Current WHO advice: "If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19." [0]
Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO?
I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :(
We keep trying to encourage our kids to ask good questions, then I see what's happening out there in the world, and I wonder when the grown-ups are going to start asking good questions...
I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :(
The idea is: "We are the decent, good, people who know the truth. Now we control the platforms, so it's only well and good we control the information, and we tell the deplorable others what they can and can't say."
Almost everyone in the history books as a horrible oppressor has told themselves that narrative. Many of them were brave, noble, and well meaning, and had an ideology that told them they were in the right.
How are the employees of YouTube or any tech company exempt from those forces? What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history?
This is how all news media operated before the internet created mouthpieces for non-professionals. In addition to suppressing some inconvenient truths they filtered out crackpot ideas that have become a plague in modern times.
What exactly qualifies someone to be a "professional" who is allowed to speak?
The vast majority of content I watch on Youtube is produced by independent creators covering a variety of topics with much more detail, expertise, and truth than any mainstream program.
There isn’t “qualified” and “unqualified”. It’s not that black-and-white, and I wish people would accept that more. Basically what we should be asking ourselves is “What’s the likelihood that what this person is telling me is correct?” which is much more useful, because it immediately puts the focus on what factors contribute to that.
We aren’t going to conclude anything useful until we can agree that there are good and bad tradeoffs between central information control and decentralized, and that the optimum at any given point in time probably lies somewhere in between and depends on the context in which the communication takes place.
It is not a given that there exists an optimal middle ground when it comes to central information control. Similar arguments have been done in regard to encryption controls where the arguments are in favor of backdoors, escrows, export control. But it has been mostly rejected that we need to find a optimal middle ground between giving government access to information and providing encryption for e-commerce depending on the context in which the communication takes place. We either have strong encryption or we don't.
I would also look to inspiration from the past, and here I will copy loosely from a talk by Eben Moglen. Government wants to control communication. Sometimes in a claim of some civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses, and sometimes quite explicitly for the purpose of remaining itself in power. But whatever the reason may be, a lust for power or a misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many, central information control is an evil whose time has come.
Right now Google is not seen as an essential part of the infrastructure of society. Google can shutdown email, maps, search and Youtube today and we the citizens have no voice to dictate otherwise. No matter how much people rely on Google maps for driving, or have information stored in the cloud that impact their lives, for now those systems are not considered essential. That view however is starting to change as people's lives start to get unseparable from their use of those services. At that point we get the same discussion. Who ought to speak to the masses, and what will that decision be based on? A lust for power, or the belief in the superiority of government wisdom?
> central information control is an evil whose time has come.
It depends on the context. If your city is being invaded by a civilian-slaughtering army, I doubt many of the civilians would refer to a coordinated military defense as "evil", even though it would rely heavily on centralized information control.
In war time we accept the kind of government control that we would never do in peace time. Law is suspended. Freedom is removed. Elections is historically often put on hold.
During war time people genuinely believe in the superiority of government wisdom. It is sad aspect of how people work during a crisis, and it has enabled many atrocities which we in peace time can't image a human being could commit. Thankfully in peace time people tend to build up some resistance and recognize government wisdom for what it is. Sometimes it is right, sometimes it is not, and only through open dialog and free communication can we determine which is which.
I think part of the trouble is, our society is built on the radical decentralization of information control during the enlightenment. Our most basic propaganda is based around the idea that we are the successful society because we allow more decentralised information control. The central powers who would like to now have more control over our information are also the primary sources of propaganda which justifies our way of life by saying everyone can make up their own mind.
If I had the skills I would build a strategy game that deals with the new reality - that tribes are nonlocal but often ideologically quite cohesive. Exploring the idea that one's ideological affiliations, rather than one's government or search engine, controls one's thought seems like it would lend itself to the medium rather well.
Tribes are non local? That's a pipe dream. Every minute 23 girls younger than 18 married in a pre-arrangement. If a 35 year old man would trade a goat for a 13 year old girl in the developed world than the tribe would hang this man before midnight when the news reports on this extreme form of child abuse. When it these things happen outside the Dunbar number in developing countries we don't give a fuck.
Today 600 million women are alive that were sold before they were 18 to the highest bid, around 200 million also received a physical downgrade by butchering & cutting out a part of their vagina.
When I say 'tribes', I am referring to any ideological monoculture. Obviously some tribes are more adapted to local conditions. I would bet even the tribes you are referring to prioritise access to communications technology that allows them to co-ordinate their activities over distances that would have been unmanageable to them two generations ago.
Makes total sense. The black and white thing always seemed so weird. It's a false dichotomy.
Even if censorship is good in the particular context (which seems to be the case here), but bad in general and bad in principle, it seems that the real issue is that there should be one unaccountable entity who gets to make that decision. Why is Youtube big enough to have such an impact without being accountable in any way to the public?
It's not just Youtube, it's also Twitter[1] and Facebook[2]. When they all act in concert with each other, it's much harder to hold them accountable.
I think censorship can be dangerous in this context so I'm working on a decentralised fact-checker. I think it could be a more constructive solution to fake news that isn't subject to these problems: https://blog.verifact.io/2020/04/20/A-decentralised-fact-che...
I believe that you, and I, have a robust filter to identify trustworthy content. But would you agree that most people consume only reliable content on YouTube, or Facebook? There is plenty of evidence that is not the case, and these platforms are being actively attacked by bad actors.
IMHO it is better to start from a point of humility and recognize that we all have our own particular blind spots. Technocratic management and epistemology would be prime examples in this case.
Who cares if people consume incorrect information? Who decides what is correct?
The WHO has been wrong throughout this pandemic. Accusations of misconduct and a pro-CCP bias are still playing out. The establishment sources have similarly been wrong. At the end of the day, man is still fallible and 'fact-check' is a deceptive misnomer.
No. Not vaccinating children get people killed. Therefore, the reasonable response is to mandate child vaccinations (together with fines and other punishments for non-compliance). With such mandates (that are already in many countries), non-compliance is limited to very tiny segment of population.
> The "5G causes coronavirus" conspiracy theory is causing people to burn down mobile phone masts.
The "5G causes coronavirus" is an obvious nonsense, but lets assume for the purpose of an argument that it is true. Even in such case a reasonable response is to petition your MP or do mass demonstrations, not burning mobile phone masts (as violent vigilantism is generally unacceptable approach).
As violent vigilantism is completely unacceptable reaction regardless of truthness of such statements, it does not make sense to blame that statements for such reaction based on being false (unless that statements also contain calls to violence, but in that case even truthfull statements would be responsible for that).
RE: 'YouTube bans coronavirus-related content that directly contradicts WHO advice'
WHO advice is the standard being proposed. Adults should be capable of consuming and evaluating information. The solution is not to regard everyone as a child who needs to be coddled.
>'So .. we should give up on all informational hygiene standards and just let people tell their followers to inject bleach or whatever'
Let individual consumers determine their own standards. It is absurd to suggest that there would be no standards without platforms or supranational organizations determining them. When you choose to take a politically charged interpretation of a presser as your own standard, you establish this.
Individuals can disagree. We can't make the world safe for everyone. If based upon your informational standards you think that the president told someone to inject bleach, that's fine. Reasonable people can disagree.
> a question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly when we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful. Steve, please.
What is your interpretation of "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside"? I mean, it's kind of gibberish, not full sentences where one concept is logically related to another, but what do you think it means? Do you think it's a responsible thing to say after the deaths of people from self-administered chloroquine? Do you not think it refers to injections of disinfectant?
Of course, part of how this tactic works is that for any interpretation I can offer you can say "that's not what he said/meant", because what he said is incoherent.
Here is a more enlightening as well as fuller quote from the president:
"And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it'd be interesting to check that. So you're going to have to use medical doctors, but it sounds interesting to me, so we'll see."
The point being he is talking about doctors investigating and employing his "technique".
Don't get me wrong, it is disappointing that someone who doesn't appear to be able to formulate long, coherent thoughts is our president, but I am sick to death of the way some of the things he says are twisted simply because people hate on him. It is a deep level of bias.
I mean there are medical textbooks that recommended injecting disinfectant for treating viruses, and there are no shortage of doctors who do it already in their practices. And if people are already doing it anyway, and as far as anyone can tell not immediately dying, then why shouldn't it be tested?
(the first talks about ozone, which is a disinfectant but fundamentally cannot be taken internally as it's a gas, and it's slightly toxic https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/ozone-generators-... ; the book mentions "Oxygen-Ozone therapy is a complementary approach less known than homeopathy and acupuncture" so that's obviously quackery as well)
Do you not see how it's ironic that you're calling other people quacks, in the context of literally lobbying against using empirical evidence to decide whether or not something is safe and effective?
You're engaging with someone who has endeavored to derail a discussion into partisan interpretations of Trump's statements. This after sidestepping logic in the original thread, bodes poorly for any further responses.
Mainstream is not professional.. just look at Fox news if you need convincing.
that say that if you cannot make the difference between an professional (or informed) opinion, and some redneck with the deep belief that the Earth is flat then I cannot do anything for you
Mainstream news, by all standard definitions, is professional. Fox News is the same as CNN and all the other channels in between, with countless examples of misinformation and outright false stories by every station.
Nobody is asking you to do anything for them, in fact they're asking for the opposite; to let them decide for themselves. And most people can do that just fine. Just because some extremist views exist does not mean the majority believes in them.
Indeed. In many fields, especially applied or related to life, only the less "professional" are assertive. Experts profess very nuanced thoughts.
Countering assertions which are proven false is good (pointing to a FAQ is sufficient). Censoring, on the other hand, seems counterproductive to me and nourishes the usual "they censor us because they cannot produce a valid counter-argument".
This statement is exactly the bollocks that got us here. Just because you have a social media account, or fucking "likes", does not qualify you to speak about pandemics, or vaccinations, or gravity, etc.
Yeah but not all " independent creators covering a variety of topics " are that experienced, and certainly not all the retards in the Covid facebook groups giving their opinion.
I'm not sure the point you wanted to make on the first place but you seemed to oppose the fact that some people should stfu a little on the internet because they know nothing.
Before the web was in every house we had professional media often pushing crackpot theories and news agents had a whole section of monthly crackpot magazines, one of mine had them right next to the comic section to get picked up by impressionable young people.
Long before all this "5g causes corona virus" in the early 90's my local paper would often have stories about cell phones causing cancer. Long before "china to blame for coronavirus" we had "legitimate" media pushing the link between Iraq and 911. Long before any WHO was at the center of conspiracy theories the UN was.
Let's not even go into things like current affairs shows and fox news. The internet may have made you more aware of the amount of crazy out there, but it was always there.
you mean like the NYT's Judith Miller, ostensibly a professional, who sabre rattled for the 2nd iraq war based on aluminum tubes which .gov leadership immediately cited after being published? because that was fairly crackpotty.
I'm not saying your example is wrong, but the fact that it's from nearly 20 years ago is very telling. Even the most credible of sources will get something very wrong on occasion.
>I'm not saying your example is wrong, but the fact that it's from nearly 20 years ago is very telling.
telling in what way? This behavior hasn't really slowed down, and was persistent through the Obama administration, too.
Many, including myself, feel as if that behavior is par for the course with regards to NYT. Chomsky refers to it as the NYT's special role of 'creating history'[0].
That's why they have some strange ability to be cited realistically by serious people, even when they're entirely wrong about something.
I think what's needed is a measurement of how many times a source was later proven to be wrong, and then issued a correction to state as much. Or even better, a percentage comparing the # of times they got wrong with the percentage of times they admitted as much. A sort of "batting average" for admitting their mistakes.
All sources will get it wrong from time to time. A reporter's primary loyalty should be to the truth, regardless of whether it aligns with their pre-conceived notions. Coming up with a way to quantify that loyalty would be a service to society.
The thing is most lies and manipulation do not happen by stating false facts. They happen by ignoring (and never mentioning) the facts that do not fit the narrative and by pushing the ones that do. Or by presenting facts in a misleading way (like confusing CFR with IFR, or eliminating context).
And I am afraid I do not know a mainstream media that doesn’t do that on a massive scale. The WSJ perhaps. Certainly not the NYT.
> In addition to suppressing some inconvenient truths they filtered out crackpot ideas that have become a plague in modern times.
Every idea starts out as some fringe crackpot idea relative to the status quo. Government recognized marriage of a same sex couple comes to mind as a recent example. Some ideas (e.g. "the general public should wear a mask in public to reduce the spread of coronavirus") make it from crazy to accepted faster than others.
You're right. We're so much better off when a significant segment of the population believes that the Secretary of State is pimping out children from a pizza restaurant.
Yes, because the idea of rich, influential men pimping out children in modern America is simply unthinkable and certainly hasn't happened recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
The conspiracy theory stuff is seemingly always exactly wrong about this. Not only does it magnify unsubstantiated allegations, it often helps suppress the genuine ones; look at how badly the Weinstein accusers have been treated.
This is a well-known issue, but what is your solution? Ban internet and go back to the 90s? It's pointless to gripe about this without a good alternative.
> crackpot ideas that have become a plague in modern times.
It's especially fascinating to read this after we have literal viral pandemic, about which WHO told us it's not transmissible human to human, government told us go and enjoy restaurants and parades, CDC banned third-party tests and then completely bungled their own tests, same CDC advised people not to wear masks, and so on, and so on... yeah sure, "crackpot ideas" have become a plague. That's where the problem is. I am sitting a month in a quarantine while watching the economy slowly turning to dust - because some crackpot dude made a video about his ideas on Youtube, right?
This sort of weird slippery slope argument that banning obviously bad advice somehow leads to youtube becoming a "horrible oppressor" doesn't pass the smell test.
By this reasoning, _any_ platform that features _any form of moderation at all_ will devolve into oppression. Is HN at risk of becoming oppressive due to banning flamebait and spam comments?
One of the youtube series I watch normally features pork ribs. Like, the shrinkwrapped package you get from the grocery store. Well that video the creator couldn't get pork ribs because of coronavirus and so had used beef ribs instead - and couldn't even plainly say the reason why. Instead he had to hold up a bottle of corona beer and say "Well, it's due to beer, if you get my drift."
Is Youtube actually in the right here? The guy just wanted to say he couldn't find pork ribs. He wasn't telling anyone to inject bleach or chug quinine.
That isn't just clamping down on the conspiracy nutters. This has repeatedly become an issue in multiple videos from videogame commentary to cooking shows I watch. Youtube and other large corporates often see themselves as leading the dumb cattle that is the general population and frankly it's outright insulting and their handling of this situation is abysmal.
But also it's going to get worse. The more Youtube can get away with these things, the more they'll do them. Don't be surprised when this extends even more to protected political speech (Israel BDS, free HK, Taiwanese independence, etc) because it's happened before and it will happen again.
I'm not arguing that youtube is doing a good job, or that youtube's brand of corona-related censorship is in any way making a positive impact.
I'm arguing against the parent comment that essentially makes the argument that _all forms_ of censorship/moderation are bad and inherently lead to oppression.
If you instead want to argue that youtube's specific policies regarding coronavirus are bad/harmful/etc, go ahead, I won't stop you.
Hn is a moderated community, and it's value partially comes from it's moderation. It's restricted to a set of topics, and if things get too out of hand whether it's a personal attack or just insanity, the comment is going to get removed.
Except you can view the dead comments. You can still see the removed stories. You have to opt-in to that, but it's just a checkbox in your profile. HN is moderated, but there is no censorship.
The issue with censorship is that it has to grow. You can't defend taking down say, videos about the Israel BDS movement, and not also take down videos about Free HK. Either the platform openly admits that it's biased or it has to keep growing what can't be discussed and inevitably that's going to start including content that everyone feels shouldn't be censored.
This is the same with your example though? Anyone can upload a video talking about the coronavirus, they just might not receive money for it (they'll be demonetized). Youtube only seems to be taking an active 'censorship' approach for comments spreading bad information about the virus. Whether or not "against WHO advice" is a good metric for this is debatable, but the goal seems worthwhile.
> The issue with censorship is that it has to grow. You can't defend taking down say, videos about the Israel BDS movement, and not also take down videos about Free HK.
I fail to see how this property, if it exists, is any less present in a "moderated but without explicit censhorship" system.
Youtube only seems to be taking an active 'censorship' approach
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky wrote an entire book about 'censorship' that's not technically censorship, titled Manufacturing Consent. Rather, what happens in the industrialized west uses soft influence and economic power to achieve the same ends. Media in such a "propaganda model" of operation does technically disseminate information, but does it in such a way as to reduce visibility, reduce emotional impact, and economically discourage.
Actually, the power to engage in a "propaganda model" of operation enjoyed by YouTube is in many ways much more immediate and absolute than that exercised by the western governments in the 20th century.
Demonetization is a form of censorship when Youtube is your paycheck.
If your employer threatened to not pay you because you took a political position that would be abhorrent and oppressive treatment. Youtube is not a direct employee and it's more of a business partner, but it's wielding it's power to control speech - which is oppressive.
I'm arguing against the parent comment that essentially makes the argument that _all forms_ of censorship/moderation are bad and inherently lead to oppression.
This is "basic straw-manning 101." Of course, if you put an absolute re-framing into the mouth of another, it's going to break. Let's try this: Any censorship/moderation of sufficient scope and power, combined with too little accountability, is probably going to produce bad outcomes.
Is YouTube possessed of great scope and power? Check.
Is YouTube transparent and accountable in the way it uses this power? Many, many people don't see it this way. To the point, that people write innumerable articles and make innumerable videos about it. In fact, people have even established at least one union around this issue.
Look, the whole principle of "Power Corrupts" is based upon the same underlying forces as, "You can't convince someone of a fact, if their paycheck depends on it." Everyone is subject to such biases. No one is possessed of all the relevant facts and perspectives. This, in fact, is the true principle behind such phrases as "check your privilege."
We are all human beings. We are all fallible. We all have the potential to make mistakes and even carry out miscarriages of justice and unfairness, if we are given enough power with too little accountability. It's thinking one is somehow immune, or somehow justified by circumstances, which is the key ingredient to the very worst evils in history.
Scope for self doubt and transparency work, and when people lack self doubt and exercise power without transparency, bad things happen. It's not some "weird slippery slope." It's an established part of the human conditions, going back thousands of years, valid in all times, all cultures, and all places.
(P.S. A key historical indicator that such corruption is happening: When a group of highly educated people start to work against transparency and the openness of information, one is in this regime of "Too much power, too little transparency." Heck, these highly educated, smart people might even pull some middle-school shenanigans, like "refutations" that leave out the sources.)
(P.P.S. One thing younger people don't understand, is how in past decades the ethos of Free Speech used to suffuse society. People wouldn't just accede to the letter of the law, they would enact the ethos in their everyday lives. There is an obvious epistemological wisdom in such practice. Really, wanting to hang out with people with such an ethos is really just an extension of wanting to hang out with honest people. Seems to me, this changed in the early days of the Internet, with electronically implemented forms of near-censorship, and that the ethos of regular life has shifted to accepting such practice of near-censorship.)
One of the things that's important when we discuss any kind of censorship and freedom of speech is what we call "Chilling Effects". If you know taking a political position is going to result in your family being arrested and put in prison, then your speech is being curbed even without being punished and it's one of the insidious wrongs of censorship.
When a grown man who was in the marines for several years is afraid he's going to lose his youtube channel talking about why he can't find pork ribs, that's a chilling effect. When a multi-million dollar videogame streamer is afraid he's going to be demonetized if he talks about why he's filming from home instead of his studio, that's a chilling effect.
The goal of a good censor is not to enforce censorship. It's to get the people to enforce it themselves.
Tim Pool has talked about it regularly, how if independent Youtubers even speak the word their video will be instantly demonetized, but bigger YT channels (those with millions of subs) as well as mainstream media outlets can use the term with no ill effects. He's such a prolific content creator across three channels I can't single out an exact video from the past ~90 days of material for you though.
If the telephone system had the same moderation as HN then I would suspect that indeed it would seen as oppressive if they were listening on all telephone calls and banned users who they deemed inappropriate citizens.
We only have one telephone system so being banned has a rather large impact as it is an essential service. So maybe we should ask what platforms are like other essential services. Radio is an essential service. What about Youtube? The telephone system is an essential service. What about Skype? I think libraries are also seen as an essential service, so what about Wikipedia? And then we have HN. How essential is HN?
I think there is a big difference between content moderation (based on published and reasonably objective rules) and an outright ban on contradicting the stance of an organisation that is highly political.
If this rule was implemented earlier, you’d be banned for saying there is human-to-human transmission, proposing flight restrictions, or advocating for the general public to use masks. The W.H.O. has explicitly advised against each of those measures, despite significant disagreement on every one of those claims. It’s absurd that dissenting against the W.H.O. has been banned, although it’s predictable of course.
I've been very surprised, and I guess I shouldn't be, that so many folks are taking such a hard black or white stance on this. There's folks who've literally pushing ingestion of Chlorine Dioxide to eliminate coronavirus, or conflating HBOT with inhaling ozone to "clean" the lungs. I 100% believe that transparency and understanding when and why things are taken down can help, but there's a _lot_ of slippery-slope arguments being made that here that actually surprised me, when we're talking about actually trying to prevent people from spreading information that can actually lead other to harming themselves, rather than seeking treatment.
Moderation is not necessarily censorship. It is only censorship if the content is removed based on the content itself.
For example, shutting down a flamewar for simply being aggressive is not censorship, as long as the same discussion would have been permitted if held in good spirit.
Censoring "wrong" content likely has bad outcomes, the worst being that with only "good" content, critical thinking may get even sloppier.
HN has plenty of rules that remove content "based on the content itself". For example, HN bans job ads (outside of 'who is hiring' threads). There are no circumstances where a job ad post is allowed outside of 'who is hiring' and YC-funded companies, not even "in good spirit". Similarly, the HN FAQ says not to post comments complaining about paywalls, and there is no 'unless you are civil' exception.
Again, does banning content from an internet forum inevitably lead to "oppression" or "bad outcomes"? If so, why hasn't this happened to HN/Reddit/Twitter/etc?
As someone who did a lot of moderation in the past, people forget any platform is more akin to a cafe, instead of a public square. A cafe has rules that keep a pleasant atmosphere. A public square has a public function and needs rules to allow for a broad discourse or protests. One could argue if there is a certain size where a platform like youtube becomes a public square. But on the whole its their room, their rules.
I disagree. Aggression in the sense of language style, is very much in the eye of the beholder. As is assigning value to a ‘flamewar’. One person’s meaningless flamewar is another person’s valuable but heated argument.
Sure, if you stop something early you may have overstepped, but no one questions violence taking place when rocks are being thrown. Same goes for once a discussion degrades to ad hominem attacks/insults.
I think it's obviously bad advice for you to suggest that censorship isn't a slippery slope. Under section 239-C of the Obviously Bad Advice Act, I have dispatched the police to your location. Please be ready to comply when they arrive.
Sorry, but history is overwhelmingly against you. The historical precedents are legion. We're not talking about some "weird slippery slope argument." This is well established human nature. In fact, many of the items in the Bill of Rights are based around this principle.
In fact, the principle has a much shorter, snappier version: Power Corrupts.
Thanks to Google, Facebook and the others this is the golden era of being able to widely disseminate your alternate theories on everything. If that is your definition of freedom then you are less oppressed then any other humans in history.
Some people would like freedom to discuss the coronavirus without being oppressed. They can't on YouTube if this policy takes hold.
The sort of people who contradict the WHO happened to be right on this one; they predicted a problem early and tended to pre-empt the WHO on upcoming problems. This was also expected, because the WHO only advises stuff that is already obvious to everyone. Interested parties can offer better advice than the WHO because they can move with news while the WHO has to wait.
Case in point, Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity runs a prepper/doomsday style channel. He is also a very smart bloke with an honest-to-goodness PhD in a virus-related field. Who are YouTube to say his opinions are less valid than an organisation that can't say "Taiwan" in a sentence and can only say things that are politically palatable to China and the US?
Chris' advice on the coronavirus has been consistently high quality, accurate, sourced and early compared to the WHO. His only fault is his standards for safety are a lot higher than are reasonable. This policy will be aimed at exactly people like him. He has been contradicting the authorities all the way.
"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit."
That is completely and totally wrong. It is INSANE to suggest something so horrifyingly stupid and dangerous with a virus that has a two week asymptomatic, contagious incubation period. All the infected but don't know it yet people would lower the number of people they infect massively if they work masks. Every single country where mask wearing in public is the norm has a much lower fatality rate than every single country where it is not the norm.
Does that say it's harmful to wear masks? The WHO's guidance has been that it isn't necessary for individuals to wear medical PPE. There are valid concerns about this, both related to shortages and improper care.
Yes, it does. "In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite". But that is irrelevant, since that is not what I claimed. I said the WHO says masks don't work. I quoted them saying it to CNN for you, and linked it. How much more in denial can you get?
>The WHO's guidance has been that it isn't necessary for individuals to wear medical PPE
I just showed you their guidance, which says they will not help. The overwhelming evidence unanimously says that it does help.
>There are valid concerns about this, both related to shortages and improper care.
There are not. There is no shortage of cotton fabric. Improper use of masks is still superior to no masks.
There is, as far as I know little to no scientific evidence that cloth masks are effective at reducing the spread of covid-19
This would make the who's statement factual.
There's conjecture, and maybe some empirical evidence about cloth masks, but it's weak.
There is overwhelming evidence. Dozens of studies, all show significant reduction the spread of viral diseases simply by tying a folded piece of cotton over your face. And if you need to back peddle this hard, maybe you should be so quick to snark in the first place?
The sort of people who contradict the WHO happened to be right on this one; they predicted a problem early...
Suggesting YouTubers were correct a form of survivorship bias. You're only paying attention to the ones that were right. Plenty of other YouTubers said things along the lines of it being a hoax, or it'd die off, or that it'd be thousands of times worse long before, and long after, the WHO reacted.
YouTube is big and covers all opinions, so of course some would be correct.
> a very smart bloke with an honest-to-goodness PhD in a virus-related field
How do I embolden text on HN? When a person with a PhD is talking about something related to their PhD it is imprudent policy to ban their content because it disagrees with a body who are (a) political, (b) purposefully slow to recommend things and (c) have covered themselves with something a lot less pleasant than glory with their response to the worst pandemic we've seen in a century. Turns out he has a biological Nature publication too [0]. I want to hear his opinion even and especially if it contradicts the WHO on coronavirus. I like to live dangerously; I'll take the risk that he isn't a specialist in respiratory infections and viruses.
YouTube has picked a policy that bans good advice if they don't like the tone or word choice on behalf of an organisation I believe the US government is trying to defund for incompetence. This is not a move that should inspire confidence in their fact-checking abilities. I'd bet they don't have doctors or nurses enforcing this policy either but it'd be nice to be wrong.
Your original statement was "The sort of people who contradict the WHO happened to be right on this one;" Now you're saying that one specific person might be right, and because of that YouTube should let any crackpot broadcast potentially lethal videos on their platform. That's idiotic.
Also, there are plenty of cases of respectable scientists throwing away their credentials to make a ton of money making completely unscientific social media posts. I'm not saying this guy is doing that, but YouTube certainly need to do more than just look as someone's history and whether they're published. The article you cite is from 27 years ago. He will certainly have changed a great deal in that much time.
I'm saying that the WHO was literally a mouthpiece for a Chinese propaganda operation in the early stages of this pandemic. Not maliciously, not intentionally, but the facts of the matter are not really an open question. The WHO were communicating based on Chinese claims that had very little basis in fact. That isn't a strange situation for UN bodies, who are buffeted by strong political winds from all directions and reliant on reporting from their member nations.
The sort of people who are happy to contradict authority were totally correct to contradict the WHO. The WHO weren't communicating best known evidence; they were communicating best known evidence that was acceptable to the Chinese.
YouTube removing people who disagree with the WHO is YouTube setting up a system that will amplify Chinese (or other large state sponsored) propaganda. And I can give an excellent example of a credentialed person who was correctly applying his credentials to warn people about an outcome that has, in fact, emerged. People like that will be targeted under YouTube's policy, which is not interested in correctness but in authority. It is enacting a policy that would have made this crisis even worse for me, because it would have removed the channel that I found out about it from. I am very thankful for having 45 days early notice.
Maybe those Youtubers were less popular because their predictions are less accurate and their logic is flawed, and people are able to see the difference? Why is biasing information the role of Youtube, shouldn’t USA and other countries educate their citizen to be resilient to inaccurate predictions, rather than cut any information at the root and only ever expose citizen to “true information”, which inevitably makes your citizen more gullible?
Saying the population can be misled is an admission that our school system creates naive dumbasses. MAYBE we should fix that first.
Yes, let's go fix people's entire educational upbringing (often tied to income and scenarios outside one's control) in the middle of a crisis so that way they can be your flavor of 'smart enough' to discern fact from fiction. This stance is absurd given the immediacy of the crisis all hinging on some slippery-slope argument that if they ban one video they can ban them all.
I think you are right, and that this is one of the more helpful comments in this thread. But maybe even this gives Youtubers too much credit.
I suspect that even those hailed as 'survivors' weren't necessarily more correct. Nobody remembers who was wrong. Nobody remembers anything, ever. Youtubers pay no price with their audience for outrageous false claims. Those were made in the past, which was a month ago. There's 30 new videos up.
Meanwhile, they reap rewards by fanning the flames of whatever subset of claims they've made that haven't proved false, and can claim they knew it all along.
Unfortunately platforms that reach billions must prioritize the danger of misinformation spreading that far and wide over allowing for every dangerous and wrong opinion.
The complete and total censorship you fear never emerges, Youtube if anything is far too lenient on allowing terrible opinions to linger on their platform. They never do away with anything besides the most harmful, hate filled rhetoric.
> They never do away with anything besides the most harmful, hate filled rhetoric.
who decides what speech is "hate filled"? this is free speech 101. what is the point of a publicly accessible social platform if people can't express themselves freely?
Free speech applies to the government, not businesses. Which is good because if it didn't there wouldn't be spam filters. Don't like their rules? Host it yourself.
Is there any reason to believe the dangers of the presumed misinformation being censored are actually significant? Is it killing more people than the Tide pod challenge for example? The article mentions taking vitamin C, and turmeric, but that just seems harmless to me. If it was just that, it’s clearly not worth banning the masks or origin discussion.
They are making a calculation that a global run on masks would hurt efforts to contain spread due to shortages for medical professionals confronting the virus everyday, as opposed to general public confrontation which is more sporadic.
Should they just come out and say that? Probably. Would it be effective? No people are irrational in crisis and their words wouldn't prevent the above scenario.
They made a calculated choice with their language which is misleading, but necessarily so. You can disagree with it, but it's far from "spreading misinformation for political reasons".
FWIW I agree re masks but withholding information from Taiwan to appease the CCP is inexcusable. Luckily the Taiwanese are far more competent than their counterparts in this farce.
> Unfortunately platforms that reach billions must prioritize the danger of misinformation spreading
No, they don't. See, this is the core problem, that premise: that's the job of governments. And in the US, the law says the government doesn't get to do that.
Arguing that entities who are arguably more powerful than the government should be doing it is literally arguing for the dictionary definition of fascism.
Actually in the US it's explicitly not the job of government, hence the bill of rights.
Individuals, and collections thereof, however, are free to censor whomever they want. This misguided idea that your protection from government censorship affects your contractual agreement with me needs to stop.
> Actually in the US it's explicitly not the job of government, hence the bill of rights.
You need to read my comment again.
In the US, it is NOBODY'S JOB.
> This misguided idea that your protection from government censorship affects your contractual agreement with me needs to stop.
Repeat after me: "I am not Google. I am not Google. I am not Google. I don't affect the lives of billions of people. I don't affect the lives of billions of people."
I did. Are you suggesting that legally, Google is unable to do this, or that ethically there is some principle that says that large collections of people should have fewer rights than individuals? And therefore that the government should restrict the speech rights of those groups?
"Some people would like freedom to discuss the coronavirus without being oppressed. They can't on YouTube if this policy takes hold." so find another platform. YouTube has no obligation whatsoever to continue to disseminate disinformation, or theories. They've had a hard enough time banning and preventing the spread of chlorine dioxide-based "protocol" information, let alone the flimflam that's being discussed right now.
The market won't sort them out, but the courts will. Wait until they are deemed a publisher, and no longer exempt from liability[0] for all of the content that they publish. Unfortunately they hire a lot of lobbyists so it might be a long wait.
Revoking 230 won't make the executives at YouTube go "gosh darn, guess we'll have to start taking a loss by employing hundreds of thousands of moderators to literally watch every video uploaded", they'll constrain and limit the platform in any way which still guarantees similar or greater ad revenue. That is, if there isn't any legal loophole like requiring creators sign legal paperwork which makes creators their own "publisher" or something along those lines.
They'll probably cull everything that doesn't earn them ad revenue, to minimize the fallout. The content will trend toward sanitized garbage and the viewers will start leaking to somewhere else.
Yep, kill any content an ML model has predicted of high risk or unprofitable. Classic example of a regulation second order effects resulting in the opposite outcome of what was intended.
maybe they wouldn't, but would you like to live in a world where a single company has a literal stranglehold on video (or search, or social network) until the end of time?
I'd rather have many companies competing with one another.
that's the problem... the same handful of companies have dominated the space for the past decade and mostly monopolized the attention. we need more competitors.
Any fun theories on how we ended up replicating the same issue of consolidated TV broadcasters and traditional media companies with internet media platforms and content outlets?
We’ve had such a long time between the passage of things like the Fairness Doctrine and now to turn the boat (not to mention countless critiques of the consolidation of local news and syndicated television networks for examples), maybe learn a few lessons along the way that I wonder if this isn’t an emergent outcome and is in reality an inherent one.
No, it's the environment that the media platforms exist in. It's our laws, our economic system, our way of governing, and who has power to influence those things: all fairly consistent due to inertia but not really fated to be what they are, IMO. People seem to think present reality was destined. I think there are other viable ways we could have developed that would look much different and have fewer, more, or just different problems than the ones we take for inevitable.
How are you going to best network effects and the race to the bottom?
It happened with news (the cable news cycle) and it’s happening with social media.
The bare, sad truth is that any private or public societal scale information sharing function eventually gets captured - driven to relentlessly pound away at subconscious fight or flight routines so that they keep their cut of the audience.
Eventually the need to keep the network alive (advertising) overcomes its ostensible mission of carrying valuable signal.
As long as the two are not divorced - the advantage will lie in exploiting the vulnerability of our neurological systems over investing in carrying more in depth, boring but accurate news articles.
At some level we must recognize that we need to get the best of a central source of truth while also ensuring that this source of truth is not captured by the governing bodies of a country.
And then they become a constrained platform worried more about litigation than enabling voices, and the disenfranchised move somewhere to hear the message. It’s already headed there.
We can't wait for markets to sort themselves out while a few executives and their well connected friends control and decide the information we get to see and hear. The stakes are too high to wait for a market solution here.
How are police, judges, jurors, etc. exempt from this narrative? Or do you believe that the entire legal system simply should not exist at all, given that it clearly needs to determine the truth value of important statements?
So, people who are tasked with determining truths like whether someone committed murder is okay, but it’s not okay to determine whether an online advertisement about a medical treatment is medically accurate?
I'm so glad we're discussing it on HN, so I can use better analogies: it's feature creep. Imagine a product wich was originally elegant and perfomant, almost in a unix way - but then dozens of product managers, each with best of intentions, started adding features to it. Oh, and the product itself was something akin to operating system kernel in terms of security - having monopoly on violence and able to literally kill people - but all those product managers wouldn't hear about moving all these shiny new features into userland, because of perfomance and ease of development.
There doesn't have to be one truth, there can be a landscape of truths and that's fine. Imagine a youtube personality with a large following made some absurd claim like "drinking bleach will help." You don't need to be a self proclaimed silicone prophet and be wiser and smarter than everyone else in history to censor that video, it's possible to stop stupid people from influencing other stupid people into doing serious damage without oppressing anybody. Imagine if the claim wasn't just inflicting self harm, but encouraging a bad meme that will spread the virus.
To me a lot that's bad with Google's politics is epitomised by the move from "don't be evil" to "do the right thing". The first was a neutral stance: just abstain from behaving so as to cause harm; the second is an active position, where the company is encouraged to act in pursuit of whatever it thinks might be good. Thus mixing its role of technological medium with that of publisher and of political advocate.
How exactly do you figure? Google has built a company around it deciding what information gets to be seen. They’ve done this for decades. Apple sells computer hardware. Even if Apple has recently started curating information, they still only curate a fraction of a percent of what Google does.
Suggesting that Apple has historically been at fault here and that Google is now just joining them sounds incredibly biased.
K but that isn’t the issue. The issue is Google choosing what information people get to know. They are the ones in the position of power to control that.
WHO is the _world health organization_ dude. We're in the midst of a pandemic. You're using a moralistic argument to respond to the form while ignoring the substance.
In the meantime, Trump advocates injecting disinfectant, what argument have you got for him?
welcome to the list of hacker news commenters I am extremely disappointed in then. I cannot logically argue you into caring about human life. though personally i don’t think conspiracy theory videos and slippery slope arguments are more important.
I'd argue you care about human life less than you think I do. Lockdowns are not about saving lives, you know that right? It's about making it take longer to kill who it is going to kill -- not overwhelming the hospitals.
It doesn't change the actual number of people killed by the virus, at all. That is to say, regardless of the shape of the curve, the area under the curve remains the same.
And economic depressions kill people too, in fact in far greater numbers than this virus has, yet. You don't seem to care about those lives either.
That's the problem with having a comfortable life. You don't see the consequences of your choices. I live in a place where I see people suffering and starving because they live hand to mouth and can no longer make the $2-$3 dollars a day it takes to keep them alive. They can't go out on the street to sell food. They can't make their few cents helping cars in and out of parking lots. They can't open their "shop" the size of a porta-potty in order to sell a few shirts. And when these conditions spread, crime and death spread with them. I've started to give away what food I can just to try to help whoever I can.
All the while, cozy HN commenters who earn $250,000 USD a year pontificating about whether we should shut off the entire planet for 18 months or more because it doesn't affect them one tiny little damn.
Nobody arguing for that point of view gives a shit about human life, they want control, plain and simple.
Do you even understand how insulting it is to deny other people agency? That's the most insulting thing you can do or say, worse than racism, sexism or whatever else, it is plain denying that the other person is a human with their own free will.
Except people who decide out of their own free will to watch and follow a specific advice and they end up dying due to it are responsible for their own deaths. You can't blame the medium though which said advice propagated. Regardless, as is and by your own belief youtube should be held responsible for the people that end up dying due to following the WHO recommendations instead of what the experts suggest.
by all means inject yourself with bleach as your “expert” suggests but don’t pretend that people deciding to spread covid19 around because they believe it’s caused from miasmas are only hurting themselves.
> but don’t pretend that people deciding to spread covid19 around because they believe it’s caused from miasmas are only hurting themselves.
Indeed, asymptotic carriers (as well as healthy people that are going to become asymptotic carriers) following the political crackpot pseudoscience advice from WHO and end up not wearing masks do not harm only themselves but everyone around them as well.
I am not referring to the tweet that you think that I am referring to.
(plus there was plenty of evidence for said X but this is irrelevant for the discussion)
For the next time I would suggest to confirm if you haven't misunderstood something before hurrying to insult the one that you are talking to.
Almost no one in previous history had an ability to directly target poor, uneducated masses which their own content created in their own bedroom.
Also let’s be honest - the likes of Hitler actually came from the likes of people who would tell you to stop listening to WHO advice and to go start fires in 5G towers.
Don’t get me wrong, freedom of speech et. al., and we’re probably also going to get burnt by the freedom with which today’s global platforms invent the rules - but the laws are being written now; and we’re obviously not dealing with an easy, black-and-white answer.
> Also let’s be honest - the likes of Hitler actually came from the likes of people who would tell you to stop listening to WHO advice and to go start fires in 5G towers.
This is not true. The rise of the Third Reich is fascinating because of its populism rooted in hard-working citizens who believed in their country.
The most well known Fascists, were not anarchists. That is accurate enough. I think going so far as to characterize Hitler's motives (as if there was a singular motive) is a bit reductive.
Would you please stop posting ideological flamewar comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, we ban accounts that do it, and we've already had to ask you.
I think we are all familiar considering your response is the de facto standard propaganda that is posted all over social media in defense of censorship.
> and the fact that you can absolutely be "censored" on a private platform.
Yes. That's the point. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Nothing emboldens racists like pointing to government oppression of their ideas. The KKK has free reign in the USA and they've experienced plummeting membership.
Nothing kills bad ideas like sunlight and scrutiny, you don't need to ban it and make them martyrs.
Sure - anecdotally- you could perhaps convince one person by highlighting information.
But the plural of anecdote is not data.
At scale - sunlight and exposure increases dissemination of bad ideas.
Designing ideas to sound appealing in a viral sense means that even their dismissal and refutation by authority sources only increases their spread in the target population.
“Of course the governments going to deny they made the corona virus! They aren’t stupid.”
“Of course scientists would say that, they need grant money.”
All the ideas that grow from the root of this tree fail at scale.
Malicious actors are beyond the scope of this axiom for example - they don’t care about being defeated in argument- they just want to let vulnerable people know they exist, and then have them fall into their ideological orbit.
Competition over information networks only drives the news cycle effect - a market adapting to target the weakest link the human Fight or flight response, over giving better quality news.
To the point where the ACLU actively defended KKK members' First Amendment rights multiple times.
Second, and more directly related to the events of this weekend, there are important reasons for our long history of defending freedom of speech — including speech we abhor. We fundamentally believe that our democracy will be better and stronger for engaging and hearing divergent views. Racism and bigotry will not be eradicated if we merely force them underground. Equality and justice will only be achieved if society looks such bigotry squarely in the eyes and renounces it. Not all speech is morally equivalent, but the airing of hateful speech allows people of good will to confront the implications of such speech and reject bigotry, discrimination and hate. This contestation of values can only happen if the exchange of ideas is out in the open.
There is another practical reason that we have defended the free speech rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Today, as much as ever, the forces of white supremacy and the forces for equality and justice are locked in fierce battles, not only in Washington but in state houses and city councils around the country. Some government decision-makers are deeply opposed to the speech we support. We simply never want government to be in a position to favor or disfavor particular viewpoints. And the fact is, government officials — from the local to the national — are more apt to suppress the speech of individuals or groups who disagree with government positions. Many of the landmark First Amendment cases, such as NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware and New York Times v. Sullivan, have been fought by African-American civil rights activists. Preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality.
That's not what I said, but it is according to empirical data. America is a long way from segregation and the LA riots.
In 1990, nearly 50% of white respondents to a survey indicated they'd oppose living in a neighborhood where half the residents were black. In 2014, under 20% would oppose it and over 80% are indifferent or would favor it.
Going back further than 1990 only serves to bolster that fact.
What explains the disconnect between public opinion surveys and real life segregation?
"Throughout the 20th Century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division result from policies and institutions that are no longer explicitly designed to discriminate. Yet the outcomes of those policies and beliefs have negative, racial impacts, namely with segregation."
Maybe? Don't confused the increase in media coverage with it actually getting worse.
If you go by the number of hate crimes reported to the FBI (which has reporting bias), it has gone up, but it's still lower than it was during the late 90's.
The LA riots were in 1992. People were getting arrested for marching for civil rights in the 1960s.
Things have improved quite a bit. There was just a period where things were brushed under the rug and not acknowledged, but giving internet access to everyone has made us aware of what's been ignored for so long. There are clear bumps of race-motivated crimes or discrimination sometimes, but there's a pretty obvious downward trend in acceptance of it.
There remain many dark corners, where these pathologies flourish.
Social media just changed the landscape. Engagement maximizing algos birthed outrage cancel culture. It lets people find each other. It accelerates radicalization, both left and especially right leaning.
And the filter bubble keeps these things out of the public sphere.
In my home country Sweden, I used to think that the rise of the "sweden democrats" (a right wing populist party) was a sign of growing support for their views. I have recently reconsidered that view. I think what we see today are things that never went away. I may be alone in this, by I regard the right wing populism as a democratisation of society. Not because I like the views voiced by the people representing that part of the spectrum, but because it introduces a large part of the population to the public debate.
I think that we, in 30 years, will look back at the rise of right wing populism as a symptom of a positive development. The populist parties do get a lot of votes, and if anything I believe that is a sign that the voters have not felt represented by the power. Which, in turn, I also believe is why the populist party supporters are so loud. If I actually believed that the government did not represent the people, I would be loud as well.
When the "anti establishment" has become the establishment I think the democratic process will end up being stronger with a discussion climate that better represents the population.
As a German, I certainly don't want the governments of the world to generalize this. As the country who (arguably) started two world wars that killed probably low three-digit millions of people, we are in a special position to assure the world that we're not gonna launch a third. Part of that is being honest about the consequences of fascist governments. The relevant ban has decades of history as being specific and limited. Frankly, at this point I trust our government to not try and balloon it into a general suppression of free speech. I don't have the same trust for Youtube.
The devil is always in the details. What does “denial of X” even mean? Can you dispute certain facts, like numbers and dates? Who gets to decide the ultimate truth?
It takes a long time for the details of history to settle. For example, nobody knew most dinosaurs had feathers until the last decade.
So would you support banning everyone on YouTube who went against WHO’s tweet[1] saying there’s no evidence of human to human transmission? That was only in January.
First of all, this is about “YouTube banning 'medically unsubstantiated' content.” as well as content that “would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” which (if those guidelines are followed) doesn’t mean banning of people or discourse, but rather disinformation. Secondly, the WHO tweeted that, but had actually already acknowledged human-to-human transmission multiple times[1][2] in the days before the tweet, so no, I wouldn’t support banning discussion around a tweet.
I agree. That being said, I think getting more definition and transparency around all this on YouTube/Google's part is going to be really important, though I don't expect it, sadly. There's a fair amount of flimflam being pushed on YouTube right now--everything from literally ingesting chlorine dioxide, to other "holistic" cures that _appear_ to be benign.
No, the idea is "there is a massive coordinated disinformation campaign designed to make the pandemic worse, what, if anything should we do to address it?"
There are two obvious options (and lots of options in between).
(1) Do nothing. Pros: the propaganda gets clicks, which means revenue. The armchair libertarians are happy because nation states continue to have the freedom to saturate all communication channels with lies. Cons: The pandemic gets worse, mass graves continue to fill up, the US continues to destabilize politically and economically.
(2) Learn from past mistakes and address the propaganda with some sort of restrictions. Pros: limits the spread of deadly misinformation, greater chance the US remains economically and politically stable. Cons: Lost revenue. The restrictions will never be perfect. The armchair libertarians get riled up because it reminds them of a Hayek fairy tale they once read.
YouTube is part of a private company. They're under no obligation to give a platform to the propaganda arms of every world's intelligence agency.
Sure my tone could have been much better. You have a good point.
But political dogmatism is also noxious. Personally I think HN is at its worst when discussions get derailed into a dogmatic recital of political cliches.
> This is the free-market, libertarian position
Right, I'm deliberately framing the issue that way.
> How are the employees of YouTube or any tech company exempt from those forces? What makes them somehow wiser or smarter than everyone else in history?
Forget history (it's popular) what about technical ability to do this? We can probably share information about "my sharona" after all.
Also, does youtube really want viewers it constantly has to protect from bad information?
>Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO?
Examples like these are frivolous. There's a heartland of obvious, flagrant misinformation that is indisputably worth banning and for which a moral case exists to ban immediately: '5g caused corona, this home remedy will cure it!' etc.
The go-to move of internet commenters craving debates is to look past the 99.9999% of cases that will get taken down and to tie everyone up in debates about hypotheticals.
Instead of telling me about your special what-if edge case, tell me whether you think the example you are bringing forward represents the heartland of content that is being targeted by this policy. Be clear about what percentage of cases you think are represented by your special example.
I agree with the conclusion that you should be clear about what percentage of content is on the side of reasonable, and which is not.
Let me however disagree strongly with your claims that this concerns 99.99999% of cases, and that the other commenter was talking about "what ifs" and "hypotheticals". That last claim seems to me to just be untrue: we know in fact that local laws, for example several american states, contradict WHO. Their point is valid. This could be a problem.
Now you have done well to state your belief of proportion clearly: only 1 in a million of the cases that will be removed should not have been removed, the rest are indisputably worth of banning.
I think you now need to go a step further: Why do you think that all but one out of a million cases will be justified? And do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary? Given YouTube's history with copyright trigger happiness, I wouldn't be so sure of these proportions, myself.
And I think that it is actually very healthy that the introduction of (increased) censoring should go hand in hand with public scrutiny and discussion, in fact I'd be very worried if we'd all just accept all of it uncritically.
Your point is, in general, well taken. I think you're right to point out commentators can blow fringe issues out of proportions. I am however unconvinced in this particular case.
The 99.99999% case scenario concerns videos that are saying '5g caused coronavirus', and meanwhile you're trying to tie up everybodies attention with special cases that don't represent the majority of cases. People get disoriented with special cases and trick questions.
Let me put it this way. If you're not just pointing to the mask example as a tentative, academic exercise, and sincerely believe that they constitute some non-trivial percentage of videos that will really get taken down, you should come out and say so. And if you don't want to commit to that, I have a hard time understanding what, other than frivolous internet contrarianism, motivates you to emphasize those examples.
>do you really think that a discussion about edge cases is so unnecessary?
Might has something to with it being easier to come up with new crackpot theories than announcing policy changes. Kind of like "then debunk the conspiracy" doesn't really work, since this requires a disproportional amount of effort. Society might be able to handle this additional effort in a "low noise" environment, but hardly when motivated actors got their foot in the door already.
Yes, I agree. My point in that comment was not to debate the merits of a general policy vs specific policy, but to dispell the idea that the general policy would only be used for the specific case of corona virus and 5G. It seems that you agree.
The technical correctness of your comment isn't of practical significance when you argue as follows:
>The 99.99999% case scenario concerns videos that are saying '5g caused coronavirus', and meanwhile you're trying to tie up everybodies attention with special cases that don't represent the majority of cases. People get disoriented with special cases and trick questions.
The example of 5g is used here to illustrate a whole vast range of conspiracy theories that can be expressed in nearly infinite permutations. If you really can't understand the role that the 5g example is playing to illustrate a class of examples and insist on arguing against just that example specially, you are completely, and boy do I mean completely missing the point and wasting both my time and yours.
Well, than I don't know what to say to you. I have already explained my view on the proportions, I have already given argument and explanation for it, and you seem to be intent on not supporting your own conclusions apart from a rather lame "you're a contrarianist" argument.
Why not actually defend your arguments and attack mine instead of circling about the issue with "this actual real life example is a what if hypothetical" and hastily drawn up dichotomies?
(Particularly this hammering that these are contrived examples is bordering on the ridiculous: we know this is true!)
You've lost your benefit of the doubt with this comment.
>(Particularly this hammering that these are contrived examples is bordering on the ridiculous: we know this is true!)
I'm just going to note you agree that these examples are contrived yet nevertheless want to debate them, apparently to performatively exhibit your appreciation for the values open-mindedness and free speech.
That's a not a constructive use of anybody's time. It's a frivolous distraction. Youtube is doing what they can to save lives by stopping misinformation in the face of a global pandemic. If you're more interested in turning this into a navel gazing exercise, I'd say you're suffering from a serious lack of perspective.
More like youtube is doing what they can to support a certain political position with disregard for human lives. If anything the WHO recommendations themselves are misinformation.
What do you think their real motivation is? Take advantage of this event to take their place as the Ministry of Truth and censor their way into being at the top of the New World Order? Or maybe they really just weren't happy with airing content at their scale that's practically guaranteed to help cause a lot of people to hurt themselves. (Or they think their advertisers aren't happy with doing that... which I think is pretty equivalent, because it involves people feeling the same thing leading to the same result.)
I try not to engage with people who go directly to snarky extremist characterization, as above. But yes, political agendas are a factor here, as is simple appeasement.
Who are they trying to appease? Trump? What agenda are they pushing specifically? "Don't get yourself infected or do ridiculous dangerous things to try to cure yourself"? Is that specific agenda bad?
That law is not contradicting the WHO, it’s just setting a stricter standard. It would be contradicting if the WHO said masks made things worse and the governments forced people to wear them anyway, endangering public health against the advice of the WHO. That’s not the case.
> Given YouTube's history with copyright trigger happiness, I wouldn't be so sure of these proportions, myself.
Exactly. There's absolutely no reason to trust Google about anything. This is a totally CYA move. That is, Google's only concern is avoiding controversy, whether it's about copyrights and trademarks, non-mainstream politics, non-traditional medicine, or whatever.
Even so, it's their platform, and they have the right to do whatever they like with it. I avoid it, and I recommend that others avoid it, but we're all free to choose.
The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human after it was abundantly clear that it does[0], claims that travel bans would be unnecessary to halt its spread[1], and claims that people should not wear masks[2].
These are not mere edge cases. We have structured our public organizations in a way that gives credentialed "experts" enormous amounts of power, but without making sure they are _actually good at what they do_. This move by youtube further enshrines credentials on top of the grave of competence. This is how you end up with the FDA banning covid tests for more than a month, how you end up with a completely ineffective CDC, or (to return to the topic at hand) the WHO spreading nonsense.
The fact of the matter is that the twitter shitposters I follow were far ahead of all the major health organizations on this topic, but if they mention covid in a tweet they'll get their account suspended now. This censorship is not about censoring bad info, it's about censoring any "non-official" info regardless of its veracity.
So far as I can tell, your extremely confident, categorical interpretations of your own citations are basically mistaken, across the board. As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility. As I read [1] it is not in any way an inaccurate statement (see [3]). When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks.
Meanwhile Youtube is going to take down videos claiming 5g caused the coronavirus, which are obviously wrong and obviously causing harm. And instead of looking at cases of obvious misinformation the policy targets, you would rather we go down a rabbit hole of idiosyncratic disputes about the the meaning of WHO statements, all while keeping up blatantly inaccurate misinformation.
Tying ourselves up in that frivolous debate would let misinformation flourish.
Geeks, more than most, should be savvy about scientific progress.
Coronavirus is still very new. We're learning new things every day. eg Today it's risks from blood clots.
I'd only be worried if the experts (WHO, CDC) failed to update their position over time.
Aside: Retric's comment earlier about AIDS killing 770k every year reminded me how long it took to understand anything about HIV, much less cope. And all the senseless unnecessary misinformation and backlash which thwarted progress.
Is it appropriate to flag HN comments that are so blatantly wrong like the one you replied to? If YouTube is taking down misinformation, is HN doing the same?
There's an endless flood of these bad comments. I'm just going through them (a new one posted every 2 minutes) and making the same rebuttal. People are stupid -- especially people who think they're smart contrarians.
As I mentioned in a few posts elsewhere in this page, 4chan was a better source of information than the WHO back in January.
You might be in earnest, but you're behaving like a contrarian who thinks they know more than they do. "You have become the very thing you sought to destroy."
I've never seen anyone be consistent in their kneejerk cries of "but free speech!" They still want moderation, banning, and silencing, especially of their critics. They want ideas removed from the spotlight they don't agree with. They say that the moderation that every platform needs to thrive is a "slippery slope" while already sliding down it
> As I read [0] it is not, in fact, a blanket declaration about transmissibility.
It's still misinformation, and it's specifically misinformation that makes the WHO complicit in 187,420 deaths and counting. There had been plenty of indications by that point that - even if human-to-human transmission had not yet been confirmed - it was still evidently spreading beyond people at ground zero.
That is, I ain't sure how you're able to read it as anything but a blanket declaration. The WHO outright said that there's no evidence of human-to-human transmission; this is an outright lie, given that the sheer number of people by that point who were hospitalized with the virus without ever having visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market would be, I would argue, evidence.
> When read [2] it's clear that it is not a blanket declaration not to wear masks.
No, but it's advice that - if followed - would make any asymptomatic carrier dangerous. The point of wearing masks is not to prevent yourself from being infected (no mask is sufficient for that), but rather to minimize the risk of you spreading SARS-CoV-2 to other people by breathing on them.
The WHO seems to have a chronic pattern of being one or more weeks behind the curve on its assessment of COVID-19 and the mitigation thereof. Needless to say, I trust them about as far as I can throw them (which is 0 meters, given the impossibility of throwing an entire organization), and that YouTube is putting them on any kind of authoritative pedestal despite these blatant missteps is ignorant of that behavioral pattern.
> Oh yes, the random programmer who know public health better than actual public health experts.
Apparently yes, given that it's a bit of a smoking gun. Namely because:
> the Huanan Seafood Market was suspected as a source of the virus but it could have come from somewhere else too.
It was (to my knowledge) the only suspected source for quite a while (up until the later discovery that the currently-known "patient zero" had no connection to it, and even then it's still considered ground zero for the outbreak). If there was any indication that "it could have come from somewhere else", and that "somewhere else" is evidently a place where even fewer patients in common visited ("evidently" because if it was a common factor it would've been mentioned instead of or alongside the seafood market, and yet... no such location was mentioned), then that serves as even stronger evidence that it's somehow spreading between humans, even if the mechanism is unknown.
If even a "random programmer" on Hacker News can point this out, then I strongly suspect there were a number of doctors and nurses and other personnel on the front lines who could have and did point this out, too.
Plus, China knew as early as 31 December that the "novel coronavirus" was related to SARS (leaking that info is what got Dr. Li Wenliang in trouble), which was already known to spread human-to-human. Seems like "it looks like SARS and probably has similar spreading mechanisms" would be a reasonable assumption when information is limited: better safe than sorry (and in this case, 180,000+ deaths later, "sorry" indeed). I obviously don't blame the WHO for the entirety of that (or even necessarily China; my government dragged its feet, too, like most governments), but the WHO is certainly not blameless, either, and that it continues to spread misinformation like how not everyone should be wearing masks doesn't leave a whole lot of room for me to give them the benefit of the doubt.
>It was (to my knowledge) the only suspected source for quite a while
Yes, but the only suspect does not mean conclusive evidence.
>Plus, China knew as early as 31 December that the "novel coronavirus" was related to SARS (leaking that info is what got Dr. Li Wenliang in trouble),
This is untrue, Li Wenliang said it was SARS, and it's actually another virus. He did not know it was related to SARS but assumed it was SARS due to the symptoms.
edit: secondly he did not leak the information, he send it in a private chat to friends, one of whom leaked it.
> Yes, but the only suspect does not mean conclusive evidence.
That's... exactly my point. The evidence pointed in favor of human-to-human transmission specifically because there was no definitive common source.
> Li Wenliang said it was SARS
SARS-CoV-2 is literally a different strain of the virus that caused the original SARS (SARS-CoV; now called SARS-CoV-1). "It's SARS" is reasonably accurate (especially given the information available at the time), even if not quite specific; it's like calling Ebola, well, "Ebola" without knowing if it's specifically Zaire ebolavirus or Sudan ebolavirus or Reston ebolavirus or what have you. Regardless, if the public and Chinese authorities had treated it like how said authorities should've treated SARS two decades ago, the world would very likely be in a much better position than it is now. And likewise, if foreign governments (including my own) believed it to be SARS instead of just some weird flu, they might very well have restricted travel earlier and imposed stronger quarantines early instead of waiting until it was too late to be effective.
How you read them is irrelevant. What's relevant is that hundreds of thousands of people read the first one, took it at face value, and decided that the coronavirus is not a threat. The WHO definitely misled people with that first one, the only thing up for debate is whether it was deliberately or due to incompetent messaging.
GP comment is a bit too categorical but it's not even a contested fact that WHO initially downplayed the epidemic, put out recommendations to keep borders open, and still continues to spread disinformation e.g. about not needing to wear masks.
I won't even say anything about the string of corruption allegations and ties to China.
And then the fact that WHO basically pretended Taiwan doesn't exist[1] and is clearly aligned with Chinese political interests over even its primary mission.
Giving absolute authority over 'truth' to an entity with such a shitty track record is insane.
Can you explain how the WHO is given "absolute authority"?
The WHO has a list of medical guidance. I've yet to see anyone in this thread complain about any of the medical guidance the WHO has provided. The most relevant is likely this page: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2.... None of this is controversial.
> put out recommendations to keep borders open
This is incorrect. The WHO recommended against banning travel from certain parts of the world. Completely closing you borders (to non-citizens) was not covered. You can read the WHO's actual statement[1], and it's well reasoned. The value of unrestricted travel for emergency equipment and personnel outweighs the value of restricted travel from certain areas. But short term restrictions are alright if necessary to build up infrastructure (iow, to flatten the curve temporarily).
> about not needing to wear masks.
They recommend against random everyday people using medical masks. Given the PPE shortage, this is not unreasonable advice. They defer to local authorities for more stringent recommendations.
> And then the fact that WHO basically pretended Taiwan doesn't exist
> The WHO has been spreading misinformation from the start, including claims that covid does not spread from human to human
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.
They did say though that flying to China was still okay in as late as February. For what? Fear of CCP?
If this virus had come in some African country, they would have no problem in closing everything out - as anyone that understands tail risks would. But because it's China, then the recommendations for actions come after the evidence can not be hidden anymore. It is immoral.
No, that's wrong. WHO essentially never encourages travel restrictions, their whole philosophy is that open international collaboration is crucial (that's why the W stands for "world"!). At the height of the Ebola epidemic, they didn't call for travel restrictions to Africa either.
There are legitimate arguments that travel restrictions are counterproductive, so you should argue against those, not against some perceived double standard that doesn't actually exist.
The fact that WHO made the same claim and the fact that it's disputed by most actual experts around the world, hence ongoing travel restrictions, is a pretty good example of why there can't ever be one arbiter of 'truth' in a free society.
Do you see the asymetry here? It makes no sense to "argue" for travel restrictions after the genie is out of the bottle. There is no "going back" to a restricted state.
If they had started with the strong restrictions and then loosened it up after more information/debate/evidence of safety, then things would be better. But instead they let it go and claimed that "absence of evidence" is the same as "evidence of absence". Completely irresponsible. This is why the WHO's response to it is so infuriating.
There are constant new outbreaks, at the rate of several per year. (If you want to try to keep up, see here: https://promedmail.org/ ) The vast majority fizzle out, and for the rest, travel restrictions are not often useful or necessary. Recent examples of this include SARS, MERS, swine flu, Zika, several hemorrhagic fevers, and resurgences of diseases like measles and plague. If the WHO responded to all of these with a call for a global travel ban, travel would never be allowed.
> responded to all of these with a call for a global travel ban
No. There is no call for a "global travel ban". Are you deliberately misunderstanding what I am saying?
The call is (or better, it was, now is too late) for a restriction of mobility in the place of an outbreak, until they either "fizzle out" or are controlled/understood/resolved by development of treatment and/or vaccine.
If an outbreak is likely to "fizzle out", then the restriction will be for a short time and localized to the source and chances of spreading around the globe is reduced. And in case the outbreak is highly contagious like this one, an early and swift restriction would prevent the pandemic in the first place, or at the very least slow down things as much as possible to avoid exponential explosion of cases.
THAT IS THE KEY POINT! The WHO should be asking for an early local lockdown so that we wouldn't have to act later in a global one.
How many pandemics did we have since WHO was founded, not originated in China, with such speed of contagion and long incubation period which allows for infected people to get infected in one city and be on a plane to infect the other side of the world in less than 24 hours?
Hard to find a counterexample when n=0.
My "being rude" is due to the fact that the WHO's actions and directions have been mostly politics washed up in science instead of properly looking for guidance for the well-being of people. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
They should've asked for restrictions. They should tell people "wearing a mask may not help you, but not wearing is certainly worse, so go ahead and get masks." All we get instead is CYA and bureaucratic responses. They need to be held responsible for their part in this mess.
You could surely find recommendations (should they exist) for unilateral imposition of rules in relation to recent epidemics like Ebola. After all your argument above was:
If this virus had come in some African country, they would have no problem in closing everything out - as anyone that understands tail risks would. But because it's China, then the recommendations for actions come after the evidence can not be hidden anymore. It is immoral.
Now I agree the coronavirus situation is without precedent, but if you're going to make assertions that they would have done X here while only doing Y there, you need to back it up with some evidence for your claims about X.
So your objection to what I am saying is that I claim some double standard when there is no instance where they applied one of these standards? Is that it?
Ok, fine. Never mind the fact that this is also a mistake of conflating absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Your objection does not invalidate what I am saying regarding the biggest problem with the WHO: their failure in defending early action and in showing themselves to be a political-bureaucratic organization more preoccupied with its own existence than in achieving the goals it was supposed to.
Swine Flu originated in the US, right? Wouldn't that be another case of an outbreak starting in a country that is rich and powerful enough to make the WHO look the other way instead of doing its job to mitigate the risk of a pandemic?
Flying to non-Wuhan China in mid-February was about as okay as driving to the next town over in the US, in early-March. An incredible majority of cases were in Wuhan.
I would add that WHO requires nations to inform them of the measures they are intending to take so that WHO can do some coordination, and nations don’t tell them and WHO has to do catch up by reading the newspapers.
Yes, that's how I interpret 'no clear evidence from preliminary investigations'.
The relevant timeline: Li Wenliang (a doctor in Wuhan) blew the whistle on Dec 30. 4 days later he was harassed by the Chinese police for "spreading rumors". On Jan 8 Li Wenliang was infected. On Jan 12 he was put in the ICU. On Jan 14 WHO denied human-to-human transmission.
December 25: Wuhan Municipal Health Committee posted on social media, “An Urgent Notice on the Treatment of Pneumonia of Unknown Cause.”
December 31: China contacts WHO and informs them of “cases of pneumonia of unknown etymology detected in Wuhan.”
January 1: Huanan Seafood Market is closed.
January 3: China informs US CDC and other countries
January 10: The gene sequencing data of COVID-19 is posted online and shared with other researchers.
January 23: China goes into lockdown.
Taiwan, themselves, had a press conference where they showed the email they sent the WHO and it did not say human-to-human transmission.
> As there were no confirmed cases in Taiwan at the time, the [Taiwan] CDC could not definitively state that there had been human-to-human transmission of the disease, he added.
> “We would really be giving a misleading message if we firmly stated that there was human-to-human transmission, so we clearly alerted the IHR about the information we received,” he said.
Just regarding your first statement: isn't 'no evidence of X' entirely different than 'evidence of no X'? Seems to me they were saying the first, but you're interpreting it as the second?
The vast majority of laypeople (inclusive of people who would be getting their information from the WHO's Twitter account) would readily interpret "no evidence of X" to be equivalent to "we shouldn't be worried about X". To pretend otherwise betrays a misunderstanding of how laypeople think.
If the WHO had a more nuanced stance, they should've made that clear - e.g. "We don't have evidence yet that the #coronavirus spreads human-to-human, but it's possible".
But the thing is, that was their stance. I agree that their tweet might show a lack of scientific communication skills or scientific education of the general public, the official recommendations have been very clear. Countries and public health organisations don't base decisions on a tweet. They go to the official guidance.
"The primary objectives of surveillance are to:
1. Detect confirmed cases/clusters of nCoV infection and
any evidence of amplified or sustained human-to-human
transmission;"
Then on Jan 10th:
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/330374/WHO-...
"As information about the etiology, clinical manifestations and transmission of disease in the cluster of respiratory disease patients identified in Wuhan is limited, WHO continues to monitor developments and will revise these recommendations as necessary."
Neither of those directly say "it's possible that the novel coronavirus, like other coronaviruses, is capable of human-to-human transmission", with the sole exception (to your credit) of one quote buried in a header in that second document: "route of transmission unknown but suspected to be respiratory".
Also, those documents seem to be focused entirely on laboratory testing and surveillance, not on, you know, treatment or prevention (beyond one section on preventing infection among medical/laboratory personnel, whence I pulled that quote) or risk assessment.
If these are the documents used for policymaking, then it seems their lack of communication skills extends even here. They'd benefit from a more bottom-line-up-front approach and making these suspicions more explicit; the documents as they stand read as a wishy-washy "well we don't quite know how this spreads and don't want to jump to any conclusions...", and it should be entirely unsurprising that policymakers interpreted that as "aight, WHO hasn't said it spreads between humans so nothing to worry about".
>Yes, that's how I interpret 'no clear evidence from preliminary investigations'.
If that is true, then you are just categorically not competent to be making interpretations of scientific statements. In a separate comment you cited a handful of sources that, on my reading you had clearly not interpreted accurately, and now you're advancing an argument that depends on a fallacy so obvious that would be dispensed with by a JV debate team.
Yes Dr. Li contracted the virus on January 8 when he returned to the hospital in Wuhan where the first patients were identified in December 2019.
Dr. Li made social media posts about the virus which Chinese authorities forced him to take down and sign a written confession and promise not to do it again.
Now the question is do you have a source that shows the exact steps, if any, the WHO took to verify the “preliminary investigation” as reported by the Chinese authorities? Because from the sound of it, Chinese authorities reported these claims to WHO and WHO turned around and published the Chinese claims without performing any independent investigation (they certainly didn’t know about Dr. Li at the time).
This is a huge non sequitur from my question on "spread from human to human after it was _abundantly clear_ that it does"
But I will respond to your goalpost shift as well in defense of Li Wenliang who's a celebrated individual in China but turned into a cartoon meme in the west.
Li, an ophthalmologist, has no first hand knowledge of the virus nor was he trying to "whistleblow". He received a private group message within the hospital from ER department director and he simply re-shared the message to other private groups with his classmates.
The ER director, Ai Fen, was the source of the hypothesis that some patients in the hospital had, incorrectly, SARS and she was the right channel to escalate in the first place. And her escalation was successful when 1 nurse was observed to have been infected on January 11th.
The only piece of new information Li brought to the world was on January 30th when he tested positive.
-why did Chinese police get involved and force Dr. Li to remove social media posts about the virus and sick patients?
-who were the Chinese Authorities, by name, who represented their “preliminary investigation”
-what steps did WHO take to independently verify what they were told by Chinese Authorities about person to person transmission before posting this information to the public on Twitter?
Edit:
No offense but you seem like one of China’s paid trolls, throughout this thread you are accusing everyone who mentions facts of “moving the goal posts” and otherwise attacking “the West”. The West didn’t give the WHO knowingly false information and use their political power to have the WHO tweet the falsehoods to the public with #TheWest
'There is no clear evidence from the preliminary investigation' and 'the preliminary investigation finds that human-to-human transmission is not taking place' are two quite different propositions. The WHO opted for an excess of scientific caution - partly to avoid pissing off China, partly out of fears of being accused of alarmism, which have since been validated in spades.
Now while I agree that WHO is a poor yardstick of scientific truth, that is a long way from saying it's useless. With all its faults I prefer to the disinformation and quackery that are flying about, and indeed pouring out of the White House.
> There is no clear evidence from the preliminary investigation' and 'the preliminary investigation finds that human-to-human transmission is not taking place' are two quite different propositions.
Everyone understands the difference.
>The WHO opted for an excess of scientific caution
No scientific caution would have been independently verifying China’s representations and throughly reviewing their claims before retweeting it to the public.
The commenter who spawned the thread may have worded it that way, but the point is much bigger, the point is the WHO was responsible for spreading misinformation.
So even assuming the commenter worded it properly “no clear evidence” WHO tweet is still misinformation to the public because they Tweeted on 01/14/20 but as early as 12/30/19 China had evidence the virus was was being transmitted person to person in the Wuhan hospital, and on 01/08/20 the a Dr. had contracted it.
So we agree that not everyone understood the difference. The commenter who made that observation was right and you were wrong to brush it away. The loss of that distinction was the basis for at least one person in this thread to wrongly assert the WHO was spreading misinformation.
You can't dispute that, so you want to shift to a broader question. I think xster already answered the claims that you are repeating now, and your reply to xster was to expand the conversation even further with even more non-sequiturs and to suggest they were a paid troll.
This is the pattern that keeps repeating itself. Someone confidently declares the WHO is spreading misinformation for reasons that turn out to be inaccurate, but take lots of time to refute. And those efforts to focus on previously made statements are met with meandering replies constantly seeking to 'broaden' the conversation.
Stuff like this is what really annoys me with Hacker News, imagine a public health official reading programming recommendations, not understanding half and making declarations that it's misinformation.
You claim they claimed it does not spread from human to human, but the tweet talks about preliminary research. If you don't understand how science works, don't make such rash opinions on it.
The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that.
For example some in the Chinese government think coronavirus was released by the US Army while some in the US intelligence community think coronavirus leaked from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan. Another example, some US government officials think chloroquine is a COVID cure, while others disagree or remain undecided.
Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies).
> The problem is they give one body the ultimate authority on what is truth. Science, epidemiology & politics is more complex than that.
That's an excellent point.
> Google should instead have a list of allowed sources (e.g. WHO, CDC, NHS, etc) and explicitly disallowed sources (states owned media organizations, politicians and intelligence agencies).
Well, isn't the BBC at least government affiliated? And yes, I'm aware that it's supposedly entirely independent.
And about intelligence agencies, the NSA has contributed hugely to computer security. It's true that they're arguably the world's greatest hackers, but that actually increases their credibility. Except for the backdoors that they hide ;)
do you think someone at google is saying: 'hmmm, I analyzed all the points and did fact checking and this video should be flagged'.
They'll have some lazily built ML algorithm that flags the whole channel with a video that mention 'corona' and demonitize them so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout.
Your scenario has already been playing out for about two months, except it's completely per-video and just a mention of corona seems to no longer cause a demonetization.
> so they can collect money and benefit from the videos but not have to do any payout.
As far as I know, free content costs Youtube. I remember reading their profit margins aren't great even on monetized content, and hosting and bandwidth isn't free.
>There's a heartland of obvious, flagrant misinformation
If it is obvious, why does it need banning?
The bigger problem is that many people haven't learned how to process information properly. It's frivolous to just demand banning. Banning should only be a first step among many to spread media competence. How can google ban corona misinformation but just recently has made ads and links almost indistinguishable on its result page?
Since when am I beholden to the WHO? I don't remember voting for any of them or agreeing for them to represent me in any way. They are not my elected government, why should I give the slightest fuck what they tell me to do?
Since its establishment by treaty and your sovereign nation of origin becoming a signatory to said treaty. Surely you can make the same point about your skepticism of transnational organizations without all the emotional theatrics, perhaps by researching the topic you aver to care about and highlighting what you believe to be its constitutional inadequacies.
>Now we need to go and look in families to find those people who may be sick and remove
them and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner so that's what I was saying previously;
the transition from movement restrictions and shut-downs
I believe unlawfully removing people from their homes and restricting their movement is against the constitutions of several countries, mine for sure. According to this transcript directly from the WHO, this is what they advocate and recommend. Speaking out against this falls under directly contradicting the WHO.
I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding what content is and is not allowed to be hosted on their private servers using their private services. This is very different from government officials that you vote for censoring free speech.
Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers.
> I hate to be the one to have to explain this to you. A private entity is deciding...
YouTube is part of a gigantic, public company with more power than many world governments. In a very real sense, Alphabet is more powerful than a hypothetical Standard Oil that also owned one of the most popular two newspapers in every single city in the US.
Their ability to shape markets, public opinion and even elections in 100+ countries is unprecedented and very easy to use with plausible deniability. Facebook is a similar sort of entity. In aggregate, the two control more personal communications than the postal service.
The notion that only a government can be a threat to free speech is outdated and naive.
Anyone who doesn't like YouTube's policies are welcome to post their content on Facebook to share with their friends, on Twitter, stream it live on Twitch, or, host it themselves on their own servers
You mean the Facebook that just banned WhatsApp message forwarding, despite their service supposedly being end-to-end encrypted? It didn't take long for that little sham to collapse did it? Sure, go self publish and watch as the self appointed guardians of the galaxy do everything in their power to stop you speaking.
We're not debating Google here. Not really. We're debating the whole ethos of Silicon Valley liberals which has become, "we're smarter than you and will ensure you think what we want you to think". Except they're not smarter. Having worked there for years I can confidently say that whilst there might have been some merit to that argument a long time ago within the scope of computer science, but years of endless hiring has now made them distinctly average groups of people with no edge over the rest of the world. Yet they continue to believe merely being a part of a particular organisation allows them to instantaneously decide the correctness of any argument.
Perhaps because their mission is to keep the world's inhabitants healthy? Of course, they have no legal authority over you, but listening to them is generally a good idea.
That's a strange way of framing the fact that the WHO is explicitly siding with China in denying the very existence of Taiwan. Especially considering that Taiwan had data that would have saved lives, had the World Health Organization acknowledged their existence.
The next time someone who has nothing to do with congressional politics refers to President Trump, are you going to get on their case for failing to acknowledge the existence of the impeachment issue? Will you accuse them of explicitly supporting one side of that conflict?
After all, it is crystal-clear to all right-thinking people that if the world were just, he would currently be in jail. Referring to him as a president is explicitly taking a political position on the subject...
This is where a person less concerned with the correct use of the terms designating logical fallacies might accuse you of a "false equivalence". Regardless, trying to reason by analogy on topics like this invites errors of oversimplification and generalization.
Staying on topic, you grossly misrepresented the situation by characterizing WHO's implicit endorsement of Taiwan's non-existance as a state as a matter of mere "argument over borders".
I feel that it is a gross representation to interpret the WHO's ''NEXT QUESTION PLEASE'' dodge to be an implicit endorsement of... A state of the world that doesn't exist?
Why do you think I feel that way? Why do you not feel that way about the example I outlined? Is it because one topic (Trump's criminality) is controversial in the Western world, while the other one (Taiwan's independence) is not?
Since when is science about consensus? I seem to recall learning more about falsification being the primary driver behind the scientific method, which tends to revolve around a rigorous process of trying to prove everything wrong until you just can't any more. Sure haven't seen a whole lot of that. Sure have seen a whole lot of, listen to us because this is what we say, without a whole lot of correctly collected data (emphasis on the correctly collected because data are worthless unless correctly collected, i've personally had to throw out hours of work because of sampling errors)to back anything up. Yet, I'm being told to accept lockdowns, police searches of homes and a whole host of human rights violations on the whims of some vague international appointed entity in the name of public safety. Any voice speaking against this is to be silenced on the public platforms of the day.
Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life.
>Yes, ignore all the overwhelmed hospitals and the sudden jump in mortality in Italy and Spain that made them decide to lock everything down after they already had a crisis on their hands. Rail more about a transnational organization with a long though often imperfect record of epidemiological expertise. Those bureaucrats in Geneva are personally ruining your life.
Not one of these statements reflects any stated positions of the parent. All are hyperbolic mis-characterizations.
> without a whole lot of correctly collected data (emphasis on the correctly collected because data are worthless unless correctly collected, i've personally had to throw out hours of work because of sampling errors)to back anything up.
"Deaths: 191,081" would beg to differ with their conclusion that there isn't a whole lot of correctly collected data. Further, we have incredibly good evidence that social distancing works. We could see it on a state by state and week by week basis in the US, as well as in other nations when they implemented similar policies. There's a whole lot of data backing up lockdowns.
There's also literally hundreds of academic papers on the subject would also disagree. I'm not sure what they expect, but you don't generally get to run longitudinal double blind studies in the midst of a pandemic (although now we're finally getting to the point that you can, with, for example, evidence that things like cloroquine don't improve outcomes).
I'm also not sure what home invasions and human rights violations they're talking about, I haven't heard of any, so I'm curious to see if that's substantiated. I doubt it is.
If you want to discuss that with the GGP, and think you can do so fairly, in good faith, go right ahead. I'm just tired of the absolute degradation of quality dialogue on this site, which has accelerated during this period of mass unemployment and sheltering in place. Extreme misrepresentations have become the norm. It's tiresome and is no way to attempt dialectic.
Did you actually read the advice? It explicitly provides advice addressing your concern.
"In some countries masks are worn in accordance with local customs or in accordance with advice by national authorities in the context of COVID-19. In these situations, best practices should be followed about how to wear, remove, and dispose of them, and for hand hygiene after removal".
It then goes on to say ...
"Advice to decision makers on the use of masks for healthy people in community settings.
As described above, the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks. WHO offers the following advice to decision makers so they apply a risk-based approach."
"However, the following potential risks should be carefully taken into account in any decision-making process:
• self-contamination that can occur by touching and reusing contaminated mask
• depending on type of mask used, potential breathing difficulties
• false sense of security, leading to potentially less adherence to other preventive measures such as physical distancing and hand hygiene
• diversion of mask supplies and consequent shortage of mask for health care workers
• diversion of resources from effective public health measures, such as hand hygiene"
This advice seems to be directed at wearing masks to prevent oneself from becoming infected, but that ain't the point of having as many people as possible wear masks while out and about; rather, it's that you can be infectious without ever knowing it (i.e. you're asymptomatic) and wearing a mask (and gloves if you've got 'em) helps significantly mitigate the risk of you spreading it to people around you. That the WHO would advise against the widespread wearing of masks goes to show how behind-the-curve they continue to be throughout this pandemic; this has been widely recommended by pretty much every other authority for weeks now.
Also, "diversion of mask supplies" is a ridiculous excuse. Even an improvised mask (bandana, something handmade, etc.) is better than nothing at all. And if you already have full-blown N95s, might as well use 'em, taking steps¹ to sterilize them and maximize their reusability (I have two N95s, one previously used long before the COVID-19 outbreak, and one new one from my grandpa who found a box of 'em with his tools; I cycle between them, giving each at least 72 hours between uses per the rule of thumb that SARS-CoV-2 won't survive longer than that on an N95 mask, and if I ever need to reuse one sooner I'm content with sacrificing my oven for decontamination purposes. I also have some work gloves that I similarly cycle through, but I also recognize that these ain't designed to resist much contamination so I still take care to avoid needlessly touching things.).
Three of those points can be addressed by proper education by the authorities. And last two points have nothing to do with risks of wearing a mask and more to do with how authorities in a country are addressing the situation.
It's pretty easy to find official answers to that question. This is from the bccdc.ca website:
> Masks may give a person a false sense of security and are likely to increase the number of times a person will touch their own face (e.g., to adjust the mask).
This argument makes about as much sense as saying seatbelts may give a false sense of security and cause people to drive recklessly. The WHOs mask advice is all outdated and from the perspective of stopping people from trying to catch the virus, whereas in Asia masks are worn to stop spreading your own virus. It's total crap that we can't question WHOs advice here - especially when they've been so behind the curve in other areas - when it could save lives.
I don't know who you're arguing with. I was simply responding to the parent's statement "I dare to ask the question", as if the contra arguments were some sort of mystery, or that they didn't exist, when pretty much any official site I've seen offers that information.
I didn't make any statement about whether I thought non-medical masks were a good idea for everyone to wear or not...
And I think it makes sense to be doubtful about this. It’s as if you’re saying wearing a helmet gives you a false sense of security. Wearing a mask may give some people a false sense of security. But at the end of the day the question is if mask-wearing populations have less infections than non-mask wearing populations.
Yeah, I just don't understand how in a thread of such important stuff, this comment that's so low-hanging, so based on a non-issue is the top, with dozens of responses to it. It's really bordering on the conspiratorial, it's a bummer to see HN embracing that.
It doesn't really make sense. You've got generic advice and then laws, WHO's statement was not in any way a contradiction of the law and it's grade school logic to see that. What's up HN?
If HN has trouble with it though, Google is not going to do much better. They are not known for having a masterful grasp of subtleties. Examples? Look at the abysmal quality of their translations, their repetitive and off target ad personalization, their weak and spotty voicemail transcriptions that miss even the name of the caller when it’s in the address book with the number, their dead or dying OSS hosting, their (lack of) care for their own products, their clunky bloat-feel mobile apps, their spam filters that even send Google Alerts to the spam box, their no fucks given customer service, their takedowns... Even their search results which have not seen any innovation for the last decade as far as I can tell. (I mean you can’t filter out or coalesce useless bad copies of stack overflow posts from site scraping copycat sites that appear alongside the original SO search hit? Really? That’s too hard for you, Google?) I don’t think they are any more capable of parsing WHO statements then a crowd of HN posters. Probably worse.
Not a huge Google fan, I've gotten downvoted more times than you can count for criticizing them, but the thread we're talking about isn't genuine criticism, it's a twisting of something easily explainable into something it isn't, which detracts from the conversation.
I agree, if techies at the heart of this can't discusses this rationally, then those that don't do this for a living are going to struggle to, which is why there should be a higher standard for discussion.
I think there's just a pretty narrow range of opinions that you're allowed to express or the regulars that have invested so much time getting karma will make sure you aren't heard.
That does stifle discussion. I dunno if HN users realize how many people just refuse to touch the site because of these dynamics.
But this, I dunno what it's about. There's a really important issue here, and it's not "WHO said you only need a mask while caretaking and local laws say you need to wear a mask ergo contradiction/we're failing the children" ain't it. HN's too smart for takes like that, I don't get it.
I don't think that's contradicting. Directly contradicting would be "Don't wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19". What you described sounds more like extending the current WHO recommendations.
I think "You need to wear a mask when you go out of the house" directly contradicts "you only need to wear a mask when taking care of someone with COVID-19"
No they're definitely saying not to wear masks because they think it's net harmful. For example
> WHO also said community masking could lead to a "false sense of security" and cause people to ignore other evidence-based measures like handwashing and self-isolation.
That still doesn't seem like a contradiction to me since they are not explicitly recommending not to do it, only suggesting to be aware of the possible downsides.
That said, they also don't explicitly recommend to not take vitamin C or turmeric so the examples given by YouTube are already in conflict
And so continues this disgustingly paternal approach of "nudging" people to do things instead of presenting clear information and empowering citizens to take correct action.
because it is true, the N95 mask don't protect you from the virus completely, and the masks that city advocate to use (non N95) don't do anything to protect you, they are there to protect others from you. If you sneeze or talk those masks will restrict most of the droplets from traveling far.
This is the heart of the issue. Just because legitimate and identifiably bad advice exists doesn't mean this is suddenly widely applicable to all health information. Youtube isn't banning content that the WHO is "absolutely certain is true" either, they are using any of the (frequently changing) general advice coming out of WHO.
There's always tons of grey area on what is true or good advice. No matter how much 'science' is thrown around, or credentialism ("they have a PhD!"), or credibility some international organization has, that does not make this any less true. Especially when it comes the speech of the general public - not some advice via some formal expert forum or government body.
Even Snopes.com is littered with incorrect and politicized positions, and unlike the WHO, their actual stated goal is trying to determine what is true or not. WHO has a million different incentives beyond this.
What is useful advice for governments to disseminate, given tons of competing interests (which is what WHO specializes in), doesn't automatically translate to what regular people should be allowed or not allowed to discuss in an open forum.
Additionally, we're not being asked to just trust WHO to have good advice and good intentions, Youtube is telling everyone to trust WHO information proxied via an Youtube moderation teams interpretation of it, via an opaque no-appeals process.
Anyone who has used any major platform before (Reddit, Paypal, etc) knows how stupid moderation teams can be. And the vast majority of moderation teams haven't been stupid enough to try to determine what is 'true' or not. Because that's crazy.
The only way I might support this is if it helps bring about the demise of Youtube.
That doesn’t really imply that you cannot or should not. The “only” there means they aren’t necessarily recommending you to do so but it is not forbidden.
So requiring you to wear masks in other situations does not contradict, because otherwise “doctors should wear masks at all times in hospital” would also contradict that (assuming the doctor isn’t taking care of just Covid-19 patients).
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," WHO executive director of health emergencies Mike Ryan said Monday.
- https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
WHO has been saying "uninfected" people should not wear masks from the beginning. That's bad advice unless you're trying to save masks for medical works which makes it a well-intentioned untruth. Either way I don't like YouTube deleting a video that contradicts this WHO "advice".
Only in the same sense that "take vitamin C" is an extension of the WHO recommendations, and Wojcicki explicitly mentioned that as an example of what's banned.
My understanding here, from the quote in the article, is that one is ok to say 'Take vitamin C', but it is not ok to say 'Take vitamin C, it will cure you [of x]'.
Sure it is. Only means exclusively, one, no more. They're saying, "You exclusively need to wear a mask if you're taking care of a person with C-19". This action, excluding all others.
"Only" qualifies "need". "you only need to wear a seat belt on public roads" and "you should wear a seat belt on private roads" are not contradictions.
Also for a long time the medias were quoting 5-10% death rates when we have now evidence that it will be well under 1%, which infectious disease specialists were saying all along.
Also treatments evolve. We were told that ventilators were absolute critical and it appears now that there may better solutions [1]. My point is you can’t enforce a single truth on a topic like that where our understanding of the virus and what to do is changing. And this understanding drives policy.
>Evidence from China is that only 1% of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within 2 days.
That assumes China is finding almost all cases and is able to track almost all cases. If they only report cases that are serious enough to require medical attention that statement is worthless. Of course, that line of thinking would require questioning China's data which the WHO would never politically do.
I think what YouTube is doing is with the best intentions - but I hate it. Silencing speech you don't agree with is a dangerous road littered with totalitarian regimes. Doing so at YouTube's scale underlines how much unchecked power corporations have in our society. I think they should not have the power to decide what voice deserves a platform and what does not. They should be regulated as a utility given their market share. You should be able to challenge YouTube in court with the first amendment. This currently isn't possible with private companies.
The central kind of thing that this ban is meant to prevent is people posting on Youtube to drink bleach as a COVID cure and laughing over the ensuing deaths. We've disapproved of that kind of speech for centuries -- this slope isn't nearly as slippery as you think it is.
Why not just base it on US law? It’s illegal to get someone to kill themselves, but not to preach exceptional philosophies. In the real world, the best way to refute a quack idea is with facts and a strong argument.
He's saying you're misunderstanding your rights regarding free speech, which sounds accurate as you seem to think you have rights on YouTube's platform. (You don't.)
Free speech only protects you from the government, there are many places that saying dumb or offensive things will get you kicked out or censored.
So yes I agree with OP, the fact that you don't understand these rights but sit at your desk and yell "but my free speech!" or "un-American!" when YouTube is trying to combat disinformation during a global health crisis could likely be a precursor to a collapse of your society. While it won't be a direct cause of the collapse, if an educated programmer on HN doesn't get it, I don't favor the prospects for the rest of the society.
I literally said you can't challenge YouTube on first amendment grounds, because it doesn't work that way. I'm not sure how that is me misunderstanding anything. More like you both misunderstood me.
What I'm saying is YouTube is a monopoly. So if you say something on there that they don't like, and they censor you, you've been effectively silenced. What other video platform will you use to get your message out? Whatever you choose you won't reach nearly as many people. Should Google have that kind of power? I don't think so. They should be regulated and the government (and by extension the people who vote for it) should make those decisions, not a corporation.
In practice this will mean "YouTube is taking down obvious contrarian theory vids which convince followers to burn 5g towers and the like". No one is actually interested in censoring your nuanced criticisms of the WHO. Your form of objection doesn't risk inciting idiots to violence.
WHO is giving medical advice, not legal advice. There isn't a contradiction here; if, because of local conditions, local government has prescribed you to wear masks when you go shopping, it isn't because your local government is making a medical diagnosis about you. It's because they want to stop the spread and they can't know that you are healthy or not.
This isn't a hard call. Neither is restricting people promoting miracle cures that lead people to swallow fish antibiotics in the name of "free speech".
Big companies have a responsibility to fight misinformation. Letting the public "figure it out on their own" is simply social darwinism, and it's cruel.
Perhaps, but given Google's track record of banning users without explanation for strange reasons I somehow doubt YouTube is able to perceive that daylight.
In some countries like India, it is mandatory to wear masks. And you could be beaten up by the police, punished, penalized, arrested and jailed for not doing so. That goes completely against the WHO guidelines. Can they ban the country's government?
The mixed messages did leave me confused in the initial stages until major TV channels broadcasted what the government wanted. Until then I thought the news was a rumor.
"Are you surprised to hear WHO saying that healthy skydivers don't need to and shouldn't use parachutes? This is backed up by a systematic review of randomized controlled trials, published in the British Medical Journal, cited more than 1000 times: https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459"
> Interpretation: Although there is widespread interest regarding the BMJ paper arguing that randomized trials are not necessary for practices of clear benefit, there are few analogies in medicine. Most parachute analogies in medicine are inappropriate, incorrect or misused.
The idea is not to stop you from spreading the information that you should wear q mask everywhere. They want you to stop spreading dangerous false information like the idea of injecting hand sanitiser to your lungs, oh, wait...
I don't think we need to declare "One truth", in order to remove the worst layer of misinformation. It's a false dichotomy.
What is the effectivness of (homemade) masks? Disbuted, so here information should be free
Should you inject disinfectives into you bloodstream to cure Covid-19? No. This is misinformation, is easily identified.
If there is doubt, it should be allowed. There will obviously always be a grey area, but for the time being, a lot of good can be done, without any harm.
First, people are, in general, really bad at navigating traumatic events and situations. Now if you've been through some real Sh!tty situations in your past, you're better able to navigate new ones, but don't make the assumption if you are able to navigate them, they can as well. Giving them 10 different sources of information including things like 5G being to blame and other disinformation can create more problems than its worth including riots.
Second, The WHO has been flogged thoroughly by the US government in the States and rightfully so given the misleading statements that were made at the onset about the ability of china to keep the virus contained. You look at the WHO ARCGIS webpage for Covid and it's got outbreaks with 30 people in a circle the same size as the US outbreak; there's some degree of obvious derision by the WHO for the west in general and the US in particular which in my estimation, factored into what they communicated. At this point it's hitting every country, so every country is going to request a reform and furthermore every country is going to be look for other trade partners aside from china.
Youtube at this point is an international utility so they are siding with an international firm; in the short term this is wise. Long-term, you can expect a US institution to take over as the authority as the vast majority of medical research worldwide is done in the US.
I think that would only be contradictory if the WHO advice said strictly don't wear a mask otherwise. In this case you're still free to choose to wear a mask even if the WHO doesn't say you should, or if local laws require it so it's not a contradiction even though it's not the exact same advice/requirement.
Do the WHO tell you not to drink disinfectant? I guess that means it would be fine to release a video saying that this will provide you with protection.
The WHO advice you are referring to is pertaining to medical masks (clearly stated in the section title of that page "When and how to wear medical masks to protect against coronavirus?")
Medical masks need to be used only if you have a proper reason to prevent the unavailability of stock to healthcare people.
Well, there's certainly truth, just WHO is not exactly the best way to it. And, as it appears, Youtube is certainly not the place one would look for a discussion that would reveal the truth. For them, whatever the official position of minitrue is this moment is the truth.
> Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO?
It's not contradicting the WHO to say "local laws say to wear a mask". That's also a statement of fact. And I can't imagine YT taking down a video saying "follow the law".
This is precisely why this sort of "helpful" censorship is not helpful. The WHO is wrong, plain and simple. There's dozens of studies that very clearly show even home made masks are highly effective in spreading viral diseases.
Of course there is one truth. We may not know it now or ever, and might be really nuanced. That doesn't excuse the institutions we ask to guard our health from dispensing obvious misinformation. The WHO and CDC are lying for different reasons about masks. The WHO downplayed the virus against evidence in January when it should have been letting the world know of the threat. This virus is mild compared to what will (probably) eventually happen.
Rumour on the street is that the advice is in place because local governments don't want people hoarding face masks, because there's a massive shortage of it in most Western countries, [1] so much so that several hospitals have eveb asked for private donations of face masks, and even the Directorate of Health. [2] This is half admitted at least by my own health authorities in Norway.
The advice from the Norwegian "CDC", the NIPH/FHI, was that you shouldn't wear a mask! [3] The claim, as it was broadcast in an interview, was that there is no evidence that wearing a mask protects you from contagion. This again springs out of the advice from the WHO. But they also claimed that it's in fact a danger of spreading the disease by wearing a mask! [4] [5] Except it's pretty controversial, and there are studies that directly contradict the official advice, for instance the now infamous bus study from Wuhan (now retracted),[6] but there are others. FHI has since relaxed this verdict, and there are news stories of them even turning 180 and advicing the use of face masks.[7]
What WHO is saying is that there is no solid proof that wearing a mask will do much to protect you. And they are correct in saying that.
They do not say that masks offer no protection. They also don't say that you shouldn't wear masks.
Actual scientists give advice based on available evidence. When there is no evidence, or available evidence is too weak, they don't give that advice and they also don't fall in the trap of considering a lack of evidence as being evidence of absence.
Thats why you shouldnt hear scientists for advice and use your brain. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If you wear a mask and doesnt have effect, nothing happens, if it does, thats a benefit, so you can only win by wearing one.
You can be rational and completly dumb at the same time.
If you wear masks, but there aren't enough on sale, you end up exposing medical personnel. Viral load matters. Exposure to high viral loads has killed young and healthy doctors. For medics masks save lives.
Wearing masks in a situation in which medics don't have enough masks is a textbook tragedy of the commons.
Yes, you can be rational and completely dumb at the same time, I agree.
Theres clearly a difference in the magnitude of probabilities between masks and tinfoil hats actually working, and we are not in a global electromagnetic disaster right now.
No, because while the CDC did incorrectly dismiss the value of masks and recommended that people focus on hand washing and distancing, they never said you must not wear a mask.
To add to this: just because you're not coughing or sneezing when you leave the house doesn't mean you'll stay that way throughout your quarantine-breaking excursion among the public. This is especially relevant for seasonal allergy sufferers like myself.
Might as well just assume that you'll probably end up needing to cough or sneeze at some point and just wear the mask.
Spam, scams, misinformation, etc. is why we can't have nice things. Every open service ends up becoming locked down because of abuse once it reaches a certain size. The choice is between censoring YouTube or allowing it to become a cesspool of garbage in which the bad drives out the good. It's just like any other Internet forum.
All our politicians around the world were so reactionary, many knew it has a 1-2 week incubation period, but no one was willing to make an order saying "WEAR MASKS" when no one was testing positive yet. They could have gotten ahead of this thing and prevented the outbreaks. The quarantines are a last resort because PUBLIC POLICY FAILED to contain the outbreaks.
WE WILL FACE THIS SITUATION AGAIN when the quarantines are lifted and everyone re-emerges. We must have a clear framework: compulsory wearing of masks and using sanitizer when entering buildings. Fines for anyone caught on camera removing their masks. They have to understand the masks aren't to protect the person wearing them, but the others. It has to be done en masse, and that's what government should be coordinating.
Obviously it's good advice to wear masks in public when confronted with a respiratory disease capable of asymptomatic transmission for days after infection. The masks don't make any one person safer, but widespread usage makes us all safer.
Trouble is, there weren't enough masks at first. It's not clear that there are now, for that matter.
One of the few things Trump is correct about is that the WHO has bungled this situation at pretty much every step of the way. So no, it's not OK for YouTube to tie their policies to WHO directives. They're a US company, so they should be referring to CDC guidelines (1) instead.
The CDC guidelines you’ve linked to continue to say surgical masks should be for medical personnel.
This is ridiculous!! A mask is a cloth on a string. We are how many months into this thing... why hasn’t our private industry created enough cloths on strings???? What is the shortage? Is it the cloth?
It’s because the politicians were reactionary and behind on the most basic things every step of the way. Why not order American companies to produce a billion masks and mail them to every building in bulk?? Save trillions of dollars later.
FWIW I found reading about the process of making respirators quite fascinating. It opened up a whole world of reading about nanofibers and the melt blown process that I'd not previously stumbled upon. Turns out good masks aren't just any old fabric - producing unwoven sub-micron nanofiber fabric is quite involved and that fabric is in short supply.
Exactly this. Parent to your comment has no firm grasp on how difficult and expensive it is to place and maintain a melt-blown-fiber shop outside of a crisis, let alone during one.
That said : cotton DIY masks can be quite effective. I recommend buying a box of shop towels, which are made with a similar blowing mechanism that creates a random fiber orientation.
The CDC is making a distinction between surgical masks and non-medical grade masks, which is fine. They will both reduce the likelihood that an asymptomatic person will transmit the disease, but the former should be reserved for medical personnel when possible.
The WHO doesn't appear to be drawing any such distinction, at least at first glance.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
>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?
The problem is not primarily when you make bad decisions and suffer harm from it. It's when you make bad decisions and others suffer harm from it. You even bring up drunk driving, yet your argument remains exclusively about damage to yourself.
Your freedom ends where the freedom of the next person begins. So not only is it "not free", it's also "not boundless". You don't get to kill people intentionally. You also don't get away with it if you do it by gross negligence (such as drunk driving).
Inciting violence is an offence in most parts of the world. Not because governments love to be oppressive but because society figured out that it's the point where you cross how much personal freedom you can have without infringing on everyone else's.
Where is this point for COVID-19 misinformation? It's a difficult question, and it's unclear what is appropriate and what is overbearing. What is clear is that harm is actively being cause by people propagating this nonsense. Whether an ideal rational adult could cut through it is entirely immaterial to this question, it doesn't stop the harm.
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.
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
> 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.
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"
> 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.
"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,"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>“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.
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.
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"?
> 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.
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”?
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."
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.
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.
you conveniently left out number three in that you connected (1) and (2) via analogical reasoning. of course, i suspect that's what they disagree with.
Equating WHO to Fox News directly as organizations does not make any sense. They are not even on the same domain.
I assumed, the readership would not conflate them on all possible attributes.
The reason for my statement was specifically to point out the flaw that WHO is guided solely by medical reasoning.
Just like it would be a flaw to assume Fox News is the unbiased broker of news events.
Is the connection that cambalache thought I was making that WHO and Fox News are both brokers of medical news and information?
If so, I'm at a loss on how to better phrase "WHO is a political organization with medical leanings just like Fox News is an entertainment channel that covers newslike topics." to convey my intent and would really appreciate better phrasing.
I would posit that the analogy is unnecessary and detrimental and that the statement "WHO is a political organization with medical leanings" stands perfectly well on its own. As have been outlined in this thread, the analogy serves more to lead the reader to wonder whether you meant to equate the two in quality or some other attribute(s) moreso than it does to explain the meaning of the first statement.
All organizations are political organizations. However, with regards to COVID, I consider WHO's advice to be mainly aimed at preventing COVID and trust them more than the USG on these issues.
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.
According to the preliminary epidemiological investigation, most cases worked at or were handlers and frequent visitors to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The government reports that there is no clear evidence that the virus passes easily from person to person.
Currently, no case with infection of this novel coronavirus has been reported elsewhere other than Wuhan.
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.
"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.
I guess if this were the 1500s YouTube would only have us post videos that confirm that witches and heretics should be burned at the stake. Maybe it would be okay to talk about a few more crusades.
Mankind improves because systems become big, rigid, and unable to evolve. People come along and point that out, suggesting various theories about how those systems got that way, the reasons why they are wrong, and offering suggestions for improvement.
It needs to be said that 99% of the time, these people are wrong. They're emotionally ill, they don't understand the situation, they have perhaps virulent and insidious ideologies that blind them to reality. These are exactly the people you want in the public square. They teach the youth about critical thinking and how to reason about your view of the world. They let the rest of us keep an eye on them in case they get violent. Plus, many of them are just happy to yell into the void; without that, there would be a lot more violence than there would be otherwise.
But every 1% of the time, those folks are actually right. Slowly they convince the rest of us. Our species improves.
YouTube can't do this. Whatever their intentions, they are directly acting against the health of our species by creating a new orthodoxy. They have to be stopped, whether broken up, taxed, or banned. It's not that the WHO is wrong here. They're probably right. It's that YouTube is making it so that the WHO can never be wrong, ie, we can never have a public discussion about their policies. Worse still, history has shown us that when you start going down this route you are actually acting against your society's interest. People treated as if they can't think for themselves turn into a population that can't think for itself. The WHO is fine, it's YouTube that has become the real enemy to public health by doing this.
> Mankind improves because systems become big, rigid, and unable to evolve. People come along and point that out, suggesting various theories about how those systems got that way, the reasons why they are wrong, and offering suggestions for improvement.
Actually, this sounds like "Institutional Sclerosis", which is actually one of the main reasons that nations fail - some structure becomes more important than the welfare of society, be it a leader, some entity (like the military) or great collection of power by few people.
This is exactly the situation that we see today that makes our society unable to evolve, and will guarantee the current slide continues.
Free speech (well, most freedoms, really) will die the day we decide "saving lives" is worth _any_ cost.
Heck, we already decided trashing the economy is worth "saving lives" (how many?), I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread, lower the suicide rate of those vulnerable to hate speech, etc. And why stop there? Remove 2nd amendment and you can save even more lives! Too much freedom just seems to lead to people dying, because people make bad choices that affect others.
You’re on a slippery slope and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation. The danger of losing civil liberties comes when the exception becomes the rule.
AFAIK, no amendments have been violated since YouTube is a private entity. They can editorialize what they, how they want. It’s is their liberty to make a choice here, the same as your liberty to not support that choice.
That's a slippery slope right there, a very dangerous one. In the US, spaces where one engages in political activities have moved from public (town square in front of City Hall) to private (the mall plus parking lot). That's a problem.
The other thing is monopolies. In the past, when you were on the fringes of the spectrum you'd publish with your fringe publisher and could at least get your message out. Nowadays Youtube suppresses the neonazis. That's nice and good, as long as it's nazis, but what if they don't like what you have to say? Big publishers and government have a symbiotic relationship, and there is always a sprachregelung.
That’s not a slippery slope but your point further on is valid. The privatization of the town square carries the potential to erode our civil liberties as these new public centers aren’t held to the same standards. The question here is then how do we protect that.
Which freedoms do we give up here? Freedom of the individual or freedom of enterprise? Imo if a corporate entity decides to act like a public space, then it should be treated like one and held accountable as such. Otherwise we’ve created a simple way of bypassing some constitutional liberties.
That still however doesn’t answer the question as to where we draw the line for freedom of expression. Nazis took over once in the public sphere and they can do it again. I will argue against moral relativism here and say yes it’s ok to suppress nazis so long as we don’t turn that around and become needlessly oppressive in other ways.
A reasonable point. But I am worried about the day that those who seek more power are able to convince people that we are in a sustained exceptional situation that is not really all that exceptional. And with private entities doing their bidding to clamp down on dissenting voices, that could become even more possible.
I don't think we are there yet, but we should be wary of that possibility.
> and don’t consider that this is an exceptional situation
exceptional situations are ripe for exploitation by corporations and governments and political parties. And indeed we've seen all of these try (and succeed) in taking advantage of the situation...
"Never let a good crisis go to waste" -- Winston Churchill
If anything that only proves the GP's point. During the mentioned time period the only solution was to infringe on civil liberties by imposing a strict quarantine, and yet the people of the day still decided that it was better to die free than to live oppressed.
Indeed they are liable... well, to a certain degree:
A prime example here is the DMCA — but there are also other existing laws that place restrictions on content, which Youtube (and other platforms/publishers) must adhere to.
> I imagine some people would be overjoyed to remove the 1st amendment in order to lower disease spread
Well, if you read the whole thing, the 1st amendment includes the freedom to peaceably assemble, so at least to that extent it has already been removed and to cheering crowds no less.
Don't you think this is because the modern secular attitude has no real foundation to make moral choices and picks "saving lives" almost randomly, just as a plausible highest good? :)
For example, Christianity strives to save souls, not lives. That gives a very different vantage point. From this point it's absolutely clear that the right to speak candidly cannot be abolished on such a ridiculous premise as saving lives.
What's the point of supporting the current economic model if it doesn't support human welfare? What's the point of any of our abstractions if they don't serve human welfare?
I'm totally in agreement with you.
The pain of economic loss is processed in the emotional and reward centers of the brain. Empathy and compassion, on the other hand, are processed in advanced sections of the brain in the anterior prefrontal lobe. When we are encouraged to think about the stock market all the time, then the emotional centers are allowed to take over, and we forget that people are what's important.
I'm responding to this not for you, but for others. You should know that what you've just said indicates a disgusting train of thought not characterised by any good intention.
--
The issue when talking about the long term affects is that, you're right, we don't have enough information. However that doesn't mean we should sit on our hands and do nothing.
The whole point of humans recording history (and science is mostly just trying things and writing them down so we can build on this knowledge later) is to see patterns and conclude things.
There's all kinds of misinformation that can spread in the cracks here because only history will tell us the real truth, but drawing on similarly infectious diseases from history will help significantly.
It's not 'ascientific' to draw from the corpus of scientific knowledge. It is ascientific to say: "This disease is completely unknown so we should wait until the human death toll has reached critical mass before making an action which could impact our wealth".
For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.[0]
In case you forgot, economy is the quantity and value of transactions in a market. Less people is lower quantity.
From the admittedly little we know about the disease, it is much more deadly than anything that's currently making the rounds. (If you're going to rebut me please control for number of people infected, because it's a common misconception that "more people die of other things" but that's because "other things" are affecting more people)
If you want to have an actual conversation, I'm happy to do that.
First of all, everything coming out in the news recently should cure you of the illusion that we have any idea about the number of people infected. Estimates of an undercounting of a factor of ten in the early days in New York. An aircraft carrier with 60% of cases being completely asymptomatic. Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
It's interesting that you use the precautionary principle only towards a virus but not towards a wide scale social experiment on an overwhelming majority of the population.
The elderly certainly contribute to the economy, but if you're pretending that it's anywhere near the impact of something like global unemployment in developed countries hitting 10%, you're being obtuse.
Your description of the economy is rudimentary and shows disregard for things like organizational capital which are vital to an effective economy.
And finally, the corpus of scientific knowledge is one thing -- attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> Sweden staying the course and not seeing perilous results.
> attempting to extract second order effects from epidemics affecting completely different populations with completely different ways and methods of interacting is an exercise in absurdity.
> For the sake of the parent, there are studies on the loss of population and if we lose 1-2% of the population in the span of a few months then indeed that will recess the economy quite sharply.
First of all, even if the true mortality rate of covid-19 were 1-2% (it isn't, it's likely much lower), it wouldn't infect 100% of the population.
You can't just do [total confirmed deaths] / [total confirmed cases] to arrive at a mortality % and then multiply by the total population to get a death count. That's horribly biased and not grounded in reality. The current estimated fatality rate is biased in my opinion as it mainly selects for people already in hospitals. Research is indicating that [total confirmed cases] may be much, MUCH smaller than [total cases] [0]. People are getting it and recovering without every being tested. Some people (a lot of people?) have mild-to-no-symptoms.
Look, it's reasonable to want to prevent excessive loss of life. But it's a double edged sword. Mortality rate for people aged 20-30 is estimated at .2% (though it'll like turn out to be lower for healthy adults). Prolonged stay-at-home orders have driven up suicide rate though (not to mention the devestating damage to people's livlihoods). 2 graduating seniors recently committed suicide at the Air Force Academy presumably related to covid-19 lockdown orders, and with a class of ~800, that's already more deadly than covid-19.
You're right we shouldn't "sit on our hands", but we also shouldn't fall victim to the politician's fallacy [1]
Look at what happened to the Chinese stock market once pictures of people literally dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan leaked, and before there was a lockdown.
>Oh! What do you do about those YouTUbe videos that tell you to drink bleach because it saves you from SARS-COV2!"
Also you should be free to sue the content creator, maybe instead of censoring content youtube should have better "know your creator" type legislation?
If we want to convince people, we can't stop at saying "freedom", as if that makes the rest self evident. We have to explain why freedom is important. Why the cost is worth paying.
Not even mentioning they are playing a dangerous censorhip game, it's very weird that they pick the WHO over the CDC after all the WHO controversies. (Taiwan, slow COVID-19 response, alignment with China lines, head of WHO was part of the corrupt Ethiopian government, $200M in business class travel, and probably more scandals.)
CDC has also a way bigger budget than the WHO. $11.1B vs $4.2B.
The majority of WHO controversies are made up, the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues; and whatever you want to say about Taiwan it is a very heated political situation.
That's also the evidence of "alignment with china": because we in the west see a failure to recognise taiwan as siding with china. Which is odd because the USA doesn't officially recognise Taiwan itself. In fact the WHO did almost exactly what a US diplomat would have done- albeit a bit delayed.
Corruption not withstanding (yeah, it's unfortunate but that thing is going to happen, what matters is the response not that it happened) it's better to have a bipartisan global concerted effort to manage these things than the centralised health organisation of a single country. Even though that country is the homestead of the service in question.
> The majority of WHO controversies are made up, the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues; and whatever you want to say about Taiwan it is a very heated political situation.
They make overt political statements all the time. For one: calling Taiwan racist when it took issue with the WHO’s inaction after their attempts to disseminate health information.
Then Tedros calling travel bans “stigmatic.” Precisely when travel bans were needed at the onset of the spreading.
If WHO is supposed to be apolitical, it shouldn’t be parroting Chinese talking points.
The Head of the WHO was attacked by racist trolls who were outwardly Taiwanese; for excluding Taiwan from membership (like _all_ U.N. projects do), And he commented about the abuse.
Taiwan does not exist as an entity to the WHO because it is not recognised by the United Nations.
As much as Taiwan has valuable lessons it's basically akin to asking why the WHO isn't listening to the municipality of sealand.
The journalist asking that question in the first place knew that Taiwan is a political hotbed and was looking for a story, they got one and the WHO is under the bus- at a time when we need a united front in healthcare globally.
If you think that's an acceptable answer, then Tedros could have given it as an answer instead of an irrelevant diatribe about mean people online.
Public health is, like aviation for example, one of those things where recognition of "legitimate" governments has to take a back seat to de facto reality. If the WHO is unable to deal with Taiwan, then we need a different organization that can.
The only way to have real collaboration on a global level is to take no sides of any kind and only agree with absolute consensus. Anything else is picking a side and alienates part of the world.
I'm sorry that the WHO isn't playing into the politics you or I like, in this case it almost certainly would have saved lives, but that's kind of the point. As soon as they "wake up to the reality" of something such as, idk, Crimea being Russian territory? then suddenly they're alienating Ukraine and its allies.
It's stupid, and fickle, but the only winning move is not to play.
They clearly took a side, I don’t know how you can look at it any other way. In your counter factual with Russia, of course they should recognize the de facto situation and send aid if something terrible happens there, regardless of how mad that makes Ukraine.
It doesn’t really matter whether my politics were assuaged, though, because they pissed off the majority of their funding and had it cut off. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Do you think it was "racist trolls" in Taiwan who made him make those factually wrong statements? Or is it more likely that the financial relationship with the WHO maintained by China influenced what they were saying? Which one is more likely?
If you don't mind me asking, could you please provide the source for one WHO controversy that is made up? Preferably one of the large ones, if applicable.
It also comes from the Absurdly laudatory praise that WHO was giving China in January about how they were setting standards for transparency and how their quick behavior had saved the world.
> China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
That said, the "WHO praised China!" meme is largely a deflection. Trump, talk radio, and Fox have been pushing it heavily in an attempt to blame others for the US's poor response.
So when it's convenient, we look to Trump as an example?
It's terrifying to watch so many people argue back and forth so adamantly defending their sides, meanwhile almost no one even brings up the possibility that they both screwed up.
One dimensional politics will be the end of the American Empire.
It's disingenuous to act like the WHO was the only folks doing this at the time, and it's being used to deflect blame - "blame China!" - from the administration.
"The WHO is just as trustworthy as Trump" doesn't really seem like a big vote of confidence for the organization. This comeback only makes sense if everything is a purely partisan divide and anyone who is against WHO must be pro-trump.
If you want to get into the details. The United Nations does not recognize Taiwan entirely because it is in the interest of China, China's strategic funding of the United Nations, and their institutional power they have as a security council member with Veto power. No other country has an interest in China claiming Taiwan isn't a country. Which it is by all means, they have their own government, land, culture, etc. They are not a part of China, it is just used a source of legitimacy for the commonly threatened and strategic takeover the CCP talks about.
So the UN does not recognize Taiwan because of China.
It is naive to say that China does not influence these international organizations for political gain. In fact anyone who studies international politics academically would acknowledge that every country who participates in these international organization uses them to gain political influence. I would argue that they exist primarily for political influence, instead of their intended goal; I mean the UN did leave a country right when a genocide started so they didn't have to deal pay to deal with it, among countless examples of it being used for international legitimacy at any cost.
> the WHO are not a political entity so they do not want to comment at all on political issues;
The WHO is very much a political entity in the pockets of the Chinese Communist Party. There's a difference between refusing to comment on Taiwan and pretending like Taiwan doesn't exist.
Ignoring the political aspect, they've dealt with this crisis terribly, being slow to respond and giving downright false advice like telling people not to wear masks.
Did you watch the video of the WHO representative when asked directly about Taiwan pretending like he didn't hear the question, disconnecting, and then talking about China without so much as even mentioning the word "Taiwan"? https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/124394050651140096...
Perhaps not as a state, but it seems as likely that they would recognize data and observations given to them from Taiwan as they would data given to them from Hong Kong... or from Hubei.
What a brillaint point that always gets overlooked. People only start taking decentralization when extremes happen and extremist are first ones on board.
You end up with majority extremist community when 90% of user pool is centrist - good luck tapping into that now.
I'm commenting on HN, which generally has a pretty low quota of unsavory people.
There's no denying LBRY has gotten some attention from the fringes, but there is a ton of mainstream, smart, completely unobjectionable content on LBRY. Check out the progress post above.
Just created an account, and have started syncing my YouTube uploads to it (it ain't much, but whatever). I ain't entirely sold on the whole blockchain aspect, but hey, worth trying, right?
One question, though: I started off at https://lbry.com/youtube and started the sync process with a channel name, and then created an account with a different starting channel name; will both channels get correctly tied to my account? They're currently set to the same email address.
Awesome, thank you for syncing! The sync process actually creates a separate channel for you, which is later transferred to your account. You can clean up the old channel: lbry.com/faq/youtube#cleanup
The above FAQ also explains the process in more detail. Let us know if you have any other questions!
1) Is not corrupt
2) At all times represents the best available expert opinion and advice
But all institutions can become corrupted and the second point is highly implausible.
WHO ignored Taiwan’s early warning and maintained for a dangerously long time that human to human transmission was not possible.
There is a reason why the US cut funding to WHO.
This new direction of social platforms to silence people is a fundamentally anti-intellectual and authoritarian idea. We are heading for something awful if we all keep playing along.
Taiwan didn't even have a confirmed case until January 21. They couldn't possibly have reported anything but unconfirmed rumors from China. WHO warned about human-to-human transmission as soon as it was confirmed by Chinese scientists.
The US cutting funding is obviously a political move in order to shift blame away from the utterly incompetent government.
From the article it should be clear that the observers were there to learn from their Chinese colleagues, not to conduct independent research on human-to-human transmission.
> From the article it should be clear that the observers were there to learn from their Chinese colleagues, not to conduct independent research on human-to-human transmission.
The Taiwanese experts saw clusters of disease, such as a wife who got sick a few days after her husband, but did not visit the wet market personally. This was an indication of human-to-human transmission. Not quite the "unconfirmed rumors from China", as you put it.
EDIT: disregard, I got the dates mixed up. Original included below for transparency's sake.
----
And particularly-damningly, the WHO then turned around and claimed on 14 January¹ that there was "no evidence" of human-to-human transmission even though said evidence was right there in front of them.
WHO never claimed this, they (correctly) cited what Chinese authorities were saying. Here is the full text of the tweet for people that don't like reading images of text:
> 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.
Also note that the WHO field visit to Wuhan took place a week later, on 20-21 January. In their mission summary from 22 January they wrote [1]:
> Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission. WHO stands ready to provide support to China to conduct further detailed analysis.
Bribing? How about Beijing hand placing the director and then letting the corruption trickle down. There are lots of things you can gain from owning a global organization like the WHO. For one, they will tote your colonies like N.Korea as being "the envy of the developing world." They can be used as a tool to influence your enemies. The only limits are your creativity.
From "AP Exclusive: Health agency spends more on travel than AIDS" [1]:
> Senior officials have complained internally that U.N. staffers break new rules that were introduced to try to curb its expansive travel spending, booking perks like business class airplane tickets and rooms in five-star hotels with few consequences.
> “We don’t trust people to do the right thing when it comes to travel,” Nick Jeffreys, WHO’s director of finance, said during a September 2015 in-house seminar on accountability — a video of which was obtained by the AP.
> the compliance rate for booking travel in advance was between 28 and 59 percent.
Just look back through the years where the WHO has posted information and data that has been false. There were scientists and doctors who disagreed, those doctors were correct. So YouTube wouldn't allow correct information in this scenario for Covid 19?
In Canada for months we followed WHO's directions to a tee and ended up rapid growth of infections until we did a 180 and implemented nearly every measure that the WHO disagreed with.
Taiwan is one of the few countries to have very few cases, and they essentially did a lot of measures the WHO did not recommend initially.
WHAT measures did the WHO "disagree" with that saved Canada? I'd love to see this post cited up to include what measuring you're referring to in both parts (agree w/WHO and disagree) and where the WHO disagreed with Canada's measures.
EDIT: As of 3/30 WHO still doesn't recommend wearing masks (except for the obviously sick) - contrary to Vancouver BC who now require at least a covering or mask.
> The WHO advised against the public wearing masks
Nope. Your article is actually about the UK's government's advice and lumps in the WHO. Here's a WHO publication from 30th of January 2020 [0] that advises all sick with "flu-like symptoms" be provided a mask (as well as healthcare workers).
The WHO, like every national government, have recommended prioritizing masks to the sick and healthcare workers since the start of the year. Canada didn't contradict that and still doesn't as far as I've read.
Giving masks to asymptomatic members of the public only makes sense when there's a large enough supply to do so without starving essential services or known carriers.
> and advised against travel restrictions.
Your own link contradicts this claim.
> However, in certain circumstances, measures that restrict the movement of people may prove temporarily useful, such as in settings with few international connections and limited response capacities.
> Travel measures that significantly interfere with international traffic may only be justified at the beginning of an outbreak, as they may allow countries to gain time, even if only a few days, to rapidly implement effective preparedness measures. Such restrictions must be based on a careful risk assessment, be proportionate to the public health risk, be short in duration, and be reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.
They then go on to essentially say that it won't work (and spoilers: It didn't work, they were 100% correct).
It also fails to show how Canada acted against the WHO advice? That was the core claim above, and your response doesn't even attempt to show that.
In fact Canada has been in lock-step with the WHO since the beginning and still is. Even according to your links.
The WHO still right now does not support wearing masks if you’re not sick. The fact that we know that people can be sick and spread the virus and still not show any symptoms suggests that every country in Asia supporting wearing the masks early on is right and the WHO is wrong.
As ever, the face mask issue is more complicated than it appears at first glance.
Yes, if everyone in the world had a sufficient supply of face masks and wore them correctly all of the time then the R0 would drop significantly.
The two keys parts of that statement are _sufficient supply_ and _wear them correctly_.
There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
I've seen people who have bought facemasks touching their face and fiddling with the masks. They don't know how to wear them correctly, making their purchase a complete waste. They've wasted stock that could have been made available to healthcare workers.
If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
But it isn't and they aren't.
WHO seems to understand this and so it seems to be a factor in their advice.
I believe they may have even made a statement to this effect at some point?
It's not complicated at all, except for those who wish to cover up responsibility for how unprepared we have been.
>There is not a sufficient supply of face masks for everyone on the planet. Anyone purchasing face masks for themselves (without showing symptoms) are taking stock away from, for example, healthcare workers. Who definitely need the supplies.
Anyone that has access to cloth can make a rudimentary mask that is better than nothing.
>If the world was perfect and every human was perfect then yes I would agree with your statement.
> They then go on to essentially say that it won't work (and spoilers: It didn't work, they were 100% correct).
How didn't it work?
All of the really successful countries at handling this pandemic continue to have significant travel measures that interfere with international traffic.
For example: Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Vietnam, even (infuriatingly, given their opposition to anyone else doing it [0]) Mainland China itself!
I think he saying that Canada followed WHO advice to their detriment whereas Taiwan strayed from WHO advice with success. I don't know about any specific examples but the efficacy of masks is one I've heard about -- essentially the WHO discouraged use of masks whereas now the common wisdom seems to be that even makeshift masks when widely used are a lot better than none.
Taiwan is an interesting case. They are not recognized as, really anything, except part of "One China" by the UN. Anyway - WHO wouldn't talk to them, even when they asked nicely.
But they, like HK (and Vietnam, and SG and I don't know who else) are part of the "China is asshoe" club (i.e. the TW believe that the Chinese government will always lie and obfuscate, true or not), and had pretty direct experience with SARS and the other corona virus (not MERS, but my brain isn't working). In any case - they had protocols in place start mandating masks - pretty much day 1. They also paid for a factory expansion of the largest vendors, pretty much day 1, and pre-paid for a pretty large order.
I heard a rumor that the Vietnamese actually hacked a Chinese "mainframe" and stole materials that allowed them to prepare. I don't know if this is true, and it is not related to Taiwan's already-in-place response plan.
Richard Dawkins recently said that HK is doing well because it followed the recommendations of the WHO.
Which is literally not the case. They wore masks, and protested to get borders closed to non-citizens asap. If the citizens had not taken things into their own hands I fear they wouldn't be in such a good position as they are now.
The WHO needs to be dismantled. china has far too much influential power in the WHO. There should be 0 politics within the WHO, no pandering to the ccp. They should exist to help everyone in the world during an outbreak like this.
Fake news can't be solved with bans, only through education. Education is a long term investment though and everyone wants immediate fixes. Expect more of this nonsensical short term thinking.
I think the issue is people latch on to these things due to feeling or being powerless. They reach for solutions rather than being stuck in an endless waiting or trusting period, hoping for remote experts to do something. Education can help that but not always, and especially if the experts are adversarial to groups of people.
With all my heart, I agree with you; but I wished I shared some of your enthusiasm.
I've been brought up with the saying, 'The sole purpose of education is to help a person think sensibly in difficult times'.
However, I've not come across any _major_ shift in education systems worldwide. Yes, there are heartening stories about a few charter school systems [1] and a few countries making strides (like Finland). But these are one off success stories.
I do hope that technology companies make a step towards solving this.
But our startup culture, unfortunately, also is laced with trying to 'show growth' all the time and that leads us to think short term too.
Perhaps something like the LTSE may help private players take long term bets (fingers crossed).
Also, even the history of education is ripe with missteps [2], mind you :) not unlike the decision by YouTube here (as someone said, The road to hell is paved with good intentions)
Don't get me wrong, I want to be as optimistic as you are :)
The level of censorship that Facebook, Medium and YouTube are applying right now should be terrifying to anyone who cares about free speech.
Dissenting opinions are important for a free society. If facts and truth are on your side, what are you so afraid of?
Aaron Ginn's "evidence over hysteria" post (1) that was quickly censored by Medium is a good example for discussion. Aaron may have been wrong, but he made his case civilly and argued in good faith. Do we really want to elect these platforms as the thought police who decide which ideas or information we're allowed to consume? Especially right now, when the "official sources" like the Whitehouse and WHO are lying to us!
In the words of Naval Ravikant, "Give your worst political enemy the power to decide what is "hate speech" and what is "disinformation" and then you'll realize that free speech isn't something we should ever compromise on".
Is this the beginning of the end for YouTube?
As someone who deeply hates how much fake news have been spreading in the past few years, I still find this very worrying, especially since the WHO has been very inconsistent with their messaging during this pandemic [1] and sometimes plain wrong [2].
To be fair no major health organization has been completely consistent or completely "correct" regarding the pandemic, in fact its virtually impossible to do so as the situation develops and our understanding of the situation changes. The recent change to CDC guidelines for the general public to wear face masks is an example of reaction to new research.
That's not to say there isn't outright incorrect fake news, but in hindsight some guidelines will always seem more correct than others.
To be fair no major health organization has been completely consistent or completely "correct" regarding the pandemic
Exactly, which is why declaring that any one entity is the unquestionable source of truth not only shreds the concept of freedom of expression but may be actively harmful.
The recent change to CDC guidelines for the general public to wear face masks is an example of reaction to new research.
Was it actually in response to new research? (Not a rhetorical question). My impression is that they had to change their policy because their "noble lie" of "masks don't work, also we have to save them for healthcare workers" was increasingly recognized as utter nonsense. Which might not have happened if anyone who advocated masks had been summarily deplatformed.
Responding to new research is one of reasons they list on their site for the face new mask guidelines. It was shown that asymptomatic people can also transmit the virus, so the CDC is recommending everyone, not just high risk people, wear face masks to limit the spread in areas where social distancing is difficult.
"In light of this new evidence, CDC recommends wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission." [1]
Telling people to not fly across the world is bannable misinormation acording to Wojcicki's definition. Of course, it wouldn't be banned, because the actual rule is a much more subjective "whatever makes YT look bad to advertisers and PR"
A big hinderance to containing the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 was all the cancelled flights, since it prevented medical experts from getting to the impacted areas. While it seems counter-intuitive at first, travel bans do little to stop the spread (especially after it's reached other countries), but they do limit our ability to fight the pandemic.
Well this isn't the ebola epidemic of 2014 now is it? Rules that apply to countries with extremely deficient medical systs don't apply to the richest country in the world.
Fine, things like this "happen". That is, incredibly cowardly and dishonest persons can play roles in otherwise not completely cowardly and dishonest organizations. However, where is the criticism? Does this guy still have a job at the WHO, what would you guess?
People who look the other way with something like this have nothing to tell me, ever, just like someone who murders people doesn't get to tell me to not use swear words.
Anyone who claims to be concerned about outcome and public safety, and wants to cooperation of people who pay attention and are not blackmailable -- I dare say, the kind of people whose support you want, not the "majority", but the ones with principles and determination, who will stick with things as long as the things demand it, not as long as they are cozy -- should get the WHO as far away from this as soon as possible. That shouldn't even need saying, but now that it's been said a lot, failure to even acknowledge the issue simply means some people do not care about outcome, they care about agenda and the prepared networks to push it, and others just blindly fall in line.
However, I enjoy dabbling in the crazy side of youtube now and again, and there is absolutely content out there that will harm people, and there seems to be an audience for it.
It seems like one of those lamentable 'this is why we can't have nice things' stories.
The line youtube is drawing seems like the wrong line. Youtube has a storied history of making dumb choices and an inscrutable system to appeal their arbitrary decisions. I'm pretty confident they will continue to mess it up.
I would like to be a free speech maximalist; it's easier since there are no tough choices to make. Unfortunately there has always been speech that is not protected (incitement/yelling fire) and we are left with the difficult task of delineating which side of the line some speech falls.
In the end that means we must always be ready to fight to keep our freedom of speech.
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.
> Wojcicki: "So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy
> Who: Fact. There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
> Potential Youtuber early January: There is news going around of a new SARS-like pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan on Chinese Social Media. SARS was very contagious, so if this is SARS we should be very worried of a pandemic, especially with our interconnected world.
> WHO: Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus
> WHO: Not a pandemic
> WHO: China is transparent and setting new standard for outbreak control
> WHO: Advice members not to ban travel from China
My sense is that the denotation of the rule ("no contradicting the WHO") and the obvious connotation of the rule ("no cranks claiming Corona is a lie that you can cure by drinking bleach") differ.
My guess would be the intent and general enforcement of the rule will not be designed to preclude criticism of the form "The WHO is politically hobbled by needing Chinese cooperation, leading to awkward situations like the Taiwan exchange" or "The WHO was slow to adjust mask guidance in response to increasing on-the-ground evidence of asymptomatic transmission" or "The one study about surface life of Coronavirus is based on very limited research design parameters and the in-air survival number seems totally indefensible", or even an Ioaniddis-style "We're vastly overestimating the threat here" objection motivated by "good science" concerns.
I wouldn't preclude, like every stupid automated Google system, that legitimate content would be removed. But I think the intent is not to remove scientifically-oriented criticism or guidance or expert debate or context. I think it's meant to remove cranks.
I understand that denotation is important, just as it is when parsing say privacy policies or AUP documents or whatever -- and if people have criticism then YouTube should refine the language here. But we shouldn't blind ourselves to the fact that reality is primarily connotative.
I have zero objection to major providers collectively deciding they don't want to do business with Del Bigtree. Others might. Regardless of where you end up on that, I think we can agree that the debate here is about Del Bigtree, not about epidemiologists disagreeing.
In my country (Germany), the government changed position so many times. What was yesterday "a hoax", became official government position few days later, etc
Treating WHO positions as "the only truth that may be publicly discussed", seems rather authoritarian and dangerous.
What's most interesting about watching platforms target "mis"-information is the question/problem of whether and how they define it.
For example, Facebook refers to "fake news" as "false news"; if you search their domains for "false news is", you'll get around 6,500 results, none of which include an actual definition of what "false news" is. Setting aside the obviously problematic policy issues associated with this, it suggests that FB either doesn't have a definition or has one but has chosen not to publish it.
Loosely, I think you could categorize information on a grid (allowing for overlap), where the columns are "information", "wrong information", and "non-information"; the rows are "deliberate" and "inadvertent".
"Dis"-information would fall under "deliberate" and "wrong", whereas "mis"-information is "wrong" but may be "inadvertent" (someone posting something they don't know is incorrect, for example). OTOH you can have "deliberate" "non-information" in the form of "obscurantism" or "inadvertent" "non-information" in the form of "bullshit". And of course you can have all kinds of stuff in between.
Then again, most platform policies ultimately boil down to whether or not a statement is likely to cause to some kind of real harm. If that's the case then I'm not sure why you need to formally identify it as "misinformation" at all. If at the end of the gay you're going to say "We removed this because it violated our policy against posts that may cause actual harm to others", then calling it out as belonging to any particular category of impermissible content is just a perfunctory nod to transparency in your policy enforcement.
If anyone here has a policy issue they're seeking advice on please feel free to reach out. I love this stuff.
I do find the "censorship by private companies" discussions particularly interesting as a number of comments seem to overlook that we're conversing this very topic on a heavily censored and moderated forum that tailors its permitted content either directly (moderators) or indirectly (users downvoting). Its content, moderation, and selection are the primary reasons we enjoy visiting this site and having discussions. Articles get flagged on a weekly basis, and most (all?) probably for good reason. Is that unwarranted censorship, or a core component of what makes this website "successful"?
Weekly? Try daily or hourly. I routinely read HN starting at https://news.ycombinator.com/active which shows flagged stories and I have showdead switched on, exactly because I don't trust the moderation here. All kinds of interesting and useful stories get flagged for no obvious reason at all. HN's own guidelines are very vague and contradictory.
I'm sure the mods just erase stuff outright too, but unfortunately there aren't really many better forums out there - subreddits are hardly a paragon of transparent and fair moderation. Slashdot got it the most right even so many years ago but the site has been abandoned and was decaying for a long time. It's just unpleasant to use these days (not because of the comments).
I don't really agree with your position here, despite having (what I think to to be) reasonable comments flagged or warned a bit. They do ok to keep a balance in this place.
That said, publicmodlogs are a boon for subreddit transparency and is certainly a move in the right direction to counter conscious and unconscious biasing in online forums. It's a bright spot in the murky world of volunteer reddit moderation
This is terrible. I wrote this week how centralized, point-and-click mass censorship has a non-obvious failure mode in emergencies/pandemics/wars that poses an existential threat to a free and self-determined society:
(Note well that this exceptionally dangerous failure mode is based simply on the existence of the technological capability of mass instant censorship, not the merit of the specific editorial decisions of what content is censored or not.)
Furthermore, in any crisis or rapidly evolving situation, any one organization deeming themselves the sole arbiter of truth is extremely dangerous. What is true one day we learn with more information is false the next. You may recall this is the same WHO who said that healthy people get no benefit from wearing masks, and that also parroted China’s line about no human-to-human transmission. They are not immune to criticism, nor should they be.
Do you trust Google and the WHO to be superhuman, prescient and perfectly informed at all times? I don’t. (I also don’t think it’s any adult’s business telling another adult what they should or should not be able to read or watch.)
YouTube’s other censorship efforts have been actively impeding the research and prosecution of war crimes in the Syrian war as they are deleting hundreds of thousands of videos, amounting to destruction of evidence.
Either YouTube needs to stop being the default video upload target for most of internet-connected Earth, or they need to stop doing this shit. The current situation is far too dangerous.
Instagram/Facebook are even worse. Same problem.
These point-and-click mass censorship platforms are ticking time bombs for society-wide abuse even if they don’t censor anything most days of most decades.
> parroted China’s line about no 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.
> They were urging nations to act for months before they actually did.
No, they were telling governments for months not to put in place travel bans and not to recommend facemasks. The countries that had the most effective responses are the ones that ignored or literally did the opposite of WHO recommendations.
The ambiguity between their various statements at that time, taken together, just furthers my point that those statements should not be immune from dialog, criticism, verification/falsification, and discussion of those results.
"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.
You can constrain your statements to only objectively true things and still be confusing and ambiguous. This is a perfect example of that. It warrants criticism.
I've probably seen this tweet 50 times now in the last week. Before that, not even once. It's easy to criticize now with 3 months of additional information and to cherry pick an instance of a few hundred characters out of all the statements the WHO has made. 99% of the criticism of this tweet that I've seen so far comes nowhere near the nuanced criticism you make here. In aggregate, the level of criticism this tweet has received has not been warranted.
It’s partly because around a week ago we discovered evidence that Chinese leadership was well aware of person to person transmission on the day that tweet was sent.
> This mission-driven WHO would not have brazenly tweeted, as late as January 14, that “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.” That claim was false, and known by the authorities in Wuhan to be false.. Taiwan had already told the WHO of the truth too. On top of that, the day before that tweet was sent, there had been a case in Thailand: a woman from Wuhan who had traveled to Thailand, but who had never been to the seafood market associated with the outbreak—which strongly suggested that the virus was already spreading within Wuhan.
I've watched criticism of that tweet since the day they posted it. Luckily Taiwan and HK ignored the WHO. And alot of people in Singapore also ignored and have been wearing masks since Jan.
I was referring to the tweet on human-to-human transmission.
Masks are a different story and I'm aware of the early criticism there. Although I think they provided a fairly reasonable argument for their position, especially given suppy constraints.
I'm referring to the tweet about human-to-human transmission. When that tweet happened it got alot of criticism. And despite the tweet we continued to wear a mask knowing the benefits of doing so.
I've been active on YouTube since 2006. Back then I would watch and make comedy videos, but around 2008 I found a love for the political / philosophical side of YouTube. Back then there used some brilliant debates among communities, and I credit early YouTube for being a huge influence on my political views today. It helped me develop an open mind and critical thinking skills that I find immensely valuable in my life today.
But today there isn't really any interesting debates there anymore. I've noticed the algorithms push certain views on me and the creators I like who speak against the YouTube's political views get their lives made very difficult through demonetisations, channel strikes, algorithm discrimination or straight up banning.
Dr. John Campbell, who posts daily on Coronavirus news internationally, and who also dives deep into the physiologic processes around viruses, illnesses, and immune function, is often at odds with the WHO. And he generally has a compelling argument for why, often quoting scientific literature.
Things like this are tricky to me. YouTube is a private platform, so they can make their own decisions, but any sort of censorship is scary to me.
I honestly don't know where to stand when it comes to issues related to censoring content like this. On one hand, you can limit information we know is false, but restricting spread of information is censoring people, something that is pretty widely regarded as oppressive.
I guess all I can do is wait and see what comes of this.
I think that YouTube is in absolute legal right to ban whatever content they want, and I wouldn't want that legal right taken away from them (or any other content platform).
However, I absolutely disagree with this specific ban on their end, and it deserves to be criticized. But, again, they shouldn't be legally restricted from making this decision, no matter how poor I believe the decision is.
I agree with your point of view. Youtube is not the government so it, in my opinion, should have its own freedom to make its own rules.
The issue to me is that Youtube is pretty much THE video sharing platform. Yes there are others but as a content creator you will reach the most people on Youtube.
Would criticism of WHO be removed. Would information about China's handling of the outbreak be banned if it is contradictory to the WHO point of view. These videos are already demonetized.
I also am frustrated when I see videos claiming garlic will prevent coronavirus. Or that 5g is the cause. I would like to think people will recognize this is not accurate but people continue to amaze me.
In some ways though if I believe in freedom of speech though I suppose I should be prepared to accept all speech.
i agree. but at the same time, why do people not get up in as much arms about manipulation? of course, censorship is a form of manipulation, but the u.s. media, advertisements, corporate culture, politics, etc. is one big cesspool of manipulation, both direct and indirect. it's just as controlling if not more controlling than censorship and, of more sinister nature, hides behind supposed ideals of freedom.
>On one hand, you can limit information we know is false, but restricting spread of information is censoring people, something that is pretty widely regarded as oppressive.
Yes. But liars, cranks and con artists should be oppressed.
I want people claiming vitamin C and turmeric will cure COVID-19 to have a voice.
Whether that voice has value is an individual decision you and I get to make, on our own.
What data do you have, that proves diferuloylmethane is ineffective in treating COVID-19?
Are you 100% sure that diferuloylmethane cannot be an ingredient in a battery of medicine to help recover from COVID-19?
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
Not a central authority that removes that choice from both of us leaving us with no choice.
> I want people claiming vitamin C and turmeric will cure COVID-19 to have a voice.
They're scammers. They're perpetrating a scam. "Giving them a voice" means allowing them to scam others out of money. Why should YouTube be complicit in running a scam?
This seems very simplistic. YouTube is more than a company, it is a community of hundreds of millions of users and thousands of workers. People use YouTube not just for ability to search and share videos, or the recommendation engine, but for the user created content. The owner of the platform is the shareholders, and their designee, the CEO, is ultimately responsible for the decision. I don't think the broader definition of YouTube made this decision.
I think it's wrong to be okay with YouTube suppressing information and misinforming people about global pandemics just because they own the corporation and infrastructure YouTube is built on. YouTube is abusing their monopoly to hurt people.
People don't like government censorship and misinformation not because it's inherently wrong for government to do these things, but because censorship and misinformation create harm. When you consider YouTube's scale and lack of real competitor - it's obvious that their censorship and misinformation is also harmful and therefore problematic. Even if it's legal, it's certainly not moral.
You know its funny how I only see this argument when the service is doing something they agree with. When it's something they don't like there's suddenly outrage.
Remember a few years ago ISPs wanting to remove net neutrality and wanting to potentially charge for access to websites on "their platform"? Suddenly they're big enough to be a "public utility" and "invasion of free speech".
Completely different. ISPs are often a government granted monopoly. You can't just up and start one to compete, so it makes sense that they must be neutral. It's not a free market.
Anyone can start a YouTube clone, and if enough people disagree with YouTube's policies, they'll come use the clone. That's the free market of ideas.
So if they make the wrong decisions and spread misinformation or fail to censor misinformation, can I sue them?
Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility? Is it just because they happen to agree with your worldview? And what if they don't -- what if they start banning videos that suggest Taiwan is a country? Would your opinion change?
> So if they make the wrong decisions and spread misinformation or fail to censor misinformation, can I sue them?
IANAL but unless someone is knowingly spreading false information as true (i.e. fraud), the answer is no. They probably don't even carry the burden of having to reasonably vet information first.
> Why do they get the power but none of the responsibility?
Because it is your privilege to use YouTube, not your right.
They don't control the flow of information. Feel free to host your alternative to YouTube if you there's a good number of people who feel the same as you out there. The problem is I'm pretty sure you're the exception... and even if you weren't, once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas so the easier recommendation is: get off your high horse.
That's sort of my point, private corporations run sites that are used by hundreds of millions of Americans, but they're not held accountable by our laws the way, for example, news corps are.
> once you were as big as YouTube you'd deal with the same dilemmas
Yeah I'm not saying only YouTube should be regulated, I'm saying sites like YouTube and Facebook should be properly classified as publishers and held to standards as such.
> They don't control the flow of information.
This is a false statement. The vast majority of Americans get their news from Facebook, and yes, YouTube. They do control the flow of information. If it's not on Facebook or YouTube, it might as well not exist for over 50% of Americans. That's huge power that these corps wield with no oversight, dontcha think?
Yeah, no... I'm not jumping down that rabbithole of thought-terminating cliches. HN is already replete with countless tiresome retreads of the same slippery slope arguments around freedom of speech, censorship, social media policies, whether truth even exists, Voltaire quotes and Orwell references. Feel free to browse if that's what you're looking for, they all devolve into the same unproductive quagmire.
There's some irony in you refusing to engage with thought terminating cliches when your original post that kicked this sub-thread off was "Yes. But liars, cranks and con artists should be oppressed."
Maybe it is, but almost no one who asks "but who decides x" in these threads is actually interested in debating the matter. They typically already believe no one should be allowed to decide, and they have no intention of actually engaging you in conversation beyond lecturing, berating and snark.
Learning when to step away from such fruitless pseudo-debates before wasting hours on the online equivalent of beating one's head against a brick wall is a valuable survival skill here. Sometimes it's best to simply state your opinion and move on.
> almost no one who asks "but who decides x" in these threads is actually interested in debating the matter. They typically already believe no one should be allowed to decide
I take you up on that offer.
Let us, for a moment, discuss this.
To disconnect us both from the exact matter at hand, because we are likely at this point pretty attached strongly to our biases to it, let us step aside, choose a completely different topic and hypothesize that our debate is on "should the government be allowed to track crimminals moving about in society".
I propose, that yes, murderers should be tracked at all times, as they move about in society, with tracking devices embedded onto their ankles.
You propose, no, no one, including murderers should be tracked at any time.
I then propose that murderers should be given a choice between been tracked, or have their pictures and descriptions published on a public website where anyone interested in staying away from murderers can check in.
I have to be honest, that already seems like exactly the kind of conversation I want to avoid.
The problem here, and it may just be an issue with the internet as a medium, or certain tendencies within technically-minded individuals, seems to be an overriding mistrust of nuance and complexity that leads to polarized, intransigent opinions.
Because really I can see both sides of that argument. On the one hand, society has an obligation to protect itself from bad actors, and part of that necessitates an ability by governments to surveil their citizens to a degree. On the other hand, people have a right to privacy and personal liberty, and governments' power shouldn't be absolute. But no one wants to hear that the only options which balance these concerns are the messy and imperfect ones where we try to do the best we can with imperfect information, and at times conflicting motives and agendas, and laws that require interpretation based on context, rather than being executed like code. The world isn't black and white, it's grey on grey on grey.
I can also see the other side of my own position in this thread - Youtube and other platforms could certainly use their outsized cultural influence and right to moderate content to suppress legitimate information or political activism. I just work from the apparently controversial premise that falsehoods do exist and that it does society no good to allow them to spread, even in the name of "free speech," and disagree with the premise that just because there is no universally acceptable, mathematically provable, perfectly objective answer to "who decides who the liars, cranks and con artists are" which doesn't carry a risk of abuse or hypocrisy, doesn't mean the only acceptable answer is that "liars, cranks and con artists don't exist, and no one gets to decide otherwise."
> It was "liars, cranks and con artists do exist, and we need to empower people to decide which is which by letting them practise."
This is such a silly argument. If I tell you two pieces of information: "Vaccines cause autism" and "Vaccines do not cause autism", how do you practice believing? By putting children at risk of preventable diseases?
Same goes for hydroxychloroquine or turmeric for covid-19. We have (at this point) decent scientific evidence for these not helping prevent the disease, and yet people will take them and either hurt themselves (chloroquine) or be willing to engage in more risky behavior otherwise.
The easiest way I have of putting this is that there is no difference between having no information, and having all possible information. If I present you with all possible strings of length < 100 containing "covid-19", you'll have lots of reasonable sounding statements about preventing the spread of covid-19. But without authoritative and reliable sources for why some of those strings are valuable to obey and others aren't, you're in no better place than if you had no information at all.
> Putting up content on a webserver is not a Youtube competitor.
Is anyone preventing me, by force or law, from hosting video on my own website? If not, you cannot compare government mandated anything with market forces. All you're saying here is that youtube is a really good product. That doesn't make obvious competitors "not count".
This is what I know - SARS-COV2 is novel and not even highly trained, world renowned infectious diseases experts know how it behaves and how to treat it.
I don't, for a second, believe Youtube has figured that one out.
Now whether you have decided to reject all competing hypothesis to something you have already decided to be the truth so you can move on with your life and be productive in areas you find valuable - that's your call but 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.
Nuance is required. There's two sub-category ends of contradictory content spectrum: baseless/wrong/speculative (worthless) and scientific inquiry (worthwhile). Hopefully algorithms won't automatically ban people like Dr. Kyle-Sidell for questioning COVID treatment protocols.
OTOH, allowing snake oil salesman junk content like from Alex Jones harms the public good.
1. Youtube ad providers do not want their ads shown with bogus content.
2. Youtube does not want to be subject to lawsuits from the transmission of dangerous bullshit.
3. Pandemic situations are not the same as being a kook and watching garden variety kook material. Misinformation regarding this has already killed people. It will continue to kill people. Save your frustration for when a content platform censors everyday nonsense, and save me the slippery slope argument.
There are freaking dentists and physicians who, in a panic, tried to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for themselves and their families because they heard about ONE study by a serial nutball out of France, which was then repeated by the freaking President of the United States.
The WHO previously stated on Twitter in January that there is no evidence of human to human transmission of SARS-CoV-2. If this rule on YouTube were in place then and someone was sharing evidence of human to human transmission that technically would have been banned.
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 there probably is person-to-person transmission, and a bunch 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.
"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.
I'm moreover pointing out that it isn't clear what YouTube would enforce or not - taken simply, there are a lot of YouTube videos that would have been in conflict with this statement on Twitter. Would they have been taken down?
I will repeat: 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. So a video saying that people should prepare would not at all be in contradiction.
The kind of misinformation that this measure is aimed at is stuff like saying that it's spread by 5G, or that vitamin C or some random herb cures it, or that drinking bleach or rubbing alcohol will kill it. These are all extremely popular online, and have led to actual deaths.
They claim it was a report for one, and not cover-up propaganda. There was evidence of human-to-human transmission, including evidence delivered to the WHO via Taiwan in December.
Then the WHO sought to spread medical misinformation about face masks and travel bans repeatedly into February and March.
I was defending Facebook for removing anti-quarantine events. There's a difference between mere opinions versus actions that directly risk the public health of non-participants and I think Facebook is nailing it.
However, Google has gotten it wrong:
1. As others have said, WHO has not earned this trust to date and is also a political organization, not one that is independent.
2. There were other options available, such as demonetization. Stopping people from profiting over putting out information that could hurt people seems more legit to me. They also could have used disclaimers, like the article mentions Facebook is doing for similar content.
3. Another option available to them? Limit the promotion of these videos through recommendations. I get why Google wouldn't want to actively be promoting videos that give terrible misinformation, so they can decide not to promote while still allowing the video to be posted. This is their normal policy for content that is considered "harmful misinformation." (Which was strengthened last year.) Why not use existing policy?
However, I'd actually be fine with them removing video of people drinking bleach to combat coronavirus. And maybe even just encouraging others to do so. But taking vitamin C? (An actual example in the article.)
Vitamin C is like, classic nonsense. People only take it seriously because it's been around forever, like homeopathy and acupuncture, not because there's any good evidence for it doing anything useful, beyond, you know, preventing scurvy.
@dang The actual policy does not say that anything that goes against the WHO's recommendations will be removed. That looks like it came from a quote from Wojcicki as an example of something that might be risky. The title is misleading. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en
We can all debate who is right or wrong as much as we like, but you can be certain of one thing - right and wrong are not what drives the decisions of large companies like Google. What matters most to them is potential profit vs risk. Allowing their platform to be used for dissemination of potentially harmful advice puts them squarely at risk for lawsuits and bad press, both of which have very highly potential costs. At the same time, it presents relatively little potential profit. If someone is harmed following the advice they found on their platform, YouTube was just following WHO advice. The finger is pointed and the risk transferred elsewhere. From a business perspective, it becomes a very easy decision for them.
I oppose Youtube's ability to single-handedly block content, for the same reason that I oppose the War On Drugs: it can't be won by fighting on the supply side. The war on misinformation has many parallels in this respect, not least because someone will always be ready and waiting to supply it, as long as the demand is there.
In this case, fighting the demand means teaching people basic critical thinking skills, how to spot logical fallacies, and methods of counter-acting propaganda and other forms of mass manipulation. Critical thinking is given short shrift, at least in American classrooms, and arming students with this kind of information would help them make more well-informed civic choices.
As much as I, as a general principle, loathe the tech giants dictating what is and isn't true for the world, in this case I feel some sympathy for companies temporarily banning potentially dangerous advice from their platforms.
Yes, it isn't absolutely clear what is "good advice". Yes, it might misfire and prevent useful content from being disseminated. Yes, the WHO is far from perfect. And yet, if I were the owner of YouTube, I would have to reduce the liability of having physical harm, or even human deaths, being attributed to content served by my product — regardless of how tenuous the connection between content and action would be, and how many disclaimers and waivers surround such content.
Collectively, it's a disgrace if all digital media adopt this strategy, because we would be closing the most effective channels by which independent researchers, whistle-blowers, cutting-edge laboratories, etc can communicate with the masses. At the individual company level, limiting potential damage is the rational thing to do. There is no easy answer, I suspect.
Fuck YouTube. At first they liberated creators and gave everyone the same upload button.
Now they’re a bunch of fascists pandering to a niche demographic. Being PC is fine in some cases but I firmly believe in freedom of expression / free speech especially
when it’s controversial. Let’s build hours ok folks critical thinking capability.
YouTube is becoming the very thing they tried not to be.
What do I think about wackos on youtube saying covid is the rapture? I think they’re fucking bananas. But I still support their right to say what they want.
Remember that on January 14 WHO tweeted that "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission". So if you knew it's a lie - which by then many in China probably did - you could not publish it on Youtube based on current policy. It wasn't in effect then, but I wonder which lies such policy would support now?
This is the Google/Alphabet that is infamous for no human customer support at all. If you ever mention coronavirus or related terms, expect the automatic ban with no way to argue for it.
I'm beginning to think that the Harry Potter was actually a dystopian novel. You must refer it like You-Know-The-Pathogen or The Pathogen That Must Not Be Named.
Pick any politician and you will likely find some egregiously false statements about Covid-19...but I have to say the WHO, maybe acting on the best info at the time or acting as puppet for China, had put out some seriously dangerous false statements, including:
On January 14, the WHO stated that there was “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.”
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 there probably is person-to-person transmission, and a bunch 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.
>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.
You say it is "completely false" that people only believe is true by repetition, well WHO has a twitter account and their whole tweet is:
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
"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.
>"No clear evidence" uncovered in a "preliminary investigation" was a completely true statement.
Something tells me you haven't seen this alleged "preliminary investigation" report, but assuming you had, how do you know China didn't withhold information?
The WHO tweet is dated 14 January 2020, but the 1st case of Covid was identified in December 2019.
Chinese police forced Dr. Li to remove his comments about Covid19 from the internet on 3 January 2020. Hell Dr. Li returned to work and contracted the Virus himself on 8 January 2020 before the WHO tweet...so how did he get it if not person to person transmission?
So China had the information and conducted a cover up a full 2 weeks before the WHO tweet.
Can you explain why Dr. Li was forced by police to remove his social media posts and sign a confession? Can you explain whether Chinese authorities investigating how the virus was transmitted to Dr. Li before informing the WHO there was no clear evidence of person to person transmission?
I mean, if you actually dig a bit deeper into the story there, Li Wenliang had no expertise in the field, was going off very little information, and was sending out mass messages saying that SARS had returned (which was absolutely not true; SARS is far worse, with 25x the mortality rate of COVID-19), which would have incited completely panic.
Yes, in hindsight they should have listened to him, and back in January I was pissed off about this because it set China’s response back by about a week, but these days a week of wasted time sounds like an excellent performance compared to almost every other country.
It’s not about the political system. Imagine an American eye doctor posting on Facebook that Ebola was going around in NYC. They would definitely face immediate professional consequences — probably more than Li Wenliang did. My impression is that the full extent of the consequences he experienced was a stern talking to by the police, which is what you get here when pulled over for speeding.
An ER Doctor reporting about the unusual number of cases is someone who doesn't have enough educational background?
If an ear doctor was finding a high number of ebola patients when treating ear conditions you would discount that information because it didn't come from someone study ebola?
The frontline doctors are the ones who will see the cases explode first.
Arresting him and saying it's nothing, he just had a stern talking to. Just like a parent educating child.
Was he putting other lives in jeopardy by sharing the truth or saving lives? Not really the same as speeding.
Let's be honest China didn't want to hurt it's imagine and thought they could cover this up. Big mistake, now they look dishonest and investment will be out not in China going forward.
You are copying and pasting the same responses throughout this entire thread challenging everyone...
You are just accepting that what Chinese Authorities told the WHO was true, yet you can't cite any actual written report or data supporting their "preliminary investigation" of the virus and human to human transmission.
>Li Wenliang had no expertise in the field, was going off very little information,
He was a Dr. in the hospital where the first covid-19 patients were identified and he obtained the information from the treating physician.
>Imagine an American eye doctor posting on Facebook that Ebola was going around in NYC. They would definitely face immediate professional consequences — probably more than Li Wenliang did. My impression is that the full extent of the consequences he experienced was a stern talking to by the police, which is what you get here when pulled over for speeding.
The US has freedom of speech, no police are going to force a US Doctor to take down a social media post and sign a confession/agreement not to post about a disease again. That is nothing like getting pulled over for speeding, and such a comparison is ridiculous, one is legitimate enforcement of traffic laws and the other is a violation of civil liberties.
It depends...like I said in my comment you replied to:
>maybe acting on the best info at the time or acting as puppet for China
The WHO is supposed to be an independent international organization, so again the question is what kind of independent study or review did the WHO do before accepting the representations of Chinese authorities and repeating them to the World?
If the WHO did nothing but promoted a tweet at the request of Chinese authorities without an independent investigation into the merits of the tweet, then it seems clear they should not have posted it at all.
Either way the international community needs to know who these Chinese authorities were and an independent review of these preliminary investigations needs to be completed.
The actual title of the article is "Coronavirus: YouTube bans 'medically unsubstantiated' content." While the article does state that content that contradicts WHO advice would violate this policy, the implication behind the current title, that the policy is exclusively focused on the WHO, is incorrect.
I largely disagree with YouTube's stance here, it's stupid. They kinda forced themselves into a corner with this one, I don't realistically think they can enforce this. Yet this is just another step in them screwing over creators. I'm especially worried about retroactive enforcement. As they often do. For example: which WHO advice do you need to contradict? Would they take down a video from January that says there's no need to worry because there is no human to human contact - as the WHO said in January? YouTube generally speaking has done shady stuff like this and it never ended well. There has to be a better way to handle this but I generally think that Susan has been busy waging a PR battle with people who don't even matter for the future of her platform.
How do we know what is best for us? What and who should we believe? It kinds of remind me how Copernicus was banned centuries ago despite now we know he was closer to truth than anyone else. If we live at his times we would say he is crazy and certainly his YouTube channel would have to be deleted but why? I guess if someone is right, he will prove it eventually. Even if it sounds crazy but the person is determined we should have right to know it and decide if we agree. Why someone esle should decide for us what we can know.
Social network, should really be owned by USERS instead of founders/investors. It should be decentralized and it should be governed based on democratic Principles. I once thought that blockchain can do the job but it proved to be untrue.
I was really inspired by John Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" so I wanted to build something that can reflect my understanding of his vision, an autonomous cyberspace. I've tried to build blockchain, DApp and App in the past two years, all failed because of technical challenges. I'm on the fourth try and we are now building a "Wechat + Twitter" website. It is now open sourced at: https://github.com/Rackar/dao-quasar
I was really inspired by John Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
Somehow despite my own digital-revolutionary tendencies (don't read too far into this, heh) I'd never come across this bit of writing before.
Thank you!
I think you'll really appreciate the IndieWeb's adoption of microformats to enable federation, a brilliant example of it in use to display a timeline-esque rendering of contributors can be found on their directory: http://indieweb.xyz.
Instead of posting directly to the directory, you enable your website with certain HTML tags and upon publishing a new page or blog entry, it federates out via webmention and anyone who subscribes to the directory gets your content.
In my opinion this is the social-media web we should have gotten.
Edit: Also, about your app...I love the UI. I can't read much of what's on the page, but I'll run your readme through a translator to learn more. Good luck!
Basically we we are separating users to smaller communities called "Groups" (similar to a Wechat group or Facebook group). Each group can have its own rules enforced by Ethereum smart contract. This way people can stay in a virtual space with whatever rules they designed themselves and mutually decided to bind of.
Then the leaders of each "group" act as board members of the whole company. They can decide everything about where how this website should be built.
Developers of this site, are merely hired by these group leaders and get paid by cryptocurrencies issued by these group leaders.
These group leaders, on the other hand, are elected by members of his group and can be voted out too.
Buy all means add a disclaimer advert akin to the old DVD FBI or other pirate warnings you couldn't skip, but to dismiss debate for people who are able to make their own mind up is only going to curtail facts. That in itself curtails advice the WHO may in itself give out.
Will youtube be expanding this to anything health wise?
Will there be an appeal process for false positives?
I feel there is more that can go wrong with this, than right.
YouTube also delists from search results content that details non-strawman evidence against the Apollo moon landings and videos of rockets appearing to hit the firmament, among many others. You can still find those videos with the same search terms by searching YouTube with Yandex or with a direct URL.
They also have unclear "hate speech" guidelines where they will remove videos and ban channels without specifying why.
The point is, this behavior is consistent with YouTube.
To be honest 20 years ago when SARS is with us, it is fine to have a neutral scientific medical ... Now we cannot trust that. It has given advice which we know as Her not right. We just ignore it. And hence if anyone use WHO as standard, can they just shut off say Taiwan from YouTube etc. I am not talking about the politics. It is the bias built-in WHO. I am not starting China. Good day.
Nothing of value was lost. It doesn't matter if you hold WHO in poor regard; pay for your own hosting if you want to publish content that YouTube doesn't want to host. I'll never understand the twisted mental gymnastics that lead people to believe they should be entitled to free HD video hosting from a private corporation.
This is the type of thing that makes people upset, then everyone forgets about it and continues using the service. Are there any specific individual actions that can be taken to push back on this? Besides "don't use youtube", because let's be honest that isn't realistic.
This is great -- amplifying lies that kill people is ridiculous. And out of crisis, amplifying lies is unethical, period. It's not censorship if you can prove it's bullshit. People have a right to express themselves, but we also have a right to not accept lies as truth.
> It's not censorship if you can prove it's bullshit.
If you think that you can prove any of the assertions at issue here one way or another, you are illustrating the problem.
For instance whether masks are worthwhile PPE is a highly complex issue and no definitive proof is available as to the correct policy across a wide variety of contexts. Yet YouTube is saying, if WHO claims it, nobody can refute that claim on their platform.
The same goes for the WHO's claims that eating seed oils and avoiding saturated fats is better for immunological health. This is a very controversial issue, and to simply rule out any contradiction on it can cause a lot of suffering if the WHO is wrong.
Whether this is censorship or not it makes YouTube a less valuable forum, and tends to protect official dicta from authorities as fallible as anyone else.
Should YouTube ban the interview with the President of the United States, where he suggests injecting desinfectant or hand sanitizer to treat COVID-19?
I'll take the fake news today just to protect speech that may be wrong today but is right tomorrow.
It's amazing how quickly people who benefited from free platforms think that people who defect to the other side only do so because they are weak minded and read some bad news.
This is pure evil. Once again the platforms have succeeded to turn an issue that concerns us all into a partisan american issue for all. It's sad to see so much of people working on software actively support this type of platfom power abuse for censorship.
It's for your own good. :) This is what my own government say every time they want to control the population. Luckily freedom of speech stands very firm in my own country of Norway, but it does not prevent the state from using the phrase.
As for the validity, when policies are in the open, which they mostly are over here, and it is clear what it is based upon, then far more people willingly accept them, because they can look into the facts themselves. They can even discuss conspiracy theories if they wish, but no one buys them, because good information is readily available. So when Norway claims that something is "for your own good," it is actually mostly true, despite the negative connotation the phrase has in most other countries.
The opposite tends to happen when information is subdued and censored, which is regretfully the route YouTube is now on. They're taking a path which is more similar to a state bureau than a private company. You're left to only speculate as to why they would do something like that, but it's likely that it is a combination of social justice leadership and governmental cooperation. As such, their difference from a state bureau is starting to blur.
The strategy of top-down censorship is sadly a strategy most employed in purely Socialist and Communist countries. But then that shouldn't be very surprising when you also see the position YouTube is in, which is so much of a market leader that they border on a monopoly.
While I can't speak for YouTube directly, since most video services are indeed free, one of the main business practises to retain such a position, is to bleed money to keep most of their services priced so low as to destroy all competition. YouTube is in a bit of a different position, howeve, because their service, particularly their suggeston service, is far better than most if not all competitors. But every time they employ censorship in any form, they bleed customers to alternative platforms, and the effect of their censorship is diminished, if not outright reversed.
We're in a very interesting time, from an outsider perspective, the American ideal of free speech originated from a time when only the establishment (mainstream media, governments, large organizations, etc) have the ability to have their speech reach general public. Meaning people who say things that damage their reputation or relationship with the establishment will quickly disappear from public eye as they lose access to those platforms.
Today, thanks for all the social/media platforms, anyone can say whatever they want, gain a cult following and make a living. This is probably not something free speech idealist originally envisioned, and is seriously testing the viability of unrestricted free speech.
Will the newer media platforms follow the footsteps of media companies of yesterday and start de-platforming people they disagree with? Or will they continue to endorse free speech in its ideal, testing if unrestricted, technologically-enhanced free speech is a net positive to society?
I believe that at this point most people already recognize that the information the receive -whether from mainstream sources or social networks- is doctored or massaged in some fashion, and almost always for political or commercial purposes.
Are the same people who fear corporate censorship actually disjoint from the ones who trust in unfettered markets to choose winners? It seems to me they must be, but are there people in fact straddling this chasm?
Should they ban religious and spiritual videos too? Who decides what is real? Are ideas the coming warground? These questions sound dramatic, but I wonder about this stuff.
The real problem is not whatever youtube does, but the pretty much total lack of competition. Youtube is like all TV-channels at once, it really is a monopoly.
The first time I got a color printer/scanner the first thing I did was slap a $5 bill on there to see if it would print a color copy.
What do you think happened?
I'll give you a hint: "EURion constellation".
Anyway, my point is, "It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye." When it comes to pandemics or currency control our systems have no problem toeing the hard line.
Has nothing to do with whether you like it or not, government's gonna govern. Make FAANG the new government and they're gonna govern.
An WHOs advice is exactly what? Take some untested meds, because why not?
Don't act in time, and if you must act, act in the most destructive way possible. Don't close borders before your country has infected. Close the whole bloody country down after the fact!
Im sick and tired of every tech company and goverment using this as an excuse to limit rights and censor left and right. I'd rather have to filter out a few videos about bleach curing SARS than living in this censorship nightmare.
There are armed groups at state capitols spreading dangerous misinformation about COVID-19 that will almost certainly cause people to get sick and die. That misinformation effort is coordinated and well-funded.
Whatever hypothetical you want to argue about censorship, you need to grapple with the fact that we face a persistent and aggressive misinformation threat, and combating it is part of the public health response to COVID-19.
Censorship is the naive and ineffective non-solution to the problem of coordinated misinformation campaigns.
It’s sort of like torture: even if it worked for the problem it is trying to solve, it would debase us as human beings to try to use it. To top that off, it doesn’t work.
What do you suggest as an alternative? What would you have done in the situation where Facebook was used as a platform to incite pogroms against Muslims in Myanmar[1]? If we have a better solution in an emergency than censorship, I haven't heard it suggested.
Facebook is a communications tool. It does not incite violence by anyone or against anyone else any more or less than any comparable communications tool. That violent people use it is not an issue with Facebook or reason to censor it, any more than the fact that violent people using cellphones is a reason to tap every cellphone.
The alternative to censorship is... not censoring.
This is NOT GOOD... because the WHO has been known to be incorrect, the data they gather may be incorrect or incomplete, their assertions may be not be good enough, and we should hear alternative, anomalous, or contradictory information or opinions.
I'm surprised at how upset people are about this. The amount of garbage on the internet now is immense. Invoking free speech, more and more of the internet has slowly become 4chan and I don't understand why more people aren't sick of it.
According to those guidelines, YouTube would have to censor the US president's Thursday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing.
“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.” --Donald Trump
YouTube isn't able to perfectly apply this "complies with WHO" filter. Even if it would, some dangerous crackpot talk is actually newsworthy. Newsworthy as in we need to know that this harmful dribble came from the US president's mouth.
> So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy,” she told CNN.
...and:
> "So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it," Trump said. "And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting."
My advice is to read Neil Postman's works, specifically
1) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 2) How to Watch TV News, and especially 3) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology if you think legacy/boomer media has any more credibility (especially today) than some random in their bedroom.
I'd also recommend reading Sharyl Attkisson's
The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote
and
Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington
That random in their bedroom is the fourth estate now.
This is going to inject a distortion on medical innovation in a time of crisis. Manipulative in the worst possible way. The moment they start censoring they become editors and not a platform.
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," the organization had said.
That was on January 14, 2020. China almost certainly had evidence of human-to-human transmission by then.
EDIT: Taiwan alerted the WHO of human-to-human transmission on December 31, 2019. So please, stop spreading misinformation about the WHO. The WHO dropped the ball, and it's being badly. Until there is a change in management at the WHO, everything they say has to be examined extra carefully.
this is a slippery slope. sure, it may seem reasonable now. But, once Youtube and facebook start deciding what you can and can't see, we're going down what could become a very dangerous path.
The WHO is completely consistent: they have never advocated for closing borders. (After all, the W in WHO stands for World.) They still don't want closed borders.
Neither does the US. Taiwan is only recognised by IIRC 12 natinos, mostly small island states. This has become another weird internet talking point as international recognition pretty much unanmiously switched to the PRC in the 1970s.
> Neither does the US. Taiwan is only recognised by IIRC 12 natinos, mostly small island states. This has become another weird internet talking point as international recognition pretty much unanmiously switched to the PRC in the 1970s.
That's misleading. The US de facto recognizes Taiwan, and the only reason it doesn't recognize it de jure is that the PRC would formally cut off relations if it did.
My guess it’s okey to do that because Chinese internal politics is based on PR which is populistic in nature. What is the proportion of people who would go out looking for lists of American exports into Taiwan vs the proportion of people who would hear Taiwan being pronounced by the president of the US?
> The only reason it doesn't recognize it is because US kicked RoC out of UN by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758
Huh? The Wikipedia article you linked says the US voted "No" on Resolution 2758. I don't see how you can claim the US did the kicking by opposing the resolution that did the kicking.
That article also states that before that vote...
> ...the United States was proposing that while the credentials of the PRC representatives would be accepted and the PRC would be seated as China’s representative with a seat on the Security Council, the ROC would continue to enjoy representation in the General Assembly.
> The "No" is a gesture. If US was serious about the "No' where won't even be a Nixon visit or Resolution of any kind.
But the question isn't just the recognition of Taiwan/ROC, in isolation by itself. It also includes the recognition of the PRC, the existence of which is a fact on the ground that's difficult to ignore.
Sure the US could have continued to plug its ears and ignore the PRC, but that was untenable and becoming increasingly so. It's pretty clear that the US's preferred option would have been formal recognition of both Taiwan and the PRC, but it doesn't always get what it wants, so it has had to contort its official position and practice deliberate ambiguity, instead.
Well, the WHO probably reads what comes to it from Taiwan, but they don't publicly give lip service to it because that would piss of china, the very large country whose cooperation they needed given that the apparent origin of the pandemic there.
The existence of political factors (which are not the fault of the WHO) makes it less than perfect, but people using it as a cudgel against the organization are (not you necessarily) are insinuating that the WHO's failure to be perfect thus makes it scientifically useless. This is an obvious bad-faith argument deployed for rather obvious political ends.
Taiwan is a unique proposition, and eviscerating the WHO for having trouble with it without acknowledging that everywhere else has the same problem makes it look like the person is either ignorant or has some agenda.
It's the awkward way they one representative handled a question on Taiwan. Pretending he didn't hear the question. I think it speaks more to the unwillingness of a world health organisation to even discuss politically dangerous topics.
>I think it speaks more to the unwillingness of a world health organisation to even discuss politically dangerous topics.
Which is perfectly reasonable if you understand that these questions are looked at through the lens of international diplomacy and these people don't just wing geopolitical questions because every single answer can cause an international shitstorm (not just in regards to China, but every territorial conflict really). This may look awkward to the ordinary viewer but it's not really.
The WHO has a fairly strong interest in staying out of politics and being a health organisation, so whatever diplomatic position they take is mostly just going to be whatever the status quo is. If you think the non-recognition of Taiwan is unethical then you should take that up with your respective government, a guy speaking for the WHO isn't really in any position to make incindiary political commentary.
The mandate of the WHO is to improve world health. Thus avoiding politically sensitive issues is correct if that helps the organization to reach its goals.
I saw that video and was shocked that a representative from WHO would behave that way, pretending not to hear the question and hanging up... utterly childish behaviour. I mean, how the hell am I supposed to take an organisation like that seriously?
Politics are a fact of international relations. It's childish to think an international organization that depends on its member countries for funding can just completely ignore that or blow it off, rather than eat shit occasionally in order to work around it.
Sure, they can make a bold impassioned speech about how science is far beyond petty concerns like national sovereignty and so on, but this isn't a movie where a great speech suddenly brings everyone to their senses. In reality the WHO works through public health departments in nearly 200 countries and also gets its funding from governments, so if they spit int he face of sovereignty, they'll cease to exist in any meaningful way and aggregate health outcomes will definitely be worse.
Straw man - you're making an argument against a point I didn't make or even insinuate.
I didn't say organisations can or should ignore politics - of course, politics affect every organisation, especially those that work across borders.
My entire comment was about the childish behaviour of the WHO represenatative when asked about Taiwan[0] - he was literally one step away from putting his fingers in his ears and shouting "na na na na na!".
Pretty much all global institutions have informal or de-facto relationships with Taiwan, that's besides the point. Not recognizing Taiwan formally has been the position of just about any institution or country on the globe for 50 years.
The TAIPEI Act doesn't change the US's position on recognition as a country.
It specifically says "the US should advocate for Taiwan’s membership in all international organisations in which statehood is not a requirement"
Note the statehood is not a requirement thing.
I think it would be great if Taiwan had observer status at WHO, and I think the TAIPEI Act should help towards this. But the point remains: Taiwan is an unusual entity, and WHO is far from alone in having trouble with this.
All due respect, but this is lunacy. The way the guy reacted then hung up is unconscionable. The WHO is clearly corrupted by China's money.
And the US is still connected to Taiwan and provides them military support. And we have a $250M 'de facto' embassy there.
Honestly, I'm so shocked and dismayed by your comment, that I think I want to stop participating on Hacker News. Your perspective is relativism ad infinitum. This is the thing I fight most against.
This isn't a community for hackers & painters anymore. Eternal Relativism is impossible to win against.
Edit: since people are misunderstanding this post, I am 100% pro-ROC and anti-PRC. I wish the ROC could rename itself to something else without triggering a PRC invasion. Check my comment history. I'm 100% pro-ROC and I support the ROC's continued (since 1912) independence as a sovereign entity. 中華民國萬歲
"Taiwan" isn't a country. It's an island controlled by the Republic of China alongside its other holdings. The ROC is a state that has existed since 1912 with continual international diplomatic recognition since then. Other countries switching diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC didn't magically make the ROC vanish.
I really dislike the fact that the media and government in the US refers to the ROC as "Taiwan". It muddies the conversation and I constantly have to explain to people that there are two governments/countries over there, one from 1912 and one from 1949.
Sometimes, I'll hear someone talk about a place called "Virginia", and I'll have no idea what they are talking about. Eventually, I figure out through context clues that they are referring to the Commonwealth of Virginia. I wish they would save me the time of having to constantly explain why they are wrong.
Bad analogy. This would be like people calling Rhode Island "Newport". The official state name is (the State of) "Rhode Island" (and Providence Plantations), and calling it by the name of one of its territories makes no sense.
Every one of the many Taiwanese people I know refer to it as Taiwan, too. It's very rare to hear anyone refer to it as the ROC, unless in the context of specifically making a distinction from the PRC, or in a formal document.
Right, calling the ROC and all of its holdings "Taiwan" just muddies the conversation and gives ammo to PRC shills claiming "Taiwan is a province of China" which deliberately uses the name of a single ROC holding and the ambiguous "China" term.
Do you tell your friends about your summer trip to the Republic of Korea? Or were you visiting the Kingdom of Belgium that year? Do those friends invite you to visit their hometowns in the French Republic, or the Federal Republic of Germany? Maybe you can stop at the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg along the way from one to the other?
When shills from an aggressor nation in a highly politicized international conflict intentionally inject ambiguity into the names used by the states on either side of the conflict, you should strive to be as articulate as possible to avoid misunderstandings.
People commonly refer to the United States of America as "America" which is odd since there's also Central and South America. Being common doesn't equal being correct, and in this case the ambiguity is used by the aggressor state (PRC) to get people to believe a certain narrative. I'll continue to inform folks where I can as most people aren't aware of the situation between the ROC and PRC. I don't care about downvotes on this site _especially_ if it's because I'm stating facts that people do not like.
Here's the TAIWAN ALLIES INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION AND ENHANCEMENT INITIATIVE (TAIPEI) ACT OF 2019. It starts: To express United States support for Taiwan's diplomatic alliances around the world.
The name "Republic of China" (as opposed to "People's Republic of China") isn't used. However there are sentences like this:
Since the election of President Tsai Ing-wen as President of Taiwan in 2016, the Government of the People's Republic of China has intensified its efforts to pressure Taiwan.
lol, see my first post in this thread. I said I didn't like the fact that the USA calls the ROC "Taiwan", and I think you are overestimating my ability to influence USA foreign policy. The USA doesn't have formal diplomatic relations with the ROC so using "Taiwan" is a kludge.
I don't have any dislike for the fact that the ROC is an independent country, whether my government diplomatically recognizes them as such or not. I'm just pointing out that, if a Taiwanese family invites you to dinner, they're going to be weirded out by you continually saying "Republic of China" throughout the conversation.
I have lots of Taiwanese friends, but I appreciate your concern. I do use 中華民國 when talking about politics or anything related to the government or cross-strait relations. If I'm talking about the island of Taiwan specifically, I have no problem saying "Taiwan".
Because all of them are actually from the island of Taiwan (not Kinmen or other holdings of the ROC), and they generally (and increasingly) do not want to be associated with "the Chinese": https://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=166
"China" is a bad brand name nowadays. I really wish they could formally rename their country with a resumption of the civil war.
Taiwan is the common name for the state that officially goes by the name Republic of China. It's de-facto administrative boundaries have been the island of Taiwan for the last 70 years. That's long enough for most people stop caring all that much. Many countries in todays world were still colonies back then.
The ROC had existed continuously since over 30 years before it occupied the island of Taiwan. What about people in Kinmen? Do you consider them part of "Taiwan"? Please use the official government name to stop aiding the PRC in its misinformation campaign.
False. And don't use the term "Chinese" as it's ambiguous. This is not what the PRC claims.
The ROC has existed since 1912 and has only occupied Taiwan since 1945 (some claim since 1952 and the Treaty of San Francisco). The ROC has been an independent state with continuous diplomatic recognition since 1912. It does not need to declare independence. I just take issue with people calling the ROC "Taiwan" as it gives ammo to PRC shills who intentionally muddy the conversation with their claim that "Taiwan is a part of China" where the term "China" is ambiguous or referencing the "One China" principle which the US doesn't even recognize (acknowledges the existence of, but does not adhere to).
> I just take issue with people calling the ROC "Taiwan" as it gives ammo to PRC shills who intentionally muddy the conversation with their claim that "Taiwan is a part of China"
...Calling it "Republic of China" is straight up saying "[this area] is a part of China". Naming it "Taiwan" is giving it an identity independent of China.
No, the current situation is that there are two governments both claiming to represent "China", not that the ROC is part of what you are calling "China" (PRC). The ROC can't amend its constitution to rename itself without triggering a PRC invasion.
You are using "China" to refer to the PRC which is misleading and muddies the conversation. I'm against calling the PRC "China" as much as I am against calling the ROC "Taiwan". Please use the full name or the acronym to avoid ambiguity.
"Taiwan" passports say "Republic of China" on them.
My passport stamps from when I entered Taiwan say "Republic of China".
Taiwan is just _one_ of the islands that the ROC controls. Calling the ROC "Taiwan" muddies the conversation and helps the PRC narrative that "Taiwan is a province of China".
The ROC has been a de facto independent country since 1912 when it was founded. The existence of the PRC since 1949 has not changed that.
On the military and foreign relation really matters in this list. In my understanding, the only reason these two still exists is because US is backing them up since WW2.
This comment egregiously breaks the site guidelines. Personal attack is not allowed, and neither are accusations of shillage, which are overwhelmingly figments of internet imagination (I've spent hundreds of hours investigating this kind of thing). Please stick to the rules when posting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
See my edit. I'm 100% pro-ROC and 100% anti-PRC. Calling the ROC and its other non-Taiwan holdings "Taiwan" helps the PRC with their "Taiwan is a province of China" narrative. First time I, a stringent anti-communist, have ever been called a PRC shill. There's zero chance I'd be allowed to enter the PRC if they can see my internet posting history.
So why not simply declare Taiwan to be a country de-facto, despite a bunch of governments who suck up to China pretending otherwise? Who gets to decide what a "country" is?
Are you advocating for separating the island of Taiwan from the ROC? I'm honestly not sure what you're getting at here.
The ROC has already been an independent entity for over 100 years. There is nothing new in this situation that needs to be declaring independence. If the ROC amends its constitution to remove "China" from its official name, the PRC will attack instantly (they've said as much).
"Republic of China" sounds like something related to China. Maybe some sort of separatist organization? If the PRC invades it, that must be some sort of civil war, an internal Chinese matter. Can't blame China for conquering itself.
"Taiwan" doesn't sound related to China at all. It implies no more "Taiwan, province of China" than "Taiwan, country in East Asia".
This statement shows the power of western media. Yes the WHO doesn't. Neither does any other political entity in the world.
Neither the US, nor the 14 of 193 UN members that has diplomatic relations with the ROC, nor does "Taiwan" itself recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation.
Even the most pro-US pro-independence party in Taiwan, the DPP, does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation. According to Taiwan, Taiwan is a province of the ROC which includes the mainland and the present country of Mongolia.
And you would want the health agency of the UN to be the first in the world to spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so?
Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission not happening and WHO refused to acknowledge Taiwan's reports. Then on January 14th, WHO tweeted saying human to human transmission was not possible. Then when it came out that they were wrong, they claimed Taiwan never emailed them. Taiwan brought receipts with the emails.
Also the WHO spokesman went on an interview with Hong Kong media and refused to even answer a question about Taiwan, then hung up the call after pretending to not hear the question.
This is not corporate media telling me so (don't even know why you would claim that). This is plain facts on video and email available for everyone to see.
Seems like a goalpost shift since I was just responding to your claim about "Taiwan sovereignty".
And since you brought up the December 31st email, that only amplifies my point about corporate media if you formed your opinion on editorials obfuscating the primary source rather than the primary source itself. Here's the actual email from Taiwan https://twitter.com/mohw_taiwan/status/1248915057188024320
"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."
It's so embarrassingly not "a warning" from Taiwan that Taiwan has been busy deleting the original email from their press release archives and rerouting permalinks to their emails (still available on their tweet at.cdc.tw/23iq82) to a further obfuscating rebuttal.
Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
You are proving my very point. The twitter email you linked specifically says "atypical pneumonia".
> In China, the term “atypical pneumonia” is commonly used to refer to SARS, a disease transmitted between humans caused by coronavirus.
"transmitted between humans" - what WHO claimed does not happen even though Taiwan warned them about it.
> patients had been isolated for treatment
That's also referring to the human-to-human transmission part of COVID - which WHO denied. This is the warning Taiwan had sent in December and WHO lied and went even further to state that they never received any email from Taiwan. It's literally in the email. I don't know how much clearer they can get.
> Meanwhile, people who just read corporate media headlines and don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking goes around telling people "Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission".
You trying to claim I don't have critical thinking makes you sound arrogant. I don't want to engage in flame wars on HN so it's not replying to it further.
I'm afraid this is another goalpost shift. Remember we started with
> recognize Taiwan as a sevreign nation
I'm then responding to your
> Taiwan emailed WHO in December warning about China lying about the human-to-human transmission
Very bold statements. If you're saying that the WHO should have changed their January 14 statement from "there are no clear evidence of human to human transmission" to "there are clear evidence of human to human transmission because Taiwan stated:
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."
then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you.
You keep saying I am moving the goalpost but I am not. My original comment was in reply to the last statement where you said:
> "spearhead tectonic geopolitical changes because the corporate media tells you so"
and I was merely pointing out that the HK media is the one which pointed out how WHO ignored Taiwan's warning. Then you went around stating I "don't bother with primary sources or critical thinking" which is just a silly ad hom attack and not worthy on HN. I almost always read the primary source and that's exactly what I had done with the Taiwan vs WHO thing. I don't just watch the media and believe everything they say, I have seen too many examples of them not reporting the facts. Also I haven't even seen much coverage of the Taiwan situation in the western media so I have no idea how you are making that conclusion. Most of the western media is too busy defending China anyway.
> then I suppose there aren't really anything anyone can say that'll be of interest to you
Considering you think the Taiwan's email wasn't enough to justify a different statement from WHO than parroting China's talking points, why do you think WHO lied about them never receiving any correspondence from Taiwan warning about human-to-human transmission?
Also maybe calling people names and thinking you are somehow better than the person you are interacting with is a tactic you wish to employ though I don't think it's suited for HN discussions. Let's not resort to that.
This is why using WHO as the body for 'truth' is idiocy. They have a hundred different incentives pulling them in different directions. Automatically making it a poor 'source of truth' or, even worse, what is not okay to talk about.
It might be a good source of information for governments around the world looking to take the most neutral diplomatic and balanced stance on every issue.
Not sure why those same incentives should then be influencing what people are allowed to talk about on the internet.
I think I generally agree. I'm very against YouTube content control whether it's censoring gun contents or taking down pro-China channels during the Hong Kong protests.
Your statement misses the point a bit though. I don't think anyone's arguing that WHO/UN is a source for (political) 'truth'. It's just a medical advisory body. If the UN was the source of 'truth', Israel might not exist in the present form anymore since half of all UN resolutions against single countries are against Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolut.... The fact that no one is likely to know that is precisely because what you're arguing against is already not true.
Taiwan data was being counted with China's. This means that many of the early safeguards Taiwan was taking to protect their country was overlooked as it's effectiveness didn't show up in the global trends reported by the WHO. In fact, when specifically questioned by the press on how Taiwan was so successful at containment and preventing the spread, the WHO leadership acted like they had never heard the term Taiwan before.
So has Newfoundland's response to the pandemic been extremely effective [0]. Where is Newfoundland's data being published by the WHO site? Here is what I was able to find as far as case statistics: https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati... No mention of Newfoundland in that document that I can find.
Is that quantifiably true? There are the same number of deaths in Shanghai and Beijing as Taiwan and the population is about the same size while Shanghai and Beijing have much less "travel restriction" from Taiwan. Why should the WHO, an agency of the UN, make an extremely aggressive political and undemocratic move and special case Taiwan when only 14 of the 193 members of the UN have diplomatic relations with Taiwan and when it performed average vis a vis other Chinese provinces.
It's evidence that the WHO is a political organization, and some of its recommendations, such as being against international travel bans, may be influenced by politics over public health.
> American officials sought to water down the resolution by removing language that called on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding” and another passage that called on policymakers to restrict the promotion of food products that many experts say can have deleterious effects on young children.
> When that failed, they turned to threats, according to diplomats and government officials who took part in the discussions. Ecuador, which had planned to introduce the measure, was the first to find itself in the cross hairs.
> The Americans were blunt: If Ecuador refused to drop the resolution, Washington would unleash punishing trade measures and withdraw crucial military aid. The Ecuadorean government quickly acquiesced.
Importantly, however:
> In the end, the Americans’ efforts were mostly unsuccessful. It was the Russians who ultimately stepped in to introduce the measure — and the Americans did not threaten them.
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 there probably is person-to-person transmission, and a bunch 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.
> "So people saying, ‘Take vitamin C, take turmeric, we’ll cure you,’ those are the examples of things that would be a violation of our policy
The WHO bannable hoax page:
> Fact: There is no scientific evidence that lemon/turmeric prevents COVID-19. In general, however, WHO recommends consuming adequate fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet.
First results from site:who.int Google search:
> Effect of curcumin, the active constituent of turmeric, on penicillin-induced epileptiform activity in rats (2012) Curcumin is a major constituent of turmeric and has many biological functions such as anticancer and anti-inflammatory effects
> Clinical trials on treatment using a combination of Traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Report of the WHO International Expert Meeting to review and analyse clinical reports on combination treatment for SARS (2003) All participants were patients with clinically confirmed SARS from Beijing Changxindian Hospital. Regimen: ... Radix Curcumae (15 g)... Relative to the control group, the integrated treatment group showed a significant decline in the general value of toxicosis symptoms, especially in the second and third weeks of treatment (p < 0.001). The integrated treatment group also showed radical improvement in alleviation of headaches, arthralgia, pantalgia, cough, expectoration and haemoptysis, chest pain, poor appetite, nausea, sweating and cardio palmus in comparison with the group treated with Western medicine.
> Altered antibacterial activity of Curcumin in the presence of serum albumin, plasma and whole blood (2017) Curcumin has been studied for its anti-inflammatory, antioxidative, anti-carcinogenic, anti-viral, anti-fungal and anti-parasitic activities
> CURCUMIN - HEALTH PROMISE FOR THE FUTURE (2015) Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) is a yellow pigment present in the turmeric (Curcuma longa) which gives the yellow color to turmeric that has been associated with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, antiviral, and antibacterial activities. These effects are mediated through the regulation of various transcription factors, growth factors, inflammatory cytokines, protein kinases, and other enzymes. Most westerners know turmeric as gold colored Indian spice. Turmeric and curcumin are not the same thing. The antioxidant and anti-inflammatory property of curcumin is much more potent in an extracted form. All of these studies suggest that curcumin has enormous potential in the prevention and therapy of various diseases.
First results on Google Search:
> Specific Plant Terpenoids and Lignoids Possess Potent Antiviral Activities against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (2007) Curcumin, a known phytocompound from Curcuma longa, has been reported to exhibit antiinflammatory, antioxidant, anticarcinogenic, and anti-HIV activities. In this study, mild activity against SARS-CoV replication and inhibition of 3CL protease were observed.
> Anti-infective Properties of the Golden Spice Curcumin (2019) Due to the lack of preventive and therapeutic options for many viral infections, numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the antiviral potential of natural compounds. For curcumin, an antiviral activity was observed against several different viruses including hepatitis viruses, influenza viruses and emerging arboviruses like the Zika virus (ZIKV) or chikungunya virus (CHIKV). Interestingly, it has also been reported that the molecule inhibits human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2) and human papillomavirus (HPV).
> Prof. Manges (2020) With the results of research that says curcumin can modulate the expression of ACE2, some parties state that curcumin makes it easy for COVID19 to enter the cell. Special research needs to be done to answer whether the administration of curcumin in lung cells accelerates the entry of germs and viruses, including the SARSCov-2 virus. What is certain is that research on turmeric, ginger, curcuma proved to show the work of the ingredients as an immune system booster.
> Curcumin Suppression of Cytokine Release and Cytokine Storm. A Potential Therapy for Patients with Ebola and Other Severe Viral Infections (2015) Curcumin has been shown to inhibit the release of numerous cytokines. The term ‘cytokine storm’ is most associated with the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic ... also known to occur in advanced or terminal cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
> Catechin and Curcumin interact with corona (2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV2) viral S protein and ACE2 of human cell membrane: insights from Computational study and implication for intervention (2020) Here, through computational approaches we have reported two polyphenols, Catechin and Curcumin which have dual binding affinity i.e both the molecule binds to viral S-protein and as well as ACE2.
> Revealing the Potency of Citrus and Galangal Constituents to Halt SARS-CoV-2 Infection (2020) Moreover, all of the citrus flavonoids possess good affinity to the respected receptors as well as curcumin, brazilin, and galangin, indicating that those compounds perform inhibitory potential for the viral infection and replication.
> Turmeric curcumin inhibits entry of all hepatitis C virus genotypes into human liver cells (2013)
I won't do the same for vitamin C, but it's definitely possible to do just that. Look, even if its scientifically proven that turmeric does absolutely nothing, it will still work as a harmless placebo.
If you found out early and spread the word about: human-to-human transmission, qualifies as pandemic, passes brain-blood barrier, effectiveness of travel blockades, you'd be in direct opposition to the facts spread by the WHO.
WHO's masks strategy amounts to: don't wear a seatbelt, it gives a false sense of security, so you may start speeding, and you'll choke yourself if you apply seatbelt without proper fit training, so just stay 1 meter apart from the car in front of you, and avoid drunk drivers. There is no scientific evidence that seatbelts work for the general public, just tons of research on effective protection for professional drivers.
If you want to fact check, actually fact check, and send the reader to a reputable source that dispels it. Don't let swarm intelligence go to waste and turn YOUtube into WHOtube. At the most, ban or dispel "5G causes coronavirus", and "Bill Gates mark of the beast" state-actor disinformation.
The comments in this thread are embarrassing. Youtube has every right to take responsibility for the content on their platform. Good for them for exercising it.
I get my Coronavirus info from following people on twitter - who are mostly honest even if biased and understand that there is a lot of unknown and being honest about it the best place to start.
Youtube also demonitized Chris Martenson's channel "Peak Prosperity" back in January when it was warning about the coronavirus crisis months before the WHO posthumous announcement of there being a pandemic.
youtube is offering a convenient service subsidized by googles big pockets, they are not some arbiter of truth (but are entitled to their opinions). there are already plenty of podcasts in their archives that directly contradicted WHO guidelines at the time they were made. I don't even think they are a major source of hoaxes/conspiracies. this is actually a bad look for youtube.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I've noticed that it's difficult to find user-generated current-events content on Youtube. The search results are dominated, artificially it feels, by clips from the major broadcasters and news agencies. User-created content is pushed down. I guess that's what preferring "authoritative" sources looks like, and I wonder if people are just "choosing" ("demanding") what the search results have been rigged to give them.
Me. All of my Canadian news broadcasters stream on YouTube and cover covid related news both live and recorded content. I use YouTube because I will not pay for cable service just to watch the news.
I can see why they want to remove bad content, but a single authority is very bad.
The tech companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al.) have taken for themselves the power of censorship, and they have lost the credibility to claim that they are neutral carriers.
I believe it is now justified to call for their algorithms to be made public, by legal means if necessary.
The WHO sent out a Tweet back on January 14 saying:
“Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus.”
From my understanding that Tweet was deleted. With all the contradicting stories coming from the media, the WH, WHO, social media, I’m going to stick with facts and not twisted agenda pushing.
YouTubers have known for a long time that certain topics and keywords will get your videos penalized. There is a popular legal channel that refers to the virus as the "My Sharona Cyrus" in order to avoid being flagged. YouTube has been engaged in social engineering for years, and yet there are still people out there who refuse to believe it, or believe it is OK because it agrees with their world view.
Then there is a whole other discussion about how capricious they are in what they decide to promote, demote, and leave alone. You can go binge watch ISIS recruitement videos as much as you want, but try to post a video criticizing Islam, gay/trans issues, etc. See what happens.
Prior to March 3rd, the official position of the WHO was that
"The flu is worse"
I don't expect the WHO to be infalliable, and I don't think this reflects malice or incompetence (they updated as information became available) but that's kind of my point. The WHO is not infalliable. The things they say are not gospel truth. Categorically banning discussion of anything that contradicts what they say is a horrendous measure that will suppress critical information, because _even the WHO_ contradicts the WHO. If the WHO is wrong again, but we are not allowed to discuss it, we will never find out. We will instead _enforce_ incorrect information, and people will die.
> Prior to March 3rd, the official position of the WHO was that "The flu is worse"
That wasn't their position, in fact they instructed other nations to prepare. The R0 and mortality rate they provided in the statement[1] is also much higher than of flu, so please don't spread misinformation.
> Prior to March 3rd, the official position of the WHO was that "The flu is worse"
This is a lie, and the product of many different organizations flat out making up claims about the WHO to deflect blame away from themselves.
The WHO has been telling nations to prepare since January. I mean, I'm an ordinary citizen and I got clued in to preparing in January from their statements.
Now, there've been lots of problems with the WHO's response, but to claim that they were downplaying it until March is outright false, and if the news you're watching is telling you that you should consider watching (or reading) something else.
My news source was the actual WHO press conferences. They've been quite clear on this since January.
If you've only heard what some secondary source says the WHO said, then your perception of the WHO is completely determined by what that secondary source wants you to think.
Ok YouTube - what is the plan if Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai becomes the next Director General of the WHO?
This creation of sacred cows from institutions is ludicrous. At one time YouTube associated itself with the SPLC to determine "hate groups", and Majid Nawaz from Quilliam successfully sued the SPLC into making a video apology and paying him millions - because they had previously placed him in their "Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists".
The tech industry seems to have a fetish for authoritative sources in a world that is constantly proving that these gatekeepers of canonical knowledge are fallible, and often to the detriment of many.
Centralization of canonical information is not a solution to determining what's true and what isn't - it simply creates a structure where the truth can be determined by some organization, and all that's stopping it from being abused is blind faith that people in these organizations will do the right thing 100% of the time, infallibly.
Everything ought to be in a position where it can be criticized freely. When you walk down the street there can be crazy people who yell all sorts of prophecies. The scale at which people can do this on the internet is higher, but that does not automatically mean that they necessarily need to be addressed.
The fact that they are backing WHO here as a means of curation and censorship instead of a less political org like the CDC, is pretty concerning. We already know WHO has stated objective falsehoods multiple times that impact the health of the world negatively.
please see the top comment in this thread, or the fourth top comment in this thread. I'm not sure why I was downvoted for making the same point as the top comments.
The concept of 'fake news' was invented to bring power back into the hands of large media companies and the corporations which control them by discrediting all alternative news sources.
I don't believe in fake news or conspiracy theories, but I do read conspiracy media and articles from 'fake news' outlets because it helps to get perspective.
There is definitely a grain of truth in many conspiracy theories and 'fake news' articles... And unfortunately this grain of truth is often never mentioned at all on mainstream media.
For example, some scientists found that covid-19 shared some non-trivial segment of RNA with the HIV virus. This is a fact but mainstream media does not mention it at all because they don't want to invite conspiracy theories that the virus could be man-made. Of course they could mention this and also add that this particular RNA sequence is also shared by many other viruses and not just HIV. But mainstream media will avoid the topic entirely because of political and financial pressures. They prefer to turn any scientist who mentions this fact into a social pariah rather than admit that there is an element of truth to it and that it could deserve further scrutiny.
Also, mainstream media would never dare to point out just how grotesquely massive the recent bailouts by the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States are. The amount of fiat dollars which will be injected into the economy is so alarming that even the billionaire fund manager Ray Dalio hinted that it would usher in a "new world order" (in an economic sense) but the gravity of the situation is not conveyed at all by the mainstream media.
Consuming conspiracy and 'fake news' media is mind-opening if you consume it in small quantities alongside mainstream media.
If you hate how divisive the world has become, then it's your moral duty to expose yourself to the other side's perspective. Mainstream media is becoming complacent and just like 'fake news' media, it's loaded with political and economic agendas. The only way to see past the agendas is to consume both.
> For example, some scientists found that covid-19 shared some non-trivial segment of RNA with the HIV virus.
This is "zombie information" and a perfect example of the kind of nonsense that should be stopped. The single paper this came from was thoroughly debunked by a hundred real scientists the day it was posted. (It used statistical criteria so loose that it could have said any virus was related to HIV.) The paper had never passed peer review, and was retracted by the authors from the preprint server it was posted on the next day.
Sounds like you didn't hear about that. If the discoverer of HIV tells you that covid-19 contains segments of HIV RNA and says that he believes that it is man-made, it absolutely deserves more scrutiny even if it turns out not to be true. The media should embrace uncertainty instead of pretending to know all the answers. This is the problem with US media, there is no truth; only one extreme lie or its opposite which is also a lie. French and British media cover all possibilities and leave room doubt - This is healthy.
This close mindedness is exactly what I'm talking about and why we need some fake news in our lives.
> This is a fact but mainstream media does not mention it at all because they don't want to invite conspiracy theories that the virus could be man-made.
Your statement is false. I searched my scraped database of local mainstream news an there were several articles mentioning coronavirus/HIV and a few dicussing the link of the two and/or describing the supposed conspiracy.
I don't like this. All of the question of 'Why on earth choose WHO' aside...it is dangerous and depressing precident.
I live with a number of ladies who are very familiar with plant medicine. When this whole thing started we all started taking lots of dandelion root / hawthorne tincture. Dandelion is well known to both help your lymphatic system and support respiratory issues.
Hawthorne is an amazing heart / circulatory support. There is literary NO RISK for us in applying these home grown medicines.
We've all been infected since then, and each of us had pretty mild symptoms, that lasted for relatively short amounts of time. About two to three weeks. Many many people see 30-40 days of symptoms.
It cost us nothing. The medicine was prepared at home. Who knows what using these plant medicines across a population would result in statistically? Maybe it would reduce hospitalizations by 1%, or maybe it would reduce them by 75%, we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
YouTube is a fantastic avenue for period to share their own experiences. Yes, you must take what people say with a grain of salt. You can't just believe anything you see. I feel sad that they are censoring people from sharing their own experiences in this time where are governments and medical systems are largely failing us.
> The inspection reports portray an industry struggling to meet basic manufacturing standards, from verifying the identity of the ingredients that go into its products to inspecting finished batches of supplements.
> Some firms don't even have recipes, known as master manufacturing records, for their products.
> Others make their supplements in unsanitary factories. New Jersey-based Quality Formulation Laboratories produced protein powder mixes and other supplements in a facility infested with rodents, rodent feces and urine, according to government records. FDA inspectors found a rodent apparently cut in half next to a scoop, according to a 2008 inspection report.
> we don't know because there's no money to be made in it.
Lots of people are making lots of money selling this stuff. It's a huge industry.
>Who knows what using these plant medicines across a population would result in statistically?
Isn't that a big point of this? Who does know? The answer is nobody, but a lot of these "alternative" medicine pushers aren't asking questions but instead presenting their "alternatives" as absolute cures
Your "plant medicine" is very likely worthless, as most are.
Lots of people have few to no symptoms. Your anecdote means nothing, and is a prime example of why we don't use anecdote instead of actual data - if people are put off engaging with actual medical services and instead are bamboozled by this sort of woo, bad things can and will happen.
Right in the beginning even the WHO knew little about Covid19 and transmissibility, mortality , etc., so anyone questioning their initial assertions would have been banned. That’s bad. The WHO is not an infallible know-it-all.
Where we live, due to local laws, we are now obliged to wear a mask to go shopping. Can one discuss that on YouTube, or would one be contradicting the WHO?
I fear there isn't "one truth" out there, despite the content providers' and fact-checkers' attempts :(
We keep trying to encourage our kids to ask good questions, then I see what's happening out there in the world, and I wonder when the grown-ups are going to start asking good questions...
[0] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...