The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Yes, there's a lot of information out there about SARS-COV2 and COVID-19 infections out there that are downright misleading at best and life threatening at worst.
No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
We already have examples of central authorities pushing "information" that they agree with and supressing information they believe is "incorrect" - as a freeish country, we should absolutely not encourage this behavior.
The argument can be made that Youtube is a private company and free to do as they please.
I personally dont agree with that argument - to a regular random person, Youtube is synonymous with video content.
Youtube is the news.
Perhaps one solution for Youtube would be to demonetize and label such content as "unsafe" aka "don't sue me bro mode".
Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content.
Anyone who watches the content with "unsafe" mode on, sees the content.
Give customers the choice to choose and make up their own minds.
Removing content with the authority of being the primary video content platform? They don't get away so easy.
With power comes responsibility.
They have to handle this another way and this, is not it.
You have not made a case for why you think that public health issues — such as Covid — should be a topic fully exempt from restriction by YouTube. You've made the case that freedom is good and that YouTube can take all sorts of steps, but you haven't explain at all what your position on this tradeoff is.
As a country that restricts public behaviors when they conflict with public welfare, it is plausible to expect that YouTube would restrict contradictory information about Covid at this time. There are millions of views on content suggesting that Covid isn't real, for example, and those will — under this plausibly correct approach — end up terminated and removed.
What public good do you suggest outweighs the public harm done by allowing (for example) "Covid isn't real" content to remain visible online?
You haven't described any public good that lends weight to your argument, and without that, your argument won't sell to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. Freedom is not always a good thing, and we absolutely have laws restricting it for valid and serious reasons. If you wish others to consider that YouTube should exercise less restriction of freedom in this area, you need to be much more specific about why — to you, personally! — you think that good will come of them backing off.
By the time the United States was founded, the idea of restricting speech that "conflict[s] with the public welfare" had become so frequently abused for self-serving censorship that a prohibition against the whole idea was written into the the highest laws of the country. The rationale for doing so applies today. A society can't figure out what is true if well-meaning people in power have the ability to censor anything that they don't believe is true. Censors can be mistaken on the facts as much as anyone else, and it's a fundamental weakness in human nature that we apply different standards to claims for and against our interests. Some central body limiting information flows for the "public good" has never led to anything actually good and never will.
The public good arising from free speech is truth.
Thanks for your explanation. But one thing still confuses me.. that we should just leave the "covid is a lie" contents there despite the high possibility that it may kill people?
Yes. Censorship is worse than any falsehood that might circulate.
>Yes. Censorship is worse than any falsehood that might circulate.
That was not the question. The question was, are people losing their lives worth having no censorship of a specific topic.
The highest laws of the country were written specifically to ensure that restriction of speech is permissible when it causes significant harm to the population without any benefit outweighing that harm.
It is illegal to yell “fire” in a crowded theater and that is permitted under our country’s highest laws.
The case you’re making is that corporations, who do not have the power of military force over their citizens, should be held to the same standard of law as the governments that do.
As those governments legally have the right to prioritize the greater public gonod over individual rights, your logic implies that corporations, too, should be expected to prioritize the greater public good over individual rights.
This seems in direct contradiction to your point that speech should not be restricted, and so I cannot accept your reasoning as presented.
I think the root of my disagreement is with your phrase “self-serving speech”: the nation’s free speech restrictions must serve the nation’s citizens as a whole, in order to be legal. They must prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few, and do so only in circumstances where the harm is great if left unrestricted. The nation did not put into place such protections at the corporate level, resulting in YouTube, a platform with a population greater than that of our nation, having no legal requirement to prioritize the welfare of most over the welfare of few.
If your position is that YouTube should be bound to the same onus of responsibility as our nation, then YouTube should be taking much more aggressive action to censor content than it has done to date. It should be restricting individual speech where the welfare of the world’s citizens is at risk of significant harm, exactly as our nation’s laws are.
It seems like your true argument is not with YouTube, but is in fact with the theory that the welfare of the entire population is sufficient cause to restrict individual freedoms; and that this view applies both to YouTube’s policies, and to United States constitutional law. It’s your right to hold that view and express it in general, but I cannot agree, as I consider its outcomes both unjust to the greater good and unsupported by law.
The "fire in a crowded theater" case was overturned: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Noted :)
> just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics
All TV news shows are that. For example, consider the cliche about the news business "if it bleeds, it leads" which is far older than Fox News.
Some are more that than others. I'm very tired of fallacies of composition.
Be careful that it's not just shows that seem to agree with one's particular personal biases.
How is it you assume you have the agency to make objective assessments, but that others don't?
I didn't say I did. I said one must be very careful to not leap to the conclusion that just because a show agrees with you, that therefore they are unbiased. Or that one is not suffering from bias themselves.
We're all very good at tricking ourselves into believing that we are objective. It's called confirmation bias.
Although some of us, like me, actually are being objective.
Flattening everything into being equal remains fallacious.
> WHO is a political organization
The YouTube statement was not, really, about the WHO. It was an interview. Wojcicki was pointing out that they'll be removing "medically unsubstantiated" content like 5G conspiracy theories, and as an example said that anything that clearly contradicts the WHO would likely not qualify.
The decision to put "WHO" up there in the lede seems to be click baiting on the part of the BBC. Frustratingly I can't find a link to a transcript of the original interview, or even an indication from the article about who it was with.
Yes, it's disappointing that that the conversation has shifted to extreme examples. The actual policy seems reasonable and has room for discretion.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260
> Fact check your work. Use reputable sources from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and National Health Service to inform your content. For official resources relevant to your country/region, check here.
Google has a long history of partnering with partisan political organizations to police content, including Politifact and the Washington Post, among others.
WHO is just another example.
In the age of misinformation, how do we better equip our society to know (or even desire to know) what is accurate information?
I think it's easy to think of censorship as the answer, and it's easy to think that in this extreme circumstance that it's the answer. Maybe it is a slippery slope.
It is a problem though. People aren't doing a very good job of handling it on their own, either. So what's the answer? Genuinely curious about this.
Concise statements, concise pro arguments, concise con arguments, each pro/con having its own pro/con arguments behind it via hypertext. Make it easier to explore the tree of evidence.
If that worked, antivaxers wouldn’t be a thing.
It doesn't work that way. It's trivial to build a rigged tree of evidence that makes any claim look good. Remember gish gallops from 90s internet arguments?
The answer is reputation. Organizations need to market their dedication to objectivity - the processes they combat their own biases and the ability they have to cover different perspectives.
I think that HN readers trend rationalist and see the problem as one of presenting evidence. I respectfully disagree and present a different perspective, one which premises that objectivity is futile and that information is social/tribal.
There is truth and then there is information. I think that people can know only information — projections of truth we think to be truthful. Information must be stored as memory and thereby is rendered organic and messy.
I argue that information is socially constructed. Given the overwhelming complexity of the world, individuals evaluate the trustworthiness of information by how much they trust its transmitter and how people in their network — who collectively form their realities — also receive that information. There is scarcely enough time or resources for individuals to independently evaluate information (in a non-social way for truthiness). Observe for ourselves: how much do we accept as information just because someone we and our friends/family/colleagues trust says it?
In short, (I think that) we believe what others believe. The cost of evaluating information is too high, and so too is the social cost of believing something that is contrary to the beliefs of those others who constitute our immediate realities (the ones we directly experience day to day).
The answer in a democratic society that aims to have a free press? I think that at an abstract level the answer will have something to do with shortening the diameter of our society-level social network and more densely connecting distant subgraphs — such that different social realities can be bridged and the Overton window can be narrowed around the mean.
One merge-tribes implementation: Institutions that socialise people at a national or state-level and cross social classes, like a year of mandatory national civil service around the country. As we go through life, we progress through a series of institutions that socialise us at increasingly wider levels: family, grade school (hyperlocal), maybe religious group, middle school (local), high school (local), then university for some (international or national but upper middle-class if prestigious; otherwise regional). The EU’s Erasmus Programme brings EU students to study in other EU countries: individual networks that otherwise would never connect, get connected — and at a collective level the Programme contributes toward a pan-European identity. But in the US and the EU there are lack of institutions that socialise the masses both at a national/union level and across class. I expect that people will balk at the idea of a compulsory program in a “free” society, but I think that it is more productive for people to think about what a healthy society should ask of each members so that it can sustain a healthy abundance of freedom.
Another idea: Facebook and other online social networks creating intimate channels — not mass channels that inevitably devolve into shouting and chanting — that foster more cross-societal interaction and awareness. Though I think this is a lot weaker than an “IRL” solution.
I find our modern epistemic crisis very interesting and welcome emails to discuss.
Misinformation is killing people. Given that, who should YouTube use as a source of truth?
The US government? Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Or should they let 4chan tell your grandma to drink bleach to fight the Rona?
4chan was taking the virus seriously back in January, when the WHO was denying the need for travel lockdowns. The misinformation coming out of the WHO is what killed people, not the early warning that 4chan gave us.
Edit: note that in both replies to my comment, none of the specific facts I mentioned were responded to. The response of the countries is being blamed, the date I mentioned is being ignored; but I am comparing the information coming publicly out of the WHO in January to the information coming out of 4chan in January.
In hindsight, if you compared the information from both at that time, you would have had a better idea of the real situation if you believed 4chan over the WHO.
Do you really believe that? Check archive.org. The WHO published info on CV including technical guidance for the health ministries of nation states, at least as early as January 24. It’s safe to assume that national delegates would have been in discussions with WHO ahead of this. Remember, there’s only one WHO and yet we have many different responses and outcomes in different countries. The only logical conclusion is that those nations who’s responses led to poor outcomes should look to their own interpretation of WHO advice and the decisions they themselves made, as the cause of poor outcomes.
In Februari the WHO urges to not impose travel bans:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-who/who-chie...
Nations who handled the crisis the best, imposed travel bans early on and were criticised by the WHO.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/30/275959/the-china...
His actual speech (that Reuter’s reported on).
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...
The key sentence that Tedros is being criticised for is:
“First, there is no reason for measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade. WHO doesn’t recommend limiting trade and movement.”
However, in the same speech:
“ we must all act together now to limit further spread. The vast majority of cases outside China have a travel history to Wuhan, or contact with someone with a travel history to Wuhan”
and
“Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it”
This leads me to believe that perhaps he was trying to have it both ways:
- flag the need for action
- keep a major player from “losing face”.
I don’t envy his job, or in fact any of the UN organisations. You’re at the mercy of your big funders; you’re trying to influence hundreds of countries who’d rather focus on their own internal politics; you have no actual power. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. How on earth do you move the needle at all in that kind of environment?
His job is world health. If he put "saving face" for China, or trying to keep his job, over recommending a travel ban to prevent the spread of a deadly virus, then he is incompetent and he failed to prevent deaths... and my point still stands.
Your point only stands if the health ministers of the countries receiving that advice, had no responsibility for the advice they gave their own governments. Or do you believe that nation states bear no responsibility for their own decisions? Remember, WHO has no actual authority to impose anything. National governments do. Look to your own health minister and leaders for where to sheet the blame. Anybody hearing or reading that speech above that didn’t act - especially given all the actual technical guidance being offered by the WHO at the same time - should be looking in the mirror. A point I made elsewhere still stands. From the same source of advice - WHO - multiple nation states took different courses of action. Why do you think that is? They surely can’t all attribute their decisions to WHO otherwise all countries would have acted the same way. Clearly that’s not what’s happened.
The WHO is a source of information. The decisions made based on that information by various countries is completely irrelevant to anything I'm trying to say.
The WHO chose to recommend against travel bans. This was the information they shared with the world. If countries chose to enact such bans anyway - good for them: they knew better than to believe the WHO. The WHO, compared with 4chan, was in January the inferior source of public information about the virus.
> found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152
This was after Taiwan's warnings in December which they ignored.
This is a hilariously revisionist take people are trotting out.
Forget the WHO for a second (which remember was politically cast adrift by the US when they refused to participate in it.)
The news coming out of Europe/Iran/China had lay people in the US concerned by late February -- yet the American Government did everything it could to belittle or otherwise diminish the threat. Now it wants to turn around and suggest that it's actions are to be blamed by the WHO? What happened to self-responsibility?
Give me a break.
You are making a different point that the US could have acted sooner in late Feb.
Before the news coming out of Europe and Iran things were breaking in China. The 4chan guys were all over it way back in Jan. Remember the Chinese Dr whistle blower who got punished for letting the truth? He was dead by Jan 20-22.. at this point the WHO was downplaying, later praising China and telling everyone not to wear a mask.
The WHO response caused the outbreak to get out of control in Europe and elsewhere long before it hit North America.
To be fair, the WHO was advocating against travel restrictions, and against calling what was clearly a global pandemic as such.
If they’d switched tune to ‘close your borders’ and ‘this is a global pandemic’ earlier you would have seen some different responses.
"4chan was taking the virus seriously back in January,"
I think the thread under this is kinda missing a deeper point. 4chan was taking this virus seriously back in January. I also wouldn't be surprised that 4chan was the original origin of "it's just a flu, bro" meme, which is to say, plenty of 4chan and related communities was also mocking the idea of taking it seriously.
The point of free speech isn't that the speech will freely contain only the truth. The point of free speech is we need that debate to find the truth. Declaring the WHO as the one and only source of truth is a bad idea, even before we observe the fact that it has manifestly made numerous incorrect statements within the past couple of months, and that reasonably people can question some of the things it is saying even now.
There isn't an option where we get only pure, unfiltered truth. Sorry. That's life. But there is an option where we pretty much guarantee ourselves that we will not get the truth, and that option is declaring a single trusted source of truth who will somehow transcend the fact they are made up of falliable and potentially untrustworthy human beings to deliver you that truth.
4chan and terrorgram were also workshopping Corona-chan memes, entertaining the misconception that black people were immune to it, and trying to figure out ways to launch the boogaloo on the back of it.
They take it seriously in the same way that a rotating drum full of ping-pong balls happens to contain the winning lottery numbers every week. Glomming on to novelty is is the defining trait of quasi-anonymous social networks.
> Misinformation is killing people.
How many? I don't think it's very many.
Isn't one too many?
You'd need to ban pretty much everything if that was the standard.
Think of all the protest and conspiracy against Bill gates, 5G, think how many people are still gathering, not wearing any protection, think of how Trump compared it with just another flu, how it would just magically go away. I'd say misinformation indirectly killed thousands of people
The ban is meant for 4chan-based messages like "drink bleach/rubbing alcohol/methanol to cure yourself now!", which have killed plenty of people.
I think it's unfortunate that the population has become so stupid that we need to protect them from killing themselves by drinking household chemicals, based on tweets or whatever.
I can't see and end game that's not terrible.
Those are White House-based messages now.
https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance
> The ban is meant for 4chan-based messages like "drink bleach/rubbing alcohol/methanol to cure yourself now!", which have killed plenty of people.
How many? Give numbers. I don't think very many people followed that advice and got killed by it, and I cannot find any data that suggests otherwise.
They could remove only obvious errors/lies like "drink bleach" rather than subscribe to a single authoritative source of truth.
As another commenter noted, wearing a mask contradicts WHO advice.
It frightens me think that anyone would seriously drink bleach to fight a disease.
None. There is no single source of truth.
Maybe they should just have a disclaimer on every video: "Watch this with a critical eye and a grain of salt. Perhaps a truckload of salt. Use your brain."
That leads to free thinking and that is _exactly_ what they don't want.
>Given that, who should YouTube use as a source of truth?
Why are we expecting a private company to provide "a source of truth"? What happened to the whole idea of the Internet being about the free flow of information?
>Or should they let 4chan tell your grandma to drink bleach to fight the Rona?
Why don't we have parental controls for our parents yet? Why are we applying blanket bans on parts of the Internet when it's clearly a specific subset of the population that needs hand-holding to not injure themselves or others?
> No, censoring that content including videos is NOT the role of a hosting platform.
Huh? If I ran a hosting platform and people were putting absolute BS on there, I'd remove it too. People who run hosting platforms want to have integrity.
The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it, and they dug their heels on calling the outbreak a pandemic for weeks.
I think it depends how youtube draws the line. If they’re removing stuff like “use colloidial silver” or “no need to wash your hands” then sure. But the WHO is not gospel.
The errors the WHO has made have generally been corrected and so far as reliable authorities go on the pandemic there isn't a more reliable one, even if all are fallible. It's a better standard than nothing for stopping misinformation from killing people.
I agree that they're generally have good advice. But, I looked at their mask guidance, and they're still recommending that healthy people do not need to wear masks.
This ignores the possibility that people may be asymptomatic and contagious. Some government authorities have called for mask wearing outside. They are contradicting the WHO.
Should Youtube remove these views? That's why I said it all depends just how strictly they're going on WHO guidelines. If they're only removing obvious nonsense, fine. But the WHO should not be the only authority, especially if different health authorities may disagree.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
The WHO never denied human-to-human transmission. This is a blatant lie.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,"
https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1217043229427761152?s=20
Absence of evidence of an effect does not entail evidence of absence of that effect.
Not sure what you're trying to say about the WHOs ongoing evidence gathering in the context of this tweet?
That's not a denial. It's a we have yet to confirm.
But surely the prudent, cautious way of wording a non-denial would be "no clear evidence of the impossibility of human-to-human transmission"?
And how do you go about testing that hypothesis except for placing infected people next to uninfected people and watching for them to become infected?
Their phrasing is correct and so is their methodology.
That’s totally true, but I don’t think it should be controversial to say that the WHO lied by omission, and that their statement was intentionally intended to convince countries _not_ to lock down.
"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.
It may not have explicitly stated that there was no human to human transmission, but that was strongly suggestive that there wasn’t.
The default assumption should be, that a virus affecting hundreds of people already, could be contagious. Suggesting otherwise, with no reasonable evidence to support such, is deliberately obfuscating if not deliberately misleading. There was absolutely no reason to make such a statement other than to parrot without question what was being reported by the PRC.
Considering Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus received support from the PRC in his candidacy for leadership of the WHO, and the significant ties between his home country of Ethiopia and the PRC, I’m skeptical that it was just absolute ignorance without any political influence or bias that prompted such a statement.
Actually, technically that is the WHO summarising results from preliminary investigations by the Chinese authorities.
Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy. It's like a newspaper reporting on the words/claims of a celeb or politician, and folk claiming that those words/claims were actually the newspaper's claims.
> Saying that that is the WHO making that claim is incorrect, a kind of logical fallacy.
WHO is in fact making that claim at the behest of China. The are not reporting like a newspaper as you claim, because a newspaper would have a duty to investigate the claims, the WHO just took China at their word and republished it.
WHO is the UNs international health organization and they are supposed to be independent. The onus is on the WHO to publish this alleged “preliminary investigation” referenced by the Chinese Authorities (hint: it does not exist). Once they admit there was no actual written report of the “preliminary investigation” or data provided by the Chinese Authorities, then they can identify the actual Chinese Authority who made the representations to the WHO, and we can continue to peal back the layers.
Do you think repeating propaganda designed to cover-up a huge outbreak is responsible for such an organization? At the time of that tweet they had zero access to China.
I remember them clearly doing that publically.
Did the WHO explicitly deny human transmission? Their earliest reports I saw said “we have no confirmed evidence of human transmission, but we are likely to find it”. It’s the second half of the sentence that people and the media seem to have ignored.
EDIT: Here's the link to their news conference on Jan 14th (same day as the "China has not reported human-to-human transmission" tweet): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia-wh...
Relevant bits:
>“From the information that we have it is possible that there is limited human-to-human transmission, potentially among families, but it is very clear right now that we have no sustained human-to-human transmission,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of WHO’s emerging diseases unit. The WHO is however preparing for the possibility that there could be a wider outbreak, she told a Geneva news briefing. “It is still early days, we don’t have a clear clinical picture.”
I didn't see where they said that second half, do you have a source? Because all I saw was a tweet from them saying that they haven't found any evidence of human to human transmission.
> The WHO denied human-to-human transmission
This is one of those completely false things that people only believe is true by repetition. Go back and actually read the full set of WHO statements in mid-January. They have a bunch of statements saying that nations should get prepared, one saying that specific studies haven’t yet found hard evidence for person-to-person transmission (because at that point most of the cases they’d managed to find were tied to the market). The WHO never, ever said that it can’t be transmitted, and they absolutely never said that people should do nothing about COVID-19. They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China"
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152
(this is CCP propaganda and they had zero access at the time, and it was after Taiwan told them about human-to-human transmission)
Can you be specific on
> The WHO denied human-to-human transmission even after Taiwan told them about it
I don't think anyone on HN needs to be told that "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" is not the same as "there are evidence that human to human transmission is not possible" which is how everyone is trying their hardest to interpret it as.
> even after Taiwan told them about it
Do you have a primary source about it? Every time someone references it, it's an editorial obfuscating the embarrassing primary source of Taiwan's "warning" email from December 31 which reads:
"News resources today indicate that at least seven atypical pneumonia cases were reported in Wuhan, CHINA. Their health authorities replied to the media that the cases were believed not SARS; however the samples are still under examination, and cases have been isolated for treatment.
I would greatly appreciate it if you have relevant information to share with us.
Thank you very much in advance for your attention to this matter."
where they're asking for the WHO's help clarifying something they heard over the news.
Taiwan told them about human-to-human transmission in December, and the WHO responded by repeating CCP propaganda verbatim in January saying there was no evidence of it.
Note that at the time WHO had zero access to China, because of the cover-up ongoing.
If you read my post I'm exactly answering your point.
Advertisers don’t want their ads on fringe content.
If that was the reason, why ban instead of just demonetizing those videos, like YouTube already does with tons of other videos that are not "advertiser-friendly"?
This is a ridiculous assumption. For two obvious examples, Art Bell attracted plenty of advertisers, as did early-day Howard Stern.
Some advertisers do, and some do not. Don't lump them all into a single bucket. YouTube is creating an environment that guarantees a future without Art Bells or Howard Sterns.
The concern you raise could easily be remedied with a single checkbox on the advertiser portal labeled "Display this Campaign on Fringe Content". The fact that with the enormous technical capability of Google, they choose not to do this and instead decide that they know the advertisers' preferences better than the advertisers themselves demonstrates clearly that this is about power and control, not ad revenue or serving the customer.
"absolute BS" various.
> Anyone who's a minor doesnt get to see this "unsafe" content.
Even that is an authoritarian nightmare. We already have laws that restrict minors from participating in certain activities.
You're saying you want YouTube to be the parental guardian of children based on their current whims. They should bar content from minors where the law requires it. Let the legislatures battle the people over whether the law-of-land should include barring minors from information that "contradicts" the WHO.
How easily we drop our freedom and liberty for a tiny bit of supposed safety. Unbelievable.
If Youtube is the news ... that would seem to involve even more editorial management.
There is a great deal of complexity here.
On the broader topic, breaking up Youtube, Facebook and the like is entirely desirable but would probably be pointless unfortunately. Increases in copyright zeal make a new competitor to YouTube impossible and the network effect guarantees both theirs and Faceebook's dominance. In light of this, I imagine the only solution is to legislatively guarantee an uncensored platform on essentially the same logic that requires net-neutrality.
But I point out that "uncensored" is entirely ambiguous. For better or worse, the vast mass of people want and expect it with the percentage very dependent on the particular item. From archaic restrictions on "dirty" words over radio waves through to displays of sex to recruiting terrorists to national secrets to doxing individuals to child pornography.
For right or wrong, somewhere, the public, legislators and each individual decides to draw a line. In addition, for short periods of crisis or certain locations or certain influencers, the line can move. The often misused example of yelling fire in a theater comes to mind but a national leader harmfully using false announcements to raise the value of stock he owns would be an example. More relevant would be the South African leader who zealously told his people AIDS can only come from drug abuse.
On the YouTube issue, for right or wrong, they drew the line in a place some would not. I would guess because they view such messaging as unusually fatal in the short term and they don't want to be a part of it. And that they could not find any simple judgement criterion that would do what they want without doing too much and yet be palatable world wide. If we legally require them to carry every upload regardless of content then it will lift all their burdens. But it will certainly create very real problems for others.
My point is that the issue is far more complex than bumper sticker sized answers.
Might I suggest a line? Damage. Quantifiable damage that reasonable people could assess in a court of law. Stop and think about every exception to free speech that the US has: libel/slander, disclosing troop movements, breaking non disclosure agreements, perverting the course of justice, direct incitement of violence... they all fairly directly cause damage.
This line is not particularly fuzzy, and it makes some forms of censorship against speech that clearly doesn't cause direct quantifiable damage stand out as something entirely different than the other exceptions.
Some examples: hate speech does not cause damage that could be proved and quantified in a court of law. "Bad words" do not cause damage. Conspiracy theories do not directly cause damage (unless a court decided reasonable people would do things that caused damage based on the information, so there could be exceptions here).
Everything is indeed complex. But some ways of thinking about a problem can make the complexity more manageable.
> Increases in copyright zeal make a new competitor to YouTube impossible and the network effect guarantees both theirs and Faceebook's dominance.
A Youtuber I follow recently made a really good point: Youtube has been promoting official channels of traditional media, it's extremely rare for a new Youtuber to become a big name, and most novel video content/memes now comes from TikTok. We're likely seeing Youtube fall out of relevance right now, with the younger generation going to TikTok instead.
I think tech moved too quickly and in some ways, due to power being left on the table by government, tech became responsible; much like how businesses have taken up the responsibility of American healthcare due to the issue being under-addressed by government.
Now that YouTube is used by people of all ages, Google has to make social and political decisions about what kind of content is appropriate for different ages.
this is an excellent idea: safe mode. let people who can't decide for themselves what's safe to watch, let them watch safe mode only. everyone else, should be able to decide for themselves (opt in)
The problem isn’t letting people decide for themselves. It’s the fact that when it comes to some things, even a small minority “deciding stupid” can destroy the commons eg endanger lots of lives. Isn’t there a saying that’s something like, “your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins”?
> your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins
I live by that philosophy!
As I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956768
"... if I see you foisting your opinions on what kind of content I get to see, that's you infringing on my freedom and we have a problem."
Your quote is more concise and to the point :D
Except the point I was making is that your right to act on your belief of egregious nonsense ends when it results in harm to me.
Who gets to decide what is nonsense. What happens when society thinks YOU are the one with nonsensical beliefs?
"Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-convi...
When people are directly threatening people because they are even slightly linked to 5G towers, or they're peddling nonsense like 'drinking bleach will cure you of corona', then I think it's fair to draw a line in the sand and say those are dangerous, nonsensical beliefs.
But to be fair to the person you’re responding to, you still haven’t answered his actual question - who gets to decide?
The example you gave is only “obvious” because the majority think so. However we’re increasingly living in an environment where people are “fleeing the centre”. People have abandoned authority, and are increasingly abandoning science, even to the point of doubting or reinterpreting their own lived experience.
The key to “common sense” is “common”. When very little is held in common, where do you find common sense?
This is precisely why, in my view, the single greatest danger to mankind is - a “meta-danger” perhaps - is the explosion in deliberate attempts (irrespective of motive - lulz, commercial profit, political influence or psychological warfare) to misinform, sow discord, and erode trust. It is an absolute scourge and is already starting to bite us in the collective arse, by limiting our ability to act collectively for objective common good.
I have no idea at all how we fight this threat.
EDITED: SP. collect > collectively
Ultimately, youtube is a website and not a utility. If someone posted something bad on your website, you'd probably delete it, too.
private company doesn't fly. The moment they started curating their content, they are no longer pipes, they are editors.
As such, they are subject to freedom of speech rules, and likely will come under increasing scrutiny as they very well should.
Its about time, too.
This is a terrible take.
> WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics.
Yes, they have opinions. That doesn't make them as corrupt as Fox News.
By spreading misinformation about face masks and travel bans, they do actually put people's lives on the line, though. WHO's body count is greater than some cable news network with less viewership than a mid-sized YouTube channel.
Let's not forget WHO opposed travel bans on numerous occasions, said face masks were not effective, and repeated CCP propaganda verbatim while seeking to punish China's enemies (and hanging up on reporters when questioned about it).
Then the Director-General implied, without a shred of evidence, that he was the victim of racist smears from Taiwan's government after he sought to put them in direct danger by denying them access to critical data.
The WHO is worse than Fox News and it's not even in the same ballpark.
Agree. They are a monopoly, and cannot be allowed to function like any old hosting platform.
The WHO was wrong on many occasions during this pandemic. They said it couldn't or was hard to transmit between people - meanwhile, it was spreading everywhere and Taiwan tried to warn them.
They said we should not shut down international travel from China. Wrong again. Taiwan and a few others did and it helped out immensely.
Appealing to human authority as the source of truth is dangerous. For humans, truth only has a chance to come out when vigorous debate is allowed.
EDIT: adding references as requested.
WHO ignored Taiwan:
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/ahel/202003240229.aspx
On Jan 12:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/12-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
There are doctors who disagree with WHO and we should be able to hear them.
Can you please provide references for your assertions. Thanks.
Not the original poster, but I found at least this one.
https://twitter.com/who/status/1217043229427761152?lang=en
"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement. They never ever said "okay, this definitely isn't transmissible, everybody can ignore it". They said in the early stages that it was too soon to be sure. All the other tweets from this period are saying the same thing: something might be coming, so countries should prepare.
To me - its just weasel words issued by an organization that was denied first hand access to wuhan. Perfectly crafted to play both sides.
None of us should be surprised that a large scale multi-national organization like the WHO can only speak in bureaucratic half truths. Their primary purpose for the CCP is to be a tool for moral laundering.
> Taiwan tried to warn them.
Do you have references for this, or the scientific data that Taiwan used to make that assertion at the time the WHO made that statement? It would better help your argument, and make it more powerful, since the only quoted text is the WHO stating "According to the preliminary epidemiological investigation..", which might very much be factually true.