Banning conspiracy theories is such a slippery slope. Where is the line for something like the lab leak hypothesis? What had to change to allow it to exist? Weren't Woodward and Bernstein or Daniel ellsberg conspiracy theorists? Should they have been silenced?
back
7 comments
>Banning conspiracy theories is such a slippery slope.
And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths.
There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made.
To be clear, your justification for why YouTube needs to censor themselves - "anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths" - is itself widely-believed misinformation. Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat... Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia. I'm not sure the USA has ever topped the chart. (Czechia is particularly interesting - they were the European "success story" the British press pointed to earlier in the pandemic as proof that the UK should be able to do better and our government failed us. In reality, they probably just got lucky the first time around. Actually, most of the success stories probably did.)
Now, a lot of less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison. If the USA was instead split up into 50 countries, it'd be much further down that ranking even if the exact same number of people died.
> If the USA was instead split up into 50 countries, it'd be much further down that ranking even if the exact same number of people died.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
If states were countries, half of the top 20 per capita would consist of US States, with the other half essentially being developing nations.
In fact, I'd say that the only reason the US per capita rate is as low as it is is that states like California (itself accounting for over a tenth of the population) actually took things seriously and brought down that average.
Split hairs all you want, but the fact that the US at one point accounted for a quarter of all cases despite being 4% of the world's population is a stain on the whole country, and a significant argument that the US is directly to blame for the pandemic lasting as long as it did.
> states like California (itself accounting for over a tenth of the population) actually took things seriously
It has little to do with that. If that were the case, Florida would not have been within spitting distance of California. Why is New York at the top of list? They had a similar response as California.
The issue is far more complex than "taking things seriously". Population density, climate, age of population, and job types probably contribute more than simply "taking things seriously".
Maybe the reason for the large number of cases in the US is people are more mobile in the US. After all, one can travel to 50 states with no border checks. More mobility => faster spread.
Here is some data for all 50 States.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us
I'll let it speak for itself.
>> top the chart in pandemic deaths
Well, the USA does top the chart in pandemic deaths. You instead just talk about deaths per capita, and call that misinformation. Ok, but that's not what the GP was talking about. A total straw man.
Then when you get around to mentioning total pandemic deaths, look at all the emotive words you pack into the sentence:
> less honest publications like to compare the total number of deaths in order to cynically take advantage of the fact that there are few countries as big as the USA, but of course that's a nonsense comparison.
> Here's the current top of the Covid-19 deaths per capita chart: Peru, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia.
I don't know where you got this list from. JHU's database[1] shows Peru and Brazil at the top for the per-capita statistic (not CFR). Brazil, conspicuously, has a COVID-denialist leader, refused a general lockdown, and is currently #3 in the world for deaths.
Edited my comment to include a link. The chart you've linked only include the "twenty countries currently most affected by COVID-19 worldwide", whatever that means. Probably something to do with current cases or recent deaths. The numbers I found match that chart for the countries which are on it, but Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czechia, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria just weren't included even though they would've been higher than Brazil if they were. Edited: as someone pointed out, there's a sortable table further down which gives the same ranking as I quoted, except it includes a couple of additional micro-countries with only a few thousand people.
(Also, Brazil is probably pretty representative of South America as a whole, they just seem to have better testing than other countries there and likely report more of their Covid deaths than others. I know a while ago, there was some analysis suggesting Mexico had more Covid deaths than Brazil with a substantially lower population and was just massively under-reporting them due to missing testing.)
>leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths
The US is currently 74th of 203 countries when counting new covid cases per capita in the last week. So my perception is people have mostly switched to shaming the US for "vaccine nationalism" and the like, and downplaying accusations of poor handling of the epidemic.
(https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#wee...)
Lets choose the conspiracy theory videos then. Conspiracy theory is just a term used to dismiss unpopular thoughts. We should be able to talk about the lab leak hypothesis. We should be able to talk about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Discussing ivermectin as a covid treatment will get you banned from Facebook, but Oxford is studying it [0] and nations such as India [1] and Egypt approved it as part of their official protocol. Now, that's not to say that ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine are effective treatments--but the fact that you can be deplatformed for even discussing a treatment that has been administered to millions of people is really absurd. We can't expect Facebook or Youtube to understand medicine and decide which medicines are ok for us to talk about; more generally, we can't trust corporations to be the arbiters of reality.
[0] https://www.contagionlive.com/view/ivermectin-to-be-analyzed...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2021/05/11/indian-...
As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals. There is no compelling reason that uneducated citizens with no medical expertise need to discuss them. I personally know several medical professionals that were aghast at the "discussion" around hydroxychloroquine.
Also worth noting hiding behind "just discussing" something is a slippery slope in its own right. There's a long history of people claiming to be "just asking questions" when they're transparently using "discussion" as a means to spread fringe ideology.
Nah. There are many cases where the medical consensus was wildly wrong and outsiders were correct.
Limiting fat and protein in favor of carbs in one’s diet is a good example. This bad advice lead to an obesity epidemic that has killed millions of people.
>As a counterpoint: if there is to be productive discussion about fringe drugs being used to treat diseases, it's going to be between medical professionals
Notwithstanding the merits or lack thereof of your point, the videos about chloroquine and ivermectin that were banned WERE discussions by medical professionals. Have you seen them?
This is actually a great point that I'd never considered.
Its completely true based on my FB or twitter feed where you can find thousands of people who couldn't pass a GED test arguing a bout science that they don't understand.
What a dystopian future you’re painting. Even “discussing” becomes “promoting fringe ideology”. Only “experts” can have these forbidden conversations.
Yikes. I can only imagine how little progress we would have made as a civilization with an a approach like that.
gatekeeping
Isn't Oxford studying it and India and Egypt approving it mean that people are discussing Ivermectin? Whether we need to discuss Ivermectin on YouTube is a very different question than we need to discuss Ivermectin at all. Videos about Ivermectin often come with a lot of disinformation about the vaccine. If YouTube decides, "hey, I think all of this is going to cloud out information about a vaccine campaign that is proving increasingly effective", I don't think that's a bad move. That doesn't mean that Ivermectin is a subject discussed under only closed doors like Communism in the 50s though.
The censorship isn't limited to YouTube. Scholarly articles from large collaborations have been censored from peer-reviewed journals when they received too much public attention:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/frontiers-removes...
> and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths
Seems a bit crude to pick on Czechia, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and France like that. Surely they're not so anti-science as you're suggesting.
Covid deaths per 1,000 population:
Czechia: 2.85 | Belgium: 2.2 | Italy: 2.11 | Britain: 1.93 | US: 1.84 | Spain: 1.73 | France: 1.65 | Sweden: 1.43
And if we were analyzing trends, Germany rather dramatically joined the Covid party toward the end (with an extreme death rate across a rough five month span). Was that due to a mass spontaneous national anti-science movement on their part? I don't think so.
Should we entrust Google, Facebook or Twitter with deciding what compromises have to be made in the name of good science and good medicine?
I mean, we're trusting them with the hosting in the first place. Of course the problem of moderation also falls on them. I mean, let's suppose they only ban straight-up illegal content. Then a similar question could be formed: "Should we entrust Google with the execution of our laws? They are not the police after all!"
If you accept the premise, what mechanism do you suggest?
If I were allowed to rewrite all the rules at Youtube, I would simplify censorship. Only content that breaks the laws where Youtube is headquartered would be removed by Youtube. No exception. AI would be allowed to "flag" a video for review and a large crowd-sourced team of moderators would vote on whether or not the video is breaking a law. They would have to attest to which laws specifically are being broken. Moderators that false-flag will slowly lose points that count towards a quorum. When a quorum of moderators agree a video is breaking one or more laws, the video would become invisible to the public and handed off to a forensic interface for law enforcement to subscribe to. The forensic queue would summarize who is posting the most illegal material and give law enforcement officials the ability to search for specific content, IP addresses, geographic locations, etc... Law enforcement could un-flag a video if it is in fact legal. Verified law enforcement are also welcome to join the moderator queue and review process. This might be a good option for those having recently left the police force due to current events. If there are laws on the books that the district attorney does not wish to enforce, they could log in and gray them out. A comment will appear showing which district attorney muted those laws.
As for false information, quackery, etc... there would be icons that people could up/downvote to provide public opinion as to something being false information. Post a video of the earth being flat? No problem, go right ahead. People can upvote the "Cool story bro" icon. Quackery icons will slowly de-rank a video from showing up in suggested. There would also be industry specific icons and people verified to be from those industries could double-up-vote icons as well as post comments with a checkmark next to their name linking to their public credentials and contact information. Cost? The verification process would pay for itself. Being a verified subject matter expert provides exposure for the individual, so there is incentive to pay to be manually verified. Being a SME does not grant the ability to remove a video, only the ability to add a comment with a checkmark. Not all SME's will agree with one another. Let the merits of their conversations drive public opinion and emoji voting. Post a cure for covid or cancer? Go for it. Verified doctors and scientists can post checkmark comments and upvote the quackery emojis if they feel it is required. Or they could upvote the green checkmark if they agree. More verified checkmarks equates to higher rank in suggested content.
Accepting that premise is tantamount to admitting you don't have the judgement to be part of the conversation.
> And not moderating them is a slippery slope to facilitating violent extremism, and to anti-science activists leading an otherwise-developed country to top the chart in pandemic deaths.
Have we really learned nothing over the last year and a half? What will it take to shake your faith in the media?
Four weeks ago, the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab was a conspiracy theory, likely to get you banned with extreme prejudice for being a qanon white supremecist.
COVID-19 was a conspiracy theory. Then it was a conspiracy theory that human to human transmission was possible. Then it was a conspiracy theory that wearing masks was at all helpful.
What will be the next domino to fall? What will the new truth be a few weeks from now?
If anything, censoring "conspiracy theories" led directly to the COVID-19 pandemic.
If this was 2015, I think things would have gone much better for us. Citizens would have been able to fill in the gaps where journalists failed us. There might have been a panic for people to buy masks and close the borders, sure, but the pandemic would have probably been contained.
I was banned for spreading conspiracy theories in February 2020 when I pleaded with people to practice basic hygiene and postpone travel until we had figured out what was going on.
An entire subreddit was quarantined in February last year for spreading misinformation about what was considered fact just months later. As of today that subreddit is still quarantined, even after the last "misinfo", the lab theory, is no longer considered taboo to talk about.
Which subreddit?
> There's no perfect solution, only compromises which have to be made.
It doesn't matter. You should not be censoring peoples opinions or them asking questions. The lab leak hypothesis should have never been censored. Maybe if someone was claiming they knew it was true without providing sufficient evidence I could see a case for it. Calling something misinformation when they aren't presenting it as fact but a possibility is disgraceful especially when it comes to journalism.
And censoring public conversation to medical malpractice & issues with treatments is also a slippery slope that totalitarian regimes have regularly instituted on their own people.
There is a perfect solution, which is for the government & the corporatist state to defend our rights, which include the Freedom of Speech. Somebody is lying & the public has a right to all of the pertinent information & unrestricted conversation. The worst case is for the liars to have total control of the information. Those are the definitions of totalitarianism & authoritarianism.
---
Edit: I actually misspoke. The worst case is Technocratic control a la Brave New World, where autonomy is lost & cyber (regulatory) divisions take over all aspects of life. Nothing screams dystopia more than a technocrat with a God complex exerting one's will to control the lives of the population. Human life is sacred & spiritual and the Technocratic movement as it stands today spoils this light to create a horde of undead.
People on this site can try to redefine the first amendment all they like, but never in the history of this country has it meant that we get to say what we want wherever we want. I can get fired for saying something offensive, but I don't moan about totalitarianism or the corporatist state, because that would be stupid. If people want to argue the merits of promoting a wider range of speech on social media, so be it, but please dispense with any comparisons to our first amendment right (which is not affected here).
"Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech."
Benjamin Franklin
Bringing up the first amendment is a way to emphasize the importance of the free exchange of ideas. It only legally restrains the government, but now other powers have gained the ability to regulate speech. The principle is the same no matter who the censor is.
> Where is the line for something like the lab leak hypothesis?
Recent history seems to have an answer - thats off limits until it fits the narrative!
> Weren't Woodward and Bernstein or Daniel ellsberg conspiracy theorists?
Not theorists. They researched and published actual conspiracies, based on government documentation.
I don't care what other political values you have. If you are pro-censorship you're not on my side. It's as simple as that.
Hmm. I’m anti government censorship, but pro my ability to censor what people say in my house, just like probably everybody. Don’t know if I’m on your side or not.
Youtube flip-flopped because they rely on others (who also flip-flopped), which is exactly what they should be doing, right? Surely if youtube middle managers decided what's kosher all by themselves, that'd be worse?
Journalists use youtube to get a wider audience, but youtube is not really a mechanism of original reporting. It's not Physical Review Letters, it's Popular Science. If things were otherwise, if getting a true and important fact idea kicked off youtube could actually silence it, we'd already be screwed.
Uh, how about they just don’t remove any video unless it contains pornographic or copyrighted content?
The problem isn’t who YouTube relies on for “the truth.” It’s that they’re removing “untrue” videos in the first place.
It's not a public service, it's a business; they delete covid misinfo because they get yelled at if they don't, not out of some misguided notion that they're wikipedia.
They have covid misinfo up while also removing accurate covid info. The problem is what is info vs misinfo has changed multiple times in the last year.
There is a range. They could be not banned, but also not algorithmically advertised for via recommendations or trending pages.
Slippery slope arguments aren’t good arguments.
They are good arguments as long as you can show evidence the slope is slippery. The slippery slope fallacy isn't that slippery slopes don't exist, it is that they are asserted without evidence.
Evidence of the slipperiness is also insufficient. Youre really lookingfor an inductive argument where each step implies the next one.
Showing that you can get n+3 via separate evidence for n+1, n+2, and n+3 says nothing about n+7
do political things not start, get normalized, then serve as a foundation on which new trends can build?
Fair… but but even one cycle of cause/effect is difficult to provide evidence for, let alone a cascade of causes and effects which sum to a slippery slope.
Slippery slope arguments would need entire dissertations of evidence to even be plausibly considered, and yet they’re one of the most common methods of naysaying.
While you’re technically correct, I’m functionally correct.