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.
> 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.
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.
Thats the biggest problem with all of this stuff. They designed their whole business to not pay people. Not only their margins would shrink, but the perceived value of the company would shrink _a lot_. They will never do it.
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.
It may be an outcome, but it certainly wasn’t ”designed to boost disinformation.” If you watch a pro-vaccine videos, it will suggest more videos portraying the vaccine positively.
My take on things as time has gone on? It’s depressing but the problem is people. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine video, the comments are filled with hundreds or thousands of anti-vaccine comments. People are the common denominator of what’s wrong with the Internet today.
I agree it’s imprecise to say it is designed to boost disinformation (which I quoted from the parent); it is more precise to say it was designed to maximise revenue.
Which, due to the business model, is more or less incompatible with presenting the truth. Truth is often uncomfortable, full of caveats and subject to change; rarely does it make for a good story. If it turns out that presenting outright false information (including lying by omission, etc.) as established fact keeps eyeballs for longer and engages more people, then the algorithm would be doing just that.
Sure, if you watch technical content and train the algorithm by watching videos from solid, trusted sources, you can (for now) get it to give you sound recommendations, but I doubt this is reliable or representative. Thus, I believe acting as if YouTube was designed to boost misinformation is not necessarily wrong, and may be more or less an approximation of the average case.
And the problem is not quite people. If people are expected to constantly counteract the efforts of a sophisticated machine that doesn’t have their interests in mind and can spend a million dollars just optimizing its GUI and algorithms, which are then deployed against each individual user (who comes alone, tired after work, low on willpower and with lowered defences from the safety of their home) to exploit the darkest in them in order to show them more ads, then the problem is not quite people—the problem is that we are dealing with an adversary.
> 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.
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.
What type of power do they really have? If you don't like their policies, don't use their services, it's that simple. The only power is in their user base. YouTube is not some necessary utility, neither is Facebook, Twitter, etc. None of these services are worth anything without users.
Social networks are unprecedented in our world. Never have you been able to spread misinformation and propaganda as quickly. I don't know what the right answer is, but it certainly shouldn't be to sit back and do nothing because "censorship". This misinformation campaign is actively killing people.
> Eroding trust by overtly controlling information sets the scene for propaganda to take deeper root.
Your choice is to either put the propaganda in front of more eyes or have the current believers doubling down, and you choose the few? The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.
Also, let's be clear: the eroded trust is with a private company that owns a community-driven platform. I know I'm getting downvoted, but seriously, move on if you don't trust them, their entire business is made from you using their service.
>* The problem is the general population does not critically think enough for the sit back and do nothing approach to work in the real world.*
This shows we have fundamentally different views of the world, so I don’t think there much more to this conversation.
I would just say, be careful what esteem you hold other people in, because on more than a few issues your are almost certainly “the general population” to someone else with the power to censor.
Post offices, libraries, and telephone calls all transmit misinformation every day. Shoot, misinformation gets spread across tables at Dunkin Donuts as people talk about life.
And that's not even getting more political and pointing out all the liars and fools in charge of newspapers and even governments. I'm not saying they're all bad. I'm saying we're not considering banning politicians and newspapers for being too incorrect. Partly because the practice of choosing and empowering censors is even worse.
Okay so you have your wish, there are 10 major video sites in the US who all have 5-20% market share. The forces that push one service moderate content will push the others.
Like there are a lot of social networks, have you noticed that every single one is monitoring for COVID related content and adding a banner?
tldr: competition can't solve political issues because there's a monopoly on government
There is government pressure (more correctly just social pressure) but the government hasn't given a mandate that these platforms must take this censorship stance.
And even then, this is only an issue because everyone is on just a handful of platforms -- so the companies build one-size-fits-all policies. But we're not all the same size.
I'm not terrified of my community encountering misinformation. I'm far more terrified of a community being unable to articulate and defend why the information is "mis".
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.
I don't have numbers, but there's a substantial population of people wary of the covid vaccines that aren't wary of polio, measles, or even flu vaccines.
I don't know why this is downvoted, because I have also found it to be true (within my immediate family).
It's hard for me to dig to the actual reasoning, but I've poked and prodded, and I think it might just be some rationalizing to help them cope with the idea that they are, in fact, vaccinated against certain diseases.
Also they're just ignorant in some cases. I got a response to the tune of "yeah (I'm vaccinated against some things)--against diseases, not viruses." Which clearly fundamentally misunderstands some things.
I've also heard people who are just against mRNA vaccines. And some who are (somewhat reasonably IMO) against mRNA vaccines until they've had a reasonable time period to let side effects etc play out.
side effects of a two dose vaccine are almost certainly going to show up in the near term of less than 6 weeks. it's not something like a drug you take daily for years and years and get a side effect from years down the line due to prolonged use.
These are, by nature, very ephemeral due to them being mRNA and either being transformed into an instruction to make a small protein that then gets the body trained to neutralize or it gets neutralized on their own because they are not long lasting in the first place. There is no instruction inside the mRNA to make anything like the long lasting effects of a retrovirus. it's simply not there to do that.
vaccines like this are more like the effects of taking a Tylenol or aspirin once... yeah you can get side effects from it but there is no long lasting effect because it's gone from your system.
Regardless of why this was downvoted, it deserves an upvote for being correct.
"Are there long-term side effects caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines? How do we know?" Basically, no because we've studied them. mRNA vaccines are notoriously easily destroyed.
And it's utter BS in the real world - did they even stop to think that some countries have given out millions of doses of Pfizer over the last 8 months, and if "all cause mortality was unaffected" compared to the pandemic situation in 2020, it would be obvious as hell. It's therefor a very extra-ordinary claim, no proof whatsoever.
Yeah it's complete bullshit... vaccines are working and working well. the only people dying and taking up the ICU beds right now in any large numbers are the unvaccinated.
> Why are they pushing this disinformation?
either one of the following groups: russian/china disinformation bots or paid shills. people that like to be "in on the know" and take contrary viewpoints that are not mainstream. people that have fully bought into the above misinformation schemes. people that have taken to it like a political fight where reason goes out the window unless you are "winning".
I ultimately think that a lot of people "broke" during the pandemic looking for some "enemy" to fight since the reality of a wild virus that just happened was too scary a thought. many people need the world to make sense and want control. some control of that is making up enemies like china releasing the virus intentionally and all the world governments working together in tandem to somehow control everyone.
"During the blinded, placebo-controlled period, 15 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 14 in the placebo group died; during the open-label period, 3 participants in the BNT162b2 group and 2 in the original placebo group who received BNT162b2 after unblinding died. None of these deaths were considered to be related to BNT162b2 by the investigators. Causes of death were balanced between BNT162b2 and placebo groups (Table S4)."
Look into statins if you want to understand bias and corruption in clinical studies.
Giving a medication to over 20,000 people and not saving a single life in 6 months is pretty weak. An NNT of over 20k is unheard of. Anything above 10-20 (not 10k) should make people at least be allowed to ask questions.
They did save two lives if you look at the death causes. 2 died of covid that were in the placebo group. There is also the numerous numbers of cases that didn't get severe covid and have long term negative side effects. Two people in the placebo group died of covid... that means they died fairly quickly and of covid directly meaning the illness was more severe. one person in the pfizer group died of covid pneumonia which means they were likely older and had a less severe infection but they still got pneumonia and died.
The number of people that got covid or severe covid in the control group were many, many times more as the vaccine protected many from getting it in the first place.
The alpha gal carbohydrate introduced by a lone Star tick trains your immune system to reject it in the future resulting in the inability to eat red meats.
The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
Researchers are very clear that mRNA therapy may be useful for permanent treatment of a wide variety of conditions in the future. The material may not persist, but the effects certainly will.
The Israeli study indicates that natural immunity use up to 27x more effective than the vaccine against Delta. This indicates that something about the synthetic solution is inferior.
What other differences exist? Will any other immune abnormalities appear over time? That wouldn't be unusual. Were other systems altered due to unknown interactions? We still discover very important natural interactions every year, so this isn't far fetched.
What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
I don't see why those perspective is hard to understand. People with low openness personalities who tend to be risk adverse are going to respond very differently from those with high openness and lower risk aversion (not to mention differing knowledge).
It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways. The idea that a long string of failures suddenly meets with absolute success just at the correct moment defies belief. Those of us who took the vaccine should at least admit to ourselves that there's a non-zero chance things are wrong this time too (though hopefully not so spectacularly) but that those effects and effect rates are still lower on aggregate than the problems from covid.
>I've been reading about coronavirus vaccine attempts since SARS. I've watched one attempt after another fail -- often in spectacular ways.
I'd like to know what these attempts were and why the current vaccines are different. Do you know a good source of information about this? Or, can you list some of these attempts?
> What about your body only making limited, synthetic antigen antibodies instead of the better, more flexible natural ones in response to even more out of band gamma or mu strains? These are entirely unknown problems we're in the process of researching and for better or worse, we're the guinea pigs.
well, scores and scores of people not dying from a virus that's killed millions is why. those "limited" (and not synthetic those are real antibodies against real antigens) are working very well unless you believe that the current world wide vaccine drive is ineffectual against all data to the contrary... the vaccines have been a huge success against the coronavirus.
and you are the guinea pig already... just in the control group that's dying left and right at a very high pace and also leaving lots of people with "long covid" that is also giving them long term, yet unknown side effects.
> It should be telling that doctors and nurses who have been watching covid patients die still often come to the conclusion that the vaccine isn't for them and is too risky.
it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
mind you that 2% number includes people that never are face to face with people dying of the disease on a daily basis in all likelihood. it is very telling when the smartest people in the room are all taking the vaccine.
finally, that Israeli study is misinterpreted... it doesn't matter if you get infected as much after being vaccinated. what matters is if you get very sick after you get infected and to that end the vaccines are wildly successful. and even then the absolute numbers of people getting sick from the strain is very small; over 650,000 people in america have died from covid and the vast majority of them are unvaccinated. full stop.
Israel's Health Ministry has clearly stated that the vaccine is 39% effective against Delta strain [0] at preventing disease. Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version. The Gamma and Mu strains are known to be even more resistant to the vaccine.
People are so desperate for their fear to abate that they'll put on the blinders while trying to convince themselves of all kinds of things.
With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission. The virus swims around many millions of vaccinated immune systems mutating until it finally finds something that works around the vaccine antibody. This is contrary to the media's anti-science garbage about unvaccinated being the cause of a virus mutating (why would it need to mutate around the vaccine antibody if they don't have any in their system?).
Paired with evidence that natural immunity is up to 27x better, the picture is pretty clear. The vaccine antibody is a response to a synthetic antigen rather than the natural one. The resulting antibody targeting the synthetic antigen (why I specifically referred to it as a "synthetic antigen antibody") is not as flexible against the actual disease.
My greatest hope at this point is that vaccinated people catching Delta are slowing the spread with the inefficient antibodies while developing natural antibodies, but I've seen zero studies about this. If this is not the case, then I fear we've kicked the danger can down the road and made it even worse. In the worst case, an ADE effect develops (not theoretical -- this was one of the biggest concerns/problems in previous SARS/MERS vaccine attempts) and 50+% of vaccinated people die.
> it is telling that there are unreasonable people out there however vanishingly small a number. In one recent survey of doctors 96% of them had gotten the vaccine. 45% of the remaining 4% were still planning on getting it. so that's about 2% of doctors that are not planing on taking it... i'd say that's an overwhelming number of doctors that are getting the vaccine.
Don't mistake getting and wanting. Most of my family are in the medical field. Some travel all across the country. Huge amounts of people had to be threatened with losing their livelihood before they got the vaccine. My sibling has had a couple months of symptoms from their vaccine (most likely because they'd already caught COVID and severe reactions are much more likely in that case). In truth, it is anti-science to require the vaccine from those with natural antibodies as we now know they have strictly better antibodies.
Then again, vaccination seems more about politics than science.
> Think about that, according to Israel, 61% of vaccinated people are catching full-blown COVID and by implication, some lesser amount are catching an asymptomatic version.
the fact that you think that breakthrough cases are somehow rare in a highly vaccinated population is nuts. of course the majority of cases will be vaccinated people in a highly vaccinated population. and also, I read the presentation it was based off and the confidence interval on that statistic is off the charts variable.
> With at least 61% of vaccinated people getting a virus with one of the highest r0 around, the vaccine is 100% ineffective at killing transmission.
That's not how those statistics work. The vaccine is not "100% ineffective at killing transmission". The nature of how the immune system works is such that there is a drop off in free antibodies in your blood stream that are able to prevent infection over time. that's 100% how it works. the fact that there is less serious cases of covid with shorter infectious periods of time with less strain on the ICU systems mean the vaccines are working.
I get you are scared of the vaccine for some reason or another but the mental gymnastics are hindering our ability to move on as a society. the vaccines allow covid to become endemic like the cold that just makes most people feel a bit shitty for a few days vs. completely overwhelm the ICUs and kill people for unrelated things.
> The alpha gal leaves your system very quickly, but the result of the (mis)-training of your immune system lasts forever.
But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system? We are now 9 months into mass vaccination, and still no sign of these ominous long-term side effects that people seem so worried about.
they aren't even sure that the tick is the cause of that syndrome. they suspect it but there hasn't been a definitive link yet. also, people are allergic to all sorts of things like almonds or bees and can get new allergies later on in life.
>But does it take years for the effect to show up after the alpha gal leaves your system?
For this specific change, no. But the point is that there is ample chance for mRNA to induce semipermanent and/or permanent changes and there's no guarantee that they'll be detected early, especially when the vast majority of clinicians aren't even looking for them.
If these vaccines do indeed, say, increase long term risk of cancer or heart problems, it will likely take years or even decades to detect especially when there is a rigid, top down enforced taboo around questioning the safety/efficacy of the vaccine. Yet another reason that censorship like this is dangerous.
Researchers also get some of their ideas through free exchange on social media. Especially when the academic establishment develops a rigid orthodoxy around a topic; when all of the institutions align behind a single preemptive conclusion and then collude to suppress even rational, science based dissent across all platforms, your society stumbles down the false path of one sided research.
Sure, all of this is possible. Really improbable, but possible.
But what are these chances compared to a real infection with coronavirus, which has more proteins than the spike protein and causes more havoc in the body?
I drove for an hour into the countryside to get the Johnson and Johnson vaccine for this reason. I got it three days before the blood clots thing came out, and was in the ER the day before the news came out with the most terrible headache I’ve ever had in my life.
It's funny how people seem to be far more wary of their cells being subjected to a controlled dose of a carefully selected strand of mRNA than they are wary of their cells being subjected to a much larger bundle of mRNA that happens to include some variation of that carefully selected strand amongst many other things that together turn the cell into a weapon producing more copies of itself, and that will eventually kill every carrier whose immune system does not come up with a countermeasure fast enough. If the mRNA vaccine that contains a tiny subset of the virus is scary, how can the full version not be far more scary?
Actually that's what convinced me to get the vaccine, the fact of how the new bioengineering for mRNA worked. I was convinced that it would be highly successful and effective. And I honestly don't believe the theories that it's effectiveness is somehow wearing off. It's much more likely that it's just not effective against Delta+mutations as that is so far from the original variant the vaccine was designed for. I don't plan to get any booster shots until a new delta variant vaccine is available.
Don't forget the obvious merely logical counter argument:
How does one come up with "being vaccinated could potentially be a time bomb" without naturally coming up with "being unvaccinated could potentially be a time bomb"?
If you don't even know what mRNA stands for without Googling it, surely you couldn't possibly guess that one of these is more likely to be true than the other.
I don't think the average person can (or will, especially) really source reliable information on how mRNA works, let alone think through the potential risks.
It's a very technical question that involves a ton of knowledge about how our body works etc.
Despite reading up about it, I wouldn't personally feel confident enough to explain it at any level of technical detail.
I don't think we can expect the majority of people to understand it and then make decisions based on that--ever.
It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
When politicians are the folks in charge of our personal health (to any degree), it's always going to immediately sew distrust-- as it should.
>It's very unclear, without deep knowledge of both the vaccine tech and the virus, which time bomb is worse. I know what the experts say, and I personally believe them, but it's not surprising to me that others don't.
But... that's the thing, isn't it? It's a fundamental issue with tackling the problem.
"I sure as hell have no idea whether 'a' or '¬a' is better, therefore 'a' is the one I am picking." It's a ridiculous level of favouring one alternative for no good reason.
I would find it acceptable if it were even based on some sort of loose heuristics for picking 'a', but they got nothing. For someone who might as well know nothing, why the heck are they so focused on 'going at it unvaccinated is probably the better outcome long term'?
Not believing the experts would lead to not having an opinion at all. What they are doing is believing that the experts are wrong.
I fully agree with all of this, yes. Disbelieving experts is wrong unless you are an expert or other experts also disagree, and I think that is a symptom of social media. SM, to me, is the real problem.
People should be taking health advice from their doctors. Not from politicians, not from companies, and most definitely not from their friends on social media. This whole age of "nothing is true", therefore disbelieving experts, is IMO being fueled by social media.
All that being said, back to the original problem: assume I don't trust (or maybe pay attention to) experts, and I know zero technical details of this vaccine nor this virus. I'm in pretty good shape and the virus is mainly killing old people. The vaccine is new, and despite it not killing people, (some of) my friends are posting on FB about how this vaccine is dangerous and I'm a test subject.
I think that's a pretty good model that fits a great, great many people. I don't think it's hard to see how they arrive on "don't get a substance I don't understand that just got invented injected into my body." I think it's the reasonable choice.
The idea that they all did research and arrived at a logical, informed decision is a problem. (Most) People aren't doing that, and broadly speaking, they're never going to.
I think that much of the distrust is not so much caused by lack of knowledge, but ultimately by inability to accept that sometimes shit just happens. They spent an entire year frantically making up culprits to blame for a virus that quite likely just happened, like a meteor strike. Making up culprits from thin air, but decidedly. Because their minds had never been confronted with tragedy lacking a scapegoat.
There's no logic to go from there to "vaccines are bad", but all the mental contortions they had to go through to blame someone primed them, hard, to active distrust.
I think his point very much means youtube should have done this sooner. There are tons of ppl that are 'anti- this vax only' because of the misinformation of youtube.
Vaccines do not always work. Vaccination is something you do as much for yourself or your own dependents (where it usually works) as for everyone else (where it might help protect someone for who it did not work well). This is the reason why antivaxx sentiment and "it should be my own choice" is antisocial and wrong.
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.
Every specific case is different; you can always find some facts which differentiate one instance from the 'general case'. It is not enough to say 'this time is different', one must overcome the presumption that general rules should hold.
I think their point is that being algorithmically induced makes the general rule not hold (which I don't agree - algorithms can be pretty damn bad at achieving what one wants).
Mind you, damn thank you for saying that out loud. People on the internet sure love to jump on the wagon of pointing out the differences of instances from a general case that often aren't even relevant for the argument.
It gave newspapers and magazines the ability to do exactly that, and some absolutely have. It's pretty easy to draw parallels between those and "content creators".
Yes, they are. Almost every one has one or more mobile devices that we carry with us at all times.
These devices have various messaging/social media services that due to social expectations we use to interact with friends, family.
It's very, very hard to laser curate the kind of messaging you get, even if you know how to do it and are willing to do it (for example for some stuff you have to mute friends and family or otherwise block them).
Newspapers were much more hit and miss. You'd have to go out and buy a newspaper, their region was at best national, etc.
In absolute terms, you're right. We interact with media more than we ever have before.
The printing press was huge in relative terms, though. There was no mass media before that. The average person was unlikely to be able to read, much less to own any books. Communicating across even relatively short distances was infeasible. Most of the media they consumed was either from the church or at least regulated by the church.
The printing press was huge because the normal person's sphere of possible influence grew 100x. Much in the way that we've 100x-ed again with things like YouTube. The relative increase in sphere of influence is similar, the absolutes are massively different.
True, but I think there's a saying about quantity having a quality all its own.
The printing press was still running at humanly achievable speeds. The new stuff is super sonic. We can't cope with it. Plus with people living longer and longer and the natural neuroplasticity decrease that comes with age, more and more people are vulnerable.
It's the kind of thing that will need to be regulated very carefully and very strongly, because that's what laws are: barriers for when the human psyche fails. Imperfect barriers, but better than nothing.
> 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?
> What is insidious, as Ulfkotte confesses, is that typically, intelligence agencies use “unofficial covers”—people working for the agency but not actually on its payroll as agents. It is a broad, loose network of “friends,” doing one another favors. Many are lead journalists from numerous countries. This informality provides plausible deniability for both sides, but it means an “unofficial cover,” as Ulfkotte became, is on his own if captured.
> The American reporter James Foley, allegedly executed by ISIS, found that out. Ulfkotte confirmed to this author that Foley did indeed work for various intelligence organizations, as this newspaper reported on last month. He also stated that if a journalist is accused of spying, such reports are almost always credible.
The point of this article is that journalists are just as fallible to money as everyone else. That the alphabet soup agencies don't mind using journalists for their own ends. To assume that stops with spying is an argument from silence (lol, but to assume that it does go past that is also an argument from silence).
It took a while to be especially effective, both because techniques of propaganda had to be learned, and because the general populace was not literate. As of 1500, population literacy rates in Western Europe were on the order of 10--25%. The climbed to 90%+ in the 19th century, the midpoint of which saw rapid advances in printing technology (iron presses, powered presses, web presses), a sustainable business model (advertising, as it happens). And in the year 1848, Europe basically exploded into revolution, affecting over 50 counries:
More generally, the role of the printing press as an agent of change (social, political, economic) is the subject of Elizabeth Eisenstein's book of the same name:
The question isn't "was this specific level of capabilities available previously" but "did the introduction of new media technologies significantly disrupt the cultures into which they emerged?"
And the case that Eisenstein makes, at book length, is "yes".
She's building off earlier work (notably McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy), and you can find numerous prior and subsequent references.
Newsstands contain dozens of newspapers, typically all owned by only 1 or 2 conglomerates. How is that any different than a Facebook feed which shows hundreds of groups spamming out propoganda, all of which are operated by a much smaller number of entities?
>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.
> I think you underestimate how fragile Democracy is and you don't need to look much farther than Moscow.
Which is exactly why we need to uphold classical liberal principles, as well as speak truth with appropriate nuance.
The best way to deal with a bad idea is with a better idea, not by silencing the bad idea.
I'd have a lot more respect for Google in this case if they, in collaboration with researchers and experts, produced their own well-researched, nuanced, carefully stated arguments against what they disagree with.
Ahh the old paradox of tolerance. What you preach has failed literally every time it has been tried throughout history. You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop. And the irony of preaching tolerance while downvoting me is ripe.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
[citation needed]. Popper's personal opinion that you linked to (and that is now used in a much more absolutist way that originally intended by its author, who never intended to cheer for censorship and crackdowns in name of democracy) isn't data and Full stop isn't a proof. Yes, Popper was smart. No, he wasn't an oracle of unquestionable wisdom.
Tell me, how was legalization of marijuana in the U.S. won? After all, chucking people into prison for decades is quite some intolerance. Did the MJ lovers stage an insurrection?
No, they won at the ballot box, which is the tolerant way. Not by reverse oppression of their enemies.
To disprove a sentence that says "every time", one example to the contrary is enough. This is your example. For another, take gay rights. There wasn't a gay revolution that would smite the religious conservatives and crush them.
> You can’t stop intolerance with tolerance, you will lose every time. Full stop.
I'm not proposing full tolerance of the intolerant. Rather, as Karl Popper explained, political institutions within a liberal democratic society are the most appropriate scope within which the people's will regarding what to tolerate is expressed. In other words, contact your representatives about what needs to be outlawed, and until something is outlawed, show liberal tolerance—which absolutely includes refuting bad ideas in public debate.
Regarding YouTube, their choice to deplatform people is their choice -- and it's not against the law, since they own the platform. I certainly disagree with the wisdom behind their choice. It's likely to cause more problems than it solves; but I'm tolerating it even as I argue against it in public debate.
At first pass, I don't see how this applies to people sharing information about vaccines whether personal experience, science, or misunderstood science.
How would you say that people sharing information about vaccines and their effects are intolerant?
How would you say that people not wanting to get vaccinated are intolerant of any particular demographic group? That's not targeting anyone by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion. It's a decision for them self about their person.
I am not an American. I actually live in a country that was a kicking baloon of totalitarian powers for decades.
The first instinct of an autocrat is to strangle free speech of his critics. This has been the case since forever.
For all their errors, societies that do have wide freedom of speech rarely lapse into tyrannies on their own account. The freedom to say that the emperor's new clothes are bullsh*t is precious.
As for your historical examples, Weimar democracy was deeply flawed in that it tolerated party militias and a lot of violence in the streets. Once people are threatened physically, they will seek 'protection' from gangsters. But violence is something very different from actual words.
And China isn't a case of a democracy that was taken over by cunning speeches of its enemies. CCP got into power by winning a civil war.
So we need to apply heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent so that we don’t turn into an authoritarian country like China or Russia where they use heavy-handed censorship to silence dissent.
Exactly. You don't uphold democracy by silencing its critics, either.
Democracy and liberal freedom is best upheld when (a) the government is founded on the principles of liberty and rule-of-law, and (b) the people treasure those principles and refuse to tolerate a government that fails to uphold them.
>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.
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).
> Imagine this attitude applied to climate change. Letting the stupid runs its course and choosing inaction, will lead to disastrous warming outcomes.
This is the same situation as climate change. Instead of doing sensible things, we banned plastic straws! (Now paper straws come in plastic packaging...). Or the situation that UK and Germany find themselves in (having invested in stupid but "green" solutions).
Not at all, we also shipped our garbage halfway across the world while pretending we were recycling; and we turned the taps off while we were brushing our teeth.
Funny that you mention that since this is a real problem with combating climate change. You need to focus on the meat of the problem, not grasping at (plastic) straws (sensible policy, but not conductive to a solution regarding this case).
The problem with climate change is that the average person can't see the effects until long past the point when the problem can be easily solved. It's not at all comparable to social media.
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.
The case numbers in Alberta are half of the peak earlier this year (when Delta started ramping up). And yet 70% are vaccinated but only 3% were earlier this year (May).
Begs the question as to why the system is falling apart now and not earlier this year.
First of all, your assrtion about case numbers being half is not correct. The third wave peaked at 25k active cases. The current peak is at 21k active cases.
Second, despite the case number not being higher than the third wave, hospitalizations and ICU admissions are higher for the current wave compared to any before. This is despite the higher vaccination rate and due to the higher dangers of the delta variant. The third wave peaked at 555 non-ICU and 183 ICU; the current wave is at 860 non-ICU and 268 ICU. ICU cases are predominantly (~90%) unvaccinated individuals.
So the system is falling apart because the hospitals are being overwhelmed, because the delta variant is more dangerous that the previous dominant variants for unvaccinated people and there are more people in hospitals and in ICUs than ever before because of this.
And this is hurting everyone, not just anti-vaxxers or those who get COVID. They even had to close 75% of operating rooms in children's hospital, because they needed to divert the resources to adults in ICUs with COVID.
But why hasn't the higher hospitalization rate played out in other countries?
And regardless, it seems odd that you can hit 70%+ vaccination rates and see a worse outcome than when the vaccination rate was ~5%.
The only way those numbers work is if Delta is several fold more deadly/severe disease causing than the prior variants, and that hasn't been seen elsewhere.
I agree. The reasons for the situation in Alberta are
1) Delta variant being more dangerous that the previous ones, causing a higher number of infections ending up in hospitals and ICUs. I shudder at the though of what would have happened if we got a delta wave before vaccination. We are lucky we got it after vaccinating 70% of the population. India and Iran (and I am sure some other countries) got their delta wave before being able to vaccinate a large enough percentage of people and the result was a human tragedy.
2) During the previous waves, when the number of infections went up, the government imposed harder restrictions to avoid this very eventuality. During this wave, government thought the vaccines meant hospitalization and ICU would be fully disconnected from case numbers, so did not impose restrictions until it was too late and the ICUs were already on the verge of bursting. Restrictions such as mask mandates and capacity limits which were present in previous waves were not imposed until two weeks ago for this wave.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence to suggest Delta produces all that much more severe disease.[1] The CDC says "it might be". Much more infectious, yes, but not more deadlier or at least not so much deadlier as to explain the Alberta numbers (especially comparing a population that is 70% vaccinated now versus 5% in the last wave).
And again, we aren't seeing the same impact outside of Alberta. In the US, which has a lower overall vaccination rate, the death rate is actually lower than prior waves.
US's death and ICU rates are higher than Alberta though, which can be explained by the difference in vaccination rates. So Alberta's current wave is not out of ordinary.
Rate of death (per 100k population) over the past 7 days:
Alberta: 2.3
United States: 3.01
Number of COVID-19 patients in ICU per million population:
4chan is infinitely more enjoyable than the majority of social media and forums out there, precisely because of how lax the rules are and because of the lack of perverse incentives for users trying to one-up eachother for internet points. The only real rules are that you can't post anything illegal and that you have to stay vaguely on-topic, and it works great.
Also, /pol/ is not all of 4chan, there's a reason it's called a containment board.
The irony is that even /pol is more "diverse" than the groups commonly requesting content control.
I suspect in intolerant times like this a lot of Jews and black people, which are probably still the prime targets of /pols "hate" go there on holiday just to get away from crazy.
Maybe not too healthy, but very much preferable to another slick corporate or political message about how they will implement racism in the future. At least /pol fails with their racism. Governments and corporations are pretty successful with it.
It is a very public example of the result of limited moderation.
Free speech advocates advocating for absolutism in free speech need a counterargument if they're going to go down that road.
In my experience, aggressive moderation, whether by the community or by admins, is the only way to keep a public community from turning into a cesspool, so if you're arguing for no moderation you better have a solution for what that actually entails.
Doesn't 4chan kind of disprove this though? I mean sure /pol/ can be a bit of a cesspool, but that's not all of 4chan. It was designed as a toxic waste storage facility and it has done that job fairly well.
You can hold great conversations on any of the like 30 other boards on the site without worrying about censorship or performance for internet points. There is still moderation, just the minimum amount possible.
A default of anonymity also helps curb a lot of spillover into the real world that happens between users of other forum sites.
The only reason 4chan gets dragged through the mud is because its containment facilities (/pol/, /b/, etc.) are among the most active boards. That speaks more to the human condition than 4chan in that people, when given a choice, tend to gravitate towards the least moderated sections of a website because they are the most engaging.
In terms of a solution I think it offers a fairly good one. If you don't want to have to keep banning malcontents across your site, then give them a place to congregate and they will mostly stay there. Try to ban them and they swarm looking for a new home.
What’s wrong with 4chan? I for one think it’s awesome, one of the few outlets that haven’t gave in to censorship.
I can give you a counterexample of Reddit that turned into cesspool with (and may be because of) excessive moderation. Just check their front page with posts celebrating people dying of Covid https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/
That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
/pol is not the only containment board or issue with 4chan
>That’s some weasel wording with “(and may be because of)”. Also if you want posts of people celebrating death just stroll over into /b and mention anything to do with minorities and/or genocides.
So like /r/HermanCainAward but without the doxing?
There's plenty of "death of the outgroup" celebration on Reddit even in big subs.
This thread was discussing whether moderation was needed or not for a forum and 4chan was brought up as a forum without moderation and all the issues with that.
You brought up /r/hermancainaward as an example of Reddit having a cesspool and tried to imply without evidence that moderating it had a hand in its creation, _and_ implied that it’s the same level of cesspool as a place like /b.
Even if we assume you are correct about it being the same level of cesspool, as we speak the Reddit admins have been instructing the hermancainaward moderators to clean up the board or be shut down, which would get rid of said cesspool.
The only thing shown is that people can be terrible as a group, but moderating at least removes the worst excesses. That does not show how to deal with those excesses in an unmoderated forum
they had done a lot of debate at there, about whether this behaviour is acceptable.
I just want to direct that the original purpose of this forums is try warn people what is the result of choice.
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.
> 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.
Back in the day, the Internet wasn't dominated by Facebook and Google.
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?
> 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
So who's going to be the one that decides what disinformation is or isn't? Where exactly do you draw a line when deciding what constitutes disinformation, and as such what gets deleted out of existence? Sure, the microchip stuff is bullshit, but where do we draw the line exactly on what vaccine-related topics can or can't be posted about online?
And this is where we fundamentally disagree, I believe that any censorship of literally any kind is too much censorship. There is no such thing as a "reasonable standard" for banning "disinformation", because any two random people will disagree on what should be silenced or not.
First, I don't think governments should be banning the speech across the entire internet. But companies with large social platforms can and probably should do so in certain situations, such as a pandemic when conspiracy theories are being spread which make controlling the pandemic more difficult, and can lead to more deaths.
As for where to draw the line, society always has to figure out where to draw lines on what behavior is allowed and what isn't. It's always a matter of tradeoffs, not some absolute principal with no exceptions. Society may very well go too far in one direction, and often has, but we still end up drawing lines somewhere. Hacker News certainly draws the line on some speech, because of a desire to keep the site respectful and on topic.
For Covid, I think the reasonable standard acceptable to a majority of people is to ban intentional spread of conspiracy theories with clearly false facts that discourage people from being vaccinated, or putting harmful substances in their bodies to combat the virus, which are not medically approved.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
Yeah, fighting ignorance isn't easy. But the alternatives are much worse, ineffective in the long run, and by damaging your credibility, impair your ability to fight rationally in the future.
De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras. "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really? Malevolent troublemaking nihilists are still at large? _Donald Trump_ won the next election?
> De-platforming is always going to fail because your opponents are hydras.
The strongest evidence against this is that the groups being deplatformed seem really, really upset by it. Seems like they wouldn't be so concerned if it wasn't effective.
> "Yay, we crushed Milo Yiannopoulos!" Er, wait, how's that going, really?
Pretty well, given that he hasn't been relevant to anything in years.
Is the actual goal of de-platforming individuals to punish or silence specific individuals, or is it to suppress remove certain kinds of speech from public discourse?
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.
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.
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".
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.
I am 46 and I was born and living all my life in Soviet Union and now Russia. So you don't tell me what a significant free speech suppression feels like)
YouTube is not a megafone. TV and newspapers is. YouTube is just a medium. People still have to find those videos, click links, share them and so on. Unless, of course, YouTube algos are putting them on the front page because they are generating more ads profit.
And you could not stop information from flowing around in 1980-s (@see "Samizdat") and hundredfold cannot do it today. If you think then closing Parler solved the problem of internal division in USA - no, it just made it worse.
That is true but I am not as disillusioned that giving everyone a megaphone was positively conductive to spread more interesting art, discussions and general content. I would not want to go back to Youtube TV.
I think people that only see the dangers of misinformation that must be contained are the modern versions of priests to be honest.
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.
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.
I didn't describe anything as ineffective. On the contrary: those who vaccinated are now very effectively avoiding being seriously sick or even dead. What was ineffective is an information campaign about vaccines, their direct and side short and long term effects. At least in US, I believe.
I mean... Yeah... Long ago some people got together and said large government organizations should not censor speech. They thought this idea was good enough that it shouldn't just be law, they should Amend the US Constitution to protect people from a particular large organization's overwhelming power to suppress dissent.
But today the organization censoring speech is a public corporation [wealthier and more powerful than most governments], and because it doesn't have explicit ties to any government, we are supposed to assume that the spirit of the original rule is not being violated. Citizens may expect no freedom of thought or expression, even if the properties Google owns appear to be and function like public forums.
> 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.
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.
There was a huge lie about Russian election interference that was heavily pushed by media companies.
I am vaccinated but it is still a medical experiment. One that should be carefully monitored. Maybe we are guilty of enabling strains like delta. Perhaps not. As I said, it warrants close monitoring.
The heart of any anti-* sentiment is DOUBT. And in case of covid vaccines part of that doubt is totally legit. Yes, in a history of mankind there was never a medical substance so rushed to the market. And yes, our current covid vaccines are far from perfect. All you can do to counter these facts are bring another facts. And not shutting down intelligent reasonable people discussing all those facts.
We don't remember people who got other theories than Galileo. We don't even remember those who judged him. Because in the end all is remains is proven unshakable science.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have different definitions of a crisis to be honest. And I also think the crisis of misinformation is blown out of proportion and is in the interest of some established forms of media, which make quite a good buck with clickable headlines that sell the apocalypse.
This crisis is used to gain more control about information channels. This is also the main criticism here, nobody argues about the validity of claims some people bring forward as an argument against vaccination.
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
The above does in fact describe a "clear and present" danger. You'll notice, however, that saying anything on the subject of vaccines, a pedophilic cabal in Hollywood, or the Moon landing is in no way like triggering the immediate stampede of desperate people who have no time to consider the truth or falsehood of potentially being trapped in a burning building.
That analogy is simply too often misused. I have to wonder if its misuse isn't itself "misinformation."
I don't think spreading misinformation about vaccines is in anyway comparable to the examples of hollywood or the moon landing, and I do in fact think it's a perfect fit for the analogy:
It is an indisputable fact that there are people dying every day because they have decided not to take a vaccine based on misinformation. That group of people is also causing the deaths of others by overwhelming the emergency facilities of hospitals. Personally, I would argue that this danger is very much clear and present.
Every one of the people you describe had time to consider the information they got and to look for more information to confirm or contradict. Again, that is nothing like sitting in a crowded theater and hearing someone shout, "Fire!"
I think people are talking completely passed each other. The conservative crowd will debate the severity of the existing pandemic and whether the cure is worse than the illness. The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion. I think both points of view have strong merit but its hard to mend the two views together they just don't really mix. The whole thing ends up being labelled "misinformation" because we aren't even on the same page. I find myself in the conservative camp which is a rare occurrence for me. But I can't for the life of me understand how people can be so enchanted with the heads of our federal organizations when the data behind their words does not stack up. Misleading the importance of data, stretching and inverting the burden of proof we should expect from our government ultimately makes me see them as liars. Watching liars speak is one thing but to see a whole populace see positive meaning, smiling nodding and go on to shout down anyone who tests the rhetoric, its blind fanaticism.
> The vaccinate all crowd well just wants everyone to be vaccinated, the severity of the crisis is a forgone conclusion.
There was a gallup poll recently that asked people what the risk of hospitalization was if you got infected.
95% of D voters overestimated the risk, 78% of them were more than 10x wrong, and 41% of them were more than 50x wrong. R voters did better, but still overwhelmingly overestimated the risks.
So we're having this enormous discussion on misinformation and how to combat it and making sure people get "trustworthy" news, and yet, Americans are completely fucking wrong about the disease. It's a giant elephant in the room that no-one is addressing!
No wonder you can't have a rational debate about weighing different risks against each other, if your opponents wrongly overestimate the risk by one or two orders of magnitude.
One thing that is hard to quantify is the risk of long-term effects, which are unknown.
There is an elegant argument, due to Laplace, that says that if you have an urn containing red and blue balls, you extract N balls, and M of them are red, you should assume that the probability that the next ball is red is (M+1)/(N+2), and not M/N as one might naively assume. The general case requires integrating the beta function, which is kind of advanced, but the M=0 case can be done with elementary calculus, as follows.
Call X the probability of extracting a blue ball, which we view as a property of the urn. If we don't know anything about X, before we extract any balls, we should assume a uniform prior distribution P[X]=1 for 0<=X<=1 (this is the main and only assumption). The probability of seeing M=0 red balls after extracting N, for given X, is the same as the probability that all balls are blue, i.e., P[M=0|X]=X^N. But we care about P[X|M], not P[M|X]. By Bayes' theorem, P[X|M] is proportional to P[M|X]P[X], times a proportionality constant that makes the total probability be 1. Because we assumed P[X]=1, we have that P[X|M=0] is proportional to P[M=0|X]=X^N. The integral of X^N between X=0 and 1 is 1/(N+1), yielding P[X|M=0]=(N+1) X^N. The expected value of X is the integral for X=[0,1] of X P[X|M=0], which is E[X]=(N+1)/(N+2). This is the expected probability of a ball being blue, with 1-E[X]=1/(N+2) being the probability of a ball being red. QED.
Now say we have historically observed 1000 vaccines and they were all safe in the long term. It is still perfectly rational to assume that there is a 1/1002 chance that this vaccine is unsafe in the long term. Anybody claiming otherwise better have a cogent argument about why the prior probability should not be uniform. Saying that 1000 vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe is equivalent to assuming a prior of the form P[X]=1/(X (1-X)), which is hard to justify (and diverges at 0 and 1).
Basically, the problem is that we are entering the territory where the risk from the disease is comparable to a rational estimate of the risk of what we don't know, and it's hard to come to any kind of cogent conclusion.
But anybody who claims that all past vaccines were long-term safe and thus this one is long-term safe clearly does not understand basic probability.
I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false, as the vaccine has been proven to be safe, and bodies from COVID deaths continue to pile up. I try not to listen to politicians for the reasons you mentioned, but just looking at the data it seems like an awfully simple problem to me.
> I think the crux of the issue is that "the cure is worse than the illness" is objectively false
Since the disease is highly age-stratified and dependent on risk factors, the same goes for the vaccines. For elderly, it's a complete no-brainer. For me, in my forties, it's overwhelmingly false and I got vaccinated as bloody fast as I could. And for anyone in a risk group, it's false as well.
But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
> the vaccine has been proven to be safe
There are several vaccines, and some of them have issues. The AstraZeneca one is pretty much not in use any longer in the west because of the blood clotting issue, and there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
You are generally correct that the cure is not worse than the disease, for an overwhelming majority of people, but the truth is more complicated, and without long-term safety data for these vaccines, I completely understand that some people are hesitant.
At the core of the anti-vaxx bullshit is a tiny kernel of truth, and I think it's better to address that than to completely suppress everything they say, because that's just gonna make people on the fence extremely suspicious and tip them over the wrong way.
> there are reports now that teenage boys might suffer myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine. Incredibly rare, but the risk is not zero.
Another interesting factor at play here is that some people prefer for negative outcomes to come from inaction than action. It's like the trolley problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem) when people try to evaluate morality.
In this case, they would rather not take an action (get vaccinated) if there's a chance of harm and would prefer inaction (don't get vaccinated) despite the higher statistical risk of bad outcomes.
Right, the risks of the disease only apply if you actually catch it, and you might get lucky and avoid it. But choosing to get vaccinated means you take on whatever the tiny tiny risk of the vaccine is to you.
> But for healthy kids and teenagers? It's a wash for them personally, but if they're hanging around people in risk groups, there's a clear benefit of them getting vaccinated.
How many kids and teenagers aren't usually around groups of 40 year olds? Are there cities which are only populated with 12 year olds? Apartment complexes exclusively for those under 18?
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.
Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform? I mean that in of itself proves nothing.
There have been many attempts and even in my own circles and in the end the it has nothing to do with the facts and all about fear and badly calculating risk.
I can understand the mentality if you're hesitant of the vaccines being new and want to wait, but just understand that the current data shows you're taking a higher risk by not taking it. Your choice in the end, though.
People who are full anti-vax are a different thing altogether.
> Why not give a flat earther a huge prime time platform?
They did. It happened, and the dude died in the rocket as it crashed to Earth. And following that, I stopped hearing so many murmurs about if a lake surface was flat or convex.
He died last year. He also had successful launches previously. And those didn't halt anything.
The world, collectively, has been a bit busy with other stuff since last year. If anything COVID conspiracy stuff has pushed out all other conspiracies.
It's not possible to embarrass someone with no shame. It's easy to lie and debate dishonestly[1]. Engaging in such a debate would only legitimize a position that may have no legitimacy to begin with.
> If the science is so clear, why not give an anti vaxxer a huge prime time platform and embarrass them in debate?
Neonazis clamor that they need a platform all the time. Now that we can see what that's like (the US, in case it is not clear) we can see that this is a terrible idea.
Pro tip: if you declare any and all "serious attempts to address the concerns" as "disinformation", then the only thing left is ostracism and censorship.
With these specific therapies:
1) Myocarditis (long term heart damage)
2) general inflammation and clot risk
3) long term risks of brand new mRNA technology
For myself and other young athletes, my research leads me to understand that the vaccine is higher risk than the infection.
My greatest concern is the totalitarianism behind vaccine passports. At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
There's a lot of misleading information out there about myocarditis that makes the risk sound much worse than it is.
Yes adverse myocarditis reaction is a risk. But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
Even if you're young and healthy, we have no idea the long term risks of contracting a serious case of covid. You have to factor that into the risk equation.
> But it's something like 1 in 17,000. 1 in 500 Americans have died from covid.
This is true but misleading. You need to account for age as the primary factor that determines the risk exposure.
Edit: Surprised that someone downvoted this. Care you explain what you disagree here? I am simply pointing out that it is not straight forward to compare risk levels because they are highly dependent on age.
Then again, those 1/500 are old age or with existing debilitating health conditions. The rest of the people have a close to zero chance of dying from Covid. It is not a great idea to expose them to that 1/17000 chance of getting an unnecessary heart condition that will affect them for life. And remember, myocarditis and blood clot issues are secondary effects we know about now. The vaccine was invented and released very recently and there is no way to know the long term effects. And don't forget, this vaccine works with a brand-new genetic technology never before released to the public.
The thing is that death is not the only strongly negative outcome of CV19. It's not uncommon for young and formerly healthy individuals to experience long term effects, sometimes with debilitating severity. That is just as much worth avoiding as death is and needs to be factored into risk calculations.
"Notably, a recent survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 29 % of healthcare providers themselves expressed hesitancy about receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. The same survey found that among the general public, the group that reported that they “definitely will not get vaccinated” may be the hardest to reach via most traditional public health means. Only two emissaries were reported as trustworthy sources by at least half the people in this group: their personal health care provider (59 %) and former President Trump (56 %). These findings suggest that individual health care provider endorsement and support may be one of the sole avenues for reaching this group with reliable and timely vaccine information [60]."
> At this point even if the shot cured cancer I wouldn't take it because of how it's pushed.
And there it is. For you at least, this has nothing to do with evidence, or facts, or information, or patience or empathy or reasoning or sound medical judgment or anything else, it's just plain stubbornness that's so out of control you're willing to die rather than do something someone else told you to do.
Look, I get it. I hate being told what to do. But at least be honest with yourself that that's what's going on, and that all your talk of side effects and whatnot is a smokescreen.
Refusing to do something purely because somebody is trying to make you do it still means you're letting other people control your actions. That's not liberty either.
You are not alone. The authoritarian threat and government overreach problems are IMO orders of magnitude more important and concerning than the virus. I will almost certainly be taking a stand and be terminated by my employer over this within the next few weeks.
Problem: An ongoing pandemic, requiring greater or lesser levels of isolation.
Solution: A vaccine. Vaccinated individuals are much less likely to suffer the ill effects of the disease and to transmit the disease. Isolation is no longer necessary.
Problem: Large portions of the population refuse to take the vaccine. Isolation is still required for this portion.
Solution: Allow those who have been vaccinated freedom from isolation.
You assume the policy of pushing vaccination is sound, so the methods of its implementation are not totalitarian or it isn't a concern. But even if it was a sound policy from the standpoint of the state, the methods employed (censorship of communications on COVID and vaccines, restricting freedoms of unvaccinated) is still a totalitarian method.
Dozens of books have been written documenting the absolute, unmitigated travesty of the Trump administration. 70 million people still voted for him, and a majority of those did so as a positive review of his performance!
I'm not sure what to do, but I know now that "mountains of evidence" does not stop alluring stupidity.
I have and I still think so. First of all, it is not realistic to assume that you will convince everyone; you won't. Second, practice is necessary and bad faith counterparts will help you get better.
It is not my impression that "energy input of people spreading X is an order of magnitude lower". On the other hand, they obsess over such topics and spend a lot of time spreading their views - that is why they are visible.
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.
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.
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……
If this is correct, then why would you believe you've ascertained truth? The very hallmark of truth as we know it is that 'better' information, meaning more and more clarified data consistently resolve on the same conclusion.
The reasoning behind understand that “correct” and “persuasive” are two adjectives that aren’t synonyms and describe different values is fairly simple to communicate
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.
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."
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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…”
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.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I'd argue it's even more specific than distrust of government; I think it's mostly tribalism, at least in the U.S. I imagine if Trump had reacted differently to the pandemic (acknowledged it was a thing at the beginning and urged or mandated vaccines) I think you'd see a high vaccination rate within his base and a different demographic altogether showing their distrust of government.
Surely it is tribalism, but are you now giving a demonstration?
I have seen Trump boast about vaccines, in his usual distasteful way. I have seen him recommend vaccines. I have not seen him disparage or discourage vaccinations (though he's been extremely clumsy, as he was with everything).
It seemed to me that originally, when Trump boasted about the vaccines, his political opponents (the Democrats in US, and others elsewhere) were the ones who were sceptical about vaccine development - simply because of this tribalism.
Agreed, and I'm not OP, but I'd define "general education" to include concepts like effective fact-checking and media literacy, and not just for our children but for older folks as well.
I think a big part of the issue are some members of the older generations who left school long ago when there was maybe one newspaper in town. The internet, which came much later, gives everyone a voice and allows every idiot to dress stuff up, make it look professional, put lipstick on it and amplify it with the click of a button. How do you know to apply critical doubt to someone's claims when you don't even know how damn easy it is to produce a convincing fake? And if you do have a doubt, how would you even start fact-checking when all you know is Facebook and Youtube?
Too many people have their guard down, sitting in the comfort of their living room browsing The Algorithm, and don't even realize they are being attacked.
Education is only a part of it. One of other parts is trust in the system. Countries with more trustworthy politicians and more humane social policy have better response both to lockdown measures and vaccines.
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.
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.
...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
> 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.
Squeezing something into a yes-no when the entire argument is in the question's premise is an unreasonable tactic.
"[What are your] suggestions for how to fight misinformation[?]" assumes that the priority is fighting misinformation. MrYellowP's major point is that the first priority is fighting censorship and the premise is misguided.
And it isn't explicit but I think I detect a secondary point that YouTube doesn't have a any good suggestions for fighting misinformation either. Doing something ineffective isn't better than doing nothing; their strategy is managing to get the anti-vax agenda in as headline news, and making the vaccine a more political issue (which is bad for its uptake).
If somebody asks for solutions better than X, giving constraints that preclude X is no better than a red herring. Contrary to your claim, MrYellowP never cast doubt on the importance of fighting disinformation, or even tried. It's just a distraction, a derailment, and a favorite tactic of disinformation enablers since forever.
> 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.
(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.)
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
The FCC has no legal authority to regulate anti-vaccine content on TV. (I don't support such content, just explaining the law.) The FCC has some limited authority to regulate obscenity and indecency on over-the-air broadcast channels only. Congress gave them this authority because broadcast spectrum is a scarce public resource that reaches into everyone's home whether they want it or not. However the FCC generally has no authority over cable, Internet, or satellite content. Those systems aren't subject to spectrum scarcity and have effectively infinite capacity.
That makes sense, thanks! I'm wondering if there is some sort of regulation possibility on their processing of content or algorithms. In other words, similar to the cookie law in EU (which has an abysmal implementation) whereby individuals have more control on what they can and can't see and what gets promoted to them.
In general content promotion algorithms can't be regulated because a recommendation on which videos to watch is legally considered an opinion and thus Constitutionally protected free speech. The Supreme Court would probably only allow regulations in two narrow areas. The first would be where the promoted content is itself not Constitutionally protected due to obscenity or incitement of violence. The second would be commercial speech targeting children, who are legally considered as needing additional protection. For example the FTC can regulate some aspects of online services for minors under COPPA.
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.
> How do you propose to deal with unpopular opinions that turn out to be correct with this method?
Multiple tiers of signal (forums open to wider ideas that are, perhaps, more private than YouTube. Additionally, academic forums where people with relevant background can hash things out). I don't think the "everyone can see everything" Facebook / YouTube / Twitter model has been proven to work for difficult and sensitive topics.
YouTube is just not one of the places the messy conversations are safe to have. It's a cat-video host, not a pathology research organization or academic community (nor does it seem it wants to be).
> Also (and related) how do you propose to deal with corruption?
I don't know, but I think there's a burden of proof that the open model prevents corruption (assuming open is what we have now). It's massively vulnerable to propaganda and information distortion based on amount of effort put into amplify signal, not truth of information in signal. People with little background in a technical subject to lean on when exercising their critical thinking are very vulnerable to the notion "Everybody is saying it, so it must be true," and when you couple that to bubble effects I worry we see bad results.
The "wisdom of crowds" was always an experiment. It's possible for the experiment to fail.
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.