8 ms·

Unpopular opinion: I don’t like this. Would much prefer that ideas compete. Id sort of give Amazon a pass since, unlike twitter, Reddit, Facebook & YouTube, it

by pbreit 8y ago

Unpopular opinion: I don’t like this. Would much prefer that ideas compete. Id sort of give Amazon a pass since, unlike twitter, Reddit, Facebook & YouTube, it doesn’t make many promises regarding the free exchange of ideas. But still.

hn19128ks8 8y ago
Today in 1985 Amazon pulls all videos discussing links between H.pylori and ulcers from its Prime platform. Many HN users laud the decision to remove the content that a "scientific consensus" of the medical community have "proven false". 'This is not about competing markets of ideas', the HN users are saying, "these are real doctors -- real scientists -- saying that the 'facts' in these videos cannot possibly be true. Therefore these are 'false facts' and should be removed." https://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/history.htm https://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/history.htm
hamandcheese 8y ago
I suspect you’ll find this opinion is more popular than you expect.
- kevinthew 8y ago
  Competing ideas are good but mass public disinformation is one the 21rst century's biggest problems already. There needs to be some counter to this.
  - freedomben 8y ago
    > There needs to be some counter to this. Does the implementation of the "counter" matter to you? Do you think giant corporations should be the gatekeeper on what information/ideas/speech is permitted and what is not?
  - gubbrora 8y ago
    It's a made up problem. There has always been lots of bad information. People are better informed than ever. Just take religion and magic and superstition which have declined a lot. It's a made up problem to justify authoritarian solutions.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      But is it an authoritarian solution? Does that terminology make sense outside of the sociopolitical context of government action? I feel it really diminishes the meaning of the word, "authoritarian" when you throw it around to describe the rights reserved by a non-government entity to police its own platform. A private company has a platform, and they can choose what content to allow on the platform. If you don't like it then enjoy your content elsewhere. If anything, it sounds like a bit of a made up problem to declare Amazon (or another similarly sized tech company) is being authoritarian by removing anti-vaccination videos. I mean come on, we have a rich history of authoritarian governments murdering people for vocal dissent. I get that you disagree with private censorship, but let's have some perspective now...
      - gubbrora 8y ago
        It's bigger than "just one company". You say it's the company's free choice but that is not true. There is a large amount of pressure on companies to conform. It's a part of a broader movement to shut down dissent wherever it exists. This movement is successfully censoring billions of people. The gloves are softer than before but the scale is larger and this is a huge threat.
    - matheweis 8y ago
      This is only true in the US; in the rest of the world the population of those with various religious beliefs is growing rapidly: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/ http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-201... http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims-are-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religious-group/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims-...
    - jakelarkin 8y ago
      there's always been bad information but it was previously hard to disseminate NEW bad information quickly. It was incredibly expensive, slow and there were watchers, gatekeepers ... various religious authorities, newspaper editors etc. now the russian election manipulation cyber warfare division or your local anti-vax grifter can anonymously target a limitless number of impressionable rubes with the click of a mouse. often for free if the content's viral. thanks social media!
stefan_ 8y ago
Vaccination is not "a competing idea".
adrr 8y ago
Not vaccinating your kids is child abuse and has negative consequences on the general public(eg: whooping cough and measles outbreaks). It should be banned like all child abuse videos.
- freedomben 8y ago
  There are some that would say that a government should not be able to force you to inject things into your own or your children's bodies. They would call that tyranny. Much of the pro-choice argument regarding abortion is based on the idea that you own your own body. My kids get vaccinated, but I sympathize with the anti-vaxxers arguments regarding governmental force.
  - melling 8y ago
    It's a bit of a public health nuisance when kids start dying because other people don't want their kids to get a measles shot It's hard to believe that tens of thousands of kids still die from the measles every year.
    - turtlecloud 8y ago
      The same argument could be said that kids born to unwilling mothers leads to social and moral decay. If you are pro abortion/ pro choice you must be pro choice for anti vaxx.
      - belltaco 8y ago
        Abortions don't create negative externalities like the anti-vaxx crowd does.
      - throwawaymath 8y ago
        No it can't because there is no direct, empirical relationship between children born in neglectful or under-resourced households and medical illness in other children. You can mount an abstract argument that there are secondary or tertiary effects that increase e.g. crime, violence or what have you. But that kind of relationship is not nearly as tight nor as evident as the reduction in herd immunity effected by fewer children receiving vaccinations. It's a difference of category, not degree.
asteli 8y ago
To me, this action says "We have chosen not to publish material, that is based on indisputably false premises, that may harm viewers and the public at large." That sounds like an acceptable line to me.
- chrismcb 8y ago
  But is that true? Did they remove all videos based on false premises? And how did they decide the premise was false?
  - melling 8y ago
    The one movie looks like it was 4.5 stars out of 5, with 3900 people rating it. It has more reviews than the Matrix.
    - lugg 8y ago
      Sex sells. This is why the whole popular vote thing doesn't really work for stuff like this. Humans are way too easily biased.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    They need not decide the premise is false; they can rely on scientific consensus. It's not a perfect heuristic but it's the most useful one we have. If they're transparent about the sources they use and they're impartial and consistent in their application (read: no videos given special treatment), they're not arbitrating. They're (actively) reporting.
    - pbreit 8y ago
      Arguable that sugar is more harmful than a video.
      - throwawaymath 8y ago
        It sure is! Tell you what, I'm all on board for a massive awareness campaign by Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Netflix on the dangers of sugar intake as well.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
SquishyPanda23 8y ago
I think your opinion is basically the standard one: censorship is generally bad, marketplace of ideas, etc. I don't have a take on this particular issue. But I think censorship is generally very dangerous, and I also think the Mill-style marketplace of ideas is a bad analogy bordering on the nonsensical the more I think about it. Humans generally synchronize their ideas with each other and generally put minimal effort into validating their ideas because the synchronization process works enough as a heuristic. The obvious attack then is to blast out intentionally harmful material in order to do things like cause disease outbreaks. Our position can't just be that were defenseless against this kind of attack because censorship is more evil than disease outbreaks. There must be some nuance that so far nobody has articulated sufficiently well. And none of this really even matters because Amazon is a private platform where I can almost never find the thing I want to watch. The amount of things not on Prime Video is so vast that it's hard to get up in arms about them removing something that has no obvious value other than to cause harm.
- matt4077 8y ago
  The "marketplace" analogy is comically flawed. The actual marketplace works only when it's tightly regulated, from anti-trust to consumer protection to standards and on. When disputes arise, the totality of civil law and the court system serves to adjudicate them. Institutions such as Bloomberg are basically deputised to be trustworthy intermediaries collecting and verifying market data.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
belltaco 8y ago
Fake news isn't ideas. It's fake facts.
- mrep 8y ago
  What is your definition of fake news or fake facts?
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    I don't really care for the "fake news" label since it's so politically charged. But I would say a thing is a "fake fact" - a falsehood, to speak plainly - if it asserts a claim about the world which has no support from the scientific community (or worse, is actively disputed by the scientific community). In other words if it's not grounded in empiricism it's a "fake fact."
  - belltaco 8y ago
    I can give an example https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/12/blog-posting/fake-news-clinton-foundation-has-no-ships-didnt-sm/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/12...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
markdown 8y ago
I mean, if you made a documentary about it being physically impossible to incinerate 6M humans in the span of time the nazi's had to do it in the ovens that they had to do it in, you'd get banned from Amazon before you could so much as publish your video. But you believing such a fringe nazi conspiracy theory couldn't kill me or my neighbour. My children wouldn't be at a real risk of dying from spending time with your kids, even if you indoctrinated them in your beliefs. Some ideas are too dangerous to even get the chance to compete, especially in a country like USA with an education system so broken that 40% of its people believe that Psychic mediums can actually talk to the dead.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Holocaust denial isn't victimless. In fact, I would argue it's far more dangerous than these vaccine hoaxes. "It happened, and therefore it can happen again" is the motto here. It is the singularity of barbarism that has defined politics in Europe and the US ever since; the crown witness against militarism, nationalism, and populism.
  - markdown 8y ago
    > Holocaust denial isn't victimless. I never mentioned holocaust denial... but let's go with that. So long as it never happens again, it's victimless. And because it's not going to happen again (nobody of consequence in any position of authority over govt, the media, or academia is a holocaust denier). Antisemitism certainly has victims, but in any case that's not the same thing as holocaust denialism. > In fact, I would argue it's far more dangerous than these vaccine hoaxes. Are you unaware that children have been dying of measles in ever greater numbers in the developed world due to the anti-vaccine movement? You certainly must be because some hypothetical danger that might occur in the future can't compare to children dying today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/measles-cases-at-highest-for-20-years-in-europe-as-anti-vaccine-movement-grows https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/measles-cases-... https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newsletter-measles-outbreaks-1.4950383 https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newslette... https://www.livescience.com/64523-anti-vaccine-movement-top-global-threats-who.html https://www.livescience.com/64523-anti-vaccine-movement-top-...
matt4077 8y ago
All the information on vaccines is out there, from trial data to journal articles to wikipedia articles to graphic novels on the history to your doctor being willing and able to explain them. The existence (and growth) of these "sceptics" is a testament to our inability to live up to your standards of critical thinking. I don't see how more pro-vaccine information could ever move the needle. The dynamics are rather asymmetric. And the "all the information/everyone decides for themselves" strategy is fundamentally impossible, anyway: if you "trust no one", your only chance to verify the benefits of vaccines is to redo the studies yourself. That's impossible, obviously. So one way or another, we need to delegate some editorial control to institutions/people that we can trust to take on part of the burdens of verifying information. "Trust" does not imply blind allegiance here: these institutions have track records that you can spot-check. There will always be competition between them. And they tend to follow long-term incentives to keep your trust instead whatever short-term benefit could be derived from lying to you. This isn't some obscure idea. It's so fundamental to the functioning of our society people don't even notice how they constantly rely on trust. Do you ever board a plane? You're trusting some FAA employees, and that they work within a legal structure that makes it unappealing for them to let a drunk pilot bribe them. Do you trust your spouse more than some random stranger not to steal from you? That's because you have known them for a decade, and (again) because they have far more to lose than to gain.
colemickens 8y ago
The idea is competing -- it continues to grow and spread despite the (continually growing and already present) threat to public health and as such, is increasingly being considered as dangerous and bad. I simply don't understand why we have to have this exact same conversation every time a private platform makes its own content determinations. I'm also getting really tired of this "it's just ideas, guys!" as nationalism, flat earthism, anti-vaxx and more dangerous, anti-intellectual bullshit spreads across the country in this YouTube-era. I'm on the phone with my brother and he's telling me about a student teacher telling middle school students the earth is flat. I'm tired of acting like it's fine and this is unconcerning. Maybe the ever-reliable, ever-silent downvoters could express themselves and tell me why I'm wrong to be concerned.

by pbreit 8y ago

hn19128ks8 8y ago

Today in 1985 Amazon pulls all videos discussing links between H.pylori and ulcers from its Prime platform. Many HN users laud the decision to remove the content that a "scientific consensus" of the medical community have "proven false". 'This is not about competing markets of ideas', the HN users are saying, "these are real doctors -- real scientists -- saying that the 'facts' in these videos cannot possibly be true. Therefore these are 'false facts' and should be removed." https://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/history.htm https://www.cdc.gov/ulcer/history.htm

hamandcheese 8y ago

I suspect you’ll find this opinion is more popular than you expect.

kevinthew 8y ago
Competing ideas are good but mass public disinformation is one the 21rst century's biggest problems already. There needs to be some counter to this.
- freedomben 8y ago
  > There needs to be some counter to this. Does the implementation of the "counter" matter to you? Do you think giant corporations should be the gatekeeper on what information/ideas/speech is permitted and what is not?
- gubbrora 8y ago
  It's a made up problem. There has always been lots of bad information. People are better informed than ever. Just take religion and magic and superstition which have declined a lot. It's a made up problem to justify authoritarian solutions.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    But is it an authoritarian solution? Does that terminology make sense outside of the sociopolitical context of government action? I feel it really diminishes the meaning of the word, "authoritarian" when you throw it around to describe the rights reserved by a non-government entity to police its own platform. A private company has a platform, and they can choose what content to allow on the platform. If you don't like it then enjoy your content elsewhere. If anything, it sounds like a bit of a made up problem to declare Amazon (or another similarly sized tech company) is being authoritarian by removing anti-vaccination videos. I mean come on, we have a rich history of authoritarian governments murdering people for vocal dissent. I get that you disagree with private censorship, but let's have some perspective now...
    - gubbrora 8y ago
      It's bigger than "just one company". You say it's the company's free choice but that is not true. There is a large amount of pressure on companies to conform. It's a part of a broader movement to shut down dissent wherever it exists. This movement is successfully censoring billions of people. The gloves are softer than before but the scale is larger and this is a huge threat.
  - matheweis 8y ago
    This is only true in the US; in the rest of the world the population of those with various religious beliefs is growing rapidly: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/ http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-201... http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims-are-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religious-group/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/06/why-muslims-...
  - jakelarkin 8y ago
    there's always been bad information but it was previously hard to disseminate NEW bad information quickly. It was incredibly expensive, slow and there were watchers, gatekeepers ... various religious authorities, newspaper editors etc. now the russian election manipulation cyber warfare division or your local anti-vax grifter can anonymously target a limitless number of impressionable rubes with the click of a mouse. often for free if the content's viral. thanks social media!

stefan_ 8y ago

Vaccination is not "a competing idea".

adrr 8y ago

Not vaccinating your kids is child abuse and has negative consequences on the general public(eg: whooping cough and measles outbreaks). It should be banned like all child abuse videos.

freedomben 8y ago
There are some that would say that a government should not be able to force you to inject things into your own or your children's bodies. They would call that tyranny. Much of the pro-choice argument regarding abortion is based on the idea that you own your own body. My kids get vaccinated, but I sympathize with the anti-vaxxers arguments regarding governmental force.
- melling 8y ago
  It's a bit of a public health nuisance when kids start dying because other people don't want their kids to get a measles shot It's hard to believe that tens of thousands of kids still die from the measles every year.
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    The same argument could be said that kids born to unwilling mothers leads to social and moral decay. If you are pro abortion/ pro choice you must be pro choice for anti vaxx.
    - belltaco 8y ago
      Abortions don't create negative externalities like the anti-vaxx crowd does.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      No it can't because there is no direct, empirical relationship between children born in neglectful or under-resourced households and medical illness in other children. You can mount an abstract argument that there are secondary or tertiary effects that increase e.g. crime, violence or what have you. But that kind of relationship is not nearly as tight nor as evident as the reduction in herd immunity effected by fewer children receiving vaccinations. It's a difference of category, not degree.

asteli 8y ago

To me, this action says "We have chosen not to publish material, that is based on indisputably false premises, that may harm viewers and the public at large." That sounds like an acceptable line to me.

chrismcb 8y ago
But is that true? Did they remove all videos based on false premises? And how did they decide the premise was false?
- melling 8y ago
  The one movie looks like it was 4.5 stars out of 5, with 3900 people rating it. It has more reviews than the Matrix.
  - lugg 8y ago
    Sex sells. This is why the whole popular vote thing doesn't really work for stuff like this. Humans are way too easily biased.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  They need not decide the premise is false; they can rely on scientific consensus. It's not a perfect heuristic but it's the most useful one we have. If they're transparent about the sources they use and they're impartial and consistent in their application (read: no videos given special treatment), they're not arbitrating. They're (actively) reporting.
  - pbreit 8y ago
    Arguable that sugar is more harmful than a video.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      It sure is! Tell you what, I'm all on board for a massive awareness campaign by Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Netflix on the dangers of sugar intake as well.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

SquishyPanda23 8y ago

I think your opinion is basically the standard one: censorship is generally bad, marketplace of ideas, etc. I don't have a take on this particular issue. But I think censorship is generally very dangerous, and I also think the Mill-style marketplace of ideas is a bad analogy bordering on the nonsensical the more I think about it. Humans generally synchronize their ideas with each other and generally put minimal effort into validating their ideas because the synchronization process works enough as a heuristic. The obvious attack then is to blast out intentionally harmful material in order to do things like cause disease outbreaks. Our position can't just be that were defenseless against this kind of attack because censorship is more evil than disease outbreaks. There must be some nuance that so far nobody has articulated sufficiently well. And none of this really even matters because Amazon is a private platform where I can almost never find the thing I want to watch. The amount of things not on Prime Video is so vast that it's hard to get up in arms about them removing something that has no obvious value other than to cause harm.

matt4077 8y ago
The "marketplace" analogy is comically flawed. The actual marketplace works only when it's tightly regulated, from anti-trust to consumer protection to standards and on. When disputes arise, the totality of civil law and the court system serves to adjudicate them. Institutions such as Bloomberg are basically deputised to be trustworthy intermediaries collecting and verifying market data.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

belltaco 8y ago

Fake news isn't ideas. It's fake facts.

mrep 8y ago
What is your definition of fake news or fake facts?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I don't really care for the "fake news" label since it's so politically charged. But I would say a thing is a "fake fact" - a falsehood, to speak plainly - if it asserts a claim about the world which has no support from the scientific community (or worse, is actively disputed by the scientific community). In other words if it's not grounded in empiricism it's a "fake fact."
- belltaco 8y ago
  I can give an example https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/12/blog-posting/fake-news-clinton-foundation-has-no-ships-didnt-sm/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2017/may/12...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

markdown 8y ago

I mean, if you made a documentary about it being physically impossible to incinerate 6M humans in the span of time the nazi's had to do it in the ovens that they had to do it in, you'd get banned from Amazon before you could so much as publish your video. But you believing such a fringe nazi conspiracy theory couldn't kill me or my neighbour. My children wouldn't be at a real risk of dying from spending time with your kids, even if you indoctrinated them in your beliefs. Some ideas are too dangerous to even get the chance to compete, especially in a country like USA with an education system so broken that 40% of its people believe that Psychic mediums can actually talk to the dead.

matt4077 8y ago
Holocaust denial isn't victimless. In fact, I would argue it's far more dangerous than these vaccine hoaxes. "It happened, and therefore it can happen again" is the motto here. It is the singularity of barbarism that has defined politics in Europe and the US ever since; the crown witness against militarism, nationalism, and populism.
- markdown 8y ago
  > Holocaust denial isn't victimless. I never mentioned holocaust denial... but let's go with that. So long as it never happens again, it's victimless. And because it's not going to happen again (nobody of consequence in any position of authority over govt, the media, or academia is a holocaust denier). Antisemitism certainly has victims, but in any case that's not the same thing as holocaust denialism. > In fact, I would argue it's far more dangerous than these vaccine hoaxes. Are you unaware that children have been dying of measles in ever greater numbers in the developed world due to the anti-vaccine movement? You certainly must be because some hypothetical danger that might occur in the future can't compare to children dying today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/measles-cases-at-highest-for-20-years-in-europe-as-anti-vaccine-movement-grows https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/measles-cases-... https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newsletter-measles-outbreaks-1.4950383 https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newslette... https://www.livescience.com/64523-anti-vaccine-movement-top-global-threats-who.html https://www.livescience.com/64523-anti-vaccine-movement-top-...

matt4077 8y ago

All the information on vaccines is out there, from trial data to journal articles to wikipedia articles to graphic novels on the history to your doctor being willing and able to explain them. The existence (and growth) of these "sceptics" is a testament to our inability to live up to your standards of critical thinking. I don't see how more pro-vaccine information could ever move the needle. The dynamics are rather asymmetric. And the "all the information/everyone decides for themselves" strategy is fundamentally impossible, anyway: if you "trust no one", your only chance to verify the benefits of vaccines is to redo the studies yourself. That's impossible, obviously. So one way or another, we need to delegate some editorial control to institutions/people that we can trust to take on part of the burdens of verifying information. "Trust" does not imply blind allegiance here: these institutions have track records that you can spot-check. There will always be competition between them. And they tend to follow long-term incentives to keep your trust instead whatever short-term benefit could be derived from lying to you. This isn't some obscure idea. It's so fundamental to the functioning of our society people don't even notice how they constantly rely on trust. Do you ever board a plane? You're trusting some FAA employees, and that they work within a legal structure that makes it unappealing for them to let a drunk pilot bribe them. Do you trust your spouse more than some random stranger not to steal from you? That's because you have known them for a decade, and (again) because they have far more to lose than to gain.

colemickens 8y ago

The idea is competing -- it continues to grow and spread despite the (continually growing and already present) threat to public health and as such, is increasingly being considered as dangerous and bad. I simply don't understand why we have to have this exact same conversation every time a private platform makes its own content determinations. I'm also getting really tired of this "it's just ideas, guys!" as nationalism, flat earthism, anti-vaxx and more dangerous, anti-intellectual bullshit spreads across the country in this YouTube-era. I'm on the phone with my brother and he's telling me about a student teacher telling middle school students the earth is flat. I'm tired of acting like it's fine and this is unconcerning. Maybe the ever-reliable, ever-silent downvoters could express themselves and tell me why I'm wrong to be concerned.