the US to be able to read a book and interpret its meaning I think we can figure out what anti-vaccine content looks like.

* That same team is going to draw the line. If it were me I would bring the banhammer on any content that had hints of grey because unless the fence is electrified people will try to cozy up to it.

* I mean yeah. You trust them literally every day 24/7 if you use YouTube at all. I don't see what's different now.

The solution is that groups of people who are actively purposely spreading disinformation that is right now in real life killing people loses the platform they have to spread that disinformation.

In the trolly problem of “I can’t say the vaccine contains government microchips and my relatives who are susceptible to this garbage might actually get the vaccine” and “I can say that spike proteins are causing salmonella but Aunt Susie will actually believe me” I know which way I’m pulling the lever.

What’s the body count and risk to others where you think it’s time for someone to be the adult and say you’re not actually allowed to be this stupid anymore because it’s hurting people?

SergeAx9• 5 years ago

every highschooler in the US to be able to read a book and interpret its meaning I think we can figure out what anti-vaccine content looks like

Good. Supposing you are graduated from hight scholl and read a book. I beleive that covid vaccines are good and everybody in their right mind and without medical conditions should vaccinate. I also beleive that everybody has a right to decide by themself to take vaccine or to pass any time. Am I pro-vaccine or am I anti-vaxxer?

jefb• 5 years ago

What's the difference between whispering "fire" in a crowded movie theater vs. yelling it out loud? - is it simply the volume of ones voice? Might some intangible like intent have something to do with it? How do you even go about quantifying that? What if everyone laughs at your outburst? What if they trample each other to death?

I feel as though this crowd gets wrapped around the axel on these kinds of questions - anything with too much ambiguity that can't be code golfed into the tersest possible formal logic statement.

When Justice Stewart attempted to define what "hardcore pornography" actual __is__ he simply wrote "I know it when I see it" (1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio).

That's about as good as one can do in some cases.

adamrezich4• 5 years ago

What's the difference between whispering "fire" in a crowded movie theater vs. yelling it out loud?

both are protected speech though

roenxi5• 5 years ago

That analogy is rather good here because it has a dual interpretation - in terms of the actual history that could be dredged up by wiki editors [0] yelling fire in a crowded theatre has led to ~81 stupid deaths globally and failing to yell fire at an appropriate time has led to at least 278 really stupid deaths in the US. In practice there, there is evidence that yelling fire is not encouraged enough.

There are real threats that are mitigated by an open and tolerant approach to speech. Cracking down on people will lead to a culture that is really bad. Which should be intolerable since the crackdown is only trying to defend against things that are mildly annoying.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

Not sure, I assume someone reports it then it gets turned over to AI to convert voice->script and compare it to a large set of known antivax rhetoric, if it surpasses a threshold it gets banned and stays that way until the owner asks for a review and then at that point a human probably enters the chat.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

youtube employees.

Even if they create a panel of "external experts", the responsibility for it should fall squarely on Youtube. Enough with the big tech deflection

xrd• 5 years ago

I'm against censorship. But I'm also against algorithmic promotion of dubious information.

As an example, several people I know personally told me they saw videos of black lives matter activists and antifa starting fires here in Oregon. It's ridiculous. But, there is enough evidence to show that those videos were created and promoted in the right way such that YouTube and Facebook put them into their viral loops and lots of succeptible people thought they were the truth.

How do we strike a balance between letting information be free and at the same time prevent black box algorithms and evil actors from hacking our society?

jlebar17• 5 years ago

It's ironic (or maybe not?) that the comments section here is filled with exactly the kind of anti-vax misinformation that YouTube is trying to take down.

To respond to one point I keep reading in here over and over: Getting and recovering from covid does not necessarily give you better protection from disease than getting the vaccine.

1/3 of people who get covid develop no antibodies at all, as compared to 0% of (non-immunocompromised) people who get the vaccine. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/574284-natural-covid-...

Also, of course, if you get covid...you got covid which was kind of the thing that we were trying to avoid. Not just for ourselves, but for our communities.

Another point I keep reading is, we don't know the long-term effects of these vaccines. And, it's undeniably true that we don't know with the certainty of evidence what will happen in ten years. But:

- 2.5 billion people have gotten at least one covid shot. This is one of the most-studied medical interventions in the history of medical interventions.

- There is no known and plausible mechanism by which the shot suddenly has bad effects years down the line. Historically, any side effects from vaccines show up within a few weeks, https://www.muhealth.org/our-stories/how-do-we-know-covid-19...

- We also don't know what will happen in ten years to people who caught long covid, and we do know that people who die from covid will not be alive in ten years.

Stay safe, everyone.

colordrops5• 5 years ago

Ironic indeed. How about referencing scientific sources rather than opinion pieces from political news sites. It's less than 2%, not 1/3, that don't develop antibodies.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24622-7#Sec2

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf4063

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9

jlebar17• 5 years ago

How about referencing scientific sources rather than opinion pieces from political news sites.

The dude is a MD PhD who's been on NPR, NYT, etc. He's literally a scientist who is a source -- a scientific source.

But sure, we can talk journal articles.

Where is your "less than 2%" number coming from? I see this in the first Nature article:

Of the 125 subjects exposed to SARS-CoV-2 according to the baseline ground truth definition, 101 (80.8%) participated to the May serosurvey. Among them, 93.5% (86 out of 92, 95% CI 86.3–97.6%), 84.2% (85 out of 101, 95% CI 75.5–90.7%), and 100% (92 out of 92, 95% CI 96.1–100%) had a positive result for Abbott, DiaSorin and Roche, respectively, whereas 44.9% (44 out of 98, 95% CI 34.8–55.3%) had a neutralising titre greater than 1:40 (1/dil). In November, 86 subjects (68.8%) were tested again, all of them except one (98.8%) tested positive to at least one serological assay.

They're saying that 44.9% of people infected had neutralizing antibodies at the level they recognize, right? They re-tested the same people six months later, and >98% of them tested positive for one assay. This doesn't speak to the 98% number you cite above. Maybe you're looking elsewhere.

I'm not going to be sealioned into going through studies if you can't point me to the section that supports your point.

Anyway for the article's 1/3 number, he also cites a study by the CDC, a fact which I guess you've chosen to ignore? https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/27/9/21-1042_article

heartbreak3• 5 years ago

This community thrives on contrarianism.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

The comment was also technically wrong. Let us not fall to a level were we ascribe character values to others.

im3w1l2• 5 years ago

That's why this thread is at 2000 comments and counting. The censorship is no longer affecting some nebolous "other people". It's coming close. People can tell that they are next in line. That they will have to start practice serious self-censorship or get banned from FAANG-land, isolating them from friends, family and potential love interests.

jlebar17• 5 years ago

they will have to start practice serious self-censorship or get banned from FAANG-land, isolating them from friends, family and potential love interests.

You mean, there could be consequences for our words and actions?

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

Ironic how this is devolving into literally a youtube comment section.

My contribution is: there is an actual study from israel that shows that recovered persons were much more (13 times more) protected than vaccinated individuals, and this is direct evidence, not inferences from antibody counts. We also don't know what the effect of vaccine is going to be as the virus mutates (ADE?). In particular, the vaccination of kids is a very contentious issue that requires debate, as kids are not in danger from Covid, thus it presents a major ethical challenge for societies.

Anyway my other contribution is that access to information should not be hindered. However youtube's problem is that it is a medium of manipulation , not a library. It would be against their interest to stop it from being so, therefore they are making the grave error of making themselves arbiters of science.

raxxorrax22• 5 years ago

If you recover from Covid it isn't really important how many antibodies you have. The important part is what indications the disease triggered. You have shifted this on antibody count without necessity. That is misinformation. We are talking about immunity, which can also mean that you do not need antibodies at all. On the contrary, Covid was healed with the first line of immune defense.

the thing that we were trying to avoid

I think we need to be more precise now because of the shift: We do not want it to be dangerous. You are spreading misinformation or at least medically incorrect information.

Ironic indeed.

jeantherapy• 5 years ago

The more wrong they are the more they n down. One of these days that strategy may pay off. Better than admitting you're incompetent egotistical dumbasses who have been acting like nazis.

water8• 5 years ago

These people act like mRNA vaccines are 100% understood and there is no room for debate

momirlan• 5 years ago

So big tech have become the holders of "truth". I don't care whose legitimacy they claim, governments are not the holders of truth either, and science changes daily. Suppressing freedom of information is not alright.

masterof0• 5 years ago

So is Joe Rogan gone from Youtube? Or only his "only fat people need to get the vaccine" videos are going to be banned? I wonder what other companies like Spotify would do to the big influencers that are spreading misinformation, etc.

caeril• 5 years ago

Rogan is not spreading misinformation.

The top two comorbidities, BY FAR, are old age and obesity. The CFR for normal-weight people under 65 is vanishingly small. This is an established fact.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e4.htm

One can fairly argue that he's doing a moral disservice to the obese and elderly by encouraging community spread, but this trend of throwing ethical disagreement under the banner of "misinformation" is absurd, when the actual science on hand supports the position.

mlang235• 5 years ago

Another reason to NOT by YouTube Premium, and leave my spare phone on autoplay when going out, so that youtube ad customers get to pay for supporting the biggest scam operation ever. 80% of the ads I get would never pass a sanity-check in my home country, such ads are simply illegal on our TV. But hey, the american is spreading scam ads, so lets just accept that.

malkia• 5 years ago

Good!

wvh• 5 years ago

Once again, we found a way to get rid of those we don't like by censoring them completely based on any utterance of a Topic or Viewpoint That Can Not Be Expressed Out Loud. Any open discussion or criticism on any sensitive topic could be enough to close down the participant's account, take away their right to be heard and even effectively erase them.

This is not a defense of any particular opinion as much as it is the right for people to be heard by those willing to listen and hopefully keep communication open to foster better education and understanding.

jude-• 5 years ago

Good. It's long past time we stop humoring the destructive delusional narcissism of anti-vaxxers. Let them build their own fucking YouTube to host their bullshit.

koolba• 5 years ago

We live in a world where the rat that heads the NIAD cannot bring himself to publicly say that natural immunity (i.e. you’ve recovered from COVID) provides substantial protection and instead says things like “we’re still looking at the data on that…”: https://twitter.com/drsanjaygupta/status/1436133536239599619

If we’re going to let that continue unchallenged then banning dissenting voices is a drop in the bucket.

gred• 5 years ago

It used to be that I didn't want to work for Google because I'm not a fan of surveillance capitalism and all of the second order effects. I'm now realizing that there is a second, just-as-important reason: the level of censorship that Google enables.

A few years ago I wouldn't have thought there could possibly be a second reason just as important to me as the centralized, pervasive surveillance... but here we are.

99_00• 5 years ago

First they came for Alex Jones, and I did not speak out

Because I was not an Alex Jones viewer.

aimor• 5 years ago

What parties motivate Google? For example: does the US Government make requests to Google directly? Do advertisers? Lobbyists? Wealthy individuals? Friends and family of higher-ups? Is the source completely internal to Google? I'd love to see more about the process these ideas go through.

macinjosh5• 5 years ago

In this situation my money is on advertisers who are being criticized on social media for sponsoring 'undesirable' content because the algorithm put their ad in front of a random video. By and large I don't think YouTube cares what is in a video unless it is illegal or something advertisers don't want to associate with.

calltrak• 5 years ago

look on https://bitchute.com or https://brandnewtube.com and you will lots of information why I will not being taking an injected experimental medical procedure . No way no how!

chasd008• 5 years ago

Not unlike the censoring any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis they (the censors) better be perfectly accurate every single time.

The moment they get it wrong and censor something that turns out to be the truth they lose 100% of their credibility and become a part of the conspiracy.

dougSF70• 5 years ago

YouTube set to win coveted heel-dragging award 2021. Yes protecting free speech on anything but science and public health.

newbamboo2• 5 years ago

It worries me when far right libertarians and the authoritarian left agree. Nothing has meaning anymore.

nathias• 5 years ago

People give them absolute control and then wonder why they would use it. Stop watching youtube, there are numerous viable p2p alternatives.

supperburg3• 5 years ago

I had to wait for 7 hours at the ER last night. People who choose to not vaccinate shouldn’t be allowed entry to the hospital.

adamhearn• 5 years ago

Why?

supperburg3• 5 years ago

Because they clog up the hospitals. In Singapore if you opt out of donating your organs after death then you also opt out of receiving organs. It’s just a sensible way of allowing people who really have a principled stance on an issue to do what they want while not being a burden on the rest of us.

chasd008• 5 years ago

if you're talking about the the ER in the USA and you didn't have a life threatening injury/illness then i say a 7 hr wait was pretty quick.

landryraccoon6• 5 years ago

Here's a thought experiment.

Suppose we were at war with a hostile adversary, and that adversary had killed over 700,000 people already, and thousands more each day.

I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech. Once the imminent threat is over, those efforts can and should stop, but not while the destruction is immediate.

Covid-19 has killed more people in the United States than US combat casualties every war since World War 2 combined. It is the the worst mass casualty event any living American has ever experienced.

Why is it unreasonable that serious and extraordinary measures should be taken? Misinformation about the pandemic has surely massively contributed to that death total. The chilling effect on free speech is worse? No, it's not. It simply isn't true that free speech won't return. But those 700,000+ and counting dead are not coming back.

ndr• 5 years ago

Surely misinformation has had an impact, but how big?

I wonder how that compares to the perceived incompetence.

Some official sources are wrong some of the time, everyone's favorite example: they told mask were useless in the beginning. They corrected course, but then told vaccinated people they didn't need masks anymore, basically making the same mistake twice. They halted AZ, paused J&J, had a gazillion change of mind on boosters. We need to be able to hear challenges to official sources.

So yes, the chilling effect can make it worse if they go unchallenged. And it's also not simply true that free speech would return either.

danielvf• 5 years ago

Well, the US sort of faced the situation that you were describing (fighting an enemy that killed six to ten million people in four years) and then passed a law similar to what you are describing. Have a a look at the Sedition act of 1918.

In hindsight it was a terrible idea, and was repealed in 1920.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1239/sedition-a...

hkai• 5 years ago

That's the thing, COVID is an "eternal war" as described in dystopian novels. If you describe COVID in war terms, then it justifies all sorts of atrocities.

landryraccoon6• 5 years ago

It's not though. Pandemics have happened before and they end.

Second, what's the atrocity being committed exactly? People temporarily are prevented from publishing extraordinarily brazen lies, clearly scientifically false, which are killing thousands of people? I can't see what the evil is here.

ceilingcorner2• 5 years ago

Should we ban car commercials? Cars kill lots of people.

Should we ban soda commercials? Obesity kills a lot of people.

Here’s the issue: if your entire value system is based on extending life at any cost to other values, you’ve already lost. Full stop.

This entire thing is one giant flashing sign that says “Modern human beings are scared of everything, even as they live in the safest times ever.”

CivBase4• 5 years ago

I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech.

Count me as one of the unreasonables, then. Anti-war protests are logically "propaganda that harms the war effort" and the idea that those would be censored is extremely frightening to me.

Covid-19 has killed more people in the United States than US combat casualties every war since World War 2 combined. It is the the worst mass casualty event any living American has ever experienced.

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Heart disease also kills more people in the US every year than every war since WW2, but YouTube isn't banning fast food commercials. [EDIT: In fact, they accept money in exchange for forcing people to watch those!]

spiderice2• 5 years ago

I think a large part of it is because the "misinformation" keeps changing. At first masks did nothing, then saying masks did nothing became "misinformation". The lab leak theory was "misinformation", until suddenly it wasn't. Large group gatherings spread Covid, but the BLM protests didn't. The list goes on, and the "experts" have changed their mind so many times that the idea that Youtube should be deciding what kind of thought is allowed is horrifying.

I am fully vaccinated, but given how many times we've been blatantly lied to or mislead by experts and officials, I can easily see why so many people don't trust the vaccine. And given that we don't know what the experts and officials are going to say tomorrow, I support people's right to be skeptical and talk about their skepticism with others.

Laremere• 5 years ago

From what I've seen, they never lied about needing a mask. The early pandemic CBS interview with Fouci says wearing a mask is fine, but unnecessary for most people and would take masks from those who really need it. There was also a larger emphasis on sanitizing surfaces and avoiding face touching. This is because sars-cov-2 is more effective spreading infections as an airborn virus than expected. Once evidence showed otherwise, masking was recommended.

The lab leak theory shows a problem with human thought and why scientific methods are valuable. People focus on what's true, instead of eliminating what's impossible. To say the lab leak theory is a possibility is reasonable. However to say it might have spread to humans through another medium (eg, meat market) is also reasonable. To try and put any sort of probability between the two reasonable possibilities is a pointless endeavor. China is likely the only one with good enough evidence to say either way, and China isn't telling anyone else. Though even that doesn't say anything, because either way they wouldn't tell anyone else.

Big gatherings are bad, but the right to fight against tyranny is more important than the badness of the big gatherings. That is the context in which experts are not condoning BLM protests.

The problem is it's really hard to tell between a carefully considered expert opinion, and just someone talking out of their ass. It's also an evolving situation, with even experts trying to work with slow to come data. It's reasonable to say that people should focus on directing others to experts, and not and try to reinterpret or make predictions of their own.

StatsAreFun• 5 years ago

That's a good point about the extraordinary measures taken. Accordingly, since the number of deaths from the top three causes of U.S. deaths in 2019 were heart disease (659,041), cancer (599,601) and accidents (173,040), we should boycott all propaganda or misinformation around how being overweight is healthy, immediately close all fast food establishments, provide free fruits & vegetables for all Americans, close all beaches to prevent anyone from getting too much sun, immediately ban all products containing cancer causing agents of any kind, mandate all cars & trucks contain ignition lockouts that would prevent the vehicles from starting if seat belts were not worn properly, immediately ban all motorcycles, immediately ban all swimming pools or mandate all Americans wear flotation devices or risk fines & imprisonment, immediately ban all guns & knives regardless of their intended purpose, immediately ban all contact sports and other sports that are considered "extreme" or high-risk, and ban all ladders & stools. If we can reduce or eliminate outright the 1,431,682 people killed from these causes, regardless of the impact on the economy or personal liberty, it would be worth it. Those people are also dead and definitely not coming back. We owe it to their families and communities to do everything we can to prevent further deaths from these causes as well.

landryraccoon6• 5 years ago

Let's be clear on what we're comparing here.

We're comparing a short term ban on provable lies about a cheap, safe and highly effective set of vaccines with a long term, permanent ban on all activities that could increase the risk of heart disease of cancer.

First, vaccines highly effective. Even if the draconian measures you proposed were implemented, would they even reduce the heart disease and cancer death totals? How much would the reduction be?

Second, vaccines are not an egregious imposition on your lifestyle. The cost is tiny, the time taken is tiny, the side effects are minor. I can't think of a single significant change in my life due to having been vaccinated, other than not worrying about dying due to Covid.

Finally, the ban on misinformation would be temporary, because the crisis will pass. Like wars, pandemics are temporary. Even before vaccination and modern medicine was invented, pandemics eventually end. When would the draconian measures you're proposing end? Heart disease and cancer are not communicable diseases. Your solution isn't a sustainable long term answer to anything.

Your comparison is frankly very dishonest and disingenuous. Wanting to reduce provably false misinformation about vaccines is nothing like the draconian, permanent measures you're proposing.

iotku• 5 years ago

Once the imminent threat is over, those efforts can and should stop, but not while the destruction is immediate.

The destruction is always immediate, there's always risks, and there's always going to be another possible (virus|war|dangerous criminal|wrong-thinker|...) in the future.

The only time I have any (although low) expectation of a policy ending is when I'm given a definite end date with a binding promise that it won't be extended.

mrkramer2• 5 years ago

I can scarcely believe that any reasonable person would argue that blocking propaganda or misinformation that harms the war effort would be an egregious imposition on free speech.

Propaganda is spread by who? Domestic traitors? Then arrest them and charge them for treason. If this was true they would be already behind bars but you don't seem to understand the only thing they are doing is expressing their opinion publicly nothing else.

SergeAx9• 5 years ago

Yes, but at the same time heart deseases are killing about the same number of people every year in US. And this is much more correct parallel than yours with hostile adversary.

landryraccoon6• 5 years ago

If there was a cheap and effective vaccine against heart disease that would reduce the yearly death rate by 90% and require no other change in lifestyle then yes, I would be for banning misinformation and lies about that too.

d0gsg0w00f6• 5 years ago

Breakthrough case here. Clinic said that's all they've been seeing recently, dozens per day.

One thing I've never understood is why the vaccinated care so much about what he unvaccinated are doing?

Vaccinated people still carry viral loads so it's either how it affects you personally or your compassion for the enhanced vulnerability of the unvaccinated. Based on the toxic rhetoric towards the unvaccinated it seems to me the former.

You've done everything within your control to protect yourself so why do you feel the need to have an opinion on their bodily choices?

kleer0012• 5 years ago

Because the unvaccinated are:

1) Filling ICUs and taking up other hospital resources unnecessarily. Leaves that for people who are injured in accidents.

2) Dying. We don't want our fellow humans dying. Only anti-social jerks don't care if their fellow humans die from easily preventable causes.

3) Carrying larger viral loads for longer.

their bodily choices?

If it were only their body it wouldn't be a much of an issue. However, it's not just their body. See above.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

The vaccine limit the spread of the disease, that's a fact. By how much is up to debate but it is not just effective at making the disease less severe.

The wave of infections caused by the delta variant is faster, larger and deadlier in places with low vaccination rates. The vaccinated are less likely to test positive by about half, symptoms or not.

Not perfect but the vaccine protects others. If the unvaccinated took the necessary precautions to avoid infecting others, it would be their problem (if healthcare is not overwhelmed...), but usually they don't. Just look at anti-vaccine protests, you don't see a lot of masks...

And of course, if almost everyone in your area is vaccinated, most cases will be breakthrough cases.

snarf212• 5 years ago

Part of it is a hope to get back to normal. The other part is that their "bodily choice" isn't self contained. If someone has ebola, is it their "bodily choice" to walk around infecting others? The unvaccinated are showing an extreme lack of empathy.

Also, go read some of the countless reports about how hospitals are overwhelmed, how states are allowing the rationing of care, how ICUs have no beds for heart attacks or normal pneumonia because the beds are full of people who don't trust doctor's enough to get the vaccine but want life sustaining help after getting covid. I predict we are going to see mass resignations from hospital workers who are burned out because one political party convinced its supporters to not take basic medical advice. I've lost two uncles from this disease. It sounds like you haven't. I hope you take a step back and think about what happens when someone you love needs ICU care but the staff, equipment and resources are full and your loved one can't be treated.

scrumbledober2• 5 years ago

My infant daughter had a fever the other day and the doctor's office said that normally if your baby has a fever for this long they would want you to bring the baby in to be seen by a doctor but they're not seeing any patients with fevers right now so just monitor the baby and see if it gets better.

machiaweliczny9• 5 years ago

And maybe that's good? We are already slowing evolution and dissolving good genes due to modern conviniences.

hpen• 5 years ago

Would they have blocked the lab leak theory when it was less popular?

fnord77• 5 years ago

I think having a small percentage of the population who are anti-vax adds to the robustness of the species. What if, odds unlikely, that there was some problem with the vax where it killed or sterilized everyone who got it? It would be extinction except for the anti-vaxxers. Now this is an super unlikely event, but there's a non-zero chance this could happen.

chasd008• 5 years ago

they better be perfectly right every time or else they become a part of the conspiracy. You would think they would learn after the lab-leak censorship fiasco.

robd003• 5 years ago

Censoring ideas just makes them more popular. If YouTube wanted to do the right thing they'd let people debate openly, instead this will just push people further into their respective echo chambers.

jl6• 5 years ago

You’d think they might try a softer approach first like slapping a strongly-worded warning on the video.

“This video contains incorrect information and should be watched for entertainment purposes only.”

hereforphone• 5 years ago

Social media companies are stifling freedom of speech in America. Have you seen the "Who's banned from Twitter and who's not" meme with Donald Trump and the Taliban? Unpopular or non-conformist opinions are censored, and it's dangerous.

"But it's private companies! They can do whatever they want!" The telephone companies are private. Do they have a right to kill your connection when you talk about unapproved subject matter? Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and so on are the modern de-facto means of communicating long distance and to wide-spread audiences.

"But it's dangerous to let these opinions reach the ears of the masses." Open discourse and trusting society to (eventually) make the right decision, given all available information, is something we've done (or attempted to do) in modern democracies. This is important.

j79• 5 years ago

"But it's private companies! They can do whatever they want!" The telephone companies are private. Do they have a right to kill your connection when you talk about unapproved subject matter? Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, and so on are the modern de-facto means of communicating long distance and to wide-spread audiences.

If I started robo-calling millions of people with unapproved subject matter, I'd wager they'd kill my connection fairly quickly.

macinjosh5• 5 years ago

I am not convinved this is a logical metaphor. Robocalls directly bother every person on a list. A social media post goes to those who've consented (i.e. subscribed/followed) and other places the social media company decides they should go. I don't see what the two have in common.

kats• 5 years ago

It's a difference between banning behavior vs. ideas.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

If I started robo-calling millions of people with unapproved subject matter, I'd wager they'd kill my connection fairly quickly.

Except that they don't. Have you been called about your car warranty, or student loans yet today?

holdupnow2• 5 years ago

Fuckin Nazis

rc_mob• 5 years ago

anti vaccine people are indeed close to as evil as nazis

macinjosh5• 5 years ago

Amazing YouTube! Finally, some good news!

I am really pumped for what this means for alternative platforms like rumble and odysee. This is the boost the independent web needs! YouTube was way too centralized.

The network is healing!

only_as_i_fall• 5 years ago

It'd be cool if this would decrease the number of antivaxxers, but actually it probably won't and Google really shouldn't be able to do this anyway.

Perhaps if YouTube didn't have almost total market dominance it would be less problematic.

burlesona• 5 years ago

I think a better solution would be to ban algorithmic media distribution. Let people post whatever they want on YouTube. If there wasn’t a toxic engagement algorithm radicalizing people this wouldn’t be a problem. That would kill the social media business model, which is an added bonus IMO.

vosper• 5 years ago

How will we tell if it works? A decrease in anti-vax sentiment and an uptick in vaccine take-up? How will we tell that it was due to YouTube?

What if it doesn’t move the needle at all (pun intended) - does it mean YouTube is much less influential than we (and they, apparently) think? Or that they waited too long and the anti-vax message had already embedded?

It’ll be very interesting to watch.

uuddlrlr3• 5 years ago

YouTube's algorithms probably radicalized a good chunk to begin with.

FpUser2• 5 years ago

Anti-vaccers have limited amount of claims. Instead of shutting them down and feeding into conspiracy if governments and big corps are so concerned they should make web sites where they disprove said claims with valid data in a way understandable by mere mortals. For interested there can be also list of references for further reading. Youtube and the likes are then free to promote / put on first page headlines from this websites.

Instead what I see when opening youtube (I am Canadian) is the pic of Theresa Tam: our Chief Public Health Officer. She is known to change her opinion every other day to the point that whatever she says can be ignored - she'll come up with something different tomorrow.

FpUser2• 5 years ago

TameAntelope2• 5 years ago

I know this comment will be lost in the shuffle, and I notice this was submitted by danso, so I imagine there's an intentionality here, but I very strongly believe submissions like these are a substantial and growing threat to HN.

Just remove them! Let's talk tech, startups, science! Submissions like these distract from the stuff I like on HN, but more importantly I worry they chase away the people I like from HN.

I flag each of these, hoping enough of us can get content like this removed, and I'm willing to be outvoted on that count, but I personally think HN is better off without this content.

elsonrodriguez• 5 years ago

People in technology fields absolutely have an obligation to talk about the morality of technology.

I'd highly recommend you to read Cat's Cradle if you haven't already. Carl Sagan also had something to say about this.

In lieu of that, one can meditate on this more condensed take:

Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun

- Tom Lehrer

TameAntelope2• 5 years ago

I don't think people in technology should stop talking about these things, I just think they should talk about it somewhere other than HN.

sneak9• 5 years ago

mRNA vaccines and UGC platform censorship are both on topic for "tech" and "science".

PerkinWarwick• 5 years ago

Heck, I view it all as 'misinformation', and I certainly don't need some cubicle drone at youtube to decide for me.

Certainly the average person is smart enough to understand the statistics of the thing, after all that's something of the point of epidemiology.

There should be enough data points by now to tell me a few things.

. What is the real value of a cloth mask worn inside in a crowd with strangers? What is the value of a properly fitted N95 mask? Give it to me as an odds calculation.

. Just what percentage of covid is picked up in bars? grocery stores? schools? at home? Our local health department is notably mum about that preferring only to hand out the county-wide ages and that's it.

.Actual strong data on value of vaccine in terms of infection and symptoms. 1st, 2nd, 3rd dose. How long are these valuable? How long will they remain so due to mutations? Odds.

.Actual data on nasty side effects of vaccine including odds.

.Fairly presented value of home remedies, anti-virals, etc.

.etc.

You can twizzle out some of this, but rarely. Cut down to the essentials, it wouldn't take up a single sheet of paper. Post that sheet of paper whenever anyone feels the need to opine.

Instead I'm treated to shaming and scolding and peoples' fear about their precious bodily fluids and I'm sick of everyone. Somehow this has become a proxy for the 2016/2020 elections complete with all the religious overtones. Please stop.

cryptica• 5 years ago

Time to switch to https://odysee.com/ - It's been growing very fast. You can buy LBRY tokens to align your incentives on the financial side: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/library-credits/

You can profit from doing the right thing and taking a stance against censorship.

Ajedi322• 5 years ago

Enough. This sort of large-scale systematic suppression of human rights (in this case the right to the free exchange of ideas) is fundamentally evil and needs to be stopped.

That it's "for a good cause" is no excuse. Neither is the fact that the perpetrator of these mass-scale human rights violations is a corporate oligopoly rather than a government, nor that the target of these abuses is "them" rather than "us". All of that is a distraction. They. Are. Trampling. Your. Rights. This cannot be allowed to continue.

thehappypm• 5 years ago

YouTube is a private enterprise. They have 100% the right to control what goes on their site. Would you be mad if a fishing forum banned non-fishing posts? Is that a large-scale systematic suppression of human rights?

Ajedi322• 5 years ago

No, because your hypothetical fishing forum is not "large scale", and because discrimination based on general topic does not suppress the free exchange of ideas the same way that discrimination based on the beliefs of the poster does.

If YouTube banned all health-related discussion regardless of what position the video was advocating for I would still disagree with that decision, but it would not be a blatant human rights violation the way their current policy is.

skocznymroczny• 5 years ago

Once again YouTube is standing against free speech.

Yes, most of you will cheer for it just as you did when Twitter banned Trump. You will say it's a private company, they have the right to do that. Don't expect people like me to support you when you complain about YouTube banning e.g. Russian activists.

Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the speech you don't agree with.

dragonwriter8• 5 years ago

Once again YouTube is standing against free speech.

No, exercising it.

Yes, most of you will cheer for it just as you did when Twitter banned Trump.

Well, I mean, its better than when Twitter rewrote its rule to officially privilege those in established positions of power to justify not taking actions against Trump's regular and egregious violations of their rules.

Don't expect people like me to support you when you complain about YouTube banning e.g. Russian activists.

I don't expect that anyway. I expect people like you to continue to pursue the position that it is impermissible for YouTube to choose not to relay propaganda of your faction because it is somehow contrary to free speech rights for them to do so, while not taking that position for viewpoints you are less interested in, all while chanting the virtues of supporting speech you disagree with.

I, on the other hand, will continue to view it as within YouTube’s free speech rights to choose not to relay either kind of content, but undesirable for other reasons in certain cases (and, where it is bot a free choice by YouTube but compelled by a government seeking to suppress dissent, a violation of free speech by the government involved, not YouTube.)

Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the speech you don't agree with.

No, it isn't.

Part of supporting free speech is that you have to support the right of people to express viewpoints you disagree with, including by declining to relay the positions you do agree with.

(It also doesn't mean you have to support their choice to express those viewpoints, or the manner in which they do it, only their right to do it.)

mrkramer2• 5 years ago

Decentralized p2p video ftw!

dang4• 5 years ago

All: if you want to read all 2500+ comments you'll need to click More at the bottom, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28693060&p=4

etc. (Sorry for the annoyance - comments like this will eventually go away.)

gorwell4• 5 years ago

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.” George Bernard Shaw

“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palko v. Connecticut

"If you believe that the arguments against slavery in their time and against Jim Crow laws more recently could only have been expressed when people had the freedom to voice unpopular opinions, then you can’t now say that free speech is inherently dangerous." Stephen Pinker

“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” Noam Chomsky

"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.” Frederick Douglass

beebmam5• 5 years ago

YouTube isn't the government

gorwell4• 5 years ago

In our internet age, the freedom of speech that truly matters is ALL digital.

The US has no Public ISP, nor Public Speech Platform equivalent of Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

What's your point?

The concept of free speech is 2400 years old. Don't be one of those people that conflates that concept with the American first amendment which only blocks government censorship and is barely 200 years old.

Private companies, groups, and people can and do infringe on everyone's right to free speech.

Thuggery2• 5 years ago

In the time when the 1st amendment was written (which is not a holy document that decides all morality. Nor is the U.S. the center of the universe) corporations as we understand them did not really exist. The people that were concerned about free speech could only conceive a hostile government of King George could really suppress them and the people willing to hear their dissident ideas. They were rich local gentlemen that had public squares and private meeting rooms. It did not occur to them that they could be silenced by the local placard maker forming a cabal that would deny any attempt to express themselves.

Times have changed and the public square is dead.

bitcurious2• 5 years ago

Note that the OP didn’t quote the First Amendment, he cited a number of powerful speeches/writings about free speech. The two are as similar as the concept of a rectangle and a piece of paper.

tikiman163• 5 years ago

YouTube has been cracking down on anything Covid related for over a year. Any discussion about Covid that has gone much past saying stay safe or get vaccinated has been instantly demonitized and hidden from people's subscriptions. This is just the next obvious step they were obviously going to take. The thing is, this is an incredibly complicated topic.

Legislation that could result in YouTube being held liable for user posted content that deseminates misinformation has been more than lightly discussed. The problem of misinformation is frequently made worse by the fact that studies have shown around 80% of misinformation of major topics can generally be traced back to fewer than a dozen unique users. It's not the same dozen people on every topic of discussion, but once some of the misinformation has gone viral it's extremely difficult to stop it getting shared again and again. This may seem like a matter of freedom of speech, but on some topics viral misinformation spreading can end up being deadly to thousands of real people.

Consider an analogy. If a person sets up to pull a prank by changing the words on a billboard, with only the intention of just surprising some people. But 3 car crashes occur where the drivers blaim the billboard for being a distraction. How much responsibility would you say the prankster has? How much should the billboard owner have for failing to prevent the prankster?

Now consider that instead of changing a billboard he changes the speed listed on a sign that cautions people not to take a blind turn at greater than 25 mph. Say he changes it to just be the same as the posted speed limit for the road and several cars spin out or there are minor fender benders. Then say he changes it to be even faster than the speed limit. How much responsibility should the prankster have for those accidents? How much should the city have for failing to prevent the prankster from being able to change their official signs?

There are strong points for debate in all of these situations. How easy was it for the prankster to access the billboard and make changes? What else were the drivers doing that a billboard could cause them to crash? What was so distracting about what they put on the billboard?

Why didn't the city post a sign that was more difficult to tamper with? How much effort did the prankster put into their fake? Why didn't local people notice the change and report it? How quickly did the city respond? How believable was the speed he put on the sign?

My point isn't to ask for the answers to these specific questions, but to point out that there is a difference between circumstances that requires greater responsibility from the medium the prankster changed. The contents of a billboard is just an advertisement, speed limits and road hazard signs are more important. Speed limits and road hazards also have to display probably true information that has some degree of validation that relying on them is safe.

This is a particularly tricky subject for YouTube because they are essentially a billboard, but people have started treating what's on it like road signs. How responsible should YouTube be when people use their platform to post complete nonsense that has the potential to get thousands or even millions killed?

ddingus2• 5 years ago

This won't end well. Suppression drives people to seek it more --and where they find it, they will have stronger investments in the ideas and it all will be harder to discuss to a rational conclusion.

adamrezich4• 5 years ago

does anyone else think that this is sort of the intended goal? not necessarily by YouTube in this case specifically but in a sort of meta sense, for many things such as this, in the past decade or so. it's almost as though those in power benefit when those who aren't in power are divided along ever more axes, axes which didn't exist only a few short years ago, but whose division is more significant than anything we've seen in many years.

for example, I'm reminded of how contemporary identity politics seemed to sprout up out of nowhere conveniently around the same time as the #occupy movement(s). since then, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the powerful people in the world are maintaining power by dividing the populace.

ddingus2• 5 years ago

I can't speak to intent, but I do recognize divided populace as being ineffective in the body politic.

trentnix7• 5 years ago

YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

Which will, of course, galvanize those who are skeptical of the vaccine and the intentions of our bureaucratic overlords. And because that's so obvious, it makes the conspiracy-theorist squirrel part of my brain wonder if that's the point.

thepasswordis• 5 years ago

Maybe I’d be more okay with this if the vaccines weren’t owned by multi billion dollar companies who stand to make billions of dollars by requiring the world to use their products.

Can you imagine that for anything else? You MUST use the product of ours, and we are actually going to make it illegal for you not to, and ban any discussion about not using it.

henning• 5 years ago

Are people mad about censorship on YouTube also mad about all the censorship that occurs on this site? Stuff gets deleted and manipulated by the mods all the time.

goatlover15• 5 years ago

It seems to me that some people on here believe there should be no moderation/censorship whatsoever on the internet. I don't know how they propose to keep sites from being completely overwhelmed by bad actors, spam and illegal activities.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

All this does is justify the anti-vaccine activists.

jonstaab• 5 years ago

Anti vaccine content is just posting pro-vaccine content from six months ago next to pro-vaccine content from today.

y04nn• 5 years ago

I'm for freedom of speech, people should be able to make their own choice with all the information available. There should be a right to be a "conscientious objector"[1] for vaccination. But to be fair, it would work only for an educated population that is capable to distinguish facts from misinformation. And for me, science should always be questioned, if not there is no research and no discoveries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objection_in_the...

xkbarkar3• 5 years ago

Months ago he was insisting that the people who had contracted COVID-19 and who had antibodies in their system may not need the vaccine. Now, we have a number of studies coming out to support that. But months ago that was "anti-vax" (employing the slanderous use of the term).

I live in Iceland. Recovery from cov-sars-2 infection is considered as valid as a vaccine here. The same goes for Norway and ( to the best of my knowledge) Sweden, Denmark and Finland. They all recognize recovery from covid-19 as sufficcient protection.

Looking at US and Canada, along with a slew of terrifying commenters in this thread, the entire Nordic region consist of misinformed anti-vaxxers that have fallen prey to fake news by this definition.

We have also never put masks on our 24 month old toddlers. US and Canda WTF is wrong with you? We have a very high vaccination rate here in Iceland but that did not stop hospitalisations, or deaths. But definetly decreased them. Our high vaccination rate has had 0 effect on the spread of infections though. Even if hospitalizations have reaped the benefits because of it. If anything we got the highest wave of infections we have ever encountered this summer. But with a clear decrease in hospital load. We went back to mandates after only a very brief 4 week reopening because our high vaccination rate did absolutely nothing to stop the spread.

When this fact hit us in Iceland, when the summer wave hit, we as a country went into a state of mild shock. As so many nations we declared victory way, way too soon.

No one mentions this in the news though. Crickets. We might not even exist for all CNN, Times, all the Posts and vox cares.

I am not in any high risk group. Got moderna 2 shots, I still have PTSD from the side effects of the second shot. I sincerely thought I took the vaccine to help prevent the spread. But I most likely went through one of the worst nights of my life for no good fucking reason whatsoever. I statistically never needed the extra protection, I can still very much catch cov-sars-2 and still very much infect and kill another fully vaccinated vulnerable human being.

I guess I am now a misinformed anti-vaxxer

jcon321• 5 years ago

While I'm sure some people would dismiss this entire comment as anecdotal I thank you for writing it.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

our high vaccination rate did absolutely nothing to stop the spread.

It was never going to. People have been asking for decades, "Why don't we have a vaccine for the common cold?" And the answer is because it's a type of virus that evolves too quickly. So we just can't. Not really. It's just not remotely as effective as say a smallpox vaccine. And SARS COV-2 is the same type of virus. A coronavirus.

It's just an opportunist money grab by big pharma, and an authoritarian power grab by those in power "for your own good".

It was always going to kill a large number (but small percentage) of people. The "vaccine" didn't stop that one bit. But you can't prove this because we can't go back in time and run to separate Earths, one with the "vaccine"s and one without. So they'll pretend it helped without it being possible to know if it did or not.

longhairedhippy25• 5 years ago

Seems like you owned yourself. By your own statement "But you can't prove this because we can't go back in time and run to separate Earths". Right now in the US, we don't have an answer to either question because of people that are unable to interpret the facts.

AstraZeneca is selling their vaccine at cost. Plenty of vaccines have been required for activities in the past, I had to provide proof of vaccination for both public school and college for my children. The real power/money grab is by all the folks blasting out this misinformation. I didn't pay a dime for my vaccine, it was provided at cost by Moderna to the organization, who distributed it for free to the public.

You realize don't you that Tucker Carlson and all the Youtubers get paid based on how much they get viewed, right? That's the money grab you're looking for...

judahmeek14• 5 years ago

I can still very much catch cov-sars-2 and still very much infect and kill another fully vaccinated vulnerable human being.

You just admitted that vaccinations decreased hospitalizations, which means that vaccinations decreased the severity of infections, which means that vaccinations decreased the chances of someone who is vaccinated from dying after getting infected

abcdeee• 5 years ago

Yes, he also explicitly admitted that in his comment. So not much of a gotcha.

silent_cal2• 5 years ago

Thank you for telling the truth.

gilbetron• 5 years ago

Have you actually compared Iceland with its high vaccination rate and places without? Iceland is kicking ass. We know vaccinations reduce transmission as well as hospitalizations and deaths.

Also, PTSD? What happened to you??

streblo2• 5 years ago

We have a very high vaccination rate here in Iceland but that did not stop hospitalisations, or deaths

Let's fact check this. Here's Reuters COVID data from Iceland: https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-m...

Iceland has had a grand total of 33 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. There have been 3 deaths total since May 2021, which is remarkable on it's own, but especially since Iceland's infections during the pandemic peaked in early August 2021. So, no, vaccines didn't totally stop the deaths. But vaccines dramatically reduced them and prevented what likely would have been a spike in deaths in August.

Here's more from the Washington Post, which actually seems to remember that Iceland exists: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/iceland-covid-su...

Many of the country’s recent infections have occurred among vaccinated people, but they’ve been overwhelmingly mild.
Iceland’s rates of covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths have remained low. Of the 1,300 people currently infected, just 2 percent are in the hospital.
The country hasn’t recorded a virus death since late May. [The article was written in early August before those 3 additional deaths].

No comment on whether you're an anti-vaxxer, but you are misinformed.

jpadkins2• 5 years ago

No comment on whether you're an anti-vaxxer, but you are misinformed.

No they are not. Your fact check confirmed their statements. "We have a very high vaccination rate here in Iceland but that did not stop hospitalisations, or deaths. But definetly decreased them. Our high vaccination rate has had 0 effect on the spread of infections though."

I don't understand how can call the OP misinformed when you are stating identical statements. The only difference in your posts is the narrative (spin) surrounding the facts.

which actually seems to remember that Iceland exists:

OP is from Iceland! Slow down and think about how condescending your post reads.

xkbarkar3• 5 years ago

BiteCode_dev• 5 years ago

Youtube can do whatever it wants, but by taking this political stance, it creates a precedent that other actors will use to ask it to censor other political content.

I'm not anti-vax, I've had dozen of vaccines including covid, but I still think anti-vaxers should be able to express themself. Who knows, one day I may realize some doubts were justified.

mikaeluman• 5 years ago

The one thing you can do to ensure vaccine hesitancy and distrust is to ban that very topic.

This standard they are setting up, already started with warnings and bans for in any way contradicting the WHO, is impossible to maintain in a consistent fashion.

I can still find thousands of videos on homeopathy, ranging from debunkings to lecture-style videos. There are people who would advocate using this rather than modern health services.

In fact, there are people who would advocate the use of witchcraft to treat cancer.

Will YouTube ban them all? Or will they just ban certain topics based on a whim?

asdff9• 5 years ago

I would say that currently today that there is a much bigger threat to public health of people believing in insane vaccine conspiracies than there is of people following homeopathy. If you kill yourself snorting ginger root it doesn't really affect other people like it does when you spread covid to 200 people in your church, since rough math would say two of them will die directly from your insane actions.

If we had an epidemic of homeopathy where millions of people are doing that instead of surgery and ending up dead instead of healed, we'd probably see similar enforcement.

You can't put out every tiny little fire, there are too many as you say, but stopping the big blazes that are currently taking over can certainly be done to an extent within your own platform with moves like this.

pknerd• 5 years ago

First of all I am fully vaccinated.

It is believed that Vaccine supporters are dumb and ignorant, could be, but how can you prove that the other party is small and well educated.

Such carpet will fuel further the conspiracy theorists and they would say to their followers, "See, we were right! they do not want you to learn the truth about vaccine"

GaryTang2• 5 years ago

The only solution as I see it is to stop using YouTube.

lgleason• 5 years ago

This is why I prefer Rumble. Given how woke politically Google has become it is no longer a platform I want to support.

Whenever information is censored I am naturally suspicious around the motivations. Censorship also gives the censored opinion more credibility because if that opinion was so objectively false and crazy it would be easy to convince people about the craziness of it. But when your ideas are so weak that the only way you can convince people you are right is to censor, ban, violently crush etc. the opposing view this is what you get.

Even though I got the vax, given all of the authoritarian thinking etc. around the pro-vax stand, lockdowns etc. I often wonder if I made the right decision.

The lockdowns, vaccines etc. have mostly been a massive over-reaction. As a software engineer I have benefited from them economically, but I still don't think the devastation from the cure, which was been far worse than the sickness was the right thing and really have never supported it.

Life is risky and dangerous. Many anti-vaxers have a philosophy where they would rather live in a dangerous democracy instead of a "safe" authoritarian government. Trying to ban their ideas does nothing to win their hearts and minds.

Also, ironically, while everyone is making a big deal about hospitals being at capacity etc. when there is a surge of cases, why is it that nobody is putting as much energy into discussing the spiraling cost of health care of why it is that we have a system with so little slack for emergencies.

bobulous• 5 years ago

The scandal is that it has taken this long. YouTube is not a public platform and should be held responsible for the content they promote.

busymom03• 5 years ago

What an awesome idea. People who have consistently been wrong and censored the correct people are making more rules to censor more. More censorship and coercion will definitely convince people to take the shots. As someone who's fully vaccinated against polio, smallpox, chickenpox, measles etc., I still get called an anti-vaxxer. My buddies in the military who have more vaccinations than the general public get called anti-vaxxer because they don't want to take the COVID vaccine since they have already had covid infection. Amazing.

Currently, the government of Canada has misinformation on their own YouTube page and government site:

1. The Canadian government uploaded "How do I know COVID-19 vaccines are safe without long-term data?" on March 25, 2021, 4 months after vaccine was authorized under the interim order and when merely 4.45% of Canada was fully vaccinated. The government's video completely sidesteps the entirely valid question about lack of long-term safety data and stated: "Clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines have been taking place since the spring of 2020 and millions of people around the world have already been vaccinated. The vast majority of side effects from vaccines are minor and occur soon after vaccination." The video obviously doesn't answer the actual question about lack of long-term safety data because it's impossible to know this in the very short period that the vaccines have been in the market. Without knowing this data, it is also impossible to give informed consent to the treatment.

One-Third of the drugs approved by the FDA and (by inference) Health Canada from 2001 through 2010 had major safety issues years after the medications were made widely available to patients. 71 of the 222 drugs approved were withdrawn, required a "black box" warning on side effects or warranted a safety announcement about new risks. The median follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took a median of 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light and issues were more common among psychiatric drugs, biologic drugs, drugs that were granted "accelerated approval" and drugs that were approved near the regulatory deadline for approval. Drugs ushered through an accelerated approval process were among those that had higher rates of safety interventions.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/26253...

So when the median follow-up period was 11.7 years and it took a median of 4.2 years after the drugs were approved for these safety concerns to come to light and this was more common for those given "accelerated approval", is it not a valid for people to be concerned about long-term safety tests? With such a horrible track record for drug approvals and delayed withdrawals and discoveries of side effects, coercing young, fit and healthy people with negligible risks to inject an irreversible, involuntary, non-long term safety tested, short-lasting, unaccountable and rushed vaccine without any guarantees of how many and how often boosters will be required is wildly unreasonable.

https://youtu.be/f4lJHthI0tE

2. The government also uploaded a video titled "Do I need to get the vaccine if I've already had and recovered from COVID-19?" on September 3, 2021. The video shows Dr. Marc-André Langlois, Executive Director of the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net) and Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, state that you should still receive both COVID-19 vaccine doses even if you’ve previously had a COVID-19 infection. The video completely fails to explain the rationale behind inoculating those with prior infection induced natural immunity when over 15 studies have now demonstrated that individuals with natural immunity from prior infection have longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization compared to the vaccine-induced immunity. We have had over 18 months and millions of cases to work with world wide to study natural immunity and yet, Dr. Langlois, claims that it is still unclear how long natural immunity protection from an infection lasts and unclear of the reinfection from variants. Health officials had a 1 year head start to study natural immunity from infection before the vaccine was even rolled out, and yet they are falsely claiming that they know more about the vaccine than natural immunity. This, clearly shows that the government's claims are not based on any science or logic.

https://youtu.be/wGbZc7q9Dpk

3. The government also uploaded a video titled "How long does it take for the COVID-19 vaccine to work after I receive it?" on September 3, 2021. The video again shows Dr. Marc-André Langlois, state that the second dose of the vaccine "boosts" the immune response and is essential "for longer lasting protection and better protection against the variants." This is also misleading because we know now that the fully vaccinated effectiveness declines to anywhere between just 16% to 66% in 3-6 months.

https://youtu.be/1jUh0VvG-b4

4. Even Health Canada's September 16, 2021 approval for the Pfizer vaccine misleadingly claims it prevents COVID even though they know that it is now uncontested that the vaccine does not "prevent" COVID in any meaningful way. It's just a potential severe symptom mitigator, not a prevention:

"COMIRNATY is indicated for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019"

https://covid-vaccine.canada.ca/info/regulatory-decision-sum...

5. Health Canada approved Pfizer on September 16, 2021 using 6 month old outdated data (data cut-off dated March 13, 2021) claiming the vaccine showed a vaccine efficacy of 91.3%. Why use 6 month old data? They also said it's to "prevent coronavirus disease 2019". We know it does not "prevent" COVID. We know it's a potential severe symptom mitigator, not a prevention.

https://covid-vaccine.canada.ca/info/regulatory-decision-sum...

6. Quebec’s July 25, 2021 onwards "Being vaccinated, it’s a win Contest" lottery makes misleading and false claims such as "reap the benefits of optimal long-term protection, including protection from the variants of the virus." It is uncontested that the vaccine efficacy declines in 3-6 months and this doesn’t provide "optimal long-term protection". So Quebec is clearly offering such monetary benefits under false promises.

https://cdn-contenu.quebec.ca/cdn-contenu/sante/documents/Pr...

Plus informed consent requires the consent to be provided without coercion and without undue inducement and unfair incentives. Yet governments are running multi-million dollar lotteries to violate informed consent.

7. Ontario government also makes false promises when mandating vaccines stating: "You can protect yourself, your loved ones and your community by getting the COVID-19 vaccine." This is similar to the Federal government's misleading claims saying "You’ll have very good protection against infection, including against most current variants of concern."

The vaccine neither prevents you from catching COVID, not spreading it and the effectiveness declines in 3-6 months. Yet governments continue to mislead people.

8. Similarly, in the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) changed the definition of a "vaccine" after August 26, 2021:

CDC defines Immunity as "Protection from an infectious disease. If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected."

On August 26, 2021, CDC defined a vaccine as: "A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease."

https://web.archive.org/web/20210826113846/https://www.cdc.g...

However, by September 2, 2021, CDC changed the definition of a vaccine to: "A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210902194040/https://www.cdc.g...

These 2 have very different meanings. Till August 26, vaccines were supposed to "produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease" whereas now they claim it only "stimulates the body’s immune response against diseases" - i.e. it doesn’t produce immunity, nor protects the person from the disease.

Based on these new changes, any therapy that boosts the immune system would meet the new pseudo-definitions of "vaccine" and "protect". Even a smoothie with healthy fruits and vegetables such as spinach, yoghurt and garlic would qualify as vaccines as they "stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases."

9. Even though Pfizer and Federal government states that the Pfizer vaccine is effectiveness starts "1 week after the second dose", yet their data continues to use 2 weeks for detailing the breakthrough cases.

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-health...

The number 1 principle of doctor-patient relationship is informed consent. All this misleading messaging by the governments makes people give "misinformed" consent. Imagine you were told a medical procedure is 95% effective at preventing you from catching HIV without any disclosures that this effectiveness declines rapidly. 3 months later, you realize that you still caught HIV, it was only around 16-66% effective and few months from now, you have an even higher chance of catching and spreading COVID. Would you be okay with this?

I have countless such examples. Those pushing for censoring misinformation are the biggest purveyor of misinformation.

cmckn• 5 years ago

I have wondered lately whether the anti-vax movement gains much of its power from the fact that most Americans don’t have a primary care physician anymore. I think almost any skeptic is convinced once they speak with a doctor they trust, who has read their chart. But most folks just visit doc-in-a-box places for their medical needs, especially in the last 10 years. I think this is bad for a lot of longer-term (public) health outcomes, one example being vaccination rates.

EastOfTruth2• 5 years ago

Monopolies like Youtube should be prevented from censoring content.

yawaworht19782• 5 years ago

With the traffic and gravity that YouTube etc have, they're almost as powerful news broadcasting tools as the classic news media.

True, they're a private company and liable for some things, but they all try to squeeze out every last cent before a government intervention.

Banning content like crypto, anti vax, gambling etc is understandable, but all the people without a voice will think they are silenced because they know the truth.

If we as society accept that, we should not claim to be any better than china, Russia, Cuba, it's just a slightly different approach, the end result is the same, undesired content is deplatformed.

By the way, I am a rationalist and never believe conspiracy theories, but I do get a good laugh out of them at times and how the people use counter arguments helps me to think in more perspectives.

q1w2• 5 years ago

The issue is that a few corporations control a majority of global human communications, and are accountable to no one for their decisions of what to censor/promote.

This is dangerous to democracy. If we do not subject them to the will of the people, they will eventually use this massive influence to make themselves immune to public scrutiny, and will one day be indistinguishable from an unelected branch of government.

dredmorbius9• 5 years ago

Not regulating their own platforms is just as dangerous, as is being repeatedly demonstrated.

YossarianFrPrez9• 5 years ago

So the second-order effects of YouTube banning content, as you point out, are interesting and hard to predict. The question is should fear of second order effects prevent YouTube from taking action towards a desired first order effect?

For some context, prior to Youtube changing the algorithm, flat earth videos basically created the modern flat earth movement [1]. It's likely that this effect can go the other way, too.

I like to think that people are less drawn to conspiracy theories etc. when they are socially well-connected. The trouble about the pandemic is that there is a negative feedback loop: we have these socially isolating restrictions because there is a deadly virus, and one reason the virus remains unchecked is, in part because a subset of socially isolated people are drawn to misinformation.

[1] See the documentary In Search of A Flat Earth for more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

natchy• 5 years ago

rationalist and never believe conspiracy theories

That’s irrational to NEVER believe them. How do you know what is or isn’t a conspiracy theory? Whether it was fact checked by our overlords?

yawaworht19782• 5 years ago

Apologies, I should have been clearer, if something is ambiguous and a government acts dodgy, I don't dismiss it. Buy things like no planes on 911, flat earth, chakras , reptile overlords, magic and so forth, I am default sceptical.

polishdude20• 5 years ago

It's interesting that a TV manyfacturer or a HDMI cable manufacturer is not expected to be liable for the content that streams through their products. But when it comes to YouTube, they aren't treated as just a vessel but as an actual source of content. I think the distinction is just the capability of each entity.

dredmorbius9• 5 years ago

When device manufacturers start preferentially favouring, or discriminating against, specific content, channels, or voices, I think you'll find they're similarly regulated. As televisions get "smarter", they are no longer passive carriers but active agents.

An HDMI cable is literally a dumb pipe, and the end-user controls both ends, fully.

(Whether or not they control what reaches the feed-end of that pipe is of course a different question.)

destitude3• 5 years ago

It would be useful for people to look up what the definition of a cult is and try and determine which side of the Covid vaccine debate that applies to.

submeta• 5 years ago

Vaccination was developed over 200 years ago, and it saved millions of lives ever since. Only the most crazy people would dispute its effectiveness or insinuate that some sort of hidden powers wanted to poison humanity.

Now when did this group of crazy people become so large that they start confusing people who don‘t have the intellectual capacity to get informed by reading serious sources.

My gut feeling tells me it is not about vaccination per se. But that‘s another topic.

issa2• 5 years ago

I am American, but I believe the American view of "we must allow everything so that important things aren't censored" is wrong. I believe it is possible to avoid the slippery slope and just ban certain things. For example, Nazi images are banned in Germany. In a sense, banning anti-vaccine propaganda is an even more important issue.

sneak9• 5 years ago

Video games with "too much" blood or gore are also banned in Germany, limiting artistic expression.

The "censorship in Germany is fine because it's just nazi stuff" argument doesn't hold water. They are currently progressing down the slippery slope.

Already you're saying it should be nazi stuff + vaccine propaganda. Next year it will be a third thing that is an important pet issue for you or an interest group.

Civilized adults don't tell other adults what they are allowed to read.

issa2• 5 years ago

I don't buy this all-or-nothing argument. People in the US have tried to ban books, heavy metal music, video games etc. And the idea that we've ONLY survived those attempts because we allow people to fly/wear swastikas is ridiculous on its face.

busymom03• 5 years ago

The moves come as YouTube and other tech giants like Facebook Inc. (FB.O) and Twitter Inc. (TWTR.N) have been criticized for not doing enough to stop the spread of false health information on their sites.

Why not also state the opposite that they have been criticized for doing too much censorship of even valid and factual information? This clearly shows that the media lives in their own bubble.

busymom03• 5 years ago

The whole private sector censorship reminds me of a very good piece by Matt Taibbi:

"People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship."

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea

dan_m2k• 5 years ago

Fucking good.

swasheck• 5 years ago

on the one hand, i think that calling this "censorship" is wrong because, in my understanding, "censorship" is an activity of the government in an attempt to remove the (presumably dissenting) voice of the populace. this is simply a company refining its product in an attempt to make it more attractive to current, or potential, consumers.

on the other hand, masks and vaccines have been so conflated with political ideology that it's easy to see why people immediately make the leap to "censorship" and it does highlight the critical reality that internet corporations either do, or believe they do, own your content and can remove it in order to suit their ends.

oauea• 5 years ago

Never thought I'd see so much anti-vaccine rhetoric on hacker news. Very disappointing.

@dang, maybe it's time to follow YouTube their example before this forum encourages more deaths?

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

Should read "Activist tech company bans doctors and scientists."

disconjointed4• 5 years ago

one major concern i have is when things like religion get blocked as misinformation, or the whole fake it til you make it crowd gets blocked. part of growing is seeing yourself differently than how you previously saw yourself, what is stopping youtube in 10 years from becoming stricter because of pressure from some new movement? imagine presenting your product in the most professional way possible and then getting flagged by you aunt who you never got along with saying the content is disinformation and you are just some try hard who can't code? or what about your dating profile? you decide to put your best foot forward by dressing nice and then you get flagged as misinformation? or here's one, what if the mainstream narrative is wrong? about something major? that most people consider the truth but its harming a certain minority group. if the internet existed during slavery times, and someone were to post a video saying black men and women are equal to white men and women and deserve to be treated equally, now you and i both know this is absurd but, that's because there was a lot of work done that changed the narrative. that work done was started by small groups and grew into a movement, imagine that movement today never getting off the ground because of it's seed content being plucked out of circulation due to it being "misinformation". sometimes social and science references are completely off, and for someone to question that mainstream narrative can appear to be misinformation for those believing a lie. don't tell me it doesn't happen; there are plenty of people who are gullible enough to hold a faulty mainstream narrative in place. look at all the crazy videos from last year and tell me if you think most people are intelligent enough to come to the right conclusions. no hate, it's just a reality.

User23• 5 years ago

Why does Africa have the lowest vaccination rate and the lowest death rate?[1]

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33075535/

disconjointed4• 5 years ago

also one thing to add, what if this is a gateway to censorship in order to hide information about certain elites legally? i am not advocating pizzagate conspiracy but this could be a way of silencing journalists doing their job and getting the news out oon one of the most powerful media distribution sites, people can build another site but when it comes to social change you want high impact.

boringg2• 5 years ago

Cut off their revenue/ability to become a micro-celebrity /reward mechanism for incendiary garbage and these anti-vaccine activists will fade to obscurity. Too bad they didn't do this earlier so they could infect the general population with their deranged ideas.

Trias11• 5 years ago

I guess someone is part of gigantic political kickback collusion scheme with big pharma.

anonymouswacker• 5 years ago

One would think YouTube could hear the Rumble-ing happening right now.

gonational2• 5 years ago

It's interesting to see people labeled as "anti-vaxxers" or "vaccine hesitant" or "unvaccinated".

If I was not looking to purchase a medication because I had no ailment, and then a medical professional came up and showed me the following chart and told me "Vaccines have cured most of the calamitous diseases of yesteryear, and here is a new one that you should take.", I would not then decide to get a vaccine. Would you? Look at the chart.

https://learntherisk.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/diseases...

No need to argue with me; why bother. I didn't create the data used to make the chart. When that feeling starts to come back look at the chart once again. The data doesn't change. Your feelings might change, but facts will stay the same each time you load the chart. Try it out.

Labeling people, because they haven't made a choice to do something that you think they should do, is a strange phenomenon.

ada1981• 5 years ago

How about banning any videos that present literal Bible content, for example.

chefkoch8• 5 years ago

i don't think believing in the bible is killing hundreds a day in the US.

superzadeh• 5 years ago

Take a look outside the US, you’d be surprised. The world is not centered around the US.

disconjointed4• 5 years ago

The drug war was a huge misinformation campaign. can we ban anything that says marijuana has no medical benefit since the science is there like actual peer-reviewed articles saying that most of the negative information spread about cannabis is false

cbtacy• 5 years ago

Reading the comments here is freaking terrifying to me. This is supposedly an educated and scientifically oriented subset of the human race and the levels of ignorance, dishonesty, and flat out lying going on here make me very, very sad. SMH.

xanaxagoras2• 5 years ago

YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.
ineffective or dangerous

Either you don't care if I get it, or they're ineffective.

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

Recently I spoke with two senior scientists with decades of experience who specialise in pharmacology, biology, and vaccines, who both work at high-level labs that inspect all types of drugs.

They both were extremely sceptical of the vaccine, with one being openly antagonistic towards it.

YouTube's new rules allow them to post content, but they both say they've been warned by their jobs about speaking out - that they will lose their careers if they say anything against the vaccines.

Where is the room for their opinion? Because they are the top of the tree scientifically. What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!

To clarify - the first scientist told me that her lab is not allowed to look at or test the vaccine, even though they test every other drug that comes into the country. She has only found a report from one other non-Pfizer lab that has looked at it under a microscope. To me, that is really scary.

distrill2• 5 years ago

trust me bro

babypuncher3• 5 years ago

If there was a problem with the vaccine we probably would have noticed something by the time a billion people got injected with it.

These skeptics need to put up some serious evidence if they want to be taken seriously.

AlexandrB6• 5 years ago

I agree. This kind of skepticism-on-theoretical-grounds might have been interesting/valuable a year ago. At this point additional evidence for the vaccine's safety mounts every day as more people receive it. Evidence for the vaccine's efficacy is also mounting[1]. Claims to the contrary would need some extraordinary evidence to back them up.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-hospitalizations-non...

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

But we have noticed problems with it.

https://openvaers.com/covid-data

belorn6• 5 years ago

One major issue was that in the beginning of this year we started with one dose, then went to a second dose a few months later, and then a third dose is starting to be recommended now a few months after that.

There are some serious evidence to back this up. A study done around early summer found that only about 50% of those that have taken two doses had any detectable traces of a defense, which was one of the reason that a third dose had to be added. By winter we don't know how effective the 2 dose or 3 dose will be.

To me that is where the focus of skepticism should be right now.

max46• 5 years ago

If there was a problem with the vaccine we probably would have noticed something by the time a billion people got injected with it.

Not when everyone who tries to talk about their bad experiences gets treated like qanon and the morons who thought 5G caused covid-19.

Even quoting CDC or letters from a company who makes the vaccines is considered dangerous misinformation and can get you banned if what you are showing doesn't paint the vaccine in a good light.

sekai• 5 years ago

experimental drug

When do drugs stop being experimental?

distrill2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, people will be saying "we don't know what happens 10 years after getting vaccinated" for 10 years

yellow_lead2• 5 years ago

By "the vaccine" are you referring to an mRNA vaccine? Are they skeptical of the J&J vaccine?

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

Pfizer. She said she doesn't know what's really in it, or how it performs transfers, what lipids it uses, etc.

clajiness• 5 years ago

What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!

What exactly is “experimental” about a vaccine that has not only been through very robust phase III clinical trials, but has also had literally billions of doses deployed?

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

The first scientist told me that practically no non-Pfizer labs have looked at it. That is not robust. Usually this stuff gets reviewed by everyone, but in this case, technical info is not available to other scientists who wish to learn more about the vaccine - according to her.

YossarianFrPrez9• 5 years ago

The room for their opinion is in peer reviewed medical journals. Short of conducting their own study, they could, for example, write a dissenting letter to the editor, or submit what's known as a "brief report." Posting to Youtube for clicks and views is to not take seriously their own knowledge. Covid-19 is a very serious issue; on the chance that your two senior scientists have information that the world needs, the appropriate venue is in the medium scientists and doctors use to communicate with each other.

Also, what does it mean to be "skeptical" of "the" vaccine? There are several vaccines. Were they skeptical of mRNA? Viral vector vaccines? All of them? Do they think that the covid-19 vaccines secretly don't work?

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

They both said they feel immense pressure not to speak out against the vaccine or publish anything against it. So the regular channels of dissent have been removed.

SkipperCat• 5 years ago

I hope they have published their critique of the mRNA technology in the last decade because the technology has been around for a long time. It was just adapted for COVID-19 in the last year.

My guess is they have not said a peep about mRNA until this became political.

AHappyCamper7• 5 years ago

They said they feel immense pressure not to say anything negative, and that they feel they have been silenced. They're not even allowed to ask basic questions about the vaccine as part of their work, even tho that's what they do for a living.

amuchmore• 5 years ago

It seems curious, then, that the entire source of the vaccine is publicly available.

user-the-name3• 5 years ago

This site is disgusting.

everyone• 5 years ago

Americans are arguing about the vaccine even here on HN. Seems like Russian social media manipulators really did a number on ye.

rackjack• 5 years ago

I support the vaccine, but this feels like a dangerous play.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

YouTube is banning anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug activists and blocking all anti-forced Sars COVID2 mRNA drug content

FTFWaPo

I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm happy to have my measles, mumps, rubella, and other vaccines. I'm looking forward to getting the new HPV vaccine (gardasil) now that they've started recommending it for adults and you can actually get your doctor to give it to you (a couple years ago they would refuse if you asked and said you'd pay for 100% of it).

Resisting this latest moneygrab by big pharma and power grab by authoritarians is not "anti-vaccine".

That's incredibly disingenuous. Because this drug is fundamentally different from what a vaccine is.

If the authoritarians and their followers pushing this can't even admit that it so radically different from a vaccine as to be outright lying to call it one, how can we even talk about it?

oblio11• 5 years ago

That's incredibly disingenuous. Because this drug is fundamentally different from what a vaccine is.

What is a vaccine in your eyes? Because the definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaccine) is:

a preparation that is administered (as by injection) to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease

It's something that's injected to stimulate the body's immune response.

It doesn't to be through using a weakened version of the virus as we've been doing so far. That's just the mechanism we had.

A diesel powered train is still a train, even if the original trains were steam powered.

NaturalPhallacy11• 5 years ago

What is a vaccine in your eyes?>

The same as it's always been:

a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease

https://web.archive.org/web/20190123105554/https://www.merri...

Same page. But from before they redefined it to include the new drug from big pharma.

8note3• 5 years ago

The fundamentals are the same. It's something with the relevant spike protein that your immune system can identify, but without actually being the virus that causes the disease

KorematsuFredt• 5 years ago

I wish Google had not done this sort of thing.

I am not an anti-vaxxer but I think we should not silence those who question vaccines, their studies and their effectiveness. By banning vaccine criticism in public domain we essentially ensure that only FDA is responsible for calling a vaccine fake, once they approve we all have to fall in line and not be skeptical about them. This gives too much power to FDA (hence a higher possibility of corruption) and a free pass to pharma companies who might push more and more ineffective vaccines with the help of their friends in FDA and CDC.

Google is pretty good at content recommendation and I am sure if they want they can solve this problem much better by identifying diversity in the vaccine criticism and accordingly give it exposure.

8note3• 5 years ago

I think the problem highlighted is that they're actually bad at recommendations beyond popularity.

whiddershins3• 5 years ago

They are doing it wrong. They should ban all discussions about vaccines.

Then it wouldn’t be censorship. It’s just asking that those discussions happen elsewhere.

RNCTX• 5 years ago

...after they've been autoplaying those videos to millions of users' TVs after they fell asleep, for the past 6-9 months?

Guess we really are getting to the end of COVID attention in the news if the Google ad algo says there's no more money in it.

ellyagg• 5 years ago

I wish I could find the post now, but a few months ago on /r/science, research showed that people who didn't believe in global warming were more likely to change their minds when presented with balanced evidence for and against.

YouTube has no idea how damaging this is to the cause.

Folks who think that policy is a war do not understand people very well or are more interested in grandstanding and point scoring than changing minds. Viewing those who disagree with you as villains or children makes life harder for everyone.

jrootabega• 5 years ago

/r/science has nothing to do with science and everything to do with whatever reddit's front page userbase needs to believe/ has been convinced to believe with ad dollars that month. It's a religion. Look at its usual submitters to see that it's a priesthood with its cult, not an open community. I say this as a non-vaccine-opponent (how ridiculous of a term is that?) Name-dropping it means nothing.

bena10• 5 years ago

I found these by searching for "climate change" on /r/science.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/jseycg/conservativ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/hnlstq/republicans...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cm0t6c/republicans...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/f9wl7g/individuals...

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/km0fzc/a_series_of...

The last looks to be the closest to what you are talking about. But even then, it's not talking about "balanced evidence" in the way you seem to present. Because some people seem to think that to balance the evidence, it's one piece from here, one piece from there, giving them equal consideration.

But it's not, it's considering the evidence without consideration to the other side. We don't give the idea that the moon is made of green cheese the same weight as the idea that it's a big rock. Because the green cheese idea is just stupid. It does not deserve consideration.

And you also have the caveat that it's self-reporting and/or questionnaire driven. I can take someone who doesn't believe in global warming, show them how greenhouse gases cause warming, get them to verbally agree that that's what happening, get them to even agree that the same could apply to the whole world, but then they'll still not believe in global warming. Because they'll have a reason as to why the example doesn't apply. But if I never ask the final question, never ask if I actually changed their mind, I can present the results as if I've converted them.

cblconfederate4• 5 years ago

i m more concerned about other services copying youtube and going very hard on any kind of covid evidence-seeking, e.g. the r/covid19 subreddit where scientific evidence is usually discussed

eric_b4• 5 years ago

I myself am vaccinated, but I hold no ill will towards those who do not get it; whatever their reason. And yet, the media is conditioning all of us to hate those people. To shame them. To ignore their reason and free-will.

The same people who are rabidly pro-vaccine are generally rabidly pro-choice when it comes to abortion. How does that reconcile? How come the government can sometimes tell you what to do with your body but not others?

And the same people who are in favor of the vaccine mandates are almost universally supporters of BLM and social justice. And yet... the majority of the vaccine hesitant are non-white. That doesn't square either.

The whole thing is absolutely fucking outrageous. I hate what the media has done to the United States. And I hate all the moral self-righteousness I see on display here and everywhere else.

fwsgonzo• 5 years ago

The whole thing is easily explainable: People who walk around spreading COV19 is killing other people. Everyone has a story like that, and it's unfortunate that we have to explain it again and again.

You have free will until you start killing other people over something that you can get for free, that lessens the long-lasting effects of a virus.

eric_b4• 5 years ago

This is such a horseshit argument. If you're at risk, by all means get the vaccine. You're protected. Job done.

"But what about the children?!?!" is the next common refrain. What about them? Look at the numbers. COVID is not a relevant concern for pediatric public health policy.

https://data.cdc.gov/widgets/9bhg-hcku?mobile_redirect=true

COVID deaths account for less than 1% of deaths in children under 15. I think the other 99% of things killing our kids is a bigger concern, don't you?

dQw4w9WgXcQ• 5 years ago

You have free will until you start killing other people over something

You do a lot of things every day that "have a chance of killing people". You get in a car and send thousands of pounds of metal hurdling down the road, you use your cell phone and drive distractedly in that metal block. Or maybe you visit Home Depot and buy a pack of nails and a few of those drop out in a parking lot and a mother in her van with children run over those nails and later have a blowout. You buy an iPhone made in China or a T-shirt made in Vietnam that employs some child laborer who is exposed to harsh chemicals and they die earlier because you personally wanted some product for your enjoyment... and the list is almost infinite.

At what point do we acknowledge our minimal control over the butterfly effect of causality and cease the woke moralizing?

gkop3• 5 years ago

I suggest just asking such a person about their principles. You’ll probably get a more helpful response if you refrain from characterizing their opinions as “rabid”. If you bring curiosity, you will disarm them, and perhaps learn something or effect a change in their thinking.

Big govt/regulation vs. small govt/freedom is just one axis. People’s viewpoints on specific issues are based on more than just this axis.

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

Those people should understand they have their free speech and so does youtube as a private company. They still have other avenues. Vimeo, odysee, gab, gittr, breitbart. It's just the rest of us don't want to see their drivel.

felistoria2• 5 years ago

The government is also circumventing the 1st amendment by pressuring Private Companies to ban speech for them.

summerlight4• 5 years ago

Not sure if everyone has read the actual policy (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11161123) but for those who hasn't:

    Don’t post content on YouTube if it includes harmful misinformation about currently approved and administered vaccines on any of the following:
    * Vaccine safety: content alleging that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities
    * Efficacy of vaccines: content claiming that vaccines do not reduce transmission or contraction of disease 
    * Ingredients in vaccines: content misrepresenting the substances contained in vaccines

Also, the policy states some exceptional cases such as countervailing views with a support from medical experts, firsthand experiences, etc.

grillvogel5• 5 years ago

this is legitimately dystopian. only can mention side effects that have been "recognized by health authorities" ? how would whistleblowing even be possible in this environment?

thesagan• 5 years ago

Misinformation should be put out in sunlight or else the public may lose the ability to think critically in some respects. Then they’ll be dependent on these companies to steer dialogue and be truth-tellers.

jolux4• 5 years ago

Also, the policy states some exceptional cases such as countervailing views with a support from medical experts, firsthand experiences, etc.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

The thing is, youtube is crappy place for "whistle blowing" because video is a terrible medium for people evaluating information critically - any references a video might have will slip by a person, the general demeanor of a presenter can matter more than their content or credentials, etc.

It's not unreasonable for youtube to refuse non-mainstream health theories even if those theories deserve an airing somewhere.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

Also useful the (consistent) Axios summary:

https://www.axios.com/youtube-anti-vax-misinformation-vaccin...

chunkyfunky• 5 years ago

Normally I'd be opposed to censorship in general, but in this case I'm kind of glad, but only because shit like this is actually happening even now: https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2021/0927/1249210-covid-pati...

AFAIC, anything they can do to suppress the raving lunacy of people like the ones who convinced that poor man to leave hospital, may he rest in peace, is a good thing in my book.

justwanttolearn2• 5 years ago

I feel like the efficacy is debatable. It reduces severe symptoms but more and more vaccinated are contracting it daily even in places of 95+% vaccinated so there's a good dialogue to be had here

ipqk• 5 years ago

Uh yeah, when more people are vaccinated, a greater percentage that get it will be vaccinated.

summerlight4• 5 years ago

It reduces severe symptoms but more and more vaccinated are contracting it daily even in places of 95+% vaccinated

That's what the world living with COVID looks like. Given the Delta's estimated reproduction number (5~8), there's no herd immunity achievable in a near future. Then make it less severe and transmissible so we can handle it without strict lockdown and overloading public health infrastructure. At least until we get a universal vaccine against COVID.

mdp202113• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, news just in: Slovenia apparently suspended today the use of JnJ, after the death of a 20yo in the past hours, «...until all details related to this case are clarified» (Health Minister Janez Poklukar)¹.

And I have difficulties in matching this piece of news with the reported words of Matt Halprin: «YouTube will take down videos that claim such vaccines are dangerous».

And also wonder if this (possible) case fits within the «rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities» (the policy).

¹https://www.euronews.com/2021/09/29/slovenia-temporarily-sus...

mdp202113• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, it seems that Russia has complained in the past 24 hours against some censorship on YT, based on "the fight against covid related misinformation", and raised a diplomatic issue accusing Germany to have supported the censorship.

Some may find curious or even amusing this odd paragraph on Le Monde:

A la fin de janvier, le président Poutine avait jugé que les entreprises majeures du secteur de l’Internet étaient « en concurrence » avec les Etats. Il dénonçait leurs « tentatives de contrôler brutalement la société ».

The main online enterprises being in competition with the states - in the attempt to brutally control society?! The formulation could probably have been less "suggestive".

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2021/09/29/moscou-mena...

bwship6• 5 years ago

The funny part of this whole thing. Is that the same people that all they do is complain about privacy concerns by Apple and Alexa etc. here on HN are the same people that consistently downvote anything I say that is anti-vaccine. I thought this community knew no blind spots. Even if I am dead wrong on my stance, the concept that it gets downvoted just because I have a differing opinion is pathetic.

touchpadder• 5 years ago

Big Pharma and Marxist Google working hand in hand.

Remember Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal? The lawyer who exposed it, who also fought Deutsche Bank in the US now exposes Covid as fraud and mass murder. https://odysee.com/@Corona-Investigative-Committee:5/Reiner-...

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

Marxist google? You have to be kidding right?

monksy7• 5 years ago

For those who were keeping track:

The virus is just like the flu it's not a problem

. The ICUs aren't that overloaded, theres no reason to worry

.. -> We shouldn't have a lock down that is this strict allow people to make decisions on their own

... -> Restaurants shouldn't be required to be closed for indoor dining

.... -> Let people chose to wear the mask or not (Considering the US/CDC's terrible stance on masks that wasn't safe on a society level [The US gov ignored and discouraged stronger masks such as KN95, KF94, FFP2 for civilian usage])

.... -> The vaccine is too new, need more info

..... -> It's not fda approved, can't take it

...... -> My freedoms/won't get it/don't have more info

It's not just citiziens that are spouting nonsense about this. It's government officials spouting this. I talked with an liqour board agent about why fining a lady operating a bar with live music during the peak of the pandemic is the correct thing to do. (Executive order banned indoor dining and alcohol consumption in the state) He literally try to discredit me at every step of the way. This was an executive order + strict liqour board rules put down.

dude4you7• 5 years ago

Ok, take the vacc. (I would have taken it if had been offered it before I got corona.)

Ok. Then what? What will happen? Corona goes away? Seriously? Corona is here to stay my friend.

alexpw5• 5 years ago

You should still get vaccinated. Post-infection immunity is very heterogeneous, with respect to what level of protection you'll have, and how long it will last. You might have great protection for a bit, or you might get reinfected just like the first time, like many have.

The combined protection of natural with vaccination will be better than just one or the other. I hope you stay safe.

monksy7• 5 years ago

Take the vaccine (Moderna if you can pick), significantly reduce the health risk of covid on you. Also, helps to dampen the overall rate in the county and reduces the risk new mutations that may create more breakthroughs.

If you're complaining about the withdraw of mitigations, that's because people and states have refused to participate in the mitigations as a whole.

If they were compliant, we'd be in a situation like Australia or Taiwan. Masks optional, nearly normal (they have restrictive borders), open concerts, and lockdowns only when a couple of cases pop up.

judahmeek14• 5 years ago

So is measles, polio, & chickenpox, but those vaccines have still made a huge difference in general quality of life.

tunesmith11• 5 years ago

You can walk yourself through the reasons why with simple math, really.

Every disease has an estimated R0. The number of people an infected person will infect. You probably have heard of this.

Delta, last I checked, has an estimated R0 of between 5 and 9.5.

Vaccination levels reduce that. And it's a simple equation. All you need to know is the vaccination rate for your population, and an estimated efficacy rate of the vaccine.

And from that, you can figure the new adjusted Rt:

rt = r0 * (1 - (vacRate * eff))

And that's it. And no matter what efficacy rate you pick (infection efficacy estimates for mRNA against Delta vary widely), the resultant rt will be less than the initial r0.

And if it's less, then that effectively means that the disease is less contagious for that population, compared to how contagious it was pre-vaccination.

And less contagious is better than more contagious.

So now I am legitimately curious. What part of the above reasoning do you actually disagree with?

(Incidentally, vaccination also improves your chances of avoiding future infection, even if you've already been infected.)

dlp2114• 5 years ago

Let's be clear, mitigations were being removed when vaccination rates were increasing and hospital rates were decreasing. It's only because a significant enough portion of the country has decided that not getting vaccinated is more important to them and have caused our medical system to be put back under strain have the mitigations been put back in place.

pfooti• 5 years ago

FWIW, an anti-vax cousin of mine has had covid three different times. Each time he recovered, but each time he kept spreading it. So don't count having had covid once as a blanket "I don't need the vax" card.

munk-a7• 5 years ago

That the government is still visibly divided over whether vaccination is a good idea is what really troubles me here and it's pretty much purely America at this point. Canadian liberals don't like the Liberals - Liberals don't like the Conservatives and neither Liberals nor Conservatives like liberals. That all said every represented party in Canada (and almost every individual MP) is either pro-vax or losing a lot of clout right now. In the US the GOP is technically for vaccinations and sane mandates - but if you look at House Reps and Governors you'll see a lot of anti-mask mandate laws and other protests.

The government is of the people - but it should be the best of us not the biggest conspiracy theorists among us (having one or two is fine - but this problem is a lot bigger than just Marjorie Taylor Greene)

jolux4• 5 years ago

In the US the GOP is technically for vaccinations and sane mandates

Some GOP members support these things. Many do not, as you mention the governors and reps.

dude1872• 5 years ago

That the government is still visibly divided over whether vaccination is a good idea

Where is that visible?

dang4• 5 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699410.

_prototype_• 5 years ago

All this for a virus with a 99% survival rate [1]. Nevermind the fact that media and government forces completely ignore natural immunity which has been shown to provide 27x more resistance to covid infection by a recent study [2].

You can't really be surprised at the general distrust and hesitancy. You can get a "Vaccine Passport" but you can't get a "Immunity Passport"?

Ridiculous

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-970830023526 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

balozi• 5 years ago

YouTube's business model is based on the free speech rights that have been secured by flesh-and-blood citizens for 245 years. The same benefits they don't see fit to extend to those citizens. They are like a beverage bottling company that draws clean water upstream before dumping their toxic waste back into the same river downstream.

hackerNoose• 5 years ago

People don't get vaccinated because of the evidence but because they chose to believe in some authority. Heavy handed censors (or fact checkers in newspeak) and other coercive tactics lead people to distrust these authorities even more.

holdupnow2• 5 years ago

What if the government figured out it could just use private companies to do what it can't?

travisparker• 5 years ago

Despite being a medical doctor, this disappoints me a great deal.

This sort of authoritarian non-discussion is exactly what's caused vaccine resistance to become an "activist movement" in the first place.

Some tinfoil-hat part of me wonders if that's actually the plan...

b7bfcdeaab335• 5 years ago

Heard this anecdotally from the following link, can't confirm it: Youtube had taken down a video from the creator of mRNA, Dr. Robert Malone.

http://www.padrak.com/coronavirus/Dr.%20Sean%20Brooks%20at%2...

jonnat• 5 years ago

This piece from The Atlantic has another view and more info on Malone's claims. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/robert-m...

stjohnswarts11• 5 years ago

The fact that he was talking to Bannon and saying that the vaccines don't work and aren't safe even though 2.5 billion people have been given them is ludicrous. Even doctors can grow stupid over time.

civilized10• 5 years ago

I saw someone post an antivax video in the comments about the toxicity of the spike protein the mRNA vaccine causes the body to manufacture.

If you have such concerns, read this: https://health-desk.org/articles/what-do-we-know-about-the-t...

The vaccine is injected into muscle and causes a localized immune reaction. The protein doesn't really escape the muscle. So it might damage some muscle cells and capillaries, but those are stressed all the time anyway and will regenerate.

lugged2• 5 years ago

That was the expectation but we later found they travel around the body and particularly build up in bone marrow and your ovaries if you have them.

They also are technically "toxic" but you need to take that word with a grain of salt. The damage is still far less than what the virus will cause if you catch it without the vaccine.

0x0000000012• 5 years ago

Citations please

ip264• 5 years ago

It seems strange to be talking about whether the spike protein is harmful. Even IF it was, isn’t it better to experience a small amount via the vaccine instead of a large amount via the virus?

artificialLimbs9• 5 years ago

For me, the virus was a day long cough, a very mild fever, and about 5 minutes of "can't get a deep breath". So for me, I know which one I'd prefer.

artificialLimbs9• 5 years ago

> "So far, there is no scientific evidence available that suggests that spike proteins created in our bodies from the COVID-19 vaccines are toxic or damaging our organs."

Is not the same as "...is not toxic and does not damage our organs."

In response you could look at this and decide maybe we're not getting the full story. Or you could look at the rampant censorship (the purpose of the OP) and decide that maybe we're not getting the whole story.

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/federal-govt-whistleblow...

What the health care worker here is saying is that doctors are not reporting adverse effects like they should be.

Yes, Project Veritas makes their videos in hyper-over-produced fashion which seems ... weird, maybe a bit disingenuous. They cut and edit and potentially leave a lot of questions on the table with that. But when I go to comments sections on reposts of this video on various sites, there are numerous health care workers saying "This is how it is, this is what is happening where I am also." Is this foreign propaganda or some coordinated trolling? Maybe.

civilized10• 5 years ago

I watched the Project Veritas video too. I noticed that the featured health care worker did not say two things she definitely would have said if they were true:

1. She did not say that there was any coercion to avoid reporting adverse events. She just said it took too long to enter the data into VAERS (30 minutes) so people weren't reporting every event.

2. She didn't say the hospital was overflowing with people suffering from vaccine side effects, or that that number was remotely comparable to the number hospitalized with COVID.

So what's the likely truth?

1. Vaccine side effects are underreported, but mostly because people are not making much of an effort to report them, not for conspiratorial reasons. This is far from new - both underreporting of relevant events and overreporting of irrelevant events are common with every medical intervention.

2. The health burden of COVID still vastly outweighs anything happening with the vaccine.

endgame2• 5 years ago

Localised, huh? Then why did shot one leave me too tired to work for several days, and shot two give me lethargy and whole-body aches?

civilized10• 5 years ago

That was your immune system overreacting to a harmless foreign substance. Kind of like an allergy, but a desirable one in this case.

mostertoaster2• 5 years ago

People keep arguing about the facts about side effects and long covid and death rates and hospital capacity. One side shows some facts in their favor and another “better” facts in another favor. This is pointless. If covid killed 10% or .00000001 of the population, censoring things like this is a terrible precedent.

Just as china has “private companies” do their censoring this is no different.

Just because the “facts” are very strong in favor of vaccination, and a majority of people are likely pro vax, this is a dangerous road.

Effectively the message, the story told about those facts is being dictated from government guidelines. You do not know what future stories will be forced to be believed in the future regardless of the “facts”.

Seriously just try and imagine a society who believes something you’re opposed too, where the facts don’t matter to you, and having it happen. Do you think you will never be on the other side?

This power will one day be wielded by those who you are adamantly opposed to.

Lily_telepath• 5 years ago

Wrote an article about this and how AI is used to enforce these bans: https://telepath.io/blog/youtube-bans-vaccine-misinformation...

Kretinsky13• 5 years ago

I have an honest question to all of the honest people recommanding their relatives to get vaccinated:

I've had covid twice, with very mild effects (stay in bed for one day or two). I'm young, no comorbidity, not obese etc. Clearly I won't die of covid, as experimental science goes.

I'm the only provider for my family (wife, kid). If I take the vaccine and get crippled, meaning I can't work anymore, will the pro-vaccine people that recommend it pay my family a pension to compensate the financial loss caused by their advice?

foota3• 5 years ago

Your risks are much higher from covid than from the vaccine.

mbg72110• 5 years ago

...Where both the "much" and the "than" parts are miniscule.

moistrobot• 5 years ago

This argument doesn't hold if he's already had covid. you don't put your seatbelt on after the car crash

Tucanix• 5 years ago

Let's just say that is an extreme unlikelihood. The risk that you would get a permanent lasting effect from covid is very large which has happened to many who have had covid, millions are not over their lasting effects. At least with the vaccine it is under someones control, designed vigorously to be safe and someone is legally responsible. If you got covid, bad luck, your problem. I don't know how it works in the US but where I live (DK) if you get some kind of bad side effect from a treatment you can get compensation very easily. I guess in the US there might be lawyers involved or I guess since you got it for free from the government that they are responsible.

Also it's still likely that if you get covid a third time that you will get a worse outcome.

Kretinsky13• 5 years ago

Where I live (France), you'll get no compensation from the state (most H1N1 narcolepsies haven't still been compensated) , any lawsuit against big pharma would be quite risky and not compensated well anyway.

"Also it's still likely that if you get covid a third time that you will get a worse outcome. " > do you have facts backing this affirmation?

mostertoaster2• 5 years ago

They don’t need to ban flat-earther videos, just saying.

mindless_solips• 5 years ago

What we're seeing is essentially the Death of the Free Flow of Information on the Internet;coming concomitant with a pervasive social slide towards Elitism when the whole point of the original revolution was to break down the siloes of power aggregated into gatekeeper hands.

In the Assault on Reason, AL Gore talked about the ability to craft systems that could enable people to create and engage with content in meaningful ways. No doubt viewing YouTube as an antidote to taking people out of a passive TV watching role and towards an active, civically engaged citizen.

The problem is, when anybody can say anything, Everyone will say Everything. YouTube's Really Dumb Idea here is to "mitigate the problem by eliminating discussion." We see how well that worked for the Catholic Church and sexual abuse allegations, the Silent Generation and LGBTQIA rights, etc.

Right after the web exploded in the early 2000s and we were all chanting "Information Wants to Be Free", a large number of us enthusiastically believed in Democracy and Reason. We believed in rational argumentation, with point, counter-point, analysis of biases and nuances, leading towards an ultimately acceptable conclusion.

Instead we got Flat Earth, Anti-vax, and Donald Trump. It's not hard to see why the enthusiasm is failing.

The problem is, it's not The Big Dumb Idiot Public's Fault. It's Ours, as technologists building these platforms.

A +/- button and free-text fields in 2021 is exactly the same technology we were using to talk in 2001, now with far more robots and malicious actors adding noise.

An Obvious Question that has been around since the advent of these technologies, that is in fact inherent in information itself, is "how do we identify Signal from Noise?"

Treating all Anti-Vax view, and even Donald Trump's banned accounts, as just "Noise" are bad precedents.

Rather, we should be leveraging Machine Learning and all the obtrusive user data we're gathering from ad farms to Actually Do Useful Things For Humanity like:

* identifying a user's background and their "conceptual distance" from the topic at hand. Aside from pointing someone to an arcane Wikipedia article likely last edited by an expert into incomprehensible oblivion, how can we determine a "learning path" series of links that can take someone from "completely ignorant" to "common knowledge educated?"

People love anonymity on the internet, but there are times when they don't, as well. (see Facebook's success)

On a random Hot Topic thread in a non-anonymous platform (FB, Twitter), the commenter's background could be probabilistically calculated to inform readers about how likely they are to know what the fuck they're talking about. I. E. If a random computer scientist blowjob like me is mouthing off about how inefficient the vaccine process has been and someone with a PhD in Molecular Biology from a reputable institution that's actively working in a lab developing in a proximal space replies to my comments with counters, that level of expertise needs to be highlighted.

"water flows uphill" and things that are just counter-factual can be detected and auto-flagged.

Actively elevating the discourse by both teaching people And giving easy tools to identify sources, evaluate their credibility, learn the argument space by highlighting the authorities and hubs of different views related to a topic, and ultimately lead to better discussions is Hard... But an infinitely better direction than draconian choices/policies that directly undermine trust in public discourse --which is a core tenet of democracy--.

fithisux• 5 years ago

So, capitalism has no relation to democracy. It is the worst enemy when gain is the target.

Why didn't hey do it before? Because it is not about anti vaxxers, but about freedom.

pvaldes• 5 years ago

Self defense against people that want you dead is not censorship.

The rumor spreaders are clearly trying to do the maximum damage as possible in the society for money. Many of them ended being victims of the virus also, so nobody can't claim ignorance at this point or say that they were just joking. If they can't understand even the most basic facts explained by science is their problem, not twitter's problem or society's problem. Science is real. Deal with it.

The snake puppeteers poisoning and driving this people to their own demise are evil. Twitter is not obligated to help them to kill more people.

samirillian• 5 years ago

I live in BC. I'm double vaxxed. We know the military, recently back from fixing Afghanistan, is using their proven effective propaganda techniques to make everything better at home.

My ex's mom is a real-ass epidemiologist, albeit not a pandemic person but you know on gov't boards and stuff. She was recommending my ex not get astrazenica, purely on the evidence.

Now, I have to have a passport to go to a restaurant. I have the card they gave me, but they will be requiring an app soon.

This is insane, it looks like pure divide-and-conquer tactics to me.

YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content

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